Review of The Mystery of Appearance: Conversations Between Ten British Post-War Painters at Haunch of Venison

12/02/12

The Mystery of Appearance: Conversations Between Ten British Post-War Painters

Haunch of Venison

7 December 2011 – 18 February 2012

It might at first seem a little unadventurous to put on a show featuring artists for whom major retrospectives are concurrently running not so far across town (in this case, David Hockney at the Royal Academy and Lucian Freud at the National Portrait Gallery), but Haunch of Venison’s current exhibition, featuring ten of Britain’s most important post-war painters, is worth its weight in gold. Displaying over forty large and small scale paintings and drawings, some on loan from major galleries, others which have not been seen in public for many years (including Frank Auerbach’s Primrose Hill, Winter Sunshine (1962-64)), the exhibition seeks to offer a fresh view on the works, methods, and personal interactions between Michael Andrews, Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon, Patrick Caulfield, William Coldstream, Lucian Freud, Richard Hamilton, David Hockney, Leon Kossoff and Euan Uglow.

The first room concentrates on nudes, and, although some are indeed highly abstracted through the artists’ use of thick impasto paint, they nevertheless celebrate the continued dedication to figurative subjects by these resilient painters during a period when abstraction was so ‘à la mode’. Thus, for example, the visitor can compare the diametrically different, but yet equally enchanting, works by Freud (Girl on a Turkish Sofa, 1966) and Auerbach (Reclining Figure, 1972), which, although similarly sized and posed, demonstrate the extremely varied possibilities offered by the same medium when applied with such different technique. Consisting merely of a few dabs of orange, yellow and white oil paint on a darkly grounded board, Auerbach’s figure nevertheless bears just as much a sense of weight, and is just as recognisable as a figure, as Freud’s intricately detailed girl, with her dirty feet and oversized, twisted and bared bottom.

This exploration of texture and technique continues throughout the other rooms, with the second gallery including a mix of both landscapes and portraits, all absolutely relishing in the joy of daubing on the paint as thickly as possible. Kossoff’s Self Portrait II (1972), whilst recognisable as a face from afar, becomes an indistinguishable sea of colour and pigment as one approaches. Nearby, his Seated Woman No. 2 (1959) is so substantially besmeared with deep brown paint that it takes no great leap of the imagination to see the logical progression to contemporary abject works of art employing not paint, but excrement. There is something extremely tactile about this piece, as if all tools might have been laid aside, and Kossoff have employed his hands. It is playful and fun, like something a young child might proudly produce for his parent.

In contrast to this, the third room makes reference to the continued influence of the Old Masters, exemplified, perhaps predictably, by Bacon’s Pope I – Study after Pope Innocent X by Velázquez (1951), reminding the visitor that these painters, whilst breaking new ground, were, nevertheless, historically and technically educated in their field. Upstairs is ample further evidence of this, with a range of studies, showing both method and skill, including a variety by Caulfield, in which his mark up grids and hastily scribbled notes regarding tone and colour are clearly visible.

As the subtitle to the exhibition highlights, however, it is the conversations between these men which perhaps offers us most insight into the progression of British painting in the post-war period. Downstairs in the bookshop are a delightful row of photographs by Bruce Bernard, showing the artists in their studios, both at work and play, and the catalogue to accompany the exhibition contains an enlightening essay considering how their relationships impacted on their work, as well as some insightful writings by the artists themselves. Thus, whilst the range of works by Hockney and Freud in their own personal shows cannot be expected to be matched, it is nevertheless a privilege to be able to see them here, set amongst their contemporaries, contextualised and reevaluated, and displayed in the impressive newly renovated Bond Street gallery space taken over by Haunch of Venison last autumn.

Images:

Frank Auerbach

Primrose Hill, Winter Sunshine

1962-64 

Oil on board 

104.1 x 144.8 cm 

Private Collection 

© Frank Auerbach 

Photo: Peter Mallet

Frank Auerbach

Reclining Figure

1972 

Oil on board 

38.1 X 40.6 cm 

Private Collection, N.Y. 

© Frank Auerbach

Leon Kossoff

Willesden Junction, Summer No.1

1966 

Oil on board 

91.4 x 152.4 cm 

Private Collection 

©Leon Kossoff

Francis Bacon

Pope I - Study after Pope Innocent X by Velasquez

1951 

Oil on canvas 

197.8 x 137.4 cm 

Aberdeen Art Gallery & Museums Collections 

©The Estate of Francis Bacon

Review of Lucian Freud Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery

12/02/12

Lucian Freud Portraits

National Portrait Gallery

9 February – 27 May 2012

‘Everything is autobiographical and everything is a portrait, even if it’s only a chair.’ And yet despite, or maybe precisely because of, such a frank attitude towards his works, the exhibition marking the culmination of the National Portrait Gallery’s Cultural Olympiad is the first show of Lucian Freud’s (1922 – 2011) works to focus solely on his portraiture, in the true sense of the word.

Spanning seven decades, from the early 1940s until his death last July, the exhibition showcases 130 paintings and works on paper, including both iconic and rarely-seen paintings of his lovers, friends, and family, each a record of an intimate relationship, personal and private. The idea for the exhibition initially came about following a conversation between Sandy Nairne (Director of the National Portrait Gallery) and Freud, in 2006, after it was known that London would host the 2012 Olympics, and the artist was keen for it to be one of the capital’s countdown events for the London 2012 Festival.

The works on display are arranged broadly chronologically, and trace Freud’s stylistic development.  The first rooms are filled with his early works – smoother, flatter, more evenly toned than the Freud we later came to know and expect. This was the period when he was learning to paint, and his subjects are primarily himself and his first wife, Kitty Garman, the daughter of sculptor Jacob Epstein. He has described himself, during this period, as ‘aggressive’ in his approach, moving from feature to feature, using a very fine brush (half the size of his little finger), to achieve intricate, almost forensic, detail. Garman described the experience of sitting for him as ‘like being arranged’, yet her grip on the rose (Girl with Roses, 1947-8) and kitten (Girl with a Kitten, 1947) is, in each instance, so tight, it is almost strangling. Was this Freud’s intent, or more a reflection of herself and her anxiety? In each picture, her gaze looks out sideways beyond the viewer, almost vacantly. In the slightly later Girl with a White Dog (1950-1), however, with its disturbing, but recognisably Freudian, green tinge, she faces forwards, staring directly both at and through the viewer – and therefore also the artist himself – almost defiantly. This is perhaps a sense of foreboding of the couple’s coming separation.

Freud was a painter of personality, capturing the character of his sitters, their psychology, rather than, necessarily, a physical likeness (although each and every one of his sitters is, nevertheless, easily recognisable). He was a master of capturing expressions and moods, as, for example, in A Young Painter (1957-8), of whom one wonders, with his rumpled brow and parted lips, what it is he is feeling: consternation, anger, concern? Similarly, Head of a Child (1954), with its wide eyes and open mouth, cries out with terror, fear, and anguish.

Woman Smiling (1958-9) marks the transitional moment in Freud’s career, at which he first stood up to paint (and never again sat down). He simultaneously also began using thicker, horse hair, brushes, and introducing a more varied palette, with less blending, and more vigorous brushstrokes. ‘As far as I am concerned the paint is the person. I want it to work for me just as flesh does.’ Freud had a fascination with the landscape of the skin and reputedly claimed there to be no such thing as bland or generic skin, and not even his portrait of his baby daughter, Bella, (Baby on a Green Sofa, 1961), spares the subject from his keen observation. As fellow artist (and sitter) Frank Auerbach (born 1931) has said, Freud’s work is ‘raw, not cooked to be more digestible as art…’

Freud’s portrayals are honest to the point of brutality. Take, for example, his portrait of John Deakin (1963-4), a chronic, red-faced, alcoholic with prominent ears; Man in a Blue Shirt (1965), a portrait of George Dyer, Francis Bacon’s lover, who later committed suicide, unashamedly revealing his hare lip and broken nose; and A Man and his Daughter (1963-4), depicting a bank robber who lived beneath the artist in Paddington, with livid scars across his face. It is unsurprising, then, to learn that Freud believed that if a painting didn’t have some drama to it, it was nothing more than paint out of a tube.

Yet there is also a tenderness to his paintings. Pregnant Girl (1960-1), a portrait of Bernadine Coverley, the mother of Bella, shows her with her head turned to the side on the pillow, breasts exposed, collar bones prominent, shoulders rounded, wisps of dark hair falling across the porcelain skin of her face – a sentimental expression of beauty and fragility.

Freud’s models often assumed unusual and uncomfortable poses, and he always required the sitter to remain present even whilst he was painting the background, fully aware of their impact on the space. ‘I work from people that interest me and that I care about, in rooms that I live in and know.’

The show would not be complete without including some of Freud’s portraits of Leigh Bowery, the performance artist, large, majestic, monumental paintings, but hung here in a small, intimate side room, selected, according to curator Sarah Howgate, to convey the size of the studio in which the works were made, and, of course, of Sue Tilley, the amply proportioned benefits supervisor who featured in a number of portraits in the mid 1990s.

The final room, of his later works, contains nudes which are gritty in all senses: their subject matter as brutal an exposure as ever, but also the texture and surface of the work – it is almost as if he had mixed some substance into the oil paint to create a raised and undulating fleshy surface. The show concludes, however, with an unfinished portrait of his gallery assistant, David Dawson, and his dog Eli, Portrait of the Hound (2011), on which Freud was working until shortly before his death on 20 July 2011. Nairne is keen to emphasise, however, that the show was planned, until very near the end, with the collaboration of Freud himself, and, as such, it is very much a ‘living exhibition’, not a memorial. Indeed, for an artist who imbued each portrait with so much energy, character, and life force, what else could it be?

Images:

Girl with a White Dog (1950-1)

© Tate, London 2012

Reflection (Self-portrait) (1985)

Private Collection, Ireland 

© The Lucian Freud Archive

Photo: Courtesy Lucian Freud Archive

Review of Hugo Dalton: Mother Nature B.D.S.M. at Bermondsey Project Space

11/02/12

Mother Nature B.D.S.M.

An exhibition by Hugo Dalton, curated by Edward Lucie-Smith

Bermondsey Project Space

27 January – 19 February 2012

Walking into this large warehouse in the middle of an industrial estate in Bermondsey is like straying on to the set of Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. Entry to the 7,000 sq. ft. exhibition space, cold and dark, is through plastic meat flaps, and the soundtrack of piano music, composed by James Dooley to accompany the show, has resonances of the falsely calming use of Beethoven’s Ninth in A Clockwork Orange. The premise of this exhibition is that Mother Nature is a Dominatrix: fetishistic, enslaving, and omnipotent. But to what extent is this impression carried over?

To read the rest of this review, please go to: http://blog.darlingcollective.com/?p=355

Review of Migrations: Journeys into British Art at Tate Britain

07/02/12

Migrations: Journeys into British Art

Tate Britain

31 January – 12 August 2012

The remit for Tate Britain is that its collection should be one of British art. Clearly, however, this is problematic, given not only the state of our multicultural society today, but also the Commonwealth, not to mention the preceding British Empire and beyond that the universally quite peripatetic nature of artists to study, find patronage, escape persecution, and so on. Tate Britain’s latest exhibition, Migrations: Journeys into British Art, largely comprising works from its own collection, takes this conundrum as its starting point, as it seeks both to raise and explore questions about the formation of a national collection of British art against a continually shifting demographic.

The show spans some 500 years, beginning with the influx of painters and sculptors from Northern Europe in the 16^th century. Following the Reformation, portraiture became the most acceptable form of painting in Protestant England and Scotland: artists such as the German Hans Holbein (ca. 1497-1543) and the Dutch Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641) were esteemed more highly than British trained artists, and, coming at the bidding of our Royal family, are now known for their iconic images of our kings Henry VIII and Charles I respectively.

A couple of centuries later, however, Britons began to travel abroad, and thus the birth of the 18^th century Grand Tour, a critical part of any young gentleman’s education. Ideas were cross-cultivated from the continent, and small memento images were produced by artists such as Canaletto (1697-1768) and brought back as souvenirs. When war prevented Englishmen from travelling abroad in the 1740s, however, Canaletto himself came to London for a nine year stay, and, during this time, he painted a good many English landmarks, including London: The Old Horse Guards from St. James’s Park (ca. 1749), on loan here from the Andrew Lloyd Webber Foundation.

Not long thereafter, in 1768, the Royal Academy was founded in London in order to teach and promote art in England. It is a solidly British institution, yet almost one third of its founding members were migrant artists active in Britain at the time.

Over the coming centuries, dialogues between different nations and artistic styles continued to increase. In the latter half of the 19^th century, whilst Paris became acknowledged as the centre for art training, London remained the more stable centre for patronage and commercial artistic success. As such, many British and American artists (including John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) and James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834-1903)) went to train in Paris before settling in London, and numerous French artists, including James Tissot (1836-1902) whose work is included here, crossed the channel both to find work, and also to escape the political aftermath of the Franco-Prussian war. These artists brought with them many new styles and ideas, some more accepted into British society than others. Tissot, for example, despite his attempts to adapt in accordance with British taste, continued to be criticised for his overly frilly and elaborate touches.  Whistler, on the other hand, who adopted the Thames as one of his key subjects and produced a great number of Nocturnes, focusing on the atmospheric effects of light on water, was graciously accepted, and remained in London until his death.

The exhibition’s coverage of the 20^th century begins with the two quite disparate, but equally influential, Jewish art exhibitions held at the turn of the century: Jewish Art and Antiquities, starring works by William Rothenstein, which argued that Jewish art was essentially just a part of British art, with no independent identity, and The Twentieth Century: A Review of Modern Movements, held at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1914, which, through its attempt to align Jewish art with Modernism, argued for a distinct identity. This section of the exhibition, along with the adjacent works by refugees from Nazi Europe, is indeed a joy to peruse, containing highlights by the likes of Jacob Epstein (1880-1959), David Bomberg (1890-1957), Oskar Kokoschka (1886-1980), Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), Naum Gabo (1890-1977) and Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948).

The same might also be said of the works by artists such as F.N. Souza (1924-1959) and Rasheed Araeen (born 1935), which are included in a section on artists who moved to Britain from Commonwealth countries in the 1950s and 60s, but, as the wall texts freely admit, felt, at the time, largely ignored and marginalised by such mainstream galleries as the Tate itself.

The 1960s works range from Gustav Metzger’s (born 1926) auto-destructive art, showcased in the form of a video of the Recreation of First Public Demonstration of Auto-Destructive Art (1965), which restages an event from 1961, whereby Metzger sprayed a nylon canvas, hanging on the Southbank, with acid, so that it slowly decomposed, revealing the vista of St Paul’s Cathedral on the other side, to David Medalla’s (born 1942) conversely auto-creative sculptures, exploring the processes of transformation, and the notion of ephemerality. Certainly, standing watching his bubbles spill out from atop Cloud Canyons No 3: An Ensemble of Bubble Machines (1961, remade 2004), one is transported elsewhere, somewhere high above an earth demarcated by country borders and state lines.

The 1980s are represented largely by works considering the poetics and politics of diaspora and displacement, and the creation of identity in a racist but increasingly migrant-populated Thatcherite Britain. Sonia Boyce (born 1962) considers the identity she is forced to adopt as a black person born and raised in this country, and Keith Piper (born 1960) similarly uses text and photo montage to deconstruct and challenge representations of British history with relation to the African diaspora.

The central part of the exhibition space is taken up by rooms showing video works from the past ten years, supposedly epitomising the very nature of migration, with the moving image itself something transient which does not exist until it find a temporary shelter on a screen. Zineb Sedira’s (born 1962) Floating Coffins (2009) is a 14 screen installation, filmed in the harbour city of Nouadhibou, Mauritania, home to the world’s largest ship graveyard, but also the departure point for West African immigrants hoping to reach the Canary Islands. Using the sea as a metaphor, and with shots of circling migrating birds, questions of belonging and displacement, beginnings and endings, are brought to the fore.

The show’s curators – and there are number of them, each working on their own specialisms – have each, in their own section, put on a good display, and, indeed, questions are raised about how, or even whether, one ought to consider Britishness in relation to art. Nevertheless, the aspiration to keep the rooms open and flowing fluidly one to the next, so that the works can speak to one another across both time and space, is, perhaps, a little too ambitious, and, overall, there is very little coherence between the vast variety of works on display. As an open house exhibition, showcasing some of the Tate’s best acquisitions, it is certainly worth a visit, but don’t necessarily expect to come away with a neatly bound narrative. That said, isn’t the need for this just a pitfall of the tightly curated contemporary art exhibition world in which we now live, where everything is parcelled, explained, and offered to the viewer on a plate? Maybe being left to wander through 500 years of art, drawing your own conclusions about the developments, cross-fertilisations, and impacts of political and social change, is not such a bad thing after all?

Images:

Canaletto 

London- The Old Horse Guards from St James’s Park  

c.1749  

Tate 

Lent by The Andrew Lloyd Webber Foundation

James Tissot 

Portsmouth Dockyard  

c.1877  

© Tate

Jacob Kramer  

Jews at Prayer  

1919 

Tate 

© Estate of John David Roberts

By courtesy of the William Roberts Society

Photo: Tate Photography

Keith Piper 

Go West Young Man  

1987  

Tate 

© Keith Piper

Francis Alys 

Railings  

2004  

Tate 

© Francis Alÿs

Photo: Tate Photography

Review of Daniel Rapley: Covenant at Payne Shurvell

02/02/12

Daniel Rapley: Covenant

Payne Shurvell

27 January – 3 March 2012

3,116,480 characters

1,189 chapters

783,137 words

31,102 verses

66 books

Such is the content of the King James Bible, first printed some 400 years ago, and now the key work in Daniel Rapley’s first solo exhibition since graduating from Chelsea College of Art and Design last summer. Entitled Sic, and filling some 1,500 sides of A4 paper, this handwritten copy of the entire text took Rapley nearly 700 hours to complete, spread over more than a year, with his getting up every morning to spend two hours at work. Displayed in a showcase, however, the visitor now only gets to see the first page of his travail, and whether or not he believes that the wad of paper underneath does actually contain the rest of the script is, as it were, a matter of faith.

For such is the role of art and the art gallery in contemporary society, as far as Rapley sees it. Brought up with the Bible, but no longer religious, he disregarded this enquiry as irrelevant, saying instead that there is, regardless, an intrinsic relationship between art and religion. Artworks are presented with authority and power in a white-walled gallery, the modern day temple or church.

The title of the exhibition is Covenant, an agreement based on trust, and many of the works in the show grew out of this initial concept. Forty (a Biblical metaphor for any long period of time), for example, is a stack of 40 identical pencil drawings, reading ‘I did not want to make this drawing 40 times but I did anyway,’ again with only the front frame visible to the visitor.  

Each of Rapley’s works is a labour intensive task, but yet his goal is also to conceal much of this effort, with what remains on view often appearing almost simplistic. In Poiesis, for example, a delicate collage of flowers cut out individually from a popular field guide to British plants, reference is made to the Heideggerian usage of the term to refer to a ‘bringing forth’, and a sharing of ideas and knowledge between an artist and his audience. And Rapley’s works are also demanding of their viewers, requiring time to be read and digested. Exigencies 1-7, for example, (the title chosen again for its connotation as the religious term for the interpretation of a text), consists of seven large pages (approximately A1 in size) of writing, or, as Rapley terms them, pencil drawings, relating, in a diary entry style, events and coincidences which occurred during the time he was working on Sic. Each one is drawn freehand, although they are so neat and exact that one might easily be mistaken into believing that they were prints. (Rapley will not reveal the secret of his method!) One story tells of how, as he developed RSI in his right wrist, he came to copy 2 Chronicles ch.15 v.7, which states: ‘Be ye strong therefore, and let not your hands be weak for your work shall be rewarded’, and, how, accordingly, over the next few days, his wrist strain subsided. Another discloses how, upon transcribing Job ch.15 v.23, ‘He wandereth abroad for bread…’, Rapley was reminded of his having forgotten to buy his own favourite bread whilst out shopping the previous day, and how now, upon returning to Sainsbury’s, he found it out of stock, and was forced to travel ‘abroad’ to an Iceland store. The coincidences abound, and, again, the faith of the reader is put to the test. Is this actually possible, or is it all too far fetched? And, of course, if it is to be believed, well then, surely this series offers some evidence for the verity of the Bible transcription project itself?

Throughout the tales, Rapley uses the third person, referring to himself as ‘the artist’. He does the same in Totem, a different, dark coloured work, hanging separately in the gallery’s entrance hall, and produced as a limited edition print. Based on the tombstone of Martin of Tours (who died in 397AD), one of the first saints whose remains were venerated as a holy site, the varnished print also incorporates some of Rapley’s blood. Apparently he rather liked the idea of putting something quite so personal into an edition, a train of thought stemming perhaps from his MA thesis in which he compared the presence of the saint in a holy relic to the presence of the artist in an artwork. Naturally, however, there are also resonances with the religious themes of sacrifice and the Last Supper.

Rapley describes his works as performative, but only in suggestion. There is something deadly serious, but yet also undeniably comic about this exhibition, and the stories related in Exigencies 1-7 cannot help but elicit a smile (about which Rapley himself also smiled). Nevertheless, the sincerity with which he explains his work and ethos are enough to engender faith both in him and in what it is he is trying to sell us – more than can be said for many a commercially-oriented artist these days. Go along and see for yourself, and take the time to read the tales and invest back some effort in return for the many laborious hours taken (if you choose so to believe) to produce the work on show.

Images:

Sic (detail)

Ballpoint on A4 ruled paper

67 x 59 x 115cam (Plinth unit)

Sic

Ballpoint on A4 ruled paper

67 x 59 x 115cam (Plinth unit)

Exigency 1

Pencil drawing on heavyweight paper

63 x 83.5 cm

Exigencies 1-7 (detail)

Pencil drawing on heavyweight paper

63 x 83.5 cm

All images courtesy of the artist, Daniel Rapley, and Payne Shurvell Gallery


Also published at http://www.a-n.co.uk/interface/reviews/single/1946979

Review of The Seen and the Unseen: paintings by Marguerite Horner and The Near and the Elsewhere: group show curated by Gaia Persico at PM Gallery and House

01/02/12

The Seen and the Unseen: paintings by Marguerite Horner

and

The Near and the Elsewhere: group show curated by Gaia Persico

PM Gallery and House

25 January – 25 February 2012

PM Gallery, a 1940s annex to Sir John Soane’s grade I listed Pitzhanger Manor House of 1800, has been described as West London’s premier contemporary arts venue, and, to its credit, it is currently hosting two exhibitions, very different in style, yet related in theme, which certainly make the trip out to Ealing worthwhile.

Marguerite Horner’s solo show, The Seen and the Unseen, comprises a collection of her recognisably haunting grisaille street scenes, largely inspired by her recent experiences of small town America. The grey skies, streets, and parking lots, devoid of populace, are bisected by bright white road markings, lamp posts, trees, and telegraph wires, and the heavy monotone is further broken at more random points by the insertion of a solitary red car, or, in the case of Vanitas (2010), a woman with bright red lips.

One wall is dominated by three larger works from 2007, Immutable Light, Ineffably Perceived, and Walled in by Feelings. These are blacker than the rest, with a more yellowish glow to the grey. They depict the dark exterior walls of houses, spooky and foreboding, lit by moonlight piercing through the clouds. Whilst, again, no inhabitants are visible, lights nevertheless burn brightly indoors, echoic, perhaps, of Hitchcock’s Bates’ mansion, or, in the case of Ineffably Perceived, where we look down also over the distant lights of a town and see the house as that of a recluse, set apart, high on a hill, something more akin to the bizarre residence of Dr Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

The Adolescent, Help, and Swept Away (all 2011) trial a new effect, reminiscent of Gerhard Richter’s squeegee works, rendering the images blurred, as if we were moving past at high speed. Are we to imagine ourselves in one of the many cars (a recurring motif in Horner’s scenes), is it just the wind in the trees, or is it perhaps all merely the nebulous scenery of a dream? If so, is this dream a nightmare? Ought one to feel threatened? Certainly the emptiness hangs heavy, and there is something uncanny and unsettling about the desolation – a definite sense of unease. But what is actually more oppressive: this fearful emptiness, loneliness, and barren space, or an overcrowded city, heaving with modern life? Horner herself says that she uses her painting precisely so as to access a space for contemplation away from the fast pace of modern life. There is certainly a sense of somehow being outside of the scene, looking down upon it, reinforced by titles such as The Guardian (2011) – but who is it that is watching, and over what or whom? Like a plague-swept empty world, a stage set with all the features of habitation but lacking the actors to fill the roles, the cars seem to take the place of living, breathing creatures, representing the transience, not only of life, but also of time and space – do we ever really inhabit somewhere, or are we bound to always only be passing through?

The second exhibition, The Near and the Elsewhere, a group show curated by Gaia Persico and bringing together works by 15 international artists, follows this thread still further, considering the impermanence of architectural structures themselves. With paintings, photography, sketches and films depicting buildings both elegant and derelict, overcrowded and empty, purpose-built and basking in their full designer glory, the visitor takes a stroll through a wide-range of contemporary metropolises, experiencing the full life cycle of the inhabitable structure. Greg Girard’s House on Huashan Lu, North View, Lane 322, Huashan Lu (2005) for example, focuses on a derelict building, falling apart and its windows boarded up, but with light still burning from within, juxtaposed against brightly lit tower blocks in the dark night sky beyond. Ferit Kuyas’ Construction Site (2005), on the other hand, whilst, upon first glance also appearing to be a scene of destruction, is actually one of the birth of a new habitation, taken from his series City of Ambition.

Peter Piller (More Beautiful from Above, 2002-2004) provides aerial views of houses, as if coming in to land at an airport, and Michael Wolf (a01, 2005, and a57, 2009, both from the series Architecture of Density) takes us in so close to the windows and balconies of the tower block, that it takes on a life of its own, becoming the living, breathing model of the portrait. This metaphor of the building as an organism is taken to the extreme, however, in Edgar Martins' Untitled (Atlanta, Georgia) (2009) in which the white interior of a house has been attacked and left mutilated with holes in its ceiling, spewing out pink insulation materials, nauseatingly semblant of hacked flesh or brain matter. If one heeds the title of the series from which this print is taken, This is not a House, then one comprehends that the structures and habitations depicted both here, and in Horner’s show, really are something more than mere exterior casings – they are creations which have taken on a body and soul of their own, and which have their own life cycles and incarnations, sometimes outliving their inhabitants, sometimes not. It is apt then, that the setting for these exhibitions is PM Gallery, part of Pitzhanger Manor House, which itself was rebuilt by Soane, later left to fall into ruin, reinstated in 1901 as Ealing Public Library, and is now open to the public as a cultural venue, with gallery attached. I imagine the number of passers through will multiply for the duration of this pair of exhibitions, and I can only too heartily recommend going along and becoming a part of the history of this building yourself.

Images:

Marguerite Horner

Passing Through 

2011 

oil on linen 50x50cm

Marguerite Horner

Walled in by feelings 

2007 

oil on canvas 92x122cm

Marguerite Horner

Ineffably Perceived 

2007 

oil on canvas 122x92cm

Marguerite Horner

Swept Away 

2011 

oil on canvas 50x50cm

Greg Girard 

House on Huashan Lu, North View, Lane 322, Huashan Lu

2005  

Courtesy of Monte Clark Gallery, Vancouver/Toronto

Edgar Martins

Untitled (Atlanta, Georgia)

from the series This is not a House

2009 

© Edgar Martins 

Courtesy the artist, The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (UK branch), The Wapping Project Bankside

See also:

Marguerite Horner's website

PM Gallery and House website

Review of Philippe Pasqua: Solo Exhibition at Opera Gallery

01/02/12

Philippe Pasqua: Solo Exhibition

Opera Gallery

26 January – 15 February 2012

Often described as the French Francis Bacon, Philippe Pasqua’s canvases can hardly be called as a pretty sight. The terms ‘abject’ and ‘disturbing’ have been used far more commonly, and yet there is something simultaneously beguiling about them. Not exactly because you are drawn in closer, since the dimensions of these works are huge – larger than life, looming down over you from afar – but because there is something confrontational and something unexplained, something that makes you want to find out more.

Untitled for the main part, the portraits, worked up from photographs, are detached from any background or context. Mixed media on paper, laid down on canvas, the faces, eyes usually closed, are beautifully drawn, with rubbings out to create intense effects of shadow and light, then washed in colour, before being subjected to violent splashes of paint in the most vibrant reds, purples, pinks and blues, making one question whether the dream-like state of the subject, seemingly peaceful, mightn’t actually be one of death. Indeed Pasqua has worked intently with the theme of death, not only in his paintings, which also include series on transsexuals, prostitutes, and children with Down’s Syndrome, but also in his sculptures, made out of skulls, bedecked, in a Hirstian manner, with jewels, butterflies, and often thick paint.

Even his nudes are overhung with a large question mark. A black and white girl, for example, hangs at the top of the staircase, sitting with her legs apart, exposed and bare, apart from a vest. Again daubed with splattered paint, and no more than a mere sketchy outline of her limbs, the dark black hair and shadowy face beggar the question of what her story might be. Is she damaged? Vulnerable? Provocatively eliciting attention? Desirous? It is impossible to tell.

Similarly with the children on show in the lower gallery, again sleepy looking, drugged even, their mouths slightly parted, sensual and enticing, but inappropriately so. Who are they? What has happened? Are they asleep, dead, suffering, at peace? Each viewer must draw his own conclusions. The information to accompany the exhibition cites Lucian Freud as having said: ‘The role of the artist is to disturb the human being,’ and if ever there was doubt as to the verity of this statement, Pasqua is living proof. 

Images:

All by Philippe Pasqua

Untitled

Mixed media on paper, laid down on canvas

© Opera Gallery Ltd, 2012

Also published at: http://www.a-n.co.uk/interface/reviews/single/1946719