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Showing posts with label tate britain. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tate britain. Show all posts

Thursday, 2 June 2022

Artlyst: Hew Locke And The Christian Roots Of Carnival – Tate Britain

My latest piece for Artlyst is on Hew Locke's 'The Procession' at Tate Britain:

"Locke has commented of earlier works that: “What seems difficult for people to realise is that the work is not simply, or mainly a political statement or an illustration of post-colonial ideas. It is about what I am interested in aesthetically and historically. It is not merely educational or designed to get over a political point. Art is emotional, intuitive and mysterious. I’m trying to get at something elusive, possibly unobtainable.” The same is true of The Procession.

Ultimately, though, Locke’s characters process and dress with the same defiance inherent in the original medieval carnivals and in the original Touloulou. They walk and talk, parade and dance, in the face of colonialism, slavery, economic exploitation, rising sea levels and more demonstrating resilience of the face of oppression, torture and discrimination. They will survive and prevail despite the challenges they face and that is ultimately what the installation reveals to its visitors."

My other pieces for Artlyst are:

Interviews -
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Eric Bibb - Gathering Of The Tribes. 

Posted by Jonathan Evens at 16:35 0 comments
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Sunday, 5 December 2021

Artlyst: Diasporan Identities: Life Between Islands Caribbean British Art – Tate Britain

My latest review for Artlyst on 'Life Between Islands: Caribbean-British Art 1950s - Now' at Tate Britain:

'Alex Farquharson writes about ‘the twinning of African-derived gods with Catholic saints and African possession ceremonies with Catholic mass – to carnival: African-derived masked ceremony and dance with Catholic European pre-Lenten carnival traditions.’ John Lyons combines gestural expressionist paint handling with vibrant colours, lines, shapes, and textures to create a playful dialogue between metaphor and psychology that captures the energy and spectacle of Caribbean folklore and mythology as expressed in carnival. Similarly, Zak Ové’s reimagined folk characters, such as Hairy Man 2013, explore the interplay between flesh and spirit, reality and possibility, parody and sacred ritual inspired by masking traditions found in carnival. Allison Thompson notes that ‘Disguise was a key strategy of survival and retention within Afro-Caribbean communities, evidenced for example in syncretic religious practices.’

Farquharson suggests that ‘Many of the artworks here are similarly transdisciplinary in their references, operating in multiple registers and evoking the cross-cultural dynamics of the Caribbean and its diasporic history.’ This is because ‘New forms were and are needed to tell new stories; to lend voice to historical subjectivities and experiences that colonial archives have silenced or grotesquely distorted.’'

For more on emigre artists see https://joninbetween.blogspot.com/2021/11/emigre-artists-and-their-cultural-impact.html. No Colour Bar: Black British Art in Action 1960-1990 at the Guildhall Art Gallery covered some similar ground to Life Between Islands. Jamaican Spiritual was an exhibition at Stephen Walbrook that highlighted the strong spiritual nature of Jamaica and it's people. The variety of spiritual beliefs held on the island reflect the diverse nature of the people who live there and the motto of the country "Out of many we are one".

My other pieces for Artlyst are:

Interviews -
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Bob Marley - Redemption Song.
Posted by Jonathan Evens at 22:29 0 comments
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Thursday, 16 September 2021

Artlyst: Ilona Bossanyi interview

My latest interview for Artlyst is with Ilona Bossanyi, granddaughter of the Hungarian émigré artist Ervin Bossanyi:

'Earlier this year I wrote an article about the extent to which artworks in the UK by émigré artists are- under threat, with some requiring urgent restoration and others in buildings that have been closed. Ilona Bossanyi, granddaughter of the Hungarian stained glass artist Ervin Bossanyi, contacted me after reading that article, in which her grandfather was mentioned, as she was concerned about the fate of the stained-glass window that her grandfather had created for the Tate Gallery...

The difficulties émigré artists such as Bossanyi have faced over the years, including the difficulty of receiving appropriate recognition posthumously, is demonstrated by the many strains seen in the story of how An Angel Blessing the Washerwomen of Chartres first came to the Tate and of its subsequent reception...

Yet, as with work by many other émigré artists, a lack of recognition, both of their work and stories, continues into the present even, at times, on the part of institutions that hold such works in trust for future generations.'

The Church Times article that attracted Ilona Bossanyi's interest was based on a conference held at St John's Waterloo to raise awareness about the threat to works by Hans Feibusch and other emigre artists. That article can be found at - https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2021/11-june/features/features/debt-owed-to-jewish-refugee-art.

See also my Artlyst articles on Refugee Artists: Learning from The Lives Of Others and
Polish Art In Britain: Centenary Marked At London’s Ben Uri Gallery.

My other pieces for Artlyst are:

Interviews -
Articles -
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Keith Green - Stained Glass.
Posted by Jonathan Evens at 21:39 0 comments
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Friday, 21 December 2018

Review: Edward Burne-Jones and Seen & Heard

My latest exhibition review for Church Times covers Edward Burne-Jones: Pre-Raphaelite Visionary, at Tate Britain and Seen & Heard: Victorian Children in the Frame, at Guildhall Art Gallery.

'Offering us a visual narrative for the huge cultural shift in how society viewed, and treated, children over the course of the “long 19th century”, “Seen and Heard: Victorian Children in the Frame” plunges us into the maelstrom of innovation and exploitation, compassion and sentimentality, which characterised Victorian society.'

'Tate Britain’s exhibition, by bringing together more than 150 works in different media, including painting, stained glass, and tapestry, presents Burne-Jones as the polymath that he would have appeared to be to his contemporary audience; to whom he was a designer and decorative and fine artist with an exceptionally wide range of literary reference.'

The review also considers the legacy of the Victorians, a legacy that I also examined in a review for ArtWay of Adrian Barlow's book Kempe: The Life, Art and Legacy of Charles Eamer Kempe:

'The legacy and reputation of many significant Victorians is complex and contradictory because their often great achievements were fashioned on the oppression of Empire and the superiority and arrogance which fuelled aggressive expansion presenting exploitation of others and their natural resources as being the introduction of civilisation.'

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Rush - The Garden.
Posted by Jonathan Evens at 20:49 0 comments
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Saturday, 3 March 2018

Fire Sermon & The Book of Chocolate Saints

In her interesting Guardian review of Jamie Quatro’s Fire Sermon, Molly McCloskey asks, given intellectual life generally has become secularised:

'How, then, are we to read a novel in which the protagonists – intellectuals, academics, adulterers – are believers, their struggles conveyed not with irony but with earnestness? How, from the writer’s point of view, to convey the weight of sin, the claustrophobia that must result from its commission, when writing about characters who have faith?'

Faith also features in Jeet Thayil's The Book of Chocolate Saints which is 'a profound and often very funny meditation on worship, representation and reality, partly inspired by his own childhood.' 

Preti Taneja writes:

'Thayil was born in 1959 and grew up in a Syrian Christian family in Kerala, south India; his father is the critically acclaimed journalist and biographer TJS George. Religion and art rubbed shoulders: the faith is one of the oldest forms of Christianity. Services are still conducted in Aramaic, the language of Jesus. Thayil remembers his grandmother was able to recite all the words of the service, though she did not know what they meant. He was surrounded by an iconography of blond, blue-eyed saints. The inherent betrayal in this only became clear to him years later.

“I realised that so many of the saints that we think of as white, as Caucasian, were not,” he says. “They were swarthy, dark skinned, black haired, unwashed men and women. I got very excited and I started looking for these saints and it’s astonishing how many there are.” A series of saint poems – some based on real people, some imagined – are in the new book.

The book’s elusive hero is Newton Francis Xavier, a fictional poet from the real Bombay school of the 1970s and 80s, who later lives in New York. Alcoholic, wild man, painter, star – he’s a composite of many people including the celebrated Indian modern artist FN Souza and the revered Indian English-language poet Dom Moraes.'

Paintings by F N Souza can be seen in All Too Human at Tate Britain which as Matthew Collings notes 'has a large section devoted to a good and energetic Indian communist painter ... who lived in London in the Fifties and Sixties.' Mark Hudson writes that one of the show’s “discoveries” is 'the London-based Indian mystical expressionist FN Souza': 'If the sudden appearance of a knowingly primitive, magic-realist sensibility feels anomalous amid the prevailing austerity-era drabs and khakis of the School of London, the best of Souza’s works such as the jagged, Voodoo-flavoured Crucifixion, 1959, and the towering and frankly intimidating Black Woman, 1961, share a kind of haggard spiritual kinship with [Francis] Bacon – a sense of torment, common to the post-war period, that goes deeper than style.'

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Eric Bibb - Forgiveness Is Gold.
Posted by Jonathan Evens at 19:33 0 comments
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