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Showing posts with label pacheco. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pacheco. Show all posts

Tuesday, 30 September 2025

Artlyst - The Art Diary October 2025

My latest Art Diary for Artlyst features exhibitions by several artists whose work I have championed through essays and exhibitions, as well as solo and group shows that explore environmental, social, and spiritual concerns. Read on for news of exhibitions by Michael Landy, Ana Maria Pacheco, Robert Smithson, and Suzanne Treister, among others, together with shows at Compton Verney, Firstsite, Pallant House, and the Engelundsamlingen in Vrå:

'‘Everyday Wonder to Revelation’ at Clare Hall, Cambridge, is an exhibition providing a rare opportunity to see paintings by Caine. These paintings delve into the core Neo-Platonist idea of the oneness of the world, the nodus mundi. We see this in his depictions of everyday objects, such as rugs, mopheads, carpets, and bundles of cloth. Although his subject matter is humble, the intricate depth of his draughtsmanship reveals unity and cohesion. We see it too in his expansive and luminous landscapes. When Caine blends his perceptions of space and shimmering light in the landscape with his exploration of the core in everyday things, he presents us with a vision of worlds beyond. His images invite us to step through a veil into barely imagined possibilities. Through his exploration of the small, the infinite beckons; through his exploration of the wonder of the everyday, revelation becomes possible.

In the essay I wrote for the exhibition catalogue, I note that: “Without reference to standard religious iconography and with a primary focus on landscape, still life, and portraits, Caine imbued and infused his work with spiritual reflection and with spirituality itself. That he did so in ways that allow those who do not share his beliefs to enthusiastically embrace and appreciate his work for their many other compelling qualities is a testament both to Caine’s skill as an artist and the subtlety of his understanding of the connection between earth and heaven.”'

My other pieces for Artlyst are:

Interviews -
Monthly diary articles -

Articles/Reviews -

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Kevin Morby - O Behold.
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Wednesday, 2 October 2024

Artlyst: October Art Diary

My October Art Diary for Artlyst highlights artist monographs, which increasingly appearing on the market as we approach Christmas. So I begin the October Art Diary with several, which are also linked to launch exhibitions. I also feature several exhibitions in sacred spaces before ending with some interesting thematic shows. Among the works featured you will find Leonora Carrington, Ken Currie, Tracey Emin, Susie Hamilton, Ana Maria Pacheco, Michael Petry, and Lancelot Ribeiro, among others:

'Another fascinating monograph to be published shortly is ‘Nolan’s Africa’ by Andrew Turley. In this monograph, Turley takes readers on a journey with Sidney Nolan from the United Nations Headquarters in New York to a suspected assassination on the Congo border, from the crematoria of Auschwitz to the formation of the World Wildlife Fund and on to the plains of the Serengeti. He walks in Nolan’s footsteps across Tanzania, Uganda and Ethiopia, seeing the world through the artist’s eyes. Written over twelve years and across three continents, this is the first book based on the newly opened Sidney Nolan Archives at the National Library of Australia, containing never-before-seen diaries, photographs and personal notes.

The result is a rich narrative that weaves together art, adventure, philosophy, global politics and world history. Artistic influences and processes, breathtaking in their scope, are laid bare as the thoughtful balance of text and images urges readers to consider the effect that the Holocaust, animal extinctions, colonial disenfranchisement and human conflict had on the artist and society. ‘Nolan’s Africa’ is a compelling picture of one of the most complex and famous painters of the twentieth century, shining new light on his examination of nature, human nature and the nature of modern civilisation.'

For more of my writing on artists included in my October Art Diary see here: Susie Hamilton; Ken Currie; Marcus Lyon; Micah Purnell; Michael Petry; Sidney Nolan; Brian Whelan; Ana Maria Pacheco; and Michael Takeo Magruder.

Interviews -
Monthly diary articles -

Articles/Reviews -

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Ed Kowalczyk - Angels On A Razor.
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Saturday, 1 August 2015

ArtWay meditation: Ana Maria Pacheco, Maciej Hoffman and Marlene Dumas

In my latest visual meditation for ArtWay I reflect on images of partners carrying each other by Ana Maria Pacheco, Maciej Hoffman and Marlene Dumas.

"The image of partners carrying each other is one that several modern visual artists have also used in exploring the nature of relationships and, just as in the U2 song 'One', images which initially seem positive turn out to be rather more ambiguous than on first sight. They include images of parents and children as well as husbands and wives."

My other ArtWay meditations include work by María Inés Aguirre, Marian Bohusz-Szyszko, Christopher Clack, Marlene Dumas, Antoni Gaudi, Maciej Hoffman, Maurice Novarina, John Piper, and Henry Shelton.

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U2 - One.
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Tuesday, 24 February 2015

Ana Maria Pacheo: Art shows how vulnerable we are

Ana Maria Pacheco is a painter, sculptor and printmaker who was born in Brazil in 1943 and has lived in England since 1973. Her work exhibits a compelling yet disturbing merging of Brazilian folklore, classical myth, mystical Catholicism and political satire. "Mythical and religious themes, usually given a dark edge, figure in much of her work" and she "deals with issues of control and the exercise of power, drawing upon the tensions between the old world of Europe and the new world of her Brazilian birth."

"The variety of Pacheco’s sculptural work is remarkable and with its tough humanist core, her project constantly provokes us to seriously question the true extent of our own humanity, and of our uses and abuses of power. Ana has said that her 'art shows how vulnerable we are'. Large and enduring themes; violence, journeys, death, love, transformation and metamorphosis reflect her high seriousness, but at the same time her work is neither pompous nor devoid of humour. With a cast of characters that are betrayed, tortured, ecstatic, seductive, grotesque, bestial or divine, her work can arouse extreme emotions, a process that some concluded art no longer has the power to elicit."

Four separate but simultaneous exhibitions, in four different Norwich locations, will bring major sculptural work from Pacheco to Norwich for the first time.

Ana Maria Pacheco Exhibitions | Norwich 2015
17 March to 6 September
Norwich Cathedral
Shadows of the Wanderer (Sculpture)

Cathedral of St John the Baptist
Study for Requiem, John the Baptist I (Sculpture)
Study of Head, John the Baptist III (Sculpture)*
*to Sunday 31st May

17 March to 31 August
Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery
Enchanted Garden (Reliefs)

17 March to 25 April
The Gallery at Norwich University of the Arts
The Banquet (Sculpture) and Prints

Event at Norwich Castle
Friday 27 March | 5.30 – 7.30pm
Norfolk Contemporary Art Society and
Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery present
Ana Maria Pacheco and Colin Wiggins in conversation
5.30 – 6.15pm – exhibition viewing
6.15 – 7.15pm – conversation in the Town Close Auditorium
Seating is limited so pre-booking is essential
To reserve tickets please email norfolkart@googlemail.com
NCAS members | £5.00 – Non-members | £7.00 (payment at door)

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Victoria Williams, Emmylou Harris et al - In My Hour Of Darkness.
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Evelyn Williams: Tender, intimate and emotional paintings

The "tender, intimate and emotional paintings" of Evelyn Williams "are concerned with the subtleties and complexities of relationships and the human predicament." Her work explored human relationships by establishing formal rhythmic relationship between figures and by charging them with intense emotion. "Her very personal paintings followed her progress through life as child, lover, mother and grandmother."

From tomorrow the Martin Tinney Gallery has an exhibition of approximately 25 works which features the last paintings she worked on. "These are powerful, haunting paintings which, fully aware that her health was declining rapidly, show the artist facing her own mortality with her customary directness and tenderness."

Fay Weldon has said: “Evelyn Williams’ work is imbued by an unmistakable mixture of grace and greatness. It is 'awesome' - if we can get back to the true sense of the word. It fills you with awe. In its restraint, its gravity, the sense it imparts of female endurance, female beauty, the power and seriousness of love between woman and child, woman and woman, man and woman, her sheer courage in taking on board the nature of the universe in its most unsmiling mode, it achieves greatness, and will outlast all of us”

Sister Wendy Beckett says: “All Evelyn’s work has a deep contemplative stillness within it. The dignity of her figures – women above all – is a consequence of their listening hearts. Looking at Evelyn’s paintings I think of Keats “Unheard Melodies” … love is her theme”

Williams' work has synergies with that of Eileen Cooper, Marlene Dumas and Ana Maria Pacheco, among others.

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John Keats - Ode On A Grecian Urn.
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Friday, 29 July 2011

What I found when I googled myself

It's fascinating what you find when you google yourself. Amongst other things that I didn't know were on the web were the following:
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Lloyd Cole and the Commotions - Why I Love Country Music.
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Saturday, 26 March 2011

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.

  • 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.
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Friday, 19 December 2008

A Christian embrace of contemporary art

I've been visiting galleries today on my day off beginning at England & Co to see Remembering Albert Herbert. It was interesting to see early etchings of London in a similar style to but without mythic power and psychological density of the Biblical etchings. Also interesting was the extent to which towards the end of his life the Biblical references fell away and Herbert focussed on relational imagery drawn from youth and early parenthood.

While at England & Co I was also intrigued by two collage constructions with found text from Chris Kenny. Kenny produces, as England & Co's website states, an unexpected kind of poetry with his three-dimensional ‘drawings’ and constructions made from twigs, fragments of maps and strips of found text. Objects or phrases of the same type are mounted on pins and organised in a way that suggests an intention to rationalise the differences between them. The constructions I saw featured fragments of text arranged to form squares or circles and either telling a partial story or making word associations. Being mounted on pins they cast shadows mirroring the squares or circles created by the found text. There is therefore a visual and lingual patterning formed from fragments and yet one that is partial, ephemeral and fragile.

England & Co also regularly feature Outsider Art and while I was in Notting Hill I picked up a copy of the Raw Vision Outsider Art Sourcebook. Produced by the people behind Raw Vision magazine this is a useful introduction to Outsider artists, environments, collections, galleries, publications, and websites.

Walking from Bond Street to Saville Row to see the Garry Fabian Miller exhibition at James Hyman Fine Art, I passed the Halcyon Gallery which is currently showing Bob Dylan's Drawn Blank series. Dylan's art is interesting more for what it reveals or doesn't reveal about him but while there I also saw some lithographs by Marc Chagall and sculptures by Lorenzo Quinn.

Quinn's symbolic sculptures reminded me of the work of Juginder Lamba and Ana Maria Pacheco but with a smoother felicity which is reflected in his choice of materials and which at times displays a sentimentality and lack of originality in his imagery; clasped hands symbolising love and an open hand holding a figure symbolising the hand of God.

What I found most interesting about discovering Quinn's work in this way, was that here was yet another successful artist exhibiting in a central London gallery and enjoying major commissions while exploring significant religious themes in his work. Many such artists seem almost totally ignored by large sections of the Christian Church and yet are successfully raising questions of faith and meaning in so-called 'secular' settings. Their work should be celebrated yet is often ignored.

Time Passage is the largest and most comprehensive exhibition of photographs by Fabian Miller ever staged in London and includes some of his most acclaimed photographic series. Fabian Miller explores the elements of light, time and colour in camera-less images produced in his darkroom. His images are created by a long process of exposing light directly onto photographic paper through organic materials and substances. He uses this approach to create luminous windows of colour that range from abstract expressionist stripes and rectangles to contemplative evocations of landscapes.

The gallery blurb notes the spirituality of Fabian Miller's work and again we are encountering an artist with links to Christianity. He was co-curator of The Journey, a search for the role of contemporary art in religious and spiritual life, exhibited at Lincoln Cathedral and chose to work specifically with cruciform imagery in his Petworth series. This is not to imply that there is anything didactic in Fabian Miller's work. His spirituality emerges through a wonderful and wondering engagement with the interaction of light and nature.

Back at home and reading the Church Times I was pleased to see that Hertford stns and the Advent Art Installation both featured in Glyn Paflin's review of the Arts for 2008. Also waiting for me was a review copy of God in the Gallery which aims to explore a Christian embrace of Modern Art. Now that I like the sound of!

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Edmund Rubbra - Fukagawa (Deep River).
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