Wikio - Top Blogs - Religion and belief
Showing posts with label warhol. Show all posts
Showing posts with label warhol. Show all posts

Thursday, 5 June 2025

Artlyst: The Art Diary June 2025

My June Art Diary for Artlyst has been published today. I begin with two important recently published books about religion and contemporary art. Next, I highlight several exhibitions and artists whose work connects with the themes explored in these books. These include Anselm Kiefer, Vincent van Gogh and Andy Warhol, alongside plans for Manifesta 16 Ruhr. I conclude with group shows that engage with contemporary issues and explore, as the title of one exhibition puts it, ‘The Shape of Now’. These include two fascinating exhibitions which are local to me, in Essex, at Focal Point Gallery and Beecroft Art Gallery:

"‘The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art’ by Jonathan A. Anderson offers a critical guide for rereading and rethinking religion in the histories of modern and contemporary art. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, there has been a marked increase in attention to religion and spirituality in contemporary art among artists and scholars alike. Still, the resulting scholarship tends to be dispersed, disjointed, and underdeveloped, lacking a sustained discourse that holds up as both scholarship of art and scholarship of religion. ‘The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art’ is both a critical study of this situation and an adjustment to it, offering a much-needed field guide to the current discourse of contemporary art and religion."

For more on Jonathan A. Anderson see here, Andy Warhol see here, and Maurizio Galia ('The Shape of Now') see here.

My other pieces for Artlyst are:

Interviews -
Monthly diary articles -
Articles/Reviews -
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Leonard Cohen - Amen.
Posted by Jonathan Evens at 22:38 0 comments
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Monday, 27 December 2021

Artlyst - And On An Art Note: End Of Year Diary 2021

My latest article for Artlyst is a diary piece covering a wide range of  exhibitions and publications including work by Marc Chagall, Giacomo Manzù, Anna Ray, and Hughie O'Donoghue. It's mainly London-based but includes a trip to St Albans Museums:

'Touring galleries in the environs of Cork Street during Advent reminded me that, in the past, galleries would often have used Christmas as a reason to show works utilising religious iconography. That seems to be no longer the case, but, as I reflected further, that seems an indication that engaging with religion is no longer a niche theme for galleries but one that has been mainstreamed. As evidence, we can look at the extent to which the religious iconography of modern or contemporary artists is now explored either as a sole focus or central strand of retrospectives, as with Andy Warhol: Revelation, which is currently at Brooklyn Museum, or Paula Rego/Josefa de Óbidos: religious art in the feminine at Casa Das Historias Paula Rego earlier in the year. Also, the extent to which the religious iconography and themes of historical collections are increasingly being researched, displayed and shared in innovative ways, often specifically with faith communities. Examples range from exhibitions such as Dürer’s Journeys: Travels of a Renaissance Artist with its exploration of contacts with Martin Luther to the National Gallery’s new Sacred Art in Collections Pre-1900 Network and the developing Visual Commentary on Scripture providing online exhibitions in dialogue with passages from the Bible.’

My other pieces for Artlyst are:

Interviews -
Articles -
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Posted by Jonathan Evens at 14:35 0 comments
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Thursday, 21 January 2021

Artlyst: Made in USA - Ed Ruscha, An American Perspective

My latest piece for Artlyst previews Ed Ruscha: OKLA at Oklahoma Contemporary focusing in particular on the Catholic influences found in Ruscha's work:

'Dual associations, blends and juxtapositions are, I think, at the heart of the influence that Ruscha believes Catholicism to have had on his work. He has said that there is a connection with his work and his experience with religious icons: the cross and the Church’s stations. He has spoken of this connection in terms of flavours that come over, ‘like incense used in the Church, benediction … the ritual … a deeply mysterious thing that affected me.’ More than that, however, is the dual nature of religious icons and Church rituals through which the ordinary becomes extraordinary; pigment on board becoming a window to the divine and bread and wine, the body and blood of Christ.'

In the article I note that this exhibition is part of a growing trend to take seriously the religious influences found in the work of many contemporary or modern artists: 

'This is not to claim such artists for the Church – Ruscha is a confirmed atheist – but acknowledges the reality of religious influences in work in ways that in earlier periods of modernism either went unacknowledged or were dismissed. Additionally, as I have sought to do in articles for Artlyst about Salvador Dali, Rose Finn-Kelcey, Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Smithson and Andy Warhol, among others, this acknowledgement of influence fills out our understanding of art history in the modern period whilst also creating a clearer picture of the continuing impact in a changed and changing cultural landscape of religious practices and theological ideas.' 

My other Artlyst pieces are:

Interviews:
Articles:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Woody Guthrie - Oklahoma Hills.
Posted by Jonathan Evens at 21:56 0 comments
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Saturday, 18 April 2020

Andy Warhol: Catholicism, Work, Faith And Legacy

My latest piece for ArtWay was originally published by Artlyst and is about Andy Warhol and the Catholic faith as explored in exhibitions at the Andy Warhol Museum, Tate Modern and the National Gallery:

'As Eugene McCarraher has explained, in The Enchantments of Mammon, ‘Warhol incorporated the formal aspects of Byzantine iconography into Pop Art.’ His ‘Campbell’s Soup cans and Coca-Cola bottles – mass-produced objects with no personal signature – recalled the anonymity and deliberate repetitiveness of Byzantine iconographers.’ ‘Warhol explained, “Pop Art is a way of liking things,” a celebration of those “great modern things” that comprise the humble matter of everyday life – a realm where, in Orthodox tradition, the divine always manifests itself sacramentally.’

The critics at the time failed to understand this aspect of Warhol’s work but it was clearly apparent to Sister Corita Kent on a visit in 1962 to the Ferus Gallery in LA to see Warhol’s breakthrough exhibition of Campbell’s Soup Cans. ‘Coming home,’ she said, ‘you saw everything like Andy Warhol.’ Kent found inspiration in signs and advertising for vibrant screen printed banners and posters that provided an opportunity to show the sacred in the most mundane.'

My visual meditations for ArtWay include work by María Inés Aguirre, Giampaolo Babetto, Marian Bohusz-Szyszko, Alexander de Cadenet, Christopher Clack, Marlene Dumas, Terry Ffyffe, Antoni Gaudi, Nicola Green, Maciej Hoffman, Giacomo Manzù, Michael Pendry, Maurice Novarina, Regan O'Callaghan, Ana Maria Pacheco, John Piper, Albert Servaes, Henry Shelton and Anna Sikorska.

My Church of the Month reports include: Aylesford Priory, Canterbury Cathedral, Chapel of St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face, Hem, Chelmsford Cathedral, Churches in Little Walsingham, Coventry Cathedral, Église de Saint-Paul à Grange-Canal, Eton College Chapel, Lumen, Metz Cathedral, Notre Dame du Léman, Notre-Dame de Toute Grâce, Plateau d’Assy,Romont, Sint Martinuskerk Latem, St Aidan of Lindisfarne, St Alban Romford, St. Andrew Bobola Polish RC Church, St. Margaret’s Church, Ditchling, and Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft, St Mary the Virgin, Downe, and St Paul Goodmayes, as well as earlier reports of visits to sites associated with Marian Bohusz-Szyszko, Marc Chagall, Jean Cocteau, Antoni Gaudi and Henri Matisse.

Other of writings for ArtWay can be found here. My pieces for Church Times can be found here. Those for Artlyst are here and those for Art+Christianity are here.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Velvet Underground - Jesus.
Posted by Jonathan Evens at 11:55 0 comments
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Saturday, 21 March 2020

Slow Art: James Turell & Andy Warhol

The final chapter of Arden Reed’s 2017 book Slow Art: The Experience of Looking, Sacred Images to James Turrell compares and contrasts the work of Turrell and Andy Warhol in order to establish whether they are, respectively, ‘the Angel and Demon of Slow Art.’ It is of interest, therefore, that the exhibition of new works by Turrell at Pace Gallery overlapped briefly with the Warhol retrospective at Tate Modern, as this, too, enabled the opportunity to compare and contrast the work of both.

Slow art is structured to slow the viewer in order that greater attention is paid to the artwork generating a contemplative state. Reed argues therefore that ‘slow art is not a thing but an experience, an ongoing conversation between artwork and spectator.’ For Reed, the work of Turrell encapsulates slow art par excellence, while, for many, the perception of Warhol’s art and practice is the antithesis; being focused on ephemeral consumables – the instant and immediate. Reed, though, is aware of the way in which such stereotypes of Warhol’s art, as fast art, sell his actual practice short. Therefore, the overlapping of the Turrell and Warhol exhibitions in London at this time provide an opportunity to revisit the contrasts between the two, as made by Reed.

Turrell’s recent Constellation works, three of which are currently at Pace Gallery, are culminations of his lifelong pursuit of an art of light, space, and time. Presented in site-specific chambers, the works feature elliptical and circular shapes with a frosted glass surface animated by an array of technically advanced LED lights, which are mounted to a wall and generated by computer programming. With a run time of several hours, the programmes run on a loop that is imperceptible to the viewer generating light changes that are subtle and hypnotic, one colour morphing into the next.

The Constellation works generate what the artist has called ‘spaces within space.’ His luminous portals are instruments for altering our perception prompting a transcendental experience; gazing into them, as Oliver Shultz, Curatorial Director, Pace Gallery, notes, ‘results in the slow dissolution of the boundaries of the surrounding room, enveloping the viewer in the radiance of pure colour.’ That experience is not immediate, but is realised as the viewer settles in to the experience within a computer programmed loop running for hours, not minutes.

Turrell is, therefore, an artist of duration for whom ‘experiencing is the object’ and whose installations enable us to ‘perceive ourselves perceiving.’ He creates theatres of perception in which light shows are performed. Reed writes that this is like ‘watching a play in which little happens – one by Samuel Beckett, say – we sit (or stand, or lie down) and look at a stage where Turrell makes “light shows” – makes light show.’

In this way, he ritualizes looking by asking us to submit to the art and enter the experience. He says, ‘I don’t think I ask too much. I ask you to wait.’ Again, ‘I’m a slow guy. I like slow planes … In a way that’s true with art, too. Things that require more time give back more. I think it’s okay to take time. It seems more direct actually.’

Sleep, made over several nights in summer and autumn 1963 with a 16mm camera and shown at the start of the Tate’s retrospective, is a clear demonstration of Warhol as an artist of duration; as with Turrell, a slow artist. The film shows 22 close-ups of the poet John Giorno, who was briefly Warhol’s lover, as he sleeps in the nude. Warhol shot around 50 reels of film for Sleep, each one lasting only three minutes. He edited them to fashion a movie without movement. The final version repeats many scenes and lasts over five hours. It is projected in slow motion, giving a dream-like feel. Giorno said that Warhol made the movie Sleep ‘into an abstract painting: the body of a man as a field of light and shadow.’

Reed notes that the pacing and length of a work like Sleep ‘call to mind meditative practices.’ He quotes Jonas Mekas reflecting on Warhol’s use of cinema:

‘Film is transported to a plane that is outside the suspense, outside the plot, outside the climaxes … We study, watch, contemplate, listen – not so much for the ‘big actions’ but for the small words, intonations, colors of voices, colors of words … We begin to realize that we have never, really, seen haircutting, or eating,’ because ‘we watch a Warhol movie with no hurry. The first thing he does is to stop us from running.’

Mekas brings us to a second element of Warhol’s practice as a slow artist, which is to enable us to stop and see the fast, ephemeral or mundane aspects of our existence as though for the first time. Warhol said that ‘Pop artists did images that anybody walking down Broadway could recognize in a split second – comics, picnic tables, men’s trousers, celebrities, shower curtains, refrigerators, Coke bottles – all the great modern things that the Abstract Expressionists tried so hard not to notice at all.’ Artists notice things that others don’t and bring those things to our attention. So, while Pop art images could be recognized in a split second, they were not intended to be viewed in a split second. Instead, they enable us to realize that we have never really seen comics, picnic tables, men’s trousers, celebrities, shower curtains, refrigerators, Coke bottles etc. because we had only previously recognized them in a split second without paying them the attention that is their due.

Eugene McCarraher noted, in The Enchantments of Mammon, that Warhol said, ‘“Pop Art is a way of liking things,” a celebration of those “great modern things” that comprise the humble matter of everyday life – a realm where, in Orthodox tradition, the divine always manifests itself sacramentally.’ This aspect of Warhol’s art was immediately apparent to Sister Corita Kent on a visit in 1962 to the Ferus Gallery in LA to see Warhol’s breakthrough exhibition of Campbell’s Soup Cans. ‘Coming home,’ she said, ‘you saw everything like Andy Warhol.’ As a result, Kent found inspiration in signs and advertising for vibrant screen-printed banners and posters that provided an opportunity to show the sacred in the most mundane.

The Tate Retrospective explores the extent to which themes of faith recur throughout Warhol’s life, including concluding the exhibition with his vast 10-metre wide canvas Sixty Last Suppers created in 1986, a few months before the artist died in his sleep while recovering from gall bladder surgery. This poignant meditation on faith, death, immortality and the afterlife, depicts six rows of ten silkscreened images, each a black-and-white reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci’s iconic mural The Last Supper depicting Christ’s last meal with his disciples before the crucifixion. A copy of the image had hung in the Warhola family kitchen as Warhol was growing up. Warhol noted, ‘It’s a good picture … It’s something you see all the time. You don’t think about it.’ To make people see it and think about it, Warhol reproduced it 60 times. Thereby, he also evoked the re-enactment of the Last Supper that takes place during every Mass.

Like Warhol wanting us to stop and really see, Turrell is also concerned to take away the distance between ‘quotidian and spiritual,’ ‘beholder and beheld,’ in order to ‘bring the cosmos down’ in order that we call our everyday existence ‘a spiritual plane.’ His Quaker experience of ‘going to greet the light’ is, as Adam Gopnik has argued, to see that ‘the mystic’s white light and ecstasies are not dim apprehensions of another realm but experiences as real and as open to investigation as sleeping, eating and breathing.’

James Turrell, Pace Gallery, until 27 March 2020
Andy Warhol, Tate Modern, until 6 September 2020

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Velvet Underground & Nico - Sunday Morning.


Posted by Jonathan Evens at 12:46 0 comments
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Sunday, 9 February 2020

Artlyst - National Gallery Explores Sin In New Exhibition

My latest interview for Artlyst is with Dr Joost Joustra, The Howard and Roberta Ahmanson Fellow in Art and Religion at the National Gallery, who has curated the first exhibition in the UK exploring sin in art. 'Sin' will bring together paintings from the National Gallery’s collection dating from the 16th to the 18th century with loans from important private and public collections including modern and contemporary works by Andy Warhol, Tracey Emin, and Ron Mueck:

"Brueghel’s ‘Christ and the Woman taken in Adultery’ is a key image ... Christ says, ‘He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone.’ People who are pointing fingers and accusing one another stop and start thinking about where they are in the story and where they stand. This is an evocative story and image which still makes people stop and think."

My other Artlyst pieces are:

Interviews:
Articles:

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Violent Femmes - Just Like My Father.
Posted by Jonathan Evens at 21:56 0 comments
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)