IN ADVANCE OF SEPTEMBER

Aglaé Bassens: 'Painting with a View' from the Bow Arts Open

September brings a rush of shows as the 'season opens' - though mostly not yet, so there's a mixture of ongoing pleasures and reliable previews in the following... starting with the painting above, which suggests a farewell to summer, and moving on to a preponderance of constructions, masking and deception. Among the many other shows opening in September and likely to prove interesting are Shannon Ebner and (in a new space) Ryan Sullivan at Sadie Coles, Uriel Orlow at Seventeen, 'Lunar Sea' at Transition, Sarah McKillop at the Mews Project Space (just 12-15 Sept), Hannah Knox at Ceri Hand, Hannah Maybank at Gimpel Fils, Sarah Anna Boghiguian and Goshka Macuga's responses to Rabindranath Tagore at Iniva, Prem Sahib at Southard Reid, Lutz Bacher at the ICA, Anne Hardy & Stephen Setford at 19 Kinnoul Mansions, Rowhill Rd. Hackney (14-15 Sept), Tacita Dean at Frith Street, Steven Pippin at Dilston Grove, Andy Holden at Anita Zabludowicz, '2Q13: Women Collectors, Women Artists' at Lloyd's Club and 'Long ago, and not true anyway' at Waterside Contemporary.

                                       

Dorothy Cross: Gravity, 2011 (detail)

                 
I also like the feel of Flash 500. Artists increasingly use text in work - sometimes well, sometimes embarassingly - and here's a timely project which provides a platform for 32 commissioned artists to write exactly 500 words without tying them in to anything else. I've already seen a few: Dorothy Cross' conversion of art-making into narrative, and George Shaw as a sort of James Kelman for the art world, both make a good impression. I recommend you sign in to have them  delivered free to your inbox daily from 16th September at  http://akermandaly.com/subscribe/.   

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Mise En Scène (Bow Arts Open in association with Crisis) @ the Bermondsey Project Space, 46 Willow Walk, Bermondsey

21 Sept - 5 Oct: www.bowarts.org

Clare Mitten: Yellow Mantel Mantel Fort - a new version will be in the show

This 19 artist extravaganza curated by Cullinan Richards in a charitable cause should prove lively. Certainly it contains a couple of bankers in Clare Mitten’s cheerfully clunky cardboard processings of the mechanical into the painterly geometries, which find a new way to give the impersonal a personality; and five large paintings by Aglaé Bassens – from the ‘outside’ range of her work, an odd sort of place which is visibly constructed out of props and paint, for all the yearning in its bodies of water. Bassens’ inside view of wigs as a transformative cipher is one of the best things in the patchy ‘paper’ show still on – until November! - at the Saatchi Gallery.

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Marcius Galan: Geometric Progression @ White Cube, Bermondsey

To 29 Sept: www.whitecube.com

Three Sections

Sao Paulo based Marcius Galan present works developed during a recent residency at Vauxhall’s Gasworks across three rooms of the big White Cube: the stand-out is  ‘Three Sections’, which uses light to create an illusion of tilted panes of green glass, which had me prepared to bash my nose as I walked through, mindful of occasions when I’ve walked into the real thing! And Galan has plenty of other ideas: super-heavy would-be-mobiles; iron bunting origami; a logical progression of erasers wearing themselves out... 

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Alzbeta Jaresova: A Catalyst For Remembrance @ the Griffin Gallery, 21 Evesham St – Ladbroke Grove

6-27 Sept: http://griffingallery.co.uk/exhibitions/current-upcoming/

Position X (detail)

London-based Czech Alzbeta Jaresova won the 2012 Griffin Prize of a six month residency leading to this show at Winsor & Newton’s gallery. Her unusual combinations of drawing-based paintings and sculptural constructions show people set in – perhaps limited by - geometric-tending environments which prove to be the very constructions which she’s made. These positions in contrivances prove atmospheric and quietly authoritative means to provoke such questions as: how does memory operate in forming our personal identities? Is it analogous to how architecture builds up what’s distinctive about a city? Is a house the embodiment of our own disposition?

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Clunie Reid: In Pursuit of the Liquid @ MOT International, First Floor, 72 New Bond St – Mayfair

To 5 Oct: www.motinternational.org

The rushing liquidity in Clunie Reid’s migration of her established collage techniques to a row of four video screens is the result, she told me, of running moving images at 12 frames per second instead of the usual 24, and inserting random still images into the vacated frames. The technique is applied to scrawled slogans (‘THINK GET’ swam out at me) and cartoons: sugar-sweet girly stuff of the My Little Pony school, and distorted women from pornographic animations - suggesting that the distinction between infantile and sexual has collapsed in both directions. Disorienting… but with a sleek black and candy-pink allure, and viewable from paradoxically laid back and comfortable seating.

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Mexico: A Revolution in Art, 1910-1940 @ the Royal Academy of Arts, Piccadilly

To 29 Sept:  www.royalacademy.org.uk

Philip Guston: Gladiators, 1940

The views of this show have tended to emphasise the absence of the murals by Riviera, Orozco and Siqueiros which have come to define Mexico’s place in the story of modern art. However, this is a superb combination of historical atmosphere and of painters and photographers, both Mexican and visiting, feeding off the revolutionary fervour. Los Tres Grandes get a painting each, and Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Tina Modotti, Edward Burra, Marsden Hartley and Josef Albers are among the highlights. Guston, too, made a mural in Mexico, and it’s great to see a darkly humorous and turbulent early painting in which children with their faces hidden beneath improvised hats seem to be fighting a mock battle with the aim of unmasking each other.

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The Masks We Wear @ ArtEco Gallery, 533 Old York Road, Wandsworth

6 Sept – 5 Oct: www.artecogallery.com

Rachel Bullock: Morand Lesovii

You can find an eclectic international section of 12 artists exploring masking - whether physical, social or ideological - just a few yards from Wandsworth Town railway station, where Norwegian Kristin Hjellegjerde moved from New York to open an adventurous space last year. Russian artist Daniel Bragin, for example, looks at how religion can act as a mask for consumerist desires; Bouke de Vries and Manuel Felesi make eerie use of ceramic doll heads; Italian Marco Querin tackles the burqa, which Hjellegjerde in her curatorial role brackets rather strikingly with nudity as ‘ways of hiding, or being hidden’; and American Rachel Bullock’s large charcoal drawing allows a woman to elude us in a fusion of re-animated fur coats and waterfalled mountain landscape.

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Gilberto Zorio @ Blain|Southern, 4 Hanover Square – Oxford Circus

To 28 Sept: www.blainsouthern.com

Installation shot in the dark

The 14 artists generally taken to make up arte povera have received increasing attention in Britain in recent years, but Gilberto Zorio has had less than most.  He works with transformations between states, and so it’s appropriate that this spectacularly installed show has both intensely lit and wholly dark phases across a 15 minute cycle, which includes a whirling canoe and a sparking star as well as more sedately-paced alterations effected by copper sulphate.  The boat, representing exploratory impulses, is one of Zorio’s favourite symbols, along with the star - a breeze block a version of which is the centrepiece of the show - and the javelin, and they all cohere in echoes if you read the list of works into the microphones which the artist also provides.

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Daniel Silver: Dig @ Grafton Way – Bloomsbury

12 Sept – 3 Nov: http://www.artangel.org.uk/projects/2013/dig

Daniel Silver is known for appropriating and transforming the traditions of figurative sculpture through re-use, collaging and outsourcing. For this free-to-all, no-booking-required Artangel commission in an overgrown inner city site he uses Freud’s collection of ethnographic figures as the starting point to set up the results of an apparent archaeological dig. Perhaps that stands in for burrowing into the subconscious and into Silver's own history as an artist, as well as  challenging us to imagine the society from which the distorted and diminished ‘remains’ have come. As Silver said of the figures in his previous major show at Camden in 2007: ‘You can walk between them and start understanding the relationships they have with themselves... but then again you are also part of that’

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Julie Brook: Made, Unmade @ The Wapping Project,  Wapping Hydraulic Power Station, Wapping Wall

To 6 Oct:  www.thewappingproject.com

Curved Rising Lines, Jebel-Acacus , SW Libya

You might say that Skye-based Julie Brook’s twenty year career combines Richard Long’s empathetic sculptural working of the landscape with Carl Andre’s emphasis on the particularity of materials. She makes the most of Wapping’s unusually large spaces to show meditatively absorbing sequences of short films from the Libyan and Namibian deserts. One distinctive achievement is to combine man-made and natural, in both performance and outcomes, in such a way that the boundaries are blurred: scuffed lines and lava ridges; measured arrangements and blown sand; found boulders and imposed geometries - all feel of a piece. Where, I found myself wondering, does the human world end and the wilderness begin? 

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Richard Serra: 'Trajectory' @ Alan Cristea, 34 Cork St & 'Drawings for the Courtauld' at the Courtauld Gallery, Somerset House 

11 Sept – 8 Oct: www.alancristea.com  19 Sept - 12 Jan www.courtauld.ac.uk

Installation at Alan Cristea

Richard Serra’s sculpture is all about weight, gravity and threat. How does that translate into two dimensions? His answer has been by drawing with heavy intensity using black paintstick as a material with its own dense monumentality. OK then, how does that operate as an etching? Serra utilises a stucco wall as the found origin of his dark textures, applying that to minimal forms dynamised by the way they lean into their white surrounds. At Alan Cristea, his first UK print show, allows us to judge across ten years of work how much is lost, retained and gained along that way. Meanwhile, at the Courtauld, Serra has come up with a new way of making drawings by sandwiching transparent plastic between Mylar sheets covered with litho crayon... 

Images courtesy if the relevant galleries and artists + Photo - FXP Photography (Serra) + Peter Mallet (Zorio) + Chris Osbourne (Silver)

PENONE AND THE TREES

Giuseppe Penone: The Hidden Life Within

Ed Matthew Teitelbaum: contributions by Germano Celant, John Bentley Mays & Didier Semin

Black Dog Publishing, £24.95

As Giuseppe Penone's year-long occupation of the Whitechapel Gallery comes to an end, it seems timely to consider him in the context of an excellent new book...

'Spazio di Luce' (Space of Light) at the Whitechapel Gallery 2012-13

This substantial book celebrates ‘The hidden life within’, an installation of new work by Giuseppe Penone which inaugurated the Art Gallery of Ontario's new Galleria Italia in late 2008, and remained on view there until early 2012. Penone chose to work mainly with wood, in keeping with the new and unusual architecture of the Gallery, which is like a towering upturned boat made of Douglas fir and glass (I was there just after the exhibition closed, and can imagine the effect).

The book, however, goes well beyond the show's contents to provide an impressively illustrated overview of Penone's practice, with a particular emphasis on his work with trees. It includes an insightful memoir/essay by Germano Celant, the writer who helped define the origins of Arte Povera; a long and illuminating interview with the artist; an essay by French art historian Didier Semin; and Toronto-based art and architecture writer John Bentley Mays' thoughts on the installation itself, which is well-enough illustrated here to provide an ersatz viewing experience. There is also Penone’s poetic ‘Liturgy of Wood’:

‘The clarity of the well-traced path is sterile.

To find the path, walk it, probe it and bushwack through the brambles: this is sculpture.’

 Penone has been well served in English recently with several monographs and the translation of his own writings - but the forward is not out of order in claiming this is the most ambitious publication on his work to date in the language.

Celant emphasises Penone's rural background: whereas American land art created a ‘mediation between the wild landscape and the super industrialised civilisation’, Penone integrates himself with the landscape, recognises its traces of human history – from farmer’s to hiker’s – and cedes control of the outcome of his work to ‘the growing of the tree or the interweaving of the branches, following their rhythms and flows' to produce 'an art that continues to happen’. In so doing, he ‘transforms the sculptures into an essential form, which takes shape naturally and expands the sculptural process by introducing a natural dynamic.’ Penone says that he wanted to work with the elements he knew most deeply – the river, the wood, the forest – ‘with which I had a strong relationship when I was a kid’. 

Didier Semin contributes an intriguing essay which draws from philosopher Thomas Nagel's famous article "what is it like to be a bat?' and Roger Callois' remarkable theory that, far from mimicry and camouflage being an evolutionary advance for defensive purposes, animals which seek to look like plants are actually dreaming of an earlier and more peaceful state, making them artists rather than fighters.  He suggests through that analogy how Penone’s  sculpture is haunted by the parallel dream that a man might know what it is like to be a tree.

John Bentley Mays concentrates on the hidden life within of the show's title: how a tree retains the ‘essence of matter’ (Penone) - 'an inner structure that can be deformed by harvesting and sawing and milling, but never wholly obliterated' (Mays). He sees Penone's art as a means of 'figuring forth'  the hidden life he finds in the heart of everything that lives, in what might be seen as a modern version of Platonic form.

Those are interesting viewpoints, but Penone’s own words in an extensive interview have the added advantage of a direct connection to the work. He has, for starters, an interesting definition of art as a perfect product, that is, one with no existing demand. An imperfect product, in contrast, is one for which demand already exists. Art, then, ‘represents the thought that is not yet known, a product which we have not felt the need for ‘. To find that product, Penone sees the role of the artist as being ‘like a priest who performs rituals’ so that ‘the artist becomes the official of this ritual’.

Like a priest, Penone uses traditional materials (more so than is typical of Arte Povera) and is keen to explore their life: ‘bronze, marble, earthenware, wood… it is true that these are materials which have been used in sculpture for centuries, but I use them in a different way.’ Less traditionally, he uses resin as the ‘perfume and blood of the tree’, a phrase illustrating how the artist is at his best when explaining the thoughts behind his works. Let’s take three of his major series. 

First, those works in which thorns are attached to canvas so that they make a pattern which ‘comes from the mark of the skin. When the skin touches a surface, it leaves a mark that is an image of all the points of contact and, consequently, this is the image of the points of sensitivity. I magnified a mark, drawing it on the canvas with some thorns I used thorns because they suggest the sensitivity of the skin. It is surprising the precision with which it is possible to localise a thorn that you have in your body.’

Second, the comparison between a found boulder, formed by the river, and a visually similar boulder sculpted in the studio. The definition between fluid and solid is uncertain, and depends on the temperature and the time. The actions carried out when someone is carving a stone are similar to the actions exerted by the water in the river.

But perhaps we should conclude with Penone’s most famous stream of work, that which discovers the sapling tree within a beam. It is, says Penone, ‘a tautology at heart, but it can also be interpreted as an attempt animate the ‘minimal’ form of the industrial wooden beam, disclosing the organic shape that produced it’.  That seems to be what Penone is ultimately about: connections - and in particular, exploring those between nature, what people make from it, and the people themselves. This book helps the reader make those connections and explore the hidden life within. 

The Tree Works

Penone works across a wide range of natural forms, including notable use of leaves and thorns as well as several streams of work which use the fundamentals of the tree in a very direct manner. 'The Hidden Life Within' discusses and illustrates these works effectively. a partial checklist of which might be as follows:

Interventions in the growth of trees

Planks whittled back to reveal the tree within

Whole trunks into which a space is carved to demonstrate the growth patterns

Trunks with channels, filled with sap-redolent resin, cut into them. Instead of carving around the sapling in the core of the tree as in ‘To Repeat the Forest’, the negative of the form within the tree is revealed and filled with resin – as if to illustrate Penone’s assertion that ‘the two perfect states, liquid and solid – a totality of image – produce sculpture’.

Drawings in the form of tree rings, but using fingerprints

Works which use the reaching out of branches for light as an analogy for sight. Here, says Penone, two people look at each other and so he ‘starts the branches in the brain, basing the work on the gaze’. There is also an echo of early action which twined three trees together ‘as if they were in conversation’.

Bronze casts of trees, held paradoxically aloft by their roots. Penone believes an uprooted tree is already a sculpture, and is ‘the horizontal perspective of the eye, contrasting with the verticality of its being’.

A bronze tree holding a boulder in its branches, has made the Documenta 2012

Work with bark, notably that which draws an analogy of skins by combining it with leather. Animal skin meets tree skin as Penone covers tree trunks with water-softened leather which keeps the form of the bark when it dries. ’It is as if you are inside the tree’, says Penone, who also wanted to make evident how ‘there is always a space between the hand and the surface the hand adheres to. It is the thickness of the waxy grease of the fingerprint'.

The Whitechapel installation cast an empty trunk with golden bark on the inside and the artists fingerprints standing in for the bark on the outside.