Review of Jonathan Gabb: SYSTEM at WW Gallery

23/01/13

Jonathan Gabb: SYSTEM

WW Gallery

9 January – 2 February 2013

Part of the prize for winning the WW SOLO Award 2012 was a three-month residency in the gallery’s studio, and Jonathan Gabb, selected from over 300 entries, made good use of this time to perfect his “SYSTEM”. Using a carefully balanced combination of PVA glue and acrylic paints – the precise measures of which only he knows – this sculptural painter creates vast sheets of pure colour in huge trays on the studio floor. Once dry, he cuts them into fringed strips, and hangs them from ceilings, skylights, and walls, like canopies and curtains, intertwining and tying individual strands to one another, and creating a panoply of colour. Tantalisingly begging to be touched and wandered amidst, these works need not only to be admired from all different viewpoints, but also just looked at head on and absorbed, as they absorb the viewer in return.

Standing beneath prime titanium 4, I feel a bit like Alice in Wonderland after she has drunk the potion which shrinks her. It is as if I have landed inside an enormous party popper, amongst the myriad multi-coloured streamers. Cascading from the skylight in the ceiling, there is a desire to climb upwards, ascending the refracted colours of the primary spectrum – red, blue and yellow – to the pure light which merges with the white strands above.

Across the room, on either side of the partition door, hang two curtains, one blue, one yellow, but both also with white at the top (parsing: prussian blue + white and parsing: cadmium yellow + white respectively). Here, rather than appearing as a light source, this upper section seems almost bleached of its colour, as if its very vitality had drained downwards to the dull grey ground, like electricity rushing to its earth.

Some strands are different colours on different sides too, and then there is also the interaction of natural light, flooding into the gallery, which makes everything appear different at different times of day. All of this was a new adventure for Gabb, whose New Cross studio has no windows at all.

The strands, which are thicker than one would expect, and surprisingly enduring, if still delicate, have a sense of presence, whilst remaining unimposing. They are “outlined” on the walls and floors by frames (the edge of the sheets of colour from which they were cut, but remain umbilically attached), demarcating their space, an imaginary support, their backbone, or their do-not-cross line.

Whether you experience these pieces as unwanted output from a shredder, crazy-coloured, man-sized tagliatelli, or the rotating sponges of a carwash, they certainly offer a full on perceptual assault. They call out to be danced amongst like streamers, and the overwhelming evocation is one of carnival and theatre, of celebration of some kind. And, indeed, that is exactly what they are: a celebration of paint and colour, pure and simple. 

Images:

Jonathan Gabb: SYSTEM at WW Gallery

Installation shots

Photos: Anna McNay

© the artist and WW Gallery

Interview with Nick Hackworth, Curator of A Cyclical Poem Photo50, London Art Fair

16/01/13

Interview with Nick Hackworth, Curator of A Cyclical Poem

Photo50, London Art Fair

16 - 20 January 2013

This year’s London Art Fair, being hosted at the Business Design Centre, Islington, from 16 – 20 January 2013, sees the return of Photo50, the guest-curated annual showcase of contemporary photography. Anna McNay speaks to Nick Hackworth, this year’s curator, to find out more.

How did you come to be curating Photo50?

I believe Sue Steward, the photography critic for the Evening Standard who curated last year’s Photo 50, kindly recommended me.

And where does the title, A Cyclical Poem, come from?

‘History is a cyclic poem written by time upon the memories of man’ from A Defence of Poetry by Shelley. 

• Image:
• 
  
• Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen
• Girl on a 'Spacehopper'
• 1971
• from the series Byker

To read the rest of this interview, please go to: http://www.photomonitor.co.uk/2013/01/curating-london-art-fair-photo50-a-cyclical-poem/ 

Review of Maia Spall: Shifting Shapes and Xavier’s Spires Spectacle at Xavier White’s, Blackheath

12/01/13

Maia Spall: Shifting Shapes

and

Xavier’s Spires Spectacle

at Xavier White’s, Blackheath

8 December 2012 – 14 January 2013

Walking into Xavier White’s front room gallery space is like walking into a spiritually uplifting, meditative sanctuary. In front of the vast bay windows, looking out over the heath, is an undulating landscape, draped in white, and bedecked with some sixty odd glass spires, lit up from within against the dark night sky behind. The remaining three walls and staircase are hung with Maia Spall’s rich and swirling purple, blue and magenta canvases, evoking a sense of movement, both of the ocean and sky from which she draws much of her inspiration, as well as of the spirit and soul. There is an all-encompassing eurythmy to the works, which carries you away as much as does the soundtrack of Gregorio Allegri’s choral piece, Miserere, composed during the 1630s for use during the Holy Week matins services in the Sistine Chapel, playing on repeat.

Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) conceives of the entire universe as a series of folds, with the major fold being the point of contact between the lower level of matter and being, and the upper level of the soul, with the critical idea being that nothing is divided, but rather runs on as one unbroken continuum. Spall’s paintings capture this concept perfectly: their waves of colour bringing out the essence of life on both levels. Floating through Night, in particular, resplendent in its varying intensities of purple, yellow, and dark, dark blue, suggests a progression upwards from the scratched into and daubed over lower third, through a patchy middle, where one can catch glimpses of the prepared but unpainted white canvas gleaming through, to the darker, calmer upper band, where the struggles of life have been replaced by a sense of serenity. Interestingly, White claims to see John Everett Millais’ Ophelia (1851-2) in this work – either way, there is a peacefulness to it; an end to the stresses and woes of earthly existence.

 

The largest piece in the exhibition, Landscape, hangs opposite the windows, an immense altarpiece behind a draped shelf, again lit with White’s exquisite spires. It is flanked by smaller figure studies (enchanting, but not as fitting as the abstracted landscapes), seascapes and coastal studies (Spall moved from her native South East London to Whitstable ten years ago). Although the influence of J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851) is apparent in works such as Sea Light and Ships at Sea, the colour scheme remains very much Spall’s own.

Trained in art therapy, Spall explains that she works “intuitively, usually as an act of expressive improvisation, musically not unlike the exploration of a free-jazz piece, […] becom[ing] absorbed with the movements and rhythms of light, colour, and composition.” It is perhaps no surprise, then, that her work has such a strong sense of breaking free: capturing momentum, entropy, and the breathing of a wave as it ebbs and flows.

Images:

Installation shot

Xavier's Spire Spectacle

Xavier White's, Blackheath

Maia Spall

Floating through Night

Oil on canvas

Maia Spall

Whitstable Coast

Call Xavier on 07 88 99 72 374 to arrange a viewing

For more information on Maia Spall, see: http://www.maiaspall.com/

Also posted at: http://www.a-n.co.uk/interface/reviews/single/2889355

Review of Richard Hamilton: The Late Works at the National Gallery

09/01/13

Richard Hamilton: The Late Works

Sunley Room, The National Gallery

10 October 2012 – 12 January 2013

Just what is it that makes Richard Hamilton’s works so different, so appealing? Sadly, the current exhibition of late works by Hamilton (1922-2011), at the National Gallery, doesn’t really do justice to his prolific and multifarious oeuvre, but, luckily, a major retrospective of his work is due to tour Europe and America from 2014. Nevertheless, it seems appropriate that the National Gallery should host this small-scale show, since it has long been a place of significance to the artist, who sadly died during the preparations for what might be seen now as a touching tribute.

To read the rest of this review, please go to: http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/richard-hamilton-the-late-works

Review of Sanja Iveković: Unknown Heroine at Calvert 22 and the South London Gallery

21/12/12

Sanja Iveković: Unknown Heroine

Calvert 22 and the South London Gallery

14 December 2012 – 24 February 2013

For her first major exhibition in London, and her first solo show in the UK, Croatian artist Sanja Iveković (born 1949) has taken over two galleries – Camberwell’s South London Gallery and Shoreditch’s Calvert 22. Spanning a variety of mixed media – from collage and photography to film and performance – Iveković’s prolific socially and politically rooted oeuvre simply wouldn’t have been done justice in just the one space.

At Calvert 22, the emphasis is placed on works concerned with the transition from socialism to capitalism after the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989 and the ensuing dissolution of Yugoslavia. Social systems, public space, and the agency of the individual are also investigated. At the South London Gallery, the focus is more on the question of female invisibility in the public arena, constructions of femininity, and performativity of identity and gender. 

To read the rest of this review, please go to: http://www.divamag.co.uk/category/arts-entertainment/art-review-sanja-iveković.aspx

Review of Judy Chicago: Deflowered at Riflemaker Gallery and Judy Chicago at Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art

19/12/12

Judy Chicago: Deflowered

Riflemaker Gallery

12 November – 31 December 2012

and

Judy Chicago

Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art

13 November 2012 – 10 March 2013

 “Feminist art is all the stages of a woman giving birth to herself. […] It is art that reaches out and affirms women and validates our experience and makes us feel good about ourselves.” (Judy Chicago, What is Feminist Art?, 1977)

Judy Chicago (born 1939) is a pioneer of feminist art, who came to prominence in the late 1960s, and is probably best known for her controversial installation, The Dinner Party (1979). Made to celebrate great women throughout history, this was a ground-breaking work, both as an icon of the feminist art movement, and, more broadly, of twentieth century American art history. Chicago herself describes the piece as: “a monumental work of art, triangular in configuration, that employs numerous media, including ceramics, china-painting, and an array of needle and fibre techniques.” Each of its 39 place settings – plates decorated with variations on butterfly- and floral-styled vulva – commemorates a goddess, historical figure, or important woman, and the whole thing stands upon an immense porcelain floor – the Heritage Floor – comprising 2304 hand-cast tiles on which the names of 999 other important women are inscribed.

These two parallel exhibitions, hosted by Riflemaker and Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art (Chicago was born Judy Cohen, into a left-wing, politically-active Jewish family in Chicago in 1939, and legally changed her name in 1970 to escape the perceived male patriarchy), are the first showing of Chicago’s work in London since her installation of The Dinner Party toured to an empty warehouse in Islington in 1985, and she is pleased to have the opportunity to introduce her UK audience to aspects of her work beyond this iconic piece, since, unsurprisingly, in a career spanning five decades, there is much more to Chicago’s oeuvre than widely known. Touching upon her most commonly recurring themes, which embrace autobiography, art as diary, erotica, feminism, the nude, self-portraiture, performance, issues of masculine power, birth and motherhood – and the cat – Riflemaker is primarily showing early paintings, sketches and sculpture (albeit alongside a rarely seen test plate and runner drawing for The Dinner Party), and Ben Uri is focusing on the more private and intimate side of her work, with over 170 pieces on display, contextualised alongside three women artists from this side of the Atlantic: Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010), Helen Chadwick (1953-1996) and Tracey Emin (born 1963).

To read the rest of this review, please go to: http://www.divamag.co.uk/category/arts-entertainment/review-artist-judy-chigago's-deflowered-and-ben-uri.aspx

Review of Clarisse d’Arcimoles: Forget Nostalgia – A Little Theatre of Self at BREESE LITTLE

19/12/12

Clarisse d’Arcimoles: Forget Nostalgia – A Little Theatre of Self

BREESE LITTLE

20 November – 19 December 2012

For her second solo exhibition with BREESE LITTLE, French artist Clarisse d’Arcimoles has turned the Great Sutton Street space into a local photographer’s studio in Britain a century ago. Venturing in from the cold winter air, the warm red walls and wooden panelling, the worn Persian carpet, and the various suitcases of bought, found, donated, and home-made props and costumes warm the visitor to his core, and the model boat standing against the cloudy backdrop at the far end of the gallery beckons to him to step not only further inside, but simultaneously back in time.

To read the rest of this review, please go to: http://www.photomonitor.co.uk/2012/12/forget-nostalgia-a-little-theatre-of-self-2/

Elizabeth Price - 2012 Turner Prize Winner

17/12/12

Elizabeth Price - 2012 Turner Prize Winner

Had I been asked to place a bet upon who I thought would win the Turner Prize 2012, my money would not have been on the film artist Elizabeth Price (born 1966), for her 20-minute-long hand-clapping, finger-clicking, sing-a-long lesson in architectural history and a 70’s news tragedy, The Woolworths Choir of 1979 (2012), erring instead towards the intricate and classically skilled pencil drawings of Nobson Newtown, produced over a 16-year period by Paul Noble (born 1963). Had I, however, been asked whom I would want to win, I would have backed Price all the way. And so it was that I found myself letting out an involuntary cheer, midway through an evening committee meeting, on 3 December, when the results were announced, and Price took to the stage at Tate Britain to accept the award from actor-presenter Jude Law.

To read the rest of this report, please go to: http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/elizabeth-price-2012-turner-prize-winner

Review of the 2012 Film London Jarman Award

17/12/12

2012 Film London Jarman Award

Whitechapel Gallery

Following on from an exciting and jam-packed day of film screenings, live performances, and talks on Saturday 3 November, it was revealed at a special ceremony hosted at the Whitechapel Gallery on Monday 5 November 2012 that the winner of this year’s Film London Jarman Award is James Richards.

Launched in 2008, when it was won by Luke Fowler, one of this year’s Turner Prize nominees, the Award is an annual prize celebrating the spirit of experimentation and imagination in film. Any mid-career artist film-maker, whose work embraces the legacy of Derek Jarman’s own highly experimental approach, can be nominated, and, alongside Richards, this year’s longest ever shortlist of ten nominees, drawn from suggestions made by a network of industry professionals, included Brad Butler & Karen Mirza, Marcus Coates, Shezad Dawood, Benedict Drew, Nathaniel Mellors, Ben Rivers, Aura Satz, Matt Stokes and Thomson & Craighead. As the winner, Richards will receive not just £10,000, but also a broadcast commission to produce a series of film artworks for Channel 4. This year also brings with it the added honour of marking the 70^th anniversary of the birth of Derek Jarman himself. For the first time too, a further three artist film-makers from the shortlist – Brad Butler & Karen Mirza, Nathaniel Mellors and Shezad Dawood – will also be commissioned to produce short art films for Channel 4.

Although each of the artist film-makers nominated has his or her own unique style, certain features seem to permeate their works. Many investigate a fusion of sight and sound: bright colours, lights, distorted shapes, swirling, spinning and moving against a soundtrack of jarring, discordant, metallic noises. Benedict Drew’s Gliss (Phrase III) Encounter With The Un-Rare, for example, pulsates to thuds and thumps, unpleasant clanging sounds and screeches, a drum, space-age noises, and a baby wailing, as clay-like shapes gyrate across the screen, an invitation to the wildest imagination to interpret what they might be. For my part, there’s a skull, and some sort of internal bodily examination going on, but what the next person will see I can’t even begin to guess.

Language is also a significant ingredient, with text flashing up on screen, varying fonts and colours, some words exclaiming alone, others going on to build up sentences. Many of the works, Richards’ included, involve voiceovers. Breaking this down, Brad Butler & Karen Mirza’s short piece, Hold Your Ground, inspired by the events of the Arab Spring, dissects the ‘semantics’ of the protesting crowd, isolating individual sounds as pre-speech elements. The result is alienating and implies a sense of struggle to communicate.

In conversation with writer and curator Gil Leung, Richards spoke of his film-making process as a dissolving of the self, and an attempt to cut back and refine his material whilst preserving an overall sense of unknowability. Appropriated and contingent fragments from very different sources jar in some way, never quite making sense, offering both resonance and dissonance. Indeed, this was the feeling I was left with after the day of events, and one which certainly echoes the tone of much of Jarman’s own work. The films in this Award offer a fitting tribute, and through the opportunities offered as a result of this exposure, many more artist film-makers will go on to leave their own mark.

Jarman Awards website: http://filmlondon.org.uk/networks/artists_network/jarman_award

Images:

Image of the Jarman Award letters spelt out on the beach

James Richards

Not Blacking Out Just Turning Off 

2011

courtesy the artist

Review of Brush It In at Flowers Kingsland Road

27/11/12

Brush It In

Group Show curated by Lorenzo Durantini

Flowers, 82 Kingsland Road

26 October – 22 December 2012 (extended run)

The title is both the key to and the stumbling block of this group exhibition, curated by Lorenzo Durantini, currently on show at Flowers, Kingsland Road. “Brush it in” is a colloquial expression for a wide variety of post-production alterations which can be carried out on digital photographs, but it is perhaps somewhat misleading given that most of the works in this show have not actually been manipulated post-production at all. Rather, they explore and exploit the realms of what would or could be done using Photoshop or other similar techniques, instigating, in the words of Durantini, “the beginnings of a post-Photoshop engagement with photography, [whereby] photographic manipulation as a physical wet process becomes digital and immaterial only to be re-materialised as physical and sculptural interventions.”

To read the rest of this review, please go to: http://www.photomonitor.co.uk/2012/11/brush-it-in-2/