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
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipbBRRFC9QwNTXWHMfTPZ9uR7wE2a4BrNIBTJGu8toXAUb-_bG8MK-EOs8DEM4vbU67ojCWOuo4Hr6V77vyXnrk3EAm4Ji4z-sBCmQBlEIgi8bwycqSErmkfRu-geL62OgDw6gPkktshVQf_EX1rO7zFWSpGrwzJZ4Ki3sABC8ne_DWtpGFSizKcwi2E0/w462-h640/burrows%20Acer%20pseudoplatanus_0093%20copy.jpeg)
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.