Cathy's Art Diary

Lovely new sculpture on the Forth Plinth in Trafalgar Square by Michael Rakowitz.   It is a recreation of the Lamassu, a winged bull and protective deity that stood at the entrance to Nergal Gate of Nineveh, near modern day Mosul, from c 700 B.C, until it was destroyed by ISIS in 2015. It is part of a larger project to recreate 7000 works looted from the Iraq Museum in 2003 or destroyed at archaeological sites across the country in the aftermath of the war.   Rakowitz has decorated it with empty Iraqi date syrup cans to represent an industry destroyed by the war and to mirror the fact that the reliefs on the base of Nelson’s Column are made from canons salvaged from the wreck of a ship lost at the Battle of Trafalgar.   I think this is one of the more successful works on the plinth. It fits it well and the colours mirror the colours of the square around it. It is also an important statement to shop a work of art destroyed by war outside our own National Gal...

Small exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery of work by Japanese photographer Miho Kajioka.   These works were hand finished silver gelatin pictures which gave them a feeling of objects not just images. I loved a long picture of a beach with the lines of beach, sea and sky running across it and one small figure at the edge. I also liked a classic picture of blossom against water and a picture of a bird on a telegraph wire across the corner of picture which reminded me of one of the videos in the Tacita Dean Still Life exhibition at the National Gallery.   Closed on 14 April 2018

Fabulous exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery of found images of people cross dressing.     The work came from the collection of filmmaker and collector Sebastien Lifshitz who has been collecting these images from flea markets junk shops and eBay. They were beautifully grouped into themes.   My favourite images were the anonymous ones such as the first section of images of men dressed as women. These were personal photos so who knows who the people are or why they wanted to record themselves in women’s clothing. Some may be theatrical pictures but many just show a need to dress in this way. Each one has an unknown story behind it. With other groups of pictures we know more about the people. There was a set from a community in Washington DC in which they took turns to host evening where there cross dressed. They are a lovely set of pictures of a group of friends. There was also a nice set of Bambi, a drag artist who had a 30 year career then left to hav...

Charming exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery looking at a private photo album of Grayson Perry’s from when he was at Portsmouth Art School and developing his female persona of Claire.   Unlike the current flamboyant Claire this was a subdued, suburban version in 1980s clothes and I could see me and my friends in her. I loved the fact the album itself was the same as my own from that period with pictures held in with silicon sheets which had lost their stickiness so the pictures are now curling up and falling out.   I liked the fact there were copies on the walls as well shown again 1980s wallpaper and an AV of the page turning. A lovely insight into a specific time in an artist’s career. Closes on 3 June 2018  

Strange exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery showing the shortlisted winners of this prestigious photography prize.   I say strange because there seemed to be very few photographs for a photography prize! In fact one of the presentations by Luke Willis Thompson was a video installation, albeit a fairly still video! Another by Batia Suter used found images and looked at how images are affected by their context. Rafal Milach did have a bit more original photography and looked at post-soviet propaganda in architecture, urban projects and objects. No I’m not sure I understood it either. My favourite piece was by Mathieu Asselin and looked at the company Monsanto examining the human, ecological and economic impact of its sometimes reckless history. There still wasn’t much photography but what there was did include showing how it had been used eg in newspaper articles as well as having a clear narrative.   Closes 3 Jun2 2018   Reviews Telegraph...

Lovely refurbishment of the Hayward Gallery following a two year closure. It’s great to have the Hayward Gallery back and it’s looking very sharp and clean. They are making a feature of it’s concrete structure and Brutalist architecture and the shop is full of books on that type of architecture and objects made of concrete. I fell for a small concrete C! It was fun going round spotting what was new. I felt the stairs has been refreshed and that the ceilings were new although still with an industrial feel. I loved the use of the sky lights on the top floor which were flooding the gallery with light but have movable covers so they can give different lighting effects. Is that new or had I just not looked up before?   There is a nice new café on the first floor which a different range of food although it was all quite healthy!   Reviews Times Guardian    

Interesting exhibition at the Hayward Gallery of four recent sculptural acquisitions from the Arts Council Collection. Which is based at the South Bank Centre but has no permanent site however is widely lent out to exhibitions.   Amalia Pica work is a garden rake on a stand. She specialises in using found objects to make absurd works. Simon Starling’s work represented a project to cross the Dead Sea consisting of a canoe made from Magnesium from the Dead Sea and photographs of the crossing.   I had seen Ryan Gander’s work before which uses versions of Degas’s Little Dancer to talk about how we look at art. This one was a blue plinth from which she had escaped to fall asleep at the bottom of it.   My favourite though was Matthew Darbysihire’s “Capitcha No 21 Doryphorus”, a blue classical statue. He had bought a 3D scan of a Roman statue which was itself a copy of a Greek original, which he then rebuilt by hand using layers of hand cut polycarbonate. I felt i...

Fascinating exhibition at the Hayward Gallery exploring the work of the photographer Andreas Gursky. These are grand, large pictures giving them a feeling of old master paintings. This was enhanced by the line on the floor in front of the works giving them the gravity of art objects. Some of the works are made from a colleague of images but have the effect of one cohesive image but it’s worth remembering that what you are looking at may not be as real as we expect a photograph to be. A good example of this came late in a stunning photograph of the Rhine with the image divided in three with the river splitting the land and the sky however it turned out a power station had been edited out. I liked the things Gursky had to say about the relationship between art and photography and his way of looking at the world. There was a mix of works some had the effect of a sublime urban landscape such as a view of the port of Salerno with patterns of cars parked in the dock and the city an...

Colourful picture outside the Hayward Gallery by Njideka Akunyili Crosby.   This is the first of a series of pictures which will appear opposite the entrance to the Hayward Gallery which they are calling their Billboard series. This one by Crosby is a colourful start with a large picture reflecting her experience of living life between the USA and Nigeria. It’s a domestic setting showing objects from her childhood.   It worked very well in this setting as it consisted of blocks of colour and pattern and combines painting, drawing, fabric and found imagery. I assume the finished work here is a giant print. I loved the inclusion of portrait fabric from when her mother ran for the Nigerian senate and a carpet of found images from Nigerian publications.   Closes February 2019  

Interesting little spotlight exhibition at Tate Britain looking at the work of Mark Gertler, centred on his most famous picture “The Merry-Go-Round” from 1917. I went round this room the wrong way so my top tip is read the information board and then move across the entrance to your right to start with the early work! The “Merry-Go-Round” looks very striking opposite the entrance enticing you into the room. As a Bloomsbury Group fan I know Gertler’s work quite well but there were a lot of pictures here I didn’t know and I was fascinated to see his only surviving sculpture. I liked the early work when he was encouraged at art school to paint pictures reflecting his Jewish upbringing, I wasn’t so sure about the later pictures which were a bit chocolate box and influenced by the worst aspects of Renoir. My favourite picture was a stunning drawing of his mother. Closes on 21 October 2018  

Confusing show at Tate Britain looking at (quote) “how artists in Britain have stretched the possibilities of paint in order to capture life around them”. I say confusing because isn’t the above quote what all painters do? From the adverts and titles I had assumed the show was about figurative painting in 20th century Britain but was confused by the inclusion of townscapes. I’m also not sure the commentary emphasised the quote, however as a general overview of late 20th painting and the links between artists it was fascinating. There were also some great pictures! By the end of the show I appreciated some of the subtle unspoken connections the show made about composition and style but it was a long burn. Needless to say I loved the first room which highlighted early 20th century artists who were an influence on the later artists. As this included Stanley Spencer and Walter Sickert I was hooked. I also loved a David Bomberg picture of Toledo which looked an abstract mess fr...

Fun installation at Tate Britain by Anthea Hamilton. The central Duveen Gallery has been transformed with white tiles into a bathroom like space which provides a performance area for a solo performer in squash like costume who moves slowly around the space using the plinths, stage and tube which have been created for them. I liked use of sculptures from the galleries collection within the space including a terracotta one turned around to show how it holds together. I have no idea what the show means but I found it mesmeric. As you go into the galleries around it you find yourself popping back to see where the figure has got to. It feels very strange when they move towards you as I have no idea how much the person can see through the squash head. I’ll certainly be checking back on it before it closes as I think it will feel quite different each time you see it. Closes on 7 October 2017 Reviews Guardian Telegraph Evening Standard  

Stunning installation on the roofs of the Good Morning and ITV Studios by Mark Jenkins and Sandra Fernandez   to highlight the issue of male suicide. The work consists of 84 figures to represent the 84 male suicides in Britain per week. The 12 figures on the Good Morning studio reflect the 12 men a day who kill themselves. The figures are dressed in ordinary clothes and their heads covered in draw string hoodies. It’s uncanny how the clothes gentle blow in the breeze making them look more real and alive. I found the work very moving and thought provoking. You read the figures in a paper and just move on to the next articles but actually seeing 84 figures and that that only represents one week of deaths is shocking.

Lovely exhibition at St Martin in the Fields of new works by Ed Gray. Gray was inspired to paint these works after looking at adoration and nativity pictures in the National Gallery which crowd scenes with a sense of spectacle. The pictures show London scenes full of people each going about their day to day lives but coming together to form a crowd. The show had a mix of original works and giclee prints as well as some sketches. Scenes included people crossing bridges, on the tube, at Liverpool Street station, going to a football match and at a protest in Parliament Square. They are packed full of life and action and he choreographs the figures into busy but engaging compositions. My favourite picture was “Adoration of Thomas A Becket on the Old Kent Road” which shows people going about their business in the snow including a boy with a shopping trolley, a man in a electric wheel chair, people with carrier bags and all the trappings of a road. It took me ages to work o...

Two contrasting exhibitions at the National Gallery and National Portrait Gallery curated by and looking at work by Tacita Dean. I would normally blog these as two separate shows but the reviewers have discussed them together and I did make a point of seeing them one after the other so I’m going to follow suit although they were quite different. I loved the Still Life show at the National Gallery. It was curated by Dean although it included some of her work. She’s picked examples of still lives from the gallery’s collection although she took a broad dentition of still life including pictures of stillness such as the tiny Thomas Jones picture of Naples. The works were shown with minimal commentary just basic labels and you were left to make your own connections. I found this approach made me slow down and really look at the pictures. It also had a mindfulness effect. Delightful narratives were set   up such as showing the Barberi sparrow hawk with a Gwen John of a bird ...

Surreal exhibition at Canada House of work by photo-conceptualist artist Vikky Alexander. As far as I could see photo-conceptualism means photo collages used to create a surreal effect. These pictures brought together postcard images of historic sites with superimposed images of real and toy animals. I thought the images were fun but wasn’t quite sure what they were saying, despite the fact the handout said they had a “multiplicity of meanings”! I did like the large triptych of black and white images of the palm houses at Kew which seemed to blend together to create one image. Closes on 19 May 2018  

Lovely trip to the archives of the National Portrait Gallery to look the material they have on the gallery during the First World War organised for friends of the gallery. This event was made by the wonderful story telling of the lady who showed us around. I am so sorry I didn’t get her name. She’d picked fascinating documents from the archive then wove them together to tell us a story and paint a picture of some fascinating characters. She looked at the two directors of the gallery during the period but more interesting were the glimpses into the lives of the guards who became special constables for the duration of the war. You always think of war as a time of great events and grand behaviour but she included wonderful tales of catching a petty thief and of arguments between the guards and the typists of the government department that moved in. She was also good at answering questions and had researched what happened to the characters that she was talking about. The event...

Strange exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum looking at trees in photographs. This was an interesting idea but there was no narrative to it other than that trees seem to have been a popular subject for photographers since its invention. The museum itself commissioned a series of pictures of tress early on its history as a learning resource. There were some lovely pictures though including Abbas Kiarostami’s picture I use here of a tree trunk in the snow with the shadow of the branches forming the branches of the picture. I also liked a Henri Cartier Bresson of a felled tree laid out in sections and a Roger Fenton of a tree through an Oxford college window. Closes on 22 April 2018 Review Guardian  

Delightful exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum looking at the Winnie-the-Pooh books, how they were written and their legacy. I thought this show got the balance right between having interactive things for children and not dumbing down the story and the content for adults. I loved the tea table, the slide and the Pooh Sticks bridge although I could have lived without the bell on Pooh’s house! The show felt slightly odd at first as it looked at the legacy before the books but with hindsight it meant that it got mechanising, Disney and songs out of the way early so that the rest of the show could slowly work through how the books came about. Equal importance was given to A.A. Milne and E. H. Shepherd and there was lots of detail on how they worked together. I watched the lovely film “Goodbye Christopher Robin” which was out recently and the show was a bit like walking through that. It was wonderful to see some of the photographs that recreates, like the picture ...

Interesting exhibition at the Science Museum looking at India’s long tradition of scientific and innovative thinking. The show was divided cleverly into three key areas, observation, calculation and innovation. Within each of these it then looked at historic and contemporary achievements using some fascinating examples. I loved seeing Everest’s theodolite as I have helped to organise an exhibition at work (RICS) which includes a model of the theodolite so it was wonderful to see the real thing. There was also a lovely drawing of Everest at work. I was also fascinated by a scrap of manuscript which includes the first recorded use of zero as a number. Our numbering system of a repetition of the repetition of the numbers 1 to 9 and zero comes from India. Closes on 22 April 2018 Reviews Times  

Fascinating exhibition at the Science Museum looking at photography in India. The show uses three pivotal dates to tell the story, the Indian Mutiny in 1857, independence and partition in 1947 and contemporary work. My favourite section was the one on the Mutiny as it looked at the birth of photography in India and used that to tell the story. I was fascinated in how quickly after the events that the demand for photographs of the main sites appeared and the idea of ruins tourism. It reminded me of the how the same things happened in Paris after the Commune. The show was full of snippets of fascinating stories such as that of photographers Robert and Harriett Tytler who not only photographed the site of the Mutiny but were responsible for selling the contents of the Red Fort buying a crown and two thrones themselves which they later sold to Queen Victoria. Also Helen Messinger Murdoch who, at the aged of 51, started a tour to photography the world and was an early pioneer o...

Interesting workshop at Conway Halls organised by the London Art History Society looking at the current exhibitions on the collections of Charles I & II. The day was led by Clare Ford-Wille and took us through both exhibitions with an excellent hand out highlighting the main works to look out for and to use in the shows. However I’d hoped for more of the narrative behind the shows. For example I’d have liked to know more about Charles I purchase of the Matua collection and what it contained plus more on how Charles II went about reclaiming objects from his father’s collection. She touched on these topics but only where the shows did and not in a chronological way. I’ve not seen either shows yet but can’t wait!