Artful Blogger UK

Doris Salcedo, White Cube Mason's Yard - until 30th June 2012

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 23:12:00 +0100

White Cube Mason’s Yard presents new work by Colombian artist, Doris Salcedo. Well known for her creation of what have been termed, ‘memory sculptures’, Salcedo, works in her own words, ‘with materials that are already charged with significance, with meaning they have required in the practice of everyday life’. Often taking specific historical events as her point of departure, Salcedo is concerned in her work with the processes of remembering and forgetting, with the inconstancy, insubstantiality, impermanence and intransigence of memory and with memorialisation, commemoration.

Powerfully, hauntingly evocative, Salcedo’s sculptures/ installations combine past and present bringing about a process of material metamorphosis. In an interview with Charles Merewether in 1998, Salcedo expounded upon this notion of metamorphosis, describing the experience of the viewer with her own artistic reconnaissance and restoration of the past: “The silent contemplation of each viewer permits the life seen in the work to reappear. Change takes place, as if the experience of the victim were reaching out…The sculpture presents the experience as something present- a reality that resounds within the silence.”

For her exhibition at White Cube, Salcedo presents two new large-scale installations, ‘Plegaria Muda’ (2008-10), and ‘Flor de Piel’ (2012). ‘Plegaria Muda’ is a multi-piece sculpture made up of 45 units reminiscent of a collective burial site. Each unit consists of two oblong tables, one upturned and separated by a thick layer of earth. Surprisingly and somewhat incredibly, through the surface of the uppermost tables sprout delicate, vivid green shoots of grass in a radical reassertion of life.

Work on ‘Plegaria Muda’, loosely translated as ‘mute prayer’, functions as a memorial to 1500 young men found dead in Colombia in 2007. The men, all of whom were from very poor families, had been murdered, and yet their deaths were falsely presented as occurring in combat. Salcedo then, , One feels uncomfortable in the presence of Salcedo’s memorial acutely aware of its commemorative function as well as of the coffin’s inherently corporeal implications.

‘Flor de Piel’ (2012), on display in the ground floor gallery resembles a vast counterpane, ‘an ephemeral skin or shroud’ made up of thousands of suffocated rose petals. ‘Flor de Piel’ explores in the artist’s words, the ‘limits of the fragile and the most delicate within the frame of sculpture’, an incredibly affective piece, begun as an aesthetic articulation of the impossibility of making a flower offering to a victim of torture.

Salcedo’s sculptures function as material manifestations of memory and of memorialisation asserting themselves in the interstices between the realms of the public and the private, indeed as the artist has commented, these works ‘refer to something extremely private’ and yet they speak not only of the individual but of the group.

All images courtesy of White Cube c. Doris Salcedo.

Originally published by Who’s Jack Magazine at http://whosjack.org/doris-salcedo-at-white-cube/

'Rose Bush', Sadie Coles Gallery- until 30th December 2012

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 21:48:27 +0100

Sadie Coles Gallery presents, ‘Rose Bush’, an exhibition of largely new work by Not So Young Anymore British Artist, Sarah Lucas in a space dedicated to her work on the first floor of the gallery.

‘Situation’ channels the spirit of the artist-led exhibitions of the late 1980s and 1990s with which Lucas and her contemporaries launched their careers. It is a wonderfully unpolished, starkly lit space that is sympathetic to and congruent with the nonchalant, unabashed and unapologetic quality of Lucas’ work.

Lucas has long made work in specific, sometimes remote and often unusual locations and ‘Untitled’ (2012), a vast pair of over the knee platform boots cast in concrete, is no exception as the installation shots, blown up and printed as wall paper, indicate. Lucas’ boots are brazenly, unashamedly fetishistic.

Equally brazen and yet subtly, semiotically suggestive is ‘Maggi’ (2012) composed of a coat hanger suspended from the ceiling attached to which are two lit light bulbs and the gaping hole of an excavated toilet bowl. It is shocking perhaps, how easily we convince ourselves of the representative quality of this crude construction of the female body. ’Maggi’ is only a woman because I see it/her to be so. Its formal concerns, the geometry of its sculpture, its wholeness in parts, endow the whole with meaning, thus light bulbs equal breasts and the vacant, endless, expectant depth of the toilet bowl equals a vagina. Both ‘Maggi’ and the boots seem at once to implicate and to defy a principally male erotic gaze, posing questions, they discomfit, disconcert and yet remain resolutely and frustratingly perhaps, reticent.

All images courtesy of Sadie Coles c. Sarah Lucas

Originally published by Who’s Jack Magazine at http://whosjack.org/review-sarah-lucas-rose-bush/

'The Bruce Lacey Experience', Camden Arts Centre- until 16th September 2012

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 21:42:32 +0100

Bruce Lacey is one of Britain’s greatest visionary, exuberant and eccentric artists. His indefatigable pursuit of ‘making and doing’ has been a kind of personal psychotherapy or rather, a cathartic working-through of his life’s experiences, an approach which begun in his early 20s when whilst serving with the Royal Navy he was hospitalised and diagnosed with tuberculosis. It was during this time that Lacey began to draw macabre scenes and visions of childhood memories.

Co-curated by artist Jeremy Deller and art historian Professor David Alan Mellor, ‘The Bruce Lacey Experience’ is a celebration of the artist’s life, and provides a rich and diverse survey of a career which has spanned more than 60 years encompassing painting, sculpture, robotised assemblages and installations as well as community arts, theatrical and earth ritual performances.

Charting Lacey’s artistic development and reflecting the various stages of his life, ‘The Bruce Lacey Experience’ begins in Gallery 3 where Lacey has brought together an extraordinary collection of objects, images and multi-coloured costumes from his childhood years with paintings he made whilst studying at the Royal Academy in the 1950s. Objects such as a loveworn Indian doll Lacey took to bed every night as a young boy and cuddled, a miniature Japanese robot, the first ever manufactured, a little trike and a grubby plastic doll sitting placidly in a tiny toy pram are seen alongside a new work, the delightfully disconcerting, ‘Genetic Installation’ (2012) a visual representation of the artists family, consisting of a vast penis suspended from the ceiling spewing the artist’s nine children as baby dolls, spawn of former partner Jill Smith and current wife Pat Lacey.

Gallery 1 presents archival material relating to Lacey’s first forays as a performance artist, producing satirical stage acts and mechanical constructs, appearing alongside the likes of Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers and The Alberts. He also famously appeared as George Harrison’s flute playing gardener in The Beatles’ film Help! Also on display in Gallery 1 is a motley crew of life size kinetic automatons, ‘electrical actors’, playing the parts of Old Moneybags, Clockface, Electric Man and Rosa Bosom. At once brilliant and terrifyingly, risibly bizarre Lacey referred to such absurd assemblages as ‘hate objects, fear objects and love objects, ‘totems and fetishes’ designed to illustrate how ‘I feel about life, about people’.

Fear of a frightening future, of the loss of man’s very individuality, and a desperate desire to regain a lost, even primitive sense of harmony with the rhythms of the natural world, help to explain Lacey’s self-immersion in the 1970s into the realm of ritual. Lacey revered pre-historic man in creating not for purely aesthetic ends but with the purpose of effecting change within the world around him. He committed himself to becoming a spiritual medium, aligned with the mysterious forces of nature. In the 1980s he returned to painting, creating shamanistic, cosmic inspired designs, visually effervescent and characterised by a kind of electric energy.

A remarkable exhibition by a truly unique British artist whose madcap maxim I wholeheartedly stand by: ‘the most important thing to remember is NEVER TO LOSE THE CHILD WITHIN YOU!’ (Bruce Lacey 2012)

‘The Bruce Lacey Experience’ runs until 16^th September 2012 at the Camden Arts Centre

All images courtesy of the Camden Arts Centre copyright Bruce Lacey.

Originally published by Who’s Jack Magazine at www.whosjack.org/the-bruce-lacey-experience/

Excuse the anachronistic nature of the posts I am currently uploading, they are archived pieces...

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 21:37:58 +0100

Excuse the anachronistic nature of the posts I am currently uploading, they are archived pieces originally written for Who’s Jack Magazine.

'The Uncanny', Ronchini Gallery- 16 January-16 February 2013

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 21:11:04 +0100

Ronchini Gallery London presents ‘The Uncanny’, an exhibition of recent work by Adeline de Monseignat and Berndnaut Smilde. Curated by James Putnam, ‘The Uncanny’ takes its title from Sigmund Freud’s completely compelling and yet ‘strange theoretical novel’[1] of the same name. Published in 1919 and intended as a mode of ‘aesthetic investigation’, ‘The Uncanny’ is unique not only within Freud’s own oeuvre but also within subsequent literary criticism and theorical output, prompting Harold Bloom in 1994 to declare, ‘it is the only major contribution that the twentieth century has made to the aesthetics of the sublime’[2]. It is an example of one of rare instances in which ‘the psychoanalyst felt impelled to investigate the subject of the aesthetic’. Both artists seek in their work to evoke in the viewer a sense, or vision characteristic of the experience of the uncanny. Defined by Freud as ‘something which is familiar and old established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression’^{^[3]}, the uncanny, (das Unheimliche), most disquietingly then has its origins in the homely and familiar, (das Heimlich).

Works by Adeline on display include hybrid creature-sculptures referred to by the artist as ‘creaptures’ or alternatively, on account of their physical appearance and uncomfortable symbolic potential, as ‘Hairy Eyeballs’. Silently seductive and tantalising in their tactility Adeline’s glass spheres filled with vintage fur are indupitably intriguing. Simultaneously (for many at least) attractive and repulsive, they seem to operate in the interstices between the animate and inanimate, neither fully subject nor object. Adeline’s creations turn compulsively on the paradox that life and death whilst seemingly insuperably separated are at the same time mere recto and verso of one another. Provoking in the viewer a sense of radical uncertainty, and in some cases, insecurity, concerning the distinctions between being alive and being dead, Adeline’s creaptures seem to inhabit, in the words of Paul Muldoon, the ‘eternal interim’^{^[4]} between life and death. ‘Lonely Loleta’ is the most ambitious of such ‘creaptures’, concealing as it does a kinetic element, or small motor, meaning that she/it appears to be breathing. Subtle and yet unmistakable, such movement arouses in the viewer a kind of visceral thrill upon first being witnessed. A key quotation from Freud’s ‘The Uncanny’, it transpires from an interview I conducted with the artist, was the starting point for the piece: with regard to ‘the persons and things, the impressions, processes and situations that can arouse an especially strong and distinct sense of the uncanny in us…E. Jentsch singles out, as an excellent case, “doubt as to whether an apparently animate object really is alive and, conversely, whether a lifeless object might not perhaps be animate”’. It is such doubt which renders Adeline’s creaptures so incredibly intriguing, desirable and yet disconcerting. Placed around the room are other such questionably animate/inanimate, uncanny and enigmatic creaptures. Sat on small chairs and wrapped in what might be seen as swaddling bands, Clarisse, Jonny, Netty and Robert resemble new born babies, their size and weight corresponding directly with those after whom they have been named. Made of hand blown glass and mirroring chemicals, Adeline’s offspring, part womb, part abstract foetal form, are in fact deceptively fragile. Reincarnations of past incarnations no longer in existence, they inspire in the beholder a peculiar kind of affection/ affectation meaning that one resists the temptation to cradle the creapture in one’s arms and rock it back and forth as one would a baby. As such they can be seen as manifestations of the ‘abject’, being that which is defined by seminal critical theorist, Julia Kristeva, as neither subject nor object and which arguably, traumatically, reminds us of our own materiality. Interestingly Kristeva also associates abjection with the maternal, since the establishment of the boundary between self and other marks our initial movement out of the chora.

Also on display as part of Ronchini Gallery’s exhibition of ‘The Uncanny’ is a selection of Dutch artist, Berndnaut Smilde’s remarkable photographs, also known as the ‘Nimbus’ series. Stunningly surreal these images depict brief moments of pure magic. Using a fog machine, lighting and a carefully controlled interior environment, Smilde conjures clouds, capturing his nebulous nimbi on camera in a variety of evocative locations. The spaces in which Smilde works are constructed, partly deliberately, partly circumstantially as liminal spaces, cryptic places, timeless and yet seeming to belong to no time. Ephemeral, ethereal, mesmeric, meditative, sublime, elusive and allusive (Smilde has always been fascinated by traditional Dutch seascape paintings and was inspired by one in particular that his grandparents owned), Smilde’s clouds, along with the location in which they are shot- anywhere from a disused Hamam to an old post office, a deserted gallery space or a warehouse stacked with shipping containers- evoke, as well as Adeline’s creaptures, an experience of the uncanny, a sense in which we are seeing something that is at once familiar and unfamiliar, present and absent, visible and yet in an instant, invisible. Such scenes seem to culminate in a paradoxical aesthetic both of anxiety and of hope. Rain clouds, traditionally ominous signifiers of potential menace seem also in Smilde’s work inherently magical and to indicate a positive aesthetic intervention, reminding the viewer that if you put your mind to it, anything is possible- the sky is the limit after all.

[1] Helene Cixous, ‘Fiction and its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud’s Das Unheimliche (The “uncanny”), New Literary History, Vol. 7, No.3 (Spring 1976)

[2] Harold Bloom, ‘Freud and the Sublime: A Catastrophe Theory of Creativity’, in Maud Ellmann, ed., Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism (London: Longman, 1994) p182.

[3] Sigmund Freud, ‘The “Uncanny”’, in The Penguin Freud Library, Vol. 14: Art and Literature, ed. by Albert Dickson, (London: Penguin Books, 1985), pp335-76, pp363-4

[4] Paul Muldoon, ‘Lull’, Why Brownlee Left, (London: Faber and Faber, 1980), p17

Future Map 2012: A University of the Arts London exhibition hosted by Central Saint Martins

Wed, 30 Jan 2013 23:13:00 +0000

On Thursday 17^th January I was lucky enough to attend the opening of ‘Future Map’, an exhibition of the work of 50 graduating BA and MA students selected from across the University of the Arts London. Now in its 15^th year, ‘Future Map’ is London’s leading annual exhibition of the finest emerging talent. Curated by University of the Arts London College Deans Mark Dunhill (Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design) and George Blacklock (Chelsea College of Art and Design) Future Map 12 seeks to reflect the breadth and diversity of Fine Art practices across the University, and in addition include works from other subject areas in order to encourage debates surrounding the inter-, multi-, and cross disciplinary nature of work currently being produced.

Sophie Chamberlain, a BA student at Chelsea College of Art and Design was awarded Future Map 12’s £3000 prize for ‘Untitled’, a sculptural piece, made partly of ice, which explores the engineering inherent in artistic creation, probing the residue of the industrial era in order to create something truly unique. Aside from Sophie’s piece, there is, however, plenty of other ingenious and intriguing work on display. My favourites, too numerous to mention, include Linda Krefft’s ‘Ice Lolly’, Tess Faria’s ‘Clean/lean’, Emily Dillon’s ‘Camera Rucksack’ and Darragh Casey’s ‘Straddle Shelf’, playful, humorous, visually witty works designed to amuse as well as intrigue. Casey’s ‘Shelf Portraits’, enacted at the CSM studio last year involve friends and members of the artist’s family being propped up and ‘shelved’ alongside their own possessions, a process intended as an interrogation of the relationship between family and furniture, body and object. In ‘Clean/lean’, Tess Faria presents a peculiar and painstaking performance of familiar domestic activities rendered unfamiliar out of context. I was also hugely impressed by the work of Phoebe and Lydia Lake, identical twins whose mesmeric and strangely poignant film piece, ‘We don’t have to be in the same place to be together’ illustrates through the use of a single adolescent male subject the extraordinary nature of a twin consciousness. Shot so as to appear to be two people, the twins express through their subject the level of unspoken intimacy that exists between them exploring by way of body language and behavioural idiosyncrasy the apparent physical and psychological bond that joins them, irrevocably, irreversibly. What unites the work in this exhibition for me is a sense of critical curiosity, a fresh and feeling response to the world which cannot fail to delight.

'Here's looking at you, kid'

Sat, 29 Dec 2012 16:42:00 +0000

Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman filming ‘Casablanca’ c. Warner Bros

Just a quick note to say, ‘Casablanca’ is such a great film isn’t it? I watched it again for the second time this afternoon. Released in 1942 ‘Casablanca’, filmed and set during the Second World War in Morocco, was initially well received but has since grown in popularity becoming one of the best loved films of all time. Semioticians account for the film’s popularity by claiming that its inclusion of a whole series of stereotypes paradoxically strengthens the film. Umberto Eco elaborated that: ‘….Casablanca is not just one film. It is many films, an anthology. […] When all the archetypes burst in shamelessly, we reach Homeric depths. Two clichés make us laugh. A hundred clichés move us. For we sense dimly that the clichés are talking among themselves, and celebrating a reunion.’ I think I agree with Eco although not with the unmistakeably disdainful undertones apparent in his appraisal- a brilliantly emotive film about love, life and sacrifice.

I meant to upload this piece, an edited version of which I wrote for the Mulberry blog (masterminded...

Sat, 29 Dec 2012 13:56:59 +0000

I meant to upload this piece, an edited version of which I wrote for the Mulberry blog (masterminded by my lovely friend Carli Humphries), back in October but somehow it slipped my mind, so anyway, voilà:

The Best of British at Frieze Art Fair 2012:

Frieze London, which celebrates its tenth edition this year, opened to the public yesterday showcasing new work by over 1000 artists from all over the world selected by 175 of the most exciting international contemporary art galleries. Participants this year include exhibitors from countries as far afield as Korea, Columbia, India and South Africa and yet, I spy with my artful eye, something beginning with B. British art is currently hot property and the work of several British artists both established and emerging feature on my best of British hit list. First up is British artist and writer, Harland Miller, whose truculently titled piece, ‘What’s All the Hubbub Bub?’ exhibited by Edinburgh based gallery, Ingleby, is one of my Frieze favourites. Far from the ‘visceral nostalgia’ of Miller’s previous Penguin piss takes, ‘What’s All the Hubbub Bub’ by Harland Miller appears curiously wise and wonderfully witty. Also exhibited by Ingleby is the monumental, ‘Rose-Marie’, a totemic seeming structure made up of a stack of lit lampshades by Scottish artist Andrew Miller.

Thomas Dane Gallery exhibits ‘Arthur Kennedy’, an oil and graphite on linen piece by British artist Caragh Thuring, bought yesterday by the Tate Modern for its permanent collection as well as a piece by London based artist Alexandre da Cunha whose ‘Bust’, which references the tradition of elevating classical busts to the level of adoration, is unmistakably phallic, constructed from a mop head, the hair of which has been elongated and intertwined with yards of hand-dyed wool and confined at the base by a large concrete block. Both are definitely worth a look.

The work of not-so-young-anymore British artists Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst is also well represented. Emin’s emotive and highly sexualised pieces are instantly recognisable as are Hirst’s spot paintings, medicine cabinet and quasi-ecclesiastical insect encrusted works exhibited by White Cube and Gagosian Gallery amongst others.

East End Gallery Maureen Paley exhibits Turner Prize winning British artist Gillian Wearing’s indubitably unnerving series of self-portraits at twenty seven years old as well as ‘My Hand’, an eerily realistic sculptural replica of the artist’s upturned hand complete with multi-coloured painted finger nails. Matthew Marks Gallery exhibits fellow YBA Gary Hume’s placid purple portrait, ‘The Dryad’, while Frith Street Gallery exhibits ‘The Line of Fate’, by Tacita Dean (she of the Tate’s 2011 Turbine Hall commission), a linear sequence of five photographs which capture a peculiarly private, poignant, poetic and arrestingly aesthetic memory of the late art critic Leo Steinberg writing.

Herald Street gallery exhibits an intriguing assortment of miniatures by British artist Matthew Darbyshire while Sadie Coles showcases terrifically titillating work by Emin’s chum and fellow not-so-young-anymore British artist Sarah Lucas alongside the work of 2012 Turner Prize finalist, Spartacus Chetwynd, whose endearingly idiosyncratic rendering, ‘Giotto’s Play’ is evidently allusive and yet wonderfully original.

Lisson Gallery exhibits star British sculptor Anish Kapoor’s ashen, volcanic seeming, and yet disconcertingly biomorphic concrete form alongside Ryan Gander’s playful ‘Sigh Cy Die, Bye Bye Cy, I Cry’, a piece which like much of his work seems to celebrate the redundancy of making art about art as an un-guilty pleasure. So, with plenty of brilliant British art on display, there’s no excuse not to get down to Regent’s Park this weekend.

Frieze Art Fair- Regent’s Park, 11–14 October

Rain, rain go away; come again another day!

Sat, 29 Dec 2012 13:42:00 +0000

Amalia Pica, Catachresis #18 (legs of the table, neck of the bottle, head of the screw), 2012.

Photography: Sander Tiedema

I’m seriously wondering when it will ever stop raining as I’m hoping to venture out at some point, while I’m in this waterlogged part of the world, to pay a visit to Modern Art Oxford. A year ago I reviewed ‘An Unfinished World’, MAO’s Graham Sutherland retrospective curated by 2011 Turner Prize nominee, George Shaw. It seems fitting then, that I re-visit the gallery, this time to see ‘For Shower Singers’, an exhibition of work, namely sculpture and works on paper, by Argentinian artist, Amalia Pica. This, her first solo exhibition at Modern Art Oxford continues a conversation which begun earlier this year with an exhibition of the artist’s work at Chisenhale Gallery, London. Having seen Pica’s humourous and remarkably visually articulate works exhibited by Herald Street Gallery at this year’s Frieze Art Fair (and in 2011 at the 54th Venice Biennale), I am keen to make my annual trip, weather permitting.

Season’s Greetings: A selection of suitably seasonal...

Sat, 29 Dec 2012 12:59:02 +0000

Cy Twombly, Winter, 'The Four Seasons', 1993-94

Vincent Van Gogh, 'Snowy Landscape with Stooping Woman', 1889

Wassily Kandinsky, Winter Landscape, 1909

James Whistler, 'Harmony in Grey—Chelsea in Ice', 1864

Season’s Greetings: A selection of suitably seasonal winter scapes

'Parlour Jardin', Oxford's Botanical Gardens, Saturday 8th September

Fri, 07 Sep 2012 20:28:00 +0100

I am super excited about attending ‘Parlour Jardin’ tomorrow night. Billed as ‘An Evening of the Uncanny’, ‘Parlour Jardin’, the result of a collaboration between Parlour Collective and the Botanic Gardens, will see the work of 17 international contemporary artists performed within the gardens.

Saturday 8th September 5.30-7.30pm. Click here to book online and for more information.

From the Parlour Jardin website:

From the dangerous gardens of the brothers Grimm to the enchantments of
the garden of earthly delights, the garden has always represented a space in literature, art, and human imagination which blurs the boundaries between the invisible and the everyday. Often portrayed as a mysterious
space full of uncanny wonders, the garden becomes an atmospheric labyrinth inviting exploration.

Parlour Jardin shall invite the audience to roam the garden encountering the site-specific works as
they explore and engage with the atmosphere of the garden itself.

Parlour Jardin will include new works by the critically acclaimed Norwegian artist Kurt
Johannessen who has exhibited extensively across Europe, Asia, and America creating more than
150 different performance works; the artist and musician Kirsten Norrie who has previously
received awards from the Wellcome Trust and spent a considerable amount of time in the desert
staying with the Hopi and Navajo in Arizona as part of a travel scholarship; the performance
artist and author Brian Catling, co-founder of the performance group The Wolf in the Winter and
professor of fine art at Oxford University; and many others.

FINAL WEEKS: ‘Lucian Freud Portraits’, The National Portrait Gallery, on now until 27th May 2012

Sat, 05 May 2012 00:01:00 +0100

Lucian Freud, Girl with a Kitten, 1947

‘I’ve always wanted to create drama in my pictures, which is why I paint people. It’s people who have brought drama to pictures from the beginning. The simplest human gestures tell stories.’ Lucian Freud.

Lucian Freud (1922 – 2011) was undoubtedly one of the most important and influential artists of his generation and paintings of people were central to his work. The National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition is the first to focus on his portraiture, presenting 130 of Freud’s paintings, drawings and etchings from the 1940s up to and including a poignantly unfinished portrait of his long-time assistant David Dawson and his whippet, Eli begun in 2011.

Produced in close collaboration with the artist, the exhibition is arranged broadly chronologically, concentrating on particular periods and groups of ‘the people’ in Freud’s life which illustrate his stylistic development and artistic maturation.

Several of Freud’s early works are among my favourites and include two portraits of his first wife Kitty Garman, which introduce us to a wan, wide eyed character in possession of a fascinating, ethereal beauty. Freud’s portraits of his second wife, Caroline Blackwood are equally captivating, the first, ‘Girl in Bed’ (1952) painted after the couple had eloped to Paris and were living at the Hotel la Louisiane depicts a wonderfully youthful, even childlike Blackwood, radiant, serene, and seemingly imperturbable. The contrast between this and ‘Hotel Bedroom’, a double portrait painted only two years later in 1954 is shocking. Seemingly clothed Caroline lies in bed looking drained, distant, and years older, tugging distractedly at her cheek with long, pale fingers she appears quite unaware of Freud’s presence. The atmosphere is oppressive, standing the on the far side of the room Freud depicts himself as a brooding, reticent character, silent and somewhat submissive. As with those of Kitty Garman, such portraits appear not only intensely observed, thrillingly luminous visual impressions, but also remarkably cerebral, poetic, psychologically charged and hauntingly distinctive. Such curiously thinly painted works are for me truly mesmeric and are, in many ways, far more affecting, than Freud’s subsequently densely worked, highly textured, obsessively fleshly observations.

By the mid-1950s Freud had abandoned his soft sable paintbrushes in favour of those made from coarser hog’s hair. In response to the work of friend and fellow painter Francis Bacon, Freud’s brushwork became bolder, heftier and more vigorous, nakedness more prevalent and the skin he was so fascinated by, less livid and more lived in. ‘When I paint clothes I am really painting naked people who are covered in clothes’: Freud found the sensual, sexual, the physical and essentially primal nature of human life endlessly enthralling. Freud’s subjects often appear then, peculiarly animal like, stripped of all that might connect them with a civilised world outside the studio.

Nakedness combined with Freud’s rather merciless and indefatigable attention to detail, make for portraits of remarkable visceral intensity. In contrast to the often insipid, rather elusive nature of the subjects of many of Freud’s portraits, his paintings of Australian performance artist Leigh Bowery have a powerful, palpable presence; massive, unashamedly exhibitionist paintings, they dominate the room in which they hang, commanding attention. Oddly enough Bowery was not asked but chose to sit for Freud naked, legs splayed, sans costumes and piercings. Lucian later said of his sitter, ‘He was a remarkable model because he was so intelligent, instinctive and inventive, also amazingly perverse and abandoned’. ‘And the Bridegroom’ is a contrastingly wonderfully relaxed and tender portrait of Bowery and his wife Nicola, a moving exploration of physical and emotional intimacy. Unknown to Freud, Bowery was, at the time, gravely ill with AIDS; such a portrait thus serves as an unwittingly poignant reminder that not only is life too short but that a life without love is not worth living.

Bowery introduced Freud to friends he thought might interest him, one of whom was Sue Tilley, also known as ‘Big Sue’, a benefits supervisor subsequently immortalised in a series of large scale, highly textured paintings. Freud found Tilley a thrilling subject worthy of painting in part due to his wish to indulge a rather peculiar ‘predilection towards people of unusual or strange proportions’. Freud depicts ‘Big Sue’ in a variety of artless poses each characterised by a sense of wilful abandon and excessive languor. Accustomed to such obsessive attention to detail it is disconcerting and I hasten to say, desperately sad to see white spaces visible in those paintings which remain unfinished. The surface of one such, ‘Portrait of the Hound’ appears disconcertingly diseased, a mass of molten, thickly paint encrusted flesh. Standing very close to the paintings, their densely worked surfaces add to the somewhat cryptic sensation one experiences of the artist’s aura, a moment in which one feels very powerfully a sense of the secret history bound up within each brushstroke. Freud is famously quoted as posing the question, ‘What do I ask of a painting?’ answering somewhat brashly, ‘I ask it to astonish, disturb, seduce, [and] convince’. Such was the credo that informed the artist’s work from the age of 20, and indeed having made my way around the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition I admit, wholeheartedly to have been astonished, disturbed, seduced and convinced of the inimitable genius inherent in Lucian Freud’s portraits.

See my original article on Who’s Jack Magazine’s website.

‘Louise Bourgeois: The Return of the Repressed’, The Freud Museum, on now until 27th May

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 17:16:00 +0100

Louise Bourgeois, Janus Fleuri (1968)

The Freud Museum hosts a select exhibition of works by Franco-American artist, Louise Bourgeois curated by literary archivist of the Bourgeois collection, Philip Larratt-Smith. The Freud Museum, 20 Maresfield Gardens, was the house where Sigmund spent the last year of his life, September 27 1938 to 23 September 1939 and the house in which his wife Martha and his sister-in-law Minna Bernays together with his youngest daughter Anna and their housemaid Paula Fichtl continued to live after his death. The house was Anna, and close friend Dorothy Burlingham’s, home until her death in 1982 and it was in accordance with her wishes that it was preserved, opening to the public in July 1986. It was not until Austria was annexed by Germany in 1938 and the Freud family began being subjected to harassment by the Nazi party that Freud reluctantly left his home of 47 years in Vienna, yet it was in England that Freud completed Moses and Monotheism and began his final unfinished work, Outline of Psychoanalysis. Freud also maintained his practice in London, receiving a number of patients at Maresfield Gardens.

Arguably more than any other artist of the twentieth century, Louise Bourgeois produced a body of work that consistently and profoundly engaged with psychoanalytic theory and practice. Louise Bourgeois was born in Paris in 1911, moving to New York in 1938 with her husband Robert Goldwater, remaining there until her death in 2010, aged 98. Bourgeois began to see psychoanalyst Dr. Leonard Cammer in 1951, the year her father died, steeping herself in psychoanalytic literature. From 1952 until his death in 1985 Bourgeois saw Dr. Henry Lowenfeld, a former disciple of Freud’s in Vienna and a prominent member of the New York Psychoanalytic Society. ‘The Return of the Repressed’ was prompted by the discovery of two boxes of writings by Bourgeois’ long-time assistant Jerry Gorovoy constituting an archive of over one thousand loose sheets which record her reactions and responses to the treatment she received over a thirty year period. These will be displayed for the first time as part of the Freud Museum’s exhibition and range from watercolour sketches, notes, dream recordings, lists and drawings.

The weather on the day of my visit to the Freud Museum is characteristically erratic, important because of the fact that Louise Bourgeois’s Spider (1994) loiters, furtive, yet momentarily defiant, in the museum’s secluded garden, situated at the rear of the house. Spider crouches on eight bent and bandy legs, her bound body exposing a single pearly white egg, indicative of impending motherhood. Bourgeois sculpted a proliferation/clutter of spiders throughout her career, often associating them, as with Maman which occupied the Tate Modern’s turbine hall in 2007, with her mother, “She was my best friend. Like a spider, my mother was a weaver… Like spiders, my mother was very clever. Spiders are friendly presences… spiders are helpful and protective, just like my mother.” I have long been an admirer of Bourgeois’s powerfully corporeal, affectively autobiographical and remarkably heterogeneous yet radically idiosyncratic work. Works on display in the Dining Room, usually containing furniture from Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham’s country cottage in Austria, include disconcerting juxtapositions of menacing metal and bloated biomorphs truncated torsos and fleshy fabric forms reminiscent of male genitalia. Untitled (2009), is particularly striking, a bulbous woollen head bulging on four sides with faces which shriek, cackle grimace and girn. In Freud’s famous Study and Library, preserved by Anna after her father’s death is suspended above his rug strewn analytic couch, Bourgeois’ Janus Fleuri (1968), a powerfully ambiguous work, part breast like, part phallic, and ‘perhaps’ in the artist’s words, ‘a self-portrait’.

On the first floor landing is placed, The Dangerous Obsession (2003) a stuffed, kneeling figure, naked and head bent, clutching a vermillion glass globe symbolic at once of blood, violence, jealousy and emotional vulnerability. On display in one of the first floor rooms is I am Afraid, 2009, an emotive piece of sewn poetry, in which Bourgeois confesses to a lifelong fear of separation and abandonment, or in other words, ‘empty stomach empty house empty bottles’. ‘The sewing’, she said ‘is my attempt to keep things together and make things whole’. Traumatised, Bourgeois is, as Freud notes, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, doomed to a compulsion to repeat painful past experiences in the present. ‘Trauma’, Cathy Caruth has postulated in Unclaimed Experience, ‘is always the story of a wound that cries out, that addresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available’. Cole argues that, the image of ‘the speaking wound…resonates in part because it returns a fundamental productivity to the sufferer, in the form of his/her urgent storytelling’. Bourgeois, through her art, through the act of creation is able to overcome the disillusioning passivity of her uncomfortable position and is able to feel actively, if feverishly, fearfully productive. The work on display in this room speaks more explicitly, more fractiously, of Bourgeois’ obsession with motherhood and includes small scale sculptural works such as, Belly, a bloated bronze (and black and polished patina) torso complete with bulbous breasts, Untitled (2005), a pale, sugar pink marble form defined by a notable bulge of buttocks and proliferation of fleshy protuberances, Le Trani Episode (1971), flaccid, fluid filled sacks cast one on top of the other in bronze, silver nitrate and gold patina, and perhaps most disturbing of all, Nature Study (1986), out of what looks like a slug worm cast emerge spindly fingers which clutch/crush a miniature headless body.

In the next door room are displayed the most aesthetically ambiguous and violently visceral works of the exhibition, seen alongside a framed selection of Bourgeois’ self-psychoanalytical musings and textual workings out. Cell XXI (Portrait), (2000) and Cell XXIV (Portrait), (2001) both depict pendulous biomorphic forms symbolic of states of ‘ambivalence and doubt’ encased within sinister steel structures. Bourgeois stated that the Cells represent “different types of pain; physical, emotional and psychological, mental and intellectual… Each Cell deals with a fear. Fear is pain… Each Cell deals with the pleasure of the voyeur, the thrill of looking and being looked at”. Two works on paper entitled The Feeding (2007) depict large, swollen breasts and the form of a baby boy, alternately sated, struggling and squealing. Bourgeois’ characteristic wet on wet application of gouache creates a bloody, saturated effect reminiscent of amniotic and other abject bodily fluids. All in all a fascinating, psychologically charged experience.

See the original and edited version of this article on Who’s Jack Magazine’s website.

Having recently visited Art Sensus’ Eve Arnold exhibition I am super excited about an exhibition of...

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 16:59:59 +0100

Having recently visited Art Sensus’ Eve Arnold exhibition I am super excited about an exhibition of photographs entitled ‘Magnum on Set’ opening on 21^st April to mark the opening of a new gallery at the London Film Museum, London SE1. The Magnum Agency founded in 1947 by Robert Capa, Henri Cartier Bresson, George Rodger and David Seymour has selected close to 150 of its most famous film images which will go on display later this month alongside original artefacts including Eve Arnold’s original Rollieflex, and Inge Morath’s Leica, not to mention a wonderful array of props, scripts and costumes.

Still to come: My thoughts on the Lucian Freud exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery

Up next…My thoughts on Louise Bourgeois, ‘Return of the Repressed’ at the Freud Museum

A great friend gave me for my Birthday recently, Camilla Morton’s Manolo Blahnik and the Tale of...

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 16:58:13 +0100

A great friend gave me for my Birthday recently, Camilla Morton’s Manolo Blahnik and the Tale of The Elves and The Shoemaker a charming fashion fairy tale memoir of high heels and happy endings complete with Blahnik’s delightful illustrations of fantastically frivolous shoes. The tale of The Elves and the Shoemaker originally by the Grimm brothers is reimagined within the context of Blahnik’s rise to fame as one of the world’s most celebrated footwear designers. An enchanting read, thank you C!

Front Cover Image of Circle: An International Survey of...

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 16:53:04 +0100

Front Cover Image of Circle: An International Survey of Constructive Art, originally published in 1937.

Ben Nicholson, (Painting) 1934

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 16:50:00 +0100

Ben Nicholson, (Painting) 1934

Ben Nicholson, White Relief, 1935

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 16:49:30 +0100

Ben Nicholson, White Relief, 1935

Piet Mondrian, Composition with Double Line and Yellow, 1932

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 16:47:29 +0100

Piet Mondrian, Composition with Double Line and Yellow, 1932

‘Mondrian and Nicholson: In Parallel’, The Courtauld Gallery, on now until 20th May 2012

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 16:46:05 +0100

The Courtauld presents a selection of works by modernist giant Piet Mondrian and great British abstract artist, Ben Nicholson in order to illustrate the creative relationship between the two that developed throughout the 1930s, culminating, at Nicholson’s suggestion, in Mondrian’s move to London in 1938, when, for a short period the city was an international centre of modernist art and experimentation. From the mid-1930s Mondrian and Nicholson were increasingly paired as leading exponents of what became known as ‘geometric abstraction’. On display is a selection of historically significant paintings and relief works, several of which were originally displayed together in pioneering exhibitions, ‘Abstract and Concrete’ at the Lefevre Gallery in London (and subsequently at St Giles Gallery in Oxford) and ‘Cubism and Abstract Art’ at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, or were produced whilst the artists occupied neighbouring studios in Hampstead. Others were published most notably in avant-garde publication Circle or were bought by Winifred, Nicholson’s first wife and Mondrian’s champion in England. Archival material, including photographs and letters offer further insights into this fascinating and fertile relationship.

Nicholson first visited Mondrian’s Paris studio in April 1934. In a letter to John Summers in January 1944 Nicholson recalled vividly his experience: ‘It was an astonishing room…with a window looking down onto thousands of railway lines emerging and converging’. Remarkably ‘his studio wasn’t white’, ‘he’d stuck on the walls different sized squares painted with primary red, blue and yellow and white and pale grey’, colours which had been built up over the 25 years of Mondrian’s residence there. ‘The paintings were entirely new to me and I did not understand them on this first visit’. Afterwards, I remember ‘sitting at a café table…for a very long time with an astonishing feeling of quiet and repose’. Nicholson, it seems obvious to suggest, is awestruck by Mondrian’s abstraction, finding his visit enlightening and intensely revelatory. He concludes with the wonderfully cryptic simile centric phrase, ‘The feeling in his studio must have been very like the feeling in one of those hermits’ caves where lions used to go to have thorns taken out of their paws’.

The visit marked the beginning of an enduring friendship lasting until Mondrian’s death ten years later, a friendship that spanned a turbulent decade of 20^th century European history ending in the outbreak of the Second World War. Mondrian and Nicholson practised Constructivist creeds in pursuance of a refined form of abstraction characterised by a precise vocabulary of colours and geometric forms. Both artists sought to offer a vision of ‘something like a new world’ at a time when alternative movements vied for prominence. They believed in the potential of abstraction to attain the highest aesthetic and spiritual power, with the balance and harmony of their compositions offering an antidote to the violent discord of the modern world.

Nicholson began to explore abstraction several years before he met Mondrian, executing his first abstract painting as early as 1924, yet he found powerful confirmation of his artistic convictions through the Dutchman’s unique, inspirational and strikingly assured example. On display at the Courtauld is Mondrian’s Composition with Double Line and Yellow (1932), bought by Winifred Nicholson in 1935, alongside Nicholson’s Six Circles (1933) and 1934 painting, a black canvas overlaid with interlocking blocks of a sophisticated blend of pale pink, purple and varying shades of grey. I find this piece intriguing and I like it very much. Also on show is Mondrian’s Composition C (No. III) With Red, Yellow and Blue, one of the artist’s first works to be exhibited in Britain (at Lefevre’s legendary ‘Abstract and Concrete’ exhibition) and the only painting of this period to combine three colours alongside Nicholson’s white relief works several of which were reproduced in Circle: An International Survey of Constructive Art published in 1937 and edited by Nicholson himself, together with architect, J.L Martin and great friend Naum Gabo. Circle was a highly influential monograph printing work by painters, sculptors, architects and writers including Arp, Duchamp, Kandinsky, Picassso, Moore, Hepworth, Giacometti, Le Corbusier, and Herbert Read and aiming to unite an international modernist movement of artists, designers and architects with an ambitious agenda to revitalise modern civilisation.

Nicholson’s white reliefs are quite remarkable, aesthetic realisations of the infinite, ‘an ideal which is complete, with no beginning, no end and therefore giving to all things for all time’. Clean, enticingly simple, precisely achieved planes of differing depths create near imperceptible shadow lines on close examination. ‘I judge paintings by the quality of light given off … In my own work, it is my only way of judging its achievement or progress’, for light, Nicholson elaborates, reveals ‘the reality underlying appearances’. Such assertive, minimalist, metaphysical statements seem imbued with a belief in utopian purity, in constructive coherence. Amongst others on display is Nicholson’s 1935 white relief, hand-carved by the artist from a mahogany table leaf bought in Camden Market. It is one of his largest and most monumental reliefs and Mondrian is known to have had a photo of it in his Paris studio.

At the same time, Mondrian was making greater use of expanses of white in combination with small squares of vibrant colour often bringing his black lines, reminiscent of the railway tracks as viewed from his apartment window, together as parallel lines, enhancing the dynamism of his compositions. Mondrian’s indubitably idiosyncratic aesthetic represented new artistic possibilities that Nicholson recognised and rendered his own in highly original and imaginative ways.

In 1938, with war seeming imminent, Nicholson sent an invitation to Mondrian enabling him to leave Paris for London. Winifred accompanied him, recalling that on the train journey to Calais Mondrian became engrossed in the passing countryside. She initially took this to be a softening of the devout city-dweller’s insistence on a geometric aesthetic, however, she soon realised he was actually transfixed by the telegraph poles when he murmured: “look how they pass, they pass, they pass, cutting the horizon here, and here, and here”. The couple were instrumental in bringing Mondrian’s work to England and in finding him other patrons among their circle of friends and associates at a time when securing sales was becoming increasingly difficult.

Once in London Mondrian was welcomed into an international community of avant-garde artists and writers living close by in Hampstead, including Henry Moore, Naum Gabo, Herbert Read, John Cecil Stephenson and Nicholson’s future wife, Barbara Hepworth, who also became a close friend. Nicholson found him a studio-cum-bed-sitting-room at 60 Parkhill Road, overlooking his own studio. Mondrian immediately set about transforming the room, “his wonderful squares of primary colours climbed up the walls”, Hepworth later recalled. Initially, Mondrian was a little overwhelmed by the vast scale of London and the deep escalators of the underground scared him but he quickly settled into London life, professing to a friend: “I’ve noticed that the change has had a good influence on my work… The artistic situation doesn’t differ greatly here from that in Paris. But one is even more ‘free’ – London is big.” He was assiduous in sampling the city’s nightlife frequenting jazz clubs with Peggy Guggenheim. Mondrian’s contentment with his new life is expressed in blithe postcards sent to his brother, Carel, several featuring one of Mondrian’s favourite films, ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’. Mondrian lived in London for almost two years working on a number of major canvases during this time. One of these was a large-scale composition that was bought by Peggy Guggenheim and is included in this exhibition.

The outbreak of war finally separated Mondrian and Nicholson who moved to New York and Cornwall respectively in 1940. Nicholson and Hepworth implored him to join them but a rural life was unimaginable to Mondrian whose conscious aversion to greenery was well known. This to me seems to represent the essential difference between the sensibilities of these two artists, while both seek to represent the infinite, Nicholson it seems has a profound attachment to the external, to nature that Mondrian by this time had rid himself of wishing to ‘transcend the tragic’ and to ‘contemplate the repose which is within all things’. Where Nicholson’s attention was focused on St. Ives, Mondrian’s was focused on lines, lines everlasting, not matched in nature and found only in the art of the city. Having settling in America he wrote to Cecil Stephenson, “I do like New York but in London I was of course more at home.” The two final works in the exhibition mark the culmination of Mondrian and Nicholson’s creative relationship. Although completed on different continents the paintings speak, the curators suggest, of the profound affinity that had developed between Mondrian and Nicholson as they worked, in parallel, over the previous decade.