Cathy's Art Diary

Nice small exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery looking at work by Van Dyck during his time in England. There were some lovely things in this show but I was left slightly asking why it was there. Looking at the web site I think it is because the self-portrait which the gallery bought recently is touring and his is it’s time in London so the gallery have brought together other works to put it into context. The show not only looked at the paintings but how the works were reproduced and disseminated so there were small sections on the work of the studio plus on printing. It showed how the works become more popular following the Restoration. I was fascinated to see a picture of Charles II as a boy which was a pattern for other pictures of him including that picture of the royal children with a big dog which was also shown here. I also liked the fact that the gallery included works by his rivals Mytens and Johnson who seemed to be earning a nice living in London unt...

Interesting exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery curated by Simon Schama looking at how portraiture reflects the history of Britain and it’s people. I liked the themes of the show, power, love, fame, self and people, and the fact it was shown in rooms scattered around the gallery which made you look at the other works in the rooms around it. However in the end I’m not sure it said anything new. I’d   had seen most of the works before so there were few surprises. Maybe if I’d watched the TV series which goes with I’d have got more from it. It felt like a show with a celebrity name to entice in people who wouldn’t normally come to the gallery. For that reason I applaud it but it didn’t have the same kick as the Greyson Perry show earlier in the year which did a similar thing. Pictures which did stand out for me included the Annie Leibovitz of John Lennon just hours before his death, a portrait by an unknown artist of the Hobson of Hobson’s Choice and the John...

Wonderful exhibition at Blackfriars Station of panoramic photographs by Henry Eeichhold shown as part of the Totally Thames Festival. These were stunning pictures of London all taken from high viewpoints. They were made up of hundreds of separate images pasted together and showed exceptional detail. Most just showed views such as the Embankment from the Shall Building or a night view from St Paul’s full of purple and yellow lights. Others showed events such as the New Year fireworks and the Jubilee river pageant. However best of all was that if you viewed them from one of the outer platforms of the station (the display was repeated on all four platforms) you viewed them against a real panorama of the river heading off up or down stream depending which way you were looking. What a great idea!

Interesting exhibition at Bankside Gallery organised by the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers. All the works were for sale and there were some lovely things but I managed to come away unscathed! I loved two square landscapes by Louise Davies and a lovely picture looking up the Thames from the O2 by John Duffin. Peter Ford’s “Book Stack” was clever as it was a collage of a pile of books but each section had been hand blocked before being cut out and added to the composition. The show was hung very cleverly to create dialogues between the pictures. I particularly liked a picture of the Tate Modern extension next to one of an Indian fort of a similar composition.

Weird but interesting installation at Tate Modern by Pauline Olowska. It consisted of a set for a site specific performance that you could walk though. The set was of a log cabin with all the features of it such as stairs and curtains painted onto the wood effect walls. Pictures from the galleries own collection which reflected how artists from the first half of the 20th century reacted to the world were included on the walls of the cabin. Artists included Matisse, Picasso, Carrington, Dod Proctor and Meredith Frampton. It was rather strange to walk through a room in the midst of all the white walled galleries and in was interesting to see pictures I knew well in a different setting. The Carrington of mountains in Spain worked particularly well. I wish I had been able to go to one of the performances to see how the space worked when it was in use by actors but I was unable to make any of the dates. I gather the play is an Avant Gard one from 1924 which would have matched t...

Disappointing exhibition at Tate Modern looking at how the world outside of Britain and North America took us and used Pop Art. I’d not realised this wasn’t a generic Pop Art show and that the emphasis was on the word ‘world’. I felt you needed some knowledge of the genre to understand properly what this about and that the show lacked an introduction. However with hindsight I’d recommend you pop up a floor to a good temporary display with one item from each of the big names from Britain and America!   There were some interesting pieces but it wasn’t the light hearted show I’d expected! Most of the rest of the World seems to have used the genre to highlight oppression and political issues so I felt quite bludgeoned by the end rather than uplifted. Pieces that have staying in my memory include Nicola L’s “Red Coat”, a leather coat built for 11 people.   It was originally designed to keep a performance group together at a festival but since has been used as an a...

Small exhibition at the Wallace Collection of armour from the time of Agincourt to mark the 600th anniversary of the battle. It pointed out that the battle is always seen as a victory by common, long bow wielding English but it proposed that the battle was won by hand to hand combat by the knights! The examples were mainly from the continent but were very impressive with a classic helmet of the time, a chain mail shirt and a cross bow and bolts. Each display cabinet looked at a different type of soldier. The display also included a painting from this year by Graham Turner showing the battle and had a cabinet on Sir James Gow who was an adviser to the Olivier film in the 1940s as well as being a Keeper at the Wallace Collection itself.

Confused exhibition at the RIBA looking at how areas which are nominally public but are owned and managed by commercial bodies use camouflaged surveillance for security and possibly to manipulate behaviour. This is what the leaflet told me anyway but I didn’t feel any sense of this being the theme. It all seemed a little random. There was an emphasis on a series of photographs by Max Colson which explored these themes but in rather a tangential way. OK I know I go to anything and therefore sometimes there are off things I end up at which have little relevance to me but this did as I live on a development which is also being promoted as a destination with museums and pubs so I should have got something from it but I didn’t!

Delightful exhibition at the RIBA exploring the principles of Palladian design and how they have been interpreted, copied and reimagined. There were some wonderful drawings and plans in this show and a few models. It was nice to have busts of Palladio and Inigo Jones watching over the proceedings. As a non-architect I would have liked a little more on the principles to take forward round the rest of the exhibition but I guess most of the audience for this show will already know a lot about this so I can see why they didn’t labour this aspect. I was most interested to see how the principles had been interpreted in later years such as how it was used in America 18th century houses such as Drayton Hall (which I have been to!) as well as modern homes. I had never associated Palladianism with post-modernism but there was a good section on how post war architects have reduced the style to abstract elements. I loved the design of the show with the drawings shown round t...

Strange exhibition at the Hayward Gallery of work by South African artist Dineo Seshee Bopape. The centre piece of the first room was a rather messy sculpture made with everyday objects. It was hard to tell if bits were meant to be on the floor or if they’d dropped off! Evidently it was meant to “engage the viewer with powerful socio-political notions of memory, narration and representation”. I have no idea what that means and I’m not sure it did! The video in the second room was more endearing as it had domestic objects and farm animals in an animation sequence. I caught a rotating rabbit which had a certain charm but again I have no idea what it meant. Two weeks on I have no memory of the video in the third room only that I didn’t stay in there very long!

Fascinating exhibition at the National Theatre looking at its design and the history of its construction. It was commissioned from Denys Lasdun in the same month as the companies’ first performance at the Old Vic. The original commission included an opera house as well as a theatre both in the modernist style a popular style for theatres at this time. However by the time it was built it was a controversial design. I was interested to see that the foyer space was inspired by the intricate Renaissance prints by Piranesi as well as a 1928 painting by Paul Klee called “Italian City”. It was also good to see one of the concrete presses which were lined with wooden planks to give the wonderful distinctive finish the interior has. It showed the level of craft which went into an industrial looking building. It also looked at the refurbishment in the 1990s and the current one. I’d never realised that the theatre pioneered the idea of all day opening of this sort of cultural ve...

Lovely exhibition at White Cube, Mason’s Yard of work by Larry Bell. Bell is part of the California “Light and Space” movement which I had not come across before. It seems to combine sculptural form and light. These works seemed to be sculptural works which included light and were also changed by light. The new works were described as Light Knots sculptures and were free hanging works in polyester film which absorbed and reflected the light in different ways are almost seemed to disappear at times. Downstairs were larger works including “Corner Lamp” which formed a diamond shaped rainbow on the wall. Also “6x8 An Improvisation” which was a maze of tall plains of, I guess, glass and mirrors. Sometimes you could see through it and sometimes you were reflected in it. It was slightly disorientating and very clever.      

Colourful exhibition at Flowers Gallery, Hoxton, of new work by Tom Hammick who has recently been artist in residence at the English National Opera (ENO). There was a mix of oil paintings and prints based on them. The blurb says they were “dreamlike landscapes” and they did have an other worldly dream like feel. They often felt very real and familiar and yet with a different spin. My favourite was called “Riding West” and showed the silhouettes of a man and a woman on horses facing a sunset. The reds, turquoise and yellow of the sky were stunning and it’s only now I realise turquoise is an odd colour for a sunset but it works. I also liked a print called “Early Morning Above a City” which was a view of people at the windows of a block of flats in pale blues. It was really interesting to see the oil pictures and prints together and to think about what works in each medium. Review Times  

Interesting exhibition at the Geffrye Museum showing work as a result of a project the museum did with the New Horizon Youth Centre, a day centre for vulnerable young people. Using items from the collection about homelessness in Victorian London they held sessions to get the young people to discuss and react to their experiences of homelessness today. Each case looked at a different aspect of the project. I loved a set of poems in reaction to a picture of a women’s Salvation Army hostel where the women slept in boxes like coffins in rows. Another section looked at what the young people considered to be the essential items to have when living on the streets. Also a section where people defined what home means when you don’t have one and I loved the one who concluded in a poem “Ho|me, How obvious, it’s me” as “me” is included in the word “home”. The whole thing was thought provoking without being preaching or condescending.  

Imaginative exhibition at the Garden Museum giving an overview of the collection before it goes into storage while the museum is refurbished and expanded. It included over 200 objects from the collection shown as if being packed up and in slightly random order. For example there was an open packing case of garden gnomes. There was also a cabinet of pull out draws with photographs in them and a wonderful long wall of pictures. The way the items were shown gave you a sense of discovery and a real excitement for what the new developments will bring.  

Stunning sculptural installation on the foreshore of the Thames at Vauxhall by Jason deCaires Taylor. It consists of four horses in white bronze with their heads replaced by oil drilling bits.   Two of them have business men on their back and two have children. They are placed so that they are covered up as the tide rises so that at high tide only the people’s heads show. If you look at facing down river the work is framed by the Houses of Parliament. I’ll admit I’m not too sure what they are about but they are so beautiful. It was also a good chance to get onto the foreshore and do a bit of mudlarking! Even though I went on a Tuesday afternoon lots of people had gone down to have a look and were just wandering round gently enjoying the work. Review Telegraph

Charming retrospective at the Mall Galleries of work by Charlotte Johnson Wahl, the mother of Bris Johnson. I admit I went out of curiosity but I really liked the work. It had rather a 1970s feel in bold colours. On the whole it felt quite domestic and about home and friends but there was also a period where she’s done portraits on commission. Early on I was struck by a wonderful picture of Tower Bridge from City Hall which had been commissioned for the building. I had a strange but interesting sense of perspective. She had also done other great cityscapes including one looking down from a high rise in New York with a helicopter passing between buildings. She had done super group portraits often of dinner parties and families. There was a great one of the SDP Gang of Four.   As I went round I realised Boris’s sister was there with a chap who she lead over to that picture and took a photo of him with it. When I looked properly I twigged it was David Owen, who was o...