Cathy's Art Diary

Delightful exhibition at the Natural History Museum of the shortlisted entries in this year’s Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition. There were 100 images arranged in broad categories. The pictures were well displayed, back lit in a large format. Some of the works were amazing studies of patience with the photographers waiting weeks or months to get the shot they want. Each picture has a good commentary telling you about how and where it was taken. There were so many good images it’d hard to pick favourites. I’d include “The Alley Cat” by Nayan Khanolkor of a leopard in an enclosed alley looking right into the camera. Also the work used on the poster of a fox peeping over a wall called “Nosey Neighbour” by Sam Hobson. I liked the gruesome picture of the aftermath of a wildebeest stampede where the dead beasts are being eaten by hyenas and I smiled at “Puddle of Procreation” by Cyril Ruoso of randy frogs as my screen saver is a picture I took of happy frogs in a pond...

Interesting display at the Science Museum looking at the life of Valentine Tereshkova, the first woman to go into space. Tereshkova spent three days in space in 1963 when she was 26 and is still the only woman to have done a solo space flight. The show looked not just at the flight but also her life after as an international representative of the USSR. There were some lovely personal objects like her parachute suit and a seagull broach she wore as her call sign had been seagull. The display was only a small room but the space was used well with a good video being played on a big screen over one of the display cases and a wonderful large portrait of Tereshkova by Amir Mazitov hung low down and taking up a whole wall. It felt like she’d entered our space and was sitting with us. Closes on 17 September 2017.

Fabulous installation at the Science Museum by Giles Walker to compliment the current robots exhibition. You are ushered into a dark room with twelve life sized figures made from scrap round a table which come to life and discuss forgiveness, guilt and judgment. The table also resembles a boat as the head of the table has a wheel and there is a child figure as a mast. Is it a play on a ship of fools? Towards the end of the 15 minute show the figure head figure which faces away from the table reads out the last meal requests from prisoners on death row. This was quite an eerie experience with the combination of the dark and the creaking noise of the models.   At first people stood still and watched but then they gradually got more confident and walked round the table as if to listen to different figures. I couldn’t always hear what the figures were saying as the speech was quite mumbled but it didn’t matter too much and certain phrases reappeared like a chorus. ...

Atmospheric exhibition at the Science Museum of photographs by Anderson & Low of the museum’s ship collection in its protective dust sheets. The close perspective on these pictures along with the smoky finish made the models feel like ships emerging from the mist. They had a Turner like quality and the mistiness made you look more closely at the detail of the hulls and rigging. I liked the ones in battle formation. It was a nice touch to add interesting quotes on the walls but otherwise just leave the pictures to speak for themselves. I loved the Proust quote “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” Closes on 25 June 2017 Review Evening Standard      

Fascinating exhibition at the Science Museum looking at the history and future of robots. The show defined robots as mechanical humans and seeing that helps as at times I felt it was more about automatons rather than my idea of robots which have a degree of learned behaviour about them. I was amazed that the show started in the Medieval and Renaissance periods by looking at the church’s use of clockwork machines to explain the heavens and the human body. I loved a delightful mini-monk which could walk across the table. The next section looked at the role of automation in the Industrial Revolution followed by a section on robots in the imagination. This was full of iconic references in popular culture including a replica of Maria from Metropolis, a robot boxing toy I remembered from my childhood and T-800 from Terminator Salvation. A big central display focused on how robots have been built moving from early examples from the 1950s to up to date work. It discussed the ...

Lovely installation on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral of Mark Wallinger’s “Ecce Homo” statue which was the first work to occupy the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square. I loved this work when it was on the plinth so was very excited to get an opportunity to see it again. Even more exciting was that this time it is in our space. I was surprised to the figure was life sized as I’d assumed it was larger to get the perspective on the plinth. It was great to be able to walk all round it and to feel the cool of the marble. It was really interesting to see people’s reaction to the piece. I had thought it might be hard to get a good picture as people would be flocking round it but people were sitting on the steps ignoring it. It was towards the end of the day and there were a lot of tour groups resting after going round the cathedral. I guess they didn’t realise that the figure wasn’t always there so there was little interest in it. One person look a selfie while I was there but ...

Fun exhibition at Somerset House looking at the history of three games billiards, mazes and chess. There was a room devoted to each game with nice illustrations of its history and new versions by contemporary designers.   It showed how games evolve as people invent new rules and misremember old ones. It saw games as the history of people trying out ideas. I was most taken with the billiards room. As well as some lovely pictures of how it developed from a game based on grass through snooker and pinball machines. It’s origins on grass are still seen in the green baize. There was a great snooker table with one raised leg so you had to pot uphill to reach that pocket. I became addicted to an electronic pin ball machine where the ‘ball’ drew a pattern as it flew round the board and created great splashes of colour as it hit the edges. The chess room would have been more fun if I’d gone with someone else as it included a number of boards down the middle of the room with...

Interesting and varied exhibition at Somerset House of the shortlisted winners in these years’ Sony World Photography Awards. I always enjoy this show for the snapshots it gives of different worlds and stories as well as for the great photographs that creates. All the pictures are displayed beautifully treating them like paintings. I like the open competition rooms but wish more those pictures had more detailed labels to tell the stories behind the pictures. Themes which emerged for me this year were work from and about China and one which looked at the Syrian/Libyan refugee crisis’s. Pictures which stood out for me included Yuan Peng’s pictures of twin Chinese gymnasts. I loved the one of them working on a bar suspended in space with expressions of pain and concentration. I two joyous pictures,   Benjamino Pisati’s of a baptism in Georgia and Tasneem Aisultan’s of an Arabic woman tossing her son in the air. This year’s outstanding contribution award went to Marti...

Dramatic installation in the courtyard of Somerset House by John Gerrard to mark Earth Day. This was a huge screen with a digital simulation of a flag pole with a flag of black smoke placed in the landscape of the Lucas Gusher, the world’s first major oil find which is now exhausted. The work was only on site for a few days but is a continual computer generation where the landscape mirrors the real site with the sun rising and falling at the correct times. The landscape very slowly revolves around the flag. The work looked very impressive in this stately setting and had the added life of being broadcast as a television interruption on Channel 4, who had sponsored the work, on 22 April, Earth Day. Closed on 27 April 2017

Cramped, disjointed exhibition at the British Museum looking at three stories of migration. Each of the stories were interesting but the room was quite small and one of them was quite a long video with subtitles which was difficult to concentrate on while standing up with another large exhibit right behind you. One story used a book Iraqi artist Sadik Kwash had drawn for his nephew with tales of the pros and cons of having left Iraq. The video was of poet and thinker Eduardo Glissant, in the section I watched he was comparing a voyage on a cruise ships to the migration of his ancestors from Africa as slaves. The third one was the most moving and talked about the prehistoric footprints which were discovered at low tide on a Norfolk beach. The display included an installation you could walk through with pictures of the footprints on the floor and a cast of one of them. However I’m not sure we could conclude that these people were on a journey or a migration, it could ha...

Confused exhibition at the British Museum looking at American art since the Second World War via prints. This exhibition has been advertised for a long time and I felt had been shown as a great pop art show examining the American Dream however by using only print media it felt quite thin if that was what it was trying to deliver. The show felt disjointed as it tried to be too many things. As well as being an overview of US art it also looked at how new print techniques brought new tools for creative ideas, it examined that technology in some detail, it showed US cultural and social history in the period as well as examining the American Dream of the title. There were interesting works but the whole thing was so huge I did find myself turning off after a while. My favourite section was on Jaspar Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Jim Dine. This was a nice postscript to the recent Rauschenberg exhibition at Tate Modern and I love Jaspar Johns’ work. I also liked the contrast bet...

Varied exhibition at Annely Juda Fine Art of work by Michael Michaeledes from throughout his career. There were a number of techniques and ideas on show in this exhibition. The early work was bright geometric abstract pieces some of the nicest ones in shades of one colour. There were also some lovely works created by cutting and folding paper or thin metal. There was a nice one like a set of steps with paper simply cut in lines and folder up. The metal versions set up lots of reflections and light patterns. The largest works were canvas reliefs with material stretched over a hidden wooden frame in nice undulating curves. You could see the shape of the wood beneath the surface. They looked very solid and yet the surface was soft. Closes on 20 May 2017

Calming exhibition at Annely Juda Fine Art of new work Edda Renouf. A number of these works used the interesting technique of removing threads from the underlying canvas and sometimes then reapplying that removed thread to the surface of the canvas. The painting on the top of this is then sanded down to reveal the linen below. I loved her use of colour, mainly blue, to fill in some of the areas where thread was removed to create a rhythmic pattern up the tall works. The commentary mentioned how she equates the work with movement and sound and I felt some of them looked like the sound waves on a digital display. I loved one which seemed to be a take on the iconic black square, though in this case is was a dark denim blue with the thin shape of an upside down T on it created by removing threads. Closes on 20 May 2017    

Small focused exhibition at Ordovas looking at the use of a single colour, white, in sculpture. There were just five works in the show but they were quality works by well-known artists, Richard Serra, Isamu Noguchi, Alberto Giacometti. Barbara Hepworth and Eduardo Chillida. There was a good selection of materials used not just the obvious marble, there was also alabaster, plaster and vulcanised rubber. The hand out for the show gave an excellent explanation of the works. I loved a small work by Giacometti from the late 1920s called “Femme” which is known to have been an influence on many British sculptors. Because it was made in plaster you felt you could see the hand of the artists in it. There was also a delightful small Hepworth from the mid 1960 with overlapping pieces of marble on a base with circles cut into them. Closed on 22 April 2017