Book Review: Bacon and the Mind: Art, Neuroscience and Psychology

12/10/19
Book Review: Bacon and the Mind: Art, Neuroscience and Psychology

Published in the autumn 2019 issue of Art Quarterly

Review of Alice Neel, Uptown at Victoria Miro

07/07/17

Alice Neel, Uptown

Curated by Hilton Als

Victoria Miro, London
18 May – 29 July 2017

“No matter what adventure we have, man is the catalyst … Man is everything.” For Alice Neel (1900-84), born at the start of the new century, her conviction and dedication to analysing and capturing the essence of the individual in a figurative style endured throughout an era of proliferating abstraction. Despite regularly mixing with avant-garde writers and activists, and sharing their political ideas, she didn’t adopt their styles. She ignored the critic Clement Greenberg’s comment that figurative painting was dead and radically proved him wrong, becoming the first living American artist to have a major retrospective in Moscow in 1981.

Read this review here

Interview with Anj Smith at Hauser & Wirth London

04/10/15

Anj Smith: Phosphor on the Palms

Hauser & Wirth London, South Gallery

22 September – 21 November 2015

With 21 paintings produced over a three-year period, Anj Smith’s latest exhibition as Hauser & Wirth London is her largest yet. It is also her most psychologically motivated and probing. An artist who seeks to celebrate the medium of painting, Smith sees the figure as a device on which to hang her concerns and her explorations of social mores. Her paintings – deeply layered to create an intense colour and incredible luminosity – deal with issues of liminality, androgyny, language, art history and zoology, amongst many others. Monkeys frolic with shattered Ming vases; a cigarette butt is revered as equal to a Van Cleef jewel; deep, dark eyes stare out from hollow sockets.

Smith’s works collapse the genres of still life, landscape and portraiture, freely referencing those who have gone before her: from 17th-century Dutch vanitas painters to so-called outsider artists, Richard Dadd and Adolf Wölfli. While acknowledging the importance of recognising where she is coming from and taking responsibility for her references, Smith is also at pains to make work that is of our time. The intricate detail, painted with single-hair brushes – stubble on a figure’s cheek, a moth hidden in the stonework, translucent veins beneath the skin – is like a reward system, whereby the viewer benefits from each further minute spent studying the work and experiences a different painting, depending on the perspective from which it is approached. Smith’s work can only be fully appreciated in the flesh and this is a valiant display well worth spending some time with.

Watch the interview here

Review of Malgosia Stepnik: City of Angels at 20 Eastcastle Street

21/05/13

Malgosia Stepnik: City of Angels

20 Eastcastle Street

25 April – 23 May 2013

I try not to go to exhibitions with preconceptions or expectations, but with a title like City of Angels, I did, perhaps foolishly, expect Polish-born Malgosia Stepnik’s current show at 20 Eastcastle Street to be somewhat pleasant to the eye and gentle on the mind. But I was mistaken. City of Devils would actually be a more appropriate name. The painted-over photographs, displayed in LED frames, and the purpose-designed wallpaper, confront the visitor with zombie-like creatures, both disturbed and disturbing, with faces overrun by amorphous fluorescent spillages, dripping from their mouths, and scaly, scabies-like spots spreading across their beleaguered visages. The hallucinogenic colours conjure up a very bad trip, and the wallpaper, quite frankly, would induce nightmares of the very worst kind. 

Stepnik, whose work draws on the tradition of semi-autobiographical and confessional art produced by women artists since the 1960s, and is further influenced by philosophers such as Carl Jung (1875-1961), herself studied Sociology, Psychology and Philosophy in Wroclaw, before coming to London and acquiring a Fine Art Degree in 2008. Her multimedia approach incorporates photography, painting, performance and film, and, alongside the still works on show, there is also a film to be watched, and the opening night viewing was accompanied by a haunting and traumatised performance in which Stepnik, clad in a hospital gown, lopped handfuls of her hair with blunt scissors. Perhaps her aim is to voice a critical comment on the aesthetic focus and values of contemporary society, where even beauty is no longer beautiful until it has been airbrushed or “perfected” still further?

Admittedly, close-up, there is something strangely alluring about the glittering scabied pockmarks of the photoworks, raised blobs of acrylic paint, glistening like gemstones in the LED light, but even so it reminds me of Count Robert de Montesquiou’s topaz-encrusted tortoise from Belle Époque Paris, which epitomises the desire to adorn and beautify taken to such an extreme that one becomes blind to nature’s joys, inflicts cruelty, and truly loses sight of aesthetic pleasure.

Images: 

Installation shot

Performance shot

Detail

All courtesy the artist (Malgosia Stepnik) and curator (Beverley Knowles)