Cathy's Art Diary

Novel loan display at the National Maritime Museum of this boat used in the Extinction Rebellion protests earlier this year. The boat is parked on the river side of the museum where it was moved to on 19 July under police escort when the Metropolitan Policy issued a section 12 notice banning the use of boats, vehicles and other structures in the protest. It’s shown with interesting facts and figures about the protest and looks great in the space. It’s rather nice to have a boat outside the confines of the gallery and not a bad place to park it until it’s needed again!

Excellent exhibition at the Oxo Tower Gallery of wildlife photographs by Roger Hooper. These were stunning, sharply focused images shown in a large scale prints. His pictures of birds were particularly beautiful including some lovely ones of penguins against a clear blue sky.   There was great sequence of two leopards play fighting in one of which he caught a wonderful curve in one animals body as it jumped out of the undergrowth. Closed 18 August 2019

Small exhibition   giving an overview of the career of Ed Ruscha. Ruscha began work in commercial graphics for a Los Angeles advertising agency and his art references the themes and techniques of advertising. I had seen his work before but hadn’t realised how much of it was painted. I’d assumed they were screen prints or manipulated photographs as they are so realistic. There were a number of his pictures combining idealised mountains with unrelated text and those painting realistic wood effects. I liked “Our Flag” the rather Jasper John’s like picture shown here. There were also some of his sequences of photographs shown both on the wall and in a small side room of the books he’s made. These included his pictures of parking lots from above taken in 1967 which he then revisted in 1999 and his Hockey like swimming pools of 1968. All the work felt like it was recording and commenting on the American Dream. Closing end of the year

Poignant exhibition at Tate Modern of photographs of Elizabeth Taylor’s house and possessions by Catherine Opie taken just before and after Taylor’s death. Opie got access to the house as she and Taylor had the same accountant but she never met Taylor. The pictures form a portrait of a person without showing the person themselves and record the opulent and the personal. The only picture of Taylor is a photograph of the famous Andy Warhol print which starts the sequence. The rest of the pictures record rooms and the detail of her possessions such as her make-up and handbags, shown reflected in a mirror in the picture I’ve used for this article. I loved the pictures of the garden including beautiful roses and a fish in the pond. Closes 17 November 2019

Colourful installation at Tate Modern by Yinka Shonibare. I had seen this work before when it was shown at Brighton Library a number of years ago and loved it then and   love it now. It consists of over 2000 books, recovered in Shonibare’s signature Dutch wax print fabric, with the names of first and second generation immigrants to Britain on the spine plus names of people who have famously opposed immigration. It is now accompanied by a website with up to date material on the topis //thebritishlibrrayinstallation.com. I love the detail of this work as you can stand and read the spines and think of all the stories behind them however it is also a very striking piece as a whole and warms the heart of this librarian. Closes 17 November 2019 Review Evening Standard

Interesting exhibition at Tate Modern of work by Dora Mauer, a Hungarian artist. Mauer’s work seems to be about method rather than product and there was some fascinating techniques and ideas used but I’m not sure I’d want to live with a lot of the product. She resisted the socialist regime in Hungary and mainly displayed her work in homes, cultural centres and student clubs. I loved the print pictured here which was made from a roughened aluminium plate folder in diagonals then used as a printing plate. Another used blocks of wood on a surface which she then ran acid through to form the printing plate. It was all about method and making. Some of the work was about altering the perception of the space and I liked a series of double sided mirrors hanging in the centre of the room with a pattern in their framing which was repeated in a painting behind and evidently reflected the Fibonacci sequence of numbers. The final room included works which mapped 2D images onto a...

Mesmeric exhibition at Tate Modern of work by Takis, the Greek artist who sadly died on 9 August this year while the show was running. It took me a while to realise what was happening in this show.   At first I thought the magnetic works were faked to look as they would have done then I realised the thin wires were to stop the pieces linking together not to hold them up! Once I got that I loved it! I loved a red canvas that had cones and fret work floating above the surface and casting shadows on surface. I found myself walking round the works to see the gap between the objects. The show also looked at Takis’s scientific work including ideas on renewable energy   and his work making art works from objects found in army surplus stores and discount electrical shops. I loved the work which made a sound, particularly the nine panels shown in a curve where metal rods, manipulated by random magnetic fields to bounce against instrument strings. It was a lovely calmin...

Stunning exhibition at Tate Modern on the life and work of the Russian artist Natalia Goncharova. The show was wonderfully colourful and included paintings, textile designs, book illustrations and theatrical designs. It chartered her work from rural Imperial Russia to her life in Paris after the 1920s. I loved the early work and it was a nice touch to show it with a peasants outfit of the time to show you where the colours and vibrancy came from. She showed an interest in textiles throughout her life and in fact the name of her family estate meant “cloth factory” and a number of the pictures in this section looked at the process of cloth making. The show looked at how Moscow, where Goncharova moved when she was eleven, was one of the best places in the world to see modern part as two industrialists, Ivan Morozov and Sergie Shchukin, had huge collections which they opened to the public and there was a room of pictures Goncharova would have seen there plus works they purc...

Interesting exhibition at Tate Britain looking at the life and work of John Opie, one of the most celebrated artists of 18th century London who is little known now. Opie was the son of a Cornish mine carpenter and didn’t go to school but was discovered by Sir John Wolcot, the satirist, who has been a doctor in Truro. In London he was hailed as “The Cornish Wonder” but faced snobbish treatment from contemporaries who called him “a rude and clownish boy”. However he became the professor of painting at the Royal Academy shortly before he died. Opie was known for his realism and the show included beautiful portraits and scenes of rural life. “The School Mistress”, which was shown here, established his reputation in London and included a lovely portrait of his mother. There were also beautiful portraits of Mary Wollstonecraft, who he knew as he socialised in radical circles, and his wife the novelist Amelia Alderson, who became part of the campaign to abolish slavery. I lov...

Fascinating exhibition looking at the year 1819 in art, a time when George III was close to death and Britain was struggling economically post Waterloo leading to the Peterloo Massacre in August. All the works on show were produced or exhibited at the Royal Academy in that year and incorporated paintings, prints and illustrated books. The prints reflect the politics more than the paintings but the later reflect painters working for the growing middle classes incorporating comedy, visual spectacle, history and travel. It was a lovely mix of familiar artists such as Turner (shown here) and Cruickshank prints but also artists who were well known at the time but have fallen out of fashion. There was a lovely Willian Etty of Mary Arabella Jay and an overblown Joseph Gandy, “Jupiter Pluvius”, which divided opinion at the time as to whether it was a dignified classical work or popular entertainment. There was a sketch of the panorama of Venice which was shown on the Strand th...

Small but striking exhibition at Tate Britain of work by Gillian Ayres who died last year. The show had just three big pictures and two prints but was a flood of abstract colour and a nice one to see on the same day as the Frank Bowling. I particularly loved the quotes from her which added to the sense of joy in the pictures such as “I want an art that’s going to make me feel heady in a high-flown way.” The paintings were very large but she had the decency to call one of them “A bloody big picture”. You have to warm to this person! Closes Autumn 2019

Charming exhibition at Tate Britain of new work by France-Lise McGurn. I loved the way the figures burst out of these pictures and seemed to dance over the walls. The pictures would have worked in their own right and have a life outside this installation but they were enhanced by the large sketched figures and splashes of paint covering the walls. The title comes from the film “Sleepless in Seattle” and the figures represent the physical intensity of living in a city which is probably why, as a confirmed city girl, that I loved them. The work felt joyful and vibrant. Closes 8 September 2019

Colourful exhibition at Tate Britain of work by Frank Bowling from throughout his career. There was a wonderful variety of work in this show and yet it all held together and did feel like the work of one artist. I was impressed that he’s still painting at 85 albeit sitting down. I was surprised that I’d not come across his before as he’d been at college with Hockney, Derek Boshier and R.B. Kitaj. I liked the room of paintings based on photographs which were bright but slightly distorted images. They reminded me of Sickert works which used a similar idea. There were interesting works which included a silkscreen print of his childhood home in Guyana often cut out and sewn onto the main work. A lot of the works seemed to be about the method and action of painting rather than the final work from fields of colour overlaid by stencilled maps, through works created by pouring paint down a canvas, the addition of turpentine and ammonia to acrylic paint to give different texture...

Fascinating study day organised by the London Art History Society and held at Friends House focusing on the role of Sienna in Early Italian Art. This was the fifth day in a series on this early period of Italian art and this time focused on the art of Florence and in particular at the role of Giotto.     John Renner, the lecturer, started by looking art in Florence before Giotto including going thought the art and architecture of the Baptistery in some detail and works by Cimabue. We then spent a delightful hour looking at Giotto’s masterpiece, the Arena Chapel in Padua, in detail. As ever John had wonderful, high quality images which were almost better than being there! I loved the section where he went through the sequence of images of Joachim and Anna which included the beautiful detail used for this article. In the afternoon we went on to look at the work of that Giotto did in Florence from Virgin and Child pictures to the Bardi and Peruzzi Chapels in Santa Cr...

Nice little exhibition at Michelham Priory of etchings and sculptures by Keith A Pettit. The etchings were mainly of Sussex scenes and were worked on cross grained wood which evidently allows for finer work. They were delicate pictures and I loved this one of Glyndebourne particularly as I   have manged to go twice this summer. The two sculptures shown also relied on the intrinsic properties of the wood they are made from Elm pollards felled in the fight against Dutch elm disease. Pettit  allows the shape of the original piece of wood to determine that of the finished work.

Underwhelming exhibition at the Royal Academy, their annual open-submission show hanging work by Royal Academician with art by amateurs. I say underwhelming as I suspect I’ve been to too many of these and they are starting to look a bit samey. There was the usual electric variety of work but somehow this year it didn’t have the wow factor. When I come back to look at my notes in the catalogue I’m surprised at how few of the works I remembered despite saying I liked them. I did like the hang of the large room 3 which included a large Anselm Keifer and a wonderful study in perspective by Ben Johnson “The Space Between Revisited”. The pictures had room to breathe and speak to each other. The architecture room left me with the usual questions about which buildings had been built and which were just fantasies. I loved a model for a new school in Erith which is just down the road from me so maybe I could go and look. Works that stood out include the Tunnock Teacakes tiger, a...

Enlightening exhibition at the National Gallery of responses by children to Joseph Wright of Derby ‘s “The Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump”. I have loved this great Enlightenment painting from the first time it pulled me magnet like towards it. I also always enjoy this annual show of children’s responses to ta picture as it often makes you look at a work in a new way. This year projects were not just artists but also scientific with some schools doing bird watching projects and another looking at the ethics of animal experimentation. My favourite scientific project let food decay then the children painted the effects and mounted them in petri dishes. There were some great model birds in papier mache and wire, some colourful binoculars and silhouette lamps.   The works shown were paintings on black and white photographs of the children to explore the light effects in the picture which gave a rather Francis Bacon effect. My favourite piece was from a school i...

Fascinating exhibition at the National Gallery looking at the work of the 15th century Spanish artists Bartolomé Bermejo. I’ve always been fond of the gallery’s own picture by Bermejo, a St Michael fighting some wonderful surreal devils, so was fascinated to see other works by him. A lot of evidence points to him being a Jew who converted to Christianity which may explain why his career seems to have been quite itinerant as he was avoiding the Inquisition. There are less than 20 known pictures by him and four of them were here. The commentaries were detailed and fascinating. As well as the St Michael there was the lovely “Virgin of Montserrat” which included the donor Francesco della Chiesa, with sinuous figures and wonderfully detailed flowers. There was also a Pieta painted for Barcelona Cathedral with a lovely human St Jerome and donor figure and four panels from a big praedella of Old Testament prophets which may have been commissioned by a fellow Jewish convert. ...

Complex exhibition at Canada House of work by Sonny Assu who investigates what it means to be an Indigenous Canadian. I liked these pieces in on immediate look but you had to know a lot to understand them. Luckily there was a good handout! Assu works with the formline tradition of indigenous art which uses a complex series of ovals, s-shapes and u-shapes to mark useful and ceremonial objects. For examples some of the works took romanticised Canadian landscapes by 19th century artists and tagged them with these shapes to show the rewriting narrative of a ‘vanishing race’.   See what I mean! I’m always a sucker for art works made from maps and some of these overlaid these shapes onto colonial marine charts owned by his grandfather to destabilise the borders on the maps. I also liked the works where he uses his old comic book collection to replicate the formline tradition of storytelling. I particularly liked this triptych. Closes 26 October 2019

Interesting exhibition at the Barbican looking at creative and scientific developments in AI using work by artists, scientists and researchers. I must admit I only did the free installations around the building. I didn’t have time to do the paid for exhibition section but I thought it was a nice touch to have a lot of free work particularly as it’s the school holidays and it is something that children can interact with. I began with the work shown, one of two by Universal Everything, where you stand in front of the screen and the avatar copies and learns from you movements. I must admit I felt a bit silly as a middle aged women standing waving my arms and legs around but it didn’t stop me. The results thought were a bit underwhelming. Good use was made of the long drop space in the middle of the building with a work called Totem by Chris Slater which used equations that model the behaviour of biological neurons and is therefore supposed to mirror emotions. I must admit...

Surprisingly good exhibition at the Barbican looking at the life and work of Lee Krasner. I say surprisingly good as anyone who follows me knows I’m not a fan of abstract art and I thought the art of the wife of Jackson Pollock would try by patience but I loved her! Maybe I understand female abstract expressionist work when the pictures by the blocks I just find annoying. I found this a much more joyous show than I expected. This show was really well arranged. For once it started upstairs in this space as it suited her earlier smaller works. I also liked the way it started with her smaller works made in the late 1940s after she’d married Pollock and then went back to show where the ideas had come from and he position in art circles of the time. I was fascinated by the section on when she supervised a War Services Project to design window store displays advertising war training courses. The upstairs section ended with Pollock’s death. You did realise what a shock it mus...

Fascinating study day organised by the London Art History Society and held at Friends House focusing on the role of Sienna in Early Italian Art. This was the fourth   day in a series on this early period of Italian art and this time focused on the art of Sienna.   John Renner, the lecturer, started by look at the relationship the city had with the Virgin and the plethora of early images this produced. This followed the Battle of Montaperti with Florence in 1260 when, following the city offering the virgin the keys to the city in the cathedral, it was said that the Virgin laid a veil of mist over the battlefield the next morning leading to Sienna’s victory.  We then went on to look at Duccio’s Maesta painted between 1308-11 and commissioned by the city. He talked us through the iconography in detail and how it can be read in different directions. In the afternoon we moved on the Duccio’s successors Simone Martini and the Lorenzetti brothers who I must admi...

Intriguing exhibition at White Cube Masons’ Yard of new work by Jeff Wall. These were large photographs displayed like paintings. The pictures have a documentary feel and yourself making up the stories behind them. I loved a pair pictures of two people in very similar interiors which I over analysed as to whether they were in fact the same space with different décor. I also liked the triptych shown here with titles for each work reflecting the Garden of Ede, Complaint, Denial and Expulsion and a wonderful picture of an hillside near Ragusa with wonderful stripes in the geology. Closes 7 September 2019

Calming exhibition at Pace Gallery of three female American abstract artists looking at their work in white and pale colours. At first glance these   worked looked very similar and a bit boring but as you looked closely all the work was more individualist and clever than you realised. I was most drawn to the work of Mary Corse and loved her “White Diamond, Positive Stripe” which at first appeared a constant white but you then realised was fading into slightly different shades. I also like her works on bevelled frames which were wedged at the back. Agnes Martin’s work incorporated thin pencil lines which played with your eyes and Jo Baer’s added a thin brightly coloured painted frame round her white works. Closes 14 August 2019

Fascinating study day organised by the London Art History Society and held at Friends House focusing on the role of Assisi in Early Italian Art. This was a third day in a series on this early period of Italian art and this time focused on the art of Assisi. I’d been a number of years ago and it was lovely to have this reminder of what I’d seen and it made me want to go back soon.   We went through the art chronologically with an obvious focus on images of St Francis. In the morning we looked at the art in the lower church from around Francis’s tomb from the earliest period soon after his death. This work was mainly by Maestro di San Fancesco and Cimabue. The lecturer John Renner took us through the works and talked about how these works defined the iconography of the saint. We then moved onto the Upper Church and a Giotto fest, or is it? John talked about how the earliest Frescos were by other artists from Rome such as the Isaac Master shown here. He also looked at whe...

Disappointing new public space at the O2 at North Greenwich. As a regular Thames Clipper user I’ve been diverted round these building works when walking to the O2 for at least two years so I was excited that the quicker path was going to reopen and be a park area with a high level walkway with river views. It is great to have the path back but when the Tide opened there still seemed to be a lot of building work going on and temporary barriers and sadly even Morag Myerscough’s bright murals “Siblings” couldn’t disguise the tube vent shafts. The whole area need tidying up a bit. The high level walk way is quite fun but I’m not sure it gives much better views than from the riverbank and it was obvious from a sign that they’d already had some health and safety issue with raised sections and I spotted another accident waiting to happen with a run of shallow steps which looked like a slope as you set off from the top. I fear the effect will soon be ruined by yellow tape. On t...

Sweet installation at the Now Gallery a journey into the mind of Argentinian artist Kinska. The idea started when the artist spent time in hospital for a hip replacement where she processed the experience via her sketchbooks which are shown in the show. Following this she made about 1000 handmade ceramic pieces which are displayed in a wooden house to represent her studio under a rainy sky of ceramic teardrops or Gotas. The ceramics were really cute and there was so much to look at. What looked a bit confusing at first but did lead you to think about different aspects of a stay in hospital. It was a nice touch to have more sketchbooks on the outside of the hut so that you could add your own ideas. Closes 22 September 2019

Mesmeric exhibition at the Hayward Gallery of work by Hicham Berrada. Berrada’s work uses scientific processes to produces it and he says he approaches the work like a scientific experiment. This show consisted of a series of two sets of sculptures and a video installation. The installation pictures here was created using equations that mimic the elements take, develop and change their form. It is a beautiful slow moving 180 degree work which I found very peaceful and relaxing. The sculptors also work in idea of slow evolution. The flat tank pieces contain chemical solutions whose reactions cause a shape-shifting structure over the course of the exhibition.   When I went they looked like fish tanks of bright coral. The upright works under glass are a small brass structure immersed in saline solution with a low level electronic current passing though. This speeds up the natural process of corrosion which takes place before our eyes. As this show is free I want to tr...

Mixed exhibition at the Hayward Gallery featuring work which explore and celebrates gender identity and fluidity. I’d looked forward to this show hoping for a fun but challenging collection of contemporary art however I found quite a lot of the work took itself very seriously and some of the commentaries were fairly impenetrable in their convoluted wordy explanations of the work such as a description of sculptures which “examine the bio-politics behind identity formation.” There were some standout pieces which I’ll describe but there was also a lot of overly self-conscious work. On the whole I thought portrait photographs came out of the show best as they record communities and invite you to engage with them. I liked Peter Hujar’s black and white pictures of his friends in 1970s and 80s   New York, Zanele Muholi’s pictures of the black lesbian and trans gender community in South Africa and Catherine Opie’s pictures which isolate sitters against a brightly coloured...

Vibrant exhibition at the Garden Museum of paintings by George Rowlett of garden designer Sarah Price’s own garden. I was struck by the smell as I walked towards this show as the paint was think impasto which still gave off a lovely oily scent. The paint was over a centimetre thick in places and had a wonderful sense of texture. In the commentary it said that Rowlett uses decorators scrapers to apply the paint and sets up a large tarpaulin under his easel as it’s such a messy process. The finished works have a real sense of being objects not just paintings and I loved their sense of colour and vibrancy. Closes 4 August 2019

Colourful exhibition at the Garden Museum looking at how Ivon Hutchins used the natural environment in his work. In 1940 Hitchens moved to a caravan in the woods of Sussex after his London home was bombed. He eventually built a house there and curated the land around to be make a natural garden.  The show looked at how he then the land in his art and began  by looking at his simplified blocked landscapes in swathes of colour which experimented with abstraction and then moved to at his lovely still lives with flowers picked from the land around him. Finally it looked at his Tangled Pond series showing the vegetarian around the four ponds in his garden. I loved the descriptions in this show including the fact that he had a potted horse chestnut in his studio which he took to his exhibitions so that real nature was included. I also liked the inclusion of some delightful sketchbooks and textiles designed by him and his son. Closed on 15 July 2019 Reviews ...

Nostalgic exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum of photographs of British theatrical productions from the 1980s and 90s by Ivan Kyncl. Kyncl photographed over 500 plays, operas and musicals despite not having worked in the theatre before he arrived in the UK in 1980. Kyncl described his very direct pictures as “in the minute” so the show features 60 shows, one for every second of a minute which was a neat way to corral such a huge output. The pictures were shown with little explanation, just the theatre, date, theatre and director. It would have been nice to have a bit more about the actors, reviews etc but mainly because I approached this show from an interest in the theatre rather than via the photographer. The effect however of taking you through 20 years of the best of British theatre was fascinating. The picture themselves were very intimate as Kyncl often worked by being on stage with the actors. Closed on 7 July 2019 Review Evening Standard

Charming exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum looking at an album of designs found in 1986 by goldsmith and jeweller John Brogden. Brogden was an exhibitor at the Great Exhibition and this album covers the period from 1848 to 1884. The designs cover all the fashions of this period and the display is used to explain these styles and trends from stylised nature, through the influence of archaeological discoveries and the fashion for cameos. Closes 17 November 2019