http://onestoparts.com/review-selected-artists-flowers-gallery
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http://onestoparts.com/review-selected-artists-flowers-gallery
Keep up with my blog – follow me on Twitter @bitesizedmary
You can also read this post on the website of the Flower Gallery
This is an exhibition of self-portraits created specifically for this show, all within the last year, either drawn or painted. Its participants take a risk. None would consider themselves a portraitist. Few would volunteer a self-portrait, bogged down as the genre is by history; tired, self-regarding, a pastime only for the masters, or simply irrelevant in the Instagram age. Choose your poison. Yet, as the show’s title and criteria imply, a contemporary take on a classic form reveals that selfies aren’t only for Facebook.
Good things come in small packages, suggests Maggi Hambling’s Untitled 2013 (Self-portrait). Thick blobs of paint both hide and reveal Hambling’s face, making it waver, ghost-like, on a pure-white canvas. As the show’s opener, it introduces the central theme; that of now-you-see-me-now-you-don’t.
Tim Lewis, with his Self Portrait (2013), manages to disappear almost entirely. He presents a steel contraption which mechanically sketches his face on the wall. This is one artist who really didn’t want to draw himself. In stark contrast, the massive linen canvas of Fear No.1 (2013), by John Keane, catches the artist with his face tense and his brow creased. Both Keane and Lewis seem to have had the same reaction to their brief, but while one found an ingenious way around his shyness, the other chose to flaunt his fear by blowing it, literally, out of all proportion.
Tai-Shan Schierenberg’s Self Portrait (2013) is an interesting counterpoint. Cigarette in mouth and chin raised, the artist asks the viewer, ‘WTF are you looking at?’ Yet his eyes don’t quite meet yours as he issues his challenge, and the crease in his brow looks familiar. Is it contempt, or is it the same fear that was on Keane’s face?
The theatrical element, the pose as performance, recurs in Peter Howson’s Self Portrait (2013). His vigorous pastels depict the artist with wild hair as outsider, madman, or seer. Whether this is as soul-exposing as it might seem, or another mask for the subject to hide behind, is up to you to decide.
Noah Becker camps it up for his close up. His Self-Portrait (2012) is smarmy with baby pink hues. The subject poses, statesman-like, in a suit and tie, with a neat parting in his grey hair, gazing nobly into the middle distance. As with most politicians, his projected image is too good to be true.
Another playful take on now-you-see-me-now-you-don’t is apparent in Jiro Osuga’s delicate Shadow (2013), where he does indeed paint himself, but decidedly undercover.
A dark laugh is added by John Kirby’s End Game (2013), which sees what we can only assume is the artist with his face covered by a white hood. A self-portrait with the self taken out of it, it becomes a commentary on the morbid nature of portraiture, which freezes a moment for eternity, while its subject continues our shared and invisible journey to the grave. Like the hood that covers the eyes of the man in front of a noose, portraits pretend that what we can’t see won’t hurt us.
The brilliant Ken Currie, whose show has just opened at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, also presents typically dark yet illuminating work. Study (self portrait with self portrait) (2012), like his Unfamiliar Refection (2006), sees Currie’s double not as his image but as his ghostly doppelgänger. It’s not his own face that haunts him, but the face of his dead father.
Jiro Osuga’s The Multitude (2013) provides a lighter close to the show. The artist presents a cityscape where every creature, from women in hijab to pigeons and squirrels, has his own face.
Amusing but ultimately eerie, this fresh work sums up the spirit of adventure that runs through this exhibition. Stranger asks us to reassess the dialogue self-portraits can open in contemporary art, and in turn, the dialogue they can open in our understanding of ourselves. Identity is a tricky thing in the modern world. Now you see it, now you don’t.
Strangers runs at Flowers Gallery, Dalston until 3st August 2013
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Since I just spent a weekend in Hungary, I can’t resist posting about what I saw there. I didn’t bother with the National Gallery, as the only contemporary artist there was Helmut Newton, and, love him as I do, I saw enough of him recently at the Newton Museum in Berlin.
The Kunsthalle is defiantly contemporary. The attendant even saw fit to warn me, wearily, of this fact before I entered, lest I confuse it with the Museum of Fine Arts opposite – clearly a mistake irate tourists had made before. Tamas Koronsenyi (1953 – 2010) is Hungarian born and bred, and here is his entire oeuvre; mainly sculptures in red, green, yellow and blue, exploring colour, surface and shape, varying in texture and size through his career.
And as you can see, it’s not bad. The earlier stuff has potential and the later stuff fulfills it. Planes and bodies become more complex, more meaningful, more loaded. Whether it entirely deserves three rooms to itself is debatable. I got the sense that there wasn’t an awful lot of choice when it came to selecting art to represent the national psyche.
The show’s eponymous piece, Art Lives!, is playful, a small square hung on the wall with a section jutting out of it, doing what it says on the tin, projecting art out of a classically flat space.
So again, not bad.
Koronseny’s work from the Seventies is displayed in a couple of side rooms, almost as an afterthought, with no discernible theme. As much as I hate to say it, this is probably the most interesting of the lot, created before he became, oh the horror, establishment-tised.
A set of female busts from indeterminate eras stand on plinths, gazing eerily at the viewer. The point where their stares converge is signposted by a black square with a round hole cut out of it, through which the viewer is invited to look, like a photographer documenting a worlds of ghosts.
On a complete tangent, Koroseny’s It’s a pleasure to drill with Black and Decker series (1981) simply displays holes he’s drilled with his Black and Decker, an amusing conceit, if nothing else.
The most illuminating part of his early work reveals the genesis of his later sculptures, the seed of his idee fixe. Can you guess what it was? I didn’t see it coming. Camouflage paint:
Altogether, an odd mix. To add to my sense of the show as a mish-mash, there was also an installation called Guns (1994). This was four massive pistols hung in the four corners of a room.
I can only assume this is by Korosenyi, as it didn’t say differently, but it’s so bizarrely out of step with the previous rooms that I was stunned. In the centre of the room was Shark (2005). In answer to Hirst’s wordy The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1994), the 14 foot tiger shark preserved in formaldehyde, Korosenyi presents a human body suspended in liquid:
Don’t worry, it’s not real. Decidedly Arabic in appearance, the body inevitably evokes the war against terror, water-boarding and Guantanamo Bay. As with Hirst’s piece, there is a visceral response to seeing it in the flesh, so to speak.
In conclusion, I don’t know what to say. I have no idea why these overtly political installations are on show alongside the more ethereal sculptures, or why Korosenyi’s ironic pieces are side-by-side with his serious work. I also visited the Kogart Gallery on the same day. They had a show entitled Analogue: 21 Hungarian Photographers from the 20th Century. If that was the best Hungarian photography has to offer, they’ve got a long way to go. Especially with Newton just down the road, shaming their socks off. I don’t want to say the same about every aspect of Hungarian art, but I’m definitely still waiting to be wowed. Maybe on my next visit…
Tamas Korosenyi – Art Lives! runs at Kunsthalle, Budapest, till 8th September 2013
Analogue: 21 Hungarian Photographers from the 20th Century
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My first thought, after traversing the two tiny rooms dedicated to this exhibition (plus small annexe for a single video work) was, ‘Is that it?’ The Saatchi Gallery is a massive space. Most of it still displays the Gaiety is The Most Outstanding Feature of The Soviet Union show that I reviewed months ago. The huge Russian show is crushingly downbeat, even if the intensity of suffering is illuminating at times. The tiny British show ambles about, tentative, uncertain and insecure.
We can believe in nothing, apparently. Rafal Zawistowski debunks religion. Her Jesus Christ and assorted Popes in melted wax and pigment are ugly, faceless icons, their halos either weak or glowing unhealthy, more radio-active than holy.
Family is out of the window. Wendy Mayer’s half-size stuffed figures in what should be comforting familial tableaux are unnerving, stuck with pins and cross-stitched at their joints as if inside out.
Don’t even think about politics. Dominic From Luton replays ‘political history as panto,’ in his Dominic From Luton As Margaret Thatcher series (2011), seeing him dressed as Maggie in a sordid environs.
Nature? Whether human or animal, it’s red in tooth and claw. Greta Alfaro’s video In Ictu Oculi (In the Blink of an Eye, 2009) stages a banquet table descended on and picked clean by a swarm of vultures. This is no Last Supper, which ends in a blessing. This is a celebration of greed that doesn’t leave a scrap of comfort behind. Did I say vultures or bankers?
Neither will technology save us. James Capper’s Ripper Teeth and Nipper (2011-2012) re-imagine industrial machinery as nightmare. The huge machine parts take on the organic but threatening forms of crabs pincers or steel teeth.
I don’t know what to make of the touch of Southern Gothic introduced by Tereza Zelenkova’s two photos, Cometes and Crocodiles (2012). Both seem to come out of a horror movie set in Louisiana via Tokyo. Other than adding to the general sense of unease, these photos are no more British than the artist’s name.
So nothing here to compare to the love-it-or-hate-it Sensation exhibition, that YBA explosion of art world lore, either in size or in scope. It’s all just a bit, meh. Perhaps the age of the contributors is relevant. With half in their twenties and the other half in their thirties, they are products of the post-Boom era. Our world is smaller and more insecure. Still, it’s all very well for these artists to dismantle whatever concepts and institutions they fancy. How about creating something instead?
New Order: British Art Today runs at the Saatchi Gallery until 29th September 2013
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As you might expect, this show is shiny. I don’t have a problem with that. I love shiny. I’m like a magpie when it comes to shiny. There were several pieces I wanted to steal and hang from my ceiling. Any exploration of light is going to prove how it can exist, visually, in three forms – solid, liquid and gas – and exist in at least three dimensions, tricking the viewer three ways to Sunday. This show does all that admirably, for the most part. But can it do more?
I must protest, briefly, at the poor staging of Anthony McCall’s You and I, Horizontal (2005). McCall is king of the large-scale, projected light sculpture. Maybe I was spoiled by seeing his sculptures in Berlin in a room that was 50ft wide and 50ft high. In comparison, the shoe-box at the Hayward, filled with sweaty people, failed to impress, and didn’t do justice to the solid forms that McCall creates.
The child-like wonder that a well-displayed light sculpture can conjure was present almost everywhere else. From the 19,500 LED lights of Leo Villareal’s Cylinder II (2012) to the single bulb of Bill Culbert’s Bulb Box Reflection II (1975), my inner infant quivered with delight. Along with everyone else, I stared at my own hands in Carlos Cruz-Diez’s Chromosaturation chambers (1965-2013), which immerse the visitor in monochrome colour, and wanted to climb up Brigette Kowanz’s Light Steps (1990/2013), a stairway that led to nothing, but looked like it should lead to heaven.
Special shout out to Jim Campbell’s Exploded View (Commuters) (2011). It’s simple in execution and also incredibly low on energy usage, one of Campbell’s signature themes (‘low resolution’). Tiny bulbs dangle from wires, seeming to twinkle randomly like an array of stars. From the right distance and angle, the viewer gets the full picture. Tiny figures are walking past, created by the lights. The commuters seem to have purpose and direction, but watch for long enough and they’re actually just on a loop. It’s a window into two mechanized worlds, one an electronic creation, and one the real life of 9-to-5-ers. Cool, huh?
Apart from Campbell, is it just lots of cleverly arranged lights? Basically, yes. I’m sorry Olafur Eliasson’s Model for a timeless garden (2011) was closed at my visit, as it’s the show’s concluding piece and might have packed a punch. Instead my last view was of Jenny Holzer’s MONUMENT (2008), a piece that only underlined what was missing from the rest of the exhibition.
MONUMENT is a semi-circular tower of rotating signs (think New York’s Time Square – she worked on its Spectacolor Board). Instead of advertising Coca-Cola, the signs feature text from declassified US government documents about the ‘war on terror.’ There are 35,000 words in total, but no matter where or when you look, you’re only seconds away from a killer phrase that tells the whole story. ‘Hit coalition forces,’ for example, or ‘Friendly fire,’ or ‘Collateral damage.’
I love Holzer’s explanation for her piece. She wants to be ‘explicit,’ she says. Wouldn’t be great if all artists were as brave? MONUMENT‘s political statement comes at the end of a show whose basic message is, ‘Light is pretty’ and ‘Aren’t artists clever?’ I’m not sorry to say that I like my art to mean something.
The Light Show runs at the Hayward until May 6th 2013
http://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whatson/light-show-69759
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I’ll keep this short and sour. As I was going around the Lichtenstein exhibition, I started taking notes, as I always do at galleries. I jot down my first impressions; the emotions, ideas and allusions that the art evokes. I have my own shorthand. S*** if I don’t like it, WOW if I do. Sometimes my notes get a little more sophisticated. But not much.
Anyway, I was doing my note-taking as I went around, and I realised I had nothing to write. The gallery’s commentary covered it all. With Lichtenstein there is no interpretation to do and, beyond a wry raise of the eyebrow, no emotion to register. Yes, the composition is amazing, and I’d sacrifice a limb (or at least a little finger) to have his grasp on it, but I think the same about most decent painters.
Isn’t it ironic and clever, his counterpoint between popular culture and high art, I hear you ask. Yes, it is, but so is a Snoopy strip. I don’t give those a second thought either. And the dots, isn’t it interesting to see such a repetitive process create individual artworks? Well, okay, it is a little interesting, but once you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. They are far from a homage to the transformative power of art.
And this is a BIG show. So there’s plenty of space to show the paucity of Lichtenstein’s vision. After room 4, which displays the massive ‘Oh Jeff, I Love You But…’ canvasses and their ilk from the 1960s – for which he is so famous – it’s all downhill. Since the hill wasn’t exactly a towering mountain of genius in the first place, it’s a short, steep fall.
Later in life he copied works by artists’ greater than himself, for no perceivable reason, then took on a series of public and corporate commissions, including the logo for Spielberg’s Dreamworks Records label in 1996.
Even he had to admit that he was ashamed to have sold out so completely, but I’m sure the cold, hard cash was a great comfort. The logo he came up with is as literal and childish as his painting above might suggest:
The last room at the Tate, showing his final work, holds pieces so forgettable and meaningless that I literally can’t be bothered to remember what they were.
I’ve been harsh, but Roy would understand. He’s become part of the artistic canon, but I’m sure, if he were alive, he’d remember the title of the Life magazine article in 1966 which asked, ‘Is He the Worst Artist in the U.S.?’ In fact, he put it best himself. Looking at his work, he said, ” I wouldn’t call it transformation; I don’t think that whatever is meant by it is important to art.” Here here, I say.
Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective runs at the Tate Modern until 27th May 2013
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Outsider art – it could go either way. Self-taught artists can produce genius or drivel, whose only saving grace is that it appears in a gallery. If you saw it out of context, you might think that a child in a bad mood had created it. Luckily the curators of Souzan, a word that means something between creation and imagination, have steered clear of that cliché. This five-part exhibition may well take you on at least the start of an intriguing tour around the edges of Japan’s artistic psyche.
There is some so-so stuff. The Language section of the exhibition (unfortunately the first section as you enter) consists mainly of Japanese characters scrawled in different ways and in different sizes by different artists. Really, who cares.
The Representation section holds, among some dross, some hidden gems. M.K’s Lady with Rainbow-Coloured Hair (2009) displays a lightness of touch and a humour that I didn’t expect to find in the ever-so-serious-sounding category of Japanese outsider art.
The text beside the fraught lady repeats the endless tirade airplane passengers must endure over the PA system (fasten your seat-belt, no smoking, get the food service now, fasten your seat-belt, etc) . I know exactly how she feels.
The Relationship section, as expected, involves a lot of sex. From Nobuji Higa’s stylised nudes, fleshy and distorted, to Sakiko Kono’s stuffed dolls, representing people who have been kind to her during her 55 years at one residential facility, you’ll find plenty to think about.
Marie Suzuki’s portrayals of sex, procreation and gender (below) are dripping with phobias of the psyche. Technically brilliant but deeply disturbing, don’t expect to see them in the flesh and walk away unscathed.
The Culture section isn’t worth mentioning, unless a ten foot map of an imaginary city scrawled in Biro is your idea of artistic brilliance. And if it is, fair play; it would be mine too if there was anything interesting included in it.
The tour de force of the exhibition was the Making section. Here creation and imagination go wild. Noriko Tanaka presents a lovely exploration of colour, aptly titles Five Colours and Other Colours. Tanaka’s hand-stitched tapestries woven from the three primary colours, plus black and white, create a shimmering rainbow that holds inside itself other, unnamed hues.
Akane Kimura creates paintings that apparently reference music, but I just enjoyed his rich palette and – dare I say it – was reminded of Rothko.
The WOW factor, the art I’d crawl over ground glass to see, was Shota Katsube’s Untitled (2011). 300 tiny figures, made out of the glittering ties that are used to close garbage bags in Japan, are displayed in a glass case, like so many gems. And intricate gems they are, each one painstakingly frozen in a pose or a tableaux. The figures reference the action heroes of American comic books – Marvel, D.C and the rest – themselves now assimilated into popular Japanese culture, as well as the traditional samurai.
These figures have to be seen to be believed. They are complete with individual weapons; swords, spears, lighting rods and rings of fire, as well as individually sculpted armour and their own personal arsenals of super-weaponised limbs. You could spend an hour studying them all, experiencing fresh discovery.
Make of them what you will. I loved the concept of American heroes recreated from rubbish material and reduced to a fraction of their size, before being displayed in a gallery like frozen artifacts of a bygone era; American artifacts that don’t realise they are frozen and that all their power is gone. A pleasant fantasy for a future world. But that’s just my take.
So all in all, some outsider art that is pretty far out there. Much further out there than I expected and much prettier too. Enjoy.
http://www.wellcomecollection.org/whats-on/exhibitions/japanese-outsider-art.aspx
Souzou runs until 30th June 2013
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To match its slightly dry title I was expecting this exhibition to show slightly dry photographic collages of the sort that have been out of fashion for quite sometime; the usual suspects were present, but I also discovered an artist so far ahead of the collage genre that she will be eternally chic.
I won’t detail the dross. Suffice to say that Jan Svoboda’s 70’s pieces, flat surfaces decorated with torn up scraps of paper, reek of flares and wide lapels, while
Roy Arden’s small-scale return to collage in 2007 is none the better the second time around.
C.K Rajan’s delicate and surreal India-based images are more subtle and thought-provoking than Arden’s hammer-to-the-head approach, and Anna Parkina presents an avant garde sensibility in densely layered compositions that spin the viewer’s head around.
The exhibition’s centrepiece is Laura Letinsky’s large still life series Ill Form and Void Full (2010-11). These photographs are brilliant. If I say they are influenced by 17th century Renaissance painting, don’t be put off – except for a nugget of old-school inspiration, Letinsky’s work is relentlessly contemporary, using a wide lens to make us question the very process of seeing.
Her subjects are the aftermaths of meals (squashed fruit and spilled wine on stained tablecloths) but here the Renaissance reference ends. Rather than offering the omniscient view beloved of traditional photography, where the viewer apprehends all in one take, Letinsky uses collage to twist perspective until the viewer is no longer sure what is up and what is down, what is a flat plane and what is three dimensional. To do this she uses a combination of real objects and magazine cut-outs, each photo shot from a particular angle in her studio; only from a single unique angle can they look as they do. Does art get any more post-modern than this? She shows us that the camera creates its own truth.
I’m speechless. A photo of a photo can’t convey the wonder, but I hope you’re smart enough to go and catch this genius in the flesh.
Perspectives On Collage runs @ The Photographers’ Gallery until 7th April 2013
http://thephotographersgallery.org.uk/exhibitions-6
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