All posts tagged Anselm Kiefer

Pushing paper contemporary drawing from 1970 to now @ the British Museum

‘Learn to draw, learn to see.’
(Established artist Eugène Boudin to the up-and-coming young Monet)

A travelling show

The British Museum houses the national collection of Western prints and drawings, in the same way as the National Gallery and Tate hold the national collection of paintings. It is one of the top three collections of its kind in the world, and houses approximately 50,000 drawings and over two million prints dating from the beginning of the fifteenth century up to the present day.

Of these 50,000 drawings, some 1,500 are by contemporary or modern artists. From this 1,500, the museum has worked with curators from other galleries around the country to make a selection of 56 drawings for this exhibition, which:

  1. highlight the range and diversity of contemporary drawings
  2. are designed to show how the entire concept of ‘drawing’ has been subjected to radical experiments and redefinitions during this key period, 1970 to the present

The idea is that after a couple of months on display in London, the exhibition will travel to the partner museums around the country, which will add works from their own collections to the display, thus creating a unique combination at each venue.

You can see how this will a) make the works accessible to audiences round the country and b) create a network of curators who are interested and informed about drawings, which could lead to who knows what consequences in the future.

What is a drawing?

Here’s one of the first works you encounter, Untitled by Grayson Perry, featuring an early outing by his transvestite alter-ego, Clare (note what seems to be a dog’s tail coming out the back of her skirt). So far, so gender-bending.

What’s really going on here, though, is the extreme stress Perry is applying to the concept of the ‘drawing’. It clearly contains elements of collage, with stereotypical photos from magazines tacked onto it, plus the diagonal colour washes and diagonal bands of glitter. Is it a drawing at all?

Untitled (1984) by Grayson Perry © The Trustees of the British Museum

That is the question which echoes through the rest of the show. Some works are old-style figurative depictions of some real object in the world, for example this attractive portrait by Jan Vanriet (although I was a little puzzled whether this was a drawing or a watercolour. Is it a drawing which has been watercoloured? Is that still a drawing?)

Ruchla by Jan Vanriet (2011) © The Trustees of the British Museum

It turns out to be one of a series developed from portrait photos of the Jews deported from one particular location in Belgium to concentration camps where they were all murdered. Kind of changes your attitude to the image, doesn’t it?

Drawing also contains the genre of satire or caricature or political cartoon, here represented by Philip Guston‘s unforgiving image of American president Richard Nixon, whose face seems to have turned into a penis and scrotum. To his left what I initially thought was his body is in fact a caricature of Vice President Spiro Agnew, who was addicted to playing golf, hence the clutter of golf clubs and balls. And the crab-like glasses on the right reference Nixon’s adviser Henry Kissinger.

Untitled by Philip Guston (1971) © The Trustees of the British Museum

(This caricature is a reminder to younger viewers that there’s nothing new about Donald Trump: America has a long, long, long track record of scumbag, murdering, lying presidents. Why, then, do the arbiters of culture give America so much weight and respect?)

And then there are what you could call artistic ‘deformations’ of real objects, specifically the human body, subjected to stylisation, morphing into abstract patterns, as in this drawing by Gwen Hardie, the tiggerish striping of the torso counterpointed by the stylisation of what are presumably female sex organs, the leaning-back posture a cross between a cave painting and a Henry Moore sculpture. Gwen is a woman artist ‘who has a longstanding preoccupation with the body and its perception’.

Untitled (1962) by Gwen Hardie © The Trustees of the British Museum

A striking ‘deformation of the actual’ is this work by Hew Locke, a British artist of Guyanese descent. According to the wall label, Locke takes the view that the Queen has been party to countless secrets during her record-breaking reign, and that this nightmarish image captures the corroding and corrupting effect all these secrets and lies have had on her, by the look of it, transforming her face into a mask of eyes against a backdrop of scores of little wiggly lime-green skulls. The image ‘asks us to question the Queen as a symbol of nationhood , as well as the power and history which she embodies.’

Sovereign 3 by Hew Locke (2005) © The Trustees of the British Museum

For those of us who were around during the punk Summer of Hate of 1977 – 42 years ago – this is nothing new. Taking the piss out of the Queen is an extremely old activity, in fact it made me feel quite nostalgic.

Sex Pistols album cover (1977)

According to the curators, the period from 1970 to the present saw a resurgence of interest in drawing. Previously it had mostly been seen as a format in which you practiced life studies, or prepared for work in a more demanding medium such as painting. The 1960s opened the box on this (as on so many other genres and practices) and freed up artists to be as playful and experimental as they could imagine. Thus:

Drawings in the exhibition encroach on territories traditionally associated with mediums including sculpture, land art and even performance.

‘Drawing’ spills out all over the place.

Five themes

The exhibition groups the works into five themes, ‘examining’:

  • Identity
  • Place and Space
  • Time and Memory
  • Power and Protest
  • Systems and Process

Personally, I felt these ‘themes’ rather limited and directed and forced your responses to works which often had nothing at all in common, and could each have stood by themselves. Except for the last one, that is: because a lot of the works genuinely are interested in systems and processes.

For example, there’s a yellow square by Sol LeWitt which is just one of countless of works the American artist generated from algorithms, from sets of rules about geometry, shapes and colours, which he created and then followed through to produce thousands of variations.

There’s a drawing of the tiles on a floor by Rachel Whiteread which comes with quite an extensive label explaining that a) she has always been interested in floors which are the most overlooked parts of a room or building and b) that it’s a heavily painted drawing, done in thick gouache onto graph paper, which points forward, or hints at, the vast casts of rooms and entire buildings which she was soon to create.

There’s a work by Fiona Robinson which juxtaposes two sets of vibrating lines which she created while listening to the music of John Cage, and then of Johann Sebastian Bach.

Related to these, insofar as it’s black and white and made of abstract patterns, is this charming drawing by Richard Deacon.

Some Interference 14.01.06 (2006) by Richard Deacon © The Trustees of the British Museum

I found a lot of these ‘abstract’ works a lot more appealing than many of the rather obvious ‘messages’ in the ‘Power and Protest’ section. But maybe you’d prefer the latter. Different strokes. The whole point is, the exhibition has been designed to showcase the immense variety of images, formats and materials which can go into the making of ‘a drawing’.

The artists

What is a drawing? Well, this exhibition presents an impressive roll call of major contemporary artists all giving answers to that question, including:

  • Edward Allington
  • Phyllida Barlow
  • Louise Bourgeois
  • Stuart Brisley
  • Pablo Bronstein
  • Glenn Brown
  • Jonathan Callan
  • Judy Chicago
  • Adel Daoud
  • Richard Deacon
  • Tacita Dean
  • Michael Ditchburn
  • Peter Doig
  • Tracey Emin
  • Ellen Gallagher
  • Philip Guston
  • Maggi Hambling
  • Richard Hamilton
  • Gwen Hardie
  • Claude Heath
  • David Hockney
  • Andrzej Jackowski
  • Anish Kapoor
  • Anselm Kiefer
  • Minjung Kim
  • Marcia Kure
  • Micah Lexier
  • Liliane Lijn
  • Hew Locke
  • Nja Mahdaoui
  • Bahman Mohassess
  • David Nash
  • Cornelia Parker
  • Seb Patane
  • A R Penck
  • Grayson Perry
  • Frank Pudney
  • Imran Qureshi
  • Gerhard Richter
  • Fiona Robinson
  • Hamid Sulaiman
  • Jan Vanriet
  • Hajra Waheed
  • Rachel Whiteread
  • Stephen Willats

Apart from anything else, it’s a fascinating cross-section of the artistic practices and concerns of some of the most important artists of the last 50 years.

Mountain by Minjung Kim (2009) © The Trustees of the British Museum

Pushing Paper is in room 90, which is right at the back of the British Museum and up several flights of stairs, in the Drawings and Print Department. It is varied and interesting and thought-provoking, and it is FREE.

Related links

  • Pushing Paper continues at the British Museum until 12 January 2020

Other British Museum exhibitions

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by Simon on September 13, 2019  •  Permalink
Posted in Art, Exhibition
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Posted by Simon on September 13, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/09/13/pushing-paper-contemporary-drawing-british-museum/

Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2019

The Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition is the world’s largest open submission exhibition, running every year since 1769. This, the 251st exhibition, was curated by Jock McFadyen RA, he has overall responsibility for its look and layout – although it’s worth noting that most of the fourteen or so individual rooms were allotted to other artists to sub-curate.

1,583 works

Over 15,000 works were submitted by artists professional, super-famous, or utterly amateur. From these the curators have chosen 1,583 pieces to be displayed in the Academy’s fourteen massive exhibition rooms, in the courtyard outside, and even spilling over into a street display in nearby Bond Street – ‘a colourful installation of flags featuring work by Michael Craig-Martin’.

Large walking figure by Thomas Houseago, in the Royal Academy courtyard (not for sale)

Variety of media

Over 1,583 works in every imaginable medium – prints and paintings, film, photography, sculpture, architectural models and much more – making it the largest Summer Exhibition in over a century. How on earth can the visitor be expected to make sense of process such a vast over-abundance of artistic objects?

Well, the answer is that everyone does it in their own way. My son and I always have a competition to find the cheapest – and the most expensive – works on offer (see the winner at the end of this review). He also likes comic or quirky pieces so he loved this sculpture of a tiger covered in Tunnock teacake wrappers.

Easy Tiger by David Mach (£57,600)

The architecture room

Some people come to see the room of architectural models and blueprints. Usually I call the architecture room the Room of Shame, from a lifetime’s experience of growing up close to an appalling New Town in my teens, and then starting my working life in the poorer parts of London amid slums and rundown housing estates. The planners and architects who designed those places should be ashamed at the barren, soul-destroying environments they condemned other people to live their lives in.

But to my surprise, I quite liked the Room of Shame this year. If you think of all the elaborate models on display as sets from science fiction movies, utterly unrelated to the actual world we all live in, then I found a lot of them entertaining fantasies. And there were some quirky and genuinely inspiring buildings, from the model of an enormous concrete grain silo which has actually been converted into an art gallery in China, to a pyramid of recycled plastic bottles built on a hypothetical beach somewhere.

‘Bottlehouse’, in the architecture room

I couldn’t help sniggering that a lot of architects – from the evidence here – appear to have just discovered something called The Environment, and are making bold little wooden models of cities which will be environmentally friendly and carbon neutral and made from recyclable materials. Well done, chaps. About fifty years too late, but it’s a nice thought. The army of cranes I see around Battersea Power Station don’t seem to be putting up anything beautiful or sustainable, and when I recently visited Stratford East I had a panic attack at the sheer amount of concrete that has been poured to make vast walled sterile walkways and esplanades without a tree in sight.

Amaravati Masterplan Model (1:1000) by Spencer de Grey RA (not for sale)

Photography

Some visitors like photography, and I noticed what I thought was a higher proportion of photos than usual though, as always, that may be a purely subjective impression. They give you a handy pocket-sized catalogue of all the works as part of the entrance price, and I’ve kept the ones from the last five or six years, so I suppose I could go through and do a precise analysis of how many photos have been included in previous years compared to this year…

For me, a lot of art (and certainly a lot of writing about art) is very samey, covering the same sort of subject matter, often small and set indoors. I really liked this photo because it was one of the few images which conveyed the sense that it is a big world with lots and lots, and lots, of people in it, people who live in worlds and conditions we can’t imagine, whose day-to-day existence is as different from our comfortable Western lives as Martians. (It’s a bloody big photo, too, at 1.5 by 2 metres.)

Saw Mills #2, Lagos, Nigeria by Edward Burtynsky (£47,000)

Big names

Some come looking for the works by big-name international artists like Wim Wenders or Anselm Kiefer or Richard Long. There was a huge muddy oil painting by Anselm Kiefer (2.8 metres by 3.8 metres), a turbulent thick impasto of brown tones, over which he had scored lines and patterns and writing. Sounds pretentious but it had real presence, it knocked most of the other paintings in its gallery out of the park. This reproduction is useless at conveying its huge, looming, disturbing, and very physical presence.

Fünf Jahre Lebte Vainamoinen Auf Der Unbekannten Insel Auf Dem Baumlosen Land by Anselm Kiefer

Modest works

Size isn’t everything. All the rooms were packed to overflowing and it was often only on the second or third go-round that I noticed small, shy and retiring works, such as a pair of lovely photos of small songbirds which, on close inspection, appear to be attached to their perches next to brightly coloured brickwork by tiny golden chains.

Gasconades (Letsdothis) by Mat Collishaw (£685)

The Wohl Central Hall where this photo was, is themed around animals, who appear in all shapes and sizes, in paintings and photos and sculptures. Other strong themes were concerns for the environment and recycling in the Room of Shame, and ideas of immigration and identity, particularly in Gallery I which was sub-curated by Jane and Louise Wilson.

Identity

As soon as you see the world ‘identity’ you know there’s going to be images of black people, and gays and lesbians, and probably refugees and immigrants. It’s a stock theme usually accompanied by stock images, and sure enough there’s paintings of a black couple and group of ladies (by Arthur Timothy), a video of a black girl dancing in her front room (by Sophie Perceval), a photo of a black mother and daughter (by Pepukai Makoni). There’s a painting of two men kissing by Ksenija Vucinic.

A Portrait of a Couple by Ksenija Vucinic (£750)

[In fact I completely misinterpreted this painting, thinking it depicted a gay couple – not least because of the word ‘couple’ in the title – when it is a much more complicated image. See the comment below this review, from the artist, explaining her motivation.]

The room is dominated by a big blue hanging fabric by Jeremy Deller with the motto: ‘We are all immigrant scum.’ This made my son quite cross. He thought it was patronising its audience: a) as if wall hangings will have the slightest impact on one of the great social and political issues of our time, and b) as if all the nice, middle-class white people who attend an exhibition at the Royal Academy are not already bien-pensant, cosmopolitan liberals.

We are all immigrant scum by Jeremy Deller (not for sale)

‘Preaching to the converted,’ is the term he used.

Wolfgang Tilmans

Dodging the woke messages, I liked this photo best of anything in the PC room. Possibly the two guys are gay and so shoehorned into the ‘identity’ theme. But the image is caught so vividly, I could almost feel the wet sand giving way under my own feet, evoking memories of when I’ve done this kind of thing.

And, to be honest, I fancied the two blokes. Fit-looking young men, aren’t they?

It was only when I looked it up in the catalogue that I realised it’s by the über-famous Wolfgang Tilmans (who had a big retrospective at Tate Modern not so long ago). And that it’s on sale for the not inconsiderable sum of £72,000.

Liam and Tm jumping up the cliff by Wolfgang Tillmans (£72,000)

Most of us, I suspect, just like pottering around this vast gallimaufrey of every style of contemporary art work you can imagine, letting ourselves be surprised and sometimes astonished at the big, the small, the political, the personal – the world of animals (beautiful prints of whales, photos of dogs) and world of men (a number of works depicting brutalist high-rises), the world of woke (gays and blacks) and the world of weird.

The Scarred One by Benedict Byrne (not for sale)

It doesn’t come over at all in this photo, but you know all the little fuses and bits of wire and coloured components you find inside transistor radios? Well, this work is actually a three-dimensional piece made up of a hundred or so of those wires and coloured components all attached to a black background to make this design.

Technological Echnological Mandala by Leonardo Ulian (£9,000)

From patterns made by man to the incredibly beautiful patterns of nature, he also liked this 3-D rendered giclée print on cotton rag depicting in vibrant super-colour a beehive.

The Language of Bees by Richard Devonshire (£500)

For my part, I liked this screenprint, unsure whether it’s a photo or a painting, or a graphically altered photo. Whatever the precise nature, on a hot summer day, it spoke to me of cool water. I could feel the ozone breeze blowing off the splashing water into my face.

Falling Water II by John Mackechnie (£1,100)

There are about 1,500 other examples I could give, but maybe that’s enough…

For the last couple of years we have been a little disappointed by the Summer Exhibition. This year, maybe it was the weather or my hormones, but I felt it was a return to form, I thought there was a really massive variety of works on display and, for some reason, lots of it really clicked with me.

For sale

As always, most of the artworks are for sale with proceeds helping to fund the Academy’s non-profit-making activities, including educating the next generation of artists in the RA Schools. The free catalogue I mentioned earlier lists all 1,583 works, their titles, artists and prices, if for sale.

It’s always part of the fun to try and figure out the cheapest and the most expensive works on display, and, as you wander round and different pieces take your eye, having a bet with your friends or family about how much each piece costs. As far as I could tell, this is the most expensive piece, an untitled bronze sculpture of an androgynous woman with a branch on her head and coils of wire round her hands with a couple of metal numbers thrown in, by Mimmo Paladino, which will set you back a cool £337,000.

Untitled by Mimmo Paladino (£337,000)

The promotional video

Related links

More Royal Academy reviews

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by Simon on July 30, 2019  •  Permalink
Posted in Art, Exhibition, Photography, Sculpture
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Posted by Simon on July 30, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/07/30/royal-academy-summer-exhibition-2019/

Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2017

Took the kids to the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. This is the 7th or 8th Summer show I’ve been to, so I know the form: of 12,000 or so works submitted by professionals and amateurs alike, some 1,200 are selected and hung in rooms arranged by different curators, picking out or choosing different themes, often with distinct wall colours to give each room a specific character.

There’s always a room devoted to architecture (the ‘room of shame’ as I call it) and one of Big Sculptures. This year there were also two room showing videos, one showing Phantom Rhapsody by Sarah Pucill and The Invisible Voice by Julie Born Schwartz. I have myself produced and directed a number of videos, and then series edited several hundred TV programmes. It never ceases to surprise me how ‘art’ videos have such low production values and use so little of the digital technology which is available. Having watched the showreels of hundreds of directors applying for TV jobs, which consist of scores of inventive clips, impactful short films, novel combinations of music and action, I’m always struck by the way art videos are so often deeply conservative and unimaginative.

And then there’s always work by the familiar Royal Academicians like Michael Craig-Martin, the Matisse-like cut-outs by Gillian Ayres, the saucy cartoonish self-portraits of Anthony Green (e.g. The Pink Lounge), evocative etchings of the Highlands and Islands by Norman Ackroyd, or the scrawny nudes by Tracey Emin – although this year Ms Emin supplied a set of smallish neon sentences spelling out phrases like ‘I Did Not Say I Can Never Love You I Said I Could Never Love You’ and ‘Never Again!’ and ‘And I Said I Love You!’. This last one can be seen through the archway in the photo below, a pink neon sentence hanging from the wall and yours for just £84,000.

View of the Wohl Central Hall featuring Petrol Cargo by Romuald Hazoume and Very Nice Ride by Paola Pivi

View of the Wohl Central Hall featuring Petrol Cargo by Romuald Hazoume and Very Nice Ride (a rotating bicycle wheel studded with peacock feathers attached to the wall) by Paola Pivi (£13,000)

Petrol Cargo is based on the scooters laden with jugs and vessels used to smuggle petrol across borders in West Africa – possibly more a piece of ethnography than art, but hey…

View of Room II featuring Untitled (Violin) by Michael Craig-Martin

View of Room II featuring Untitled (Violin) by Michael Craig-Martin RA (£120,000)

Although you can take a few minutes to read the wall label in each room which gives the ostensible aim and guiding principles the selectors used to make their selection, these would be impossible to guess from the works alone which, in each room, present much the same kind of cluttered random feel.

View of Room II showing Volute IV by Paul de Monchaux (£36,000) and Full House by Sean Scully (NFS)

View of Room II showing Volute IV by Paul de Monchaux (The bronze sculpture on the floor – £36,000) and Full House by Sean Scully RA (the big painting – Not For Sale)

My kids quickly devised a game called Find The Most Expensive Work in The Room, though this didn’t stop us just liking things we liked, such as Aeronautics by Alexander Vorobyev, bottom left and heavily channeling Paul Klee – and Frederick Cuming’s slightly disturbing Children’s Playground, Sicily. These were in Room I which was absolutely crammed with works stacked next to each other. It’s an interesting effect. This is how the Victorians displayed their pictures – without the enormous reverent white spaces we’re used to in normal exhibitions. It tends to make you make much quicker, more sweeping judgments: Yes, No, No, Yes.

Room I featuring Aeronautics by Alexander Vorobyev (botton left - £6,000) and Children's Playground, Sicilty by Frederick Cuming (bottom right - £7,200)

Room I featuring Aeronautics by Alexander Vorobyev (bottom left, £6,000) and Children’s Playground, Sicily by Frederick Cuming (bottom right, £7,200)

Sometimes works catch your eye. Or the arrangement of works. So, simply having two works by Bill Jacklin RA next to each other more than doubled their impact – though both have a hint of the Jack Vettrianos about them.

Hub I (£55,000) and Umbrella Crossing IV (£35,000) by Bill Jacklin

Hub I (£55,000) and Umbrella Crossing IV (£35,000) by Bill Jacklin

Room V is dominated by Natural Pearl, a sculpture in steel by Nigel Hall RA. On the wall, at the top, to the right of the doorway, you can see two of the bright, attractive decorative works in the style of Matisse’s cut-outs by Gillian Ayres RA. These come in signed editions of 30 at £4,700 a pop.

Room V featuring Natural Pearl by Nigel Hall (£189,600)

Room V featuring Natural Pearl by Nigel Hall (£189,600)

The woman on the right in the photo is above is holding a flute of champagne. because in the centre of the largest room is a bar serving champagne among other intoxicating drinks at Royal Ascot prices. So there were lots of white middle-class people sipping champagne and considering post-colonial works such as Inheritance by British artist Zak Ové, noted for ‘his documentation of and anthropological interest in diasporic and African history’.

Inheritance by Zak Ové (£21,600)

Inheritance by Zak Ové (£21,600)

Next to this pillar are two works by Mozambique artist Gonçalo Mabunda, both called Untitled throne and made out of decommissioned weapons used during Mozambique’s civil war in which over a million people died. They’re clearly related to the famous Throne of Weapons in the British Museum made by Cristóvão Estavão Canhavato as part of the same project titled ‘Transforming Guns into Hoes’, part funded by European charities.

One chair costs £14,400 and one costs £15,000 – the kids suggested that one costs more because some of the ammo is still live – and that the only way to find out which one is to sit on them both and see which one blows up! Nothing in Art, I explained patiently to my son, is that exciting or dangerous. When curators describe a work of art as ‘dangerous’ or ‘risky’ they don’t, in fact, mean it.

Untitled thrones by Gonçalo Mabunda (£14,400 and £15,000)

Untitled thrones by Gonçalo Mabunda (£14,400 and £15,000)

In a corner of room VI were this set of figurines a little over a foot tall, each with an individual name (Taigen, Monika etc) by Japanese artist Tomoaki Suzuki and retailing at an impressive £24,000. My son calculated you could buy 480 Action Men for that price.

Taigen, Monika, Larry, Dasha, Rosie, Kadeem and Kyrone by Tomoaki Suzuki (£24,000)

Taigen, Monika, Larry, Dasha, Rosie, Kadeem and Kyrone by Tomoaki Suzuki (£24,000 each)

Amid so many so-so abstract paintings, I was attracted to sculptures of the human form. This one-off mannequin, a ‘unique fibre-glass sculpture, hand-painted with Dutch wax pattern, bespoke hand-coloured globe and steel baseplate’ is by Yinka Shonibure RA and titled Venus de Medici. (Hanging on the wall to the left is Métamorphose de Papillon by Abdoulaye Konaté – £35,000)

Venus de Medici by Yinka Shonibare RA (£162,000)

Venus de Medici by Yinka Shonibare RA (£162,000)

Looking into it now, after my visit, I notice that this room, Room VI, was curated by Yinka Shonibare and was probably my favourite, with half a dozen big striking sculptures.

Mūgogo - The Crossing By Naomi Wanjiku Gakunga (£17,500)

Mūgogo: The Crossing by Naomi Wanjiku Gakunga (£17,500)

When there are lots of paintings, of wildly different styles and aims, hanging cheek by jowl, it’s difficult to sort out your responses to them, or to really pay attention to each one. You tend to be attracted at a quick glance by the colour, the design, the subject conveyed (whether it’s a figurative work), and so on.

For example, the semi-abstract works on the right are probably the better pieces, but by this stage the visitor is over 750 works into the exhibition (!) so the rather exhausted eye tends to be drawn to the easier-to-process figurative images on the left.

Corner of Room VII

Corner of Room VII

In the above photo, the image of the door open into a room is Postern by Suzanne Moxhay (£895), to its right is Sic Transit Gloria Mundi (After Piranesi) by Emily Allchurch; on the right wall are Of by Elizabeth Magill (£10,000) and Baroda – Tree Of Art by Katsutoshi Yuasa (£2,500).

Room IX is dominated by a vast work by Gilbert & George, the latest in their huge stained-glass-window style works divided into panels and generally depicting crude and vulgar subjects – I am still reeling from the similarly huge works depicting turds and piss, such as Spunk Blood Piss Shit Spit (1996) which I saw at Tate a few years ago. The example here was relatively restrained Beard Speak, made up of panels containing the text of adverts stuck up in phone boxes – from the days when there used to be phone boxes.

Beard Speak by Gilbert & George

Beard Speak by Gilbert & George

I preferred two sculptures by women artists: Amy Remixed by Sarah Gwyer (£7,500): my daughter told me how much work it must have been to colour and then sew together all these sequins, beads and so on.

Amy Remixed by Sarah Gwyer (£7,500)

Amy Remixed by Sarah Gwyer (£7,500)

And, nearby, a wonderful sculpture of an old sailing ship made from fake and real pearl necklaces, bracelets and tiaras, Wing Wo by Ann Carrington (£31,560) maybe a reference to the gold and precious stones so often transported across the seas in the high period of piracy in the 17th century.

Wing Wo by Ann Carrington (£31,560)

Wing Wo by Ann Carrington (£31,560)

I was intrigued enough by this to search the internet for an explanation of the name.

Luckily the final room, the Lecture Room, felt much airier and spacious, a big room with a manageable 20 works, including Und Du Bist Maler Geworden by Anselm Kiefer (NFS), Painting For B by Secundino Hernández (NFS) and two bright abstract works by Fiona Rae RA, She Pricked Her Finger Cutting the Clouds (NFS) and Many-Coloured Messenger Seeks Her Fortune (NFS).

View of the Lecture Room including, from left to right, Und Du Bist Maler Geworden by Anselm Kiefer, Painting For B by Secundino Hernández, and She Pricked Her Finger Cutting the Clouds and Many-Coloured Messenger Seeks Her Fortune by Fiona Rae RA

View of the Lecture Room including, from left to right, Und Du Bist Maler Geworden by Anselm Kiefer, Painting For B by Secundino Hernández, and She Pricked Her Finger Cutting the Clouds and Many-Coloured Messenger Seeks Her Fortune by Fiona Rae RA. The sculpture is Bumps In The Road by Huma Bhabha

Better online?

So many ways of seeing and being and expressing and depicting – quite bewildering. It is worth commenting that it is in many ways more satisfying to view works via the online search portal.

Seeing works online, in isolation, helps you to:

a) notice them at all among the scrum and hubbub of the packed walls displays
b) dwell on their merits

It’s beyond the energy of most gallery visitors to pay close attention to over 1,000 art works. There are 48 just in this photo below, and it shows less than half of one room.

It dawns on me that it may be a good idea to spend some time scrolling through the works online, deciding what you like, and only then visit the exhibition to see them in the flesh…

Lots of pictures

An awful lot of pictures

Related links

More Royal Academy reviews

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by Simon on July 1, 2017  •  Permalink
Posted in Art, Exhibition, Sculpture
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Posted by Simon on July 1, 2017

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2017/07/01/royal-academy-summer-exhibition-2017/

The Royal Academy summer exhibition 2016

The pleasures of the annual summer exhibition at the Royal Academy are:

  1. The sheer scale – 1,240 exhibits this year.
  2. The variety – it is not a show of One Major Artist, where you’re meant to pay close attention to the artistic development of a Matisse or a Georgia O’Keeffe – it’s such an enormous ragbag of styles, formats and artists, confusing and inspiring by turn, that so you can just like whatever you like.
  3. The prices – most of the exhibits are on sale and the exhibition booklet gives prices: it’s always amusing to be shocked and outraged at the outrageously large prices of the whoppers, but also touched by the affordability of some of the simpler works.

I’ve been to half a dozen summer shows and this seemed to me a rather dull one. Maybe I’m getting used to them, but too many of the oil paintings in particular, were just ‘meh’. Oil paintings of the canals of Venice, of a nude model in the artist’s studio, of a mantelpiece or a flight of stairs in someone’s house. Haven’t these subjects been done to death? Haven’t I seen them done a thousand times before, and much better?

Installation view of the Summer Exhibition 2016 © Stephen White

Installation view of the Summer Exhibition 2016 © Stephen White

Likes

I learned about Jane and Louise Wilson from their black and white photos of ruined WWII concrete defences on the Normandy coast. Several of their other large format photos are currently on display at Tate Britain. For this show, they’ve hung six massive colour photos taken in the city of Pripyat, abandoned and never repopulated after the catastrophic nuclear accident at the nearby Chernobyl nuclear power plant.

Atomgrad, Nature Abhors A Vacuum VII by Jane and Louise Wilson  © Jane & Louise Wilson

Atomgrad, Nature Abhors A Vacuum VII by Jane and Louise Wilson © Jane & Louise Wilson

They are powerful depictions of derelict ruins and set off a theme which runs, here and there, throughout the rest of the show, of ruin and collapse. Immense and atmospheric though they are, the impact is slightly undermined by the perspex cover on each image, which reflects the overhead lights so it’s hard to see an entire image without a patch of shiny reflection. (As luck would have it, I recently read a gripping thriller set in the Exclusion Zone around Chernobyl, Martin Cruz Smith’s Wolves Eat Dogs, which powerfully conveys the eeriness of the abandoned city, so the photos brought to life Cruz Smith’s wonderful text.)

Old favourites

You only have to visit a few of the Summer Exhibitions to begin to recognise old favourites who exhibit year after year. These include:

Allen Jones made his name in the 1960s with female shop window mannequins dressed in sexy underwear and posed to form a coffee table or chair. A retrospective of his work here at the Academy last year showed that his later work has included a lot of paintings of sexy women in leather boots etc in a kind of nightclub ambience of yellow and green washes of colour. There are half a dozen of these paintings in this year’s show, plus one life-size mannequin of a pert-breasted lovely with a splash of yellow paint across her. A snip at £210,000.

Anthony Green exhibits each year faux-naive paintings generally of himself, his wife, their house and garden, done in a cartoonish style and often with the frame cut out around the shape of the main image, for example Self-portrait for Gaston Lachaise £6,000. Reassuringly familiar.

Norman Ackroyd displays wonderful black and white etchings of the isles off Scotland, as seen rising from the sea, often beswirled by seagulls, with titles like Cow Rock, County Kerry (£1,100), Midsummer Sunrise, Sound of Mull £570, Skellig Revisited £570.

Very similar, but done in intaglio and so with darker blacks and a hint of blue, was a series of depictions of the landscape of Iceland and Antarctica by Emma Stibbon.

Mick Moon paints peasant fishermen scenes onto what looks like planks or cross-sections of weed. Evening Fishing £25,200.

Michael Craig-Martin makes very soothing big paintings of everyday objects in striking, unshaded primary colours. Space II is very big and costs £170,000.

Tracey Emin’s sketchy sketches of what is probably her own naked body on a bed go for £1,850 a pop.

Installation view of the Summer Exhibition 2016 © Stephen White

Installation view of the Summer Exhibition 2016, featuring a typical large work by Michael Craig-Martin © Stephen White

Novelties

Allora and Calzadilla displayed a life size petrol pump emerging from a block of grey stone, titled 2 Hose Petrified Petrol Pump. Powerful. Not for sale (NFS)

My son like the enormous Böse Blumen by Anselm Kiefer, a vast grey slab of lead, with daubs and blodges of oil paint and, incongruously, a relief sculpture of a big leather bound book. NFS.

Beard Aware is the name of a huge mock-stained glass work by pranksters Gilbert and George, depicting the artists bending over to moon us, but their bottoms concealed by swathes of barbed wire. One of an extensive series which is something to do with security, apparently.

In the same room is a raised dais bearing a large rectangle of paper on which are two carbonised skeletons, blackened bone fragments, some of the teeth with gold fillings. Self Portrait as Charcoal on Paper by Zatorski and Zatorski, £42,000.

Installation view of the Summer Exhibition 2016, featuring Beard Aware by Gilbert and George, andSelf portrait as charcoal on paper by Zatorski and Zatorski © Stephen White

Installation view of the Summer Exhibition 2016, featuring Beard Aware by Gilbert and George, and Self portrait as charcoal on paper by Zatorski and Zatorski © Stephen White

The Small Weston Room is devoted to 30 or so black and white photographs by the husband and wife team of Bernd and Hilla Becher. They spent decades photographing isolated and often derelict industrial buildings with Teutonic precision – always on the same kind of grey, overcast day in spring or autumn (never summer) to avoid shadows, and always using a camera placed on a tripod at human eye level. These images are then arranged into squares or rectangles of prints showing the same type of building – gas tanks, cooling towers, water towers, stone works and cooling towers. My son liked the cooling towers since they had the most variety on the central design, and also often looked like space ships.

In the room devoted to Landscape, I liked Black Sea by Lee Wagstaff, a simple depiction of waves (£3,500) and a big colour photo of a Coal Mine, Outer Mongolia by Richard Seymour (£4,200).

Gillian Ayres has had a long career. She is represented here by two colourful woodcuts on paper, which channel Matisse’s late paper cutouts – Scilla and Achiote (£5,760 and £6,600 respectively).

Architecture in the room of shame

As usual one room is devoted to architects’ fanciful, space-age plans for buildings which might as well come from another planet. If architects are in any way responsible for the inhumane, rainy, windswept heartless streets and concrete rabbit warrens which so many Londoners are forced to endure, they whole profession should hang its head in shame.

Slick, clean, plastic or wooden models show the utopian world of these fantasy planners, a world where it never rains, it’s never windy, and where cars, buses, vans, lorries, cabs, coaches and diesel trains don’t – apparently – emit any toxic gases – a world free of CO2, CO, sulphur dioxide or diesel fumes. By rights this room ought to be pumped full of car and bus fumes so that visitors quickly feel sick and ill, in order to convey the awful, car-choked reality of the shiny plastic dreams peddled by so many architectural fantasists.

Themes

Room VI claimed to house works devoted to ‘the role of art in healing a shattered world’. Sentimental tripe. Art may record the appalling devastation humankind is wreaking on the planet, but I’m not aware of it forming the keystone of any notable peace agreement. In Chechnya, former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Iraq – is there a lot of healing art?

One example among scores – Christopher Hughes’ sketch of the utterly devastated landscape of Homs in Syria, depicting how actual buildings often fare in the actual world, instead of in the utopian fantasies of dreamy architects.

Room IX featured a lot of work by the Sensation artists, the Young British Artists who shot to fame with the Sensation show in 1997. (Surely they should be celebrated next year – will there be a twentieth-anniversary show?) As a totality, this room instantly made more visual impact than most of its predecessors. It felt like it was the product of people who were savvy with the actual, image-saturated culture we live in – compare and contrast with the very tired-feeling oil paintings of Venice or a garden.

I liked All The Fish In The Sea by David Mach (£56,000).

Transformer-Performer Double-Act VIII by EVA & ADELE (2015) Photo courtesy of Nicole Gnesa Gallery

Towards the end of the show, the Lecture Room has a lot of big sculptures in it, including David Mach’s Silver Hart, a stag’s head made out of shiny coat hangers (£48,000) – though nothing will top the gorilla made of coat hangers which he exhibited a few years ago.

My son liked Wood Burner II by Guy Allott, which looked like a tea urn with space rocket fins attached.

Leila Jeffreys contributed two big colour photos of cockatoos (£2,160). There was a big black-and-white photo of people at a nightclub dancing – a rare window into the actual everyday world where millions of people live – the daily commute to work, meeting friends down the pub, playing football and other sports, clubbing, cafes, taking kids to school, homework, shopping, cooking – which is almost entirely ignored by the world of art and architecture alike.

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by Simon on July 12, 2016  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on July 12, 2016

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Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2012

To the 244th Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, where nearly 1,500 exhibits have been selected from over 11,000 entries, as usual ranging from Royal Academicians and well-established artists through to the less well-known and lucky amateurs. As usual you can buy almost all the exhibits. The RA website has a room guide; each room is curated by a different RA with a different theme. I went with my son and we liked the following (the number refers to the catalogue number):

1457 The Milkmaid, a photo recreating a famous painting by Vermeer, by Raeda Saadeh (£1,400)

1471 to 1473 right at the very end of the exhibition (like last year) three sweet giclee prints by Quentin Blake (£700)

8 Ken Howard‘s self-portrait in a cluttered studio in Venice (£35,000); I find these kind of slightly obscured, dirty realistic paintings a bit predicLeonard McComb, table but my son liked it

55 the striking polished bronze of a young man standing by Leonard McComb RA (£600,000)

261 Anomaly 1 by Peter Bill, a small, realistic painting of two mannekins kissing (£1,700)

265 Aldeburgh II – one of several Anthony Green RA paintings instantly recognisable for their cutout shapes and cartoon-cum-Stanley Spenser style and rudeness (£12,000)

277 Dressing for Work by Aman Mojadidi, a life size photo of a buff American-looking young man, carrying several revolvers, except he wore a long beard and turban like a jihadi

344 Black treacle by Joel Penkman, a two foot square ultra-realistic painting of a Tate & Lyle treacle tin (£1,500)

425 The End by Yosef Cohen, a sculpture of the mechanism of a cheap electric clock, stripped of the face to be just the little motor and three hands and the second hand painfully ticking from half past to quarter to and then falling back top half past. We both found this hypnotic and strangely gripping (£88)

558 to 563 a set of beautiful etchings of Scottish, Lake District and Norfolk scenery in black and white by Norman Ackroyd RA (£500 to £950)

569 to 572 the usual clutch of amateurish Tracey Emin polymure gravures which were by far the most bought-up items, festooned in red dots which means people have bought copies of them (they come in editions of 90)

824 Samson. My son really liked this enormous painting of a mountain done in paint larded so thick and rough onto the canvas that it had cracked. By the well-known Anselm Kiefer and not for sale (in the version on display the egg in the image I’ve linked to is replaced by a rifle. I think my son liked the rifle as much as the clotted paintwork)

836 My son’s favourite, Flood by Shirazeh Houshiary, 6 or 7 foot by 3 or 4 foot wide aluminium sheet covered in blue with abstract stripes giving a mysterious textured feel and concentrating in a rough black circle towards the top. (From her home page > Selected works > Painting > Flood.)

840 Chicken chair by Olu Shobowale, a gruesome lifesize sculpture of a double throne made out of old chicken bones, yuk. (£1,300). Reminded me of the throne of guns created by African craftsmen from decommissioned weapons and exhibited at the British Museum a while ago.

1165 Layed Back, a 3 or 4 foot square image of Snoopy made entirely of playing cards by David Mach RA (£21,600)

1189 It was also David Mach who created the leopard made from coat hangers, titled Spike, probably the single most striking artefact in the exhibition (£170,000)

1198, my personal favourite, I laughed out loud for a minute. Self-portrait as a litter bin by Michael Landy RA, a perfect rendering of a plastic litter bin except made in bronze (£26,000).

1240 Miss Sugar Cone Unsure a ceramic sculpture of half a dozen ice cream cones melting into each other by Anna Barlow (£1,600).

1250 Banded Throng by Stephen Cox RA, a set of 25 African style masks made of granite with bands of gold across them (£40,000).

1272 Feathered Child I by Lucy Glendinning an extraordinary sculpture of a child crouched on the floor, made of bird feathers (£12,000).

1297 Cloned Marmot with petbottle by William Sweetlove, a sculpture in silver-plated bronze of two marmots, their heads splashed with red paint. Made me laugh out loud (£3,500). On Google I found various images splashed with other coloured paints. Maybe it’s a whole series.

1475 Heaven’s Breath by Kenneth Draper RA, a wonderful 3D construction with metal slivers, like sperms suspended an inch or two over the surface. Very sci-fi. This image doesn’t do it justice, it’s much bigger and more haunting.

1188 Yogini: Horse by Stephen Cox RA. A 6 foot sculpture in granite of a woman’s nude body but with the head of a horse superimposed the length of its torso so that the horse’s eyes are the breasts and the horse’s nostrils are over the loins. Big, striking and disturbing. (£60,000)

1266 Spillage by Rebecca Griffiths, a big silicon and aluminium sculpture of a cloak slung over truncated shoulders, with no head either, but the (metal) cloak clinging to the outline of two shapely buttocks. The Turin Buttocks, as I renamed it. Them.

908 Walking Drawings, Cumbrian Heavy Horses I by Everton Wright, an enormous photo (lamda c-type print) of horses on a beach (£5,500).

1176 to 1180 pencil sketches of nude women by Ralph Brown RA. Not absolutely brilliant but suggestive, poignant, intimate, fragile cartoons of the female figure (£2,760).

579 to 581 three exquisite screenprints by Stephen Chambers RA (£1,350 to £1,430). Chambers exhibited a small set of similar dream-like images in primary colours on a paisley background last year, that time of figures falling in a dreamlike way out of trees. I like them a lot; they’re like good quality book illustrations; they have the same dreamy feeling as the Moomintroll books!

1461 Ndutu, a striking photo (ultrachrome in acrylic block) by well-known photographer David Usill.

From which I realise that I tend to prefer sculptures, and then prints and etchings and photos, to paintings; and prefer abstract or quirky paintings to more routine, ‘realistic’ ones. In my humble opinion painting is a tired medium in which it’s very difficult to do anything new; whereas there’s still lots of unexplored space in sculpture and objects and installations which can flexibly reflect, in unanticipated ways, the vastness of the world around us and the complexity of human experience.

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by Simon on August 5, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on August 5, 2012

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2012/08/05/royal-academy-summer-exhibition/

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