Tuesday, 2 September 2014

ART STUFF ON A TRAIN 61-70

Paul’s ART STUFF on a train # 70: ‘17 = 276’


                       Susan Collis The Oysters Our World Paul’s ART STUFF on a train # 70: ‘17 = 276’

Susan Collis: ‘The oyster’s our world’, 2004 – Wooden stepladder, mother of pearl, shell, coral,fresh water pearl, cultured pearls, white opal, diamond

Among London’s smaller galleries, I particularly like Seventeen. Fronted by Dave Hoyland, it’s friendly, imaginative and unpredictable; counts some favourites of mine among its own artists (Susan Collis, Graham Dolphin, Oliver Laric); runs two shows at a time; and is open to all sorts of unpredictable stuff, typified by the basement film programme curated by Paul Pieroni from 2007-09. And it was always easy to explain where it was: 17 Kingsland Road, near Hoxton Square.
Now, though, it’s moving further up the road to increasingly fashionable Dalston, and so joins the mildly illogical group of galleries who aren’t where their name says they are. New York’s 303 Gallery may hold the numeral shift record, having left 303 Park Avenue South in 1986 and arrived at its present 507 West 24th Street via numbers 513, 89, 525 and 547 on four other roads between. In less integral paradoxes, Hay Hill soon moved to Cork Street then Baker Street; Paradise Row has just closed on Newman Street; and Christopher Crescent has got as far as Brussels from its eponymous Hackney address. Frith Street has been in Golden Square for seven years (but has just announced the addition of a project space in…. Frith Street!). First up from 4 September in Seventeen’s new incarnation at 270-276 Kingsland Road is the group show ‘Either’ and a solo for Sachin Kaeley, the only painter the gallery represents, albeit in a decidedly post-internet mode.
               Sachin Kaeley 2013 20 crop Paul’s ART STUFF on a train # 70: ‘17 = 276’

              Sachin Kaeley, ‘Acrylic and spray paint on board’, 2013

Paul’s ART STUFF on a train # 69: ‘Spirit of a City’


amelie 5 Paul’s ART STUFF on a train # 68: ‘Spirit of a City’

Amelie von Wulffen: from her Untitled selection, 2010-13 – here it’s the glasses of wine which have a post-coital cigarette

Art Biennials are great ways of getting around unfamiliar aspects of a city. Venice is the archetype, but it works elsewhere, even if – as in the current Liverpool Biennial and its associated shows – most of the art itself is uninspiring. You get, for example, into a fascinating circular block of social housing to see… a one hour 1980 TV programme by Jef Cornelis featuring four Belgian professors in a sub-titled discussion of the role of the intellectual in Flemish society. Or tour the peeling atmospherics of a former blind school and trade union HQ for the main group show, most memorable for an eight channel sound room with linked script by Rana Hamadeh, aggressive enough to be physically challenging as it pulls you into the Shiite ritual of Ashura. More reproducibly, Amelie von Wulffen’s adventures of fruit and tool characters tread the borders between art and illustration, children’s storyboard and adult perversity, with some wit. The John Moores Painting Prize had its few moments, including Jane Bustin’s transcendental move into copper – mysteriously not among the five works shortlisted – shown here reflecting Juliette Losq’s vertiginously drawn hinterland, which is. Open Eye’s spanking new premises have an appealing backwater of Hans Haake’s practice: his student photographs documenting Documenta 1959; and the old Open Eye space, remodelled as Model, has the lively group show ‘Axolotl’. Still, most of the best art was in the least surprising venue: Tate Liverpool, where imaginative re-presentations of less-often seen parts of the Tate collection (highlight: Paul Nash’s bark and slate collages) were shown, plus Nasreen Mohamedi’s tremblingly drawn grid dispersions and Mondrian as seen through his studios.


liverpool 027 moores comp Paul’s ART STUFF on a train # 68: ‘Spirit of a City’
Juliette Losq’s ‘Vinculum’ reflected in Jane Bustin’s ‘Christina the Astonishing’ 

Most days art Critic Paul Carey-Kent spends hours on the train, traveling between his home in Southampton and his day job in Surrey. Could he, we asked, jot down whatever came into his head?

Paul’s ART STUFF on a train # 68: ‘Please Release Me’


      bank 1 Paul’s ART STUFF on a train # 67: ‘Please Release Me’
Artspeak’s dodgy reputation isn’t new, as shown by BANK’s PRESS RELEASE project, now on show at Tate Britain (and at www.john-russell.org). In a process which now seems touchingly archaic, the collective (running 1991-2003, and featuring John Russell, Simon Bedwell and Milly Thompson at the time) gave marks out of ten and made unsolicited critical annotations on the type-written hand-outs from 1998-99. They faxed them to the galleries by way of free consultancy on how to tidy up their self-presentation and avoid ‘the new bureaucratic meta-language’ of ‘meaningless mannerisms’ and ‘badly thought out (non) theory and jargon’. The rebukes are fun, but did their efforts have any effect? Stephen Friedman scored 1/10: criticisms included a habit of dealing in opposites such as ‘both serious and frivolous’, a technique which ‘means you have nothing to say about the work’. Maureen Paley (1.5/10) was traduced for using the hesitant term ‘can appear’ and for how ‘extremely bad use of punctuation and grammar’ marred a press release ‘refreshingly devoid of any ideas’. The approach garnered a comparatively dizzying 2.25/10, despite some empty terms of praise: viz ‘you keep telling us things are important – I’m becoming suspicious’ and ‘what does ‘beautiful’ mean? This is a press release, not a script for The Antiques Roadshow.’ Perhaps it’s the impact of word processing, but this year’s output from the three galleries looks far more professional and avoids those sins. The writing is also reasonably clear, excepting The approach’s text on Alice Channer, in which ‘instead of volume, the tensile subject aspires to a back-end viral aesthetic’ and ‘the dialectic between concept and matter collapses’.


       bank 3 Paul’s ART STUFF on a train # 67: ‘Please Release Me’

Paul’s ART STUFF on a train # 67: ‘The Process of Fashion’


alexis harding orange rev Pauls ART STUFF on a train # 66: ‘The Process of Fashion’

Alexis Harding: ‘Orange Revolution’, 2014: Oil and gloss paint on wood

Young American painters of process-based abstraction seem to be market darlings at the moment, from Ryan Sullivan’s chemical tilt-mixing of various paints to Wade Guyton pushing computer printers past their limit to Sam Falls’ use of the weather. I was reminded of such approaches by two excellent current shows. Mummery & Schnelle’s gathering of thoughtful abstraction (to 2 Aug) includes three paintings by London-born Alexis Harding. He’s been exploring the after-life of paint for two decades, applying enamel gloss over incompatible oil and giving it months to respond to gravity. Thus in ‘Drop Out’, the paint tries to escape downwards – in some works it reaches the floor – while ‘Orange Revolution’ refers not so much to the Ukraine as to how the canvas has been rotated during production. The Belmacz’s small and unusual space has room for only three of the Berlin-based Dane Morten Skrøder Lund’s large and adventurous paintings (‘Wellbound’ to 6 Sept). I like them all, but he seems to have begun each from scratch with startlingly different results – as if building accident into not just how a painting turns out, but how it’s conceived. One conjoins two canvases hammered into each other and has allowed paint to run through nail holes; one its rainbows of lacquer and acrylic overlaid with slabs of corroded Polystyrene; one has had silicon injected through the back, and a plastic sheet stretched over the front. The workings of the market are hard to fathom, but I can’t help wondering: if they were recent American graduates, would Harding and Skrøder Lund be stars of the auction room?


                     Untitled 2014 Oil wax acrylic vinyl paint styrofoam glass copper screws on canvas 170 x 130cm 11 Pauls ART STUFF on a train # 66: ‘The Process of Fashion’  
Morten Skrøder Lund: ‘Untited’, 2014: Oil, wax, acrylic, vinyl, paint, styrofoam, glass, copper, screws on canvas

Paul’s ART STUFF on a train # 66: ‘Late Arrival’


         Paul’s ART STUFF on a train # 66: ‘Late Arrival’
      Clive Hodgson: Untitled, 2012


It’s nice to see an underrated artist steal into the limelight, and such is the case with the painter Clive Hodgson (born 1953), who’s just had his American debut (at White Columns in April). Now he finds himself in three of the many summer shows now open, which almost all do far more than lazily lump together the gallery’s own roster. Simon Lee, Laura Bartlett, Pace and Carroll / Fletcher would be my pick of the Hodgsonless group exhibitions, and he’s in three others – proving how his modestly-sized, primarily abstract paintings can fulfill various agendas. July at The Approach concentrates on mark-making, so foregrounding Hodgson’s waveringly nuanced and washily layered use of oils. Timothy Taylor’s Slow Learner, curated by Andreas Leventis, includes artists who employ text and symbols to subvert meaning. That fits with Hodgson’s repurposing of emblems from decorative traditions; and with the way he privileges both their date of making and his name to align, in White Columns’ words ‘the melancholic daily realities of On Kawara with a decidedly informal take on formalism’. Sherman Sam sees that as ‘existential, in that it is declarative of existence – both the artist’s and the work’s’. Sam himself curates a beautifully surprising cross-generational flower show at Ancient & Modern, which includes both sketchily direct flowers and a painting of circles which, given the context, stand as floral.


     Clive Hodgson Untitled Circles 2011  Paul’s ART STUFF on a train # 66: ‘Late Arrival’

      Clive Hodgson: Untitled (Circles), 2011

Paul’s ART STUFF on a train # 65: '28 Years and 1.1’

kissing gold sarah anne j Pauls ART STUFF on a train # 64: ’28 Years and 1.1’
 
Sarah Anne Johnson: ‘Kissing Gold’, 2013 from the series ‘Wonderlust’, in ‘The Combinational’ at Studio 1.1


I recently came across a copy of Art Monthly for July 1986. The magazine doesn’t look so different from the July 2014 issue, and – like that – includes listings of some 200 forthcoming shows. The public sector landscape was similar, though there was of course just the one Tate. Much else has changed. A number of less contemporarily-oriented commercial galleries – Browse & Darby, Crane Calman, Colnaghi, Francis Kyle, Redfern – remain but no longer feature in the Art Monthly listings. They’ve become more selective, given that there are now far more galleries in total. Only a dozen of what I’d see as non-public galleries with a contemporary focus still exist: the long runners are Annely Juda, Flowers, Anthony Reynolds, Maureen Paley (then ‘Interim Art’), Matts Gallery, the Mayor Gallery and Victoria Miro, which have all moved at least once since then; and Bernard Jacobson, Gimpel Fils, Hamiltons, Marlborough and Waddington, which have stayed put. Anthony d’Offay (which ran 1965-2001) is the best-remembered of the spaces since closed. Among the many which have gone and I’ve never heard of, Diorama, the Narwhal Eskimo Art Gallery, 9H, Monolith, the Submarine Gallery, Vortex and The Young Unknowns sound rather distinctive. Of course, my favourite features of the July 2014 issue are my own review and the listing of the show I’ve curated at Studio 1.1 (founded 2003)…


mapplethorpe pooppy1988 Pauls ART STUFF on a train # 64: ’28 Years and 1.1’

Robert Mapplethorpe: ‘Poppy’, 1988 at Hamiltons – ‘an erotic reading’ is that ‘Mapplethorpe captured the flower in an uncommon position – from behind. The carefully positioned light source emphasized this ‘backdoor’ point of view’ (Peter Schultz)

Paul’s ART STUFF on a train # 64: ‘Only Connect’


chan 20 haircut l the argument haircut of the year 12 13 Pauls ART STUFF on a train # 64: ‘Only Connect’
 
Paul Chan: ‘Haircut of the Year’, 2012-13

Artists are interested in connections, so it seems like an obvious move to use electronic cables as a physical representative of linkages… yet I don’t recall that being done as thoroughly as it currently is in both Basel and London. In Switzerland, Paul Chan is the subject of the 2014 show at Schaulager (to 19 Oct) – an immense and impressive space which concentrates on putting together one magisterial survey each year. It features Chan’s Henry Darger based cartoon history of the world; falling ‘Lights’ projections on the floor; paintings on the covers of 1005 books; shadow-play explorations of the Marquise de Sade – and the latest stream to emerge from Chan’s impressive variety: ‘arguments’ in which electronic cables, plugs and sockets combine – sometimes with abject found objects, including hundreds of shoes in his biggest argument – to suggest the logical flows of philosophical analysis. The cables generate a distinctive aesthetic most easily related to drawing. Jim Lambie (at Sadie Coles to 16 Aug) is more painterly and musical: he’s plugged electric guitar cables into glossy monochromes which incorporate paint-drenched sections of men’s clothing. Typically enough, the cast-off and quotidian is pressed into the service of art historical references and a lyrical, maybe transcendental, use of colour. Lambie’s show also includes shoes, dangling on safety pin chains… I dare say any artist can be connected to any other in three steps – Lambie and Chan, though, need just the one.


Lambie ANswer MAchine Pauls ART STUFF on a train # 64: ‘Only Connect’
                        
                        Jim Lambie: ‘Answer Machine’, 2014
 

ART STUFF on a train # 63: ‘Monitor as Star’


start 032 prodger ART STUFF on a train # 63: ‘Monitor as Star’


The Block & Charlotte Prodger: ‘Markets’, 2014


When visiting Tate Britain – as you really should while Phyllida Barlow is in regally ramshackle occupation – pop into the Chelsea Space opposite. For The Block and Charlotte Prodger’s ‘Markets’ (to 26 July) the video monitor takes centre stage. A monitor might be described as a means of showing films which has an industrial rather than domestic identity, and which isn’t equipped to receive a broadcast signal. None has ever been commercially produced for art exhibition purposes, but the Hantarex MGG (1989-2005) and the Sony Cube (1986-96) gained a reputation as good vehicles for art prior to the rise of the flat-screen. That stemmed from such features as an absence of visually intrusive frontal controls, a minimal frame, and an integrated handle for ease of lifting and stacking. Now The Block, set up by Matthew Fitts with the primary purpose of acquiring and refurbishing those two obsolete monitors, has designed and produced a hybrid, splicing their qualities. Charlotte Prodger (Turner Prize shortlist 2017, you heard it here first) makes minimalist but canny use of them. She broadcasts the fascinating story of how Gertrude Stein (or was it her new lover, Alice B. Toklas?) corrupted a text’s meaning by replacing every ‘may’ or ‘May’ with ‘can’ or ‘today’ in order to avoid reminding herself of ex-lover May Bookstaver. Meantime the four screens make somewhat Stein-like concrete poetry from the names of horses related to one part-owned by Fitts, as if to suggest a parallel substitution move. But those smart, sculptural monitors are the stars…






the block Sony PVM 2730 ART STUFF on a train # 63: ‘Monitor as Star’

Sony Cube 27″


 

Paul’s ART STUFF on a train # 62: ‘Constable at the Double’


hadleigh castle Pauls ART STUFF on a train # 62: ‘Constable at the Double’


John Constable: Sketch for ‘Hadleigh Castle’ circa 1828-9


Whilst some commercial galleries have closed in response to tough times, the institutional response tends to be to rotate shows more slowly, and to rely on re-presenting existing holdings rather than on securing loans. Thus Tate Britain’s ‘Ruin Lust’ (March-May) appeared to have been selected by the simple means of entering the term ‘ruin’ into the Tate’s collection’s data base. The current ‘Kenneth Clark: Looking for Civilisation’ (to 10 Aug) isn’t quite like that, but a high proportion is from the Tate or the National Gallery. Indeed, one painting made it into both shows. Fortunately, Constable’s ‘Hadleigh Castle’ was a double highlight. It sat well in ‘Ruin Lust’ because it gets at incompletion from both directions: as a sketch, it’s prior to Constable’s full realisation of his vision; and as a building it’s been uncompleted by time. ‘Looking for Civilisation’ demonstrates Clark’s tastes through what he bought, commissioned or wrote about, and he cited Constable’s oil sketch as the refutation of those who asked why British painters were ‘charming and decorative no doubt, but entirely lacking in the passion and dramatic power of our literature’(in The Listener, 1937. Other lordly choices include swathes of Sutherland, Moore and Piper and some fine early Pasmores from a period when Clark paid him a salary by way of encouragement. ‘Evening Star’ is a landscape which anticipates aspects of the abstract turn, contrary to Clark’s tastes, which Pasmore would soon take.


pasmore The Evening Star Effect of Mist 1946 7 Pauls ART STUFF on a train # 62: ‘Constable at the Double’

Victor Pasmore: ‘The Evening Star: Effect of Mist’, 1946-7

Most days art Critic Paul Carey-Kent spends hours on the train, traveling between his home in Southampton and his day job in Surrey. Could he, we asked, jot down whatever came into his head?

Reading:

Paul’s ART STUFF on a train # 61: ‘Ellipso and Downpoint’


oval 1forWeb vaux Pauls ART STUFF on a train # 61: ‘Ellipso and Downpoint’

Mark Vaux: ‘OV. S.9.’, 2014

Almost anything goes in painting these days – no need for paint or ground, for example, let alone a particular shape. But a shaped canvas remains the norm, and the overwhelming majority are rectangular. By way of alternative, the circular tondo is notoriously awkward to handle. Perhaps there should be more ovaloids, such as Thomas Grünfeld’s playfully macabre ‘Augenbilder’, which incorporate glass eyes so that the painting seems to look at the viewer. Just so, Marc Vaux revealed some exemplary (eggsemplary?) examples at Bernard Jacobson 2-31 May. They’re constructs as well as ovals, Vaux being a fine multiplier and exploiter of edges as a means of complicating space, colour and light. Perhaps what the format needs is a snappy popularising name (elipso!?). Triangles are also unusual, especially when pointing down. Yet my favourite works in Darren Flook’s first curation for Max Wigram (‘Ice Fishing’, to 26 July), are three such triangles by the Chicago-based McArthur Binyon, divided with cunning near-symmetry into one almost-half covered with obsessively ground-in wax crayon, the other subjected to laser-printed images rendered ghostly by submersion in oil stick . Their back story – and the images’ source – is as a parallel for his family’s transition from tenant farming in rural Mississippi to factory work in Detroit. ‘The same hands’, says Binion, ‘which bled picking cotton as a child, now bleed from the abrasion of colored wax on wood.’

                    McArthur Binion Stelluca VII 2011 Pauls ART STUFF on a train # 61: ‘Ellipso and Downpoint’

                      McArthur Binion: ‘Stelluca VII’, 2011

Sunday, 24 August 2014

BEYOND THE BLUE COCK


     Katharina Fritsch: Hahn/Cock, 2013 in Trafalgar Square


Galleries aside, London grows ever more artistically interesting. I rather like Fritsch's 15 footer poking fun at Nelson's Column. But pausing only to note of that the German word hahn has the same double meaning as cock in English, here's my choice of less publicised sculptural works - some permanent, some temporary -  you can see out and about in London  this summer.
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Dale Chihuly: The Sun, 2014 at Berkeley Square


The latest international venue for this Dale Chihuly spectacular is Berkeley Square, till the end of the year. It consists of 1,573 hand-blown glass elements from the glass master's studio in Seattle, where for 35 years now he has directed others rather than blowing the glass himself (Chihuly was blinded in one eye by glass in 1976 - not in the studio, but when thrown through a car windshield). The Sun works well both by day, when the effect is of an impossibly exotic tree, and when illuminated each night.

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Cecil Balmond H_Edge  at Bishop's Square, Spitalfields

Anglo-Sri Lankan designer, architect and artist Cecil Balmond's urban walk-in hedge will hover over a reflecting pool opposite the Allen & Overy building until October. The 'leaves', I suppose, are thousands of curvy x-shaped aluminium plates, held tensely in place by stainless steel chains. Balmond (co-designer of several Serpentine Pavilions and, with Anish Kapoor, of the ArcelorMittal Orbit) sees it as embodying 'infinity and zero' - so it may be just me, but I found it an attractively kinky from of foliage. And, like 'The Sun', it is dramatically illuminated at night.
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Gavin Turk: Nail, 2011 at One New Change, St Paul's

What god-sized object used to be pierced by this 12 metre bronze, treated to take on a stable look of rust on an equally blown up - and so unnatural - scale? Whatever it was, the nail seems stranded between the resonance it would have in the nearby St Paul's Cathedral and the role it didn't play in building the new shopping centre outside which it stands. Gavin Turk's comic riff on Claes Oldenberg certainly puts the nearby bollards in their place.



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David Batchelor: Chromolocomotion, 2014 at St Pancras Station

The latest commission (April-Oct) over the Grand Terrace of a station best known sculpturally for Paul Day's 9 metre kissers is a much happier match for Sir George Gilbert Scott great Gothic design of 1868-1874. Colour theorist David Batchelor uses 44 Perspex L-shapes to play the look of a video game and the giant Olympic Rings previously seen here into a stained glass effect. The right light through the Barlow Shed roof turns the platforms into stages for rainbows, and 'you can't not like that', as the artist himself says. Though those lumpen lovers are annoyingly close...

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Oliver MarsdenDub, 2010 at 10 Rochester Row, Westminster

Oliver Marsden is best-known for meditative paintings which explore the intersection of intense colour with the mystical power of circular formations to produce what he calls 'a state of resonance' - as if sound waves were caught in a liquid speaker.  I was surprised to hear that he'd applied the approach to the facade of a building, but the 'luxury living' of  55 apartments and penthouses at Ten Rochester Row hums with satisfying subtlety.


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Mark Titchner: Love Flags, 2014 on the South Bank


Turner-prize nominee Mark Titchner’s festival flags spelling out ‘love’ incorporate the rainbow spectrum, as used by the peace and pride movements, and the love knot.  Here's one seen through Jeppe Heine's ever-popular  Appearing Rooms fountain. The Festival of Love, which runs to the end of August, has its share of naffness but incorporates many good things: lots of Lothar Goetz; entertainingly phallic  inflatables by Zoe Walker and Neil Bromwich; Frances  Stark's video My Best Thing; and the excellent show What's Love Got to Do with It in the Hayward Project Space  (with Anna Barham, William Cobbing, Sharon Hayes, Joanna Piotrowska and Ilona Sagar). 

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Tobias Rehberger: Dazzle Ship, 2014 at Victoria Embankment

As part of the centenary commemoration of World War One, Tobias Rehberger is ‘dazzling’ the HMS President  near Blackfriars until December. The ship served (built 1918) served as one of the ships painted in camouflage designed to confuse German U-Boats.  Recreating the visual technique, Rehberger designed a print of pipework viewed from different perspectives that completely covers the boat. The project complements Carlos Cruz-Diez's (much less effective) dazzling of the historic pilot ship, the Edmund Gardner, in Liverpool.
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Uliana Apatina: Vertical Immersion at St Mark’s Church, 337 Kennington Park Rd (accessible to October inc. Art Licks Weekend 3-5 Oct)
An unusual public art location arises from the enthusiasm of the vicar of St Mark’s church, directly opposite the Oval tube station. The extensive crypt contains both a café and a run of chambers with installations by the Siberian space creator Uliana Apatina. A green neon and salt room, That Side Where Real Is, incorporates the video history of no fewer than nine previous installations, so revealing aspects of a rather ghostly location’s past, complete with atmospheric sounds of the film’s own making. Vertical Immersion fills a cell-like space with lines of fishing wire which look impenetrable until a path through is spotted, only for the route to veer towards invisibility as the angles change. You end up feeling your way into an uncertain future.

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Shin Meekyoung: Written in Soap: A Plinth Project, 2012 at Cavendish Square, Mayfair

Korean Shin Meekyoung is known for making surprising use of soap. You can currently wash your hands on one of her sculptures in the form of the Toilet Project at Sketch in Conduit Street. The external location of this version of the Duke of Cumberland provides an alternative mechanism for deterioration. Two years in, he's lost an arm and leg and is cracking up badly - catching up, perhaps, with what the original 1770 sculpture of the Duke would have looked like had it not been removed in 1868.

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Shin Meekyoung: Plinth Project (2012). Cavendish Square, 24 July 2014




Clem Crosby: 180 Monochrome Paintings, 2004-06 at the Young Vic, Southwark


Were can you find 180 paintings on permanent outdoor display? You may have walked past and not noticed, but the panels which might seem to be merely cladding the Young Vic Theatre are indeed manifold individual yellow-tending abstracts by Clem Crosby, held in place and semi-hidden by a mesh screen. The paintings look best at night, when their variation and expressiveness emerges fully: add that the bar’s pretty good, and you don’t even need a play to justify a visit.

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Wendy Taylor: Spirit of Enterprise, 1987 at Heron's Quay

From dung beetles to pilot kites to a giant timepiece near Tower Bridge, Wendy Taylor's seventy-plus  probably mean she has more public sculptures on display than any other living artist. It's no surprise, then, to find her in the Canary Wharf area, which has many such commissions, some of responding well to the settings of water and architecture. That's the case here, as mirror-polished Thames-like curves  pick up on and reflect the surroundings to suggest a that man and nature might progress harmoniously.
 
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James Hopkins: Angled Ball, 2011 near Wembley Stadium


Sport can make an awkward subject, but James Hopkins scores with a four metre high ball at Wembley. Its hexagons and pentagons make up a convincing black and white football from some angles, but transmute into a prototypical modernist abstraction from other viewpoints. That’s consistent with Hopkins’ established interest in how points of view change what we see, and so suggest that there is no objective ‘true perception’ - as in his equally cunning sculptures of words reflected in mirrors such that, for example, 'rear' becomes 'view'

Monday, 21 July 2014

THE COMBINATIONAL - TO 27 JULY

Wil Murray: In My Culture Food Was Not Very Important


THE COMBINATIONAL

at Studio 1.1 Gallery, 57a Redchurch St, Shoreditch



with Susan Collis, Appau Junior Boakye-Yiadom, Suzanne Moxhay, Wil

Murray, Sarah Anne Johnson and Catherine Herbert



July 4th - 27th



private view July 3rd 6 - 9pm


The found and the collaged are dominant modern modes: what artists choose to use, and how and why they present or combine them, count for more than their ability with traditional techniques. One could also say that life in most of the world is less about individual survival than it would have been in pre-modern eras, more about how we live together and whether we can survive that. The Combinational looks at how six artists combine materials in sculpture, video, painting, photography and mergers thereof, to reflect on how we live together . Moreover, the show is itself a combination of Canadians – Sarah Anne Johnson and Wil Murray – and Britons – Susan Collis, Appau Junior Boakye-Yiadom , Suzanne Moxhay and Catherine Herbert.


                                                 INSTALLATION & OPENING


Fellow artist Dagmara Genda helps Sarah Anne Johnson install Wonderlust

Wonderlust (detail)


Bella Easton shows her jewellery to Sarah Anne Johnson


Installation view with Appau Junior Boakye-Yiadem's film and Catherine Herbert's Cacti Combinations prominent

Catherine Herbert, Marguerite Horner and Uliana Apatina



Appau Junior Boakye-Yiadem at centre of the external throng


Suzanne Moxhay at centre

Alys Williams (Wil Murray's gallerist) with the cold climate combination of Uliana (Siberia), Dagmara (Poland) and Sarah (Winnipeg)

Susan Collis
Suzanne talks to Sarah and Dagmara

                                                ABOUT THE SHOW
 

                           Sarah Anne Johnson


Party Boat, 2012

Sarah Anne Johnson (lives and works in Winnipeg, Canada) trained in photography at Yale, but takes that starting point to explore herself through such diverse projects tree planting, eco-volunteering in the Galapagos and joining a scientific expedition to sail through the arctic pack ice. One unifying approach across these projects has been an urge to expand the photographic record by inhabiting the experience afresh, such as by modelling the site or intensifying the photographs’ effects by chemical or painted interventions. Her series Wonderlust explores how she herself deals with intimacy, using other individuals and couples making love as her surrogates. Having photographed them in their homes, Johnson made studio interventions to point up and play off the wide range of emotional experiences of sex. From escapist to tantric to comic to aggressive, Johnson explores, critiques and celebrates the combinational of lovemaking – and leaves her viewers with an uncomfortable mix of voyeurism, bashfulness and sentimentality.





Splatter Paint, 2013
                                 

                           Susan Collis


                         


The oyster’s our world, 2004: Wooden stepladder, mother of pearl, shell, coral,
fresh water pearl, cultured pearls, white opal, diamond

You may know Susan Collis as an artist whose work is easily missed, as she’s played with the values of material, labour and art by reproducing, for example, what look like accidental splashes of paint in mother of pearl. Collis is less interested, though, in invisibility than in shifting the perceived value and in rescuing the overlooked. What seems accidental and worthless proves to be deliberate and expensive to produce, whether in materials or labour. Here she takes those interest in somewhat different directions. In Depth Charge she brings together leads from propeller pencils, combining many potential drawings at the same time as repurposing the basis of drawing to minimalist sculptural ends. For value transfer of The Queens pearls Collis extracts the monarch's one visible earring from a dozen £50 notes, to form a pearl necklace and a face of sorts beneath a drawing pin nose. 

 
              

Anything really, 2011: 0.9 mm pencil leads, framed



                  Appau Junior Boakye-Yiadom 

 

                 

              Hot Chocolate, 2009: Sony 32″ Monitor,’The Alternative Fireplace’ DVD,

                                         Porcelain Cat, Tempered Dark Chocolate

Sculptor and film maker Appau Junior Boakye-Yiadom (lives and works in London) uses the backdrop of the studio, in which everyday objects and found audio and visual footage are merged and animated into short performances, to document art as an activity through video, photography and installation.
Golden Underground shows him playing a piano with a paintbrush. Mindful of Proust's ‘remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were’, Boakye-Yiadom aims to investigate the connection between recording and the present. Photographed plantains invade the filmed space in lively style; the sliding motion of the ‘moonwalk’ dance step is in turn slid across the space on a tugged TV, emphasizing the object behind the image; the slippery relationship between the production of image and words is wittily emphasised by setting Picasso's painting movements to Felix Okoye's all-too-true words: 'It would be better not to know so many things than to know so many things that are not so'.



Golden Underground, 2011




                                                 Suzanne Moxhay



             Byway, 2012


The work of Suzanne Moxhay (lives and works in London) doesn’t immediately look like collage, but her haunting landscapes and interiors are actually composed by building up miniature ‘flats’ in the style of film sets, hence the ambiguities of scale and depth. AS a result, although they may look realistic at first, on closer inspection they begin to fall apart The familiar yet distanced atmosphere is explained by the main sources of the archive which feeds that process: images from the 1950-70’s, with the National Geographic Magazine prominent. To what extent, then, is how we live now a function of how the past has fed into the present? If significantly so, then Moxhay’s visions seem to point towards a foreboding, if not apocalyptic, world to come. 

 


    Copse, 2014

                                     Wil Murray


         

 If You Lived Free Or Died Here You Would Be Home Or Dead By Now, 2010

Wil Murray (lives and works in Calgary, Canada) hybridises painting and collage. His method arose from the thought that – although it’s inevitable nowadays that paintings will be photographed and distributed on the Internet – painters never address that. So Murray asked how he could move that into his process. The result is that you need to look rather carefully to sort out the nature of what you see in his constructs: is that a stroke of paint on a flat surface; paint which has been applied to glass, removed from it and inserted elsewhere; a photographed swathe of paint, cut out and collaged, sometimes alongside their original; or a photograph of another works (or, perhaps, of his studio). When found photographic elements and three dimensionality are also in play, complex settings arise for what is at root the basic painterly gesture. Adieu Vielle Europe 5 combines scenes from old travel and tourist photography books as if through an on-screen wipe. 

 


Adieu Vielle Europe 5, 2014



                                  Catherine Herbert




     Eurv, 2013


Catherine Herbert (lives and works in London and Chelmsford) makes intricate collages which combine cut-out shapes with acrylic and glitter, using a template made from her own preliminary drawings. So, for example, images of trees are applied to a shape taken from a drawing of an ivy’s growth, linking what strangles and negates the tree to its reappearance through different means. Other collages enact a parallel move by creating animalistic forms out of images of genetically distorted life, so building in the consequences of our maltreatment of the environment. Given those concerns, her combinations of cacti don’t just bring an alternative spiky beauty, they pose such questions as: is this unnatural act a stand-in for human relations or for genetic distortion? And, if the former, is that relationship symbiotic or parasitic?

 
                


               Cacti Combination, 2013



Images and participation courtesy of the artists and Julie Saul & Stephen Bulger galleries (Sarah Anne Johnson), Seventeen Gallery (Susan Collis),  Vitrine (Wil Murray) and Bearspace (Suzanne Moxhay).

About Me

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Southampton, Hampshire, United Kingdom
I was in my leisure time Editor at Large of Art World magazine (which ran 2007-09) and now write freelance for such as Art Monthly, Frieze, Photomonitor, Elephant and Border Crossings. I have curated 20 shows during 2013-17 with more on the way. Going back a bit my main writing background is poetry. My day job is public sector financial management.

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