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Showing posts with label maureen paley gallery. Show all posts
Showing posts with label maureen paley gallery. Show all posts

Wednesday, 8 May 2024

Artlyst: May Art Diary

My May Art Diary for Artlyst includes exhibitions exploring new towns, migration, literature, reflections, and martyrs at galleries including Gibberd Gallery, Ben Uri, Tang, Maureen Paley, Kristin Hjellegjerde and Ikon. There are also solo shows by Matthew Krishanu, Alastair Gordon, Yvonne Maiden and Peter Rodolfo, and church-based exhibitions at Emmanuel Church, Eastbourne, St Martin-in-the-Fields, and Ely Cathedral:

'The Methodist Modern Art Collection is one of Britain’s most important collections of modern religious art, comprising over fifty paintings, prints, drawings, reliefs and mosaics. The Collection includes famous names from the British art world of the last 100 years (Graham Sutherland, Edward Burra, Patrick Heron, Elisabeth Frink) alongside more contemporary artists. Started by a Methodist layman and art collector, who along with a Methodist minister, wanted Methodists to have an appreciation and understanding of contemporary art and what it could bring to illustrate the Christian story, the collection has steadily grown since then and has visited many towns and cities giving people of all denominations an opportunity to see this for themselves.

Following the recent opening of its new church building, Emmanuel Church, Eastbourne is hosting an exhibition, ‘New Vision,’ which features 35 pieces from this collection.'

Interviews -
Monthly diary articles -
Articles/Reviews -
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T Bone Burnett - He Came Down.
Posted by Jonathan Evens at 18:55 0 comments
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Thursday, 5 October 2017

Tim Rollins and K.O.S., The moonlight was behind them...

“Great art is an instrument of God,” says Tim Rollins, founder of K.O.S. (Kids of Survival) who are exhibiting at Maureen Paley Gallery until 12 November. This is so, Rollins states, because you have to “bring faith to art as you do to God” and artists imitate “the penultimate creativity of God.”

However, you won’t see overtly religious imagery if you visit The moonlight was behind them...; in part, because the title of this exhibition finds its root in the gothic novel Dracula by Bram Stoker with an ominous darkness that Rollins and K.O.S. think relates to our current political and social condition.

Rollins’ collaboration with the members of K.O.S. takes the form of drawings, sculptural objects, paintings on canvas and paper. They highlight quotes from books, plays, operas and prose with which they engage as they relate the stories to their own experiences or to politics. Their art is created directly on these inspirational texts.

In this exhibition: “Gretchen am Spinnrade (after Goethe and Schubert) reflects on the swooning for Faust by Gretchen, distracted by her treadle. With the Brothers Grimm tale Rumpelstiltskin, the spinning of straw into gold hints at the blind pursuit of material splendour in a late capitalist period that might be seen to discourage critical thought. Tim Rollins and K.O.S. also revisit George Orwell's Animal Farm, with the relevance of the allegorical narrative only becoming more potent since its original publication. Other work makes reference to Goethe’s epistolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1774.”

Although they have engaged, on other occasions, with religious texts and imagery – as with I See the Promised Land or The Temptation of Saint Anthony – the religious underpinning of their work is not primarily found in their use of symbolism. Rather, it concerns their processes of creation.

These involve reading and researching inspirational texts in order to find images that make literature visible. K.O.S. artist Robert Branch has spoken of this process as one which involves struggle in a social experience. He says, “Art making doesn’t come with written instructions, with a step-by-step process.” Instead, you “just kind of feel it out” because art “is a process of faith.” In this way, Rollins suggests, you “become an instrument for something that cannot be articulated any other way.” “Like the paint, you’re a medium” for “some spirit … making something manifest.” This process of faith, Rollins says, is about making “the invisible visible, vision becoming visible, and making hope material, power manifest, and Spirit sensuous.”

Rollins is “an active member in the music, arts, and HIV/AIDS ministries at Memorial Baptist Church in Harlem” and draws deeply on his church experiences in discussing art as a process of faith. He speaks about Holy Ghost moments saying that people “underestimate the power of the Holy Spirit”: “We don’t make this work. It is not like speaking in tongues. It is the Holy Spirit present … Painting is capable of rapture. Our paintings are ecstatic utterances made material and visible.”

So, if you want to experience rapture, spiritual ecstasy and, even, the “glory of God,” then this exhibition based on horror, fairy tale and political allegory may be just the place to go.

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The Voices of East Harlem - Simple Song Of Freedom.
Posted by Jonathan Evens at 20:57 0 comments
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Sunday, 30 June 2013

The past is not even past

Having been to see Saints Alive by Michael Landy at the National Gallery, Laura Cumming's Observor review seems to me to be the one which captures the significance of this exhibition best:

"It is remarkable that the National Gallery had such faith in Landy, never mind reinforcing the floors for his giants. But the result is a tremendous event that seizes the viewer, involving us in a spectacle of passion, conviction, suffering and belief driven both literally and mechanically by violence. Their true subject, in this respect, is awe. These sculptures take you into the paintings, but above all into the lives of the saints, in the most eye-popping, nerve-touching, heart-wrenching way."

As Cumming notes "Landy has spent the past two years looking hard at paintings of saints and thinking about the complete self-abnegation of their lives." Similarly, Tim Rollins and K.O.S. also regularly create contemporary art based on art of the past. William Faulkner's statement - ‘The past is not dead. In fact, it’s not even past.’ - is a guiding light for their work. Accordingly, they "embrace the idea of the arena of art existing in the fourth dimension of a social imagination beyond space and time, contingency and possibility."

Inspired by the Time Traveller in H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895) the group have endeavoured to explore this idea in their current exhibition at the Maureen Paley Gallery and have made work based on imaginary ‘visitations’ with Shakespeare, Mendelssohn, Haydn, Darwin and Strauss:

"Their journey begins in 1590 at the time when Shakespeare was writing A Midsummer Night’s Dream and simultaneously in 1826 when Mendelssohn at 17 years of age began work on his own score for a production of this play. In their work A Midsummer Night’s Dream (after Shakespeare, 1590-1596 and Mendelssohn 1826–1842) they invited young people to transform into the character of Puck, painting flowers and blossom over sheet music from Mendelssohn’s score that was completed in 1842. Next they imagined the first performance of The Seven Last Words of Christ by Haydn in 1786 and created seven paintings that use black Spinel pigment that they applied onto pages from this score. They then visited Charles Darwin in 1837 as he began sketching out his idea of a ‘Tree of Life’ in one image that would be developed into his theory of evolution described in On the Origin of Species published in 1859.

In 1945 they meet with Richard Strauss in the final days of WWII while he was composing his elegiac and mournful Metamorphosen (in Memorium). This music created a deep desire within the group to reflect on their experiences working in the South Bronx that brought up feelings of tragedy and transformation, destruction and rebirth. They have created a meditation in this new body of work that memorializes, researches and remains hopeful by existing in past, present and future tenses."

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Joseph Haydn - The Seven Last Words Of Our Saviour On The Cross.

Posted by Jonathan Evens at 22:41 0 comments
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