Airbrushed from Art History (23)

Wallspace, the exhibition venue in the church of All Hallows on the Wall in the City of London which had as its aim to provide a spiritual home for the visual arts in the capital, closed at the end of February. After four very successful years, like many arts organisations currently, they struggled to secure the stable finance needed to ensure their future.

Wallspace achieved a huge amount in the past four years by highlighting the extent to which spirituality features within the mainstream art world and showcasing the breadth and diversity of those artists who express their faith commitment through their work or engage positively with the Church as a patron. The vision for, and achievements of, Wallspace were developed principally by its Director, freelance curator Meryl Doney.
 
As the email bringing the sad news of Wallspace's demise stated: "There really isn't anything else quite like Wallspace, with its dedicated focus on contemporary art that explored rich and challenging spiritual territory, in its spectacular 18th century sacred setting. We are proud of everything we've achieved since we began in March 2007. From our opening exhibition of Damien Hirst's New Religion, which examined issues of truth and human obsessions, to our final show Commission, which showcased the extraordinary breadth and depth of art in churches across the UK. Wallspace has established a benchmark for quality, variety and vigour."

The highlights from four years of Wallspace exhibitions showcase the breadth of an under-reported rich and challenging exploration of spiritual territory to be found in contemporary art:

• Damien Hirst's New Religion included an altar holding a cedar cross studded with gem-like pills, a child's skull and a heart wrapped in barbed wire and pierced by needles and razor blades, cast in silver, and a large carved marble pill. One complete set of prints and sculptural objects were displayed in a specially constructed devotional case or reliquary. And, so struck was Damien Hirst with the church's interior that he has also produced three large new paintings made specifically to hang behind the altar at All Hallows.
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  Sokari Douglas Camp's The World is Richer centred around new work for the bicentenary of the abolition of slavery. The Wallspace exhibition featured a number of steel maquettes representing the artist's thinking towards a major public memorial in London's Hyde Park to mark the 2007 bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade.
• Sam Taylor-Wood's Pietà, Ascension and Prelude in Air brought together three distinctive film pieces that include biblical and religious references, and spiritual resonances. They explored ideas of presence and absence, performance and vulnerability. The first two films made direct reference to traditional, western Christian iconography. The third presented a musician who is totally engaged with the Bach prelude he is playing, but he is performing the work without his cello. The music and the man are palpably present; the instrument that links the two is absent.
• For Epiphany Wallspace gathered together 15 contemporary, traditional iconographers who live and work in the UK for what was the first exhibition to get the work of the very best iconographers in Britain together in one place. All the icons shown were contemporary but nonetheless were produced in the traditional manner, using authentic ancient designs and methods. The exhibition was timely, given the current revival of interest in icons and their increasing appearance in cathedrals and parish churches across the country.
• In Memória Roubada (Stolen Memories) Ana Maria Pacheco, previously Associate Artist at the National Gallery, showed a dramatic 2-piece work for the first time. Her powerful and disturbing painted wooden sculptures Memória Roubada I and II confronted ideas of displaced people and severed cultures - results of the colonisation of Brazil.
• Visionaries: working in the margins was Wallspace's exploration of the work of visionary painters from Stanley Spencer to the Chapman Brothers arranged so that visitors were 'led' through the work from 20th to 21st century. The paintings looked stunning in the church, setting up dialogues between the artists and across a time span of 85 years.
• The Collection showed highlights and new works from the Methodist collection of modern and contemporary art. In the early 1960s John Gibbs, an art collector and Methodist layman, realising that many contemporary artists were concerned with themes from the life of Christ, decided to create a collection of such work. With the help of Methodist minister Douglas Wollen, he acquired paintings and reliefs, which became the core of the Methodist Church Collection of Modern Christian Art – described as ‘the best denominational collection of modern art outside the Vatican’.
• Commission: An exhibition of contemporary art in British churches took the story of commissioning contemporary art for British churches up to the present day. Starting with Henry Moore’s remarkable, and at the time highly controversial, altar for St Stephen Walbrook, the exhibition highlighted the work of 14 artists who have taken on the challenge of a permanent work for a religious space. Major recent commissions for the Lumen Centre URC church and St Martin in the Fields London, and Tracey Emin’s neon artwork for Liverpool Anglican Cathedral were all represented.

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Low - Weight of Water.

Absence of God - Raqib Shaw

Raqib Shaw’s paintings in Absence of God are sublime in all senses of the word.

In their scale and content, they reference the sublime apocalyptic works of the Romantic artists, John Martin and Francis Danby, which miniaturised human beings emphasising our powerlessness in the face of God and Nature as part of their exploration of the sensations of immensity, darkness and terror. Shaw uses similar methods – densely populated scenes set against backdrops of classical ruins – to engage similar sensations of decline and fall.

But Shaw’s paintings are also sublime in their technique and beauty. Working with metallic industrial paints, Shaw creates a marbling effect through use of a porcupine quill and outlines each detail of his compositions in gold. When glitter and gemstones are added to the mix the whole shimmers in a riot of colour, which although slightly kitsch, nevertheless is harmoniously blended towards beauty.

When combined with the monstrous content of Shaw’s works - the intense violent and sexual nature of its manga-like imagery – a bitter-sweet paradox is established which, in light of the exhibition’s title and his anthropomorphic imagery, could reflect a world of harmonies and beauty formed with intricacy and inter-connectivity yet red raw in tooth and claw.

Shaw draws on the works of Hieronymus Bosch in depicting the monstrous beauty found in the absence of God. He finds there a similar paradox; Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights also being Hell. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his sculpture Adam, which features a human figure with a bird’s head, its mouth and genitals swarming with parasites, mounted by a large, bejewelled lobster. Adam removes the monstrous from the beautiful and represents the fall of humanity into the bestial.

Shaw’s work in its focus on the monstrous and its referencing of past masterpieces has parallels with the Goya-based installations and vandalisations of the Chapman Brothers. However, the paradoxes that Shaw establishes through the beauty of his violent compositions seem to avoid the double negatives of, for example, the Chapman Brother’s Insult to Injury series where their defacing of Goya’s Disasters of War etchings seems to revere desecration and thus reverse the intent of Goya’s work.

Shaw’s paintings counter many of the stereotypical critiques of contemporary art. They are conceptual works requiring traditional painterly skills in terms of composition and technique. They are figurative narrative paintings which form abstract harmonious visual wholes. They are iconoclastic while referencing a broad multi-cultural art history. In short, they are sublime.

Absence of God, Raqib Shaw, White Cube Hoxton Square, 20 May – 4 July and Kunsthalle Vienna, 19 August – 27 September 2009

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David Byrne - Road to Nowhere.

Visionaries

Visionaries is a sampling of Visionary Art which moves forward chronologically and selectively from Stanley Spencer to Street Artists while referencing Blake and Goya as giants on whose shoulders all Visionary Artists stand.

The exhibition sets up a series of polarities that derive, on the one hand, from Blake’s visions of spiritual reality breaking into the material world and on the other, from Goya’s nightmares revelling in the material reality of death and decay. The two are opposed as twin gateways at the exhibition’s entrance where a Stanley Spencer study for the Betrayal in the Garden, in which the everyday provides the setting for the mythic, faces down two of the Chapman Brothers’ revised and improved etchings from Los Caprichos, in which Goya’s original images of human vice are themselves defaced and destroyed.

The strongest works in this exhibition are those which work with these polarities in place of resolving them in one direction alone. Noel White’s Downland Discourse features three travellers walking between the parallel worlds of flesh and spirit with the central character of the three holding together the polarities towards which his colleagues veer. The Black Madonna of Norman Adams is integrated into the garden in which she stands, her form echoed by the natural geometry of which she is part. Here, darkness and light form one whole.

Crossing the Water to the Promised Land by Albert Herbert depicts turmoil and upheaval as a baptism through which we pass to emerge as children returning home. Peter Howson Legion portrays the violent expulsion of the demonic in the claustrophobic context of a fevered crowd by a Christ who is calmness personified. Adam Neate creates an icon of suffering humanity by transcending his transient materials of cardboard and spray paint, a reversal of iconographic technique and materials.

Meryl Doney, who has curated Visionaries, writes of Visionary Art as existing on the margins of contemporary art yet stubbornly refusing to wither and die. Its place can be that of the unheard, unregarded prophet, the holy fool crying out in the wilderness. Its strength, and that of this exhibition, is the vigour and passion with which the spiritual and material territories of the human condition are explored.

Visionaries is at the Wallspace Gallery, London, 20 May to 10 June and Greenbelt Arts Festival, Cheltenham, 28 to 31 August.

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Bob Dylan - Every Grain Of Sand.