Cathy's Art Diary

Interesting exhibition at White Cube, Mason’s Yard of new work by Magnus Plessen. The works have the appearance of collage but are in fact painted. The press release says he has taken inspiration from a 1924 anti-war book showing the impact of automatic weapons on the human body. However he has taken this idea and made the images quite tender particularly those downstairs of himself and his pregnant wife. They are still quite visceral but show a real relationship between the figures.   I liked the way the works were set against a wooden floor and that Plessen often turns them round in the painting process to work on them in two directions, both of which gives them a sense of precarious unbalance. Closes on 14 January 2017  

Good exhibition at the Mall Galleries of work by past winners of The Columbia Threadneedle Prize’s Visitors Choice Award. I was interested to note that I had seen the work of a couple of these artists in private galleries around London in the last year or so and the commentaries outlined what artists had gone on to do and how they had used their prize money. Boyd & Evans who do large scale landscape photos graphs of the USA which I had seen at Flowers Gallery had used the money to fund the trip to the US where they took the pictures I had seen in the gallery. The photos compare to the mammoth American Sublime landscapes of the 19th century. I liked Lewis Hazelwood-Horner’s painting of craftsmen in their workplaces and Robert Truscott’s bronzes of a First World War horse and a Prison of War. My favourite though were three huge hyper real canvases by Ben Johnson of classical interiors. Each was about 6ft by 4ft and they had a huge impact. I so wanted one. Anyone got

Delightful exhibition at the Mall Galleries featuring the work of this collective of artists who combine traditional techniques to modern themes. I liked the Harriett Spratt’s wonderful rather Dutch style portraits particularly her triptych of three views of a young girl with a pony tail. I also liked Lizet Dingeman’s still lives putting objects and animals out of context particularly her wonderful dead duck. I was however blown away by the work of Helen Masacz. She seems to work in a number of genres but always using a realistic style. There were two lovely seascapes and some lovely self-portraits with a cattle skull. However my favourite was just a study of a rumpled bed with white bedding and a wonderful red morning light falling on it from one side. I also liked a shelf of weird slightly sinister objects normalised by the implication that it was part of an artist’s studio. Closes on 20 January 2017  

Interesting exhibition at the Mall Galleries of recent work by art graduates chosen by members of the Federation of British Artists. This show had a very similar premise to the Bloomberg Contemporaries next door at the ICA but was a completely different show. This one concentrated on ideas of representation and draftsmanship rather than ideas. Like next door there were still quite a lot of bad paintings but there was also some lovely work. I liked Felix Higham’s expressive figure groups and the anomalies in them like the outline of bottle floating on a bar. I also liked Conor Murgartoyd’s still lives in interiors. James Rogers take on Caravaggio’s Narcissus was interesting pairing a picture with a 3D printed sculpture. My favourite work was a stunning still life of surgeons instruments laid out in an operating theatre pictured from above by Inez-Hermione Mulford. It was larger than life and hyper real with modern Dutch Golden Age feel to. I’m not sure I could live wit

Interesting exhibition at the ICA looking at the life and music of the calypso singer Mighty Sparrow. The show consisted of good timeline of Sparrow’s life and a display case tracing his career relating it to political events in his home country of Trinidad and the US. I hadn’t realised that calypso was a competitive art form. The shows small display was complimented by an installation by Carmel Buckley and Mark Harris of 180 ceramic tiles, the size of an LP record, showing the front and back of all Sparrow’s albums. They looked just like real album covers and created a wonderful display over two walls. Can I get my Springsteen albums done please? Closes on 5 February 2017

Ugly exhibition at the ICA showing casing the work of new and recent fine art graduates. There was very little which was attractive about this show. There were a lot of strange badly produced paintings and installation/sculptures which looked more like piles of rubbish. In its defence a lot of the work was conceptual but the labels were minimal. Unless it’s obvious I think conceptual art needs some explanation to help the audience appreciate the thinking and process behind it. If a work is produced (and I’m making this up) by adding one empty tin can to a pile for every time the BBC mentioned Brexit then it has some meaning if you don’t know that it’s a pile of dirty old tin cans. So rant about conceptual art over, there were some things I liked, but not many! I liked “The King” by Jamie Fitzpatrick, a large wax figure on a plinth of a fallen king. I’m not sure what all the extra heads were about but I loved the one on the back with a mechanic jaw which clicked away every

Lovely evening at the National Gallery for members with a preview viewing of a new Sky Arts documentary on Artemisia Gentileschi followed by a discussion with the director, the assistant curator of the current Caravaggio exhibition and the art critic Jonathon Jones. The film is fantastic. It is done as a docu-drama with wonderful reactions of an artist’s life in the period and some of the pictures she painted. At times some of the language felt quite flowery but it turned out all the first person pieces were Artemisia’s own words from letters and her testimony in court. Alongside the drama were good interviews by art historians and descriptions of how her pictures reflected her life. Artemisia had difficult life having been raped by one of her tutors and a friend of her father. Her father brought the case to court and we have a transcript of the hearing but oddly not the verdict! The programme discussed how this may have influenced her art, with an emphasis on strong femal

Interesting exhibition at the House of Illustration which had invited the illustrator Laura Carlin to work in ceramics. There were some nice objects in the show but it didn’t fill the space very well and they looked a bit sparse. I liked a work with large white figures being looked at by tiny figures called “Statues in the Museum” and a Noah’s ark which began with animals drawn on the blind behind it morphing into ceramic animals. My favourite piece thought was marge mural made of 650 tiles showing a history of London. I liked the way the scenes flowed into each other and took up different shaped spaces. There was a lovely train over a line of tiles but other scenes, liked the Norman Conquest, took up a rectangle of tiles. Most of the mural was in muted brown but a lovely terracotta fir of London which cut through one section. I hope this finds a permanent home somewhere. How about the new Museum of London? I hope they’ve seen it! Closes on 5 February 2017

Nice little exhibition at the House of Illustration of work by Quentin Blake illustrating a book by Beatrix Potter. Potter had sent the words for the book to her publisher in 1916 but only completed one picture. The text was rediscovered 100 years later in the Victoria and Albert Museum archive and Quentin Blake was commissioned to illustrate it. The pictures were very distinctive Blake and there were some lovely witty images. It would have been nice to have the text with the pictures as it was hard to piece the story together just from the pictures. There seemed to be odd images such as the cat shooting crows which I am sure fitted in but looked odd out of context. I did fall for a lovely picture of a line up of three sheep and book plate incorporating other Beatrix Potter characters.   Closes on 27 February 2017  

Delightful exhibition at the House of Illustration looking at the life and work of Edward Ardizzone. I knew Ardizzone’s work from his illustrations for children’s books and his work as a war artist in the Second World War but didn’t know anything about his life. I got the impression of a very hard working artist with a huge diversity graphic design work. I particularly loved the birthday telegram he’d designed in 1967. I liked his early work drawing and painting working class subjects around Maida Vale. I was interested to see that the Tate bought a work by him in the 1930s but that his work hadn’t sold well. I loved his war pictures. He seemed to bring a gentle human quality to the work. Even though most of the figures had indistinct faces their bodies were really expressive. There was a lovely picture in an underground shelter which had a feeling of the solidity of the Henry Moore pictures of the same scene. Most moving was “A cup of tea for the burial party” with fr

Fun installation in Granary Square behind King’s Cross Station by Alex Chinneck as the area’s Christmas tree. The work looked like a giant tree complete with lights trapped in a hug block of ice which gave the tree a ghostly appearance. Having read more about it since I realise it was actually resin used to look like ice, which I guess is more practical! The effect of the large puddle of melted water round the bottom was created with clear wax. The whole thing was really effective and a different take on a festive theme. Closed on 1 January 2017 but I saw it on 4 January 2017!

Entertaining exhibition at the British Library focusing on five Victorian entertainers to showcase the popular entertainments of the time. There was a lovely video recreating the act of each performer alongside play bills, posts and other ephemera.   They included magicians, a mesmerist, a circus impresario and a musical hall and pantomime star. I was fascinated by John Neil Maskeyne who established the Egyptian Halls as a venue calling it the Hall of Mystery, There was a contemporary film that he’d made and shown there of a conjuror pulling eggs from his mouth and then removing his head for it to appear in a giant egg next to him. It still amazed today and the gentleman next to me and I both reacted with shock when it happened. It was nice to include Dan Leno and emphasis his role in creating the idea of the Pantomime Dame, very topical. There was a nice original film in his section too showing him having tea with his family and fooling around. Another London ve

Fascinating exhibition at the British Library looking at the history of the 20th century through maps. The show had nice clear themes of mapping a new world, war, peace, the market and movement. I loved the colour palette used for the display and the idea of putting maps of different styles on the floor to gently guide you round. I liked the idea of putting two maps together as a contrast, often one from early in the century and one from later; however it was annoying that, as the labels were always on the right that this meant the label was therefore a long way from the first item you looked at. I would like to have seen a bit more about how the maps were made but I liked the fact they didn’t just talk about geographical maps but also about how maps can be used to show data about economic and social issues. They also looked at maps as art works and how they are often used to communicate an idea. There were some wonderful maps and objects in the show. I loved the Haig

Fantastic exhibition at the Queen’s Gallery looking at pictures of artists from the Royal Collection. This was a nicely curated show setting up interesting themes such as nice contrast between introspective self-portraits and those painted for self-promotion, pictures of artists by their friends, artists in their studios and pictures of earlier artists to promote your role in the history of art. However the well set up theme was knocked for six by the quality of the pictures on show! It included some of my favourite pictures such as the Artemisia Gentileschi self-portrait and I was lucky enough to be there in time for a nice talk about the picture by one of the attendants. It was also lovely to see the two Zoffanys of artists at the Royal Academy and connoisseurs at the Uffizi. The later was quoted a lot in the recent course I did on classism so it was great to see it in the flash again. I had been wondering for a while why the National Gallery had taken down the huge