Review of Hedda Sterne at Victoria Miro Mayfair

02/03/20

Hedda Sterne

Victoria Miro Mayfair, London 

29 January – 21 March 2020

Hedda Sterne. “The only female at [the] birth of abstract expressionism.” Friends and neighbours with gallerist Peggy Guggenheim and in the stable of art dealer Betty Parsons. A “great-artist”. 

Born Hedwig Lindenberg on 4 August 1910, in Bucharest, Romania, Sterne lived to the grand age of 100, dying in New York City in 2011. She knew she wanted to be an artist from the age of five or six. “I always loved Leonardo,” she told Sarah Boxer, for the New York Review of Books, shortly before she died. “Artists were always referred to as great artists. I thought that’s what the profession was. One word: great-artist. There wasn’t one moment in my life when I thought I wanted to be anything else.” And so that is what she became. She began to make a name for herself in Romania, but it was after arriving in New York in 1941, fleeing Nazi-occupied Bucharest, that things really began to happen. Having married and separated from a man named Fritz Stern, she adopted his surname, adding an “e”, maintaining this moniker, despite her marriage to fellow Romanian artist Saul Steinberg, three years later. 

Sterne fell in love with America and painted its modernity from every angle: “The American kitchen, the American bathroom, the American street, you know, its horizontals and verticals, its points and lines. New York was a total delight, a paradise.” In 1950, she was photographed by Nina Leen, along with 14 other artist-signatories – including Willem De Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still – of an open letter to the president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, protesting against the museum’s aesthetically conservative group-exhibition juries. The photograph, of which Sterne later said, “I am known more for that darn photo than for 80 years of work,” describing herself as the “feather on top”, was subtitled “Irascible Group of Advanced Artists” and published on the cover of Time-Life magazine on 15 January 1951. Being the only female in the picture garnered Sterne much attention – positive and negative. Lumped together with the abstract expressionists, partly because of her gallerist and dealer, and largely because of this photograph, Sterne always maintained she was not one of the group. “I was not an abstract expressionist. Nor was I an Irascible,” she told Boxer, and, as critic Grace Glueck wrote in 2006: “She has maintained a stubborn independence from styles and trends, including surrealism and abstract expressionism … Although she never developed a signature style, Ms Sterne’s explorations have produced a small universe of evocative images.”

Read my full review here

Interview with Carmen Neely

01/03/20

Interview with Carmen Neely

Carmen Neely (b1987, Charlotte, North Carolina) makes abstract, expressionistic paintings that translate poignant memories and experiences into gestures on canvas. In turn, these gestures frequently take on a life of their own, being sculpted into 3D forms, photographed and catalogued, and often, like so many other objects and imagined entities in the artist’s life, taking on names and unique personalities. Neely is a collector: of memories, of objects, of paraphernalia, of phrases. All of these things make their way on to and into her canvases, pushing the boundaries of painting, exploring its sense of timeless self-reflection, and ensuring there is a pure and open honesty in her own self-reflective work. 

Studio International spoke to Neely by Skype about her practice, the role of collecting and (re)creating characters and identities, and how to be serious about one’s play.

Read the full interview here

Interview with Jake Wood-Evans

27/02/20

Interview with Jake Wood-Evans

Jake Wood-Evans: Relic

The Gallery, Winchester Discovery Centre

10 January – 29 March 2020

Entering the Gallery at Winchester Discovery Centre is currently something like entering a church or sacred space. The lighting is low and focused on the large, arch-topped canvases, created especially for this exhibition by Hastings-based artist Jake Wood-Evans.

Wood-Evans’s work derives from his fascination with the baroque, especially, in this instance, with the grand altarpieces by the likes of Rubens and Van Dyck. However, after marking out the basic figuration of his version of the painting he is working from, he then sets about removing elements, pushing the paint about in its fluidity, mixed with turps and linseed oil. His resulting imagery sits somewhere between figuration and abstraction – with an element of the meditative – inviting viewers to bring their own interpretation and narrative to the traces and relics of what has been, both on Wood-Evans’s own canvases, and on the canvases of the original paintings, with the passing of time, added layers of varnish, and restorative work, all leaving their mark. 

Studio International spoke to Wood-Evans about his inspirations and his process.

Watch the interview here

Review of Van Eyck: An Optical Revolution at the Museum of Fine Arts Ghent (MSK)

14/02/20

Van Eyck: An Optical Revolution

Museum of Fine Arts Ghent (MSK)

1 February – 30 April 2020

The Ghent Altarpiece (completed in 1432 and inaugurated in 1435) is as known for its eventful history – as the most frequently stolen work of art, with one panel’s whereabouts remaining unknown since 1934 – as it is for its splendour and precise craftmanship. More recently, it has also become a social media sensation, with the Mystic Lamb (the surprisingly tiny central “figure”, representing Christ as the Lamb of God) even being given its own Instagram account, as the ongoing process of restoration has revealed a completely different – and far more exquisite – painting underneath centuries’ of overpainting and oxidised varnish. 

Even after restoration, it still remains a mystery which Van Eyck sibling painted what. The work is thought to have been begun by Jan’s elder brother, Hubert, (c1360/70-1426) about whom little is known, and by whom no further works are thought to exist, and completed by Jan (c1390-1441) after Hubert’s death. There is some suggestion that their two other siblings may also have lent a hand, although only Hubert and Jan are credited in the Latin quatrain on the polyptych’s frame, which calls Hubert the greatest painter there was, and Jan “second in art”. The consensus, however, is that the majority of the work was undertaken by Jan. To celebrate the near completion of this restoration project – which has taken longer than planned due to its unexpected complexity – and the opening, in October, of a new visitors’ centre in St Bavo’s Cathedral, for where the altarpiece was commissioned, and to where it will return, the former capital of Flanders is celebrating a year’s worth of Van Eyck-themed festivities, exhibitions and events, under the (somewhat cringeworthy) header of #OMGVanEyckWasHere. At the heart of this is the exhibition, Van Eyck: An Optical Revolution, at the Museum of Fine Arts Ghent (MSK), which, for the past eight years, has housed a studio for the restoration work, visible at all times to the public.

Read the full review here

Interview about Norman Cornish

21/01/20

Interview about Norman Cornish

Norman Cornish (1919-2014) was born into a mining family in Spennymoor, County Durham, as the eldest of seven children. Aged 14, he had to leave school and go and work in the mines. He was, however, also a keen artist, and, through sheer determination and drive, simultaneously forged a career drawing and painting. After 33 years in the pits, he retired due to chronic back problems, and was finally able to dedicate himself full time to his art. His sketches of workers in the pub, playing darts or dominoes, of locals queuing at the fish and chip van, and of his wife, father and children, paint the portrait of a place and time and are as synonymous with the northeast of England, as LS Lowry’s are with the northwest. Nevertheless, despite numerous honorary doctorates and an MBE for his contribution to art, his renown seems more locally bounded. This is something that his family hope to change, and, with 2019 being the anniversary of his birth, they helped put on an array of exhibitions and establish a permanent trail in Spennymoor, taking visitors to key sites where Cornish worked. 

I spoke to the artist’s son, John Cornish, about the celebrations – some of which are still ongoing, his father’s legacy, and his own memories of family life. 

Read the full interview here

Interview with Paul Mpagi Sepuya at Modern Art, Vyner Street, London

20/01/20

Interview with Paul Mpagi Sepuya

Paul Mpagi Sepuya 

Modern Art, Vyner Street, London

11 January - 15 February 2020

Paul Mpagi Sepuya (b1982, California) began his photographic career taking straightforward portraits. Even today, a decade and a half later, he believes the basis of his work remains the traditional studio portrait, which he always takes of friends and people he knows; occasionally also of himself. His presence in the image, which is often overemphasised in curatorial selections, is very much secondary, however, with the key focus being on the camera itself, and the act of photography. By placing the camera or tripod at the centre of the composition, and using mirrors, frequently tainted with smudges and smears, so as to make evident their presence, he deconstructs the process, as well, frequently, as the resultant image, which is cut into fragments, later to reappear in other works. Although the images themselves are now taken digitally – purely as a means of expediency – Mpagi Sepuya does no digital manipulation of his works whatsoever. Everything that appears in the shot is actually there in his studio.

While Mpagi Sepuya’s work has often been described as being about queer identity, this is, again, secondary to the camera itself. Here he explains how, although black and queer experiences are clearly conditions that lead to the space that makes the work possible, it is these conditions themselves that interest him more than making any overt declarations about gender, sexuality or race. The compositions are not planned but arise out of his living with the material until it finds its way into an image. While there are myriad layers to his works, and, in fact, to the layperson, they might seem incredibly complex, Mpagi Sepuya maintains they are little more complicated than a selfie, shot by a teenager in a bathroom mirror. 

I spoke to Mpagi Sepuya for Studio International ahead of the opening of his first solo UK exhibition, taking place at Modern Art, Vyner Street, as part of CONDO. Watch the interview here.

Review of In the Land of the Gods. Marc Chagall and the Greek World at the Musée National Marc Chagall, Nice

10/01/20

In the Land of the Gods

Marc Chagall and the Greek World

Musée National Marc Chagall, Nice

16 November 2019 – 27 April 2020

In the early 1950s, Marc Chagall (born 1887, Belarus) accepted the suggestion of his Greek publisher friend Tériade (real name Stratis Eleftheriadis) to illustrate a new edition of the second-century AD pastoral prose romance Daphnis and Chloe, attributed to Longus, and set on the Greek island of Lesbos, where the young shepherd and shepherdess fall in love. To get a feel for the country and its history and mythology, Chagall made two trips there, in 1952 and 1954. He also visited a wider range of tourist destinations, including Athens and Olympia. The Jewish artist was bowled over by what he described as “the land of the gods” – a country where every monument transports the visitor back several thousand years, yet with affinities to the ambience of the French Riviera, where he had made his home in Saint-Paul de Vence. What followed were series of illustrations, not only for Daphnis and Chloe, but also Homer’s Odyssey and Sappho’s poetry, and paintings, gouaches, ceramics and large-scale mosaics (for the faculty of law in Nice), and set and costume designs for the Paris Opera. Hellenic culture became mixed in with Chagall’s Jewish motifs and Old Testament illustrations and remained a prominent influence on his work until his death in 1985.

Read the full review here

Review of Josef Herman: Journey at Flowers Gallery, Kingsland Road, London

06/01/20

Josef Herman: Journey

Flowers Gallery, Kingsland Road, London
15 November 2019 – 25 January 2020

I don’t know what I will be
A poet or a painter
I don’t know whether I will speak
Through poems or paintings.

I like pictures in poetry
I like poetry in pictures
I don’t know what I will be
A poet or a painter.

Perhaps I will never be
A poet or a painter
And with unwritten poems
I will pass through life, a living picture.

(Josef Herman, age 12)

Born in Warsaw in 1911, Josef Herman, the subject of this two-floor retrospective, comprising works drawn from a career spanning half a century, was the son of an illiterate Jewish cobbler. He grew up in a predominantly Jewish working-class neighbourhood and had little formal education. Nevertheless, he was a voracious reader and well versed in what was going on in the wider art world. 

In 1938, Herman moved to Brussels to escape the onslaught of nazism. From there, he fled via France to Britain – first to Glasgow, then to London, then to Ystradgynlais in south Wales, then back to London, then to Suffolk, and ultimately to London again – where he remained until he died in 2000, age 89. Herman’s choice of the Belgian capital as his first port of call was significant, given the decision of so many other émigré artists to head to the artistic capital of Paris. As his son, David, writes in his contribution to a catalogue published by Ben Uri Gallery in 2014: “That generation of Jewish refugees, especially those from central and eastern Europe, divided into those who were by temperament insiders (for example, GR Elton and Isaiah Berlin) and those who were permanent outsiders. Herman was in every sense an outsider: he was from eastern Europe, passionately involved with Jewish culture and soaked in Yiddish writing, politically on the left. Above all, his artistic formation could hardly have been more remote from the central British traditions.”

Read the full review here

Interview with VALIE EXPORT

13/12/19

Interview: VALIE EXPORT

VALIE EXPORT (b1940, Linz, Austria) is one of the most significant artists in the field of performance and new media, and has been awarded the 2019 Roswitha Haftmann Prize. Her career, which spans five decades, has been pioneering in film, video and installation art. However, she is probably best known for her groundbreaking Aktions and performances of the late 1960s and 1970s, which introduced a new radical form of feminist art to Europe. 

In 1980, EXPORT represented Austria at the 39th Venice Biennale (alongside Maria Lassnig). For her first exhibition at London’s Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, this installation has been brought to the UK, and is every bit as powerful now as four decades ago. 

Read the full interview here

Q: Barbara Walker

04/12/19

Q: Barbara Walker

Published in the winter 2019 issue of Art Quarterly