Cathy's Art Diary

Impenetrable exhibition at the National Poetry Library in the Royal Festival Hall by Joo Yeon Park to mark the 30th anniversary of the death of Samuel Beckett. OK I admit I’ve read the description two or three times and still can’t make head nor tail of it! The main work was an installation called “Twenty Times a Thousand” made in response to Beckett’s poem “Echo’s Bones”. So far so good but I still can’t work out what the circles are about. They make an attractive piece though. However it was nice to see a selection of archive material on Beckett   from the library’s collection including press cuttings, images and a rare copy of the aforementioned poem “Echo’s Bones”. Closes 29 March 2020

Strange exhibition at Somerset House looking at how mushrooms have been used to inspire art and what their future is. Yes, you heard it, an exhibition on mushrooms! Evidently fungi have recently been categorised into their own kingdom, closer to animals that plants and they are thought to underpin all life on earth. In art they have been seen as objects of horror and disgust until they were rehabilitated by Alice in Wonderland. There was a lovely selection of drawings of mushrooms by Beatrix Potter and a case of Alice in Wonderland archive material. Contemporary art was represented by the wallpaper pattern by Alix Morrison shown here and a series of prints by Cy Twombly and I loved Amanda Cobbett’s small sculptures of mushrooms made of 3D embroidery. The last room looked at the future of mushrooms including some building blocks partly made from them and a look at their use in medicine.   Closes 26 April 2020

Fascinating exhibition at Two Temple Place examining the collection of textiles by women.  This show looked at the collections of seven women organising them roughly chronologically and by collector, telling you a bit about the woman and why they collected then showcasing items from those collections. He clothes spanned four hundred years and most of the world.   The show introduced me to some great characters and well as including some beautiful textiles. I think my favourite ladies were the early ones. I liked Louisa Pesel, an embroider from Bradford, who started the Bradford Khaki Club in 1917 for injured First World War soldiers and taught them how to sew and embroider and later on worked at Winchester Cathedral and led a project to create 360 kneelers. I loved Olive Matthews who started collecting pre-Victorian clothes with her pocket money. She never paid more than £5 for a piece and amassed 3000 items. She reminded me of when I collected vintage clothes...

Fun installation at Westminster Underground Station by British Ghanaian artist Larry Achiampong. Part of Achaimpong’s on-going multi-disciplinary and multi-site project ‘Relic Traveller’, this work took the iconic London Underground logo and recreated in red, green and gold, which represents African diasporic identities. Red and green are for the land, the people and the struggles the continent has endured, while gold represents a new day and prosperity.  There were eight new logos used throughout the stations. I must admit they had been awhile before I spotted them. In my defence I walk through the station more than I actually use it but , once I had realised there was art about, I really loved this work as the logos maintained their function and brand while being a bit different an innovative. Closes 29 February 2020

Magical exhibition at the Halycon Gallery of video presentations by Dominic Harris. It’s hard to find an overarching label to describe this show. It was digital works presented like paintings or nature studies. The commentary called them a “surreal and whimsical take on reality set in the context of art history”.   Flowers, birds and butterflies looked still but as you walked past them they moved in interaction with you. With the sunflower shown here its petals moved gently in a breeze and in a representation of butterflies mounted in a case, one by one they flapped their wings. My favourite were four pictures referencing Dutch flower pictures which gradually got more modern and minimal until the last was just falling petals. The gallery assistant showed me how, if you moved your hand across them, you could move the flowers or they retreated into buds if you touched them. I could have played with it for hours! I wasn’t so taken with the Disney works. Harris is one ...

Fun exhibition at Sprüth Magers of three installation works by Peter Fischli and David Weiss. The main work on show was Raft, part of which is shown here, which is a sculpture of objects on a raft made in polyurethane. Referencing the Raft of the Medusa in the Louvre in this item I felt it was memories rathe than people being saved. The objects were eclectic mix of paint pots, toilet rolls, radios, old furniture, crates, an accordion and much more. The whole thing was surrounded by circling crocodiles and hippopotamuses, albeit that in this case they were circulating in another room.    On the first floor the installation consisted of 12 tables with groups of black and white photographs which I again felt was about snapshots of memories although in this case it was looking at the art of amusements parks but with the colour and excitement removed. I admit I never found the third video installation which was in the basement and never worked out what the longest t...

Vibrant exhibition at David Zwirner Gallery of work by the Indian artist Benode Behari Mukherjee from the 1950s and 60s. These were bright abstracted collages putting you in mind of Matisse but most intriguing was that Mukherjee was blind when he made them. He shaped and organised the pieces but touch and dictated the colours to assistants. The pictures made with paper, news print, string and bits of material, were full of action and life. I loved the pictures of street performers. Even more remarkable were the drawings on show, all also done after he had gone blind. They were expressive pictures of people and animals with no hints that they were produced from memory and gesture not sight. Closes 22 February 2020 Review Guardian

Beautiful exhibition at David Zwirner Gallery of work by Ruth Asawa, the first major show of her work outside the USA. I loved the wonderful hanging sculptures made looped wire which reminded me of salad dryers. I particularly like the ones with shapes within shapes and they were beautifully hung here as a collection you could walk around setting up interesting vistas through them. There were also examples of her tied wire work where a group of wire were divided out like the branches of tree, starting with a clump of all the wires at the centre and dividing off in groups until there was just the single strands at the periphery of the work. The commentary said that these were based on a desert plant but they reminded me of lungs. The works were surrounded by Asawa’s sketches for them and photographs of her working on them in her studio. Closes 22 February 2020 Reviews   Guardian Telegraph

Nice display  a t the National Gallery highlighting “The Finding of Moses” by Orazio Gentileschi which has recently been   acquired by the gallery. The picture was shown with two information boards on the artist and on the iconography of the picture. It is one of the few pictures made while Orazio was working for the English court in his late 60s. The picture was painted for Queen Henrietta Maria and hung at the Queen’s House in Greenwich. The river in the top right hand corner is meant to represent to evoke the Thames. It may have been inspired by the recent birth of the future Charles II. It was a nice touch to have this display in the same room as the Caravaggio’s of whom he was a follower and with the recently acquired picture by his daughter Artemisia. Incidentally I can’t wait for the exhibition of her work coming soon to the gallery.

Interesting small exhibition at the National Gallery looking at how Bomberg was inspired by his study of works in the gallery in the early 20th century. The most interesting thing about this display was that it showed studies as well as the finished works. Because Bomberg’s work is quite abstract and disjointed I usually can’t see the subject in it but seeing the more realistic studies with them helped me see the image trapped within.   I am not sure I always understood the connection with National Gallery work that they were trying to make. It might have worked better if more of the Old Masters were hanging in the room rather than having to remember the images in this display and walk round the main galleries to find the originals. However I am going to a day’s workshop on Bomberg and art education in a few weeks so hopefully I will be enlightened. Closes 1 March 2020 Reviews Times Telegraph Evening Standard

Quirky exhibition at National Portrait Gallery looking at popular portraits in society. This is a new area of collecting for the gallery and it looked at how named individuals or identifiable characters are represented and seen by a wide cross section of people via the pictures of people that surround us that aren’t formal portraits. These range through caricatures, souvenirs, currency and posters. The show was arranged in sections including royalty, politics and Shakespeare as a national hero. I loved the use of ceramics in it including a bust of William Booth, a commemorative plate for Victoria’s Golden Jubilee and a medieval floor tile of king. The more unusual items included the attached tea towel of Charles and Diana, a rubber duck of Shakespeare and a dog toy based on the Splitting Image puppet of Margaret Thatcher. Closes 1 March 2020

Annual exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery for this award for photographic portraits. I thought it was a good show this year with some wonderful images. There seemed to be a theme of people photographing their mothers including the attached by Sirli Raitma of her mother who suffered from depression but posed in strange clothes and the process started to lift her out of her illness. I liked Garrod Kitkwood’s joyous picture “The Hubbucks” a picture of a family going to the seaside with all the accoutrements for their trip, including an inflated dolphin, on the roof rack. You had to smile at the child with a mas of red curly hair with her head out of the window.   Sometimes it was the story that sold the picture such as with Ocled Wagenstein’s “Mordechai and Aryeh”, a picture of Mordechai mourning his partner of sixty years by wearing his clothes. My favourite picture this year was by Seamus Ryan of Captain Hannah Graf MBE for a series called Pride in London. ...

Charming exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery of work by Finnish photographer Pentti Sammallahti. These were beautifully observed, classically printed photographs mainly of cold landscapes. I loved   a picture of ducks and swans on a smooth lake with the swans making a white focus to the centre of the picture plus one of a frog in a river with just it’s head peeping out. My favourite two were of dogs, the one shown here of farm dogs with a tractor, and one of a dog in the snow carrying a bag, a picture full of purpose. Closed 2 February 2020

Interesting exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery looking at the Soho area of London through the lens of seven photographers from the 1960s to today. The commentary links the timing of the show to the “imminent completion of Crossrail … in autumn 2019” which seems a little ironic and was obviously written a while ago. But is does rightly point out that this is changing the area as it become a prime target for redevelopment. My favourite works were those from the 1960s by Kelvin Brodie showing street scenes and police raids, as shown here, and John Goldblatt who photographed the dressing rooms of strip clubs. I loved their gritty realism. I also liked William Klein’s work from 1986 looking at 24 hours in the life of the area.   Corinne Day’s pictures from 2003 focused on her friend’s taken in her flat in the area and Gebler Davies work from 1998 looked at the Colony Room Club. It was a nice touch to have commissioned new work from Daragh Soden which looked at...

Comprehensive exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery looking at food photography. The show looked at how eating is mundane and carnal but central to ritual, religion and celebration and how photographs about food are rarely about food. It looked at how still life of food, which had always been a popular genre of art, translated into the world of photography. I was most attracted to the early photographs, having recently done a course on the relationship between art and photography, so it was great to see a lovely Roger Fenton of a decanter and fruit from the 1850s as well as Charles Jones’ wonderful picture of lettuces from 1900. The section on sharing food had a fun focus in picnics including a photo of a picnic being held across the Mexican border and a Tony Ray Jones from 1967 of Glyndebourne with evening dressed diners at a picnic table with cows behind. There was a good section on the history of photography for cookery books with a nice array of examples from...

Interesting exhibition at Philip Mould & Company looking at the work of the early 20th century society portrait painter, Ambrose McEvoy. McEvoy was well known in his day, having been encouraged by Whistler and traveled to Dieppe to work with Sickert, but is largely forgotten now. He posed his subjects using cleverly arranged electric lights which gave the pictures a clear bright quality. The pictures now have an old fashioned look and subject but they have wonderful loose brush work. The pictures on mass give a view of society in the early 20th century and, particularly the downstairs room, gave you a sense of being at a fabulous cocktail party. I loved the picture of Lady Diane Copper, shown here, which she entitled “Call to Orgy”! It was a nice touch to have the actual top worn in one of the portraits shown with the picture as it gave an idea of the artistic interpretation involved. I was fascinated by the section on the archive material collected by McAvoy’s...

Strange exhibition at Canada House by Skawennati, describes as an “urban mowhawk woman and cyperpunk”. The premise of this show was that the work was all created within the virtual environment, Second Life. She makes movies she calls “machinimas” and photographs “machinimagraphs”. Both of these are made by her avatar. She uses this medium to look at indigenous people and to raise their profile and sees it as a world in which they can have their own voice and not reinvent as ‘normal’.   I loved the wall of portraits from this virtual world but am struggling a bit with whether I think they are fine art. They are however clear, bright, striking images. I’m afraid I didn’t have time to invest in the video presentations. I also liked the series of three doll sculptures, a real Barbie in a customised outfit, a 3D print of that Barbie and a corn husk version. Closes March 2020

Stunning exhibition at White Cube Bermondsey of new work by Anselm Kiefer. From the wonderful main corridor lined with 30 vitrines, boxes filled with a collage of painting and sculpture, I was grabbed. Each box work as a standalone work but the whole became an installation. The detail of each was different and I particularly liked the ones with gold backgrounds. From the corridor you fed off into the side rooms which were mainly dominated by huge landscapes. My favourite was “Ramanujan Summation 1/12”, a huge piece in a room of its own, which worked like a modern altarpiece. There was a complex explanation of it but I saw a First World War battlefield with rows of posts and explosions. I stood in front of it with a sense of awe. I loved the three “Superstrings” pictures, great wide landscapes, with paths leading to a horizon. They made me feel very positive and lifted, however the description described them a devastated landscapes, so maybe I was just in an optimistic ...

Fascinating exhibition at Eames Fine Art of prints by Hogarth. All the usual suspects were here but with an excellent commentary on them in the context of their time plus a history of the engraving plates. The prints shown here came from the last printing off Hogarth’s own repaired plates in 1822 and were lovely, crisp versions. It was nice to be able to get up very close to the prints, yes the glasses were off, and see how they were made up of tiny hatched lines, in an almost Pointillist style. It made you appreciate the workmanship and planning involved. I particularly like the prints of London and theatrical life such as the attached of strolling actresses dressing in a barn, not exactly much privacy but I guess that wasn’t the point! Closes 2 February 2020