Between: british art

Showing posts with label british art. Show all posts

Wednesday, 18 May 2022

Artlyst: Sensuous Sickert and Philpot Two Major UK Solo Exhibitions

My latest piece for A rtlyst compares and contrasts the Walter Sickert exhibition at Tate Britain and the Glyn Philpot exhibition at Pallant House Gallery:

"Both exhibitions provide comprehensive overviews of their subject’s works; Walter Sickert primarily uses a thematic structure to do so, while Glyn Philpot: Flesh and Spirit’s aim is to combine the thematic with the chronological. As an exhibition enhancing one with an established reputation – albeit one that has faced questions about the dynamics of power depicted as well as those exercised by the depicter – Walter Sickert can include works by the influencers of Sickert – Whistler and Degas – and those influenced, including Lucien Freud. By contrast, Glyn Philpot: Flesh and Spirit seeks to rehabilitate and re-establish a reputation on different grounds from those on which his reputation was originally gained. As such, the focus is on Philpot’s work with a sense that the edginess of his work was what undermined his original reputation without gaining, either at the time or subsequently, the recognition it deserves.

Between them, these exhibitions provide and open up the foci and tensions of British art in a period when the traditional and the modern were, within British art, effectively counterbalanced. That balance was lost with Sickert’s reputation rising and Philpot’s, despite his effective embrace of modernism, falling. Interestingly, it is Philpot’s engagement with racial and sexual power dynamics which is playing a part in rehabilitating his work, while raising questions about aspects of Sickert’s work and reputation."

My other pieces for Artlyst are:

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Steve Taylor and Danielson Foil - Nonchalant.

Friday, 24 April 2015

still small voice: creating sacred space

My latest exhibition review for the Church Times is of still small voice at The Wilson in Cheltenham. The collection of British biblical art currently on show there 'begins with the Nazarene and Pre-Raphaelite styles of William Dobson and William Bell Scott, and continues, with Eric Gill as the bridge between Modernism and the earlier Arts and Crafts movement, through the inter-war period of the 1920s and 1930s, the Second World War, the post-war era, and the later 20th century, into the early 21st century.'

Included is a stunning Craigie Aitchison piece: 'Completed just a year before his death, Body of Christ (Red Background) is an example of the spiritual depths of modern art, with its full-on expressive use of colour combined with the stripped-back minimalism of its imagery. Christ is the cross, the cross is the wound at the heart of the canvas, and this gash in the blood-red background is the point at which light enters the space ...

this is art that creates sacred space by taking you "somewhere beyond yourself and outside of your own little world".'

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Krzysztof Penderecki - St. Luke's Passion.

Sunday, 14 September 2014

Paul Nash: Truth and Memory

Andrew Graham Dixon gave a compelling portrait of Paul Nash in the first programme of the BBC series British Art at War. Graham Dixon argued that:

‘Nash was scarred by the war and the ghosts of those experiences haunted his work throughout his life. A lover of nature, Nash became one of Britain's most original landscape artists, embracing modern Surrealism and ancient British history, though always tainted by his experiences during two world wars. A private yet charismatic man, he brought British landscape painting into the 20th century with his mixture of the personal and visionary, the beautiful and the shocking. An artist who saw the landscape as not just a world to paint, but a way into his heart and mind.’

Nash’s work currently features in Truth and Memory at the Imperial War Museum; ‘the largest exhibition and first major retrospective of British First World War art for almost 100 years.’ Using artworks drawn mainly from IWM’s national collection and including work by some of Britain’s most important artists of the twentieth century, this exhibition assesses ‘the immediate impact and enduring legacy of British art of the First World War.’

Truth explores ‘how artists encountering the front lines experimented with new forms of art to capture the totally unfamiliar experience of the First World War.’ Through the work of CRW Nevinson, Paul Nash and William Orpen, amongst others, the exhibition considers ‘British artists’ quest for an authentic or ‘truthful’ representation of modern war.’

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Ivor Gurney - Severn Meadows.

Thursday, 28 April 2011

Newspeak: British Art Now Part II

Earlier this week I was at the Saatchi Gallery to see Part 2 of Newspeak: British Art Now. Having appreciated the first part of Newspeak, it was encouraging to see that the standard of work remained high in part 2 and that painting continued to feature strongly. These are the artists that caught my attention:

Juliana Cerqueira Leite: Leite's work is driven by an investigation into physicality and how we interact with the physical world. Oh came from thinking about physics: what would our bodies look like if time didn’t separate our actions? She traced the area around her as far as she could reach without moving her feet and made an object that would materialise that space. She sees it as a volume defined by the potential of touch.
Jonathan Wateridge: Wateridge thinks of his work in relation to cinematography; composing realistic but fictional images. These are paintings that play on a sense of the familiar - our understanding and consumption of archetypal or generic images - by way of a B-movie aesthetic meeting the Sublime.
Tessa Farmer: Made from desiccated insect remains, dried plant roots, and other organic ephemera, Farmer’s Swarm references Damien Hirst while envisioning the purveyors of mischief and magic (fairies) as an actual species, as animalistic and Darwinian as any other to create a microscopic apocalypse.
Dan Perfect: Perfect says that his paintings are like imagined interiors or psychological landscapes; stage sets or dramatic scenes from video games. They are re-imagined experiences, a decayed science fiction where tumultuous change and biological entropy is intervened and radically altered. Everything is partial in these paintings: masks, costumes, body parts, animals that are human, humans that are animals, things are taken apart and exploded.
David Brian Smith: Smith's Great Expectations - Wow takes a picture of a Shepherd tending his flock found in a newspaper from the 1930s and uses the image to jump between different styles of painting to reinvent the space, light and palette within the picture.
Anne Hardy: Hardy’s photographs picture depopulated rooms that suggest surreal fictions allowing our relationship with them to be in our imagination.
Anna Barriball: Barriball covers the surfaces of everyday objects so they become seductively sinister husks of their former selves unveiling a mystery in the domestic and familiar. Door is a drawing that assumes the qualities of a sculpture. Its burnished graphite surface captures every subtle detail of the original object, while the paper warps and fluxes through repetitive handling to gain a solidity of its own. Black Wardrobe becomes a monumental void connoting absence and memory.
Idris Khan: Khan compiles single super-images by digitally layering and super-imposition of multiple images of industrial subjects giving the effect of an impressionistic drawing or blurred film still. The effect is of a soft ethereal energy conveys a sense of time depicted in motion. They exude a transfixing spiritual quality in their densely compacted details and ghostly outlines.
Clarisse d’Arcimoles: d'Arcimoles' series consists of a photograph from her family album and a picture of the same person taken in 2009 in a scene that’s been exactly reproduced creating a way back to childhood, even if just for a short instant. d'Arcimoles says, "We were all children once, and that is something that is always current within us ... By creating these kinds of comparisons, or rather confrontations, I felt like I was exploring time in its oddest form – as if there was a dialogue between the past and the present moment."

Confessions of Dangerous Minds, showing at the Phillips de Pury & Company galleries at the Saatchi Gallery in London, features 19 established and exciting up and coming artists to explore the breadth, depth and diversity of Turkey’s visual arts. Here I particularly liked:

Yasam Sasmazer’s works feature figurative sculpture of children or ‘little people’. Made to confess something seemingly naughty, there is something uncanny in the fantastic world the artist creates, a feeling that we all remember from our childhood.
Ebru Uygun embraces a minimalist and abstract approach to painting; concentrating on colour, form and space. The artist adopts a technique by which she combines torn strips of canvas into a new single work, each strip forms a piece of the work in an dazzling accumulation of colour and pattern.
In Ramazan Bayrakoglu's works, the viewers’ first impression comes from the image seen through the use of satin cloth or plexiglass. As viewers visualise the material and the subject together, the meaning of the work is ultimately understood; the result is a comparison of various works and the different feelings evoked in the audience.

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Arcade Fire - Ready To Start.