ING DISCERNING EYE 2024: PAUL CAREY-KENT’S NOTES ON HIS CHOSEN ARTISTS
On view at the Mall Galleries, London
Admission free
Friday 15 - Saturday 23 November, 10am - 5pm, Sunday 24, 10am - 1pm
I am one of six selectors for this year's show...
When I’m attracted to art it typically operates like this:
something draws me in visually; it turns out that there’s an idea involved;
that proves interesting; and the combination of form and idea isn’t something
I’ve seen in quite that way before. That ought, in turn, to mean that the work
is worth writing about. The works I’ve chosen are a mixture of artists I’ve
invited (about whom I tend to have written before) and anonymously chosen open
call selections (most of whom I haven’t written about previously). Either way,
I’m setting out to provide some 50 words on each of my chosen works - both to
test my own instincts and to give viewers one possible way in. Looking across
my 120-odd choices from some 55 artists, I believe they demonstrate the
substance I seek. Yet most of the artists don’t have a gallery to represent
them: evidence both of the current depth of artistic ability, and of why it
isn’t easy to make a living through art. So I hope both that visitors enjoy the
work, and that the artists sell as well as they deserve!
Talar Aghbashian
Untitled / Huggling statues, 2024 (+3)
Born in Beirut of West Armenian descent and now based in London,
Talar Aghbashian is a painter who explores the human relationship to the landscape,
and the projection of one onto the other. Her large paintings use layering to
muddle our understanding of what is and isn’t present now, and what might or
might not have been present before – consistent with wondering what has
occurred in a psychologically charged place – and context is often a site of
conflict. Landscape, body and still life become conflated. These smaller works
achieve related effects more simply. Are those really huggling statues, or is
that just a pareidolian interpretation of mountains? And do statues anyway have
the agency to hug? Is that a horse’s
tail, or a flow of water suggesting it? Are we looking at natural formations or
human constructions in the untitled works?
Emma Alcock
Rectangle with Line II, 2017
Emma Alcock’s meditative painting generates its quiet presence
through the patient application of veils of paint to form what seem on the one
hand like hovering abstractions, on the other possible shorthand for everyday
objects. Might ‘Rectangle with Line II’ show a straight vase on one of two
table tops in skewed perspective? Even taking it literally, we might wonder
what the line is – if the vertical, isn’t that more a slim rectangle? If the horizontal, why isn’t it ‘rectangles’
plural?
Nibras
Al-Salman
Fading Colours, 2023
What is this pile of ceramic and stoneware? The aftermath of a
collapse? Perhaps, but surely there is more than plausible underlying order to
the sequencing of black and white elements. Nibras Al-Salman came here from
Iraq, and says that ‘Fading Colours’ explores the fragile and fragmented memory
of a culture from which he has been physically distant for several decades.
That’s why the porcelain sheets, imprinted with a pattern inspired by Middle
Eastern abstract geometric art, are fragmented and incomplete, as memories
become.
Richard Baker
Sideboard 3, 2024 (+1)
I like a nice ‘figuration works as abstraction’ moment,
and Richard Baker delivers that in ‘Sideboard 3’ and ‘Unit 5’. He characterises
them as part of ‘an investigation into the hidden human histories behind seemingly
insignificant objects. Often ignored, they bear witness to sensuous activity,
be it remembered, lived, forgotten, or mythologised. In these modestly scaled
works, the depicted objects are presented dislocated from their conventional
domestic settings and isolated within an intangible space.’ At the same time, if these were pure
abstractions, we might look to Donald Judd and Piet Mondrian respectively.
Ingrid Berthon-Moine
Ingrid Berthon-Moine works in drawing, sculpture and
installation to explore the physical and cultural dimensions of the human body.
Taking inspiration from diverse sources such as language, psychoanalysis, and
feminism, she weaves personal narratives into her work, challenging
conventional understandings of such human experiences as sex, illness, and
death. Here she shows what might be called drawings, but with added sculptural
elements. They make for a double playfulness: in the use of materials, and in
how they address such tropes of sexuality as the oyster as aphrodisiac and the
surrealist equation between nipples and eyes. What’s the difference between
pushing a button and teasing a pompon? More seriously, as she says, her hybrid,
manifold subjects ‘signal new subjectivities, hierarchies and anatomies’.
Samantha
Beck
Harvest Moon, 2022
Inspired by the sea-battered steel
groynes on Southwick beach, the Brighton-based artist Samantha Beck draws with
rust. Her title, ‘Harvest Moon’, doesn’t just operate visually, but takes us
back to the tidal source – and, specifically, to the autumnal equinox, when the
full moon rises above the horizon much faster than usual.
G R Biermann
snow+concrete 14, 2022
German-born conceptual artist G
Roland Biermann works across multiple media, often focussing on transformation.
That presaged by the sculpturally presented photograph ‘snow+concrete 14’, as
we assume the snow will melt. Perhaps there’s an implication that we will be
stranded on an unsustainable ‘concrete island’ (to borrow from JG Ballard) once
global warming has run its course.
Day Bowman
Flood and Ebb 3, 2023 (+1)
Growing up in a small, West-Country seaside town, says Day Bowman, ‘it is not surprising that much of my work has referenced the sea, the beach and littoral and, from an early age, I was acutely aware of the life of the seasons with the tsunami of summer visitors followed by the closed-up, out-of-season, winter months.’ She often echoes the marks, lines and shapes that children make on the beach, so that ‘the canvas becomes the beach that acted as the large- scale canvas of my childhood.’ Here ‘Flood and Ebb’ points towards the tides that play such a central role in that experience, while ‘Storage Facility 2’ reminds us of the infrastructure off-season.
Simona Brinkmann
Simona Brinkmann is a sculptor who
takes a feminist perspective on power structures, particularly as those power
structure are built into architecture. So, when I asked her to make sculptures
to go on plinths – not her usual style of presentation - I might have expected
that she would undermine the historical expectations of how that should
operate. Just so, instead of classical figures securely centred, we find
jumbled oddments that seem too big for their plinth; eccentrically position
themselves half-on, half-off; or even seem about to topple off completely.
True, they include marble, but it’s rough-edged and dirty, reminding her of the
municipal marble one finds in public spaces (walkways, monuments, and
especially street name signs) from her time living in Rome and Milan.
Collectively, they are the 'Cinch' series, Brinkmann explains, ‘as all the
pieces feel to me like they have a relationship to the idea of the cinched body
and an idea of architecture as enclosure’. As for what’s on the plinths, we
might sense the body in space, but hemmed in, having to fit with restrictions –
as well as being placed in a position of some precarity. Eccentric materials
reinforce that: an orthopaedic corset, rubber car mats, stirrups. Yet what also
emerges – it comes across as another surprise – is sculptural coherence.
Aisha Bridgman
Representation meets abstraction
in the imagined landscapes of Aisha Bridgman’s lush acrylic paintings. She
aptly describes her current series as ‘moon-soaked’, capturing their almost
paradoxical combination of clarity and mystery, stillness and implied action:
is someone about to look up that periscope, and at what? Is that a diving board
under the night lights? If so, will there be a diver? Bridgman says her
intention ‘is for the viewer to escape into and explore these otherworldly
landscapes, with their linear structures and off-kilter habitats’, and I seem
to have done just that…
Broughton & Birnie
Navigator, 2024
A giant treads the
land, but gently, insubstantially, suggesting how matters ought to be navigated
from a position of power. Kevin Broughton and Fiona Birnie make their paintings
together: simultaneously on large works, or by taking turns on smaller works –
such as this – hung on the same wall. They don’t consult, but aim to surprise
each other: I wonder who came back to discover the other had added the legs to
‘Navigator’?
Judith Burrows
A Small Re-wilding_undeterred by inhospitable terrain, 2024 (+1)
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 – she has her own way of ‘printing’ from
plants onto steel. She is inspired by Cal Flynn’s book ‘Landscapes of
Abandonment: Life in the Post-human Landscape’, which looks at nature’s ability
to repair polluted and spoiled environments and survive through adaptation and
re-invention.
See Samantha Beck for artist shot.
Tracey Bush
In ‘Lost Wings of Summer’, Tracey
Bush presents 24 butterflies in an entomology case. It’s a natural history
collection with a difference - a requiem for thirteen British species, five
extinct, and eight on the endangered red list. Their colours have disappeared
in advance of their full disappearance. Moreover, says Bush, ‘butterflies are
amongst the first indicators of environmental change; these collections hope to
highlight their frailty and diversity, as an alternative to a collection of
actual specimens.’
Rebecca Byrne
‘I spend so much time making these
pastels’, says London-based American Rebecca Byrne, ‘erasing them back to the
ground, starting again, and layering up marks and colours. Up close, they look
like abstract gestures – one day that may just take over everything’. Here the
marks still cohere clearly enough into trees, writhing with a hint of Van Gogh.
If they look as if they could be beings with agency, that fits, as Byrne was
reading modern takes on ancient Norse mythology while making this series, and the
trees are the setting for the supernatural. She explains that ‘The Well of Urd
is next to the trunk of the tree Yggdrasil. Urd is one of the Norns who live
under the tree’s roots. Norns are goddesses of destiny and there are three:
Urd, Verdandi and Skuld – legend has it that they are present at every child’s
birth and determine the baby’s fate from day one.’
Jay Cee
Alice, That Look, 2024 (+1)
Whoever lies behind the somewhat
enigmatic initial name ‘Jay Cee’ has a persuasive way of setting painterly
portraits into striking colour schemes animated by irruptions with an abstract
quality. Alice, giving ‘that look’, is bisected by a doubly-triangular back
drop with a surprise incursion from a smaller triangle. Does the title
‘Scarlet’ name the second model, or refer to how the chair’s redness has spread
to the wall to give her a halo of sorts? Either way, she conveys a quieter
personality.
Simon Chalmers
Greenhouse, Uploders Cemetery Allotment, Dorset, 2024
Simon Chalmers makes what one
might call photographic models, wittily confusing the distinction between 2D
and 3D - so this isn’t so much a group of photographs of a greenhouse, as a
stage set made from photographs. Chalmers sees his range of such models as
‘three-dimensional moments, caught and preserved like solid memories forming a
kind of geographical diary’.
Thomas Clare
I couldn't, 2023
William Cobbing
Still from
William
Cobbing foregrounds clay performatively, exploiting its clagginess more
radically than by making ceramics - most often by masking his protagonists –
here himself - to striking, absurd and psychologically ambiguous effect. In
‘Will.ni.naiz’ (that’s ‘Will, I am’, but in Basque) the slapstick energy lands
somewhere between attractive and repulsive, funny and disturbing... Is
mutilation occurring, or is this a more benign revelation of the self?
Malcolm Crocker
Stages of Change, 2024 (+3)
Imagine
a science fictional world in which we don’t build houses, we simply trigger
their growth as if they came into being organically. That’s the impression
given by Malcolm Crocker’s architectural landscapes, speculating on where the
Anthropocene might take us. He says he is interested in
how 'patterns of change, destruction, renewal, evolution, life and death are
written into the geology and archaeology of our planet'. Perhaps his
sci-fi-surreal cityscapes also reflect a little of his background in
town planning which, unusually, preceded attendance at art college when he
retired. But the practical realities of granting permissions are no
restriction on his irreal fantasies, which soar above the clouds or flatten
down into aerial abstraction with no limits other than the imagination's. Perhaps
they are landscapes of the mind? The ‘Stages of Change’ pair suggest that the building
process may be ongoing, while the triangular ‘Sky Machines’ place the viewer
at an unusual speculative angle.
Theo Ellison
Theo Ellison’s
film features a fire one could plausibly call apocalyptic, but for just the four
factors: it’s only an artichoke burning; the flames have no destructive effect
on the flesh of the vegetable; floating in the air, it is evidently a digital
construct; and the title ‘Trinket’ is far from cataclysmic. That all fits with
Ellison’s interest in employing the tropes of the romantic sublime in a modern,
knowingly distanced, manner by setting it on a collision course with decidedly
un-romantic digital processes. All the same, there is a certain beauty…
Bella Easton
Bitten by Witch Fever 3, 2021
Bella Easton’s practice is founded
in drawing, typically homing in on domestic details. Renovating her Victorian
house in South-East London, she found a section of wall with the ghostly
remains of a design that had seeped into the original plaster. She developed,
replicated and reflected on this to generate an intensely gradated fabrication
of the multiple relationships and contradictions between natural and
artificial, open and closed, uncanny and familiar. The squares we see are
lithographic prints each pressed twice onto paper-thin porcelain, in slightly
different registrations, to form a version of the modernist grid. The
Rorschach-like result is a coming-together that may look like one complete
view, but is actually a doubling of two halves. The title ‘Bitten by Witch Fever’ refers to the
arsenic found in 19th century wallpapers: William Morris described the doctors
who attributed poisoning to his businesses as ‘bitten by witch fever’, wrongly
insinuating that they were quacks – though he later accepted the case for
arsenic-free papers.
Nogah Engler
Nogah Engler’s investigation of
landscape starts from a particular point of ambivalence - an ongoing
investigation of collective and personal memory related to her family, who
lived in the Carpathian Mountains in the Ukraine. All except her father - who
survived the Holocaust - were murdered during World War II. She has returned to
Ukraine a number of times, and explains that ‘going back to that crime scene
with its sublimely beautiful landscapes highlighted the paradox of the beauty
against the bloody history of the place ‘– the more so as the locals were
‘extraordinarily friendly… How could the parents and grandparents of these
people have been so cruel? What was the turning point? What is the thin veneer
of culture? The place turned into a microcosm for me; a kind of laboratory
where I could ask difficult questions about human morality in a way that was
not time or place specific.’ Such questions are not on the surface of her
paintings here, but knowing they are there explains their fragmentary nature –
and, of course, they have an added resonance in our current age of
incomprehensible aggressions.
Ben Fenton
Hearts and Thoughts No. 1 (The Observer Building, Hastings), 2024
South coast
painter Ben Fenton is known for his distinctive depictions of brutalist
architecture from the 60’s, with titles pointing to psychological undertones.
Here he turns to an abandoned interior which now acts as an occasional art space
– and it’s something of a personal choice, as I grew up with the Hastings &
St Leonards Observer as my local paper. These days the paper is printed in
Portsmouth, and the still-empty offices have hosted several art shows.
Archie Franks
City of Plymouth waltzer, 2022 (+1)
Archie Franks’ subject is the
intersection of consumerism, leisure and Britishness. He tackles those with an
awareness of the more poisonous and divisive aspects of national identity – as
found an outlet in Brexit – but also an understanding of their nostalgic
appeal. Here, then, we have a fairground ride, exciting by the standards of the
pre-digital childhood experience; and a view of the archetypal English sport of
cricket, based on his regular sourcebook of ‘chocolate box’ views, ‘Remarkable
Village Cricket Grounds’. Moments of transcendence in the gloom.
Abi Freckleton
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Brightly Feeds, 2023
Abi
Freckleton’s ceramics find a novel way to channel the modernist tradition of
repurposing the discarded. In general, as she puts it ‘Both material and
photographic samples are excavated, broken down and then recombined along with
clay, glaze, glass, paper and other components. Aggregated together and allowed
to flow, these gatherings of matter take on their own new forms…. What past
lives, meanings and memories are carried through time within these
transitions?’ The works are rooted in specific experiences, which led her to
write poems – I don’t have room here – that lead her into the sculptural work.
She explains that Brightly feeds and Just sprung ground ‘are made
in response to a moment in a forest in Bedfordshire and incorporate found
puddle mud, photographs, footprints and remembered colours from that moment’.
Last rays hang tight ‘was made in response to looking at the twilight sky.
The feeling of being connected across hundreds of miles to beings for whom the
night has not yet come’. And They lingered as softened holes ‘takes its
title from the text documentation of a performative work made on a beach in
Australia, at dawn.’
Rosie Gibbens
Rosie Gibbens makes performances, videos and sculptures that
feature her own body in various ways as a means of magnifying the absurdities
of contemporary life, saying that ‘I often approach my work as an alien visitor
attempting to participate seamlessly in contemporary life, but not quite
managing’. She is particularly interested in gender performativity, sexual
politics, consumer desire and the slippery overlaps between these. Here we see
a collections of her ‘micro-performances – perverse interpretations of everyday
actions that somehow muddle up the categories between, for example, housework
and self-presentation and wellness. They serve both to amuse with their
unexpectedness and also to suggest that what we regard as normal might also
have its ridiculous side. Do we really question conventions?
Alastair Gordon
Prayer Match, 2020
Three matches taped to a board?
No, but close examination is needed to clock this as a hyperreal painting –
Alastair Gordon is a particularly dab hand at painting illusionistic tape, as
he often does. That trick then gives way to considering the pattern of the wood
grain, and how it might relate to the preceding smoke. Then back to the
decision to depict three matches:
burned-out individuals or a Holy Trinity of sorts?
Tom Hackney
In 1923, Marcel
Duchamp announced – though not quite truly - that he had given up art in favour
of chess, which he pursued to an international standard. Chess, like art, can
be considered in terms of retinal and non-retinal characteristics: the physical
placement of the pieces, says Tom Hackney, represents the thought-space shared
between opponents. That lies behind paintings which convert the moves from
Duchamp’s games into visual form, so undermining the great prankster’s
self-proclaimed switch from art to chess by turning his chess back into art.
Hackney paints, in sequence, the path of each move, so that where some linen
squares remain unpainted as they were not on any such path, others build up
multiple layers to semi-sculptural effect. They are not always black and white:
the Fleisher game applies an idea of Duchamp’s for a set in which different
pieces had different colours. Result: a clever way to arrive at abstract forms
while outsourcing the decisions required. Duchamp would have liked that.
Habib Hajallie
Rosalind Franklin, 2024
Habib Hajallie creates ballpoint
pen drawings that look to champion – from the perspective of his Sierra Leonean
and Lebanese heritage - figures from ethnically diverse backgrounds that have
conspicuously been omitted from traditional British portraiture. Here his focus
is slightly different: Rosalind Franklin (1920-58) was a pioneering female
scientist at a time when that was not widely expected: the background text
makes the comparison with the tale of how a rooster was put on trial in 15th century
Basel in for ‘the heinous and unnatural crime of laying an egg’.
Berthram Hall
It is no surprise
that Berthram Hall - furniture maker by day, sculptor by night – works
masterfully with wood. ‘Gamete’ - portraying a sperm on one side, and an
embryonic egg on the other - dances its form into life. The space where those
male and female gametes meet is left empty with possibility. Hall’s parents
arrived here from Ireland and the Caribbean, and he sees ‘Passing Through’ as
representing the migratory journeys preceding the moment of his own conception
– as well as how we all pass through ‘sliding doors’ moments, the possibilities
that determine the direction of our lives.
Roxana Halls
Observing how often women
subconsciously exercise self-surveillance, so deeply is female self-control
embedded into cultural expectations, Roxana Halls likes to depict women
enjoying behaving ‘badly’. That includes them laughing in situations where you
wouldn’t expect it: eating, climbing, after a plane crash… She cites writer
Hélène Cixous and her reading of the story of the Chinese general Sun Tse, who decapitated
a group of women he was trying to train as soldiers, so disconcerted was he by
the persistent laughter with which they responded to his orders. Here the
laughter is presented plain, but with a further subversion of expectations in
the rather radical lipstick.
Roland Hicks
Shady Three-Bit, 2023
In recent years Roland Hicks has
used gouache, paper and coloured pencil to refashion and scrupulously reproduce
the texture of plywood and Oriented Strand Board (OSB), so that first we are
deceived, and then surprised by such an investment of time and effort in what look like discarded offcuts. He sees
them as ‘trompe l’oeil still life paintings of fictional artworks’. It’s only
at the level of finely graduated detail that we can tell what has been done.
Here Hicks seems to be presenting found objects as if they were still life
paintings - in the manner of, say, Daniel Spoerri - when actually the objects
are themselves the painting. Hicks is interested, he says, in the question of
‘at what point something starts to look like an artwork, and what is deliberate
and what accidental in that’.
Rosalind
Hobley
Dahlia IX, 2024
Rosalind Hobley describes herself as ‘an artist making prints inspired by sculptural forms’, and that’s exactly what she delivers rather beautifully through a modern twist on one of the earliest photographic methods, the cyanotype. Hobley works photographically with a camera and photographic lighting to make a large format negative that brings out the form of the flowers. This is placed on paper coated with a solution of iron salts, exposed to light, and then washed with water. The darker parts of the image turn a deep Prussian blue. It’s a nice update to the most famous cyanotypes in art history: the plants captured so graphically by Anna Atkins in the 1840’s.
Rebecca Holton
Not just Rebecca Holton with 'Stephanie's Back', but my wife, Stephanie!
Stephanie’s Back, 2024
Rebecca Holton is a classically-trained
realist painter who concentrates on observational figurative work and portraits,
with a flourishing commission practice. She also makes sensitive nude studies,
usually from life, but in this case from a photographic source. The title
‘Stephanie’s Back’ drew me in a little more, as my wife is also a Stephanie –
though this is Holton’s interpretation of an image of a professional model you
can find on Instagram @stephanie_herself.
Jeremy
Hutchison’s short film reverses the troubling second-hand supply chain
that sees some 24bn charity-gifted garments shipped abroad annually, most to
Africa. 40% end up on mountains of landfill - in Ghana, they are known as
‘obroni wawu’, Dead White Men’s Clothes. Hutchison, wearing
sculptures made from second-hand clothes sourced in West Africa, becomes a
spectre of waste colonialism as he wanders Dakar. Shipped back to the United
Kingdom, he then haunts the shopping malls, textile recycling plants and
corporate HQs of fast fashion brands. In the process, he performs his own
entanglement with the network of processes that sustain the second-hand
clothing industry, contesting its claims to charity and
sustainability, presenting it instead as a form of zombie
imperialism. This impactful film is shown with a totem-like sculpture made
from the same material: a miniature effigy of the Dead White Man.
Phil Illingworth
‘I don’t mind if they make people
smile’, says Phil Illingworth of his paintings, ‘but I don’t want them to look
comical’. Hang on, you might say, are they paintings? True, there’s no canvas
involved, and not a lot of paint. Yet Illingworth’s concerns are painterly –
indeed, he is on the committee of the artist group ‘Contemporary British
Painting’. Yet he likes to explore the language of painting in a wittily
experimental and three dimensional way. ‘Psychophant V’ is the most extreme
example. It looks somewhat like a rack to hang things on, even as its own
hanging is a prominent feature. It does, though, nod to the history, from
Seurat to Hirst, of using coloured dots in painting. The title – a made-up
word, I assume – suggests a sycophant who is manically keen to please – perhaps
Illingworth is poking fun at his own choice of attractive colours. A ‘Gnossienne’
– he does like a playful title – is a freeform piano composition by Erik
Satie. That suggests that we might read those squiggles of paint as musical
notation on a score – though followers of recent painting will also be reminded
of Jonathan Lasker. We’re drawn into speculation, but these works are
essentially abstract, as well as essentially paintings. They are, you might
say, signs that do not signify.
Louise Ørsted Jensen
Pretender 2, 2024 (+1)
UK-based Danish artist Louise
Ørsted Jensen works across performance, video and installation - as well as
painting - to engage with notions of transgression, piracy and surveillance,
and confesses a deep fascination with explosions. That makes this a
comparatively quiet pair of works, any explosions being limited to the musical
type implied. And even those are wittily silenced: the drummer has the dramatic
pose and flailing hair off pat – but does seem to lack the drums…
Liane Lang
Sculpture meets photography in the
work of Liane Lang. Here she shows
prints made onto agate and onyx – typical of her way of using materials with
their own distinct chronologies to enact the experience of engaging with the
historically layered landscapes, with how what’s visible now evokes multiple
pasts. 15m years old would be young by the standards of agate. And from what
time do the figures evoked come? Lang complicates that question by sometimes
using wax models for her photographs. We end up, as one title has it, in a
‘Deep Time Dip’ that speaks to the comparative fleetingness of human life on
earth, and how soon - by agate’s timescale – we have made our future
problematic. And where do such thoughts about time occur? In the present, in
the personal time of viewers, in the future memory of their experiences. When
we look at Lang’s work we are in time – where else can we live? – thinking
about ourselves in time.
Yeside Linney
Regeneration, 2024
We’re all familiar with the
sculptural portrait bust, and with the painted portrait. But why paint a
portrait of a sculptural bust? The answer lies in the subtly vegetal details of
the face’s features: this is a head as if planted separately in soil. Why so?
The title is ‘Regeneration’, and Yeside Linney says: ‘I often use nature as the
connection with my Nigerian past’. Say 'Ye-see-dee', by the way. An African heritage takes fresh root in
British soil. Linney explains that she is addressing her ‘double consciousness’
(Du Bois’ term for the struggle of Africans to remain true to black culture
while faced by the demands of a predominantly white society, such that they
‘feel their two-ness’). She also points out that the classical portrait bust
was rarely used to depict women, let alone black women; and that the hair as
grass in ‘protective’ Bantu knots refers both to the lawn’s history as a status
symbol for the elite, and to how natural Afro hair has often been perceived
negatively.
Dongqi Luo
Tangled, 2024
Dongqi
Luo is a weaver who recently graduated in textile design at the University of
Creative Arts. ‘Tangled’ is a silk yarn construction which, for all the complex
interpenetration of threads, has enough discipline to make the title somewhat
ironic. And it references abstract painting in a style that makes it a nice
complement to Christina Niederberger’s work.
Christopher Madden
Overthrowing the Oppressor, 2023
I’m not surprised that ‘Overthrowing
the Oppressor’ was made by an artist who is also a cartoonist. Yet, as
Christopher Madden himself says, it isn’t so simple. Were the nails hammered in
by another hammer? In that case the nails are not a metaphor for the oppressed
rising up against their oppressor, but are more like the followers of another
power (another hammer?) that may turn out to be as oppressive as the hammer
that they’ve empaled. And it has art chops, calling to mind Man Ray’s iron with
nails (‘The Gift’, 1921), Yoko Ono’s ‘Painting to Hammer a Nail’, 1961, and the
whole nail-driven oeuvre of Gunther Uecker, not to mention African fetishes.
Joanne Makin
Selfie, 2024
The twist in ‘Selfie’ is that it
isn’t a selfie, but a painting of the artist – I assume – makin’ a selfie. That
suggests that someone else took a photograph – also a non-selfie, then – from
which Joanne Makin made her attractively blurred image. And that effect makes us
wonder if it’s a painterly decision, or reflects badly on the technical ability
of the photographer of the source image…
Henrietta McPhee
Tuk Tuk, 2024
Henrietta McPhee makes ‘ceramic
paintings’ as part of a wider practise, centred in clay. She likes to play between 2D and 3D, and I
imagine there’s a related appeal to the tuk tuk, a three-wheeled
rickshaw-vehicle that doesn’t quite come down on the side of bicycle or van.
This one, in a joyous extra absurdity, seems to be filled with balloons to the
exclusion of any space for the driver.
Nadège Mériau
April (Cropped Series), 2021 (+3)
London-based French artist Nadège Mériau shows three images from her lockdown series ‘Cropped’. We see her hands holding vegetables. Careful examination reveals that these are not photographs but scans, in the course of which Mériau has moved the vegetables to provoke analogue distortions which add a painterly touch, while reading as digital glitches - and also suggesting the presence of water. The frame of the scanner acts as the limit, cropping the crops. Mériau grew the food herself, and consumed it twice – first through a bodily performance and then putting it into her body. ‘Cropped’ foregrounds caring, but there is also an almost religious treatment of radishes and potatoes as improbable icons. Mériau complements that with a new film. ‘Slow Rushes’ refers playfully to film rushes — raw, unedited footage — and the ironic contrast of filming snails during rush hour. She explains that ‘while hurrying to work, I suddenly noticed snails crawling across the pavement, and found myself having to slow down to avoid stepping on them. I crouched down to observe them more closely and became mesmerized by their deliberate, unhurried journeys. Needless to say, I was late for work!’
Christina Niederberger
Anges' Hanky, 2024 (+3)
These paintings, looking more
woven or stitched, fit into London-based Swiss artist Christina Niederberger’s
long-running practise of effecting an affectionate critique of modernist
masters by deriving illusory textiles from them. She identifies three drivers
for that. First, the public-facing, masculine, gestural tradition of heroic
modernism is brought into the feminine and domestic sphere. Second, the
traditional hierarchies of art and craft are collapsed onto the
same plane. Third: given the digital world’s surfeit of images, she’d
rather recycle modernism into a contemporary context than add to the
post-modern excess. Those levels of interpretation come together seamlessly to
yield a painterly abstraction that wittily builds a fresh language out of
not-uncritical nostalgia: she has lovingly stitched up Picasso and de Kooning:
here, Bauhaus and cubist languages are presented together with a step into the
female zone, through a tribute to Agnes Martin.
Rossanne Pellegrino
Cool Rider, 2018
This is from Rossanne Pellegrino’s
‘Strange New world’ series, in which the Adelaide-born artist, now based in St
Leonards-on-Sea, documents and embroiders on her Australian family background
by altering old photographs. The cool rider is her uncle, given a suitably
hippy aura by his niece’s additions, which also suggest the rush of a bike
oncoming at speed.
Brian Prangle
Perfect Drying Day, 2023
I liked two works in which the
titles suggest that the quotidian act of drying the washing is the main
subject, yet it isn’t. Birmingham-based Brian Prangle says he uses soft pastels
for the primal feeling of
applying and mixing pigment with his fingers directly onto a surface. In ‘Perfect
Drying Day’ that’s in the
service of a composition, made from a snapshot in Spain, in which the sheet being hung out keys us in to the
primary geometry of the buildings surrounding it.
Sarah Purvey
Fractured, 2023
What is fractured in ‘Fractured’, Sarah Purvey’s tactile
intersection of drawing and sculpture? Not, I’d say, the clay, which is
punctured but unbroken. It could be the expectation of functionality; or it
might be meaning - the fractured language of holes eludes us. Purvey says the
piece ‘serves as a witness to the gradual hollowing of an individual living
with memory loss… a haptic map of the chaos associated with the
disappearance of self.’
Daniel Rapley
Drift 130, 2024 (+3)
Daniel Rapley is interested in
issues of authorship. A dozen years ago that took the extreme and rigorous form
of copying out by hand the entire King James Bible. His newest body of work,
‘Drift’, has a more visual basis: Rapley has collected over 20,000 35mm slides
spanning the 1930’s to 90’s, when the format began to disappear. He selects
two, stacks them on top of each other, and photographs them on a light box in
order to make a new print. He’s not too concerned with what the slides depict,
making the process somewhat abstracted and decidedly painterly. Not
surprisingly, he says that there are many failures before he finds the kind of
tonal, chromatic and compositional coherence he is looking for within the
complex and sometimes ambiguous layering. The resulting visual allure may be
the main thing, but contingent issues arise: the nature of time (relevant to
which he is collaborating with the philosopher of time Kerry Langsdale),
memory, and transparency.
Alison Rees
In Between the Lines III, 2024 (+2)
‘In Between the Lines’ III, IV and V are each comprised of four elements. Alison Rees describes herself as using ‘porcelain, thinly rolled, to create a strong, yet fragile looking, minimal form’. You might call them ceramic paintings. Rees also thinks of books: they ‘draw upon the language of the paper page – its repeatable dimensions, thinness, use of borders and grid layout – to tell abstract stories in clay. The stories I tell are of person and of place, of the ordinary and the everyday, and of nimbleness and agility within a sometimes weighty world… I am interested in abstracting information from my environment and, through colour, repetition and variation, making something new from it… Through this deliberate reduction in volume and process, a minimal three-dimensional object emerges which contains layers of meaning without material weight.’ We can see these, then, as buildings reduced to their geometric essence, nodding to hard-edged minimal painting while using pleasing colours and the appeal of ceramic to foreground pleasure over severity.Then there’s the echo of alphabets and Pacman. And that’s all before we get to their actual basis: water drainage grills!
Louise Rieger
Good Drying Weather, 2023
I liked two works in which the
titles suggest that the quotidian act of drying the washing is the main
subject, yet it isn’t. Louise Rieger’s ‘Good Drying Weather’ is being enjoyed
by a tricyclist who rather cutely grabs our attention. It makes sense both that
that the Kentish artist has had a career in children’s TV, and that she uses
1970’s Polaroids as a source.
DJ Roberts
DJ
Roberts’ wide-ranging practise incudes highly detailed graphite drawings in
which the small scale and the time evidently invested combine to generate an
intimate engagement with the typically nostalgic inflection of his subjects. As
he explains of this set: ‘I grew up on a series of RAF bases, and the look of
such places - concrete blockhouses, tarmac, structures whose purpose seems
unclear - fascinates me and is a recurring
theme in my work. Ugly though these places are, as a kid I found them
tremendously exciting. Planes would be taking off at night, you’d see pilots
coming out of the mess in all their gear. And of course there was the travel -
I was at boarding school and from one holiday to the next I never knew where I
might be going. Riffling through a magazine the other day I came across a
photo of one of the bases on which dad had served. It got me started on this
series of drawings, which concentrate chiefly on his postings abroad. The
titles are deliberately nondescript; there is something anonymous and uniform
about a military base, and you never know quite what goes on inside the
buildings around you. But the images bring back strong memories, and this sort
of environment always gives me the agreeable sense that something might be
going to happen - that there is the possibility of action!’
Fiona G Roberts
Fiona Roberts loves to explore
different combinations of paint and ground: here she sticks to oil but on
acrylic glass, aluminium and paper – it’s worth checking what differences the
surfaces make. In all cases, the mark making treads a dynamic line between what
we see as abstract – perhaps accidental – and what we see as representational.
We might take that to parallel the difference between the outward appearance we
can seem and the inner thoughts we cannot - for where Roberts varies less is in
subject matter. The female head predominates. I read that as a feminist choice:
she foregrounds female agency, and has sometimes dealt with explicit back
stories, depicting - in her non-literal manner - women murdered by their
partners, women who can paint as a counter to contrary patriarchal claims, her
mother as a representative of generations of women denied opportunities. Yet
the nature of that emotional engagement remains ambiguous from picture to
picture. Where some sense vulnerability, other might see thoughtfulness: what
matters to Roberts is that emotional readings are available, and that we arrive
at them through painterly effects.
Sara Rossberg
Sara Rossberg is a German painter
who studied at the Städelschule, Academy of Fine Art, Frankfurt before coming
to England on a scholarship in 1976 – and staying. She takes hundreds of street
photographs of others, as well as turning the lens on herself, as the starting
point for markedly material paintings: she prints the images in black and
white, the better to generate her often virulent colour choices without
restraint. Rossberg’s aim is to ‘explore humanness in a broader sense’ – not
setting out narratives, nor representing particular individuals, but creating
an object that conveys a feeling of intensity through a physical presence that
uses just acrylic mediums and pigment, repeatedly layered and scraped away.
Simon Taylor
Baked Wotsits 16.5g Pack 82 KCal, 2024
The normal convention for still life paintings is to show the items of value as you would come across them in the house. That won’t be regularly arranged across a white ground, but Lisa Milroy has established that as an alternative mode using such items as shoes, fruit and ceramic pots. The effect is to animate items in their own space. Simon Taylor gives that a humorous and absurd tweak by choosing cheaply cheerful Wotsits as his subject.
Alice Walter
To visit Alice Walter’s small seaside
studio in St Leonards is to tread on scraps of sawn plywood and pick your way
through frayed odds and ends of previously used canvases and curios that have
washed up there. All are integral to how she builds up her endearingly
ramshackle visions of landscapes-come-interiors-come-video-games. They start
out abstractly – until the textures and colours suggest some sort of
figuration. Walter 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.
