Cathy's Art Diary

Small exhibition at the Museum of London of photographs by Kasia Wozniak to compliment the Sherlock Holmes show. I found the premise for this display a bit contrived. The idea was to use outfits reimagined from the Holmes stories using 21st century menswear designed in London. The outfits were then photographed using the Holmes generation technique of wet plate collodian images which just produces one print of the image. Added to this was the idea of whether we can read people by their clothes. The idea was an interesting one but I thought there were just not enough images to make it work and I would not have seen a Holmes link unless I’d been told. To me the images just looked styled not like real people, more of a fashion shoot.

Delightful display at the Museum of London looking at Paddington Bear in the light of the recent film. There were a number of items lent by the author Michael Bond including the typewriter on which he write some of the stories and letters which children had sent to Paddington at 32 Windsor Garden which had been forwarded to him. Oddly enough there were lots of parallels with the Sherlock Holmes exhibition as both are enduring characters plus both seem to have a new incarnation for each generation. My version was the 1970s cartoon and it was great to see one of the original bears from that as well as some of the flat background characters. I watched a little girl looking at the costume for the new Paddington and I guess that will be her version. Incidentally I do realise the new version is a cartoon but the animators made a costume so they could animated the texture and movement of his clothes and, yes I loved the film! Most fascinating was to see that in the original ...

Interesting installation at the Museum of London to accompany their Sherlock Holmes exhibition. This consisted of six telephone box shaped boxes each with a representation of the famous Baker Street door with clues in their design to the names of Sherlock Holmes stories. These were rather lovely objects and fun to get in a look around, although I will admit I wasn’t too sure when I got surrounded by school children at one point! I hadn’t the patience to do the quiz but a very nice attendant did come up and show me how to do it and offer a pen and paper to help. A nice welcoming touch!

Entrancing exhibition at the Museum of London looking at the fictional character of Sherlock Holmes, how he came about, the world he lived in and how he has been represented. From the entrance through a bookcase I was completely engaged with this exhibition. It starts by looking at the origins of the character and how Conan Doyle came to write the books and stories as well as how they were received and became popular. There was an interesting section on how the illustrations of Sidney Paget helped to establish the character in the public imagination and his friendship with the author. My favourite section looked at the London of the time through maps, photographs and paintings. I loved three old maps with pinned string showing you the journeys around London taken I particular stories and a time lapse film of what those journeys looked like now. The exhibition built up a real sense of how life at the time the books were written what changing and how Holmes used all the...

Entertaining exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery looking at the legacy of pop art in China, the Former Soviet Union, Taiwan, the UK and the USA. I went along to this show expecting it to be quite dry and worthy but it was really colourful, engaging and funny. I laughed out loud at a number of works. I must admit generally I seemed to be drawn to the British and American works more such as Jeff Koons skit on Damian Hurst “Three Ball Total Equilibrium Tank” with three basketballs some of which had the brand name Shaq Attaq. Also Marc Quinn’s skeleton’s having sex called “The Selfish Gene”. I was also drawn to works by Alexander Kosolapov from his take on the Malevich “Black Square” as a cigarette pack to the statue in the photo I’ve used “Hero, Leader and God”, you decide which is which! Also fun was Leonid Sokov’s “Light from a Window”, pieces of wood cut to represent light from window falling at angel on the wall. Gu Wenda’s United Nations: Man and Space” took up a whol...

An interesting display at the Photographers’ Gallery on their Media Wall of a work by Penelope Umbrico. It was an changing kaleidoscope field of colour. As I watched it was very lime green and yellow and it seemed to have a rather warm glow. It was a pleasant, relaxing series of images. It was created by re-photographing images of the sun with a iPhone from her computer screen. This pixilates the images and the screen showed these merging into each other. According to the blurb it is part of “her exploration of the ever increasing production and consumption of photographic images online”. Thank goodness for the blurb or I wouldn’t have worked any of that out. However it’s a good example of the fact you can like something without knowing what it is!

Quirky exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery looking at the fashion photography of Viviane Sassen over the last 20 years but arranged like an installation. The way these pictures were shown was fantastic however looking back I now realized I didn’t really look at the pictures only the display! The first section was a rolling set of image which displayed across the floor and into a mirror. The way the mirror was arranged it cast an image on another wall and then reflected that image too. OK I admit I don’t understand and spent a long time standing trying to work it out, hence not looking at the actual pictures! The second section was a more conventional rolling image of the pictures but I think I was still too busy trying to work out the first room to take much in! Review Evening Standard Stop Press When I added the tags for this article I realised I had seen a very similar exhibition of Vivianne Sassen's work in Edinburgh just over a year ago!

Stylish exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery of pictures by Edward Steichen for Vogue and Vanity Fair in the 1920s and 30s. These were beautiful sharply focused images arranged in date order. Each one was marked with the date it was published in a magazine. They were arranged really well in a lovely symmetrical, rhythmic hang which made them easy to look at and made the gallery really attractive. I also liked the use of design he did for silk which was used as a feature wallpaper. A nice understated touch. I loved the fashion photography and because of the chronical hang you could trace the evolution of the wonderful flapper dresses into the cool elegant bias cut gowns of the 1930s. I particularly loved his photographs of the lovely brocade T-bar shoes.   I also liked the wonderful portraits he did of a wide range of people. I’d expected the Hollywood elite and the acres of actors and actress we have now forgotten, but I hadn’t expected Harold Nicolson and W.B...

Fascinating lecture at the Wallace Collection given by Louise Baker, the archivist at Madame Tussauds. She told us about the history of the museum from its early days in the French Revolution.   I had known it had begun around then but didn’t know the popularity of Dr Curtis’s salons where you could see figures of the famous before the Revolution and then of the roll the collection played. I loved idea of Madame Tussauds modelling the death masks of the aristocrats off their severed heads in her back yard! I also didn’t know how she fled to Britain and toured with the collection for 30 years. Louise was most interesting when she talked about the objects and clothes the museum had collected over the years. Since Victorian times the idea has been that if you were modelled the museum asked you to donate clothes for the figure and objects associated with you. Despite a fire in the 1920s and being hit by a bomb in the Second World War there is still an extensive collection. ...

Fascinating exhibition at the Wallace Collection looking at the origins of the collection and the people who had collected it. It’s quite hard to explain! Basically the collection is based on the collection of five generations of a family, the last man being Sir Richards Wallace, the illegitimate son of the 4th Marquis of Hertford who had unexpectedly inherited his father’s collection in 1870. Richard added to it and his widow left it to the nation in 1897. Things   are made more complicated as some of the characters had about four different names during their lives deepening what title that had inherited or been given. Thank goodness for the family tree at the beginning. The most interesting section was about the 3rd Marquis whose wife was an ‘intimate friend’ of the Prince Regent and his son who became a friend of the Prince and spent time buying art with him. There was a wonderful set of Regency cartoons featuring the family with great explanations of who all the pe...

Eclectic exhibition at the ICA showing work by promising artists emerging from art schools picked by established artists. I am cheating slightly with this as I have already seen and reviewed the show when I was in Liverpool but I thought it would be interesting to see it again in another venue and see if different works stood out. In the end the works I had liked before I still liked and the one’s I hadn’t liked I seemed to blank from my mind because I didn’t recognize them but still didn’t like them! There was a lot of rather shoddy painting and slightly odd sculpture as well as a room of video art which, as in Liverpool, I couldn’t be bothered to engage with. A lot of contemporary art seems to be about making a mess and then giving it a name! As before I loved Bee Flowers called “Flow Body I” an art nouveaux plaque but this time it was being mugged by a neon grafitti style animal with a loud swearing sound track. Poor Body Flow sat there elegantly next to it, in a ...

A messy installation at the ICA by Julie Verhoeven looking at concepts of femininity. Where do I start! Basically it’s a very messy room full of old bits of material, toilet seats and toilet roll with cardboard on the floor. It is like being inside Tracey Emin’s bed! The only femininity it brought out in me was an overwhelming desire to tidy up! I think it was saying something about the mess and reality of human bodies but I don't really want to see that in a gallery. Sorry I just couldn’t be bothered to try to engage with this. There were videos but they were hard to watch within the mess and a few them were viewed through toilet seats. I did hear other people in the room say how interesting they thought it was so maybe I was just having a cynical day! Review Evening Standard    

Small exhibition at the Mall Galleries of prize winners in the annual Artists and Illustrators magazine competition. The works are quite mixed. I liked Alan Morley’s “Old Kentish Lane” a wonderful portrait shaped lime green landscape. Holly Brodie’s “Self Reflection at a Red Signal” a picture of the inside of a tube train looking thought the window at another train with the reflection of the artist hidden in the window was clever. I also liked Jo Quigley’s “Little Boxes” a water colour of suburban street with layers of roofs. I would have been interested to know if any of the work had been done as an illustration and if so what for.

Tempting exhibition at the Mall Galleries of craft works by members of the Society of Designer Craftsmen. I remember this show and many of the people who exhibited from last year. My favourite was still Kathryn Bonson’s ceramics. I bought a vase by her last year. This year’s work was slightly more figurative as well as featuring amazing landscape effects. I also liked Margaret Gardiner’s lustre effect pots. There was a lot of amazing jewellery and I liked Fumi’s large flowers on a pearl necklace and Michele White’s rather art nouveaux organic work. I am not so convinced by the textile work. It is very intricate and beautiful but I’m not sure what you’d do with some of it. I would have liked to have seen more work in wood. There was some lovely furniture but compared to come of the other materials not enough.

Interesting exhibition in the lobby of One Canada Square, at Canary Wharf featuring work by the Hungarian artist Bálint Bolygó. The website write up says he “explores mechanical and natural processes to make kinetic sculptures and installations that harness the physics of nature, science and engineering”. This means he creates works mechanically and shows both works in progress and finished works. I loved the big wall picture being made by a Spirograph type construction. It was quite dense when I saw it but it would have been nice to see it at different stages. It hung with finished works. He used the same techniques to create images on globes.

Fun trail around Canary Wharf featuring light sculptures. Some of the works were beautiful and static such as the three dresses by   Tae Gon Kim and the deer by Cedric Le Borgne. Others were more interactive such as the cube you walked round the outside of pulling the light effect long with you and the Ice Angel by Cinimod which I had a play with.   Thank you to my companion for the afternoon Hilary for the photo! The event would have benefited from better signage. The map was good but only showed where the exhibits which are staying for the whole month are it didn’t show the ones for the specific Winter Lights weekend. Some of them were hard to find and it was hard to plan a route. I also admit it was blooming cold (not the exhibitions fault!) which made I more imperative to be able to move between objects quickly and accurately!

Excellent exhibition at Tate Modern looking at photographs of conflict and its effects. I thought this might be a slightly worthy history of war photography but it was much cleverer and more thought provoking. The works were arranged in order of how soon they were taken after the conflict so they began with pictures of the Hiroshima bomb exploding and ended with pictures of First World War battlefields taken last year. In doing this it made you think about the effects of war and conflict and the different stages in our reactions. I ended up sketching a time line in my notes showing reactions starting at shock and disbelief, moving on to horror, then interest in the horror (for example the battlefield tours of France in the 1920s), long term effects, a desire to forget and ignore, understanding and even a desire to preserve the destruction. Each conflict seems to move through these stages at a different pace and different people can react to the same event at a different pa...

Interesting exhibition at the Cartoon Museum looking at gekiga, an alternative manga from Japan. I had no idea what this was when I went to it, but you know me, I’ll go and see anything. I found the social side of this fascinating. In the post war period in Japan there was a demand for all sorts of entertainment but manga cartoons were seen as juvenile so gekiga grew up as a more adult form created by the children of the war years. Originally people couldn’t afford to buy the books so they were rented. I preferred the early sparser images many of which were very similar to the earlier Japanese print style.   I liked “The Story of the West” with a smoking cowboy. I found some of the later images a bit confused and fussy.

Nice exhibition at the Cartoon Museum looking at how Hogarth depicted London in his prints and etchings. I liked the way the exhibit was arranged geographically around the city so it almost took you on a walk of Georgian London. It pointed out that this was a time when the city was going through a transformation with a lot of property development and financial speculation. The commentaries on the pictures were great and really explained them but they were a bit too long and slowed up some people’s viewing. It was nice to see some of the great sets of prints again and there was a small set looking at cruelty to animals which I had not seen before. In the set a boy goes from kicking a dog, to being a carter who beats his horse, to becoming a highway man to being executed and dissected. The moto is don’t kick dogs! I also liked the Industry and Idleness series which contrasted a good and a bad apprentice. One goes to church the other watches a play in the graveyard. ...

Interesting small display at the British Museum focusing on a bronze head of Augustus which was found in Sudan. The head is in remarkable condition because it was removed from the statue during a raid on Italy by the Kush people who rivalled Egypt for regional dominance. It was then buried in the entrance to a small building so that everyone who entered the building walked over the head of the emperor. There was a fascinating slide show in the room showing modern versions of destroying statues as a political comment and also of a mosaic of George Bush snr outside a hotel in the Middle East so everyone entering the hotel stepped on him. Amazing to think we still do the same things now we have always done. Is this a remembered behaviour or just an instinct? The head itself was beautiful. It looked so fresh and new. I was fascinated to read that you can identify where it may have been made by the fact that a curl in front of the left ear curls back not forward. I wonder ...