Review of Paul Housley: England Sleeps at Poppy Sebire

19/10/12

Paul Housley: England Sleeps

Poppy Sebire

14 September – 20 October 2012

“In an art world brimming with prolix paintings overstuffed with historical hyperawareness, the appropriation here constructs a refreshing picture of self-doubt within knowledge.” Such was ArtReview columnist Nigel Cooke’s comment on Paul Housley’s Self Portrait as Picasso’s Last Self Portrait (2011).[1] Clearly Housley must have a large dose of self-doubt then, as his current exhibition, his second solo show in two years with Poppy Sebire, is largely made up of further such appropriated portraits – depictions of himself as an artist, both through the act of making a painting, and in his alter-ego guise as Picasso, fully kitted out with beret, paintbrush, and “the Spaniard’s regulation school-of-Paris stripy shirt.”[2] Yet is it not a contradiction to contrast such work with a “historical hyperawareness”? Is this not precisely just such a case in point?

Housley’s works are virtually all cases of appropriation – be it of subject, image, or object – since he works primarily with found artifacts. His studio contains an ever-growing collection of strange and intriguing paraphernalia, bric-a-brac, and discarded works. Whereas previous exhibitions have largely comprised paintings of these objects themselves, this one is filled with appropriated images painted on to found canvases and frames, often spilling over the edge so as to unite the two components in their reincarnation. The works deal with the nature of what it is to be an artist, and, in their play on this, as well as in their homage to Picasso, several have spawned multiple eyes, including the small and dark Artist Wearing a Blue Beret (2012), and, most extravagantly, Totally Wired and Cranked Up Really High (2012).  At slightly larger than A1 size, this is by far the biggest work by an artist who prefers to produce pictures on a smaller-scale, thereby forcing his viewer to come closer and thus confront his own self-image head on with the image in the portrait staring back.

If one were to risk further artistic comparison, it is possible also to recognise an element of George Condo, but without the grotesque or cartoon features, and, of course, the famous pose of Matisse’s Nu bleu II (1952) is unmistakable in Green Thinker (2012). The paint is scratchy, messy, and seemingly carelessly applied, with a lurid pink skin tone, like something a child might pick out of a box of crayons. Nevertheless, there is an appealing quality to these simplistic images, which certainly are not as naïve as their surface appearance would suggest, carrying a deeper meaning and discourse, expressing both self-doubt and self-confidence, for it is surely not just anyone who would be audacious enough to take on the style of masters such as these.

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[1] Nigel Cooke, “Now Hear This”, ArtReview, September 2011

[2] Ibid

Images:

All images © the artist and courtesy of Poppy Sebire

You Ain't No Punk You Punk

2012

Oil on canvas

35 x 25.5 cm

Artist Wearing A Blue Beret

2012

Oil on canvas

26 x 20 cm

Woman Showing Joy

2012

Oil on canvas

60 x 45.5 cm

Review of Billy Childish: Frozen Estuary and Other Paintings of the Divine Ordinary – Part II at Hoxton Arches, Arch 402

19/10/12

Billy Childish: Frozen Estuary and Other Paintings of the Divine Ordinary – Part II

Hoxton Arches, Arch 402

9 – 21 October 2012

Billy Childish (born Steven John Hamper, 1959, in Chatham, Kent) is a longstanding figure in the art world. His raw, expressionist woodcuts, graphic works, and paintings have been produced in cycles over the past 35 years, alongside the publication of five novels, more than forty volumes of poetry, and over 100 full-length music albums. It is only recently, however, that the anarchic artist has begun to show up on the radar of more mainstream collectors, something he has, and continues, to resist with some vehemence.

His latest exhibition, Frozen Estuary and Other Paintings of the Divine Ordinary – Part II, takes him back to his roots, growing up near to, and working as an apprentice stonemason during his teens at the Royal Naval Dockyard in Chatham. It features eighteen new works, a mixture of large-scale oil paintings and smaller watercolours – something fairly new in Childish’s repertoire, and a response to his success, ensuring that he still has work available which can be sold at lower prices – created over the past year whilst he had an artist’s residency at the Dockyard.

“The stories I heard as a youngster have remained the most potent with me,” says Childish. “They are what grips the imagination.” And this series of work grew out of stories he was told, during his time as an apprentice, about the big freeze of 1947. When he recently stumbled upon a photograph of ice-bound ships from a similar big freeze back in the 1890s, his memories were rekindled, and, after some further research, he found additional photographs from both winters, from which, adding in elements from his own memories and imagination, he produced his new works.

The paintings have an unfinished look to them, with bare patches of canvas showing through. There is a sense of their having been painted in haste, perhaps in an attempt to finish them before the scene thawed. The bare areas are jagged and angular, like sharp juts of ice, and the oil paint drips and glistens like melting ice crystals. The palette is limited, with aquamarines, maroons, yellows and browns, offset against a startling white which reflects every bit as brightly as real snow. The shivers of intense cold permeate not only the worn and weary dockers, despite their full-length wading boots, coats with upturned collars, and caps, but the gallery visitors too.

In amongst these large canvases hang smaller watercolour sketches of the same scenes, bright in their watery blues and purples; clean, crisp and cold. A couple of almost sentimental images of Childish with his toddler daughter break up the collection of labour and toil, infusing the series with a sense of light-hearted childlike enjoyment of the snow, back in the days of innocence and easy enchantment, as Childish puts it, “knowing less of the boundaries of the world.”

Finally, one immense, larger-than-life portrait canvas looms, depicting a full-length, naked Childish, drawn in charcoal, with a cross around his neck. His head is leaning forward in an almost challenging manner, as if he were exclaiming: “Look at me! I’m here!” And, indeed, he is. Despite his long time coming, Childish has now hit the art scene big, and, I predict, is here to stay.

Images:

All images courtesy the artist and L-13 Light Industrial Workshop

Frozen Estuary - Oyster Smack, Caroline, 1947 (violet series, version x)
2012
oil and charcoal on linen
122 x 81 cm

Frozen Estuary - Oyster Smack, Caroline, 1947 (watercolour)
2012
watercolour on paper
22.5 x 33.5 cm

Frozen Estuary - Oyster Smack, Caroline, 1947 (violet series)2012
oil and charcoal on linen
122 x 183 cm

Frozen Estuary - River Roach, 1947 (watercolour)
2012
watercolour on paper
22.5 x 33.5 cm

Father with Daughter Walking (watercolour)
2012
watercolour on paper
22.5 x 33.5 cm

Self
2011
charcoal on linen
244 x 122 cm

Review of Frieze London 2012

16/10/12

Frieze London 2012

Regent’s Park

11 – 14 October 2012

This past week was one of the busiest weeks and highlights in the arts calendar, as Frieze London 2012 came to Regent’s Park, marking the tenth year of one of the most important international contemporary art fairs. Once again taking place inside an imposing temporary structure, designed by architects Carmody Groarke, the fair welcomed over 175 galleries from 35 countries, as well as launching the new Frieze Masters, with a further 90 galleries showing works made before the new millennium, and hosting a mixed programme of Frieze Projects (five site-specific commissions), Frieze Film, Frieze Talks (a line-up of international artists, filmmakers, curators and cultural commentators), and a free-to-enter Sculpture Park in the English Gardens, curated by Clare Lilley, the Director of Programmes at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. 

To read the rest of this review, please go to: http://diary.darlingcollective.com/?p=742

Review of There’s Something Happening Here at Brancolini Grimaldi

16/10/12

There’s Something Happening Here

Brancolini Grimaldi

14 September – 10 November 2012

Curated by James Reid (photography director of Wallpaper) and Tom Watt (art director of ArtReview), There’s Something Happening Here is a group show with a difference. Each of the 17 artists on display either do, or have done, editorial work or fashion shoots, hence being on the curators’ radar, but, brought together, their experimental works for this show explore themes of angst, identity and fragility, as well as playing around with the subjectivity of photography itself. 

To read the rest of this review, please go to: http://www.photomonitor.co.uk/2012/10/theres-something-happening-here-2/

Review of Ian Robinson: Collections. Artist in Residence 2012 Solo Show at the Muse Gallery

15/10/12

Ian Robinson: Collections

Artist in Residence 2012 Solo Show

The Muse Gallery

11 – 28 October 2012

“Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories.”[1] Whether one subscribes to Walter Benjamin’s view of the objects of collection as “treasure-houses of memories because each […] object evokes the precise memory of where it was acquired and under what conditions,”[2] or whether one agrees more with Jean Baudrillard and his assessment of the act of collecting as the “pathological need to sequester the love object”[3] and to inscribe it into a series, thus destroying its context of origin, and rendering it merely part of the collection, it is clear that there is a level of obsessionality displayed by the collector, and a sense in which the object becomes fetishised and elevated, representative of far more than its original use value would imply.

For artist Ian Robinson, his photorealistic “portraits” of the objects of collections began when he was still at college, and he started to paint pictures of his own record collection. Upon moving to London, he suddenly found he had access to numerous other collections, including those of Sir John Soane, Cassiano Dal Pozzo, and Aby Warburg, and his focus switched from music to literature. He would visit the collections, make drawings and take photos, and then scale these up, sometimes by hand, sometimes by projecting the photograph on to the canvas, and paint them in minute detail over a period of months. The results are documents of documents, catalogues of catalogues, copies and replicas, or “models of a real without origins or reality: a hyper real.”[4]

Following a year’s residency at The Muse Gallery, Robinson is now showing a collection of his works (and, since Benjamin suggests that “of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method,”[5] so, similarly, creating a collection of paintings of collections by painting them oneself must also deserve its share of praise), lovingly drawn and painted images of vinyl records, CDs, books, documents, albums and manuscripts, tattered and dog-eared, wrinkled and creased, generations of recorded media, families, lineage and heritage. The sketchy Bookend (2011) appears like a photograph of an old beloved grandfather, and Richard Prince Photobooks (2011) (itself an homage to an artist who collects), has the air of a family portrait, posed and poised, some members worn and aged, some younger and/or better preserved, each with its own value and its own history, but all coming together as part of a greater whole.

More recently, Robinson has returned to collections of music, and has spent time at the Ministry of Sound and at Rough Trade Records. His red chalk drawing of a mixer at the former was inspired by seeing an exhibition of red chalk works at the Scottish National Galleries, and the air of antiquity bequeathed by this choice of medium echoes a sense of loss with the disappearance of a format and the death of a generation – Robinson himself regrets that he no longer buys vinyl today. Technics Turntable (2010), a black and white biro and pencil drawing on paper, positions the machine floating in space, with no ground whatsoever: a pure celebration of the object itself.

For nineteenth century French collector Edmond de Goncourt (1822-1986), who, along with his brother Jules (1830-1870), brought about a revival of eighteenth century Rococo style, the aristocratic lineage of an object was an important part of its value, and for Robinson as well, the history associated with an object or a collection is of great significance. Part of his work involves researching both the collector and the collection, and gaining some insight into their inner world and psyche. Their obsession becomes his, and their complete collection a unique object in his pictorial one. Baudrillard is keen to point out that the series in a collection must always remain open and incomplete, for “lack is the guarantor of life: to complete the series is to die.”[6] Robinson is a young man, with talent and a passion for his work, and so I can only surmise that his series will continue to grow.

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[1] Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting,” (first published in German, 1931), in Illuminations, ed. H. Arendt, London, 1970, p60

[2] Naomi Schor, “Collecting Paris,” in The Cultures of Collecting, eds. J. Elsner & R. Cardinal, London: Reaktion, 1994, p252

[3] Ibid, p257

[4] Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation: The Body in Theory, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1981, p80

[5] Benjamin, 1970, p61

[6] Schor, 1994, p258

Images:

Ian Robinson

5 Studies

2011

Oil on canvas

45cm x 32.5cm

Ian Robinson

Bookend

2011 

Oil on Board

25cm x 18cm 

Ian Robinson

Richard Prince Photobooks 

2011 

Oil on Canvas

37cm x 40cm 

Ian Robinson

Technics Turntable 

2010 

Biro and pencil on paper

39cm x 26.5cm 

Also published at: http://www.a-n.co.uk/interface/reviews/single/2546087

Review of Telling Stories: Hastings at Hastings Museum and Art Gallery

13/10/12

Telling Stories: Hastings

Hastings Museum and Art Gallery

22 September 2012 – 13 January 2013

If a photograph can capture a moment and preserve it for eternity, it is unsurprising that most of the 14 artists showing work in Telling Stories: Hastings, the second exhibition in a project which began in Margate last year, have chosen to use this medium when inviting us to share the stories of their lives. 

Image:

Cathryn Kemp

Installation shot of Sleeping Beauty 

2012

iphone photographs as composite on 5mm aluminium DiBond, exhumed nightgown, constructed oak cabinet and stand

Photo: Alex Brattell

To read the rest of this review, please go to: http://www.photomonitor.co.uk/2012/10/telling-stories-hastings-2/

Review of Anish Kapoor at Lisson Gallery

11/10/12

Anish Kapoor

Lisson Gallery, 29 & 52-54 Bell Street

10 October – 10 November 2012

To mark thirty years of the artist’s collaboration with the gallery, Lisson is currently giving over both of its Bell Street spaces, as well as the sculpture courtyard at number 29, to Anish Kapoor, offering him the chance to show an entirely new body of work, created in his studio over the past year.

Kapoor, who describes himself as “an artist who’s in between painting and sculpture,” started these works with a “simple proposition”: is it possible to make earth into sky? According to him, yes, it is. And this is achieved, it would appear, through using a mixture of organic materials and colours, by playing with scale, positioning small works next to and amongst larger ones, and by turning things inside out and upside down.

“I’m deeply interested in where things begin,” says Kapoor. The works in this exhibition look for places of origin; proto-places. They are simple forms, with a certain gestalt. Moving on from his earlier primary colour pigment works, Kapoor here has turned to using earth. In the Shadow of the Tree and the Knot of the Earth III looks, to me, like a beached whale, whilst In the Shadow of the Tree and the Knot of the Earth VI could be a wave lapping the shore, and In the Shadow of the Tree and the Knot of the Earth II, a volcanic cloud. Sculptures are laid out contrasting the geological and biological processes of autogeneration and erosion. Pump-generated concrete works of built-up deposits (e.g. Spittle), described by Kapoor as “a lump of stuff, almost as if unmade, proto-architectural”, stand next to polystyrene creations, eaten away by resin, and liberally coated in marble dust, evoking the natural forms of rock and coral (e.g. A Ghost’s Endeavour and Erosion). There are also smaller cement pieces, hanging on the wall, volcanic and cratered, evoking, Kapoor suggests, stigmata and the cult of St. Sebastian.

The most recognisably Kapoor room is the back room at number 29, which is hung with six perfect fibreglass hemispherical monochromes, with which Kapoor confesses to having had a long love affair. “[Monochrome] is the thing in my practice which I keep coming back to. I work in fibreglass a lot too – it’s very versatile.” Having spent many years making shiny objects, however, he is now experimenting with a mix of watercolour which produces something neither shiny nor matt. “I’m interested in colour as a condition, as a singularity: psychologically, physiologically, phenomenologically,” explains Kapoor, and, indeed, the works create a fully state-effecting experience: stand close enough to Green, for example, so as to be fully immersed and block out all surrounding vision, and it creates strange and hypnotic visual waves of yellow and blue, and an amplified echoing of voices and sounds in the surrounding gallery. Step back and look away, and everything becomes temporarily rose tinted.

The sculpture yard is home to the most recent work on display, Intersection, assembled only in the past couple of weeks, and made of Corten steel, the same material as in the canopy element of the controversial Arcelor Mittal Orbit sculpture at the Olympic Park. With reference to Brunelleschi and the long tradition of architecture, Kapoor seeks to “give geometry a strange organic presence,” and to play with contradictions by creating an object whose interior is larger than the shell which contains it – bringing the sky down to earth and turning it in upon itself.

The newest departure for Kapoor, however, is working with sound. Upstairs at numbers 54-56, he has created a full room installation, Anxious, which he describes as an “anxiety room”. There is nothing really there but a spotlight and a very low frequency sound, scarcely audible, but, apparently, the same frequency as has been recorded in haunted locations. The work is phenomenologically driven and deeply auto-suggestive, making even Kapoor himself feel anxious. Indeed, as I stood and moved about the space, feeling the slight changes in intensity, my chest tightened, my heart began to thump, and I found myself gasping for air.

Kapoor, who also has a big exhibition coming up at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, Australia, from December, is not yet resting on his laurels, despite his claim that he’d rather like to. “There’s still a lot to do,” he says, “so I keep doing it.”

Images:

Anish Kapoor

Installation View, Lisson Gallery, London 

2012

Courtesy of the artist and Lisson Gallery

Anish Kapoor

Untitled

2012

Cement

Courtesy of the artist and Lisson Gallery

Anish Kapoor

Installation View, Lisson Gallery, London 

2012

Courtesy of the artist and Lisson Gallery

Anish Kapoor

Intersection

2012

Corten steel

Courtesy of the artist and Lisson Gallery

Anish Kapoor

Anxious

2012

Enclosed space, sound

Courtesy of the artist and Lisson Gallery

Bedwyr Williams: Dear Both at Ceri Hand Gallery

11/10/12

Bedwyr Williams: Dear Both

Ceri Hand Gallery

8 October – 3 November 2012

As Ceri Hand’s third exhibition in London, albeit in a temporary space before moving into her permanent Fitzrovia gallery in spring 2013, she is proud to welcome Bedwyr Williams, the polymath artist-cum-stand-up-comedian who will represent Wales at the Venice Biennale 2013. Anyone brave enough to venture to Covent Garden’s Monmouth Street, despite the advertising information in the form of a letter from Williams threatening to “make you eat all of your bloody dental floss from the bin,” “bop you on your bonce with your shower head until a cartoon lump forms,” and “hang you on your own back fence like a Yule wreath,” will be greeted by an eclectic mixture of photography, sculpture, film work and drawings, and, if lucky, a performance from the man himself.

Words are a key part of Williams’ work, and titles vary from straightforward and obvious descriptions, to comical, clever puns and, on occasion, scarcely veiled threats. Don’t Ever Open My Mail Again (2012), for example, consists of three circular singed doormats, and Clocsiwr (2012) (Welsh for “clogs”) displays a pair of wooden-soled white trainers on a plinth. For Bad News (2012), two black nylon kites flutter in the breeze of an electric fan, foreboding and ominous, like the sails on the ship in the tragic legend of Tristan and Iseult, whilst, on a lighter note, Research Fellow (2012) consists of a door with Williams’ name, hanging on the wall above the staircase, suggesting perhaps the nature of how he sees his own oeuvre.

In a similar vein, The Teacher (2012) sets up an imaginary dialogue between a large and a small hammer, the former with its head slightly tilted to look down upon its protégé, whilst Artist Artist (2012) performs a real time one interaction between two speaker boxes, each uttering and echoing the title at seemingly random points in time.

Williams’ favourite work in the show is OO/HO (2012), a miniature model lamp post, lying on its side in a glass box. Making it made him sad, he says, as it is so pathetic! He is also fond of The Burn (2012), however, a shell encrusted BBQ, like a large-scale version of the trinket boxes available in all kitsch seaside souvenir shops. This one is, quite simply, “good fun”.

Living in a small village in North Wales, Williams is the first to confess that most people there, including his partner, probably think he’s a “weirdo”. He doesn’t think so, himself, however. After looking around the exhibition, hearing a performance reading requiring me to imagine myself a mole, and having a brief face-to-face conversation, I remain inconclusive as to my own view. One thing is for sure: he is not your run of the mill artist! To get a taste of what is to come on a larger scale in Venice next summer, and to decide for yourself, take a trip down Monmouth Street, but be careful – you were warned!

Images:

Bedwyr Williams

Dear Both

2012

HD video

5' 48 secs.

Photo: Anna Arca

Courtesy of the artist and Ceri Hand Gallery 

Bedwyr Williams

Strafed

2012

Drilled plastic tables and table & lights

Dimensions variable

Photo: Anna Arca

Courtesy of the artist and Ceri Hand Gallery 

Bedwyr Williams

The Burn

2012

Shell encrusted metal BBQ

23.6 x 23.6 x 42.5 in. / 60 x 60 108 cm

Photo: Anna Arca

Courtesy of the artist and Ceri Hand Gallery 

Also published at: http://www.a-n.co.uk/interface/reviews/single/2544922

Review of the Turner Prize 2012 Exhibition at Tate Britain

07/10/12

Turner Prize 2012 Exhibition

Tate Britain, London
2 October 2012 – 6 January 2013

Love it or hate it, the Turner Prize is upon us once again, and, after a year’s sojourn at the BALTIC, it has returned home to Tate Britain. This year’s nominees are film artists Luke Fowler (born 1978) and Elizabeth Price (born 1966), performance artist Spartacus Chetwynd (born 1973), and the architectural draughtsman Paul Noble (born 1963), for his intricate and disturbed designs for the dystopian metropolis, Nobson Newtown.

To read the rest of this review, please go to: http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/turner-prize-2012-exhibition