Q: Morehshin Allahyari
Published in the autumn 2019 issue of Art Quarterly
Saturday, 12 October 2019
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
Book Review: Bacon and the Mind: Art, Neuroscience and Psychology
Published in the autumn 2019 issue of Art Quarterly
Interview: Lucy Joyce
12/10/19
Interview: Lucy Joyce
Lucy Joyce: Electric Blue
E-WERK Luckenwalde
14 September 2019 - 28 March 2020
One of the two inaugural exhibitions at the former coal power station in Luckenwalde, a small town in the middle of the East German state of Brandenburg, is an expanded work, Electric Blue, by the British artist Lucy Joyce. It began as a flagpole commission (something the co-director Helen Turner – former senior curator at Cass Sculpture Foundation, near Chichester – would like to run annually), and grew to include an exhibition of drawings relating to the power station, the town, and their history, and a live “Aktion” on the opening day. The latter involved seven performers hoisting seven-foot mirrored arrows above their heads on the rooftops of the building, containers and parked vehicles, muttering the words: “Hope is not enough.” The seven performers represented seven Luckenwalde inhabitants Joyce had worked with in a research capacity during her residency in the run up to E-Werk’s opening. These ranged from Herr Schmidl, a former senior employee of the power station, to Turner herself. Miniature 3D-printed figurines of these seven characters also stand above the door to the gallery in which Joyce’s work is displayed. They will, she hopes, remain displayed somewhere in the new arts centre, long beyond the period of her residency and exhibition – a reminder of all those who made the project possible.
Joyce’s work is always multilayered, typically creating an interface between passersby and the cultural institution, or inviting people who are unfamiliar with contemporary art to discover points of access. For Turner, therefore, Joyce was the natural choice, because, as she explains: “I was really resistant to making this an isolated contemporary institution. I didn’t want it to just have the Berlin art crowd coming here, or even the international crowd; I wanted it to be a place that the locals felt welcome to come to as well and I knew Lucy would produce a really sensitive, generous commission in this regard.”
Studio International spoke to Joyce about her residency and project on the opening day of E-Werk – just ahead of her Aktion.
Read the full interview here
Mandy Payne: Out of Time
12/10/19
Mandy Payne: Out of Time
Huddersfield Art Gallery
5 October 2019 - 4 January 2020
‘What began as a utopian project to design new schools, libraries, hospitals, housing estates, city halls, using the most cutting-edge building techniques, was deemed to have failed; resulting in ugly, inhuman buildings, unfit for purpose,’ says arts writer Liz Hoggard at the start of an article entitled ‘Why we must learn to love brutalist architecture’[1]. Artist Mandy Payne needs no convincing. She has long been inspired by the urban landscape – in particular Brutalist architectural structures, modernism, social housing, and notions of utopia and dystopia. She seeks, in her work, to capture not just often-iconic buildings and estates before they disappear to make way for luxury housing, but also the traces that people leave behind, and the memories that the buildings absorb. ‘The Lamp of Memory’ is indeed one of Victorian art critic John Ruskin’s chapters in his architectural treatise Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), and the idea that buildings are receptacles for what has passed through them is common in contemporary social sciences as well, where reference is frequently made to ‘collective’ or ‘cultural’ memory. Unlike objects, buildings remain rooted where they are, but can simultaneously change their type, thus becoming a fascinating and unique representation of time.
Payne, whose observational paintings are highly process driven, and full of different marks, textures and patinas, works with materials that have a physical connection to the sites themselves. She casts her own concrete (possibly a hangover from her previous career as a dentist, during which she would work with dental plaster and stone, wax and metals) into small canvases, which she works on directly, using micro masking tapes and spray paint (to reference graffiti) to build up zones of flat colour and then oil paint to add layers of finer detail. Until recently, her works were constrained by their medium, being no larger than 30cm square, but. for a while now, she has been exploring making larger works, using lighter, glass-fibre reinforced concrete panels. Another recent innovation is the use of marble as the substrate to highlight the perceived social inequalities of building materials. Funding from Arts Council England has enabled Payne to explore multiple locations in the lead up to this exhibition.
From 2015-17, Payne held a part-time fellowship in Stone Lithography at Leicester Print Workshop (with grants from Arts Council England and the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation). During this time she pushed her practice still further, and now, as can be seen in the gallery vitrines, often creates lithographs with the same narratives as her paintings, which she frequently prints on to Japanese paper and collages on to concrete. A process of rebuilding? Of retrieving and reconciling a memory?
Surrealist artist Salvador Dalí spoke of people’s ‘hunger’ and ‘thirst’ for ‘concrete images’ and, although he wasn’t speaking in as literal terms as Payne’s practice, her works certainly meet that basic human need, providing documents of these dying concrete constructs, which modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe described as ‘by nature skeletal buildings […] buildings consisting of skin and bones’ – as important to us, then, in our collective memory, as our own ancestors.
Image: Mandy Payne, Out of Time, 2019 © the artist
The Role of Reinterpretation in Annie Zamero’s ‘Royal Revolutions’
12/10/19
The Role of Reinterpretation in Annie Zamero’s ‘Royal Revolutions’
‘Reinterpretation,’ writes the anthropologist John H Hamer, ‘[…] is the way in which people seek to relate and adapt their changing experiences by using the past as a marker for interpreting the present.’ Annie Zamero’s work is all about reinterpretation. It was described in the New Art Examiner as ‘follow[ing] the example of Picasso, amongst others, to make a radical reinterpretation of earlier iconic works’. Indeed, Zamero combines aspects of Old Master, Baroque and Rococo paintings with imagery of contemporary icons of power– royalty and politicians – typically portraying them as if viewed in a fairground mirror, distorted to the point of abstraction. Zamero creates caricatures – or political cartoons – but seeks to elevate them to the level of fine art, in part by adding this historical gravitas, but also by her clearly defined methodology – which involves far more than simply taking a likeness to the extreme by exaggerating prominent characteristics. ‘They’re not really cartoons – some of my studies are quite serious character studies,’ she told Jude Cowan Montague on Resonance FM.
Read the full essay here
Tuesday, 8 October 2019
Laura Jean Healey: The (Un)Holy Trinity
08/10/19
Laura Jean Healey: The (Un)Holy Trinity
Laura Jean Healey is an award-winning film-maker who uses the medium of film to explore the nature of the cinematic experience. Her particular focus is on the role and objectification of the female form on the screen. Her holographic film installation, The Siren (2012), shot underwater in slow-motion, won the Passion For Freedom Gold Film Award in 2014. She is currently working on a new project, The (Un)Holy Trinity, exploring the representation of three legendary ‘unnatural’ women: Lilith, Eve and Salome.
Can you summarise the concept behind your forthcoming work – a triptych of digital films, portraying Lilith, Eve and Salome, entitled The (Un)Holy Trinity? What do these three women represent, both in existing legend, and for you?
Throughout history, these three women – taken directly from the Bible (Eve and Salome), or inspired by the inconstancies found within the book (Lilith) – have been vilified for their ‘unwomanly’ actions and used to serve as a warning as to how destructive female sexuality can be if left unchecked.
According to Jewish law, Lilith was the first wife of Adam. She was made in the same manner as him and considered herself his equal. When he wanted her to lie beneath him, she refused to submit, enraging both Adam and God. In her frustration, she fled from paradise, and, in so doing, became a succubus (temptress of innocent men), breeder of evil spirits, and child-murdering monster of the night.
Eve, unlike Lilith, was not made as an equal to Adam. Even though both she and Adam ate from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, bringing about the Fall of Man, it was Eve alone who bore the ultimate responsibility and was punished with the pain of childbirth and being subjected to her husband’s will.
Salome was a young virgin, who danced for her uncle/step-father, in order to win the head of John the Baptist. In her desperation to possess him, she exerted a more dominant, ‘masculine’ sexuality and was punished for this ‘monstrous’ nature.
I have always been fascinated by these women’s stories. It is these cautionary tales of the ‘unnatural woman’ that have been used to justify holding back women throughout history. Even today, women are often still inherently judged by these unfair and contradictory standards.
Review of Power Night: the Launch of E-Werk Luckenwalde
08/10/19
Power Night: the Launch of E-Werk Luckenwalde
E-Werk Luckenwalde, Brandenburg, Germany
14 September 2019
If you want to ensure that the launch of a new arts centre goes with a bang, who better to invite to curate the opening night’s programme than the now veteran London-based international performance art festival and commissioning body Block Universe? Founded in 2015 by Louise O’Kelly, the all-woman team, which now includes Katharina Worf, Xica Aires and Tatjana Damm, is celebrating its fifth year of programming, and, following a successful fifth edition of the annual festival in London in May, and the first performance festival as part of the Venice Biennale, 14 September saw the already-international team take its cutting-edge mixture of contemporary visual art, dance and music to the seemingly peculiar location of Luckenwalde, a small town 30 miles south of Berlin, in the middle of rural Brandenburg, in the former East Germany. The occasion was the launch of E-Werk Luckenwalde, a new arts centre, sited in a former coal power station, acquired in 2017 by Pablo Wendel, the CEO of Performance Electrics, a not-for-profit energy provider he established in 2012. The conceptual art and energy outfit produces and supplies what Wendel terms “Kunststrom” (or “art electricity” – produced through art installations, sculptures, performances and interventions, which employ renewable energy technologies).
Read the full review here
Thursday, 3 October 2019
An Elusive Presence. WG Sebald: His Writing and Photography
03/10/19
Lines of Sight: WG Sebald’s East Anglia
Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery
10 May 2019 – 5 January 2020
Winfried Georg Sebald – known as WG to the literary world and as Max to his friends – was born in the Bavarian Alps on 18 May 1944. After studying German and English Literature, first at the University of Freiburg (Germany) and then the University of Fribourg (Switzerland), Sebald came to the UK in 1966, where he was a lector at the University of Manchester, before moving to – and settling in – East Anglia, with his Austrian-born wife Ute, in 1970. He first became a lecturer at the University of East Anglia (UEA), later being appointed to a chair of European Literature, and going on to become the founding director of the British Centre for Literary Translation. Author of four genre-defying novels, largely concerning the themes of memory and loss – Vertigo (1990), The Emigrants (1992), The Rings of Saturn (1995), and Austerlitz (2001) – as well as numerous essays, Sebald was tipped as a potential future winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature when he tragically died, in 2001, aged just 57, in a car accident, triggered by an aneurysm.
Read my full essay here
Tuesday, 1 October 2019
Review of Helene Schjerfbeck at the Royal Academy of Arts, London
01/10/19
Helene Schjerfbeck
Royal Academy of Arts, London
20 July – 27 October 2019
20 July – 27 October 2019
It is the same old story over again: a female artist, with a vast number of works to her name, successful during her lifetime, but since largely forgotten to the world at large (albeit still a known name in her native Finland). Her male contemporaries, whose influence is visible in her work (but would this have been a reciprocal relationship?), remain, of course, well known even outside the core of the art world. As deserving as the many other “rediscovered” women being brought out of the closet and put back into the spotlight, Helene Schjerfbeck (1862-1946) is currently having her turn with her first UK solo exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, London (organised together with the Ateneum Art Gallery/Finnish National Gallery).
Born in Helsinki, Schjerfbeck was discovered young by the Finnish painter Adolf von Becker, who secured her a place at the Finnish Drawing School when she was just 11 years old. Five years later, she moved to Becker’s private academy, from where she travelled to Paris to study at the Académies Trélat and Colarossi. Living the life of an educated artist, she flitted between Paris, Pont-Aven, St Petersburg, Vienna, Florence and even St Ives, Cornwall, exhibiting successfully across Europe, particularly in the Nordic countries, but never especially so in the UK. A major exhibition planned for the United States in 1939 was cancelled due to the outbreak of the second world war. Schjerfbeck, who died when she was 83, represented Finland posthumously at the Venice Biennale a decade later, in 1956.
Read the full review here
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