Exhibitions: Tate Modern and Wellcome Collection

Today I've seen Tacita Dean's photogenic FILM in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern together with the Gerhard Richter retrospective before going to the Wellcome Collection for their Miracles and Charms exhibitions.

"FILM is an eleven-minute silent 35mm looped film projected onto a monolith standing 13 metres tall at the end of a darkened Turbine Hall ... FILM ... takes the appearance of a filmstrip with sprocket holes exposed onto the emulsion. The layering of imagery also conjures the transparency of a strip of celluloid, giving the appearance of being able to see through the screen itself to the wall of the Turbine Hall behind it. Playing with the distinctive architectural character of the east wall, FILM has the rhythm and metre of a visual poem. Images, some familiar from Dean’s previous works, such as lightning, trees and seascapes, juxtapose with panels of colour and interact with the grid structure of the wall. The resulting piece is a montage of black and white, colour and hand tinted images, including allusions to surrealist art, a Mondrian painting, and the mountains of René Daumal’s novel Mount Analogue and the Paramount Studio logo."

"Gerhard Richter: Panorama is a major retrospective exhibition that groups together significant moments of his remarkable career. Since the 1960s, Gerhard Richter has immersed himself in a rich and varied exploration of painting. Gerhard Richter: Panorama highlights the full extent of the artist's work, which has encompassed a diverse range of techniques and ideas. It includes realist paintings based on photographs, colourful gestural abstractions such as the squeegee paintings, portraits, subtle landscapes and history paintings."

"Wellcome Collection's autumn exhibition programme explores the extraordinary in the everyday with two shows: Infinitas Gracias: Mexican miracle paintings, the first major display of Mexican votive paintings outside Mexico; and Felicity Powell: Charmed Life, an exhibition of unseen London amulets from Henry Wellcome's collection, selected and arranged by the artist Felicity Powell. Drawing lines between faith, mortality and healing, Miracles and Charms offers a poignant insight into the tribulations of daily life and human responses to chance and suffering."

"Infinitas Gracias features over 100 votive paintings drawn from five collections held by museums in and around Mexico City and two sanctuaries located in mining communities in the Bajío region to the north: the city of Guanajuato and the distant mountain town of Real de Catorce. Together with images, news reports, photographs, devotional artefacts, film and interviews, the exhibition illustrates the depth of the votive tradition in Mexico."

"Charmed Life features some 400 amulets, selected by Felicity Powell from Henry Wellcome's vast collection, which will be exhibited encircled by ten works by the artist. The amulets, ranging from simple coins to meticulously carved shells and from dead animals to elaborately fashioned notes, are from a collection within a collection, amassed by the banker and obsessive folklorist Edward Lovett."

"Felicity Powell works in white wax in low relief on the backs of mirrors. Her figurative imagery is full of subtle and macabre humour. The heads she has modelled are always in the process of change, each is infused with metamorphic potential: growing antlers, extruding tentacles or coiffed with spaghetti; as though the known phyla have been infiltrated by subversive and impish genes. The images have the wonder and strangeness of exhibits from a cabinet of curiosities."

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Robert Plant & The Band Of Joy - Silver Rider.

Beyond 'Airbrushed from Art History' (7)

Magdy William, a student under the late Dr. Isaac Fanous, the founder of the school of modern Coptic painting and the initiator of the modern renaissance in Coptic art, has been one of the world’s premier Coptic icon artists for several decades. In addition to his work beautifying countless churches throughout Egypt and around the world, he has held solo exhibitions in Europe and Australia. His next major European exhibition will be in Norway in 2012 where over three hundred of his icons will be exhibited in three cities simultaneously. His studio is located along the Nile in Maadi at the Coptic Orthodox Church of St. George.

 
His current exhibition, The Eternal Eye, opened today at St John’s Maadi, the international Episcopal Church in southern Cairo founded in 1931. The icons being exhibited range in theme from the Biblical stories in Egypt to Coptic saints. This is an exhibition that reflects the desire to see the establishment of a new Egyptian society, in the wake of the January 25 Revolution, that inherently respects and honours religious diversity. The objective of the exhibition is to encourage a better understanding of Egypt’s indigenous Christian community, the historic Coptic Orthodox Church, which constitutes up to 10% of the population and traces its heritage back to the first century. This significant indigenous Christian presence in Egypt plays a critical role in enabling all faiths to coexist in harmony.

Retablos are votive paintings that give thanks for prayers answered. This tradition came to Mexico five centuries ago with the Catholic Spanish. For two centuries retablos have been painted onto small metal sheets by neighbourhood retableros. Mexican painter Frida Kahlo had an extensive collection of retablos. Artist Alfredo Vilchis Roque picked up on this tradition of telling a simple, dramatic story with a figurative scene and written commentary. He has been painting for 20 years, and his paintings are based on stories that have been told to him.

Alfredo is a lively man, full of himself, and proud of the work he has been doing for the last 23 years, bringing history and people's stories to painted form while keeping the tradition of retablo and ex-Voto making alive. He begins work with a pencil drawing showing the basic layout - simple and not very detailed. From this he paints the final piece in oil on sheet metal called lamina.

Today his sons, Hugo Alfredo, Daniel Alonso, and Luis Angel, are following in his footsteps.They live in a working class barrio of Mexico City, and have learned the trade and tradition from their father. Their paintings have been shown, along with those of their father, in Mexico City, Paris, Miami, Chicago, and Seattle. Their family's art is the subject of two books: Infinite Gracias: Contemporary Mexican Votive Paintings, and Rue des Miracles.


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Omar Khairat - A Place In The Heart.