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Showing posts with label figuration. Show all posts
Showing posts with label figuration. Show all posts

Tuesday, 22 October 2024

Artlyst: Ken Currie, Kehinde Wiley, Susie Hamilton - Three Exhibitions About Communities

My latest exhibitions review for Artlyst reflects on show by Ken Currie, Kehinde Wiley, and Susie Hamilton:

'The work of Ken Currie, Kehinde Wiley and Susie Hamilton can be seen currently in central London. Each knows the communities they paint intimately and create insightful figurative work as a result ...

Although differing considerably in application and style, these works have a common core in relation to the empathy and attention shown and paid to the communities depicted.'

Click the following links for more of my writing on Susie Hamilton, Ken Currie, and Kehinde Wiley.

Interviews -
Monthly diary articles -

Articles/Reviews -

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Big Star - Watch The Sunrise.
Posted by Jonathan Evens at 15:02 0 comments
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Tuesday, 17 October 2023

Artlyst - R B Kitaj And Philip Guston: Figurative Painting Celebrated

My latest exhibition review for Artlyst is on ‘R.B. Kitaj: London to Los Angeles’ at Piano Nobile with mention of 'Philip Guston' at Tate Modern:

'Painting has been declared dead many times as it has reeled under the double-barrelled attack of photography and conceptual art. Similarly, figurative art has at points been counted out in opposition to abstraction and art for art’s sake. Nevertheless, both have survived, enabling us to have our cake and eat it in an art world where conceptual art, digital art, installation art, painting (including figuration and abstraction), performance art, photography, sculpture, and video art all co-exist and interact.

Two artists whose dogged persistence with figurative art, in the face of more reductive critical perceptions of art, enabled us to reach this place of diversity are currently having major retrospectives in London: Philip Guston and R.B. Kitaj.'

My other pieces for Artlyst are:

Interviews -
Monthly diary articles -

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Leonard Cohen - Everybody Knows.
Posted by Jonathan Evens at 18:28 0 comments
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Thursday, 28 January 2016

Figurative Art Today


The Columbia Threadneedle Prize 2016: Figurative Art Today will be at the Mall Galleries from 3 to 20 February 2016, daily 10am to 5pm (closes 1pm on final day).

The Columbia Threadneedle Prize showcases the very best in new figurative and representational art.

The winner of The Columbia Threadneedle Prize will receive £20,000 plus a solo exhibition at Mall Galleries. The Visitors’ Choice Award, voted by visitors to the exhibition in London, is £10,000.

The exhibition will tour to Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, Italy in July 2016 in an unprecedented exchange with Florence’s largest temporary exhibition space.

The show includes Tea, a watercolour by Zi Ling.

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Florence & The Machine - Strangeness and Charm.

Posted by Jonathan Evens at 21:54 0 comments
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Monday, 4 May 2009

Airbrushed from Art History? (2)

Mark C. Taylor writes at the beginning of his Disfiguring: Art, Architecture, Religion that religion and the visual arts are at war.

"Many representatives of the religious and political right," he suggests, "assume that it is their God-given mission to purge the polis of [the] catastrophic disease" that is contemporary art. In examining the roots of this situation he focusses on the theorists of art and religion.

Throughout the twentieth century, he argues, that Christian theologians and philosophers of religion have been, for the most part, either critical or dismissive of the arts. For many, this has been under the influence of the dialectical theology of Karl Barth "in which the affirmation of God presupposes the negation of nature, history, and culture."

On the other hand, he notes the influence of the art criticism of Clement Greenberg in which autonomy in art "results from a gradual process of abstraction in which everything that is regarded as extraneous to a particular medium is progressively removed":

"From this point of view, the development of modern art follows an "inexorable logic" that leads from figuration and ornamentation to abstraction and formalism. The process of abstraction reaches closure when the work of art becomes totally self-reflexive and transparently self-referential ... Painting that is essentially about painting seems to leave little room for religious and spiritual concerns."

Andrew Spira, writing in The Avant-Garde Icon, notes that "Avant-garde artists were passionate and vociferous in their denunciation of the credulity, passivity, manipulation and conservatism of conventional religiosity." Their antipathy towards religion should not be underestimated and reflects the fundamentally different points of view commonly understood as meaning that there was little in common between the art form of icons and that of avant-garde art: "the sacred versus the secular, the traditional versus the revolutionary, the faith-based versus the self-righteous, the figurative versus the abstract."

With views of this nature prevelent within modern art criticism it is easy to see how the influence of Christianity on modern art could be dismissed, denigrated or overlooked. Influential modern artists who either had a sincere religious commitment or who consistently explored religious themes had their work dismissed as sentimental or lacking in innovation. So, for example, William S. Rubin in Modern Sacred Art and the Church of Assy dismisses the work of Maurice Denis as "pale and overrefined" and that of his followers as "saccharine" while the work of Catholic converts like Albert Gleizes and Gino Severini is only "derivative modernism."

Such assessments, which resolutely ignore the influence that such artists had on their own generation, reflect the views of those on the rollercoaster ride of modern art movements where the only valid movement is the currently fashionable movement which makes everything that went before passé.

Both Taylor and Spira, like Doss and Siedell, recognise that the views summarised above are one-dimensional takes on the diversity of modern and contemporary art. Spira notes that:

"although evidence of [the] receptivity [of avant-garde artists] to icons is more hidden than evidence of their rejection of the Church and its trappings, it is arguable that the tradition of icon painting was integral to the shaping of their work. As with children who rebel against their parents but turn out to resemble them, the art of the avant-garde often showed striking similarities to icons in looks, mannerisms and even in deeper sympathies."

Similarly, Taylor argues that having "defined the terms of debate for many critics, Greenberg effectively obscures the self-confessed spiritual preoccupations of the very artists whose work he analyzes":

"All of the major abstract expressionists were deeply interested in religion and actively incorporated spiritual concerns in their work. Moreover, such involvement with religion is not limited to postwar American art. From the beginning of modern art in Europe, its practitioners have relentlessly probed religious issues. Though not always immediately obvious, the questions religion raises lurk on or near the surface of even the most abstract canvases produced during the modern era.

One of the most puzzling paradoxes of twentieth-century cultural interpretation is that, while theologians, philosophers of religion, and art critics deny or surpress the religious significance of the visual arts, many of the leading modern artists insist that their work cannot be understood apart from religious questions and spiritual issues."

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Arcade Fire - Intervention.
Posted by Jonathan Evens at 18:36 0 comments
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