TRAIN THOUGHTS
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Paul’s ART STUFF on a plane # 75: ‘Thinking Inside the Box’
Spending a week based in Juan les Pins wasn’t meant as an art trip, but there’s plenty in the area between Cannes and Nice, including museums dedicated to Matisse, Picasso, Leger and Chagall. A less expected Riviera sighting is this 30 metre high square head, which houses the offices of the main public library in Nice and can lay claim – at least, by day – to being the world’s first inhabited sculpture. ‘Thinking Inside the Box’ was designed by Sacha Sosno (born 1937) a Marseille-born Latvian who got to know Matisse and Klein in the 50’s and has since specialised in public projects. It opened in 2002, and looks particularly good at night, when internal illumination allows a view through the covering of perforated aluminium. The public can’t get inside the several floors in the neck and head, but the extensive ground floor displays Sosno’s maquette (‘The Little Big Head’?) and a related work, in which an open volume stands in for a life-sized figure’s face - a literal version of ‘having your head buried in a book’ or maybe even ‘thinking inside the book’. The Bibliothèque Louis Nucéra is part of the same complex as the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MAMAC), which has more Sosno and – in a complementary exhibition of sorts – an extensive retrospective of the Portuguese artist Julião Sarmento. His signature subject in explorations of memory and desire is a woman in a black dress: she recurs in fragmented forms, typically without a head, square or otherwise…
Turning to the Turner
The vast majority of artists in Britain are based in, and show mostly in, London. Yet not only have most recent Turner Prize winners been from Glasgow, none of this year’s contenders are based in London and only one of them is shortlisted for a show there – or, indeed, in Britain. And there’s extra homogeneity in their work: all four are concerned with reuse of material in transformational ways. Tris Vonna-Michell (lives in Stockholm and Southend, nominated for a show in Brussels) has been recycling the same 80 photographs and text about his mother for ten years, exploring the capacity to make things fresh through presentational variation. Duncan Campbell (Glasgow, Venice) appropriates details from Sigmar Polke’s paintings for a short film, and bases a longer one on Chris Marker’s film about African art. James Richards (Berlin, Venice) makes what you might call abstract films by collaging representational images in a way which foregrounds the peripheral. ‘Rosebud’ includes censored photographs, flowers trailed across bodies and underwater footage in a claustrophobically horizonless back and white. The most radical, you might say, in terms of artistic language, and the only one to show in the light, is Ciara Phillips (Glasgow, London). She’s the first of the 130 artists shortlisted for the Turner Prize to date to specialise in printmaking, which she makes contemporary infection through an immersive installation, acceptance of chance, play with the edge of language, and community involvement. The reuse? The 400 prints in her Tate room feature many slight variations on a few base images. Ah, I see I have the shortlist in ascending order of merit…
Most days art Critic Paul Carey-Kent spends hours on the train, traveling between his home in Southampton and his day job in Surrey. Could he, we asked, jot down whatever came into his head?
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Paul’s ART STUFF on a plane # 76: ‘Three Styles’
Philip Guston and Kazimir Malevich both started painting figuratively, switched to abstraction with success, then returned to a new mode of figuration. Picabia!? Theirs is a rare club, but one to which the Russian-born French artist Nicolas de Staël (say ‘Nicola der Stile’) might also seek membership, judging by a revelatory show in Antibes which is based around his late nudes. Staël (1914-55) is famous for his early 50’s paintings, and for his dramatic plunge from the 11th floor of his apartment building in Antibes at only 41. The best-known example of Staël’s early figurative style is a portrait of his first wife, Jeannine Guillou, herself a talented painter. She died in 1946, and the widower married Françoise Chapouton. By then he was on the way to his most characteristic approach of building up slabs of impasto to interchange landscape and abstract effects. In 1952 he fell for Jeanne Mathieu, who ‘came with such strong harmonic qualities’ she robbed him ‘of all the calm I need to complete my projects’. She was the model for most of the nudes in ‘La figure à nu’ at the Picasso Museum. They range from the clotted to the lyrically direct as his last paintings became more fluid and figurative. There are also collages, charcoals, elegantly simple line drawings and four superb small canvasses in which the model lies back while reading. But the artist’s depression was exacerbated by Jeanne’s refusal to leave her husband for him once he’d left his wife for her. The breaks aren’t so sharp as Malevich and Guston’s, but one could still say: three women, three Staëls...
Most days art Critic Paul Carey-Kent spends hours on the train, traveling between his home in Southampton and his day job in Surrey. Could he, we asked, jot down whatever came into his head?
Paul’s ART STUFF on a plane # 76: ‘Three Styles’
As Frieze focuses attention on art as business, could there be a new model for the art market, one which places less emphasis on putting on exhibitions, relying rather on the Internet and Art Fairs to sell work? Maybe so, though we’re not there yet: for the most part the online market operates in a different commercial zone, and it’s a physical programme which secures entry to fairs. Yet there is a growing tendency for galleries not to simply close if that considerable commitment stops suiting them, but to embark on a different existence. Payne Shurvell, for example, having run a programme from Hewitt Street for 3.5 years from 2010, have subsequently used pop up spaces – as with Aidan McNiell’s show (to 29 November) at the Canadian High Commission. WW have sub-let most of their Hatton Garden space, but retained an office there from which to run such initiatives as their Solo Award leading to a show at the London Art Fair. And Bristol’s WORKS|PROJECTS, one of the leading – indeed, one of the few - commercial galleries outside of London, recently took an upbeat view of ‘moving forward to explore a more dynamic model than its past gallery-based programme, combining a series of strategic development initiatives with a peripatetic programme of exhibitions’. Those approaches have all evolved on the back of the credibility earned from running a more conventional space, but it will be interesting to see both whether they work, and – if they do – whether art businesses might be founded, rather than rebooted, on such models.
Amba Sayal-Bennett
CLEO CONTRA-AUGUSTE
Drawing Projection, Tape, Paper, Celotex
Most days art Critic Paul Carey-Kent spends hours on the train, traveling between his home in Southampton and his day job in Surrey. Could he, we asked, jot down whatever came into his head?
takes the artist’s own large-format botanical images of English Roses and transforms them into lyrical works of light and shadow
The NEW MODEL or CLOSURE, but not as we know it
Payne Shurvell - Canadian High Commission, St Barnabas
Works / Projects
WW shrunk to former office
Some galleries already have few shows...
Or else are ‘between spaces’ – Hidde van Segelen
Cabinet - secretive - only one show so far this year!?
ROOM!?
After over five years of programming, WORKS|PROJECTS will vacate its current space in Sydney Row, Bristol, this month to concentrate on a new, expanded programme from the end of 2014.
Over the past five years WORKS|PROJECTS has developed a reputation as one of the leading commercial galleries outside of London. WORKS|PROJECTS will build on this reputation through continuing to work with some of the UK’s leading artists, including Heather & Ivan Morison and Richard Woods, as well as nurturing the best emerging talent in the South West of England.
From Autumn 2014, however, WORKS|PROJECTS will move forward to explore a more dynamic model than its past gallery-based programme, combining a series of strategic development initiatives with a peripatetic programme of exhibitions and commissions by gallery artists across the South West of England and nationally.
We look forward very much to sharing the new programme with you later in the year.
With best wishes
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Simon Morrissey
Director
We are certainly not closing WP, just closing that space and adapting so we can serve our artists better (many of whom work at least in some degree beyond the gallery model) and so we can achieve more for the sector - we are leading some really exciting strategic developments from the autumn onwards.
And yes - it felt like a time to innovate and set an agenda rather than copying the model everyone else uses. Not ruling out another fixed space in the future but we need to be flexible in the immediate future to take advantage of the exciting opportunities that are coming our way.
best for now
Simon
On 2014-08-06 12:35, Paul Carey-Kent wrote:
Hi Simon
Thanks for the news - you make it sound so positive it probably
doesn't count as a closure, just a change of approach - is this just
the way everyone will be operating ten years from now? I suspect it's
possible,
Paul’s ART STUFF on a train # 72: ‘Five Generations’
There are a lot of galleries in London… And so it was that I found myself in Stern Pissarro for the first time last week, in what is its 50th anniversary year - this though it’s been hidden in plain sight at xxx St James’ Street since 2009. You can see various secondary market works upstairs (Fernand Leger, Kees Van Dongen, Arman and AR Penck are current highlights) and a stock of paintings by the descendants of Pissarro downstairs, for following David Stern’s marriage to Lélia Pissarro in 1988, a 19th century generalist dealership morphed into a business run largely by the family to show the family. The x and London based impressionist Jacob Camille Pissarro (1830-1903), had seven children, five of them boys. He taught all of them, but neither daughter, to paint. The gallery represents ten of the family, happily including three women from later generations, one of them Camille’s great granddaughter Lélia. The most striking work by his sons, judged by the current display, is that of his 4th: Ludovic-Rodolphe – or ‘Rodo’ – Pissarro (1879-1952) took inspiration from the night life in Montmartre in the decades leading to World War I, the effect being a more impressionist and less graphic take on Toulouse-Lautrec. Like his father (1870-1890) he spent time in moved to London (1914-24). Genetically, he did little to secure the future of what became the family business – none of Camille’s 16 grandchildren were Rodo’s – but he did labour for many years to produce the definitive catalogue of his father’s paintings, such as this characteristically brushy view set a dozen miles outside Paris.
Most days art Critic Paul Carey-Kent spends hours on the train, traveling between his home in Southampton and his day job in Surrey. Could he, we asked, jot down whatever came into his head?
Pissarro, Camille
Top of Form
Bottom of Form
Oil on canvas
46 x 55.5 cm (18 ⅛ x 21 ⅞ inches)
Signed lower right, C. Pissarro
Painted circa 1869
Provenance:
Alfred Daber, Paris
The Lefevre Gallery (Alex Reid & Lefevre), London (acquired from the above in 1950)
Robert Morley, London (acquired from the above in 1951)
Annabel Morley, London
Dr. W. Eisenbeiss, Zurich
Private Collection, USA
Exhibited:
London, The Lefevre Gallery (Alex Reid & Lefevre), Géricault to Renoir, 1951, no. 23
London, The Lefevre Gallery (Alex Reid & Lefevre), XIXth and XXth Century French Paintings and Drawings, 1960, no. 29
Literature:
Christopher Lloyd, Pissarro, London, 1992, no. 8
Joachim Pissarro & Claire Durand-Ruel Snollaerts, Pissarro, Catalogue critique des peintures, vol. II, Paris, 2005, no. 136, p. 127
Louveciennes was merely seventeen kilometers outside Paris yet, with its idyllic landscape and unobstructed views, it was a favourite destination for Pissarro and several of his contemporaries, including Renoir, Monet and Degas. Indeed, Pissarro's early paintings from Louveciennes are not only among the most important works of his career, they are also among the very first truly Impressionist compositions ever painted. It was in the wake of this period in the artist's career that critic Armand Silvestre referred to him as "basically the inventor of this painting," while Paul Cézanne proclaimed more than thirty years later that Pissarro was in fact "the first Impressionist" (as quoted in Ralph E. Shikes & Paula Harper, Pissarro, His Life and Works, 1980, p. 78).
Le ru de Montbuisson, Louveciennes offers superb evidence of the artist's early Impressionist approach and, in its virtuosic adaptation of subtle tonal relationships, it reveals Pissarro's profound understanding of the effects of light on color. Meanwhile its painterly surface exemplifies the artist's characteristic brushstroke, which during this period was precise and tightly clipped; even in the dim and atmospheric backdrop of a clouded sky one can observe the premeditated significance of each stroke
Ludovic-Rodolphe Pissarro, born in Paris in 1878, was Camille Pissarro’s fourth son, and encouraged by his father he began drawing from nature at an early age. He was familiarly known as Rodo and generally signed his works ‘Ludovic-Rodo’ (or early on in his career, just ‘Rodo’).
The impact of Camille’s art and teaching on Rodo was obviously considerable, and his artistic production encompassed a wide range of media, including oil painting, tempera, watercolour, gouache, wood engraving, drawing and lithography. He also exhibited regularly at the Salon des Indépendents over a forty year period.
In 1894, at the age of sixteen, Rodo published his first wood engravings in the anarchist journal, Le Pere Peinard, and when Camille left France for the safety of Belgium during the anarchist upheavals of that year Rodo joined him there.
Rodo moved into his first studio in Montmartre with his brother Georges in 1898 and found the night-life of Paris, and the habitués of the cafes, theatres, circuses and cabarets of the area, compelling subjects for his work. With his younger brother Paulémile he met artists such as Kees Van Dongen, Maurice de Vlaminck and Raoul Dufy, and in 1905 he participated in the first Fauve exhibition at the Salon des Indépendents.
At the outbreak of war in 1914 Rodo moved to England, and over the next few years he lived mainly in and around West London. He worked closely with his brother Lucien to establish, in 1915, the Monarro Group which was formed with the aim of exhibiting work by contemporary artists inspired by Impressionism. Many of the works produced by Rodo while he was in England were of major London landmarks. After 1924, when Rodo had already returned to France, he divided his time between Paris and Les Andelys in Normandy.
Despite his rich artistic heritage and his achievements as an artist, Rodo is perhaps best remembered for his contribution to art history. For twenty years he researched and compiled a catalogue of his father’s paintings – a project that was finally published in two volumes in 1939 and which is still considered to be the definitive reference book on Camille’s work. Rodo told Lucien that the compilation of this catalogue was a fascinating task, revealing as it did “the work of the artist, its highs and lows, its progress as a whole through acquired experience”.
10 of the family represented
Full Artist List
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It should be noted that the artists shown in blue on the family tree are not all the artists in the Pissarro family. They are purely the ones represented in the gallery.
Jacob Camille Pissarro, the undoubted master of the French Impressionist Movement, was born in 1830 and lived for 73 years producing some of the finest works of the Movement but, equally importantly, his paintings contributed to a change in the traditional perception of art at the time.
He was known not only for his fine painting but also for his ability to teach others; Gauguin, Van Gogh and Cézanne being three of his more renowned pupils. Camille Pissarro also taught all of his sons to paint but he recognised the need to limit his own influence Med en bra casino bonus far du i alla fall betydligt mer casino spel for pengarna och chans att vinna en slant. on his children and, once they were competent with his Impressionist technique, he urged them to pursue an individual style. A harder but more caring taskmaster would be difficult to imagine; to the extent that four of his sons, Lucien, Ludovic-Rodo, Georges-Manzana and Paulémile became recognised in their own right. A fifth son, Félix, was also a talented artist but died at the early age of 23.
Both Lucien and Paulémile passed on this legacy; Lucien through his daughter Orovida and Paulémile through his son Hugues-Claude. Lucien’s and Orovida’s teacher-pupil relationship parallels that of Camille and Lucien in several ways, and she became proficient with the Impressionist technique before turning to a decorative style inspired by Japanese, Chinese and Indian art in the 1920’s. Like Orovida, Hugues-Claude was trained by his father as an Impressionist and has for many years painted in that style, although more recently a fresh bold approach to landscape and still life has emerged.
The tradition now continues through Lélia Pissarro, the daughter of Hugues-Claude, who studied with both her grandfather and her father although, unlike the other family members, she became an abstract painter before returning to Impressionism. Lélia now looks back to her great-grandfather’s style and to subjects celebrating the pastoral tranquillity of the late 19th century, painting scenes of her native France and the rural English countryside of her adopted home.
The extraordinary legacy of Camille Pissarro is the foundation of this outstanding family tradition which continues to be redefined and reshaped by successive generations of Pissarro artists, and it illuminates the enduring nature of Camille Pissarro’s Impressionist teachings within the family. It also reveals the incredible diversity of talents and styles represented in these artists’ works, all the more remarkable given their common root in Impressionism.
Lélia Pissarro has painted since the age of 4, having been educated by her grandfather Paulémile and her father H.Claude Pissarro
From infancy until the age of eleven she was entrusted to the care of her grand-parents, Paulémile Pissarro and his wife Yvonne, in Clécy, Suisse Normandy, where her interest in drawing and painting was nurtured by her grandfather who taught her the fundamental impressionist and post-impressionist techniques. When she returned to her parents in Paris at the age of 11, the role of teacher was taken over by her father and she subsequently studied at l’Ecole des Beaux-Arts.
Lélia moved to London in 1988 and her work has regularly been exhibited in galleries around the world, and following the tradition of her great-grandfather, grandfather and father, Lélia has played an important role in continuing this artistic dynasty by participating in a series of exhibitions entitled Pissarro – The Four Generations. These exhibitions have been mounted in London, Tel Aviv, five major museums in Japan and the Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale, ABSTRACT gt gdaughter
Paul’s ART STUFF on a train # 7x: ‘Hurry along! You’ve only got six months…’
It’s easy to find one doesn’t see much of our national collections’ permanent collections (they’re always there, why hurry?) and that can extend to the rotating displays within them, even though they’re temporary. One might propose a paradoxical law: ‘the longer a show runs, the less likely you are to see it’ because you don’t hurry and then it’s too late… Anyway, the Tates are good at such room-sized presentations. At the moment I like…
Art Biennials are great ways of getting around unfamiliar aspects of an atmospheric city. Venice is the archetype, but it works elsewhere; and even if – as in the current Liverpool Biennial and its associated shows – most of the art itself is uninspiring. In, for example, to a fascinating circular block of social housing to see… a one hour 1980 TV programme featuring four Belgian professors discussing the role of the intellectual in society. Or round the peeling atmospherics of a former blind school and trade union HQ for the main group show, the only truly memorable work in which was a wonderfully severe sound room with linked script by xxxx which evoked the feeling of being in a xxxx. The best art was in the least surprising venue: Tate Liverpool, where imaginative representations of less-often seen parts of the Tate collection (highlight: Paul Nash’s bark and pebble collages) were shown, plus Nasreen Mohamedi’s tremblingly drawn grid dispersions and Mondrian through his studios. The John Moores Painting Prize had its moments, including Jane Bustin’s transcendental move into copper – mysteriously not among the five works shortlisted – shown here reflecting xxx’s vertiginously drawn hinterland, which is. There seemed to be an echo in that of how Mondrian hung panels of colour experiments in his studio, alongside mirrors, as in this reconstruction of his space in xxx, which was the Tate’s central feature.
Sosno column mid September
Seventeen column
Eileen Mayo
Folkestone
New Model of the Gallery
Instead of volume, the tensile subject aspires to a back-end viral aesthetic
the dialectic between concept and matter collapses
Artspeak’s dodgy reputation isn’t new, as shown by BANK’s 1999 PRESS RELEASE project, now on show at Tate Britain (and at john-). In a process which now seems touchingly archaic, the collective (John Russell, Simon Bedwell and Milly Thompson at the time) group gave marks out of ten and made critical annotations on the type-written hand-outs of the day. They faxed them to the galleries by way of free consultancy on how to tidy up their self-presentation and avoid ‘the new bureaucratic meta-language’ of ‘meaningless mannerisms’ and ‘badly thought out (non) theory and jargon’. The rebukes are fun, but did their efforts have any effect? Stephen Friedman scored 1/10: criticisms included a habit of dealing in opposites such as ‘both serious and frivolous’, a technique which ‘means you have nothing to say about the work’. Maureen Paley (1.5/10) was traduced for using the hesitant term ‘can appear’ and for how ‘extremely bad use of punctuation and grammar’ mars a press release ‘refreshingly devoid of any ideas’. The Approach garnered a comparatively dizzying 2 ¼/10, despite some empty terms of praise: ‘you keep telling us things are important – I’m becoming suspicious’ and ‘what does ‘beautiful’ mean? This is a press release, not a script for The Antiques Roadshow.’ Perhaps it’s the impact of word processing, but this year’s output from those galleries looks far more professional and avoids those sins. The writing is also reasonably clear, excepting The Approach’s text on Alice Channer, in which ‘instead of volume, the tensile subject aspires to a back-end viral aesthetic’ and ‘the dialectic between concept and matter collapses’.
‘the cusp’
Folkestone
Paul’s ART STUFF on a train # 66: ‘Late Arrival’
It’s nice to see an underrated artist steal into the limelight, and such is the case with the painter Clive Hodgson (born 1953), who’s just had his American debut (at White Columns in April). Now he finds himself in three of the many summer shows now open, which almost all do far more than lazily lump together the gallery’s own roster. Simon Lee, Laura Bartlett, Pace and Carroll / Fletcher would be my pick of the Hodgsonless group exhibitions, and he’s in three others – proving how his modestly-sized, primarily abstract paintings can fulfil various agendas. July at The Approach concentrates on mark-making, so foregrounding Hodgson’s waveringly nuanced and washily layered use of oils. Timothy Taylor’s Slow Learner, curated by Andreas Leventis, includes artists who employ text and symbols to subvert meaning. That fits with Hodgson’s repurposing of emblems from decorative traditions; and with the way he privileges both their date of making and his name to align, in White Columns’ words ‘the melancholic daily realities of On Kawara with a decidedly informal take on formalism’. Sherman Sam sees that as ‘existential, in that it is declarative of existence - both the artist's and the work's’, though Hodgson has said his signature move is also informed by his remembrance of particularly frustrating handwriting lessons as a left-handed child. Sam himself curates a beautifully surprising cross-generational flower show at Ancient & Modern, which includes both sketchily direct flowers and a painting of circles which, given the context, stand as floral.
ART STUFF on a train # 65: ‘The Process of Fashion’
Young American painters of process-based abstraction seem to be market darlings at the moment, from Ryan Sullivan’s chemical tilt-mixing of various paints to Wade Guyton pushing computer printers past their limit to Sam Falls’ use of the weather. I was reminded of such approaches by two excellent current shows. Mummery & Schnelle’s gathering of thoughtful abstraction (to 2 Aug) includes three paintings by London-born Alexis Harding. He’s been exploring the after-life of paint for two decades, applying enamel gloss over incompatible oil and giving it months to respond to gravity. Thus in ‘Drop Out’, the paint tries to escape downwards – in some works it reaches the floor – while ‘Orange Revolution’ refers not so much to the Ukraine as to how the canvas has been rotated during production. The Belmacz’s small and unusual space has room for only three of the Berlin-based Dane Morten Skrøder Lund’s large and adventurous paintings (‘Wellbound’ to 6 Sept). I like them all, but he seems to have begun each from scratch with startlingly different results - as if building accident into not just how a painting turns out, but how it’s conceived. One conjoins two canvases hammered into each other and has allowed paint to run through nail holes; one its rainbows of lacquer and acrylic overlaid with slabs of corroded Polystyrene; one has had silicon injected through the back, and a plastic sheet stretched over the front. The workings of the market are hard to fathom, but I can’t help wondering: if they were recent American graduates, would Harding and Skrøder Lund be stars of the auction room?
Most days art Critic Paul Carey-Kent spends hours on the train, traveling between his home in Southampton and his day job in Surrey. Could he, we asked, jot down whatever came into his head?
ART STUFF on a train # 63: ‘Monitor as Star’
When visiting Tate Britain – as you really should while Phyllida Barlow is in regally ramshackle occupation – pop into the Chelsea Space opposite. For The Block and Charlotte Prodger’s ‘Markets’ (to 26 July) the video monitor takes centre stage. A monitor might be described as a means of showing films which has an industrial rather than domestic identity, and which isn’t equipped to receive a broadcast signal. None has ever been commercially produced for art exhibition purposes, but the Hantarex MGG (1989-2005) and the Sony Cube (1986-96) gained a reputation as good vehicles for art prior to the rise of the flat-screen. That stemmed from such features as an absence of visually intrusive frontal controls, a minimal frame, and an integrated handle for ease of lifting and stacking. Now The Block, set up by Matthew Fitts with the primary purpose of acquiring and refurbishing those two obsolete monitors, has designed and produced a hybrid, splicing their qualities. Charlotte Prodger (Turner Prize shortlist 2017, you heard it here first) makes minimalist but canny use of them. She broadcasts the fascinating story of how Gertrude Stein (or was it her new lover, Alice B. Toklas?) corrupted a text’s meaning by replacing every ‘may’ or ‘May’ with ‘can’ or ‘today’ in order to avoid reminding herself of ex-lover May Bookstaver. Meantime the four screens make somewhat Stein-like concrete poetry from the names of horses related to one part-owned by Fitts, as if to suggest a parallel substitution move. But those smart, sculptural monitors are the stars…
I recently came across a copy of Art Monthly for July 1986. The magazine doesn’t look so different from the July 2014 issue, and – like that – includes listings of some 200 forthcoming shows. The public sector landscape was similar, though there was of course just the one Tate. Much else has changed. A number of less contemporarily-oriented commercial galleries – Chris Beetles, Browse & Darby, Crane Calman, Colnaghi, Connaught Brown, Curwen, Francis Kyle, Maas, Redfern – remain but no longer feature in the Art Monthly listings. They have become more selective, given that there are now far more galleries in total. Only 11 of what I’d see as non-public galleries with a contemporary focus still exist: the long runners are Flowers, Anthony Reynolds, Maureen Paley (then ‘Interim Art’), Matts Gallery, the Mayor Gallery and Victoria Miro, which have all moved at least once since then; and Bernard Jacobson, Gimpel Fils, Hamiltons, Marlborough and Waddington, which have stayed put. Anthony d’Offay (which ran x – x ) is the best-remembered of the spaces since closed. Anne Berthoud, Odette Gilbert, Nigel Greenwood are gone but not, I’d say, forgotten. Among the many which have gone and I’ve never heard of, Diorama, the Narwhal Eskimo Art Gallery, 9H, Monolith, the Submarine Gallery, Vortex and The Young Unknowns sound rather distinctive. Of course, my favourite features of the July 2014 issue are my own review and the listing of the show I’ve curated at Studio 1.1…
Artists are interested in connections, so it seems like an obvious move to use electronic cables as a physical representative of linkages… yet I don’t recall that being done as thoroughly as it currently is in both Basel and London. In Switzerland, Paul Chan is the subject of the 2014 show at Schaulager – an immense and impressive space which concentrates on putting together one magisterial survey each year. Following on from his Henry Darger based cartoon history of the world, the falling ‘Lights’ projections, 1005 books, shadow-play explorations of the Marquise de Sade etc, the latest stream to emerge from Chan’s impressive variety are ‘arguments’ in which electronic cables, plugs and sockets combine – sometimes with abject found objects, including hundreds of shoes in his biggest argument – to suggest the logical flows of philosophical analysis, many of them punnily titled to reference Greek luminaries, eg . The cables generate a distinctive aesthetic most easily related to drawing. Jim Lambie (at Sadie Coles to xxx) is more painterly and musical in his use of cables. In the series which includes ‘Answer Machine’, he has plugs electric guitar cables into glossy monochrome paintings which incorporate paint-drenched sections of men’s clothing. Typically enough, the cast0off and quotidian is pressed into the service of art historical references and a lyrical, maybe transcendental, use of colour – seen best, perhaps, in this show, by xxx, in which coloured mirrors are mounted on ladders. Lambie’s show also includes shoes, dangling on safety pain chains along with sunglasses… I dare say every work of art can be connected to any other in three steps – Lambie and Chan, though, only need one.
ART STUFF on a train # 59 / 60: ‘Ellipso and Downpoint’
Almost anything goes in painting these days – no need for paint or ground, for example, let alone a particular shape. But a shaped canvas remains the norm, and the overwhelming majority are rectangular. By way of alternative, the circular tondo is notoriously awkward to handle. Perhaps there should be more ovaloids, such as Thomas Grünfeld’s playfully macabre ‘Augenbilder’, which incorporate glass eyes as the speckles on egg shapes so that the painting seems to look at the viewer. Just so, Marc Vaux has recently revealed some exemplary (eggsemplary?) examples (at Bernard Jacobson 2-31 May). They’re constructs as well as ovals, Vaux being a fine multiplier and exploiter of edges as a means of complicating space, colour and light. Perhaps what the format needs is a snappy popularising name (elipso!?). Triangles are also unusual, especially when pointing down inverted (though which is the right way up?) in the manner of a road sign. Yet my favourite works in Darren Flook’s first curation for Max Wigram (‘Ice Fishing’, to 26 July), are three such by the Chicago-based McArthur Binyon, divided with cunning near-symmetry into one almost-half covered with obsessively ground-in wax crayon, the other subjected to laser-printed images rendered ghostly by submersion in oil stick . Their back story – and the images’ source – is as a parallel for his family’s transition from tenant farming in rural Mississippi to factory work in Detroit. ‘The same hands’, says Binion, ‘which bled picking cotton as a child, now bleed from the abrasion of colored wax on wood.’
Most days art Critic Paul Carey-Kent spends hours on the train, traveling between his home in Southampton and his day job in Surrey. Could he, we asked, jot down whatever came into his head?
That videos at openings are best in foreign language with sub-titles, if there is dialogue.
Bank press releases
ART STUFF on a train # 61: ‘Slowly, Twice’
Whilst some galleries have closed in response to tough times, the institutional response tends to be to rotate shows more slowly, and to rely more on representing their own holdings than on securing loans. Thus Tate Britain’s ‘Ruin Lust’ (x-X) appeared to have been selected by the simple means of entering the term ‘ruin’ into the Tate’s collection’s data base. The new show at Tate Britain, ‘Kenneth Clark: Looking for Civilisation’ isn’t quite like that, but x% are from the Tate, due to the need to access the National Gallery’s collection… One painting, though, has made it into both shows, the first time I’ve noticed that in successive exhibitions. That did involve carrying it downstairs, but that must represent excellent cost minimalisation nonetheless. Fortunately, it’s a highlight in both. Constable’s xxxxx sat well in ‘Ruin Lust’ because it gets at incompletion from both directions: as a sketch, its prior to Constable’s full realisation of his vision; as a building it’s subsequent to that stage. Its freshness also makes it also one of Clark’s better purchase decisions in the context of xxxxxx.
ART STUFF on a train # 58: Dolled Up
When male artists use dolls we seem to get into creepy territory pretty fast – Hans Bellmer, Morton Bartlett, Helmut Newton. Actually Cindy Sherman and Sturtavant may be a bit male in that respect, so maybe it’s a false dichotomy. But I was going to that say that female use tends to be more about Jung and less about Freud, more about memory and identity, less about sex and the surreal. That’s fair of two artists currently viewable in London. Laurie Simmons has photographed dolls as a vehicle for her concerns, notably a critique of all forms of female confinement, since the 1977. She has work with a Japanese inflection both in the V&A’s Prix Pixet shortlist (to xx) and at Wilkinson (to xx . The former are of posed, life size ‘love dolls’, the latter are of followers of the Japanese cult of ‘kigurumi’, in which people dress in doll costumes with full latex body suit and mask. Liane Lang’s evocation of Elizabeth Barrett Browning in Italy is also some way from a straightforward doll. For ‘An Idle Brain Is Satan’s Shoppe’ (viewable by appointment at the House of St Barnabas via info@ to 17 June) Lang photographed the Casa Guidi villa which the 40 year old eloper shared with Robert Browning: appropriately for the poet’s invalidity, Lang has used life cast wax to represent her ghostly visitation. Both artists use dolls and their hinterland to create atmosphere, but I dare say dolls are also easier to deal with than people…
Most days art Critic Paul Carey-Kent spends hours on the train, traveling between his home in Southampton and his day job in Surrey. Could he, we asked, jot down whatever came into his head?
ART STUFF on a train # xx: ’internal cyclic self-portrayal’
Two striking works on current show seem to come via the same logic, what you might call ‘internal cyclic self-portrayal’, to the relationship between paper and trees… but from opposite ways round. First, at the new Copperfield gallery, Will Lunn’s welcome extension of the exhibition history of the characterful former church hall in Southwark, previously occupied by Poppy Sebire and Ceri Hand: Tom Dale makes the leaves of an office plant resemble the leaves of a book by cutting them into rectangles. Over the run of the show, however, the ficus will shed the grid imposed on it and regrow natural leaves. Nature is not so easily controlled. Maddox Arts, in an echoic contrast, has Colombian Miler Lagos’ The Rings of Time (in ‘About Time’ to 31 May). Lagos constructed his own agreeably Heath Robinson machine in order to recycle a 2 km run of The Times back into a log, which is a similar size to the roll that blank paper comes in for the press. So the production process is reversed and the timeline of the news is drawn into the annual rings of a tree.
'About Time' to 31 May
650 editions of 'The Times' made into a roll which
A art trip to Thanet has plenty to commend it just now: not just a riot of thoughtful reflections on colour and light at Turner Contemporary, courtesy of Mondrian, Finch, de Waal and Lewitt, but also a powerfully coherent double show at Ramsgate’s UpDown Gallery (to July 6). The Up is new work by Cedric Christie, including the latest in his long-running series of scaffold pieces, which might be described as line drawings achieved by sculptural means. ‘When Dreams Become Promises’ uses three sections of pipe in each work: two heavily rusted, being I suppose the practical realities of the world, outnumbering yet encouragingly outshone by the eidenic prospects one might read into the third, smoothly powder-coated element. The Down is Christie’s choice of work by 20 other artists which I would chareterise as drawings in which the lines is are made by any means except drawing. Highlights include Pascal Rousson’s new strand (ha!) of knotted rope webs; Simon Liddiment’s evocative way of chipping paint off wood; and Loukas Morley’s hanging presentation of a supermasket basket which he found squashed into a distorted grid drawing. He told me anti-Tesco’ campaigners had shown an interest in using it, which figures; and that he’d tried deliberately running over many another basket to far less satisfying effect.
ART STUFF on a train # 59: ’After Fashion’
It’s been hard recently to avoid two artists who were famous in the 1950’s, fell out of critical favour, and are now being repositioned as significant enough for comparison with Moore, Hepworth and Bacon – which would lead to an upturn in prices. Alan Davie (Falkirk1920 – Hertfordshire 2014) died just before his shows opened at Tate Britain, the Portland Gallery, Gimpel Fils (his long-time representatives) and Alan Wheatley. He was arguably the first European – unless we count de Kooning as Dutch – to adopt the heroic action painting mode with success, and the Portland Gallery’s strong selection from this unquestionably hot period was decidedly de Kooningesque. You can find Lynn Chadwick (London 1914 – Gloucestershire 2003, so 100 years on) in the Royal Academy courtyard, Blain Southern and Osbourne Samuel. So: is the hype justified? You can argue that (1) they were overrated in the 1950’s; (2) they undermined their early reputations by getting stuck in set formulae (Chadwick) or by moving too far from their strengths (Davie’s switch from jazzy spontaneity to clearer-cut symbolism); or (3) you might claim – as the galleries obviously do – that they simply passed from fashion, the whims of which disguised their true worth. For me, it’s a mixture of all three, but especially (2), for both… but it’s nice to have the shows to facilitate forming a view.
As soon as I saw Alina x’s x the truth slid along: eels are underutilised in contemporary art, given that they can stand in such a slippery way for the dance of line; anal retention; Freudian fears; and the elusive phallus. French artist Aline B uses them often, here allied to double-take background of ceramic turds and a cast bum to speak of the rejected and left over, and to chime with her film of lovers against a voiceover considering the orbit of waste in the most enticing work in IMT’s xxx to xxx. Only Ellen Gallagher comes to mind for comparable eeliness, but Rachel W (at Pippy H to xx)
Clare Price essays a maximalist hang at the Acme project, the space formerly occupied by The Showroon before its move west: ss small and xx large portrait format paintings with a sensuous and bodily enjoyment of paint which – even if the title hadn’t come from her writing – might put us in mind of Joan Mitchell. My favourites, though, introduce a ghostly geometry into the mix: enough to trigger mind behind body, reason lurking in and instinct, digital and analogue (and the ghost of Price’s previous use of pixels as a motif), city and landscape
A.R. Hopwood: The False Memory Archive
Alistair Hopwood? Not least o has occuppied both Carroll / Fletcher’s new project space (in what was the Nettie Horn gallery) and the appropriate Freud Museum for an extensive exploration of false memory. Perhaps you think you’ve seen it already, but why not go again? Not least of the pleasures is a wall of found photographs, fitted to found frames, from which the supposed evidence of UFOs has been removed. Often, Hopwood told me, the removal was of what had anyway been a mere photoshop addition… Can you imagine generating a false memory of a UFO sighting from forgetting that you yourself had doctored a photograph to include one?
ART STUFF on a train # 74: ’Red and Black and Women’
It would be hard to call it a face-off, but both Gilbert & George (Scapegoating Pictures for London at White Cube Bermondsey to 30 Sept) and Mary Kelly (On the Passage of a Few People through a Rather Brief Passage of Time at Pippy Houldsworth, to 4 Oct) tackle political subject matter through a graphic photo-based style in red, black and white. The self-proclaimed living sculptures are in feisty form, play the role of realist visionaries to guide us through the religiously-infected hostility they see in society. Bomb-like ‘hippy crack’ canisters, collected from East End streets on which nitrous oxide provides a popular ‘high’, carry a menace consistent with how often the Gilbert and George are digitally masked, fragmented and skeletonised. That said, 60 images – mostly 8 feet high – become a wearying grab of almost all of White Cube’s Bermondsey flagship, and that’s without the other half of the series, which is in Paris. Kelly’s much more modest show also bears witness: its images are derived from her own magazine archive of such collectively formative events as an anti-abortion rally in 1972 and the Vietnam War. Women’s domestic labour underpins what we see, as image and text is made up from units of lint, which Kelly casts in the filter screen of a tumble dryer over hundreds of cycles. So far as I can recall, figures largely hidden by burkas are – together with the Queen – Gilbert and George’s first portrayals of women… but I’d go to the female behind the scenes first.
Most days art Critic Paul Carey-Kent spends hours on the train, traveling between his home in Southampton and his day job in Surrey. Could he, we asked, jot down whatever came into his head?
ART STUFF on a train # xx: ’Skull Surprise’
The skull has a long tradition as the vanitas in still life meditations on mortality, but in the Hirstian era I’ve tended to feel there are a few too many around. Almost as well-worn, though still enjoyable, is the trope whereby a work looks like one thing from a distance but another when you close in.
Two recent shows feature initial view - of ants and flowers – which prove on getting nearer to be composed of skulls: doubly predictable? Oddly, no – two of the most arresting gallery moments currently on offer are at Pace’s Burlington Gardens space and at the Saatchi Gallery. The former is the follow-on from the Chinese Buddhist artist Zhang Huan’s well-known use of temple ash to make paintings and sculptures. From twenty feet ‘Spring Poppy Fields’ look like psychedelic fields of blooms in line with the title’s heroin overtones. From two feet they come out as Ensor-like carnivalesque skulls – hinting perhaps at one possible end of drug addiction. The latter (to 31 Aug) features Rafael Gómezbarros' 440 giant ants swarming over the walls. Each, it turns out, is made of two cast human skulls. Branches act as legs, and the whole is held together by dirty bandaging. The ants, which have been shown on the colonial facades f public buildings in Colombia, represent the displacement of peasants due to war and strife.
Rafael Gómezbarros: 'Casa Tomada (Seized House)
The latter (to 31 May)
Dolls
ART STUFF on a train # xx: ’17 = 84’ (or whatever)
Among London’s smaller galleries, I particularly like Seventeen. Fronted by Dave Hoyland, it has some personal favourites among its own artists (Susan Collis, Graham Dolphin, Oliver Laric); runs two shows at a time; and is open to all sorts of unpredictable stuff, typified by the basement film programme curated by Paul Pieroni from 2007-09. And it was always easy to explain where it was: 17 Kingsland Road, near Hoxton Square. Now, though, Seventeen is moving further up the road to the increasingly fashionable Dalston, and so joins the mildly illogical group of galleries who aren’t where their name says they are. New York’s 303 Gallery left 303 Park Avenue South in 1986, and is now at 507 West 24th Street, having traversed numbers 513, 89, 525 and 547 on four other streets between. In less numerical paradoxes, Hay Hill is now on Baker Street; Paradise Row has just announced its closure on Newman Street; and Christopher Crescent has got as far as Brussels from its eponymous Hackney address. Frith Street has been in Golden Square for seven years (but has just announced the addition of a project space in…. Frith Street!). First up from 4 September in Seventeen’s new premises at 270-276 Kingsland Road are a group show ‘Neither’ and Sachin Kaeley, the only painter represented by the gallery.
Lots of art these days is in a comic vein, but genuinely funny work is rare. David Shrigley is often funny; Maurizio Cattelan, sometimes. With this two-gallery show the painter Amelie von Wulffen, who lives in Berlin and is a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, joins that exclusive company. A series of 47 small watercolor cartoons at Alex Zachary is a riot. With loosely drawn black lines and pale colors, each represents a little psychodrama enacted by anthropomorphic fruits, vegetables and tools. At a glance the series resembles illustrations for a children’s book. Some works, like the image of a corn cob strumming a guitar by a campfire, are innocent enough. Others, like that of demonic potatoes sexually abusing crying tomatoes in a dungeon, are for grown-ups. All are wonderfully odd.
At Greene Naftali, Ms. von Wulffen reveals her own personal and professional conflicts in a diaristic series of sketchy drawings. Including narrative voice-overs and dialogue bubbles, they unabashedly expose what it is like to be a midcareer female artist — i.e., more like “Seinfeld” than “Lust for Life.” What she does not seem to realize, however, is that one of her problems might be her paintings, 11 of which are also on view. Made on 6 ½-foot-high canvases, they display all kinds of painterly application — stains, puddles and vigorous brushwork — and murky, cartoonish imagery. But the focus is more on style, process and varieties of abstraction than narrative, and that makes them comparatively generic. Working on paper with modest expectations, Ms. von Wulffen finds something in herself more wild, true and disarmingly funny.
A banana has stage fright. A tooth walks with crutches. A lemon gets angry at an apple. An ice-cream cone goes sledding. A paintbrush goes to an exhibition opening. A hammer comforts a nail. Two glasses of wine just had sex, and have a smoke.
In Amelie von Wulffen’s watercolours,common objects have become animate subjects, complete with personalities, moods and plenty of opinions.
Amelie von Wulffen’s (b. 1966, Germany, lives and works in Berlin) recent solo and two-person exhibitions include an exhibition atGio Marconi Gallery, Milan, 2014, Am kühlen Tisch, Portikus, Frankfurt, 2013; and an exhibition at Greene Naftali Gallery, New York, 2011. Group exhibitions include Galerie Tobias Nähring, Leipzig, 2013; Painting Forever! Keilrahmen, Kunstwerke, Berlin, 2013;
and A TOP-HAT, A MONOCLE, AND A BUTTERFLY, curated by Anthony Huberman, etablissement d`en face, Brussels. Von Wulffen studied at the Acadmey of G+Fine Arts in Munich from 1987 – 1994 and was a Professor of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna from 2006 to 2011.
Rana Hamadeh proposes that justice be understood
as the extent to which one can access the dramatic,
or theatrical, means of representation. By way of narration, props, chants, and scenography, she orchestrates paradoxical situations where the theatrical and actual exist simultaneously. Taking as a case study the Shiite ritual of ashura – where tens of thousands of men, women and children take to the streets to re-enact and ‘re-witness’ the slaying of their spiritual leader – she decodes this performance, re-arranges its elements allowing a new experience to emerge.
Rana Hamadeh’s(b. 1983, Beirut; lives in Rotterdam) work has been shown,among others, at EVTA International, 2014 and KIOSK, 2014; Meanwhile…Suddenly and Then, Lyon Biennale; Lisson Gallery and Beirut, 2013; Townhouse Gallery, 2012; Van Abbemuseum, 2011; Beirut Art Center, 2010; and New Museum, 2009. She graduated in 2009 with an MFA from the Dutch Art Institute/ ArtEZ Institute of the Arts, and is currently auditing within the Curatorial Knowledge PhD programme at Goldsmiths University, London.
Compared with previous editions, the 8th Liverpool Biennial is a pretty modest affair. There’s less focus on making a visual impact on the city, less sense of the festival wheedling its way into the nooks and crannies of Liverpool’s everyday life. There are even fewer promotional banners hanging from lampposts – the International Conference of Business seems to have snapped most of those up.
The Biennial does transform one aspect of the city, though, taking over the disused old Blind School – built in 1850 and most recently used as The Trades Union Centre – for A Needle Walks Into a Haystack, curated by Mai Abu EIDahab and Anthony Huberman.
The title feels appropriate. As you wind through the shabby corridors and bashed about rooms of this former institution, it’s quite easy to get a little lost, to find yourself back where you started. A bit like the cartoon rat in Peter Wachtler’s animated film, despondently crawling out of bed each morning and back in again at night, as the artist dolefully recounts all the stuff that life has thrown at the rat/him/us. As a bowling ball falls off a table and on to poor ratty’s head for the umpteenth time, the weight of life’s pressures gets ever heavier.
Also featured are two more short animations from Wachtler, one showing homeless people sleeping round a fire, the other a pair of crutches walking down the street as an increasingly angry, despairing and deluded narrative flashes up on screen. These are stand-out, hard to miss works that set the scene for the show’s loose theme of how we cope with and subvert life’s crushing routines and society’s expectations of us.
There are 17 artists across the Blind School’s three floors, and while some of the work is frustratingly opaque (high on this list is Michael Stevenson’s computer games competing against each other to ‘win the swing of doors’ borrowed from John Moores University’s school of computing and mathematical sciences), the strike rate isn’t bad.
A small room on the ground floor is a treasure trove of drawings and paintings by Chicago artist Christina Ramberg (1946-1995) – a quietly subversive meditation on form and femininity. On the building’s top floor, things get considerably louder for Rana Hamadeh’s Can You Pull in an Actor with a Fishhook or Tie Down His Tongue With a Rope? (2014), an eight-channel sound piece in a specially constructed room. Drawing on the Shiite ritual of Ashura, Hamadeh remixes the chanting of thousands of men, women and children to create a physically draining experience.
Architectural intervention
Over at Tate Liverpool two floors are given over to the Biennial programme. In the Wolfson Gallery, French architect Claude Parent has constructed a kind of adult’s playground in light grey and yellow, in which a selection of works from the Tate collection are exhibited. Wooden ramps shift sightlines and turn walking round the gallery into a small adventure, taking you face-to-face with Paul Nash’s Voyages of the Moon (1934-37) or Edward Wadsworth’s geometric woodcuts (1915). The works – from Naum Gabo, Helen Saunders, Francis Picabia and more – are a delight in themselves, but Parent’s architectural intervention is the star here; a sculpture for walking on and through.
On the second floor, there’s more from the Tate collection in a show looking at domestic environments and implements. It is dotted throughout by Patrick Caulfield pieces, and there are also two rugs from 1929 by Francis Bacon, an Andy Warhol drawing of beauty products from 1960, a Giorgio de Chirico from 1926 and a Lucy McKenzie painting from 2011. It’s a lively, fun and surprising selection consisting of over 80 pieces.
At Bluecoat, there’s more looking back in order to better understand the present with a James McNeill Whistler show that focuses on the influential nature of the artist’s attitude and approach to art, as much as the art itself. It’s a brave move and an interesting and enjoyable show, but so much of one artist – and one who has been dead for over a hundred years – feels a little out of place in a biennial of contemporary art.
Sharon Lockhart’s 29-minute film at FACT isn’t newly commissioned, but it is relatively recent work. Made in 2009, Podworka results from the American artist’s time in Poland and shows a variety of different children at play. Except for a lone grandmother, adults are absent, the children creating their own worlds in cobbled courtyards amidst abandoned buildings and graffiti-covered walls. It’s a simple idea that is utterly captivating thanks to its clever framing – static camera, walled spaces and never a hint of the sky or what lies beyond these play areas.
There’s plenty more going on at partner venues across the city – 50 new paintings at the John Moores Painting Prize exhibition, shows at The Royal Standard and Open Eye Gallery, Carlos Cruz-Diez’s Dazzle Ship on the waterfront. It is, though, the core curated programme that defines the Biennial and, the old Blind School aside, this edition feels curiously weighted towards art from the past rather than the present. And for a biennial of contemporary art, that seems like a misjudgement; more new work next time, please.
Positives of moving: if space small and artists (Sue Collis, say) have had four shows in it…
One small pleasure of driving a car is what I’ll term ‘the certainty of the cusp’: that moment as you approach a green traffic light after which you know you’ll get through, even if it turns amber as you arrive. It’s a parallel sensation to walk into a show and instinctively sense that you’re going to like it, even if you can’t yet explain why. That’s how I felt entering xxxx
Most days art Critic Paul Carey-Kent spends hours on the train, traveling between his home in Southampton and his day job in Surrey. Could he, we asked, jot down whatever came into his head?
ART STUFF on a train # 47: ‘Positively Completed’
Those Gallery Weekends Compared
Happening to be in London and Berlin on successive weekends, I was able to compare the fledgling EC1-WW
Event’s 2nd year with the 10th edition of Berlin’s Gallery Weekend. They are of a different nature, the former designed to highlight those galleries which aren’t easily defined as west end or east end, but somewhere in between and so not covered by Fitzrovia lates or the East End’s first Thursdays.. or South, come to that. The latter centres on simultaneous openings on Friday evenening of 50 of the most prestigious galleries. In the absence of a conventional art fair in Berlin, it might be seen as ‘Frieze week without Frieze’.
ART STUFF on a train # 47: ‘Positively Completed’
During 2008-12 London saw a recession and an apparently counter-cyclical increase in the number of contemporary galleries. Now, as we’re said to be emerging from our economic woes, galleries are closing. More bullish landlords putting up rents are one factor, plus perhaps the failure of the improving economy to boost sales as hoped. That’s included some of the best small spaces run by female gallerists. The harbinger, in retrospect, may have been the closure of Poppy Sebire (2009-13) CHECK, followed by Danielle Horn and Marie Favier’s Nettie Horn (2007-13); Lucy Newman Cleeve’s Man & Eve (2006-13); Chiara Williams and Debra Wilson’s WW (2008-14); Raphaëlle Bischoff and Paola Weiss’s Bischoff Weiss (2005-14); and, completing this particular circle, Ceri Hand, who started her eponymous gallery (2008-14) in Liverpool and was the successor tenant to Poppy in Southwark. We could look at that negatively, but I’d sooner celebrate them all as successfully completed projects – the essences of which may well re-emerge in other forms, along with their energetic visionaries. Indeed, I could have added Megan Piper: her innovative Piper Gallery ran only for 2012-13, but she’s moved on swiftly to campaign for the London Sculpture Line. Certainly there was nothing mournful about the last shows at WW, which included 65 dress paintings by Lisa Milroy which could be taken from the rails and hung to taste by the visitor; nor at Bischoff Weiss, where Rana Begum’s xxx brought a forward-looking back-glow to even the darkest of frontages…
There are certain intermediate relations to the sexual object, such as touching and looking at it, while the road compilation and are recognised as the residual
Contact... Between the mucous membranes of the lips to people concerned, is held by sexual steam among many nations might of the fact that the two parts of the body involved do not form part of the sexual apparatus but constitute the entrance to the digestive tract
The versions are sexual activities which either (a) extend, in an anatomical sense, beyond the regions of the body that are designed for sexual union; or (b) linger over the intermediate relations to the sexual object which should normally be traversed rapidly on the path towards the final sexual aim
Fetishism what is substituted for sexual object is some part of the body (such as the foot or hair) which is in general very inappropriate sexual purposes, , or some inanimate object which bears an assignable relation to the person whom it replaces
Scopophiliac aspect of art
ART STUFF on a train # 47: ‘Positively Completed’
ART STUFF on a train # 50: ‘Before and After the Internet’
‘Post-internet Art’ - a current buzz-term meaning work informed by the web, rather than anticipating its demise – is well represented in London now in shows by Camille Henrot (Chisenhale), Hito Steyerl (ICA) and Trisha Baga (Anita Zabludowicz). Yet there’s still a perverse pleasure to be taken in the art of altering and deconstructing the old-fashioned book, and Carolyn Thompson is among the most imaginative such practitioners. Her recent show at the Eagle Gallery (Feb-March) focussed on Penguin’s Great Loves group of publications. Full stops are joined by lines to form the tangled analogue web of a seduction from Kierkegaard’s ‘Seducer’s Diary’; in ‘Gasping for Breath’ we see pages from Anias (CHECK) Nin in which the female character has an orgasm, but with only the punctuation left to hint at what hardly suits words; and, most strikingly, Freud’s Deviant Love grows hair on every page, laboriously sewn in to emphasise the terms which he regards as expressing aberrations: xxxxxx Thompson’s title, My Funny Valentine’, suggests an overture proposing the fulfilment of impressively varied desires. Thompson also channels the scopophiliac aspect of art appreciation, and picks up on one of Freud’s examples in his account of ‘fetishism’ as when ‘what is substituted for the sexual object is some part of the body (such as the foot or hair) which is in general very inappropriate for sexual purposes, or some inanimate object which bears an assignable relation to the person whom it replaces’. The Internet has, of course, proved ideal for such interests…
And there’s more Freud now in Miroslav Balka’s double show at White Cube and – of course – the Freud Museum.
ART STUFF on a train # 49: Material Realities
The use of surprising materials has long been a central feature of contemporary art, yet the novelties keep on coming. Two Africans currently showing in London are good examples. Young Ethiopian Ephrem Solomon (Untitled Life at Tiwani Contemporary to 29 March) makes woodcuts, but doesn’t print from them. Rather, he applies collages to the surface – cut-up text which suggest his subjects’ lives may be hard to comprehend, as well as referencing the use of newspaper to cover the walls in poor dwellings – and paints over both the wood and the newsprint. Solomon’s father was killed in the Civil War, and a mournful air spreads from the motifs of empty chairs to less obviously infected portraits. Ivorian Armand Boua (Enfants de la Rue at Jack Bell Gallery to 17 April) paints with tar as well as acrylic, but his choice of ground is the more unusual aspect: the battered cardboard boxes used as makeshift shelters by the streetkids whom he depicts. A national trauma also lies behind these repeatedly scraped surfaces: many children were displaced in the capital, Abidjan, in the turmoil which followed the disputed election in 2010.
Moreover, both use their personal materials with a purpose – to reinforce the depiction of gritty realties.
Hi Jack
Attached as promised one copy of artist names guide!
Societie Realiste: Mottopsy @ Tenderpixel, Ten Cecil Court – Leicester Square
To 26 April:
The Parisian cooperative Sociietie R are self-professed radicals who examine ‘the interlacement, divergence and manifold interdependence between political entities and cultural fields’. That may sound forbidding, but their application of the method of ‘averaging’ as a way of capturing the inevitability of compromise is very user-friendly. The computerised combination of the commonest elements from the UN’s 193 national anthems yields a cacophony pretty much as you might expect. The walls are covered with text which enacts an averaging twice over: the 20 nouns most frequently featured in national slogans are each laboriousky stencilled out of three from a range of 60 typefaces lifted from geographically-titled newspapers around the world.
The very international Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978) was an Italian, born in Greece and raised in Germany, who found his artistic voice in Paris, married two Russians and died in Rome. Think of him, and you probably think of the classic paintings from 1911-19, those in which he achieved a transformation of the ordinary by framing it in the unexpected ways which would come to be called ‘metaphysical’. That’s to ignore quite a lot: the weird pastiches of the classics to which he turned after the war; the extraordinary late 20’s pictures of gladiators heaped up and deflated; the proto-surrealist novel; the late repetitions and variants, sometimes with misdating, of his own early work, variously seen as stale, fraudulent (can an artist fake his own work?), provocative, or post-modern Avant la lettre with the added spice that de Chirico spent his last 50 years proclaiming that modern art was worthless and so this new style was to be preferred: John --, perhaps, but without the irony, All of which is fairly well-trodden ground… But a new exhibition in the very pleasant environs of the Estorick Collection features not just late paintings, such as this affecting horse, but also a large sample of De Chirico’s rarely-shown sculpture. Most of it looks like variously-patinated figures from his classic paintings, and at a similar scale. The least painting-like figures somewhat unconvncingly meld body with architecture by substituting buildings for inner organs. By contrast, the Great Metaphysician towers over the gallery, and the scale is justified by extra impact. Like most late de Chirico, I reckon, the sculpture has its merits as well as its failings.
Time and place were right for Paula MacArthur’s paintings of diamonds. The time: just ahead of Valentine’s Day, with an opening freebie package including a heart-shaped balloon and packet of love hearts - designed, in MacArthur’s words, ‘to save me a last minute trip to the cornershop’. The place: the archetypal impress-the-client foyer of a City office block, for which art consultant Vanessa Brady has organised shows since it opened in 2009. What better than the flashy and often morally dubious stones (think blood diamonds) to smuggle a critique into the capitalist heartland under the cover of romance. And to suggest that art can belong in the same category as the biggest and most vulgar of jewels? For these are certainly big: MacArthur’s smallest paintings are x feet wide. The three with the most impact are double that, and make the most of fluorescent paint. ‘Are they painted from life?’ I asked jestingly, observing the comparative modesty of her own ring. MacArthur’s main source is her own photographs of geological displays in musuems. As for style, for all their initial glamour, up close they’re mainly excuses for abstract mark-making. Add that cut diamonds are ideal vehicles for the exploration of light and cubist surfaces, and they prove a rich subject in all their facets.
"Joseph Cornell displayed a cabinet with bottles on shelves called Pharmacy in 1943," said Thomson. Nor were Hirst's spin paintings or his installation of a ball on a jet of air original, he said, noting that both were done in the 1960s.
"Hirst puts himself forward as a great artist, but a lot of his work exists only because other artists have come up with original ideas which he has stolen," said Thomson. "Hirst is a plagiarist in a way that would be totally unacceptable in science or literature."
Aggrieved artists include John LeKay, a Briton who says he first thought of nailing a lamb's carcass to wood like a cross in 1987, only to see it reproduced by Hirst. Lekay previously claimed in 2007 that he had been producing jewel-encrusted skulls since 1993, before Hirst did so. Lori Precious, an American, says she first arranged butterfly wings into patterns to suggest stained-glass windows in 1994, years before Hirst.
Imitation may be flattery, but not when Hirst is taking both the financial and artistic credit for their ideas, say Lekay and Precious. LeKay has never sold anything above £3,500, while Hirst's set of three crucified sheep was a reported £5.7m. Precious's butterflies sold for £6,000 against Hirst's version for £4.7m.
While Hirst is one of Britain's richest men, LeKay cannot live off his art. Accusing Hirst of being dishonest about where he gets his ideas, he said: "He should just tell the truth."
Although LeKay recognises that artists have always found inspiration in each other, he says the great ones adapt ideas to create works with their own individual and original stamp.
He said: "Damien sees an idea, tweaks it a little bit, tries to make it more commercial. He's not like an artist inspired by looking inwards. He looks for ideas from other people. It's superficial. Put both [crucified sheep] together and … it's the same thing."
In the 1990s, they were friends and shared exhibitions, which is when Hirst may have seen his sheep. Since then, LeKay has become more interested in Buddhism than material wealth, so he does not plan to seek compensation.
Precious recalled her pain at seeing Hirst's butterflies in a newspaper: "My artist friends and collectors called to tell me they couldn't believe the similarities between Hirst's work and mine, and … at first I too thought it was my work."
Although the patterns are not identical, she said: "It's the same material (butterfly wings) and the same idea (recreations of stained-glass windows)."
Without the funds to pursue legal action, she no longer produces butterfly works.
It emerged in 2000 that Hirst agreed to pay an undisclosed sum to head off legal action for breach of copyright by the designer and makers of a £14.99 toy which bore a resemblance to his celebrated 20ft bronze sculpture, Hymn.
There’s a certain ritual quality to how often Damien Hirst is accused of plagiarism: do his skulls copy Stephen Gregory, his spots Walter Robinson, his razor paintings Lene Bladbjerg, his blown-up toys xxx? I suspect it’s all just a ,matter of surfing the zeitgeist. Now, though, few think he is so surfing, yet there’s an intresting comparison to be made between the new direction in which Hirst has just taken his spot painytings – jocuoarly turning one into Mickey Mouse for z spots go pop moment – and this canas from xx years ago by Bart van der Leck.
It would be easy to identify the influence of Matisse’s famous Red Salo on this painting by the Dutch Fauve Kees Van Dongen, but if anything (and it’s probably coincidence) it’s the other way round. Van Dongen (1877 – 1968) was best known as a flattering portraitist of society women, but this 1917 composition
ART STUFF on a train # 33: ‘Stoned’
ART STUFF on a train # 21: ‘Pierdom’
ART STUFF on a train # 40: ‘The Framed Ceramic Clothing Coincidence’
Two fine shows by 70’s-born sculptors opened on 30 January. They feel very different yet share a surprising amount. Manchester-based Samantha Donnelly and Portland, Oregon’s Jackson Hutchins both use ceramics, unusual framing and clothing with personal connections; and both combine sculpture with their less familiar wall-based works.
Hutchins is known for ceramic/plaster sculptures/vessels which take the place of figures on found sofas. There are five at Timothy Taylor (to 8 March), one incorporating a shirt of her husband's (I know the feeling: not every old favourite of mine makes it through spousal quality control). Hutchins’ recent canvasses are stained with furniture polishes, which she uses like paint, and foreground their support structures to make frames of sorts. Polke and Tapies are summoned as well as Frankenthaler and furniture. In my favourite, it's as if the outer rim of stained canvas is framing the frame.
Donnelly (at Ceri Hand to 1 March) brings a poised haphazardness to figure-sized combinations of appropriated items, built around a ceramic sculptural heart. The artist's leather trousers are in the mix: Donnelly explained they were a 'difficult' item to wear in practice, however, seductive the prospect. Here, too, I liked the wall-based work: Donnelly blew up adverts from aspirational lifestyle magazines then photographed, scanned and reprinted them, picking up distortions along the way, before re-photographing and developing the results. Their darkroom black and white seeks, perhaps, to return the impersonal fecundity of the post-digital image to the more closely attended world of analogue history…
There was a curious coincidence in two the openings I visited last week: Manchester-based Samantha Donnelly and American Jessica Jackson Hutchins both featured ceramics, unusual uses of the frame as a means of slightly distanced self-quotation and clothing with personal connections and the bearer of contrasting intimacy. Both shows combined sculpture with the less well-known wall-based works Yet the two shows were very different...
Hutchins is known for her abstract ceramic/plaster sculptures/vessels which sit in the role of figures on found sofas: there were five of these at Timothy Taylor (to 8 March), one of which contained a shirt of her husband's (I know the feeling: not every favourite garment of mine makes it through spousal quality-control during the washing process which precedes my ironing). Hutchins' newer stream of paintings made of re-stretched canvas stained by various furniture polishes, which she uses like paint. These play with a consistent structure, foregrounded so as to form a frame of sorts at the same time, calling up Polke and Tapies as well as Frankenthaler. In my favourite it's as if the outer rim of stained canvas is framing the year support/frame, which is itself stained to resemble rusting iron.
Donnelly (Rubbernecker at Ceri Hand to 1 March) has made figure-sized instructions, which bring a poised haphazard this to such items as a mask, boots, picture frames, change, spooling VHS tape of the Yoga variety and the artist's leather trousers around a ceramic sculptural call. Again, as Donnelly told me, never trousers are a 'difficult' item to wearing practice, however, seductive the prospect, and so they ended... Here, too, I liked the less familiar wall-based stream of work: Donnelly has blown up, photographed, distortingly scanned, re-photographed and then develop the old fashion way in black and white adverts from aspirational lifestyle magazines to yield a perverse means of returning the impersonal fecundity of the post-digital image to the more personal and closely attended world of analogue history. And her friends were bulldog clips...
ART STUFF on a train # 40: ‘Beattieful London’
‘Beattie’ is an unusual name, meaning, of course, ‘one who holds land on condition of supplying food to those billeted by the chief’. True, a Google search yields 3 million results, but Jones get 236m and even Nash 28m. So it’s a surprise to find that two unrelated painters so called – Dominic, 32 and Basil, 78 – should have London shows running for the same five weeks to 22 February. Both look to the past. Dominic, at FOLD in Clerkenwell (and also in Saatchi’s New Order II), colourfully approximates the forms of constructivist abstraction using odd scraps of wood, plastic, card etc, as if countering its purity – as Ben Street puts it - by assembling a half-remembered version out of the discarded stuff of contemporary life. Basil, a couple of miles west at Hales in Shoreditch, looks back to the visibly energetic mark-making of abstract expressionism, but applies it to archetypal forms with potentially symbolist import. This selects the biggest and best of his steps motif, the oldest of which was made 20 years ago. They come across as to me as optimistic ascents from left to right, but then I’m not Chinese. Neither quite achieves beauty, but then I doubt if they aim for it. What’s the word for ‘aesthetically pleasing, but not beautiful’? ‘Harmonious’ isn’t quite edgy enough here, and ‘attractive’ sounds slightly condescending in an art context. Let’s settle for ‘beattieful’.
Josh Blackwell: Never Uses
How do you define silliness, and is it always bad? The question was triggered by the latest new media sensation from over the pond: the Chisenhale’s showing of Jordan Baseman’s film Raspberry Poser.
One often finds that the most interesting art is on the very of potential failure is almost kitsch almost amateur almost nothing. I was reminded of that she's an email Gallery, where the latest American news media oriented wunderkind Jordan Wolfson has installed his new 14 minute film raspberry poser. You have to take your shoes off, which is a little bit silly, in order to loll upon a deep pile carpet and watch combination of live action, cartoons, found footage and CGI computer-generated image which follows the adventures of flying condom, filled up variously with raspberry coloured items, and bouncing group of AIDS viruses which look like raspberry cubes into which floppy nails have been driven. These characters zoom and bounced around the street, an alternate with a Beano-type cartoon character and the artist himself posing as a punk. The whole set-up struck me as essentially silly
ART STUFF on a train # 42: ‘Mid-Century Fair’
The London Art Fair has improved a little each year recently, with more adventurous and fewer dire galleries in the mix and a good curated photo exhibition. The 2014 edition (14-19 Jan) also saw some stimulating match-ups in the project section, for which young galleries were invited to share a stand. All the same, its USP remains as an enjoyable, if unrevelatory, place to find the leading British artists of the last century: plenty of Nicholson, Lanyon, Heron, Riley, Hitchens and Hoyland... Yet there are always less familiar examples mixed in with the more predictable fare. This year my favourites were a Paul Nash at Piano Nobile and the Wilhelmina Barns Graham retrospective at Art First. Nash’s unique chord is struck when an aspect of the surreal insinuates it as-if-naturally into the landscape and hints at symbolic intent without going the whole ham-fisted hog. Just so, the watercolour River foregrounds a pair of empty swings against a serpentine (WORD) estuary. Childhood trauma? Political indecision? Barns Graham (1912-2004) was the pre-eminent female painter among the St Ives group, outliving all the men and enjoying a particularly productive eighth decade. Emerald and Cadmium Green is from a lesser-known stream of her richly varied oeuvre, one which merges abstraction and the landscape by equating the scientific waves of particle physics with natural waves – here of the sea, perhaps, or of wind in the grass. The result is a buzzy study in dot dynamics which forms some sort of event horizon.
94
tures, Cy Twombly’s photographs, John McCracken’s mandalas. Think of Ivon Hitchens (1893-1979) and you’ll think of his elongated landscapes, typically of wooded scenes in the South Downs. Indeed, there are 10 lush examples in Richard Green’s current exhibition Ivon Hitchens: Romantic Modernist (to 14 Dec). Yet I hadn’t previously realised that typical Hitchens exhibitions during his lifetime sprinkled nudes and still lives among the landscapes. Richard Green’s show revives that by including a still life and three nudes: a hot Fauve from 1948; a 1965 figure which tends towards landscape; and one from 1968 which makes abstract play with cushions. Those three have enough brio to make it seem a pity that Hitchens was held back from painting more of them by his inability to afford a model. And it wasn’t just Hitchens: the other landscape, still-life and abstract-oriented painters of his generation reverted to the figure from time to time, consistent with the life class training of their student years. William Scott, Patrick Heron and Ben Nicholson all produced interesting examples. In Scott’s case, not only did he return frequently to the figure, but some blurring occurs, as it’s easy enough to read, say, Still Life with Candlestick in more sexual terms than his nudes.
The location and atmosphere of an exhibition is a big part of the reason to see it, the more so given that some idea of the work can often be gleaned from the internet. I’ve recently been involved in two differently dramatic sites: curating a Maria Marshall solo show in a storage room off the side of a food factory near King’s Cross, stacked with such a quantity of tins and machinery we were tempted to claim it as an installation; and writing an essay for a show at the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS), one of the four experiments at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, where a scientific community of 6,000 work at the furthest edge of sub-atomic knowledge. The sophisticated 27 kilometre 4 metre diameter tunnel in which protons are smashed together at close to the speed of light is itself a stunning sight, well captured by Michael Hoch’s cross-section photograph below. Alison Gill’s installation was in a hall directly above a tunnel access point. Unusual has its hazards, though, and on the day I was visiting it proved necessary to ‘open the plug’ to bring materials above ground. All I saw were the sculptures unceremoniously stacked to one side, one of them broken, and a gaping chasm down to the mouth. Happily, all is now repaired and replaced, allowing a boundary-challenging meshing of physics, poetry, psychoanalysis and sculpture to take forward CMS’s sub-agenda of countering the modern separation of science from art.
It’s true that dressing as a cactus, with many a toothpick, and watering herself; and hammering her way out of a plaster cast around her, hesitating with some apprehension when it came to the head, were humorous results.
Most days art Critic Paul Carey-Kent spends hours on the train, traveling between his home in Southampton and his day job in Surrey. Could he, we asked, jot down whatever came into his head?
The location and atmosphere of an exhibition is a big part of the reason to see it, the more so given that some idea of the work can often be gleaned from the internet. I’ve recently been involved in two differently dramatic sites: curating a Maria Marshall solo show in a storage room off the side of a food factory near King’s Cross, stacked with such a quantity of tins and machinery we were tempted to claim it as an installation; and writing an essay for a show at the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS), one of the four experiments at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, where a scientific community of 6,000 work at the furthest edge of sub-atomic knowledge. The sophisticated 27 kilometre 4 metre diameter tunnel in which protons are smashed together at close to the speed of light is itself a stunning sight, well captured by Michael Hoch’s cross-section photograph below. Alison Gill’s installation was in a hall directly above a tunnel access point. Unusual has its hazards, though, and on the day I was visiting it proved necessary to ‘open the plug’ to bring materials above ground. All I saw were the sculptures unceremoniously stacked to one side, one of them broken, and a gaping chasm down to the mouth. Happily, all is now repaired and replaced, allowing a boundary-challenging meshing of physics, poetry, psychoanalysis and sculpture to take forward CMS’s sub-agenda of countering the modern separation of science from art.
I guess it won’t surprise you – it’s a critical commonplace with which I’d disagree if I could - to learn that Bill Woodrow’s retrospective at the Royal Academy is a tale of two halves: a brilliant run of prolific invention c 1977-83, typically reconfiguring found objects; then a subsequent move into wholly produced sculpture, typically bronze, in which the wit seems to get clogged up in the deliberation. Yet that first half of 30-odd works constitutes one of the best shows in town, not simply for new-to-me examples of the well-known cut-outs, in which new forms emerge from metal items, but also the Breakdown series, in which appliances are disassembled well before Damien Ortega set out the parts of a Volkswagen, seven smashed TVs telling of their blindness; the magical environmental equation converting bicycle frames into a tree; and the Fossil series in which household appliances are covered in plaster, skilfully rendered as stone so that they seem to have emerged from rock. Validation of the ongoing relevance of that last stream came at Alison Jacques. Where my favourite piece in Matt Johnson’s new show had the feel of an unmade Woodrow: a bicycle lodged, in theft-proof impracticality, in the middle of a large boulder.
Perhaps I should have gone to the Venice Biennale’s opening week, but I went instead to the last few days in late November. True, quite a bit has closed by then, but there’s still more than enough art to fill a long weekend – and you can look back at what the critics decided, and disagree. Two of my favourites were large scale transformative installations which related rather closely to each other. Both made the most of no.t being on the main sites – so they were harder to find, but integrated more fully with the city. The essence of Venice is water meets light meets history, so there’s a certain logic to featuring florescent tubes in 18th century palazzos overlooking canals. Long-underrated veteran Bill Culbert lit up the eight connected spaces of New Zealand’s Front Door Out Back. Cupboards, tables and wardrobes were energised by literally piercing light, and in one room opening on to a canal-side terrace, the light seemed to have washed in with the floating detritus to form an everyday epiphany – though one which could also be read as a city _ jostling too close to the water. Pedro Cabrita Reis wasn’t Portugal’s official artist, but that didn’t stop his ‘collateral event’ a remote whisper being a highlight. The atmosphere was quite different, blending the work into the space rather than bringing the world so explicitly in. Reis set up a sort of double intersection, as the outlines of alternative rooms made by light cut through the palazzo’s dividing walls; and the artificial light cut through the natural light streaming in at the windows. It’s a pity on this evidence that Dan Flavin never had a solo show at the Biennale.
29: The Lights Staying Off
Creed, Martin. Work No. 227: The lights going on and off 2000. Lights on timer. the Tate modern
Tate Britain has just purchased and is showing Martin Creed’s Work No. 227: The lights going on and off, 2000. This might have felt familiar enough to pay deserve minimum attention, but for two factors. First, the room was closed off as the installation wasn’t working – or, should I say, only half of it was working – the ‘off’ half. Five seconds on, five seconds off: how hard can it be? Apparently there was more to it than a blown bulb: attendants explained that they’d been entertained by daily visits from electricians seeking to correct an overheating problem. Second, Tate has just paid around £100,000 for the work. What has it got for that? Not, I suppose, the right to turn their lights on and off, but the right to attribute doing so to Creed. That brings in the essence of his work: a poignant desire to avoid mistakes by avoiding decisions. A door won’t be open or closed, balloons will half-fill a space, a drawing will last till the ink runs dry. Maurizio Cattelan, in 2004, thought Work No. 227 ‘looked like a mood swing’ with its ‘ability to compress happiness and anxiety within one single gesture. Lights go on, lights go off – sunshine and rain, and then back to beginning to repeat endlessly.’ Is it worth the money? First I think so, then I think not.
I do not know what Creed was thinking about when he made it but to me it always looked like a swing, a mood swing. All rather interesting, but what does it tell us about the valuation of instructions as opposed to objects?
It's one of their many paradoxes that all of Creed's immaculately resolved artworks emerge out of an acute indecision. "I find that it's difficult to choose, to decide that one thing's more important than the other," he says. "So what I try and do is to choose without having to make decisions." To this end, he takes the stuff that already exists in the world-air, noise, a door--makes his mundane "materials" fulfill their expected function, and then subjects them to a further series of "nonchoices." Hence the doorstop in Work No. 115 is positioned at the exact point between open and closed; the lights in Work No. 160 are off for as long as they are on; and the balloons in the various "given spaces" have tended to be either "noncolors" like black or white or all the colors one can possibly buy. As far as Creed is concerned, air is the perfect material: everywhere yet invisible, both everything and nothing. Appropriately, his most permanent and conspicuous work to date, a public text piece that runs some forty- odd feet across the frieze of a former orphanage in East London and declares EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE ALL RIGHT, is made from glass tubes of white neon, a fragile combination of live electricity and inert gas. (A version of the piece is currently on view in a Public Art Fund project in Times Square.)
Plenty of artists do pretty much the same thing most days. Normally that’s just the making of art – Frank Auerbach is famous for going to the studio every day of every year. Sometimes the output is also obsessive, when it tends to be a way of recording and meditating on the passage of time: the two obvious examples are On Kawara’s ongoing litany of date paintings, and Roman Opulka’s spending much of 1965 to his death in 2011 painting the numbers from 1 - 5607249. Those projects both incorporate time’s passage: the calendar moves on, the numbers get bigger. Opulka also increased the proportion of white in each canvas, and had hoped to reach an all-white 7777777. The German Peter Dreher (born 1932) is different, even though he’s been painting the same empty glass tumbler in the same conditions on a near-daily basis since 1974. There are 5,000 so far, and a sample of 144 (along with other work) can be seen at the Milton Keynes Gallery to 24 November. His USP is more a strategy of non-development. The subject is just the impulse for the activity, which Dreher considers to be exercises in abstract mark-making, albeit they always turn out to depict his glass. Hence the Zen title for the whole series ‘Every day is a good day’, and hence Dreher’s statement that he ‘wouldn’t be all that upset if they were to disappear.’ Turns out he isn’t obsessive at all.
Most days art critic Paul Carey-Kent spends hours on the train, traveling between his home in Southampton and his day job in Surrey. Could he, we asked, jot down whatever came into his head?
What’s a painting? The obvious answer is paint on canvas, or maybe better some kind of liquid which dries onto some kind of ground. But it’s possible to make something best considered a painting without using any liquid: take DJ Simpson’s router in MDF works or Sergei Jensen’s carpet pieces. Else liquid may be used without a ground, as in Lynda Benglis’ poured latex painting/sculptures or Piers Secunda’s objects and wall-hung reliefs formed entirely from industrial paint: he even uses paint to make the bolts which hold them in place. Glenn Brown has made paint-sculptures which push Aurbach’s portraits all the way to 3D, as well as flat photo-relist depictions of their thick impasto. One could add Eduardo Costa, Analia Saban and Wang Yuyang. So there’s a definite tradition behind the practice of emerging artist Jonathan Gabb, currently showing (to 16 Nov, with an artist’s talk on this Thurs, 7th) at A Brooks art in Hoxton Market, an attractively adventurous and characterful artist-run space which occupies a former Victorian florist’s. Gabb’s bright work suits that lineage, as does the show’s title, ‘Opera Rose’, which is actually a type of electric pink acrylic paint. Gabb applies paint to cellophane, allows it to dry, then strips it off to form ribbons which he hangs into a space-defining architecture of pure colour. Looks great against the ex-shop’s windows.
Most days art critic Paul Carey-Kent spends hours on the train, traveling between his home in Southampton and his day job in Surrey. Could he, we asked, jot down whatever came into his head?
colourful work suits that lineage,
Who came? Steph, Bella Easton, Paulina O, Jonty, Tammy, Vici, Maria. Laksi!? (Maria’s neighbour), Zoe Simon, artist from A Zab, bag of money artist, Cavadonla (didn’t speak to her), Juan (not Karen?), Zavier, Nessie Stonebridge, Josephine Breese, Henry Little
Offer to missing: artists + Rob Lee, Carlos, Francesca, Laure,
Since 1972, the German painter Peter Dreher has each day painted an empty glass, sometimes at daytime and sometimes at night. To date, Dreher has painted over 3,500 canvases of the glass, all the same size but slightly different depending on the light in his studio and Dreher’s mood on each given day. The small paintings are completed in one sitting in the artist’s secluded studio in the Black Forest.
This ongoing project, entitled ‘Tag um Tag ist gutter Tag’ (‘Day by Day is a good Day’), has both an obsessive conceptual rigour and a fascination with the process of paint itself. Peter Dreher does away with the apparent duality of ‘representational’ and ‘abstract’ by showing infinite variations of the same object. Peter Dreher’s first solo exhibition in the UK presents a large group of paintings from this series, all executed in 2005 and hung in chronological order.
Peter Dreher lives and works in St Märgen, Germany. Recent solo shows include ‘Phenomenon of Time’, Galerie Herrman & Wagner, Berlin, Germany (2004); Galerie Katharina Krohn, Basel, Switzerland (2005); ‘Real’, Quint Contemporary Art, San Diego, USA, (2003); Museum Katharinenhof, Kranenburg, Germany (1998).
Peter Dreher
25 January – 25 February
The Approach
First Floor
Peter Dreher
20 September - 24 November 2013
Preview: Thursday 19 September/ 6pm-8pm / All welcome
This autumn MK Gallery presents an exhibition of work by Peter Dreher (b.1932), a painter from South West Germany who has produced a daily painting of the same, empty glass for the last 40 years. This remarkable series, of which there are over 5,000 examples, is titled Every Day is a Good Day, taken from a Zen-Buddhist saying that suggests everything is of equal importance.
Dreher’s practice is contemplative, diaristic and obsessive. His work highlights minute changes in our surroundings, deliberately marking the passage of time and ultimately providing evidence of the artist’s existence. His work inevitably recalls the subtle shifts and gradations in Giorgio Morandi’s still lifes as well as the rigorously serialised approaches of Dreher’s contemporaries such as the conceptual artists Hanne Darboven, On Kawara or Roman Opalka.
The exhibition at MK Gallery will be organised in three groups: the Long Gallery will include around 150 of the glass paintings from the 1970s to the present day, as well as related engravings, watercolours and drawings; the Middle Gallery will bring together still lifes, including paintings of flowers, foliage, vegetables, skulls and a large series of detailed and close-up pencil drawings of an aubergine; and the Cube Gallery will feature architectural scenes made up of separate canvases, each of which was painted in a single day.
- See more at:
Genius, sex and mystery
How about an exhibition which sets dazzling formal mastery in a context of censorship, controversy and a radical merging of high and low cultures? Not Grayson Perry plus the mastery, but the British Museum's comprehensive overview of Shunga (‘spring pictures’). This genre of sexually explicit art was practised by all the leading lights of The Floating World, which brought the ethos of pleasure-seeking to Japan during 1600-1900. Cue the interplay of bodies and textiles in scenes which bring humour and mutual tenderness to the landscape of love. Refreshing, though it’s a still a sex show designed for private viewing of scrolls. So, what kind of sex show is it? Well, it’s a male viewpoint: no female artists in Edo Japan. The figures are rarely naked: areas of explicit and outsized genital interplay emerge from and contrast with areas of patterned clothing, which is the source of much of its aesthetic charge. There’s plenty of variety. The mood may be urgent, romantic, chatty, domestic, commercial, humorous. The acts include a man enjoying another man while his mistress waits her turn; the collection of improbable quantities of vaginal secretion in a jar; a woman multiply ravaged by an octopus; and shaven-headed nuns taken by priests. What you don’t get, in contrast with the current pornographic convention, is any fellatio. Was it a rare practice, or simply not depicted, and if not, why? Googling offers no help here: we have genius, sex and mystery.
Anatomically exaggerated but outsize genitals positions to show them fully new tech (woodblocks) used for porn
Seen in private – scrolls and prints put away when not in use
No evidence of size of genitals prized in Edo fantasy not reality size prevented oral depiction? Or was it a rarer practice? Equal value with head?
British Museum emphasises the art – of course – but one of the attractive features of the Floating World (ie art in line wit hthe ethic of xxx) is that sex is just one part of a seamless attitude, so if it wasn’t about the sex, it would have been integrated more widely.
, , some European couples wh end up looking oddly like late Picasso (but then he was a fan), there are two omissions. First, unsurprisingly,: nothing by women. Second, a lack of oral sex. There is one image of cunnilingus, categorised as dirty in its inscribed text, but nowhere does that standby of modern erotic imagery appear: fellation.
No oral sex
11 x artists (not Andy, Clarisse, Nick) inc Alison with Kevin, Tereza with Zoe Simon & her two editors, Pernille with black boyfriend, Christina with Philip, Dolly with Mick, Nika with X, Harald with girlfriend, Alex’s x + baby,
ASC – Darren, Peter, Julia (dark short hair),
e-cat to Francesca, check Meeka,
staying with Maria offer…
Note to Darren re rabbit
Paintings without canvas – Auturo Herrera – felt shapes on wall. Neo-Naturists – on body. Lynda Benglis – pooled on floor. El Anutsui DJ Simpson Zoderer Sergei Jensen – carpet paintings – see Art Forum article 9.09
Paint with no ground: Eduardo Costa, Lynda Benglis, Glenn Brown, Analia Saban, Jonathan Gabb, Piers Secunda
Paintings without liquid – Mark Bradford ‘White Painting’ 2009 (paper collage tricked out to look painterly) DJ Simpson
ART STUFF on a train # 27: ‘Look, No Canvas’
Most days art critic Paul Carey-Kent spends hours on the train, traveling between his home in Southampton and his day job in Surrey. Could he, we asked, jot down whatever came into his head?
How much is more than enough? Allen Jones’ still somewhat notorious invitation to sit on a woman (Chair, 1969) sold for close on £1m last year. The acrylic on fibreglass in leather piece is an edition of six, and hardly a rare sighting. Overload was surely reached during October, though: I’ve seen it at Tate Britain (to demonstrate, as part of ‘Art Under Attack’, how well it’s been restored after an acid assault), at the Barbican (a good fit for the mostly predictable ‘Pop Art Design’), in Christie’s first exhibition in the former Haunch of Venison space (‘When Britain Went Pop!’) and in Aquavella’s booth at Frieze Masters. In the latter two its almost-as-notorious siblings, Table and Hat Stand, accompanied Chair. They still get a strong reaction. I’m pretty sure it’s the sex, not the art, which generates that, though a case can be concocted for Jones’ trio as the pop art equivalent of Richard Artschwager’s sculptures which pretend to be furniture, their apparent female submissiveness offset by the way they invade the viewer’s space. There’s nothing wrong with sex, of course, but you need to go to British Museum’s magnificent Shunga show (to 5 Jan) to see a more even balance of effect between it and art.
Most days art critic Paul Carey-Kent spends hours on the train, traveling between his home in Southampton and his day job in Surrey. Could he, we asked, jot down whatever came into his head?
Life: it’s just one thing on top of another. And some sense of that is captured in two shows – within 200 yards – which come at the imagistic equivalent from opposite directions. The first applies then strips away layers away to reveal what’s hidden; the second over-determines the layers then selects which ones to emphasise. A ten year retrospective at Gimpel Fils (to 11 Oct) reprises how Hannah Maybank covers her canvases with variously-coloured acrylic over latex, then peels them partially back to reveal landscapes in which the curl of the surface operates both sculpturally – as shadows, branches, leaves - and metaphorically: where else do you find the past, but hidden beneath the present? At Hamiltons (to 1 Nov), the Swedish photographer Jacob Felländer gives us fifteen views out of the same window in New York. That may sound unpromising, but these are big, multiple photographs made by the slowed winding of an analogue camera, and Felländer has added paint and charcoal to bring selected aspects of the negatives to the surface, rather as you might heighten the pentimento of first thoughts subsequently adjusted in a painting. If space can drift over time, Felländer had wondered, thinking of the movement of continents, then could he capture time drifting over space? That one thing on top of another can have its attractions.
What exactly is gained by confronting great art in typical museum conditions? The usual hierarchy of fame applies at the Rijksmuseum, leading to a permanent ruckus around Rembrandt and Vermeer. Plenty want themselves photographed in front of The Nightwatch in the established manner of tourists concentrating on proving in future where they were in the past, rather than experiencing the present moment. More mysteriously, perhaps, many want their own straight photos of the work, which will be unfocused, ill-lit and partial up against what’s readily available on-line. The Mona Lisa, of course, tops the fame rankings, so you see it at such a distance behind its bullet-proof glass in the Louvre that it’s harder at first than at second hand to assess the plausibility of the theory that it’s a self-portrait in drag. Back in Amsterdam, most of the vast Rijksmuseum is stunning, but few bother, for example, with the Adriaan Coorte’s side-roomed set of meditations on particularised fruits: yet surely many would be drawn in – just as with Vermeer - to their peculiarly modern intensity. Maybe what’s sought isn’t the art, but a connection with its maker. What better, then, if you’re in Amsterdam, where – though he lived there for just one of his 37 years - van Gogh’s aura is taken to reside, than to see all the paintings in a 3D film sequence? You’re pretty much in the room with him, and no-one else will be standing in the way…
Tate Britain’s show on iconoclasm has been widely panned. Some of the criticism is well wide of the mark, suggesting that the first quarter, which deals with the destruction of religious imagery following the English reformation, shows only that too little survived to generate any visual interest. Far from it, the modern attraction of the aesthetic of the fragment emerges triumphantly, nowhere more surprisingly, perhaps, than when a fragment of Mary is eroticised through the only surviving part of the infant Jesus being a hand clutching her breast. It’s a show of four quarters, each weaker than the one before, the superb account of state-sanctioned iconoclasm (c 1536-1700) being followed by an interesting section on the people attacking monumental representations of state power (c 1700-1900) ; a duller quarter on gallery art which was attacked in the C20th; and a weak one on the somewhat different matter of artists using destruction in the production of their work. Yet this was fully correctable: keep the first half, and mix alongside it contemporary work which does actually operate in an iconoclastic manner or consider the related issues. Stephan Bruggeman, Oliver Laric, Liane Lang, Laura Mulvey plus the included Chapman Brothers. Job done – I wonder why the Tate didn’t do it? Basquiat?
ART STUFF on a train # 21: ‘Pierdom’
Most days art Critic Paul Carey-Kent spends hours on the train, traveling between his home in Southampton and his day job in Surrey. Could he, we asked, jot down whatever came into his head?
Teignmouth Grand Pier, Devon, 2011
Hastings Pier, 2011
I do like a good typology. They have a fascination of their own, whether they’re art or not. Plenty have looked to be art as well since the prime example of the Bechers, who brought a rigorously consistent formality to their black and white shots of industrial structures: consistent angles, slightly overcast conditions, no human traces, taken from a ladder or platform. Yet there’s an alternative, seen in Simon Roberts’ just-published book Pierdom (and linked exhibition at the Flowers Gallery to 12 October) showing all 58 British seaside pleasure piers and the sites of some of the similar number lost since their 1910 peak. Roberts varies the angle, distance, extent of surroundings shown and role of people so that the individual geographical and social contexts of the piers are given full scope rather than being subsumed into regularity. That works in its different way, and suits the subjects’ wide range of current vibrancy, from community and tourist hubs to ruined husks. The consistency is in their Victorian engineering: boards over light gothic ironwork on screw piling. The collection also drew me pleasurably into recalling which I’d actually seen – starting with Hastings, where I grew up, the pier shown in its recent, seriously fire-damaged state. Maybe I should declare an interest, but actually I could think of better ways of spending £12m on my home town than reconstructing the pier.
USE OF CHEWING GUM (see ‘chewing; in pics)
Dan Colen, Alina Szapocznikow’ Randy Moore (‘Oral Pleasure’), Ben Wilson, Tom Friedman, Adam McEwen, Alex Hoda (chewed pieces cast monumentally in marble)
ART STUFF on a train # 24: ‘The Corrrect Use of Gum’
Most days art Critic Paul Carey-Kent spends hours on the train, traveling between his home in Southampton and his day job in Surrey. Could he, we asked, jot down whatever came into his head?
Alex Hoda’s current show at Edel Assanti features marble sculptures of chewing gum. That fuses two well-established tropes: blowing something small up big to make us look at it differently, which Claes Oldenburg was first to exploit systematically; and using precious material - and the labour of production - to elevate the worth of something casual or valueless, which, for example, Sue Collis does particularly subtly. Jeff Koons’ balloon dogs or Urs Fischer’s giant aluminium versions of squeezed lumps of clay offer combined approaches. What’s more, the art use of chewing gum is pretty-much a tradition of its own. Alina Szapocznikow’s 1971 series of ‘Photosculptures’ monumentalise pieces which she chewed. Adam McEwen has used wads on canvas to refer to the bombing of German cities in WWII, contrasting the understanding of gum-chewing child and gum-arranging man. Dan Colen has made enough ‘paintings’ with gum that he has an established process: ‘I pay people to chew the gum. Students get 50 cents for each piece. Then we take the gum and make it dirty with street shit. I want it to be both elegant and real’. Which leaves us with the question: has Hoda taken established tropes in fresh directions, or is just an ersatz follower of others? The visceral impact of a metre-tall gob of marble gum spat straight on the wall certainly feels like something new.
One might look at Claes Oldenburg, Robert Therrien or Martin Pomeroy’s butterfly eggs for the first of those; Gavin Turk, Sue Collis for the second and.
North London Artist Ben Wilson paints tiny pictures on discarded chewing gum.
Hartmut Stockter: sparrows cast in it 2012!
CB: Where do you find the gum for your gum paintings?
AM: I chew the gum. Well,
Interview
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In the disjointed art community of the early 2000s, there was one scene of brash, energetic young artists that emerged in downtown New York City and ended up defining the decade. For a while that group—at least from the outside—was spearheaded by photographer Ryan McGinley, whose early reportage photos of Lower East Side friends and dirty, young ne’er-do-wells perfectly captured the vibe and destructive glee of it all. As the decade progressed, other artists from this pocket of close friends surfaced: Dash Snow, Dan Colen, Nate Lowman, Aaron Young, and Agathe Snow, among others. On the outside, they seemed to trade primarily in nihilistic urban imagery, much of which they picked up from the skateboarding and graffiti communities, and critics were quick to peg them (and occasionally write them off) as heterogeneous inheritors of punk, Semina, Basquiat, and a ’90s mix of DIY and shock art. But the reality is that each of these artists was developing a style, technique, and an aesthetic direction that was entirely his or her own. Dan Colen has come out of this now legendary scene to become one of the most accomplished and promising multimedia neo-pop artists of his generation. He started out by producing a series of photo-realist paintings at his studio in the back of his grandfather’s antiques shop in Flatbush, Brooklyn, populated by magical fantasy characters. Another series of paintings featured Disney-style burning candles, where the smoke emanating from them contained disarming messages. He went on to explore spray paint on canvas, chewing gum as an abstract technique, and paint made to look like bird droppings. Now he’s mining the psychological joy-and-sorrow stimuli of confetti. Confetti suggests a party that is still going on, but for Colen, now 31, the endless party—with its wild nights, fast friends, and heavy toll of drugs—is largely over. In 2007, Colen and Dash Snow famously created the installation work NEST out of shredded phone books in Jeffrey Deitch’s SoHo gallery. At the opening, a party ensued that suggested the good times had just begun. Very few who attended could have guessed that they would end two years later with the tragic death of Snow, who overdosed last year after a long, hard-fought battle with heroin addiction. That loss was a hard blow to friends and artists in downtown Manhattan and no doubt had a sharp effect on Colen. But the New Jersey native has grown up on his own, and his work has matured to the point that he needs a sober focus to bring it forward.
This month, Colen, who first showed with Rivington Arms and is currently represented by the Gagosian and Massimo De Carlo galleries, will open an as yet untitled solo show at Gagosian in Chelsea, on view from September 10 through October 16. The event is quite a leap for a guy who once had to crash on McGinley’s beanbag chair when he visited the city before moving here in 2001. The show promises a mix of paintings, sculptures, and installations, including an upside-down half-pipe and the precise refabrication of all the bikes outside the Hell’s Angels’ club on East 3rd Street—knocked over Pee-Wee Herman–style. McGinley visited his childhood
friend Colen in the Tribeca studio he shared with artist and occasional collaborator Nate Lowman, just before his move to a larger space to prepare for his biggest show yet.
RYAN McGINLEY: I don’t really know where to start because I have so many memories of us together as kids. The first memory I have of us talking about art was when we were teenagers in the parking lot of that place where we used to play pool every night in New Jersey. I had my portfolio for Cooper Union in the back of my hatchback and I showed it to you.
DAN COLEN: I remember that. You made that painting of a computer-head guy.
McGINLEY: The computer-head guy was pretty good. I just told Chuck Close about that painting because it almost looked like one of his paintings.
COLEN: I remember that time really clearly because we were one year apart, like 16 versus 17, and you were already thinking about your future. You had a portfolio and I didn’t yet. But it’s funny because we never really went there before that moment. It was like, Oh, you got a portfolio? Now we can talk about art. Like, I wasn’t just going to show you the drawings I made of naked ladies.
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McGINLEY: It’s so crazy to think that was already 15 years ago. That’s a 15-year dialogue about art—the longest dialogue on art I’ve had with anybody. In doing research for this interview, I went through all the art you’ve made over the years. I kind of stopped thinking about the art and started thinking about all the memories—where I was in my life when you were making your bird-shit paintings or your first baseball diamonds at RISD [Rhode Island School of Design] or the one that said “Jack.” And I thought about what I contributed, like when I’d come back from my road trips and bring you all those missing-persons or missing-cat posters and how those posters ended up on your rock sculptures. I almost started crying the other day when I saw one of those rocks at the Dakis [Joannou] show at the New Museum. I was standing there looking at every single thing on it—like I remember that day you wrote that person’s name with gum. It was an intense experience.
COLEN: That rock sculpture was from the show in Berlin [from the show No Me, September 2006]. That was such an awesome trip, but it was definitely the last of those trips. It was like we were burnt-out on being kids, but we made it work one last time. That piece is called Nostalgia Ain’t What It Used to Be, and it’s such a sentimental piece.
McGINLEY: I remember that trip to Berlin. I remember going to that apartment that Javier [Peres] rented for everybody, and we all stayed up all night doing drugs. Neville [Wakefield] and I had made a plan to go to the art fair the next morning, and I got in a car with him at 10 a.m. after not sleeping and had a complete panic attack.
COLEN: [laughs] I remember you talking about that.
McGINLEY: We literally pulled up to the art fair and I immediately left, hyperventilating in another cab on my way back to the house. I was just trying to hold my shit together so bad, like totally feeling that at any moment I could have told the cab driver, “Take me to the hospital.” I slept for two days straight and then woke up to go directly to the airport back home.
COLEN: Is that when you were having a lot of panic attacks?
McGINLEY: No, there were just way too many drugs. It was crazy. I don’t think I drank that whole summer, and then suddenly just coming to see you and Dash [Snow] and Bruce [LaBruce] and everyone else, it was complete peer pressure and party antics.
COLEN: But you made up your mind before you got there, man. [McGinley laughs] It wasn’t peer pressure. We all came so ready, remember? You showed up . . .
McGINLEY: All right, next question. I wrote down a bunch of different memories. Like I remember when you threw that wood plank through a restaurant window at that Visionaire party in the Meatpacking District [2001]. All the people at V were calling me the next day asking if you were my friend, and I denied everything.
COLEN: [laughs] That’s a real night from my memory. Nobody knew who we were. We’d go someplace and you’d say, “I’m Ryan McGinley,” because you had already gotten such a head start. It’s weird to think about that time when we were all like, “Is Ryan going to take us?” Or, “Ryan, you’ve got to get us in.” And then we’d all destroy the party. We’d ruin it. But I remember that night because I had a real bonding experience with Dash. He was just like, “Oh, this guy’s like that?” And it was so crazy getting chased by all the models.
McGINLEY: I remember Chris Bollen, who is at Interview now and arranged this conversation. He worked at V then, and he was the first person to call who actually had my back. He was like, “Don’t worry about it. But I’ve got to know for my own sake.” And I was like, “I don’t know who that guy was. I think he came with Bruce LaBruce.”
COLEN: I’ll tell you what happened. None of us really smoked weed at that point anymore. But suddenly these people came up to Dash and me and said, “You guys have to leave. You were smoking weed. You were hanging by the bathroom.” And we were like, “No, we weren’t.” It went back and forth. They were really adamant. So we left, but we started to smash all the martini glasses.
McGINLEY: I remember I was in the bathroom and heard all these glasses break.
COLEN: That’s probably why we were lingering outside—we were waiting for you. I remember Ivana Trump was there. It was one of the first fancy parties I ever went to. Ivana Trump was wearing stilettos with diamond straps around her ankles and I don’t know why, but it suddenly felt so right smashing martini glasses everywhere. We ran out and then Dash and Agathe [Snow] started getting in this crazy fight. Dash took Agathe’s keys and threw them up on a nearby rooftop. They were fighting, so I picked up this piece of wood and was just like, “I’m gonna throw this through the window.” I dragged it a block and a half, and they were like, “No, don’t do that.” And I said, “Fuck those motherfuckers. We didn’t smoke weed. We weren’t smoking. Fuck them.” Then there was a whole male-model chase, which was the craziest thing ever—10 male models chasing me through the streets of the Meatpacking District for like 10 blocks.
McGINLEY: This leads into my next question about all of your misadventures. Talking about Ivana Trump, I feel like you’ve had so many interactions with celebrities and they’ve all been bad. Keith Richards almost tried to kill you, right?
COLEN: [laughs] I mean, I used to kind of go for it, right? Like, I’d be the one who would say, “All right, there’s Kate Moss. I’m going to try to make out with her.”
McGINLEY: And that didn’t go down well. What about Tom Ford—trying to make out with him?
COLEN: Not just trying to make out with him, but then touching his hair. He didn’t like that.
McGINLEY: That’s a no-no.
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COLEN: It’s such a paradox. You come from this place where you want fame; you don’t want to be bourgeois, but you want to be successful. You want to be accepted, but you also want to be going against the grain. You want to be on the outside, but you want to be on the inside. There are all these gestures that I used to go through . . .
McGINLEY: Everything and nothing.
COLEN: Everything and nothing. But it’s such an immature thing because really what you want is acceptance, and you want to pull it off in your own way. It’s almost premature to be doing things and then simultaneously as an artist illustrating them. I’m glad I was that guy rather than anyone else, but I like how I function better now—stick to my own business, do what I do.
McGINLEY: When you first moved to New York, you lived with me on 7th Street. Where was your first studio?
COLEN: I had that little studio on top of the antiques store. It was tiny—only one painting fit. I worked on the chest painting the entire time. Then I moved upstate because I couldn’t build anything in that studio.
McGINLEY: I thought you went upstate because you couldn’t focus in New York and you needed to get away from everything. Because that’s the reason I made photos outside of New York. If I had to stay in New York to do what I do, I just couldn’t do it. Too much of my concentration has been broken.
COLEN: It was about that, but it was also definitely about wanting to experiment with what happens when I go to a place where I can only work, where I have no other options. I work a lot, as you know. When we were living together, I’d come home at four in the morning and then we’d stay up until six, go to sleep, and then we’d wake up and go back to work. Some nights I’d come home at two and we’d party until six, but we always worked. I think it was really important that I ran out of space in that first studio. There was a woodshop upstate, and I could build new stretchers there.
McGINLEY: I remember you going crazy upstate.
COLEN: Yeah, I was. You know what I remember? I remember you calling to tell me about the Whitney [Museum, 2003] show. And I remember you left me a message and were like, “I’ve got something fucking crazy, man.” I was kind of going crazy already, but for two months up there it was so inspiring. I remember I was sitting in the woods and you called and said, “I got a show at the fucking Whitney!”
McGINLEY: I remember you were like, “Yeah, right.” You know, my first trip outside of the city was to come visit you upstate when A-Ron [Aaron Bondaroff] organized that van trip. I moved to New York in 1996, and that was 2002. Until that trip, I never really left New York. You couldn’t pay me to leave New York. I was so into the city. I wanted to be here every second I could. But going upstate and seeing everyone out of their element—just putting a whole group of people somewhere new and seeing what happens—was really eye-opening. That was the first time I ever used fireworks in my pictures. Dash brought those fireworks.
COLEN: Do you remember how you got me naked, and we went on the four-wheeler. That was horrible!
McGINLEY: I loved the studio you moved into after upstate—at the antiques store on Coney Island Avenue. I remember the first time I went there. They had beautiful antiques, not just junk, but pieces of art. You’d wander through the entire store with costume jewelry and lamps and vintage paintings, and then your studio would be in the back filled with all of these photo-realistic paintings that you were working on. Just having to trek all the way out there was so bizarre.
COLEN: It was almost out of some weird child fantasy movies where the door moves and you are transported to a magical world. It was fortunate for me that my grandfather had that antiques shop, and I knew I wouldn’t have to pay for a studio. But also I have to give the credit to its location. I had to go out there, and nobody would visit. And if anyone did, it was so exciting. I have vivid memories of Dash coming out there and you coming by and scooping me up at night. But those paintings [Seven Days Always Seemed Like a Bit of an Exaggeration] were about solitariness. And I never would have started that found-paintings series unless I was living amongst them in that store. That was a special place.
McGINLEY: It’s tied up with your family. Everyone always says they have a crazy family. I thought mine was pretty eccentric—until I met your family. You have the enthusiasm and intensity of your father, the eccentricity of your aunt and grandmother, and your mom kind of holds it all together. I remember the first time that I met your aunt, she pulled up in an old Mercedes, and the entire car was filled with junk, from action toys to TVs, jewelry, and scarves. There wasn’t a spare inch in that car except for the driver’s seat and the passenger seat for your grandmother. And then your grandmother got out and she was wearing a Tina Turner wig and a Robert Mapplethorpe leather-daddy hat, and her dentures were half out of her mouth. Then it struck me, “Oh, it makes sense.” The larger picture of who you are came together.
COLEN: For all the drama we all have with our families and all the tension and hostility, I couldn’t have done this without my family. Being the people that they are—they’re crazy—made it possible for me to be crazy and to live a lifestyle of my own design. They made it possible for me to walk down the street and make my own decisions every day, you know?
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McGINLEY: I saw a guy on the street the other day, and he was just some random weird New York dude, and he was wearing this shirt that said I do whatever the fuck I want. That’s the best shirt I think I’ve ever seen, because I really feel like we’re so lucky to do whatever we want. That statement speaks to me in so many ways. But I can’t imagine having the dad that you have. In the sense of being an artist, he’s the greatest dad ever. I appreciate my family—
COLEN: Your family is crazy, by the way. But our families are as different kinds of crazy as possible.
McGINLEY: It’s just that I can’t talk to my family about art. It’s not their thing. But it’s amazing you have a dad who you can talk to about art in such a profound way. I was thinking of all the letters he writes you.
COLEN: He still writes me a letter every week. I can’t keep up with him. The other day he said, “I’d like to come to your studio where I could just have it to myself and sit there and take some notes.” I said, “Take notes on what?” He said, “On your paintings.” He also said, “Listen, it’s really important that when your show’s up at Gagosian I have my own time in there.” I said, “You can have as much time as you want.” Obviously he can, but you know he’s going to demand to shut everything down to get his own time in there. He got such a late start in his own art it was hard for him to make a career out of it, but thank god for me, you know? It was nice to have those discussions with him. I remember some basic art lessons he gave me early on. In high school he would show me Monet, Manet, Picasso, Matisse. But I didn’t know much beyond that. I went to college not knowing who Matthew Barney or Richard Prince was or any of this shit. My dad brought home Jasper Johns and Cy Twombly books. We were so busy skateboarding I didn’t have time to get too interested. But I remember him saying, “All these people talk about these two guys being the greatest contemporary artists. I’m not going to like them just because people say so. But I’m going to bust my ass trying to see what they see in it, because they’re getting so much out of it and I want to have the same experience.” He had the vigilance and the belief that art takes patience. It worked for him with Jasper Johns, but he never got there with Cy Twombly.
McGINLEY: My father taught me about supply and demand. We used to watch the stock market. He also used to force me to play tennis.
COLEN: Oh, my dad forces me to do a lot of fuckin’ things.
McGINLEY: Most of the e-mails I get nowadays are from students who ask me how I got my start. In truth it’s from having a really supportive family but also having a good patron who will help you—like financing all those early trips I took. When you were starting to show with Javier [in 2004], you approached him in a really businesslike way. You said, “Listen, I need money. I need you to support me, pay my rent, pay for my supplies, and in exchange I will make these paintings for a show.” I think that’s an important lesson for young people who want to be artists: You have to find someone who believes in you and who will help you find that time where you don’t have to think about a job but just making work. If I didn’t have those people in my life, I wouldn’t be in the position I’m in.
COLEN: That was some shit I learned from you—because you hustled in a very specific way. And that call I made to Javier was a really crazy call. People don’t make calls like that. But you have to go for it. You have to carve out a way to make this fucking possible for you—which has a lot to do with not having a job, right? We both needed nothing in our own way. We needed to be able to give it everything. It’s such a weird self-confidence that an artist has—to conceive of this thing that serves no function and say,
“I’m going to really work hard for it and give it and it’s just going to matter to people.” You really have to believe it all on your own. And then you need this other guy, who’s like, “Yeah! You’re gonna do it. And I’m gonna help you.” You had Jack Riley [an early patron of McGinley’s], and I had Javier. You need to be able to focus on your work. You can’t go and bust your ass at some shitty job all day and come home and try to make art . . . You gotta put all your heart into it.
McGINLEY: I remember talking to Jack Walls [artist and longtime boyfriend of Robert Mapplethorpe] at some point . . . I feel like he was our godfather and gave us a lot of advice. He said to me, “I knew that you and Dan were going to make it when you guys decided not to become barbacks.” He said, “If you’re an artist, you have to be unemployable and you only can make art.” One of the first paintings you made in college was for Jack Walls, right?
COLEN: Definitely. Jack is so important to our history. I remember making that baseball-field painting in college and getting an inkling of what I wanted to do. Then I came home that summer thinking I’d go back a lot more ready. That’s when I met Kunle [Martins] and Jack. You and I had lost contact for a period of time, and you had gone out and met all of these different people. Your life just expanded. And that’s when I found out that you were gay. [laughs]
McGINLEY: I thought you knew! And that’s when you found out!
COLEN: I feel like we were in Cherry Tavern, and I was talking about Kunle and someone said, “That guy’s gay.” I was like, “What? That’s crazy.” I was just so innocent. And I said something to you like, “What’s up with girls?” And you were like, “What are you talking about? I’m gay, man.” I said, “Wait, what?” For me it was like, Whoa, we grew up together, we were doing the same shit. We’ve come this far sharing a path that’s so similar. That was a big juncture. It was like, “If he’s gay, I might be gay. I probably am gay. What’s the difference? He’s Catholic and I’m Jewish.” Spending that whole summer hanging out, I even had that period where I wished I was gay. “This gay shit seems dope. I don’t know how to deal with girls, and these guys are all buddies, and they’re fucking, and they’re having fun.” I sweated it. But when I went back to school, I was like, “Well, I’m just this middle-class white Jewish guy.” I feel like I got plenty of things to make art about that, right? But at the time, I thought, Why can’t I make art about being gay, about being black, about identity, about all these things? And I went back to school and I made that stuff that was a weird exploration of homosexuality. They’re paintings about men. That was the first body of work I was proud of. I remember thinking, This stuff is legitimate art. I came out of school and I sold those, and for a while it kept me from having to find a job.
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McGINLEY: You know that we lived together for 10 years? A decade. It’s crazy. First I lived on Bleecker Street and you used to sleep on that big yellow beanbag. And from there we lived on 7th Street together with all the things that went down there. Then eventually we shared a studio on Canal Street. That move really helped me, and that’s when business took off. So many things changed. But what I’m trying to say is that I miss hearing your feet in the morning. You dragged your feet in a certain way and I would think, Oh, Dan’s up. Now I have my own apartment with no other roommate, which has always only been you.
COLEN: If I wasn’t sleeping on 7th Street, I was sleeping at Jack’s or Dash’s—people that I met through you. I felt like you were taking care of me the whole time, showing me the ropes. I’m glad I did that one thing where I got Canal Street for us. That was my one contribution to a grounded lifestyle.
McGINLEY: What about showering? Are you showering these days?
COLEN: I’m pretty clean. I mean, so much shit has happened in the last year that it’s pretty crazy. It was a profound thing to move out from you on Canal Street because I felt like, “I’m leaving Ryan. I’ve got to figure out how to be a grown-up.” So now we live alone, but I miss so much of it . . . The relationship that roommates share—even just sharing a studio. Now I’m moving out of the studio that I share with Nate, and I’m going to be on my own in Tribeca. For a while Nate and I were trying not to leave, but it ended up happening in a really beautiful way. I’m excited about the move. I need a space to myself. My work needs it.
McGINLEY: What work are you making for the Gagosian show? What are your plans for filling up one of the largest gallery spaces in the city? Are you gonna have a skate ramp?
COLEN: Yeah, I’m gonna have a skate ramp.
McGINLEY: An upside-down one?
COLEN: Yeah, an upside-down one. But deciding and committing to do the show at Gagosian was a process of so many years.
McGINLEY: Since your bathroom show at Gagosian [Potty Mouth Potty War, 2006]. You had a show in Larry Gagosian’s bathrooms. And what’s even crazier is that he has, like, 10 bathrooms at that gallery?
COLEN: I think I used five of them.
McGINLEY: Even Wal-Mart only has one bathroom. I always liked that show. I visited it a few times, and I tried to use every bathroom that your paintings were in. That was really important to me to pee in every toilet or, like, try to take a shit in every one of them.
COLEN: I used that photograph of yours for the flyer for that show.
McGINLEY: Oh, yeah. That was a photo from Dash’s house of you peeing into my mouth.
COLEN: Yeah. But it’s funny because I didn’t meet Larry back then. Larry had no interest in getting to know me. He had no clue who I was.
McGINLEY: You never met him at the bathroom show?
COLEN: I met him the opening night. What was more exciting was that it was the opening of David Smith that night, and except for me and a few friends, no one had any clue that my bathrooms were opening. I think he just let some kid do something over there that didn’t take up space in his gallery. It’s funny all of these years later that I’m doing a show at [Gagosian] 24th Street. It took me a really long time to get comfortable with that, you know? It basically got to the point that the show I wanted to do in New York turned into this thing I couldn’t imagine doing anywhere but 24th Street.
McGINLEY: How did you go from doing all of those time-consuming candle paintings to doing the Holy Shit paintings? The paintings you had made before those were so labor intensive, taking one or two years to complete. Holy Shit has such a sense of immediacy to it. I remember thinking that sort of hanging out with Dash and all of our friends doing graffiti, that that immediate gesture of the hand might have worn off on you.
COLEN: I needed an outlet for something immediate. I made it in Paris after we all went over there. I spent two years in my studio making four paintings, and you guys were going to Paris for Agnès B., who didn’t have much interest in me. I was like, “I can’t get stuck in New York.” I said, “I have some paintings.” I just wrapped up some blank canvases and sent them over. They flew me to Paris, and me and Dash went to the hardware store. I had never even bought spray paint before. I did the Holy Shit painting in the courtyard right there. I brought it back to the studio in New York and didn’t think about it. But then I showed it to Javier, and he was psyched and brought it to Miami. Then I showed it to Neville two days before the show he was curating at Barbara Gladstone, and he put it in.
McGINLEY: Last time I saw you, you said you were going to quit smoking. Did you?
COLEN: Nate and I quit together. It’s been six weeks. We did the Allen Carr seminar, which tries to get you to understand why you smoke. And now I run and do yoga.
McGINLEY: Watching you smoke was one of the craziest things I’ve ever seen, because even though you smoked, like, two packs a day, it was like every drag was your last drag ever on the face of the earth. I’ve never seen anybody smoke like that, like you were smoking a crack pipe or something. Like you were trying to get to the last of the rock with the cigarette. It was fucking weird, man.
COLEN: My life is about deprivation right now. I felt like this was a good time to do that.
McGINLEY: So your life is a series of noes right now. Do you have some yesses in there?
COLEN: It’s everything and nothing. The noes and yesses are simultaneous. I feel differently now, and I’m excited about the project I’m working on. I’ve never been this excited about my work.
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McGINLEY: I’m excited that you’re alive and that you’re not dead. I thought you were going to die for so many years. Now do you feel like you’re going to live until you’re a hundred years old? I kind of feel like I will. That’s been a recent feeling.
COLEN: I wouldn’t be making this show if I were getting high right now. I’d be making a different show. I probably wouldn’t be pulling off 24th Street, but regardless, I would be making work. I don’t think it would be as good. The thing is, I never used to respect the importance of a healthy livelihood. It didn’t occur to me to live healthy. I didn’t see any benefit in it at all. It was all about breaking, destroying, and burning shit down. I didn’t realize that I was burning myself down.
McGINLEY: When I look at you now, I’m just so happy to have my friend with me, because I’ve lost so many people to heroin over the past few years. Through it all, you’ve kept your shit together with your art. You never stopped being prolific.
COLEN: So much shit has happened in the past year that I can’t really credit any one thing for the shift in my lifestyle. I found the desire to figure out how to live because I saw that my work was starting to suffer. I don’t know how I maintained my work. I let everything else fall down around it. It was the last thing standing for me. But I saw how distant it was getting, and my relationship with my work changed. The breaking point wasn’t just Dash or my health. In the end it was the way I was seeing that changed.
McGINLEY: Do you remember that intervention I organized for you? [laughs] That was really fun, man. I think I got your whole family together and all of our friends, and we all huddled in my side of the studio.
COLEN: I couldn’t believe that was happening unbeknownst to me.
McGINLEY: We were all huddling together and being like, “Okay, okay, sshhh, shut up, turn your cell phones off. Okay, is everyone ready? Is everyone ready to do this right now?” I remember looking in everyone’s eyes and staring everyone down, and I think your parents were already crying, and then I was just like, “Keep it together. We’ve got to do this,” and then, like, going into the kitchen and you just being like, “Oh my god! Seriously?”
COLEN: [laughs] Oh, my god.
McGINLEY: That was 2006.
COLEN: It was important. Obviously, I was really stubborn and not absorbing anything you guys were saying, but it resonated. It made an impact on me. I stopped doing heroin because of that intervention. I didn’t stop getting high, but I did stop using heroin six months later. It’s kind of like how I quit smoking. You get the information in your head that you don’t want in your head, and it gets stuck there—like having you guys do that. It stuck in my head, and it ruins it.
McGINLEY: You once said, “My work keeps me away from love.” I sometimes feel the same way. I feel many artists probably feel like that. What’s your interpretation of that?
COLEN: I think it’s the same way with our not having jobs . . . Basically we compromised on all the basic things that everyone else has. I think that people don’t have anything comparable to what we have with our work, except for a child or a spouse. We’ve always put our work first. And when you’re starting out, you do have to put all of your energy into it and make sure you have a place in the world, and you’re fighting to hold on to that. I needed to live how I have lived for the past 20 years to do what I do, to make what I make, to think how I think, to feel how I feel. But I’d like to experience as much as I can in my life. Love is important. I didn’t have the energy to be giving it to somebody else in a way that they deserved, and I knew that. So I’ve always been scared to go too far with somebody I care for because I knew there would come a day when I’d need to pick up and finish a painting for the next three months. That day is inevitable.
McGINLEY: Your new paintings, which include pictures of confetti, seem to me about celebration. And the idea of celebration resonates a lot in our lives as being these downtown crazy party kids and having celebratory adventures. The “hamster’s nest” that you did with Dash is definitely a celebration. The idea of fantasy and celebration are big themes in both our work.
COLEN: There’s something about the potential in confetti. There is a side that’s purely celebratory to it. In a way, those paintings could be pure abstraction. It’s lines of red and green and blue. But all of these mechanisms we have for celebrating are so double-edged. So much sorrow comes out of joy. I’m not sure where the paintings will lead, but I like the potential in them. It started when I was working with a gum painting that started to look like confetti—and it reminded me of a parade for JFK.
McGINLEY: I have a lot of remembers about you. Do you remember when I was on one of my trips and you had anal sex with a girl on my bed and there was shit on my bedsheets and I hung them up in your studio?
COLEN: Wait, those bedsheets exist somewhere . . . We could find them . . . I don’t remember, but you wrote something on them!
McGINLEY: Did you save it as a piece of art? I was so not psyched, but I wrote something really clever. What was it?
COLEN: It was so good. It was really clever, and somebody took them. I feel like Dash might’ve even . . . But there has to be a photograph of them somewhere.
McGINLEY: I also remember being with you on September 11. The night of September 10 we were out at a party at The Park for Marc Jacobs, and we stayed up getting high until 6 a.m. and then went to sleep. At 9 a.m. the buzzer was buzzing, and this librarian . . .
COLEN: I still sometimes see him in this neighborhood—
McGINLEY: He was crying. He said, “Oh, my god! The World Trade Center—a plane flew into it.” And you and I were like, “Listen, you just moved to New York. You’re from, like, Minnesota. Just chill. Shit like this happens all the time . . . ”
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COLEN: And then we went back to bed.
McGINLEY: But eventually we went outside, and we realized the tragedy that had happened, and we walked around. I remember being with you on the West Side Highway.
COLEN: We had our bikes.
McGINLEY: Yeah. I have a picture of it. I remember being with you on the West Side Highway and it was right after the second building had fallen, and there was an insane cloud of smoke.
COLEN: We went riding around that night with a bunch of people, and we had to snake to get closer and closer because all the streets were blocked off, and we were coming from the East Side to the center and went all the way around to try to get in from the south. And there was one fireman walking down the block covered in soot, and he was so spaced-out, like he was on another planet.
McGINLEY: In closing, I want to say that one of my favorite artworks of yours is the photograph of Garfield and his sidekick Odie in front of Stonehenge [Odie and Garfield]. I like it because it reminds me of us.
COLEN: That piece also makes me happy, in a really weird way. I always knew you liked it, but I don’t feel like too many people ever gave a shit. That work was solid, though. It holds its own. I think it’s been important in my development to have the freedom to say, “I want to put it in a frame and call it mine.”
is actually an inhabited building, part of the main public library in Nice. The head was designed by the artist Sacha Sosno. The Square Head is a monumental sculpture 30 meters high. It consists of a cube of 14 m side housing the offices of the library Louis Nucera , supported by the bottom of a bust huge, truncated at the mouth. The construction of the library in 1996 and decided by the architects Francis Chapus and Yves Bayard , associated sculptor Sacha Sosno .The building was inaugurated on 29 June 2002. His night light is entrusted to Yann Kersalé .
Rather, I thought it housed the public library, but I think it might just be the library administration buildings. That's ok, though it dents my fantasies a bit (just think about it, reading a book in the nose, wandering into the frontal lobe section, eavesdropping in the ear....).
I had really wanted to visit this area of France in 2009 (there are Picasso museums in the area!) but it just didn't work out. But now, it's biting at my fancy again, and I'm dreaming of future travel again. For me, that's two things: one is just a future trip to France, the other is a possible mission to visit fabulous library buildings around the world.... interesting premise...
Anyways the "Square Head" in Nice is the vision of local sculptor Sacha Sonso. It is actually called La Tête au Carré, which means "Thinking inside the box". How delightful! I just adore it.
Thinking inside the box
Posing an accusatory and clear metaphor, French artist Sacha Sosno designed this massive sculpture for the Central Library in Nice. Titled "Thinking Inside the Box," the work has a clear but nonetheless important message. At a staggering height of 85 feet, the massive cube-shaped sculpture with a chin, actually houses three floors of books in a perfect melding of art and education.
Although unclear in the bright sunshine of the French Riviera, the floors of the library can be seen at night when it is illuminated through the canvas that covers its exterior. Whether the metaphor applies to you, or another other sun-soaked pedestrian on the streets of Nice, its imposing figure remains intriguing.
Cd have been a cute version of i though arrested… transformed by library purpose +
Sacha Sosno , born in 1937 in Marseille , is a sculptor , painter and sculptor French.
Biography [ edit | edit the code ]
Sacha Sosno spent his childhood in Latvia . A Nice , he met the painter Henri Matisse in 1948 and Yves Klein and Arman in 1956. He studied oriental languages at Sciences-Po in Paris in 1958.Back in Nice in 1961, he created the magazine Sud Communication , where he published the first theory of the School of Nice . In the 1960s, it makes practical archeology, press, printing, became a war reporter in his military service in Northern Ireland , in Bangladesh , and Biafra .
He returned to painting. The concept of obliteration ("hide better show") is directly inspired by his work as a photographer. He also participates in the sociological art in Paris with Fred Forest . "There is no obstacle"
Bronze
2007
3.5 meters high 2.8 Tons
Hippodrome Cagnes-sur-Mer
In 1974 he sold his Paris studio to make a crossing of the Atlantic by boat with his girlfriend Maschat. He exhibited at Porto and Caracas . Back in Nice he created his first sculptures (cars obliterated).
In 1980 he was artistic advisor in the seam. The Museum of Fine Arts Jules Cheret in Nice dedicated a solo exhibition, and the Aldrich Museum in Ridgefield had his first American exhibition. He was commissioned a work for the Beaubourg in Paris, and works with the Marisa del Re Gallery in New York .
In 1980, Jacques Lepage in Nice, he met the artist Vittorio Del Piano , author of a project Taranto : Museo della Sensibilità Mediterranea della Città dell'Arte e-Pura .
Between 1986 and 1988, he made sculpture projects in relationship to architecture, including two monumental bronzes Hotel Elysee Palace in Nice with the architect George Margarita .
In the 1990s, he set up his studio in the hills above Nice Bellet where he planted vines and olive trees. He works in various architectural projects and international exhibitions to the United States ,Japan , Korea , Canada and Greece . He opened a workshop in Annex Monaco .
2000-2002: He made the Square Head , first inhabited sculpture in the world [ref. needed] , including the offices of the Central Library of Nice Louis Nucéra 1 . It participates in international exhibitions over the next few years Russia , in China and Italy. He received various orders of monuments for monumental sculptures and outdoor.
ART STUFF on a plane # 20: ‘One Leg Good’
Paralympics for art would make no real sense, so it’s rather perverse to ask ‘who painted best from a wheelchair?’ Naturally age can lead to frailty: Renoir and Matisse made iconic late works that way. More youthfully, Frida Kahlo’s last works before she died at 47 were made after losing a leg to gangrene, and Chuck Close has been confined to a wheelchair since 1988. In some of those cases – notably Matisse’s cut-outs – physical limitations directly affect the type of work; and that’s true of the last years of the German-born, mostly French-dwelling Hans Hartung (1904-89). His unusual life included marrying Norwegian artist Anna-Eva Bergman both before and – having divorced in 1939 – after the Second World War, in which he lost a leg while fighting for the French Foreign Legion. Hartung’s studio is preserved on the hills above Antibes, along with various implements for applying paint: brooms, branches, forks, curry combs - and a garden spray attachment much-used during his last decade. That found Hartung, considerably aided by assistants, in ‘a trance-like state… partly induced by wine and an insulating barrier of Baroque music played extremely loud’*. Those many late works – e.g. 360 canvases in his 85th year! - have been considered of dubious status, but now the centrality of Hartung’s direction of events from the wheelchair tends to be recognised, however far from the vigorously mobile archetype of the heroic painter.
* from Jennifer Mundy’s excellent analysis of the late work at
ART STUFF on a plane # 19: ‘Where is the Picasso Museum?’
Picasso is readily associated with Malaga, where he was born; Barcelona, his teenage home; Paris, where he found fame; and the Riviera, where he grew old – and all have museums in his name. There are also four so titled elsewhere: in Berlin, where a recent refurbishment dedicates a whole building to the immensely impressive Picasso holdings of the Berggruen Collection; a much more modest selection in Madrid, derived from a friend; Münster, with 800 prints; and Lucerne, which concentrates on a photographic record of Picasso the man. Perhaps there are more, but I know of none outside Europe, which – after all – Picasso hardly left. On the Riviera, Picasso lived mostly in Vallauris (1948-55), where he discovered ceramics and painted the murals ‘War’ and ‘Peace’, which form the basis of its Picasso Museum; Cannes (1955-61); and the village of Mougins above Cannes (1955-73). Yet just a two month residency in the Chateau Grimaldi, Antibes in the summer of 1946 forms the basis for one of the best of the nine: 23 paintings and 44 drawings with plenty of shown where they were made: nymphs and fauns, including the famed La Joie de Vivre make for a beautifully coherent and joyful set. Picasso required they stay put - so, to Antibes… CHECK BASIS
National Picasso Museum "War and Peace"
Place de la Libération - Tél. 04 93 64 71 83
Open from 10.00 to 12.15 and from 2.00 to 5.00 (till 6.00 from 15 june to 15 september).
Closed on Tuesdays and Bank Holidays. Price : 3,25 €
|Antibes Juan-Les-Pins - 1946 |
|A period of intense happiness for Picasso who created the poem “La Joie de Vivre”. He settled at the Château Grimaldi which|
|overlooked the sea for painting and which has since become the Picasso Museum where many works by the artist dedicated to |
|the Mediterranean are on show. |
|Vallauris Golfe-Juan - 1947 |
|It was at Vallauris that Picasso discovered ceramics. Here, he produced over 4000 works at the Fournas workshop. He also |
|gifted the sculpture “L’Homme au mouton” to the town, which can be discovered in the Place du Village and chose the Roman |
|chapel of Vallauris to put up the important fresco “La Guerre et La Paix”. |
|Cannes - 1955 |
|In 1955, Picasso settled in Cannes where he bought a sumptuous 19th century house “La Villa California” with an |
|uninterrupted view of the sea. An ideal location to retreat and create, he established his studio here and created many |
|major works such as the series dedicated to Ménines. |
|Mougins 1961-1973 |
|Picasso died in Mougins in 1973, in his last home, Notre-Dame-de-Vie, which was also his final workshop. He already knew |
|this perched village extremely well, having visited with Dora Maar from 1936 to 1939. His intimist world and his interest |
|for photography can be discovered through images in the Photography Museum. |
Picasso Museums – Paris / Malaga / Barcelona / Antibes
P lived 6 months Antibes 1946, and in Vallauris 1948-55
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• Don't arrive at the Picasso Museum in Lucerne expecting to find many of the man's works. Although it does include a few ceramics and sketches, this is principally a portrait of the artist as an impish craftsman, lover and father. Nearly 200 photographs by David Douglas Duncan create a captivating picture of the last 17 years of Picasso's life with his family in their Cannes home
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• Museums
(Spanish pronunciation: [bwiˈtɾaɣo ðel loˈθoʝa]) is a municipality of the autonomous community of Madrid in central Spain. the Picasso Museum. This small museum contains works by Pablo Picasso from the collection of Eugenio Arias. Arias, a barber by profession, came from Buitrago and was a friend of the artist.
BERLIN - There are impressive museum collections – indeed entire museums – of works by Pablo Picasso: in Malaga and New York, Paris and Barcelona, Münster, Madrid, Basel and Cologne.
The best one? Berlin – part of the legendary collection of art dealer Heinz Berggruen (1914-2007) housed since 1996 in a palazzo-style building across from Schloss Charlottenburg royal palace.
Berggruen’s collection doesn’t only comprise top-class work by Picasso, but other classical modern artists – Cézanne, Braque, Matisse, Klee and Giacometti – as well. In 2000 when the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, encompassing Berlin’s state-run museums and other cultural entities bought the priceless collection for the “symbolic” sum of 130 million euros, the Berggruen Museum became one of Berlin’s most attractive cultural addresses right up there with the city’s Museum Island.
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Picasso's "Dora Maar With Green Fingernails - Berggruen Museum
Since the summer of 2011, the museum has been closed for expansion and restoration – and although the Berlin architectural firm of Kuehn Malvezzi has added 10 new rooms by joining the existing building to the one next door in a federally funded, 6.5 millio euro project, the sense of intimacy that helped make a visit to the Berggruen collection so memorable in the past has not been lost.
The 20-meter-long steel-and-glass pergola that links the two buildings offers a view of the new sculpture garden, and the additional space inside means that the 250 art works could be re-hung in a way that brings out their full intensity.
The original building is now exclusively devoted to Picasso. Berggruen’s Picassos reflect his collector’s passion and are rounded out by loans from Berggruen family holdings. The collection offers a wide-rangng number of works that include paintings but also works on paper, prints and sculptures. The selection takes us from the young artist’s realism though his Blue and Rose periods, analytic and synthetic Cubism, the surrealism of the 1930s and 1940s, then through to the trials of strength of his old age – the Spanish artist kept producing until he died at the age of 92 in 1973.
A jubilant array
All the artist’s favorite subjects are represented: the circus folks and the poor he painted in his bohemian phase in Paris in the early 1900s; the array of women – bathers, mothers, lovers, reclining models and sleeping nudes – painted over the years; the Cubist still lifes, experiments in taking apart and reassembling; the characters from Greek and Roman mythology; the masks of the artist as an old man.
But if the collection covers all phases of the artist’s production, it does not pay the same amount of attention to each: Berggruen the art dealer, collector and friend of the artist’s was less at home with the aggressive Picasso than he was with the lyrical Picasso.
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Picasso's "Seated Harlequin" - Berggruen Museum
The result is that some Picasso connoisseurs may find things missing here and there – perhaps some monumental dancers on the beach from the 1920s, bitter emblematic figures from the Guernica period, or wild and defiant late work. But what are a few lapses in the face of such a jubilant array? Just taking in a drawing like ''Dora Maar with Her Hair Loose,'' that Berggruen bought at a Paris auction in 1998 for $994,000, is a huge art experience.
Moving on to the new part of the museum and to the delicately poetic work of Paul Klee (1879-1940) is like changing worlds. The 60 small-format works by the Swiss artist are the second focal point of a collection also renowned for its bronzes by Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966), including his famous Cat; joyful vibrant color cutouts by French artist Henri Matisse (1869-1954); and several portraits and a study of an apple by Paul Cézanne (1839-1906).
Heinz Berggruen was born in Berlin to a Jewish family, and fled the Nazis in 1936. He returned to Berlin in 1996 – bringing his art collection with him in what the New York Times in its obituary of Berggruen called a “powerful gesture of reconciliation.” – and is buried there.
Picasso finds new lease of life in Antibes
Works created by Picasso during his stay in Antibes reflect the light and lore of the seaside town, and a revival of the painter's spirits
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In playful mood ... Picasso's La Danse sur la plage, part of his exhibition at the Musée Picasso in Antibes. Photograph: Succession Picasso 2009
In the summer of 1946, Picasso and his lover Françoise Gilot left Paris and headed for the south of France to stay with an engraver friend, Louis Fort. In her book Life with Picasso, Gilot describes the tiny hamlet of Golfe-Juan, on the coast between Antibes and Cannes, as almost deserted when they first visited. These days the area heaves with tourists and the beach is lined with sun loungers and expensive restaurants. It was on this beach that Picasso met another friend, thephotographer Michel Sima, who told him about the space at Château Grimaldi, a Roman fort that was rebuilt in the 14th century and bought by the French crown. Now owned by the city of Antibes, it had been renamed Musée Grimaldi and housed archaeological artefacts.
The museum's curator was struggling to fill its vast space and was more than happy to devote the former guards' hall on the second floor to Picasso as his studio. The artist's sojourn may have been brief – he stayed roughly from the middle of September to the middle of November that year – but his output was prodigious: 23 paintings and 44 drawings came out of his two months in Antibes.
When he moved in, Picasso told the curator that he would decorate the walls of the castle as a thank you. But they were in a rough state of repair, and in the end Picasso was unable to fulfil his promise, with the exception of one graphite drawing, Les Clés d'Antibes. (The drawing can still be seen in the hall of the Grimaldi.) Instead, he donated the work he'd done there to the museum, stipulating that they should remain there permanently. "Anyone who wants to see them will have to come to Antibes," he declared.
Picasso, 1945–1949: L'Ère du Renouveau (The Age of Renewal) at the château, which is now the Musée Picasso, invites people to do just that. It's the first chance to take a comprehensive look at what is often referred to as Picasso's Antibes period. As well as the collection donated by Picasso, a further 140 exhibits have returned to the studio in which they were conceived.
Picasso worked mainly at night, leaving Gilot in the afternoon in the house in Golfe-Juan. His friend Sima was invited to take photographs of him at work, and these pictures are included in the exhibition, intimate portraits of the artist in a playful and mischievous mood.
Picasso's painting La Joie de Vivre (1946) is emblematic of his stay in Antibes, reflecting not only the Greco-Roman heritage of the old Mediterranean port, but also Picasso's mood at the time. The composition is based on Greek mythology; it depicts a tambourine-playing nymph, wild horse-like creatures, and fauns dancing and playing the duale – a double-barrel flute typical of this part of France. It refers to the story of Antipolis (the Greek name for Antibes) and is also a homage to Gilot, his muse of the time.
La Joie de Vivre hangs on the second floor of the museum, in the space that became Picasso's studio. Sunlight streams through its fortified windows and the Mediterranean glistens beyond. It's not hard to see where his inspiration came from.
The painting is also intriguing because of the materials Picasso used. When he arrived in town there was a shortage of art materials, so he worked with what was available locally. Instead of canvas, the panel was made of asbestos-cement; Picasso also used boat paint procured from the quayside, which he applied using household paintbrushes. He reasoned that these materials would be perfect for the environment and the climate.
Another iconic painting here is the triptych Ulysse et les Sirènes (1947), in which the features of the Greek hero are represented by the insides of sea urchins; behind him we can see his boat and beyond that the snow-covered peaks of the Alps. Such is the influence of Antipolis in this painting that it is almost inconceivable that it could hang anywhere else.
However, not everything in this exhibition is sunlit. The show includes Picasso's 'vanités', paintings made during the occupation of Paris. In these, his palette is reduced to shades of grey, ochre and black, symbolising the austerity and harshness of the war years. In one of his still lifes from this era, a mask and a pair of leeks form a skull and crossbones. There is also a jug. The metaphor for death is evident in the mask and leeks, but the pitcher of what can be assumed to be water represents a cleansing process, as if Picasso is ready to wash away the memories of war.
Nowhere is this new lease of life portrayed more clearly than in the image of Picasso's lover, muse and soon-to-be-mother of his child. Françoise Gilot can be detected in nearly every painting, as a nymph, cat, moon goddess, flower and fish. A fantastic series of 13 graphite drawings are rhythmical portraits of her, each created in seconds without the artist's pencil leaving the paper.
When Matisse came to visit the museum and saw the long plywood panel of the Reclining Woman, a painting of the nude body of Gilot splayed at perpendicular angles, he spent the afternoon sitting in front of it, sketching and taking notes, trying to figure out what Picasso had done with the top and bottom of the body.
The Age of Renewal in Antibes is more than an adjunct to this year's round of Picasso shows. It's an opportunity to breathe in the air and soak up the atmosphere of a place that inspired a man widely regarded as one of the greatest artists of the 20th century.
ART STUFF ON A TRAIN: THE WHAT AND THE WHERE OF FEATHERS
Most days art Critic Paul Carey-Kent spends hours on the train, traveling between his home in Southampton and his day job in Surrey. Could he, we asked, jot down whatever came into his head?
How to Get Into a Show
Every now and again I hear an artist wondering how they can get into a show. Artists aren’t always the most practical types, but actually it’s fairly straightforward. Points to look out for are that some small galleries are erratic in their opening hours and it’s best to phone first; entry intercoms can be a pain; there’s the odd gallery three floors up with an eccentric lift; and Gagosian’s doors are unusually heavy. That said, Larry does employ impressively muscular security with the dual function of opening the door and providing the art with an aura of value, even if - his Henry Moore show was a case in point - vandalism of any impact would be difficult and theft impossible without a forklift truck. So what is the best way of getting into the world’s top gallery? I recommend approaching too swiftly for the doorman to react, applying far more force than a casual opening would normally require, and then strolling through with cool independence. As for the related question, of how to get one’s work in… Assuming that, too, isn’t of a weight requiring heavy equipment, Banksy solved the matter some years back with his guerrilla placement strategies. Why do artists persist in asking these questions?
ART STUFF ON A TRAIN: Marooned with Caulfield
Most days art Critic Paul Carey-Kent spends hours on the train, traveling between his home in Southampton and his day job in Surrey. Could he, we asked, jot down whatever came into his head?
Some artists are strongly associated with a particular colour: Van Gogh’s yellow, Klein’s blue, Reinhardt’s black etc. I wouldn’t put Caulfield in that group, but I was struck at Tate Britain’s exemplary overview of his paintings (closes 1 September) by the number in which dark reds predominate. The usual Caulfield tropes are certainly in evidence, too: plenty of time in the restaurant; no one else around yet; the Cubist still life flattened out and then expanded into architectural settings; persistent traffic between reality and artifice; an interest in the exotic smuggled into the everyday; sharp shadows; the black outlines which – until the late 80’s - fix and almost imprison objects, so contributing to an atmosphere of bittersweet melancholy; the late mix of styles through which Caulfield reflects, pre-internet, on how our perceptions are largely constructed second-hand by images. But anyway, Stereo Record Player, Tandoori Rest, Registry, Happy Hour and his last painting, Braque Curtain, are all predominantly dark red. Happy Hour includes a glass of claret, reflecting Caulfield himself and triggering the thought – most of these are wine-dark tones. That fits with his recurring interest in food and drink, and also matches the sense that we’re balanced somewhere between the anticipation of pleasure and the expectation of regret. Still, I’d rather be marooned with Caulfield than in the parallel Hume or Lowry shows.
It’s natural to concentrate on what an artist is showing, but where makes a big difference. Kate MccGwire’s ‘Lure’, on tour to the Discovery Centre, Winchester this summer, originated at All Visual Arts, who – long with Pertwee, Anderson & Gold – have shown MccGwire extensively in London. Both galleries favour the gothic drama of spotlit darkness, and it was a welcome change to see the work in daylight. MccGwire has been using feathers – sourced from an extensive network of pigeon fanciers and farmers – since 2006, and if that sounds a gimmick on a par with building ships out of matchsticks, the naturally-lit results belie any such equation. Rather, MccGwire marshalls various feathers into a rich and darkly animate minimalism in which all parts get used, from the thousands of full feathers teeming into abstracted yet creature-like forms such as ‘Gyre’, to the quills of crows: laid flat, they make for serial mark-making akin to Hanne Darboven’s; stood on end they seethe like an organic version of Gunther Uecker’s nail works. Then, peeping at fanned pigeon feathers through lead sheeting, I was reminded of the burned works of Alberto Burri. And a promising new strand creates a version of one of Hans Haeckel’s illustrations of underwater forms, neatly combining the freedom of the air with life in the watery depths.
What should we call the shapes of paintings? ‘Square’ and the round ‘tondo’ brook little argument. Semi-circles are xxx (Stella) protractors ‘Portrait’ and ‘landscape’ are easy enough, ie differently oriented versions of of oblongs around about 8 x 6. Richard Prince’s Protest Paintings (of which there are 19 at Skarstedt until 29 Dec) are actually four pieces of canvas, including a placard-shaped central piece on which Prince’s usual range of bad jokes become unorthodox political statements. But what name should we give to their narrowly vertical twice-as-high-as-wide ratios? This is the shape space taken up by a standing figure, so perhaps ‘stander’ would serve. Lay a stander horizontally, and you have I suppose a ‘recliner’: something like the cinematic widescreen, a format favoured by Ivon Hitchens. Get much narrower and you have a tower (eg Larry Poons’ xxxx) or a plank (Jackson Pollock’s xxx).
DUE MAX W
ART STUFF on a train # 26: ‘When Photos are Paintings and Paintings are Photos’
Visitors to the Max Wigram gallery often assume that James White’s still lives from hotel rooms and the interiors of boats (to 9 Nov), are black and white photographs. There’s the exacting and somewhat forensic grey-scale reproduction of glass and mirrored surfaces; a snapshot casualness to the choice of items and their composition; and a run-off of white as if a contact sheet has been cropped. Some future show should contrast these works with White’s photographs, which – even though they originate from his archive of source material for the paintings – look more like paintings than the paintings made from them. This results from their unnaturalistic colour and dominant use of a stylised ‘lens flare’ after-effect, sometimes set against solarised backgrounds. The paintings, it seems, edit out the obviously painterly effects which the photographs are printed to exaggerate. Back at the paintings, that said, closer examination does show the brushwork on the unusual material of Plexiglas; an objecthood more typical of paintings is emphasised by the double layer of birch board on which they are set in Perspex box frames; and that white band starts to feel more like a way of revealing the nature of the ground – or even, it being placed where a signature might be expected, a jocular way of signing the work ‘White’. It’s in the back-and-forths – between painting and photograph, between throwaway and exacting, between pointlessness and point – that the interest of White’s work lies.
Photosynthesis: Photographs and Paintings by James White
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
Book of Genesis 1:2
I just like stuff. I’ve always liked stuff.
Lemmy Kilmister
The story goes that our planet, in its infancy, possessed no air, or what we now refer to as atmosphere, and that it was, as the first quote above indicates, ‘without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep’. This is very hard to imagine, as we now inhabit a world full of light, air, and atmosphere, and filled with, in the words of Motörhead’s front-man Lemmy, ‘stuff’.
The story goes that on our early planet, simple microorganisms, which we now refer to as bacteria, began to inhabit the large amorphous pool that engulfed the Earth. This bacteria was predominantly purple in colour, and in its abundance, it turned the waters into a large purple ocean. Again, this is hard to imagine, but think of a child’s drawing, where planet Earth is not blue but purple, or a sci-fi movie made using low-budget CGI, and you begin to get the picture. This layer of purple bacteria acted as a sunscreen from the ultraviolet rays of the sun, and the story continues that beneath this protective purple ocean, other bacteria – this time green in colour – began to form. Over millions of years, or what we now refer to as the past, this green bacteria slowly emerged and crept from these oceans on to the shores of the land. Eventually, this green bacteria developed into complex plant forms, and it was these oxygen-producing plants that in turn helped to create the ozone and atmosphere that made possible what we now refer to as ‘life on earth’.
In Abstract Thoughts, we are presented with a similar world, where bursts of life forms appear to emerge from James White’s images. Manifesting their presence in the form of glowing circular flares of near-fluorescent colours, and incandescent accents delineating these images of domestic interiors, the emerging colours appear in stark contrast to the metallic silvery ground from which they seem to have emerged phantasmagorically. The photographs in Abstract Thoughts originate from the artist’s personal archive of source material for his paintings. Now this photographic archive has been revisited by White, and, through subtle interventions, recontextualised into a new body of work that offers an uncanny glimpse into the process of his art.
The stylised ‘lens flare’ after-effect predominant in these images – a device more often used by film directors and commercial photographers to create ‘atmosphere’ – is in this instance suggestive of a more esoteric or, as the book’s title suggests, ‘abstract’ activity. These incandescent globes of colour also seem strangely reminiscent of the images of auras and chakras belonging to the ‘astral plane’, described, amongst others, by the nineteenth-century clairvoyant and theosophist, C. W. Leadbeater, who first mentioned this term in his book Dreams: What They Are and How They Are Caused (1898). Sometimes these globes of colour appear to be seen from the edge of our peripheral vision, bouncing off objects or hovering in the corner of a room, and at other times they are set against solarised backgrounds (where the image has been printed in reverse) creating an eerie, ghostly atmosphere.
The decision by an artist characteristically known for emphasising in his paintings a stripped-down and hyper-literal objectivity, to show these (modulated) archival glimpses of super-saturated multi-coloured flares, poses an intriguing re-evaluation of the tenets underpinning his work.
In 1974, and until his death in 1987, Andy Warhol began to fill a series of Time Capsules containing photographs, newspapers, magazines, letters, postcards, books, exhibition catalogues, and even telephone messages, alongside countless ephemera such as announcements for poetry readings and dinner invitations. The 612 containers, consisting of standard-sized cardboard boxes (which Warhol kept by the side of his desk), were filled on an almost daily basis, and were sealed once full, ready to be sent to storage. Although one could argue that this process was a way of managing the vast amount of source material and paraphernalia that Warhol came across, there is also a generosity in preserving these moments, and allowing, through their disclosure, an opportunity to reassess previous assumptions made about his art.
Until I encountered the images in Abstract Thoughts, I used to believe that James White’s decision to use photography to underpin his art, resided in his choice to make paintings that would show discarded moments such as those found on a film’s editing-room floor. If his work was a video-diary, these would be those moments when we are waiting for the narrator to appear on the screen. In using photography, I believed that James White was navigating his way through familiar arguments about ‘the death of painting’ with the savoir faire of a hobbyist who enjoys making his work, coupled with the cool, systematic objectivity found in the photographs of Bernd and Hilla Becher, who, through their typology of industrial architecture, documented a disappearing German past. I believed that White’s paintings captured a current mood: a balance of uncertainty and anticipation, without ever descending into metaphors about our times being ‘the morning after the night before’, or coercing the viewer into thinking that somewhere within these paintings we may find the hidden hope that tomorrow might bring.
White is an artist better known for making paintings that depict domestic scenes of unromantic interiors and quotidian details, presenting snapshots of everyday life that appear to have been collected at random; coat hangers in a half-empty closet, cluttered work surfaces, a bedside table with an IKEA lamp and a pair of reading glasses. The images presented in his paintings tend to capture moments that could be described as mundane or ordinary, and appear to be void of the drama and high octane content associated with the YBA and Post-YBA generations from whichWhite has emerged.
Executed in a grey-scale palette absent of chromatic intervention, his paintings are seemingly unadulterated equivalents of the photographs from which we imagine them to have derived; offering no further attempt to describe a mood or give a personal comment. In the words of Frank Stella: ‘what you see is what you see’. Displayed in Perspex box frames, the paintings’ high glossy varnish further seals and preserves ordinary moments inside an archival space, designed neither to belittle the mundane nor to honour the wonder in ordinary things. Here, the moments White chooses to encapsulate are not ‘one of those days when it’s a minute away from snowing and there’s this electricity in the air’, such as that illustrated in the famous floating supermarket bag scene in the film American Beauty (Sam Mendes, 1999). Instead, White’s works resemble paintings that could have been made from a collection of forensic evidence photographs, or those taken for the purposes of an insurance claim.
From a distance, one could be mistaken in thinking that James White’s paintings are indeed photographs, as they so faithfully adopt the traits and signifiers of the photographs from which they derive – the stark shadows, distorted angles and shallow depth of field of close-up flash photography. Normally, only the unpainted birch plywood edges of these paintings suggest a glimpse of warmth or life behind the layers of synthetic and mechanical processes employed to produce them, and on the whole there seems to be an ambivalence and matter-of-factness in White’s thought process, which is captured and sealed in these vacuum-packed environments. Although polarities do resonate when viewing them, the equality in which feeling and unfeeling, considered and random, organic and mechanical is stated, resembles a newsreel, or list of ‘match of the day’ football scores, where the commentator offers no emotional variation after each score has been read out. The resulting tension produced by the consistent manner in which no additional commentary is given, builds within these chambers to the extent that even the shiny surface – or familiar logo – of an iPhone (Milk and Stuff, 2010) is greeted by the eye with the excitement felt when bumping into an old friend in a foreign land. A land occupied by impersonal transitory encounters such as those depicted in the aptly named Another Hotel series.
Abstract Thoughts, however, offers the opportunity to re-examine White’s art, and the linear relationship we assumed this had with photography. Abstract Thoughts not only indicates that as an artist White is generations away from the work of earlier photorealists (such as Richard Estes, Ralph Goings and Chuck Close), whose painting techniques endeavoured to elevate the photographic image, but suggests instead that there may be something else happening in his paintings beyond familiar arguments around photographic representation. This new body of work reveals that the reciprocal relationship once understood to exist between photography and painting in White’s art, may involve a thought process not so immediately apparent.
If his paintings are indeed a hyper-literal objective view of the world, then the photographs in Abstract Thoughts show the process of photosynthesis that takes place in his work, where energies are exchanged and transformed. Like the chemical reactions taking place deep within a plant’s cellular structure, transforming carbon dioxide into oxygen, these new works reveal an otherwise invisible alchemy unfolding.
Juan Bolivar, 2012
What's so special about your tube of toothpaste and your old polystyrene lunch box?
'They're quite dull aren't they? The paintings are not meant to be about the hidden beauty of banality but about randomly selecting things that happen between the sink, the bathroom and the bedside table.'
And yet the reflections and lights effects are quite beautiful…
'For some reason I do paint a lot of glasses. It's almost by accident that they crop up in the environments where I focus my paintings - in neutral spaces or hotel rooms. The more I travel, the more pictures are taken at two or three o'clock at night when I'm jetlagged and can't sleep, but the subject matter changes. I once made a whole series based on those aeroplane flip-down tables called “Relationships”'.
Apart from a handbag, there's no suggestion of any relationships in these new pictures.
'A lot of it is to do with being alone, that moment of fragile, desolate isolation staring blankly into space, when we're all islands in our own heads. They're very much like cutaways from film scenes where the camera pans onto some banal situation, a numb focal point in a movie.'
How important is the photorealist technique to you?
'I've been doing these for ten years, but my intention is not to make something that looks like a photograph. I feel closer to On Kawara than to Chuck Close because I admire that minimalist spirit that begs the question: how do you keep doing that?'
In terms of making these part of a daily ritual, like keeping a diary?
'Yes, it's just a job. It can be incredibly boring to work like this over long periods of time - it depends on what side of the bed you get up on - and I know how long an image will take, just by looking at it. The average is about three weeks and then each one has to dry for a month, but if you go up close you can see that they're painted quite quickly and that I've emptied them out quite a lot.'
Do you edit the photographs through painting then?
'I try to be as honest as possible, so there's one image of a low-rent wardrobe but the shirt's got a Prada label, which I've kept in. I include bits of my life - whether it's an iPhone or a ketchup bottle - as these details and brands date the paintings very specifically. For instance, you can't buy a £1.09 pack of PG Tips any more, they've gone up to £1.19.'
BUSINESS OF LABELLING _ DON’T HAVE TO READ = + at Fair etc – lure vs status assertion
ART STUFF on a train # 18: ‘How Much Is Not Enough?’
Galleries vary in how much information they give. Some believe a press release is too reductive or demeans the purity of the work, so a list of titles is your lot. Saying that little tends to come across to me not as cool, but as lazy or arrogant - unless there’s genuinely nothing worth saying about the work: if so, perhaps there should be a disclaimer to that effect! Occasionally there’s a press release, but it isn’t available physically (‘it’s on the web site’, you’ll be told, as if to emphasise how awkwardly old-fashioned it is of you to turn up in person). Such reticence is unusual, though: most gallerists see it as part of their role to make explanations available in writing and orally, and many make quite an effort. This seems unrelated to the size of gallery or the reputation of the artists involved: Cabinet and Corvi Mora, for example, do the bare minimum. Some do plenty, but largely on a chargeable basis: Gagosian, Annely Juda and White Cube tend that way. Others belie apparently modest resources with both a press release (for a rapid overview) and a free quality booklets for most shows: Bischoff Weiss, Austin Desmond, the Hua Gallery and Maddox Arts, for example, take a bow…
Gagosian never labels its works in art fairs. That comes across in several ways. First, as an assertion: our artsits are so famous – or should that be ‘so predictable’? - you’ll know who they are anyway. True enough, I admit, though I like to know the titles and dates, even so. Second, as flattery or fuck off: we believe in your knowledge and taste; or, conversely, you shouldn’t be here if you don’t know who that’s by. Third, as a lure: to draw you into enquiry, conversation, purchase from the many staff typically present – who are, I should add, always happy to be asked. I’ve no idea which of those effects are intended, but is the policy catching on? Not exactly: of the x galleries exhibiting in Frieze this year, x went for labels. Does the fair have a policy on the matter?
Big galleries - call someone down
Small galleries see owner
See no one – Union, Peer
The people I know in large galleries is often because they used to work in smaller galleries.
ART STUFF ON A TRAIN
Most days art Critic Paul Carey-Kent spends hours on the train, traveling between his home in Southampton and his day job in Surrey. Could he, we asked, jot down whatever came into his head?
ART STUFF ON A TRAIN 12: WHAT ABOUT THE CEILING?
Painters make little use of the floor, which they tend to leave to sculptors, and also seem reluctant to use the ceiling, despite the lack of competition and the historical example of Michelangelo. Step forward Robert Irwin: not only is it good to see Pace give a debut London solo show (to Aug 17) to Californian master of perceptual effects, and to see the locally-specific 47 tube light work Piccadilly, it’s also refreshing to see that the whole room installation Who's afraid of Red, Yellow & Blue³ III consists of paintings which fully cover the floor and ceiling, while the walls remain bare. I struggle to think of another example of this, save Irwin’s previous (San Diego, 2007) expansion of the iconic 1969-70 Barnett Newman painting. Who's afraid of Red, Yellow & Blue³ III covers 1,400 square feet of floor and a matching amount of ceiling with brilliantly reflective lacquer and polyurethane paint on six honeycomb aluminium panels, arranged so that matching colours reflect each other. At the crowded opening the many movements around and through the panels (you can’t walk on them) made for a busily changeable scene. When I returned later, in contrast, I was able to appreciate its more meditative and inwardly reflective side, when the windows mirrored in the ceiling and floor came fully into their own.
ART STUFF ON A TRAIN 10: TAPESTRY, INNOVATION AND THE WEB
Gerhard Richter is the most expensive living artist (£24m auction record recently), and when you hear that he's turned one of his paintings into four tapestries you might suspect he's just milking his brand. Yet, on the contrary, the four woven works now on show at the smaller Gagosian Gallery retain a surprisingly painterly impact even as they move some way from the original source, Abstract Painting 724-4 (1990): each repeats four times, with kaleidoscopic reflections, the image of one quadrant of the painting. Moreover, they're just part of a radical revisiting of that scraped abstract. Richter has also used its digital template to generate thousands of computer transformations which conclude with massive 'Strip' displays of more than 8,000 stripes - abstract representations, you might say, of an abstraction. You can discover all this of this at another Richter phenomenon, namely his website. gerhard- provides a superbly organised and fully illustrated overview of everything Richter considers part of his oeuvre: for example over a thousand paintings; his vast Atlas archive of source materail (maybe 8,000 newspaper clippings and photos), drawings, overpainted photographs, works on paper, watercolours, artist's books, works of glass, and sculptures. What's the point, you might wonder, of a printed Catalogue Raisonne? But there's also one of those in progress ...
Gerhard Richter: 924-1 STRIP, 2012
Unique digital print mounted between Aludibond and Perspex (Diasec)
Gagosian Gallery presents a group of four tapestries entitledAbdu, Iblan, Musa, and Yusuf (all 2009) by Gerhard Richter.
These works are based on Abstract Painting (724-4) (1990), a key example of Richter’s distinctive approach to non-representational painting. The visual effect of the tapestries is a Rorschach-like multiplying of the forms and colors of the original canvas.
Woven on a mechanical jacquard loom, each tapestry repeats four times the image of one quadrant of the painting. Somewhat surprisingly, the painterly, stochastic qualities of the original translate onto the loom’s digital iterations. Though derived from the same painting, each of the four tapestries surprises and dazzles with its own complex symmetries. InAbdu, a cobalt blue supernova erupts into a sea of overlapping reds, mixed whites, and yellows; while Iblan is a layered vision of lilacs and midnight blues that emanates from a bright white center. Within a delicate red top-layer, some marks appear to have been finger-painted; given such refined illusions of gesture it is easy to forget that the works do not employ paint at all.
In recent years, Richter’s interests in media-merging and appropriation have resulted in works that multiply and transform his abstract paintings into prints, books, and other paintings. The digitally generated Strip paintings of 2012 are complex manipulations of the same painting from which the four tapestries were produced. But in the tapestries, the continuous probing of the space between painting and photographic reproduction finds resonance in the textures of the artisanal medium, rather than in the smooth depiction of color and speed. Translated from paint to wool, Richter’s distinctive abstraction imbues a traditional medium with new dynamism, while the act of painting itself passes into a parallel tactile realm.
An illustrated catalogue with an essay by curator and critic Francesco Bonami will accompany the exhibition.
An enormous Gerhard Richter painting of Milan's Piazza del Duomo (Cathedral Square) that was commissioned to cheer up the offices of the electronics conglomerate Siemens sold for $37m (£24m) on Tuesday, setting a new auction record for a living artist.
At almost 3 metres by 3 metres, Domplatz, Mailand from 1968 is one of the German artist's biggest works and, with its look of a fuzzy black-and-white photograph, is instantly recognisable as Richter.
It was bought by a Napa Valley vineyard owner, Donald Bryant, who punched his fist in the air after successfully buying the Richter at Sotheby's big contemporary art sale in New York. The work "just knocks me over", he said, although when told it was the most ever paid for a Richter he laughed: "I'm not sure I should be breaking those kinds of records."
The Milan painting was sold by the Hyatt hotel group – it hung in Chicago – achieving a price 10 times higher than they paid for it in 1998.
Richter, subject of a major retrospective at Tate Modern in 2011, already held the living artist record after Eric Clapton sold Richter's Abstraktes Bild for £21.3m in London in 2012.
ART STUFF ON A TRAIN
Most days art Critic Paul Carey-Kent spends hours on the train, traveling between his home in Southampton and his day job in Surrey. Could he, we asked, jot down whatever came into his head?
ART STUFF ON A TRAIN 9: WHAT ISN’T THERE
Most days art Critic Paul Carey-Kent spends hours on the train, traveling between his home in Southampton and his day job in Surrey. Could he, we asked, jot down whatever came into his head?
There are two ways of reviewing a retrospective: on the basis of what’s in it, or according to what’s missing. I’m more interested in the merits of what I can see than of what I can’t, so it rather annoys me when a show-off reviewer concentrates on the latter. Looking round the latest offering from the excellent Parasol Unit, then, I’m inclined to focus on how the non-chronological hang in a large space of Merlin James’ intimately-scaled, gently hesitant experimentalism allows for 44 paintings to build up rhythms and thematic repetitions which feed lovingly off a gamut of other artists. But here’s the rub: the show could be a little less polite, a little more surprising. There’s no sex – though this has been a major strand of James’ work, and one which would have allowed for more radical irruptions; and there are only a couple of the recent paintings on transparent surfaces; which expose their own construction and can feature, for example, rather absurd little houses placed in the visible supports. That stream feels to me like the distinctive place towards which James has been travelling. So I’m breaking my own rule… In which case I may as well ask: why does the Tate’s Lowry retrospective include none of his seascapes, nor any of those creepy constrained-marionette drawings which the aging artist gave to his niece?
ART STUFF ON A TRAIN 8: SAME WORK, DIFFERENT PLACE
Buried in the ludicrously uneven 44 artist cavalcade of the latest Saatchi survey, 20% of which could have made for a show of considerable sensitivity, are two ‘selfies’ by Nina Katchadourian, shot in the loo of a plane. She wasn’t smoking or joining the mile high club, but – of course – dressing herself in a mock-up of 18th century Flemish headgear using the materials to hand. Seen as an example of paper in art, this seemed somewhat silly, and uncomfortably reminiscent of Hendrik Kerstens’ photos of his daughter. Yet the same images work well at the Turner Contemporary in Margate: not only are they attuned to the curatorial context of a fascinating show on ‘Curiosity’, we see more of them, and they form just a small subset of Katchadourian’s ongoing project ‘Seat Assignment’, in which she makes art out of her mobile phone camera plus whatever’s available on the plane (she splits her time between the US and Finland and has made 101 flights since 2010!). Katchadourian places items from the meal over in-flight magazines to surreal effect, catches fellow passengers reflected in seat belt buckles, exploits the glare of glossy paper to create ‘high altitude spirit photography’ etc. Now her lavatory hats seem part of a persuasive exploration of resourcefulness, which comments in passing on how much of the international art-set’s time is spent in flight.
IS THAT UNIQUE?
Two interesting shows just reminded me that the line between one-off and multiple can get rather blurry. American artist Allan McCollum is known for collections of serially produced works which undermine the traditional criteria of rarity – and yet are subtly different one from another. ‘The Shapes Project’, on view at the JGM Gallery in Paris, pushes that to a new extreme, by setting up the computerised possibility of making 31 billion different possible shapes – that’s one for everyone who’s expected to be alive in 2050, the scheduled completion date for the project . A few dozen were on physical display: were they unique, or were they from a planet-sized edition? Back in London, Michael Landy’s ‘Run for Your Life’ is a 2013 remake of a work made, but not preserved, in 1993. Does that make it the new original? Whatever the answer, it’s a highlight of Landy’s revelatory and affecting retrospective-through-drawing across Thomas Dane’s two spaces, which you could argue provides a more uniquely personal connection to some of his projects than the fabricated end product. Either way, I enjoyed it more than the National Gallery’s show of kinetic sculptures of the saints, 50% inoperative when I was there. There are no queues at Thomas Dane, and the only Break Down is a drawing related to Landy’s famous project of that name.
Michael Landy
Run For Your Life, 1993-2013
oil stick on paper
153.5 x 212 cm
© the artist. Image courtesy of Thomas Dane Gallery
What’s closest to unique: an edition of three, or a painting which is very like 20 others in a series? What about AP, Museum Exhibits, CW term?
MIND THE LACK OF GAP
It's easy to assume a sharp contrast between fashionable galleries selling cutting-edge contemporary art and staid dealers handling traditional still lives, history paintings and landscapes. In fact, it’s not so simple: the same challenging and up-to-date spirit can be applied to any genre and shown anywhere. You can see a good demonstration this week. The Maas Gallery (15 A Clifford Street, with a temporary extension to 28 Cork Street) normally concentrates on historic masters, but has an extensive show of Sarah Adams' latest paintings of rocks and caves around the Cornish coast. Adams goes to considerable trouble to make studies on site before increasing the scale in the studio through a repeated wet on dry process, allowing a layered spontaneity which parallels the geological processes being depicted. That, along with a range of weather conditions, mineral deposits and algae growths which yield more vivid and varied colours than one might have believed natural, leads to near-abstract passages which had me thinking of Braque, Feininger and Riopelle as well as the 19th century romantic tradition. The gap between realistic painting of a relatively abstract subject by an artist aware of modern art trajectories and more avowedly experimental process-based abstraction need not be so wide after all.
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The three women make one tiger trick and other oddities
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Veronica Avluv earns her tiger stripes
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We may have strayed into leopard territory here
REGARDING THE MEDIUM
I found myself fighting an instinct in Rodney Graham’s new show at the Lisson Gallery. It see it as a witty take on the idea that what an artist makes is determined by his surroundings: thus, Graham plays an artist who makes paintings and sculptures which utilise pipe cleaners in a studio which happened to have them lying around. We see him in action, as an artist playing the role of an artist, and we see the results. But the most striking feature is the sheer scale of the light boxes, with the room-height triptychs almost twenty feet wide. They look good, but I wondered how much of that was to do with the scale and backlighting, which I suspect could make almost any photograph impressive. Cue that old experiment of taking a photo then assessing the image on my preview screen. Less impactful, of course, but then it occurred to me that I wouldn’t discount the effect of scale in painting or sculpture, but consider it an integral part of the production process and the effect. Yet just because photographs obviously could be printed at a range of scales, the particular scale chosen can seem a contingent matter which shouldn’t be a necessary part of the effect. Yes, I reflected, maybe that’s unfair, maybe – to coin a term – it’s mediumist.
Blind Time
Spruth Magers’ new Robert Morris show doesn’t include his ‘blind time drawings’ – in that respect, I suppose, it is itself blind - but I found a beautiful book of them on the gallery desk. Morris draws with his eyes closed or blindfolded, the better to ‘undermine every idea of intentionality’. Other sighted artists have used similar techniques to set their imagination against radical physical limits – Claude Heath is my favourite – and the late styles of some masters, notably Titian and Monet, are arguably a function of deteriorating sight rather than deliberate strategy. And you would expect there to be plenty of partially sighted artists, given that only 10% of the registered blind can see nothing at all. But, I wondered, has a fully and congenitally blind visual artist ever made an impact? The best that Google can throw up is Turkish painter Eşref Armağan, hardly a household name. He achieves surprisingly conventional representations using a Braille stylus, plus paint on his fingers to colour the shapes. That’s to say, he doesn’t invent a ‘new way of seeing’ appropriate to someone with no vision, which would surely be more interesting. So, a gap remains: for an artist who’s never seen the world to reveal in some uncanny way just how they don’t see it.
The Size of It
It's always interesting to see how artists deal with scale, and Jonathan Delafield Cooke's show at Purdy Hicks is an interesting case. His fantastically detailed charcoal drawings include a life-sized sperm whale. That comes in five sections (as if to emphasise the partial nature of most whale sightings) and at 35 feet wide only just fits along the gallery's biggest wall. It contrasts with a 72-strong shoal of separate fish, each drawing six inches across. Shuld there, though, have been 205 tiddlers, that being how many you could buy for the £50,000 price of the whale? My favourites, however, are Cook's barnacles: he presents their surprising variety and majesty through drawings which blow them up to a mountainous aspect some 50 times their usual height. And while we're on such comparisons, the show happens to feature both the family with the largest penis (the sperm whale’s fellow Balaenopteridae, the blue whale, has a 10 foot member capable of 35 pint ejaculations) and the infra-class with the largest penis relative to its body size: being stuck where they are, the Cirripedia have to wave their feathery genitals around to reach a neighbour, and so some of the 1,220 species of barnacle have penises eight times as long as their body – getting on for a hundred yards in whale currency...
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Gooooooooooooood evening: today I’m on a train patrolled by a guard who keeps himself amused by stretching out the first syllable with which he greets new passengers at each stop. It’s an affectation which soon loses what little charm it might have had. But isn’t plenty of recent art like that? Everyone’s so busy striving for their own individual language, many end up with a perfectly trivial means of distinguishing themselves. Just so, at Saatchi’s latest selection of proposed new stars, )….
Of course, we do want individual takes on the world, but they need to have some necessity and richness, some underlying logic. You can see that, to use three recently departed examples, in how Richard Artschwager arrived at working with the forms of furniture, why xxx used torn-off posters, . But for those who’re just casting around for a gimmick of their own: Gooooooooooooood night.
The Opening Laid Bare
I see the Gagosian Empire has adopted the term ‘Opening Reception’ rather than ‘Private View’ for the evening gathering which precedes a new show. That makes sense, as most PVs are decidedly public and crowded affairs, which offer little privacy in which to contemplate the art. Indeed, it’s the norm for geographically-challenged galleries to find that more people attend the opening than the rest of the run combined. Why go then, when so many others do? For a drink, of course; to talk – to the artist in particular, perhaps; and to say you’ve seen the show even if, in large part, you may not have done. Sometimes there’s the bonus of a performance. The naked figures activating Konrad Wyrebek’s sculptures certainly gave attendees reason to tread carefully round a crowded room at the recent launch of the Point Zero space (in Gillett Street next to Dalston Kingsland railway station). That’s now viewable in its video-assisted afterlife as part of cracking first show themed around the body as body: ‘Flesh Reality’ features up and coming artists alongside an array of famous names indicative of curator Eiko Honda’s connections: Hans Bellmer, Sarah Lucas, Laurie Simmons, Kiki Smith, Erwin Wurm… So what if you’ve missed the opening?
How unique is a photograph? I ask party on observing that the new Chritopher Williams photographs at David Zwirner are from an edition of ten with three APs (artist’s proofs – fair enough, but they may come on to the market at some point) and four HCs (???). Some of them. Moreover, are decidedly similar either to each other (there are three similar shots from a series of a ceramic brick) or to previous works by Williams (you’d have to be in the know to distinguish these reconstructions of camera operating instruction phtographs from previous ones). What if an edition of three came with ten APs and ten HCs?
Francisco de Corcuera
The Impossible Existence of a Mathematician
8 May – 27 June 2013
The materials used are a combination of oil-based mediums, acrylic and graphite on canvas.
I Have It Taped
The old question of the artist's intentions came up for me at Rosenfeld Porcini's exhibition of the Swedish-based Chilean Francisco de Corcuera. His large, uniformly formatted acrylic, oil and the graphite paintings combine monochrome colour fields with algebraic symbols, geometric lines and trompe d’oieil elements, often as if bits of tape are stuck to the canvas. It’s presented as Catholic work "haunted by the possibility of living life by the rigid structures which organised Western religions impose upon the believer". That didn't come across to me before or after reading it, but I did like the micro – macro sense of zooming in on the surface of the various landscapes, seemingly at night (black), the moon (grey), the desert (yellow) and the sea (blue) - and it's also nice to add another artist to my list of those who’ve used the illusion of tape applied to the canvas. This derives, of course, from the 18th century tradition of deceptive trompe d’oiel - such as Cornelius Gisberts' paintings of documents stored in pouches on the, wall which tempt the viewer to try to take them down. Also on the current list are David Musgrave, Kees Goudzwaard, Tod Norsten and ....
Users of real tape: Jim Lambie, Thomas Hirschhorn, Edward Krasinski
Born in Chile in 1944, Francisco de Corcuera has lived for many years outside his native land. Immersed
in the arts since childhood, he has always considered himself first and foremost a painter. Throughout
the various decades, his works have retained a constant philosophical preoccupation – he is, by his own
declaration, a conceptual artist yet equally importantly a painter.
Raised in a strong Catholic background, he has been haunted by the impossibility of living life by the
rigid structures which organised western religions impose upon the believer. He has endlessly posed
himself the question: can one live life by order and rules alone or will life itself inevitably get in the
way? His paintings, notwithstanding their formal development, have conceptually always illustrated this
dynamic quandary.
He begins the process of painting by drawing a complex grid of geometric lines, mathematical
theorems and algebraic symbols. However, once this foundation is complete, the artist begins making
marks with a far greater sense of freedom; areas of colour emerge as do strange forms which appear
raised off the canvas like strips of coloured paper. Yet these are, in reality, skilfully painted illusions – a
homage to the trompe d’oeil tradition of the eighteenth century.
“Since very early on, I have been fascinated by illusion, particularly the magic in art, in the
transformative power of painting. The turning or changing of flat surfaces into an image of convincing
reality was my main concern”
Here’s a thing: I lrather liked xxxx ut, it seemed, for all the wrong reasons.
How late do art talks start? 15 mins late, it shdn’t have started. Link quote from Ashbery – Recent History
Small galleries vs big galleries
Late night openings
Tattoos as art….
How much does an artist need to change?
You could argue that the main point of going to a gallery is to see the installation: a combination of past viewings, internet images and art fairs might give you a fair idea of the works in the show, but not of how it all fits together in the space. It’s good to report, then, that plenty of thougt and effort goes into how shows are presented. Let’s consider some tactics:
• make the work on site: then you have it, the most natural of installations. I like Samara Scott’s florid-pastel world, but has she successfully carved out a zone beyond the echoes of Karla Black? I’m not sure, but the xx tenuously-constructed sculptures in her solo show in a former timber merchants feel as if they were made for the space. Which they were…
• Exploit the architecture. MV hangs her Lol spectacularly down a stairwell in the home-as-gallery atmosphere of DomoBaal. The combination of studied neckties and men’s socks looks rather sadly phallic, but in fact – like most of V’s work – it carried a scientific sub-text, beng a model of primitive computer circity which required intricate wiring coinstions best produced by the Little Old Ladies who give the technique its title.
• Transform the architecture.
• Echo the themes: Carlaw St Lukes have built a system of wooden cabins such as you’d find if you attended the ski jump, the atmosphere is caught by Malanie Manchot’s series of films without
• Let the work ifest the whole space
• Make the best of what you have. Charlie Dutton doesn’t have much space, but together with painter- curator Kate Lyddon he makes the most of it: one sculpture fits effectively in a cupboard, a video plays in a back room, a head spins as if to take in the clutch of paintings, and c Bonla’s hypnotic video takes aural control:
• Spend big bucks.
Mny artists love lyng with scale, but I’ve rarely seen a more effective contract tha the marine elemtns in Jh Delfield Cook’s beiful charcoal draeing
It turned out that your exclusion from the Clerkenwell late programme was a simple administrative error, and Domo’s quite happy to include you ‘unofficially’, and in full next year.
I recently visited one of Berlin’s two annual Gallery Weekends, in wihc galleries coordinate matters so that there are extended hours (11-10 Fri, 11-7 Sat and Sun), lots of openings (51 on Friday night) and events = all without the ditrsaction of an Art Fair: the Gallery Weekend is effectively an art fair in situ. It was wonderful. Why not hold such a weekend in London in the first half of the year, to complement October’s ‘Frieze week’? The idea arose in discussion with Kate MacGarry, and we agreed that late June would be a good time, providing a boost to the last round of shows before summer at a time when London is an attractive destination. We envisaged new shows being open from Frday, but with the opening receptions staggered: East and South on Friday, west and central on Saturday nights.
Some words are nice: tegument, for example: a natural outer covering. A word which could do with more art-critical work-out, as there’s a definite difference between the artificially covered surface and the exposure of the natural.
Richard Woods: D.I.Y.
Monday 29th Apr 2013 - Saturday 1st Jun 2013
34 Cork Street
The Alan Cristea Gallery is proud to present a solo exhibition of works by Richard Woods from 29 April - 1 June 2013 at 34 Cork Street. The exhibition will feature a site-specific installation in which Woods will clad the gallery space from floor to ceiling. This large-scale installation will show alongside two new series of editions, his renowned Woodblock Inlays series as well as a group of new sculptures, all combining to create a homogenous environment.
The work of Richard Woods traverses the boundaries between art, architecture and design in an on-going examination of the relationship between the functional and the ornamental. The everyday surfaces that surround us provide the canvas onto which the artist transposes elements from the vernacular of traditional urban design. His architectural interventions toy with perception and reality, manipulating and transforming the facades and interiors of existing structures through the application of synthetic fronts or 'logos': galleries become mock-Tudor houses, City Hall security booths red brick-castles, and cloistered Venetian courtyards crazy-paved suburban patios. His simplified, stylised facades poke fun at our aesthetic values, both mocking and paying homage to the cult of renovation and DIY. His distilled encasements impose new values on the buildings they occupy, contrasting the urban with the rural, the old with the new, and the congested with the minimal. Each installation challenges us to confront the way in which we construct our surroundings, and probes the irrevocable artificiality of our local environment.
Woods' site-specific installation at the Alan Cristea Gallery will comprise interior floor and wall coverings in his trademark vibrantly-coloured and exaggerated wood-grain motif. Deceptively simple in form, these bold images are produced using traditional block-printing techniques and installed as parquetry (inlaying wood in geometric patterns). Pre-occupied with the notion of reproduction, the techniques employed by Woods allude to historical artisanal processes, the power of iconography and the dominance of consumerist plasticity. As is the case with much of Woods' work, the method of construction is appropriate to the surface he is mimicking, articulating the similarities between the artist's methodology and materials, and those used in everyday situations.
Woods' print projects are the result of collaboration between the artist and Alan Cristea Gallery and represent a natural progression from his installations and sculpture, all of which start with a printed image. The first suite - Woodblock Inlays - takes their composition from seemingly random scatterings of ‘offcuts' from one of the artist's floor installations printed onto a single colour background taken from a sheet of plywood. The most recent series, shown for the first time here, appear as more ordered compositions - segments seemingly abstracted from a larger completed floor work. Both series are densely inked and heavily printed to create a rich, physical surface on the paper. Reminiscent of Suprematist aesthetics, the strength and severe geometry of their lines also recalls the abstraction of High Modernism, drawing attention to its devolution into the world of commercial decor. Echoing the postmodern irony of his installations, the work plays with the intersection between the real and artificial.
German artist Bettina Pousttchi broadens the previously conceived notions of her medium by bringing together architecture and sculpture in her photography. For ‘Trade Routes’, Pousttchi has created a new photo installation entitled ‘Piccadilly Windows’. Pousttchi uses a selection of photographs of structural elements from renovated timber-frame houses taken near her hometown and then re-works these into a pattern that recalls traditional architectural elements of the Middle East. The resulting motifs are applied directly to the nine windows of the main gallery. With this subtle intervention combining an archetypal example of Western European architecture with traditionally Middle Eastern architectural ornamentation, Pousttchi makes a transnational gesture that investigates the cultural dimensions of architecture.
BETTINA POUSTTCHI — OFF THE CLOCK
Opening Friday, 26 April 2013, 6 – 9 p.m.
Exhibition 26 April – 22 Juni 2013, Buchmann Galerie Berlin
Seoul Time, 2012, Photograph, 120 x 150 cm
The Buchmann Gallery is delighted to present the exhibition Off the Clock, featuring new
works by the Berlin-based German-Iranian artist Bettina Pousttchi (*1971).
The works shown here circle around and contemplate different concepts of time and
perceptions of time using the medium of photography and sculpture.
Following the photo installation Framework for the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt in 2012, the
current exhibition for the Berlin Gallery Weekend shows another of Pousttchi’s major
photographic works: the first half of the 24-part photo series World Time Clock. Since
2008, Bettina Pousttchi has been photographing public clocks in cities around the world.
The group of works will be completed in 2013 when photos from 24 different time zones
together will form a “photographic world time clock”.
The system of time zones was created in 1884 at the Washington Meridian Conference in
response to increasing mobility; Greenwich in London was defined as the centre of this
system and its point of reference. Bettina Pousttchi’s clocks all show the same time, and
the artist thus uses photography to suggest an imaginary synchronism. She not only
emphasises the global network that spans our world, fuelled by increasing mobility and
digital communication, she also highlights the special role of photography in relation to
the perception of time and the associated medial construction of history and memory.
The artist’s interest in time is continued in a group of sculptures, Squeezers, which is
being shown in an exhibition for the first time.
The Squeezers are made of mechanically deformed bollards. The original function of the
bollard, namely to mark a border in the public space, has been nullified. The surfaces
appear soft and flowing, and the individual bollards are entwined in dynamic motion. All
sculptures are made of one and same object in different manifestations which, due partly to
the varying colours, seem like phases of time or shadows of each other. These works are
reminiscent of groups of figures, possibly also because the names of the sculptures have
been taken from Berlin street names.
Bettina Pousttchi has had solo shows in the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt (2012), Kunsthalle
Basel (2011), and in the Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin, where in 2009-2010 her much-acclaimed
photo installation Echo was displayed on the façade. She also exhibited at the Biennale in
Venice in 2009 and 2003. Her works have been shown in TENT Rotterdam, Lewis Glucksman
Gallery in Cork, Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin, Museum on the Seam in Jerusalem, Kunsthalle
Detroit and Centro Cultural Recoleta in Buenos Aires.
Between 2 May and 27 July 2013, Hauser & Wirth London will be presenting a new
architecture-inspired photo installation by Bettina Pousttchi on the
Every line divides space and permits two operations:
following the line, remaining “in line” as a formation,
accepting the line as a boundary; or deviating from the
line, dissolving the formation, violating the boundary.
Whether a line of fire or a traffic line, the issue is always
what side of the line one is on. The area beyond the line
entails risks. The line—as Ernst Jünger and Martin
Heidegger agree in their respective essays called “Über
die Linie” (About/Across the line)—opens up a “critical
zone,” that is, an area of risk that forces a person to
weigh things up and decide.
The video L i n e poses this problem as a question of
power. In various formations, uniformed police forces
pace along a white line that cuts boldly through the
lower third of the image frame. It is not clear what roles
are played by the line and the policemen, who march
along in it both directions beyond the right or left edge
of the image. Occasionally one sees, at the upper edge
of the image, elements of a crowd-control barrier. The
power of the state is found, typically and here too, this
side of the line. Beyond lurks its “other.”
The line does not, however, simply divide space into
this side and that but also organizes it. The white line
effortlessly brings the movements of the body into a
linear form. The forces of order that patrol on the line
make it abundantly clear that it is precisely this line that
constitutes the order that the stripes serve. They cannot
be overstepped. This line could be anywhere, and the
uniforms could bear any symbol. The significance of
the line for the organization of movement is explored
and reflected on aesthetically in several of Bettina
Pousttchi’s works: Take Off, L a n d i n g, and Starker Staat.
The lines that cut through our everyday lives and
put us in our place can all be reformulated as
prohibitions —do not cross—that challenge us to
transgress them. That is why the state reinforces its
lines. The more security forces guard a line, the clearer
it becomes that transgression is expected. The strong
state is thus always a weak state, preparing for a state
of emergency because it is expecting to be challenged.
Pousttchi’s meditations on the framing of social
space go beyond the line, however. Her installations
cannot be restricted to the alternative of this and that
side of the line and its dialectic of boundary and transgression.
She showed L i n e together with Pertinent
B l o c k, an installation made up of barriers. These crowdcontrol
grilles that play a central role in the installations
Locked and Landing are encountered in public spaces
everywhere a crowd of people has to be directed and
diverted temporarily. Such barriers guide airline passengers
to their gates and fans to their venues. It is not
the power of the state that organizes the social space
here but rather a variable, mobile, flexible, modular,
temporary architecture whose logic is not that of the
law (and its transgression) but of discipline, and we
have become so accustomed to its regime that we have
almost lost sight of alternatives.
Bettina Pousttchi’s oeuvre enables us to experience
these different topographies of power and direct our
gazes past their manifestations to the conditions of the
constitution in aesthetic research into fundamentals
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