Between: serpentine gallery

Showing posts with label serpentine gallery. Show all posts

Wednesday, 26 March 2025

Artlyst - Arpita Singh Social Observations Serpentine North

My latest exhibition review for Artlyst is on ‘Arpita Singh: Remembering’ at Serpentine North:

"The’ Golden Deer’ and ‘Searching Sita through Torn Papers, Paper Strips and Labels’ bring all these strands together in images which, as Geeta Kapur writes, explode with warfare in “planetary wars that will annihilate the universe” and which leave “armies of kith and kin slaughtered on home ground”. The search for unattainable desires, as symbolised in The Golden Deer, is the catalyst for the violence covering the text-based maps that form the torn and dismembered worlds depicted in these works. These large works are major statements about mimetic desire and our human tendency to create and punish scapegoats."

My other pieces for Artlyst are:

Interviews -

Monthly diary articles -

Articles/Reviews -

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Watkins Family Praise - Grief And Praise.

Friday, 28 June 2024

Church Times - Art review: Judy Chicago: Revelations at Serpentine North, London

My latest exhibition review for C hurch T imes is on Judy Chicago: Revelations at Serpentine North, London:

'A final recent drawing And God Created Life, sums up Chicago’s belief, as described by Martha Easton, that a “united humanity” through “the blending of genders in the very body of God anticipates the reclamation of Eden and the resultant peace on earth” as envisaged at the end of Revelations. This fascinating exhibition and Chicago’s body of work challenge us to consider how we might “imagine a more equitable and inclusive world”.'

Other of my pieces for Church Times can be found here. My writing for ArtWay can be found here. My pieces for Artlyst are here, those for Seen & Unseen are here, and those for Art+Christianity are here.

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Judee Sill - The Kiss.

Friday, 21 July 2017

Grayson Perry: The Most Popular Art Exhibition Ever!

My latest exhibition review for Church Times is of Grayson Perry: The Most Popular Art Exhibition Ever! at the Serpentine Gallery. In the review I argue that Perry:

'may be the perfect artist for our troubled times, because he absorbs into himself and his creations a multiplicity of references, which he mirrors back to our culture, but refracted through the perspective of his dual identities.

This makes his work prophetic as it re-presents ourselves and our culture, but in ways that playfully challenge and criticise our notions of identity and the basis for these notions.'

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Peter, Paul & Mary - The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.

Saturday, 17 June 2017

Exhibitions update: Image and identity

I've recently enjoyed seeing two exhibition about image and identity:

Grayson Perry: The Most Popular Art Exhibition Ever!: This summer Grayson Perry, one of the most astute commentators on contemporary society and culture, presents a major exhibition of new work at the Serpentine Galleries. The works touch on many themes including popularity and art, masculinity and the current cultural landscape.

Perry’s abiding interest in his audience informs his choice of universally human subjects. Working in a variety of traditional media such as ceramics, cast iron, bronze, printmaking and tapestry, Perry is best known for his ability to combine delicately crafted objects with scenes of contemporary life. His subject matter is drawn from his own childhood and life as a transvestite, as well as wider social issues ranging from class and politics to sex and religion.

The Most Popular Art Exhibition Ever!, tackles one of Perry’s central concerns: how contemporary art can best address a diverse cross section of society. Perry said: “I am in the communication business and I want to communicate to as wide an audience as possible. Nothing pleases me more than meeting someone at one of my exhibitions from what museum people call ‘a non-traditional background.’ The new works I am making all have ideas about popularity hovering around them. What kind of art do people like? What subjects? Why do people like going to art galleries these days? What is the relationship of traditional art to social media?”

A Channel 4 documentary Grayson Perry: Divided Britain followed Perry as he created a new work for the show: his attempt to capture the thoughts of a divided country a year after the EU referendum. Harnessing social media, Perry invited the British public to contribute ideas, images and phrases to cover the surface of two enormous new pots: one for the Brexiteers and one for the Remainers. He also visited the most pro-Brexit and pro-Remain parts of the country for the programme, which is available to watch on All4.

Saatchi Gallery and Huawei have teamed up to present From Selfie to Self-Expression. This is the world’s first exhibition exploring the history of the selfie from the old masters to the present day, and celebrates the truly creative potential of a form of expression often derided for its inanity.

The show also highlights the emerging role of the mobile phone as an artistic medium for self-expression by commissioning ten exciting young British photographers to create new works using Huawei’s newest breakthrough dual lens smartphones co-engineered with Leica.

I'll also be going to see Art Out of the Bloodlands: A Century of Polish Artists in Britain at the Ben Uri Gallery from 28 June - 17 September 2017. This exhibition focuses on the contribution made by the largest migrant community to 20th/21st Century British Art, this exhibition highlights the work of Polish artists who have worked and continue to work in Britain. Featured artists include: Jankel Adler, Janina Baranowska, Marian Bohusz-Szyszko, Stanislaw Frenkiel, Feliks Topolski and Alfred Wolmark, complemented by contemporary practitioners working in London now. All but a handful of the featured works have been created in England – the new homeland - yet many retain symbols of Polish national identity, from Catholicism and the cavalry, to the dark forests and traditional embroidery.

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Pink Floyd - Wish You Were Here.

Tuesday, 7 August 2012

Clack and Pouka: Olympic exhibitions

I've enjoyed seeing Olympic-related exhibitions in Central London today featuring two commission4mission artists.

Chris Clack is part of exhibitions at Westminster Abbey, St Margaret's and Methodist Central Hall celebrating the Cultural Olympiad with a range of artistic forms from sculpture, carvings and glasswork to art installations, photography and paintings in various medium. The exhibitions are in partnership with More Than Gold, the agency established by all the main denominations to help churches make the most of the Games. The ‘Westminster Arts Inspired by the Games’ Festival is open throughout the Games and incorporates work from a number of celebrated artists from around the world. Details on contributors can be found at http://www.morethangold.org.uk/art.

Pouka is currently exhibiting paintings and sculptures (including the 18 metre long 'I AM' painting) at the African Village in Kensington Gardens, just opposite the Royal Albert Hall, which is there for the duration of the Olympics. The African Village is a village of stands presenting the cultural and artistic diversity of the African continent through an exhibition area and a restaurant open to the general public.

At Methodist Central Hall Westminister I also saw both Key of David - a huge canvas, 18 feet high by 72 feet long painted by artists from every corner of the globe - and a selection of work from the Methodist Collection of Modern Christian Art. This latter exhibition offers the public a rare opportunity to view works from this impressive, yet little known, collection. On show are artworks by key twentieth-century figures, including, but not limited to: Graham Sutherland, Edward Burra, Eric Gill, Patrick Heron, Elizabeth Frink, Jacques Iselin, Georges Rouault, and Craigie Aitchison.

Finally, I enjoyed seeing this year's Serpentine Gallery Pavilion by Herzog & de Meuron and Ai Weiwei plus To The Light, a retrospective of work by Yoko Ono exploring her influential role in contemporary art across a wide range of media and showcasing her continuing interest in the relationship between the roles of artist and viewer.

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John Lennon - Woman.

Thursday, 4 August 2011

Exhibition reviews

Today I was fascinated to see, and a little underwhelmed by, Michelangelo Pistoletto's The Mirror of Judgement at the Serpentine Gallery.

Pistoletto is a leading figure in the development of both Arte Povera and conceptual art and this installation has had rave reviews, including the Guardian calling it "a beautiful and mind-expanding experience." As in much of his work, Pistoletti has here made use of religious concepts, imagery and phrases together with his repeated use of labyrinths and mirrors. He has written that "the mirror is the mediator between the visible and the invisible, carrying sight beyond it's normal possibilities" but has also stated that the "image in the mirror is objective; there is no interpretation.”

Pistoletto argues that at "the beginning of our century, the avant-garde made art again autonomous." "Art ceased to be a symbol of religious and political power" and "actively takes possession of those structures such as religious which rule thought; not with a view to replacing them itself, but in order to substitute them with a different interpretative system, a system intended to enhance people’s capacity to exerting the functions of their own thought." This is where Pistoletto's labyrinth is intended to lead us. We move past symbols of four religions (a prayer mat, statue of Buddha, prayer stall, each before mirror, represent Islam, Buddhism and Christianity respectively, while a pair of large arched mirrors stand in for the Jewish Torah), to a central chamber containing a mirrored obelisk and the New Infinity sign (Pistoletto's symbol for the Third Paradise; a fusion between the first paradise in which terrestrial life is completely regulated by nature’s intelligence and the second Artificial Paradise which is developed by human intellect).

All this background information seems necessary in order to relate to Pistoletti's intent for this work; meaning that the work relies on a literary interpretation. The ambience at the Serpentine, at least as I experienced it, is not particularly contemplative as notices ban the touching of the work (due to its fragility), gallery attendants chat in corners, and there is no sense of the prayer objects inviting use. Visually, the concept is literal; mirrors judge us each time we use them and Pistoletto's installation doesn't alter that experience significantly without knowledge of the literary concepts that underpin the work.

Also at the Serpentine currently is this year's Gallery Pavilion designed by Peter Zumthor. Zumthor's pavilion as a "hortus conclusus", an enclosed garden, also relates to concepts of Eden or paradise. In Zumthor's essay about the pavilion, he begins by writing: "We come from nature and return to nature; we are conceived and born; we live and die; we rot or burn and vanish into the earth."

Out of Australia at the British Museum begins with the opposite; the wilderness inspired expressionism of the ‘Angry Penguins’ group of artists – Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd, Albert Tucker and Joy Hester. Arthur Boyd is a favourite artist and his prints do not disappoint formed, as they, through their fevered, passionate mark-making, echo the strength of the content. The exhibition includes an early work in Boyd's highly original Nebuchadnezzar series. Boyd and Tucker both address the passionate and predatory aspects of eroticism, something that also features in Eric Gill: public and private art, the other British Museum exhibition that I visited today. Gill combined sensuality and spirituality in images such Divine Lovers, which forms the centrepiece of this small review highlighting the wide range of his work. The effect that knowledge of the abusive element of Gill's sexual practice has on our response to the sensuality of his work is rightly noted but the primary focus is on his art and ideas.

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The Smiths - Cemetry Gates.

Thursday, 30 June 2011

Eden at the Serpentine

Kieran Long has written a very interesting piece in the London Evening Standard about this year's Serpentine Gallery pavilion created by Peter Zumthor.

Zumthor has referred to his pavilion as a "hortus conclusus", an enclosed garden, and Long notes that the reference inherent in this garden/cloister hybrid goes "to the very roots of Western culture, the mystical Christian tradition of the inviolate Eden that the Latin words call to mind":

"It is not simply a monastic kitchen garden; it has to do with how gardens connect us to the most universal of themes. In Zumthor's essay about the pavilion, he begins by writing: "We come from nature and return to nature; we are conceived and born; we live and die; we rot or burn and vanish into the earth." These are not the words of an artist merely engaged in the manipulation of sensory effects.

Perhaps death, life, religion and the mystical universals implied by walled gardens are taboo at the press conference of a fashionable art institution but it is undoubtedly in the background of Zumthor's thinking, even if he doesn't quite make it explicit. He has spent the past few years working on projects deeply connected with the Catholic Church. The first, a modest chapel in a field in Germany (Bruder Klaus Chapel, 2007) is made of the roughest concrete blackened by intentional charring, with a poured lead floor. The second is the beautiful Kolumba museum in Cologne, run by the catholic Diocese of Cologne (2008), which works with existing historic ruins to make an ambiguous civic monument. Neither of these projects is in any way dogmatic about Catholic faith, but both of them deal with how architecture can help us understand our place in the world."

Long applauds Zumthor's "serious-minded attention to the most universal themes in architecture."

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Ed Sheeran - Wayfaring Stranger.

Wednesday, 30 September 2009

Serpentine & Westbourne Grove

I met up with Alan Stewart on Monday at the Serpentine Gallery for one of our periodic sessions comparing notes on our respective ministries while taking in some art. It was also an opportunity for me to firm up my input to the Everyday Icons day which Alan has been involved in organising.

We began with a coffee under the sinuous and mesmeric Serpentine Pavilion 2009 which provided the opportunity for some great 'Windows on the world' photos (which will feature in coming weeks) and the more descriptive photos above.

From the Serpentine, we walked through Notting Hill to Westbourne Grove where we saw Chair Poetics at England & Co and an exhibition of works from the School of Paris at Hanina Fine Arts.

Ralph Ball and Maxine Naylor use design as a critical, visual discourse to communicate ideas about design, culture and society today. In Chair Poetics ordinary, everyday chairs are reconfigured to ask questions about our relationship to utility, familiarity, obsolescence, sustainability and value. While interesting in their own right, the reconfigured chairs, to my mind, had greater aesthetic values in the photographs that Ball and Naylor had taken of them than in their battered and broken reality.

Hanina Fine Arts write of the School of Paris that:

"From the concentration of radical thought in Paris, after the second World War, a new generation of artists emerged, known as the Jeune École de Paris. These artists came from all over Europe and the vibrant and provocative nature of their work reflected the turmoil of civilisation and sought a renewal of language and aesthetics that would provide expression and orientation to the loss of faith in traditional values within post-war society."

These are artists that in terms of art history are not well known because they pursued abstraction after the Art World's interest had moved on from that movement to the next and subsequent movements. This does not mean though that their explorations of the potential of abstraction were without value making this an exhibition of surprises from artists about which I had read very little. I particularly enjoyed the thick brush strokes of Claude Vernard into which he scraped patterns and over which he splayed lines of pure paint.

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Fleet Foxes - Your Protector.