Cathy's Art Diary

A nice exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery looking at French architectural drawings from 1765 to 1837. I must admit I can’t work out the significance of the dates! Maybe it was just the first and last pictures in the show but it feels a little random. Generally in the show I’d have liked to know a bit more about whether the designs were influenced by historic events. This is an amazing period in France but there was little mention of the effect of this on architecture except to say there was a growth in civic building after the Revolution. There were some delightful pictures. I loved a cross section of the Comedie Italiene theatre complete with audience members moving around it. One section looked at building for hygiene and featured a meat market and slaughter house! I liked the way some works were displayed on a table in the centre of the room in the same way they were probably shown at the time, propped up in frames. The trestle used was a contemporary French one w...

Beautiful exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery focusing on Rodin’s fascination with dance in his later years. The show began by looking at his interest in the Cambodian dancers who came to Paris for a state visit in 1906. Rodin became fascinated by their unusual movements and spent three days in Marseilles with the troupe sketching them. If you watch the recent “Fake or Fortune” series on TV you’ll remember that featured one of these drawings. These are very freely drawn and painted works with a real sense of movement. It then looked at his interest in avant guard dancers of the time including Isadora Duncan, Ruth St Denis and Loie Fuller. The show included photos of them as well as his drawings. I loved a strange photo of Duncan dancing in a garden watched by Victorian men in hats. The main section of the show focused on a series of small sculptures Rodin made in 1911 called “Dance Movements”.   These were displayed as a wonderful parade of dancers down the middle...

Interesting exhibition at the National Gallery of two paintings by Bautista Maino on loan from the Prado. These pictures are influenced by Caravaggio so act as a complementary show to the current main show “Beyond Caravaggio”. They are also a nice Christmas show as they show the adoration of the shepherds and kings. They are bright, sharply focused pictures, packed full of figures. I loved the details in them such as some beautiful mushrooms by one of the king’s hats. I also liked the naturalists boy angels, models which could have come straight out of early Caravaggio. Maino was in Rome shortly after the unveiling of the Contarelli Chapel with Caravaggio’s great St Matthew pcitures. He must also have seen the wonderful Dying Gaul sculpture as he bases on of the shepherds in the foreground of his painting on it. Although this exhibition only has two pictures in it the commentary on them is brilliants and really illuminates and explains what you are looking at. ...

Clever exhibition at the National Gallery looking at the influence of Caravaggio. I was pleased I knew my Caravaggio well as there were only a few of his works in the show but it referred to many other just showing them as small reproductions on some of the labels. While I’m mentioning labels can I make a plea to bring back the small booklets the National Gallery used to produce with the labels in them? It really helped the flow of an exhibition and stopped bottle necks of the middle aged trying to read small print on labels, It also gave somewhere for geeks like me to make notes! I liked the arrangement of the rooms by themes which were also vaguely chronological and I also liked the fact that it looked at his influence in his own life time not just after he died. It was also a change to see some interesting less well known pictures and the curator had tried to get pictures from British collections wherever possible to also show the influence of this genre in Britain. ...

Interesting workshop at the National Gallery looking at the life and work of the Dutch flower painted Rachel Ruysch and using her to discuss the history of female artists. This was one in a series of workshop on women artists but I have only been able to get this one. It was led by Jacqui Ansell who is always good. The session began with an interesting look at why there are so few women artists represented in the National Gallery, whether this is just because there weren’t many or whether it is also because they have been forgotten by a male art historical world. We looked at the work since the 1970s to discuss this issue. We then went on to look at Ruysch’s work, how it was received in her own lifetime and what enabled her to be an artist at that time. A 75,000 gilder lottery win allowed her a certain amount of freedom in her work as she could work without money worries and take time over her work. He work was commissioned by the Duke of Tuscany which is why it is represe...

Nice small exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery of a series of drawings by Antony Gormley shown with one of his statues. The drawings were a series called “Fall” from 1999 which were silhouettes of a figure falling through a sepia wash. The figures were unmistakably the proportions of Gormley himself which we now know so well!  These were shown with one of the iconic figures by him which was suspended from the ceiling over the main reception/ticketing area next to the long escalator. This let you view it from so many angles from below, from above and from alongside view the mezzanine and first floor balconies. It’s always good to see Gormley’s work in difference places. The statutes have become part of the cultural zeitgeist and yet putting them in new spaces makes them look fresh.   It was also interesting to see drawings by him and see how his ideas about the experience of occupying the human body transpose into different mediums. Closed on 27 M...

Fantastic exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery focusing on Picasso’s portrait works. Although his was a large exhibition and busy, the pictures were well spaced out and it took you clearly through themes and periods in Picasso’s life. I would have liked to know a bit more about some of the people pictured but I also liked the fact the show assumed you knew a certain amount and focused on the style of the portraits not Picasso’s life or the relationships. I liked the early, more realist work, such as the picture of Bibi-La-Puree portrait full of character with a Van Gogh like use of colour.   There were also some lovely sketches of friends at a bar in Paris and a section on portraits of writers done as frontispieces for books. There was a great   drawing of Poulenc with wonderful simply drawn tweed. I loved the room dedicated to Picasso’s first wife Olga with a lovely mix of styles. It included the beautiful brown, naturalistic portrait of her which I w...

Strange exhibition at Annely Juda Fine Art of work by Lucia Nogueira. The work consisted of installations and sculpture based on found objects and acquired in army surplus stores and medical and second hand shops. It all felt very conceptual and I’m afraid it didn’t speak to me. There was an oriental carpet with broken glass at both ends which I must admit I just wanted to take a hoover to! There was also a pile of rope and a wig in a box! I did like a set of small standing plastic bags with eye holes cut in them which reminded me of the Anthony Gormley Field works. Closed on 29 October 2016

Intriguing exhibition at Annely Juda Fine Art of work by Suzanne Treister. The show is made up of works by a fictional creation Hillel Fischer Traumberg, a banker turned ‘outsider artist’. The premise is that he is a high-frequency trader who experiments with drugs and explores the ethno-pharmacy of over a hundred psychoactive plants. He uses Hebrew numerology to find the numerological equivalents of the plants’ botanical names with companies in the FT Global 500 Index. Are you still with me? I’m not sure I am! The press release continues the story but I must admit I got a bit lost at this point! However I liked the works this premise produced. They consisted of mind maps of company names and wonderful pictures of plants on black backgrounds. The works I liked best were a wall of mock botanical drawings with company names which looked a bit like bank notes. Closed on 29 October 2016  

Thought provoking exhibition at the Ronchini Gallery by a group of artists who question reproducible medias from traditional books to website imagery. The commentary says it is about “the inherent fallacy of today’s mass media”. No, I’m not sure what that means either but there were some interesting work. I liked Rose Salane’s sculptures based on snippets of conversation and stories heard in public spaces. As well as creating the sculpture she invents newspaper clippings to tell the story. I liked one made of the side of an iron park bench with a plaster cast of a bag on it. Augustus Nazzaro’s detailed paintings of printed documents were stunningly produced but left me wondering why! Like the previous artists I’d seen in the gallery next door he painting an image, sanding it back and painting it again with precision detail. I assume it’s saying something about repeated reproduction of images but it felt like overkill. I loved Samuel Levi Jones’s work using out of...

Fascinating exhibition at Vigo of new work by Kadar Brock. This is definitely a show where it’s worth picking up the press release. On first glance I couldn’t work out these pictures which just seemed to be flecks of colour on pale canvases with holes in. However on reading the blurb I realised he paints a picture and then undoes it with a razor blade, primer and a sander then repaints on that surface sometimes repeating that process until he has a work he is happy with. Each work has traces of the previous work. I thought this was such an interesting idea making the works objects rather than paintings. I loved looking at the detail of the surface once you know what had happened to it, as the commentary says “What remains are strange ghosts and echoes.” It was a nice touch to include a more usual picture which I assume is the starting point for these works and the more usual image that they start out as. Closes on 8 November 2016  

Lovely exhibition at the Halcyon Gallery of new work by the sculptor Lorenzo Quinn. I love Quinn’s work but I found it was getting a slightly saccharine and sentimental. I would rather have been left to think about them myself and didn’t need the quotes from the artist to labour the message. I still like his wonderful smooth figures and his use of balance in the work. I also like the high shine and finish to the work. I like his hands set in circles which rock and it was a nice touch that the gallery attendants were quietly setting some of them rocking as you walked round. I loved a work called “Balancing our Worlds” of two people pulling against each other in harmony, yes I know that sounds like a contradiction! My favourite piece was “Reach” of a naked couple with a ladder at an acute angel with the man supporting it at the bottom and the woman at the top reaching out into the unknown. Such a beautifully balanced piece with the ladder at just eh right angel and a se...

Nice exhibition at the Fine Art Society of the work of the pop artist Gerald Laing. The work didn’t quite work in this rather elegant, refined space. The hang in the downstairs, white modern space, worked better than that upstairs with the art nouveaux fireplaces. I liked the bronzes as you came in which were quite Art Deco in style but were made in the mid-1970s. I particularly like “An American Girl” a figure leaning forwards, the style suggesting she had a cloche hat on. The polka dot pictures reminded me of the Polke exhibition I saw in the summer. It was good to have included some of his later work including the large bold pictures of Amy Winehouse. Closed on 13 October 2016 Reviews Evening Standard    

Colourful exhibition at Sotheby’s, the preview for a sale of 20th century Middle Eastern art. This was the first time I’d been to a sale preview and I have to admit I was only brave enough to go in as I’d spotted a rather nice coffee shop at the back of the building. I share that with you as a top tip! A great cup of coffee in a nice space and pictures from a forthcoming sale, Scottish artists, around the walls! The Middle Eastern art was a revelation to me and there were some lovely pictures although most of it you could like to a Western art movement and I didn’t feel I was seeing a unique Middle Eastern view of the world. There was a lovely seated life study of a naked woman sitting on a rock by Georges Hanna Sabbagh from 1928 which felt like a Slade school work. I loved her rounded thighs and the lovely flesh tones. I loved two still lives by Manoucher Yektai both featuring a vase of flowers and a bowl. I also liked a city on a hill by Abdulhalim Radwi with blue p...

Large installation at Hauser and Wirth by Mike Kelley. The work dates from 1999 and took up the whole space. The first section was a rectangular enclosure built to look like a Chinese gate complete with pink and red lanterns. The second was a grotto/landscape made of concrete with splodges of spray-paint colour with cheap religious statuary and coins. OK I admit it, I had no idea what it represented or meant! Reading the blurb it’s saying something about the Los Angeles Chinese-American community and cultural collision but I didn’t get any of that form just looking at it! I think I just found it a bit of a mess. Closes on 19 November 2016  

Calming exhibition at Hauser and Wirth of new work by Brazilian artist, Lygia Pape. Most of the work were geometric abstract prints on Japanese paper from the 1950s mainly using fine lines or large block of black to create thin white lines. However the work I liked best was an installation in the back room of fine silver threads running in diagonal lines, like the prints, with light shining through them. As you walked round the work the lines appeared and disappeared at the light caught them. It was really beautiful. I also liked two pyramids of blue pigment with lights shining onto the tip. I always love things made of pigment and was intrigued to know if there was a structure under the blue or if it was solid colour. Closes on 19 November 2016  

Small but interesting exhibition at Ordovas looking at a number of great artistic partnerships of the mid-20th century. The partnerships were represented by a work from each artist and the show was accompanied by a great handout telling you a bit more about the artists and the partnerships. It would have been nice to have more on the detail of the relationships between composer John Cage, choreographer Merce Cunningham and the artists Ct Twombly, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. I feel there might be a novel in the vague “artists and personal relationships”! It was a nice touch to be running a film collaboration between Cage and Cunningham alongside the pictures and sculptures. It was amazing to find a lovely Frida Kahlo self-portrait downstairs. It always comes as a surprise to me that you can find works of that calibre in private galleries in London which anyone can visit. I was sorry that Diego Rivera was mentioned but there was no work by him. There was a love...

Interesting exhibition at Messum’s of work by Rose Hilton. These pictures had a slightly Bloomsbury feel with dissolving, abstracting figures in delightful colours I loved one of a woman sitting reading with a blue mirror in the middle of the picture. Here were also some pictures where the figures are sketchily defined in a patterned, rather abstract background. Closes on 11 November 2016

Fun exhibition at Waddington Custot of work by John Wesley from throughout his career. The title comes from Wesley himself to describe the repetition in his work. The show had a pop art feel to it with very bold and district pictures and objects. I particularly loved the objects including a tall blue table with picture of women on the four sides of its base. Also an old fashioned suitcase with a couching naked female figure. The pictures were fun to and I loved picture of repeated pop art versions of the classic portrait of Proust against a pale blue background. Also a different take on counting sheep with a picture of a blue bed with two pink bulls floating over it! Closed on 22 October 2016  

Fabulous exhibition at Flowers Gallery of new work by Patrick Hughes. I have seen his work before in Royal Academy Summer Exhibitions and love it! It really plays with your eyes and mind. They works are really hard to explain! I’m going with painted reliefs. A detailed, almost super real picture is painted across a 3D surface which means that it alters as you walk round it. Sections which first appeared to protrude actually seem to recede from another angel. They remind me of the 17th Dutch optical illusion box pictures. There was a stunning picture of Venice which really brought back my recent holidays there. Also some of interior scenes which views of Venice thought the window. I loved some of art galleries but wanted to know if they were real galleries! The pictures on the walls were ones I knew but I couldn’t remember where they were to work out if it was a real space, however I suspect they are fantasy galleries sand don’t we all have them! Closes on 5 November 2...

Interesting exhibition at the Redfern Gallery of work from throughout Margaret Mellis’s career from her painting of the 1930s though to her driftwood reliefs of the 1960s and 70s. I liked the paintings of bottles which used bottles to form almost cubist shapes and to show how shapes relate to each other. I also liked a picture of a fish, a pan and a palette from the 1950s. I wasn’t so sure about the geometric abstracts in bright primary colours which felt slightly out of place with the rest of the work. However I did like the driftwood reliefs. I loved the worn texture of the component pieces and the way she composed these into a scheme. Closes on 12 November 2016  

Beautiful exhibition at Browse and Darby of new work by Jane Patterson. These were wonderful bright, cheerful pictures of domestic and ordinary subjects. She repeats her subjects and I particularly liked a set of a room and the view through its window. There were also still lives in which you could spot the same objects from different angels. These reminded me of the Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell pictures of Charleston Farmhouse and their use of the things around them in their creative process. I also liked her landscapes again repeating a scene of Burling Gap. I loved one which included a house on the edge of a cliff. However the still lives of food were also good such as a simple picture of herrings. Closes on 4 November 2016

Wonderful exhibition at Fortnum & Mason of art from the collection of Frank Cohen, described in the excellent brochure as “one of the most important private collections of Modern British art in the world”. This was a great opportunity to see some rarely shown works and to see them in such an innovative setting. Most works were on the main staircase but others sat on the shop floor. Trying to see them all took me to areas of the shop I’d not seen before. There were some amazing works. As any regular readers may have realised I love British art from the early 20th century and there were some great examples I didn’t know such as three pictures by William Roberts “Discussion in a Café”, “The Boxing Match” and “Snooker”. All of these were studies of people at leisure in groups and I loved the way the figures fitted together in a flat pattern. There were some great late 20th century work as well. I loved a Maggi Hambling in the 5th floor foyer of a bar with a mirrored c...

Colourful exhibition at the Bernard Jacobson Gallery featuring the work of Robert Motherwell, an American abstract expressionist. It has been put on to complement the current exhibition at the Royal Academy which I haven’t been to yet. This gallery is just over the road from the RA so pop over if you are at the show there. However I must admit it confirmed in my mind that I think I’ve going to find the RA exhibition hard going.   I just don’t respond well this this sort of abstract work. The pictures I liked were those with some base in the real world such as “The Studio” from 1987 which I think you can see some semblance of a figure at an easel. I also liked “Mexican Window” which I didn’t understand at first but they did see in it a yellow house with a blue shutter. I got on best with pictures that had some explanation on the handout so here’s hoping the RA show has a good commentary or I’m lost! Closes on 26 November 2016  

Interesting exhibition at White Cube, Masons’ Yard, of Greek artist Jannis Kounellis. The main set of work in this show was a series of pictures called the Alfabeto series featuring black stencilled letters and symbols on white back grounds. The canvases measurements were based on the house in which he lived and he likened them to frescos. I thought they work well on mass but not sure they would work that well as individual pieces. You really want the works on them to make sense but they are just random.   In the ground floor gallery I liked a wall sculpture consisting of three oil lamps on looped steel rods. I wanted to know if it was ever lit! Closes on 29 October 2016

Interesting exhibition at the Imperial War Museum by Edmund Clark using photography and a conceptual approach to examine the human, ethical and legal implications of the war on terror. One installation looked at looked at the 18 Britain’s who were held at Guantanamo Bay through photographs of the homes they returned to. It looked at how they related to their new space having been confined. It included a beautiful photograph of a rose floating in water. Another section looked at people who are placed under control orders which involved various constraints on their movement including forced relocation. It again looks at the spaces they are living in. There was a room of photographs of a house shown in the order in which they were taken including their IMG number. Closes on 28 August 2017  

Disappointing exhibition at the Imperial War Museum looking at war movies, why they are made, why we watch them, how they are made. I say disappointing because the exhibition wasn’t big enough! There was so much that they could have covered that it felt that they’d only tackled a small proportion of it. Also at times I wasn’t sure if they were telling the stories of the films or the events they were representing. Everything was good and there were some great objects which I’ll come to but I felt if they’d tried to say a bit less they would have said it better. Now the good stuff! The show started with the documentary that was made of the Battle of the Somme which was shown in cinemas within weeks of the battle. It revolutionised film going, changing it from a lower class leisure pursuit to a having mass appeal all levels of society went to see it hoping to spot family members at the front. I loved the middle section about the people in the films looking at the actors,...

Enjoyable exhibition at the Newport Street Gallery of work from throughout Jeff Koons career. I know there is a serious point behind these works about consumerism, mass culture taste etc but whatever the point they make me smile! I love the fact that so much of it is very ordinary objects but not made of the usual materials. Who can resist an inflatable lobster balanced on a chair but made out of aluminium and steel! There was one of the classic Koons balloon animals made of stainless steel which completely filled the double height middle room in the gallery which meant you could not only look round it but also down on it. I liked the steel reworkings of marble statues and again it was lovely that you could walk all around the works and look at the detail. I loved the huge pile of Play-Doh in the last room. It looked so realistic but was made of 27 individual pieces cast in aluminium held together by their own weight. I loved the juxtaposition of the bright colours an...