Between: gormley

Showing posts with label gormley. Show all posts

Monday, 18 December 2023

Artlyst: Antony Gormley Explores Self Awareness White Cube Bermondsey

My latest exhibition review for Artlyst is of Body Politic: Antony Gormley at White Cube Bermondsey:

"Antony Gormley has spent his career investigating the relationship of the human body to space. Through his fertile imagination, this has proved to be a seam that he can continuously mine, whether using his own body or those of others, in order to explore questions of where human beings stand in relation to nature and the cosmos. His latest exhibition at White Cube Bermondsey uncovers new ways to probe these fundamental issues.

“The responsibility of the art of our time is to reflect on and provide instruments for examination and self-awareness” Antony Gormley

He is doing so at a time when human beings are predominantly urban dwellers in industrially manufactured habitats, and when, Teresa Kittler writes, there is a broad “cultural acceptance of the rights of money, goods, ideas and tourists to travel – a phenomenon accelerated by new technologies” at the same time as national governments are controlling or denying that same right to migrants. In this exhibition, Gormley uses the industrial processes that produce clay blocks, concrete, iron and steel to create works that examine the dynamic tension between our need for refuge and our need to roam."

Interviews -

Monthly diary articles -

Articles/Reviews -

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Brian Eno - Thursday Afternoon.

Saturday, 22 June 2019

RA Summer Exhibition

Run without interruption since 1769, the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts is the world’s largest open submission art show and brings together art in all mediums – prints and paintings, film, photography, sculpture, architectural works and more – by leading artists, Royal Academicians and household names as well as new and emerging talent.

This year, acclaimed British painter Jock McFadyen RA takes the mantle from Grayson Perry to co-ordinate the 251st Summer Exhibition. Over 1,500 works are on display, most of them for the first time. Highlights include an animal-themed ‘menagerie’ in the Central Hall, with works by artists including Polly Morgan, Charles Avery, Banksy and Mat Collishaw. Artist sisters Jane and Louise Wilson RA have curated two galleries, one of which showcases work exploring light and time. Further artists exhibiting include Jeremy Deller, Marcus Harvey, Tracey Emin RA, Frank Bowling RA, Antony Gormley RA and Honorary Academicians Anselm Kiefer, James Turrell and Wim Wenders.

Outside the galleries, international artist Thomas Houseago has taken over the RA’s courtyard with a group of large-scale sculptural works, and the exhibition spills out into nearby Bond Street with a colourful installation of flags featuring work by Michael Craig-Martin RA.

In addition to the above check out the following:

'Agony in the Garden', 'Death of the Virgin', 'Deposition' and 'The Visitation' by Paula Rego;
'Rachmaninoff. Piano Concert No. 2' by Alexander Mochalov;
'Three Paper Darts' and 'All The Tape Left Over From My Last Painting' by Alastair Gordon;
'Passing By' and 'Across The Station' by Peter S. Smith; and
'Blues' from the Series 'Song of Solomon' by Clack & Cargill.

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T Bone Burnett · Jay Bellerose · Keefus Ciancia - A Man Without A Country (All Data Are Compromised).

Saturday, 24 December 2016

Artists Rebranding The Christmas Tree Tradition

My latest article for Artlyst is entitled 'Artists Rebranding The Christmas Tree Tradition' and highlights Christmas Tree installations in London by Shirazeh Houshiary, Alex Chinneck and Anthony Gormley:

'Whether your preference is for the traditional decorations and associations of the Trafalgar Tree or for the innovative visual images created by these commissioned trees, London affords this year a breadth of engagement with the sight of decorated evergreens and the gift-giving associated with them.'

My other Artlyst articles are:

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Thea Gilmore - Sol Invictus.

Saturday, 17 December 2016

Connaught Christmas Tree

I saw the Connaught Christmas Tree recently on a visit to Farm Street Church. Designed by Antony Gormley the Tree has been unveiled outside the Connaught hotel:

'The magnificent Western Red Cedar tree sourced from Shropshire stands 17.5m tall on Carlos Place. Its trunk has been transformed into a tapering column of brilliant light across which dance its branches and foliage.

Commenting on the tree, Gormley said, “It was a joy to collaborate with Zumtobel and their brilliant team of lighting innovators on this project. I thought that rather than decorating the outside of the Christmas tree it would be fun to light its core, the trunk, transforming it into a radiant centre against which the branches would become illuminated and silhouetted. I want the tree to celebrate life and all its myriad forms. At this, the darkest time of the year and at a moment of global dysfunction, I hope this magnificent tree conveys a feeling of continuance and vitality.”'

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Kate Rusby - Kris Kringle.

Saturday, 23 May 2015

Greenwich views

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Rickie Lee Jones - The Moon Is Made Of Gold.

Thursday, 9 April 2015

Spokesperson for the silent throng of things made by the human hand

The Evening Standard has four pieces written in appreciation of Neil MacGregor following the announcement that he is to step down as Director of the British Museum. This is fitting because "he has popularised the extraordinary riches of the museum in such as a way as to make them part of an intelligible human story, accessible to the ordinary public."

Michael Prodger writes that MacGregor "sees no conflict between popularity and scholarship and instinctively grasps that the public wants information as much as entertainment."

Antony Gormley described MacGregor as "the spokesperson for the silent throng of things made by the human hand, heart and brain over all time. Like no other before him, he has helped us see, empathise and interpret the huge diversity of humanly made things, allowing us to understand what they are and the world from which they come."

I was pleased to see that his future projects "include working with the BBC and the museum on a new Radio 4 series on faith and society." His series 'A History of the World in 100 Objects' was, in part, an inspiration for my short story The New Dark Ages, which can be read using these links - Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

Saturday, 21 September 2013

Struggles to contend with the Australian landscape

Australia is "the first major survey of Australian art in the UK for 50 years, this exhibition spans more than 200 years from 1800 to the present day and seeks to uncover the fascinating social and cultural evolution of a nation through its art. Two hundred works including painting, drawing, photography, watercolours and multimedia will shed light on a period of rapid and intense change; from the impact of colonisation on an indigenous people, to the pioneering nation building of the 19th century through to the enterprising urbanisation of the last 100 years."

Anthony Gormley comments: "When I think of Sidney Nolan, Fred Williams or Arthur Boyd, I think of harsh earth and fierce sunlight. Through its new occupiers, somehow Australia produced modernist vigour ... There is a directness in the Indigenous traditions, whether the dots of the Western Desert or the colour field paintings of the Great Sandy Desert, where pigment is used to carry mineral truth as well as lived feeling."

Leading Australian contemporary landscape painter Idris Murphy has said:

"I’m not interested in negotiating my way around Indigenous painting. I think it is going to be a problem – can the Western tradition sustain a view of the world? I mean, Peter Fuller used to talk about this when he came to Australia very briefly; he saw in Fred Williams and Sidney Nolan the potential for the ‘last great hurrah’ of the Northern Romantic tradition and I think there’s a lot of truth in what he said. I think it’s going to be a problem – it’s not a problem for me – I’m just lapping it up! Of course I’m not Indigenous but I love the idea of this great wonderful European tradition, which I belong to, fusing with Indigenous art – happening right under my nose, in my lifetime! And I can see that as a whole new sort of language base for contemporary painting."

It will be interesting to see if this show gives any sense of this new sort of language base that Murphy sees in contemporary Australian art. By contrast Adrian Searle has suggested that the show is strong on Aboriginal art and full of classics – but loses its way in modern times:

"The show peters out in a parade of examples, a checklist of single works hung cheek by jowl with no real coherence. There is too much that feels secondary, or like retreads of flavour-of-the-month international fashions.

I am certainly no expert on Australian art, but even I can tell that, however enlightening parts of the earlier sections are, the show fails to give a sense of any of the more recent art except in a tokenistic way."

The Guardian does have a helpful timeline of Australian art, however: A history of Australian art – interactive timeline.

Back at the RA, author Tim Winton will explore his belief that ‘Australia the place is constantly overshadowed by Australia the national idea. Undoubtedly the nation and its projects have shaped my education and my prospects, but the degree to which geography, distance and weather have moulded my sensory palate, my imagination and expectations is substantial. Landscape has exerted a kind of force upon me that is every bit as geological as family.’

In today's Guardian, Winton selects Fred Williams's Yellow Landscape, 1968-9 as his favourite artwork from his homeland:

"he renders the scale and mystery of the physical world by tiny marks. The forms and figures are like scars in the hide of a beast too big to properly conceive of, let alone see entire. All these wens and divots are without pattern and yet they bring to mind calligraphy. These are the marks, the messy, chaotic texture that even the practised eye struggles to contend with in the Australian landscape. Whether you're seeing it from the air or at ground level, this is what your senses struggle with in the open country, such flat planes worked over with hieroglyphics born of fire, erosion, meteor showers, drought and epochal passages of time. Here humans might seem incidental."

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Midnight Oil - Dreamworld.

Saturday, 20 August 2011

Art in Guernsey

Sausmarez Manor, parts of which date to the early 13th or late 12th centuries, has been altered, reduced and added to over the years with major changes in Tudor, Queen Anne, Regency and Victorian times. A delightful spot to spend in amiable and unhurried surroundings, the grounds house a sculpture exhibition which currently comprises 130 pieces by 57 different sculptors. Generally minor works can able to be seen to best advantage in the beautiful tropical garden.

The current exhibition at the Guernsey Museum and Art Gallery is Mervyn Peake’s Sark - To the Sweep of a Steel Bay; a celebration of the centenary of the writer and artist Mervyn Peake, who lived and worked for some years in Sark. Peake's son has rightly written that this:

"is an outstanding example of how the artist and writer's work can be displayed in all its glory in a relatively small space. The designer, curator and director of the gallery have given the local public and visitors to the island, a genuinely beautiful mix of water colours, pencil and oil paintings, within the octagonal gallery."

As a result of time on Sark, Peake wrote Mr Pye, a parabolic novel using the motif of the messianic or diabolic outsider who becomes a catalyst for change. Sitting mid way between, on the one hand, Mr Weston's Good Wine and Mr Golightly's Holiday and, on the other, Brimstone and Treacle, Mr Pye sees its central character land on the island of Sark equipped with love, his mission to convert the islanders into a crusading force for the undiluted goodness that he feels within. The extraordinary inhabitants of the island range from the formidable Miss George in her purple busby to the wanton, raven-haired Tintagieu, 'five foot three inches of sex'. Mr Pye, however, is prone to excess and in the increasingly personalised struggle between good and evil, excess is very nearly his downfall. The prejudices of a close-knit society shine through the story in which the characters, cameos and events add up to an hilarious romp.

Remaining on an angelic theme, we bought an interesting etching, from the Coach House Gallery, entitled Angel Sleeping, by Latvian artist, Katrina Graseva, whose work has been described as having "naive and whimsical charm" and who works with lithography, watercolour and in children's book design.

Hauteville House, where Victor Hugo lived in exile for 15 years (from 1856 to 1870), displays Hugo’s abundant creativity in the astonishing richness of its decoration, his use of recycled and reclaimed objects within that decoration, and the symbolism of his interior design as visitors literally rise from darkness to light in moving through the house. As Charles Hugo put it, the house is "a veritable three-storey autograph, a poem in several rooms".

Nick Boulos has described how a visit to the house begins in the suprisingly dark and oppressive hallway, where a creaky wooden staircase spirals out of view while heavy doors and intricately carved wooden panels line the walls. With its secret doors and bold interiors, the property was designed to intrigue and challenge visitors, reflecting Hugo's view that knowledge leads one into the light. His glass, rooftop lookout, reached via the third-floor library, allows a column of sunlight to illuminate the length of the staircase. A simple, drop-down table in his study is the place where Hugo put the finishing touches to Les Misérables. This room was a haven; he would sleep, write and (much to the dismay of his neighbours) wash up here, savouring sea views over the neighbouring Channel islands of Sark, Herm and, on a clear day, France. He likened his house to "a seagull's nest high above the immense foam of the waves".

Anthony Gormley has sculptures on both Guernsey and Herm, as part of the Art and Islands Foundation initiative. We saw Another Time XI on Herm. While Gormley's bodycasts often have huge resonance depending on the form and location chosen (such as Sound II at Winchester Cathedral or Another Place at Crosby Beach), here though the repetition of yet another Gormley bodycast seems merely decorative, rather than possessing genuine conceptual force through a thoroughgoing engagement between form and location.
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Gillian Welch - The Way The Whole Thing Ends.

Thursday, 7 April 2011

Modern British Sculpture

Yesterday I heard The Very Revd. Nicholas Bury, former Dean of Gloucester Cathedral, speak at an event organised by Art & Christianity Enquiry about the Cathedral’s engagement with the visual arts including Crucible, the successful sculpture exhibition organised together with Gallery Pangolin and held in the autumn of last year.

Crucible showed over 75 works from 48 artists - a who’s who of contemporary British sculpture - from the "New Bronze Age" sculptors of the 1950s to current household names like Damien Hirst and Antony Gormley. The curator of the exhibition and director of Gallery Pangolin, Rungwe Kingdon, argued that: "Such enormous diversity, such a range of expression, powerfully illustrates the vitality and vibrancy of the sculpture scene." Pangolin Editions was founded in 1985 by Kingdon and Claude Koenig and by working with some of the foremost artists of the late 20th and 21st century, their foundry has grown into the largest sculpture foundry in Britain. Every sculptor they approached responded positively, a testament to the strength of the relationships they have formed. Therefore, most of the works included in Crucible were made in Gloucestershire, by the talented craftsmen working at Pangolin Editions foundry in the Stroud valleys, or by artists from Gloucester Cathedral.
Kingdon aimed to "choose objects that demanded attention, questioned convention and stimulated ideas" believing that sculpture "articulates images and ideas in a primarily emotional way, responses that are felt as much as seen." The sheer diversity of the seventy-eight pieces could be seen both in "their varied form, texture and colour" but also in the emotional responses made to them; "many confound, others delight, some may make us laugh and others even induce melancholy." Late twentieth and early twenty-first century sculpture, Kingdon suggests, "is famously irreverent, bawdy and questioning," but he also believes that the exhibition clearly articulated its "fascination with belief, faith and the potent ideas religion addresses: life, death, pain, pleasure, denial, excess, our interdependence and individuality; the opposites that question the ‘how?’ and ‘why?’ of our existence."

He concluded: "We wanted to find contemporary sculptures that would complement the magnificent setting of Gloucester Cathedral, which is a great work of art in itself ... The result is a tremendous endorsement of the sculptural richness of our age and a fitting tribute to the medieval period, justifiably known as the ‘great age of sculpture’ in British history."

Like Crucible, the Modern British Sculpture exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, which I saw today, is primarily relationally based, in this case showing how, for over 100 years, London and its museums have had a powerful appeal for sculptors, and how the Royal Academy itself has played a significant and controversial role in shaping modern British sculpture. To highlight the extent of the Royal Academy’s influence, the exhibition features sculptures by three of its former presidents – Frederic Leighton, Charles Wheeler and Phillip King.

However, unlike Crucible, which focused on the emotive nature of sculpture’s engagement with ultimate themes, the RA’s survey is chronological and focuses on the dialogue that British Sculpture has had within a broader international context, highlighting the ways in which Britain’s links with its Empire, continental Europe and the United States have helped shape an art that at its best is truly international in scope and significance. A series of visual juxtapositions are intended to challenge the viewer to make new connections and break the mould of old conceptions. So, for example, a series of significant loans from the British Museum and the V&A are shown alongside modern British sculptures from the period 1910-1930 to highlight the inquisitiveness of British artists when the Empire was at its peak and London was, almost literally, the centre of the world. The visitor is invited to make comparisons between these pieces and consider the dramatic effect that non-western techniques, iconography and cultural sensibility had on the development of British sculpture at the beginning of the twentieth century.

The extent to which both exhibitions have been formed through the relationships that each institution has fostered means that neither exhibition can be definitive in their treatment of the subject. The argument underpinning the selection and display of work in the RA’s show means that the works are viewed within a narrative of dialogue while at Crucible the works themselves were in dialogue with the architecture, functions and meaning of the building.

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Bruce Cockburn - Pacing The Cage.

Saturday, 7 March 2009

commission4mission's launch

Bishop David, the Patron of commission4mission, giving his keynote speech

Fr. Hingley speaking about commissions for the interior of St Albans

Fr. Hingley showing the sandblasted glass entrance doors at St Albans

Peter Webb and Fr. Hingley lead the returning party from the exterior artworks

Fr. Hingley begins his presentation and tour

commission4mission enjoyed a successful launch today at St Alban's Romford.

Fr. Roderick Hingley, St Alban's Parish Priest, gave a tour of the artworks commissioned for the church and described how the series of commissions had helped to transform the church in terms of light, space and welcome. He spoke about the way in which commissioning contemporary artists had meant that the artworks had relevance and resonance for local people, most obviously in the Mark Cazalet cancel ceiling mural with its imagery drawn from rural and urban Havering. What the achievement at St Alban's demonstrates is not only that the commissioning of contemporary Christian Art by Parish Churches is possible but that sensitive, informed and brave commissioning enhances the mission of the church as well as its aesthetic.

I gave a brief presentation of the aim and objectives of commission4mission which also set out our initial programme:

• exhibitions at Pentecost Festival (30th May) & Chelmsford Cathedral (2nd-7th November);
• study day at Chelmsford Cathedral (7th November);
• exploration of four possible commissions with two proposals submitted;
• co-operation with the Faith & Image group;
• application submitted for catalogue funding;
• art workshop at ‘Fun in the Park’ in Barkingside (13 June);
• invitation to be part of London-wide discussions on art in religious spaces;
• invitation to exhibit in the West Ham Festival; and
• support from Bishop of Barking for commission4mission leaflets.

Finally, Bishop David gave the keynote address as Patron of commission4mission. He began by speaking about creativity as both God-given and a key aspect of what it means to be human. He described the birth and growth of a child into adulthood as the most astonishing kinetic sculpture. He outlined how he saw spirituality breaking through in much contemporary and modern art and called for Christians to be sensitive interpreters of such art. Among the examples he cited were the humanity of Anthony Gormley's work based as it is on his own body and the 'something more' of Damien Hirst's diamond encrusted skull, For The Love Of God. He ended by using a quote attributed to Rowan Williams “that artists are special people but every person is a special kind of artist.” commission4mission would need, he suggested, to be a support the special people that artists are in their creativity but also to find ways of revealing and developing the creativity of all.

Among those present at the launch were representatives of the Arts Centre Group, Faith & Image and the World Art Federation.

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Eric Bibb - Connected.