ADVANCED CONTEMPORARIES

 

ADVANCED CONTEMPORARIES highlights the work of seven artists with three things in common: they’re making excellent work, are over sixty, and don’t have a gallery to represent them. That makes it, in effect, an ‘advanced version’ of the well-known Bloomberg New Contemporaries. The main point is simply to appreciate the art of Francesca Simon, Sara Rossberg, Olivier Richon, Colin Crumplin, Jane Clarke, Pauline Caulfield and Judith Burrows as a celebration of artists over 60 deserving of attention. They may be older, but they are very contemporary, making politically relevant, materially fresh and visually exciting works.

What, after all, does it mean to be Contemporary? Is it linked to youth? 'Contemporary' is defined as ‘living’ or ‘occurring in the present’. These seven artists have been occurring in the present for over forty years. A rare achievement of commitment, belief and quiet dedication, marks them as advanced contemporaries. They are artists not supported to ensure the long-term sustainability of their emerging practices, but who have made work anyway, unattended and unheralded.

That does also raise a question: is the art industry ageist? It seems harder both for older artists to establish themselves if they are ‘late starters’, and to find another gallery if their gallery closes – as will happen to many at some point. Never mind the age, feel the quality!

Installation shots by Theo Ellison:

ARTISTS

             

Judith Burrows: Undeterred by inhospitable terrain: Acer Pseudoplatanus from the series ‘Stitching the scarred Landscape’ - Steel, Organic matter, oils, lacquer, piano hinges. Four panels, each 30x125cms

Judith Burrows uses the antagonistic association of raw steel and organic elements to stand in for industry meeting nature, generating a sharply geometric fragility through controlled exposure to natural elements. Thus ‘Undeterred by inhospitable terrain: Acer Pseudoplatanus’ is a collaboration with nature inspired by ‘Landscapes of Abandonment: Life in the Post-human Landscape’ by Cal Flynn, which looks at nature’s ability to repair polluted and spoiled environments and survive through adaptation and re-invention. And Burrows sees ‘Domestication’ as challenging the anthropocentric view, giving equal status to fellow inhabitants of the planet.

 

Pauline Caulfield: Linen Throw, 2023 – H232 cm x W270 cm gathered to 200 cm

Pauline Caulfield is a textile artist who blurs the lines between art and design in, for example, wall hangings, giant fans and playing cards, architectural interventions and ecclesiastical vestments. There’s a brand-free pop tinge to how her works move between hard-edged abstraction and illusion. The exhibited ‘Linen Throw’ illustrates her playful confusion of categories: it might seem to be neither a day blanket, given its formal display on the wall; nor a painting, given its potential use by any visitor fancying a nap. Perhaps, given the Union Jack colours, it is a flag.

        

Jane Clarke: Goddess, 1995 – 98 - Painted steel, H 100 x W 78.5 x D 35cm

Jane Clarke makes steel sculptures – sometimes exuberantly polychromic, sometimes more monumentally monochrome - bringing many associations together into a distinctive visual language. She sees memory as fundamental to that, saying that ‘memory of family, everyday rituals, of engaging with the world physically, intellectually, and emotionally’ are all  instrumental building blocks for her, and that memory in turn underpins her working practice, as ‘the material of steel, forged through the process of heat, also has memory’. At the same time, her sculptures reference modernist languages and conflate overtones of weapons, machines, the female body, and landscape forms.

Colin Crumplin: Paris, 2021 - acrylic and oil paint on canvas, 64 x 82 cm

Colin Crumplin makes two part paintings that reverse the usual process of abstracting from reality by taking a chance-driven abstract starting point and then – perhaps years later – finding something figurative in reality which matches it in some way. This builds the world’s unpredictability into the process and provides a dynamic and innovative way of staging modern painting’s typical contest between form and content. Travelling from abstraction to the world, he arrives at such as flowers, volcanoes, animals and – here – a fiery anti-government protest with echoes of Delacroix’s iconic ‘Liberty Leading the People’, and his own eye with a temporary condition. 

Olivier Richon: Mound of Butter, 2016 - chromogenic print, framed, 65cm  x 82 cm

Olivier Richon investigates the artifice of representation through highly stylised and formal photographic versions of traditional tableaux, given a witty edge by the choice of caption and arrangement of the elements. He has often featured stuffed animals, apparently out of place and seeming to parody the expectation of their allegorical role. Here less animate still life items play a similarly elusive function, one that Richon has located in Baudrillard as seeking ‘to analyse an object without interpreting it’. A tension arises between the realism of the image and the attempt to impose meaning on it.

           

Sara Rossberg: There, 2023 - acrylic medium + pigment on canvas 200cm x 160cm

Sara Rossberg makes intensely material figurative paintings which represent emotional states.  She describes them as ‘exploring humanness in a broader sense’ – not setting out narratives, nor representing particular individuals, but seeking  to create an object that conveys a feeling of intensity, She likes viewers to read her uncompromising colours and textures up close, like an intimate engagement with skin. That physical presence originated fifty years ago in Rossberg’s experiments with the old master technique of layering egg tempera and oil, a process she has gradually taken to the extreme using acrylic mediums and pigment.

 

Francesca Simon: Coded, 2023 - acrylic and pencil on linen on wood, 63 x 120cm

Francesca Simon plays with repetition, reflection and patterning in geometric abstractions which act as a visual filtering of the world around her: from architectural forms – including the Crossrail building site that neighboured her former London studio – to the North Yorkshire landscape she walks through daily from her current base. She talks of looking down and seeing the ground at her feet, paying attention to the land, its tactility, its colours, its forms. That has fed into the blues and greens typical of recent work, bringing nature into dialogue with the formal rigours of constructivist painting.

 

ADVANCED CONTEMPORARIES opens Tues 16 July 18-21.00 at Somers Gallery, 96 Chalton Street, Somers Town, London (between Euston and Kings Cross stations) and runs to 3 August, Tues – Sat 12-6 (if closed, call at Flori Canto, 96 Chalton Street for access)

Artist presentation / discussion of works on Sat 27 July 15-16.00

Curatorial tours Sat 3 Aug 15-16.00

Curated by Paul Carey-Kent, Emma Cousin and Theo Ellison

TALKS 

Four of the artists explained something more of their process at talks on Saturday 27 July. For example:

Sara Rossberg explained that all her effects – from translucent layers of what looks like resin to textured impasto - are achieved with acrylic medium and pigment - often up to 20 layers.  If she doesn’t like visible results after application, she scrapes off as many layers as necessary in another intense bout of work.

Referring to his mound of butter, Olivier Richon said that he had actually seen a comparably large mound in a restaurant in Brussels: he wanted to photograph it, but it was too difficult to separate it from the background. He had to merge several normal slabs of to make a mound used in his photograph, which uses Antoine Vollon's painting 'Mound of Butter', c.1880, as a starting point.

 Judith Burrows' most striking technique is the integration of plant and steel through a printing-type process, the details of which she is still developing and is not yet ready to reveal…  Which, of course, only increased the curiosity of the audience as to how exactly she does it!

Pauline Caulfield revealed that her linen throw was not painted in a shaped form as one might have expected, but printed in a rectangular form and only then altered to achieve the simple yet striking play of real and illusory seen in the final work – ‘the simplest possible trompe l’oieil’, she said, but very complicated to achieve.

TWELVE STREETS IN SOUTHAMPTON

 

TWELVE STREETS IN SOUTHAMPTON  

 

There are plenty of bars here,

true enough,

but none of them

below road, in a cellar.

If I'm caught one more time

in Astral Weeks,

that makes sense:

Southampton’s where I heard the album first. 

The curses don’t surprise me here:

the minimal florality

is a particular

effing disgrace.

Kids from the Flowers Estate

were always said to be tough cases.

Luckily for local teachers

no roads were named for beasts of prey.

       

The closest we get to Jupiter

may be more than 400 million miles,

but that’s not very far

by the standards of deep space.

  

You thought the Nile

was a river in Africa?

You need to take account of global warming

and widespread displacement…

I spy

with my little eye

something beginning with ‘R’…

or do I mean ‘P’?

  

From here you can get

to every other street in the city.

Just as, I concede,

You can from every other street.

The city’s roads celebrate

23 other saints…

but why deny Denys the glory

as their only cephalophore?

Plenty of people

have had a street named after them

but maybe only Mary has doubled up

with a porno mag.  

 

Some joker told me

the top of this hill was known as witts end,

but - having run up it -

I wasn't laughing.

This is a good place

for a child to be father of the man:

it backs right onto the explorative potential

of St James’ Park.

 

On the Roads

I have taken the list here as defining which streets are in Southampton.

The best-known of my Southampton streets is Above Bar: right in the centre and a hub for pubs and shops. Everyone calls it ‘Above Bar’, so I was a little surprised to see that the sign actually says ‘Above Bar Street’. The term was originally applied to the district lying north of the Bargate, i.e. outside the walled city. I guess I should now get my hair cut at Above Barbers.

Cypress Avenue: In ‘Cyprus Avenue’, from Van Morrison’s 1968 masterpiece ‘Astral Weeks’, he meditates on his adolescence in Belfast, pivoting on walking up the eponymous street: ‘I'm caught one more time / Up on Cyprus Avenue’. Southampton’s equivalent is named for the tree rather than the country - but it all sounds the same in a song. Curiously, I suppose, I didn’t hear ‘Astral Weeks’ until I was in my mid-thirties, shortly after moving to the city.

Effingham Gardens in Sholing is, I suppose, named after the village near Guildford - who knows why? Aside from the unusual name, it has no distinguishing features. 

Honeysuckle Road: All the roads on this estate, built as social housing in the 1930's,  are named for flowers: Begonia, Bluebell, Carnation, Daisy, Daffodil, Honeysuckle, Iris, Laburnum, Lobelia, Lupin, Primrose, Pansy and Violet Roads. It had a bad reputation in the 1980-90’s, less so now, and it is conveniently placed right opposite Southampton University.

Jupiter Close is part of a celestially-named block of roads in Lordshill, along with Andromeda Road and Gemini, Mercury, Orion and Saturn Closes. The photograph shows the less-than-heavenly site of the themed wall paintings that introduce the estate. Jupiter is, indeed, close: about 45 light minutes from Earth.  It’s 1,344 light years to the nebula of Orion, and the Gemini stars are 2,800 light years away. Even they might be reckoned comparatively close:  Andromeda is over 2.5 million light years away - and the observable universe, doubtless only a small proportion of the whole, is some 47 billion light years across - and the universe continues to expand...  

Nile Road, along with Omdurman Road and Khartoum Road, forms an early 20th century development of three streets in Portwood, near Southampton Common - all taking their names from the history of British imperialism in Egypt. Having lived in Omdurman Road, I have often navigated Nile Road, but never in a boat. 

All I can point out about Pointout Road – a crescent in Bassett – is that it seems to be the only street in Britain so named. By way of comparison, there are about a dozen Nile Roads.

Portal Road is, in fact, an unlikely starting point: an obscure street in Totton, a no-through end to several roads leading only to housing, its sole sign largely hidden by vegetation. But it does have what might be a portal box…

St Denys Road runs down towards St Denys Railway Station: not many streets have a station named after them, given that you can hardly count ‘Station Approach’. St Denis / Denys was a 3rd century Bishop of Paris, martyred for his faith by decapitation. He is said to have picked up his head and walked several miles while preaching a sermon on repentance: carrying your own head is the action of a cephalophore.

Whitehouse Gardens: ‘Whitehouse’ was a British pornographic magazine, founded by David Sullivan, published from 1974-2008. Although evidently named as a rebuke to the anti-pornography campaigner Mary Whitehouse (1910-2001), it contained a disclaimer saying that the name had nothing to do with her. I dare say the same would have been said by whoever named the street, which is near Southampton's Western Docks.

Witts Hill is a long and suitably steep road in Bitterne. 

Wordsworth Road: ‘The Child is father of the Man’ comes from Wordsworth’s 1802 poem, ‘My Heart Leaps Up’. The six-acre greenery of St James’ Park in Shirley – from which the second image is shot - incorporates extensive play and sports facilities.

ST LEONARDS MEETS THE WORLD

 

ST LEONARDS MEETS THE WORLD

Electro Studios, St Leonards-on-Sea, East Sussex, 17-27 May 2024

Hermione Allsopp, Blue Curry; Colin Booth, Koushna Navabi; Joe Packer, Robyn Litchfield; Toby Tatum, Tereza Bušková; Geraldine Swayne, Miho Sato; Alice Walter, Kristian Evju.

Curated by Paul Carey-Kent

For ‘St Leonards meets The World’, curator Paul Carey-Kent – whose home town is St Leonards – has matched six artists based there with six UK-based artists who bring an international dimension. Pairings are founded on the idea that the works have enough in common that a conversation between them will prove interesting.  It is to be celebrated that, despite Brexit and the way Britain is run, there are still plenty of artists from across the world who are based in the UK.

Hermione Allsopp and Blue Curry (originally from the Bahamas) are sculptors who exploit how found objects encode meaning, and here those meanings relate to the nature of tourism - in two rather different coastal locations. The installations of Colin Booth and Koushna Navabi (Iran) incorporate chairs - but neither sets them up for comfortable rest, so much as an anatomisation of the world’s problems. Joe Packer and Robyn Litchfield (New Zealand) are both atmospherically bosky painters who can be read in formal or environmental terms, yet their perspectives are not so similar. Geraldine Swayne and Miho Sato (Japan) paint people – the former with highly diverse media and scale, the latter much more consistently – but both withhold enough to make the emotional tenor of their not-quite-portraits fascinatingly ambiguous. Toby Tatum and Tereza Bušková (Czech Republic) make films celebrating and elevating the everyday – in nature and in human tradition - to highlight its beauty and suggest an underlying significance. Alice Walter and Kristian Evju (Norway) both collage together disparate sources and materials to make paintings with mythic resonances, but there is – apparently - a sharp difference in the control they bring to those combinations.

Beyond those paired conversations, there are points of connection across the show as a whole. One might, for example, consider the unexpectedly rich and pointed implications the quotidian can have; the interface between ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultures, between tradition and modernity, between natural and constructed, between different nations; or the importance of materials – including the site-appropriate use of sand – all as St Leonards meets the world.

Hermione Allsopp: 'Memory Hole', 2024

Hermione Allsopp makes sculptural work by turning found objects – frequently furniture - into new forms or compositions.  These are familiar, known, domestic items that have been discarded in charity or junk shops – not, inert materials, but ones that carry collective attachments, memories and meanings. She sees that as ‘raising questions about the value and material nature of everyday objects’. That may turn a desirable item into something repulsive, or introduce questions of taste. ‘Sandhole’ uses an inflatable ring to reference the conventions of local tourism: holidaying, the beach, swimming, ice cream, sticky food - and the fact that we’re on the site of the impressive lido that stood in front of the gallery’s building from 1933-86. We might ask, though, what such rings are for: this one seems to have been rendered insufficiently buoyant to aid a swimmer or effect a rescue. It’s not much of a stretch to think of peril at sea, and then of small boats full of migrants…

Blue Curry: 'Rent-a-dread', 2010

Blue Curry grew up in The Bahamas - but came to the UK in 1997, aged 23. Since then he has been living a ‘life between islands’, bouncing back and forth, making work in both the UK and the Caribbean. He has spent time working throughout the islands and takes an interest in how the whole region is viewed and consumed. Utilising that background, he stacks up and compounds ideas of the exotic, the native and the tropical, facilitating their critical examination. He does that by combining found objects that speak of such issues. ‘Rent-a-dread’, for example, references the common occurrence in Caribbean tourism of mostly white Western tourists fulfilling certain fantasies by paying to be with a usually-dreadlocked Rastafarian-styled man to spend time with them on their vacation. The form matters, but – noting satisfying tourist expectations can be ‘like living in a deafening echo chamber of clichés and stereotypes’, Curry is interested in ‘the fantasy and the reality of the Caribbean, and how one replaces the other.’

 

Colin Booth: 'Tilt' 2024

Colin Booth combines, alters and re-contextualises found elements – of material, history and language – to form resonant new constellations of meaning. He moves things out of their utilitarian origins into a new being as objects of contemplation, and in so doing connects social and cultural aspects of past and present. His themes are often heavyweight - he has, for example, installed the shortest sentence in the Bible – ‘Jesus Wept’ – as an imposing neon sign in a socially disadvantaged neighbourhood, so relating an ancient phrase to modern conditions using current technology. Booth’s appealingly cheerful installation of sun-yellow chairs appears lighter in mood. But something is wrong with them: none is quite true, though each arrives slightly differently at its point of impending imbalance - like a comic version of one of Sol Lewitt’ s conceptual series of variations on a form. One imagines sitting and toppling. Would that be just to clown around, or is the world out of tilt? Matters could be serious, after all.

 

Koushna Navabi: 'Female Trait', 2021-24

In 2022, Tehran-born Koushna Navabi founded the campaign ‘Artists for Women Life Freedom’, giving a clue to the political charge behind how her work explores the constant rub of the familiar and domestic against the surreal and the strange. She works in mixed media with a strong emphasis on textile, embroidery and knitting to present a variety of deformed, transformed and reformed objects: a female body, dismembered and rendered from rough wood fused with a rug from home; a ring for the finger, its intimacy disrupted by a tiny political monument. ‘Female Trait’ looks like two outsized ovaries on a pair of 1950’s school chairs, complete with fallopian tube and what might be hair sprouting from follicles seen through a microscope. It combines the bodily with a disruption of the sacred, for Navabi has cut into two Persian kilim carpets, which she says is ‘sacrilegious for an Iranian: however old they are, you are supposed to mend them’.  The combination reads as a critique of the role of women being linked to reproduction, rather than education.  

Joe Packer: ‘Nashgumbrooke III’, 2020

Joe Packer grew up close to English woodland, and this experience is part of what informs his current paintings. That said, his landscapes almost give way to abstraction – he describes the idea of painting landscape as ‘an armature to hang the painting on’ rather than the primary subject. His works are dense with form and colour, and rarely feature the horizon. Consequently, they feel closed-in and subterranean, and it’s hard to judge scale: are we in the microscopic undergrowth or looking down at the patterns of a forest? Is that a tree or a leaf? That generates an ambiguity, aided by his preference for framing the paintings internally as well as externally. As Packer explains: ‘I don’t like the abruptness of the edge whereby a painting ‘just stops’, so I often break up the edge with a frame which is part of the painting yet also ends it.’ The result is a psychologically charged space in which to engage with the visible drama of how a painting is made.

               

Robyn Litchfield: ‘Canoe Cove’, 2024

Robyn Litchfield returns regularly to the South Island of her native New Zealand to find the inspiration for her atmospheric forest landscapes. Originally, she used old photographs as a source, finding that she liked how their black and white framed the world and freed up colour for her own decision-making, allowing her to develop the landscape as a ‘psychologically transcendent space that produces heightened self-awareness’ and led to the somewhat other-worldly monochromatic aura of her interpretations. Much of the unspoiled, never-logged area is fertile swamp forest, so Litchfield has to travel by kayak to find the best views. Most of the trees are Kahikatea or White Pine which grow up to 65 metres high with a lifespan of 600 years. ‘You feel’, she says, ‘in the presence of beings’.  Viewpoints are obscured much of the time, and Litchfield mimics that effect by using stencilled shapes as portals within the landscapes.  Recently, she has floated those shapes free of the backdrop to float against swirling cloudiness, as in ‘Fragment 1’.

Geraldine Swayne: ‘Girl smoking in W11’

Geraldine Swayne has worked as a special effects designer and musician, and made experimental films… all of which one might trace into the lively vibe of her paintings. They range from miniatures on glass to sweeping larger-than-life acrylics, though various types of enamel on aluminium might be her most characteristic medium: that yields a ‘glassy surface’ she likes, allowing the effect of light coming through, of material revelation rather than mere image. Are they speaking of another place?  Swayne’s sources are disparate – from her own photographs to found caches of vintage material to  pornographic magazines – but the effect tends to be filmic, as if they are stills preceding an action, or there’s something going on off-screen. The subtext, then, may be narrative or revelatory: we are invited to speculate, but matters remain mysterious. Swayne’s apparently more straightforward pictures pick up some that charge from her wider practice. What is the text that Suzanne is reading? How come the simple act of plaiting seems to be leaking into the painting’s background?  What has so drawn the smoker’s attention out of frame?

 

Mihi Sato: 'First Step', 2023 

Miho Sato trained as a graphic designer in Japan, but has been painting in London for three decades. She hoards images – mostly of people - she finds in magazines, postcards, or reproductions of other artworks. So, popular culture meets the history of painting - but once something appeals to her, all is absorbed equally into her treatment. She reworks the sources in rapid and muted acrylic, simplifying them, freeing them from any specific setting, omitting shadows, hiding any facial detail – so denying the viewer the usual point of engagement. The result is a curious combination of clarity and vagueness, as if her subjects are floating up from memory – an effect heightened when the subjects, as here, appear to be children. That yields a haunting resonance, but the emotional tenor is hard to pin down.  Is ‘First Step’ a charming reminiscence of achievement, or is the inexperienced skater about to fall? Is the washing out of detail a means of focussing on the emotional core, or is Sato criticising anonymity and blankness in modern society?

 Toby Tatum: still from ;'The Garden' 2019

Toby Tatum writes illuminatingly about his own films, so over to him on ‘The Garden’, 2019. It’s composed of ‘only two extended shots, both showing variations on a manufactured garden of outsized plants and rock formations, which are subject to a prismatic incursion of shimmering lights. The film’s title seems simply descriptive, and it does describe the film - the garden being a bordered, organised outdoors, set apart from the riotous, inhuman sprawl of nature - but it also brings to mind the Biblical garden, the prelapsarian space where the serpent lurked. Perhaps the first of the film’s two gardens might represent some sort of elevated spiritual realm whereas the succeeding space, emerging from the river of serpentine lights, suggests a more sensual realm, perhaps even a fallen world. At the time, I was making The Garden, I considered it representative of what I liked to call Psychedelic Romanticism… not only in its streams of colours, but also in its emphasising of flowers and plants and in the open-ended, ambient time-space that it occupies.’

 

Tereza Bušková: still from 'The Little Queens', 2022

Originally from Prague, Tereza Bušková came to my attention for short films made in Bohemia, presenting living tableaux - more like a linked succession of moving paintings than a story - in which traditional rituals are seamlessly merged with artistic reinterpretations and interventions with haunting, cello-heavy soundtracks. They can be taken to assert the resilience of rituals that outlasted communism. Bušková has recently made her films here, in collaboration with people.   ‘The Little Queens’ is an ancient Moravian festival: on the cusp of spring and summer, rural communities used to celebrate their daughters in order to strengthen their own connection with nature and ensure a bountiful harvest. The people of West Bromwich revisited it for a 21st Century audience. ‘Surrounded by their attendants clad in festive raiments’, explains Bušková, ‘the King and the Queen walked under an ornate canopy and gave blessings to all... The ultimate creation was a richer, more cohesive community, one that can weather the relentless waves of anti-immigration sentiment, misogyny and xenophobia.

 

Alice Water: 'Demise of Sunflower', 2024

Alice Walter builds her endearingly ramshackle paintings from small sections of sawn plywood, frayed odds and ends of previously used canvases and oddments that have fed themselves from the locality into the decidedly functional mess of her St Leonards studio. If that sounds abstract, it is – until the textures and colours suggest some sort of figuration – then she goes with that, adding in some recurring tropes, such as a ‘blockhead’ that might be a self-portrait of sorts – she likes ‘the idea of the cartoon bringing things down to earth in a humorous way’. Out of all that something of the medieval, the folksy and the surreal coheres in a peculiarly Walterish way, topped off by riddling titles. Where is the sunflower in ‘Demise of Sunflower’? Ah, of course… Then we go back and forth between the material reality, the ambiguous space and scale, and the compelling presence of her small worlds.

 

Kristian Evju tends towards the enigmatic. His characters – whether in a play or dream – are a mixed bunch, but then Evju explains that he ‘doesn’t want to know anything about’ the figures he draws from a vast range of historical archives. ‘I look at paintings like arguments about whatever I’m trying to explore’, says Evju, ‘but who knows what that is?’ Scenes and characters are inspired by found imagery, fragments of the past merged with an imaginary present. Moreover, he adds in equally mysterious patterns, such as the op-art styled bodies in the ‘Interventions’ series, and often places the figures in geometrically and materially elaborate settings – here a geometric structure of poplar, aluminium and Perspex. Yet what sounds as if it will jar is executed with manic precision, so that the implausible becomes illogically convincing. Yet that still leaves us unsure of time, place or the degree of reality - and of the mood: are these surreal japes, or dystopic dissections of the post-truth world?

 

Additional  images by Bethany Parkinson: