Cathy's Art Diary

Striking exhibition at Annely Juda Fine Art of new work by the abstract sculptor Nigel Hall. The show included four large works and a selection of smaller ones and drawings all based on the interaction of interlinking circles and ovals. The large works looked magisterial in the white space and looked different from every angle. I particularly liked the blue and black title piece shown here named after a Bob Dylan song. The smaller works felt more domestic but kept the same strength and line. Seeing them with the drawings made you think about the shapes and how they reacted together. Closes 30 April 2021  

Thoughtful exhibition at Halcyon Gallery looking at how three artists use national and political figures and imagery to look at identity. The show included a classic set of Andy Warhol’s Chairman Mao screen prints which fascinatingly reproduces an image in different colourways so it ceases to have its original meaning and an impact. These were shown alongside some powerful portraits of individuals wrapped in flags by Mitch Griffiths, from a soldier in conflict to a vulnerable young woman in an American flag. The works are so highly finished and realistic I had to check online that they were paintings not photographs. However my favourites were Dominic Harris’s digital butterfly works. In the one shown here butterflies make up the American flag but if you touch the surface they break free and fly around the image. In another they fly away and return in a different colour. Larger individual works hung together react to sound and fly away if you clap or shout. Thank you to the securi...

Fun exhibition at Hauser & Wirth of two series of Charles Gaines’ Plexiglas gridworks. T he works overlap a glass pixilated effect colour image over a black and white photograph. The colour image being a mathematical analysis in colours of the photograph or a collection of photographs. I’m not sure I understood the logic or what the colours and numbers but I liked the images they created. It was nice that each series “Faces” and “Trees” were shown in separate galleries so you could concentrate on each one. “Faces” is an amalgam of faces in a series which began in 1978. Gaines uses people who identify as multi-racial or multi-ethnic and overpays their images in the colour section of the work to emphasis the similarities and differences in the faces. “Trees” continues a series which began in 1986 and in this case just looks at Dorset trees. The back photograph in this case shows a section of a tree whereas the colour grid shows whole ones again overlaying colour graded images ...

Interesting exhibition at David Zwirner of new work by Luc Tuymans made during lockdown. Most of these works were sketches, many done when Tymans was unable to get to his studio. They did give a sense of someone getting back to their creative roots in lockdown. The core of the show was a painted animation featuring two monkeys including a toy one from his childhood alongside sketches for its production. I loved some of the delicate drawings including a sketch of a Holbein portrait and a wonderful picture of a tulip. My favourite was the street seen shown here with the symbol for a video on the top which makes you want to touch it and watch it move. It will be interesting to see what develops from these spontaneous works in the future. Closes 22 May 2021

Charming exhibition at David Zwirner of a selection of work ay Antiguan artist Frank Walter. These were all small pictures of a variety of subjects and including abstract works. I like his strange, heraldic animals on red backgrounds but my favourites were his peaceful landscapes often evoking the island he came from. From reading the press release I didn’t really understand the work I was looking at, but a useful article in the Evening Standard filled in the gaps. The work at face value is pretty and quite naïve so I wasn’t sure why they had got to a leading London art gallery. However in reading the article I found that Walter had suffered from mental health issues and part of his therapy was to paint on anything he could lay his hands. A lot of these works are small because that are painted on the back of packaging boxes. He produced over 5000 works but rather than concentrating on individual works they need to be seen as a reflection of his mind and emotions. The heraldic pi...

Interesting exhibition at Thaddaeus Ropac of works in aluminium by Robert Rauschenberg from 1991. The show consisted of two series of works “Night Shades” and “Phantoms” alongside photographs by the artists used as source images for the paintings. The works have images silkscreened onto brushed or polished metal with brush strokes of tarnish called Allum Black. “Phantoms” create images of street scenes which appear and disappear as you move around them and add your reflection into the mix. I love the way they reflect the other works around them setting up a dialogue. “Night Shades” are darker images giving the impressions of city night scenes. Closes 31 July 2021  

Colourful exhibition at White Cube Masons’ Yard of new work by Gilbert and George. This was my first post-lockdown trip into a gallery so frankly anything real would have looked good but this was a fun way to start and definitely work that needs to be seen in the flesh to get the full impact. In each picture Gilbert & George insert themselves, dressed in bright suits, into urban landscapes among the detritus of the street sometimes enhanced with overlayed images. They seem to strike more playful poses than usual and, matched with their brightly coloured suits, it makes the streets look even more disturbing with the discarded drug packets, abandoned mattresses and graffiti. I loved the wit of the titles, picking up aspects of the image including “Respect Road” which included a Considerate Construction sign and “Cashmere” which picked up on the brand name of the discarded pink mattress included in it but enhanced with images of boxes of guns which led you to think of conflicts ...

Unusual online talk from the National Gallery introducing the idea of slow looking. C aroline Dawson and Holly Morrison explained the idea of taking time to look at a picture. They said that on average we look at a picture in a gallery for 8 seconds, I suspect I take a bit longer than that! They discussed the role that audio description can play in this and, taking Titian’s “Bacchus and Ariadne” as an example, Caroline took us through various descriptions of sections of the work, encouraging us to close our eyes while we listened then to look at the area the picture she had described with a fresh eye. I did find that there were things you looked at again, for me the cloud formations, however I found the words distracting. It felt odd to use a different medium to make you slow down and look at the work. Just stop and look. The idea seemed to be to make you look more closely and make up your own mind about the image and yet you had just been told what to look at. I also realised t...

Engaging online talk from the National Portrait Gallery touring their temporary conservation studio where they have moved during the refurbishment of the gallery. Alex Gent, Sally Higgs and Stuart Ager talked us through the work they had done prior to moving the collection and how they were taking the opportunity to do conservation work while the work isn’t on display. Each of them talked us through projects they were working on at the moment. Stuart talked us through his research for making a new frame for the self-portrait of the artist Joseph Southall and his wife, shown here, who had worked together to design frames for his pictures. Alex talked about how they work with contemporary artists whose work has been commissioned to understand their process and any conservation issue which might arise in the future. She took as her example a new portrait of Baroness Doreen Lawrence which I can’t wait to see in the flesh. Finally Sally talked about pictures she has worked on to ge...

Interesting  online lecture from the National Gallery looking at some of their major restoration projects over the years. Nick Pace took us through five pictures detailing the work that had been done one them with good illustrations of them at various stages of the process. Surprisingly he started with Holbein’s “The Ambassadors” which looks so fresh and new but he pointed out that in the 1970s it was a much darker work and at some point the planks had actually parted company. The most fascinating section looked at the Trinity Altarpiece by Francesco   Pesellino and Filippo Lippi which came to the gallery in 6 different sections starting with the figure of Christ and God the Father in the centre. Two saints on the left are still officially owned by the Royal Collections yet the work now looks like one seamless altarpiece. It was nice to also look at Manet’s “Execution of Maximillian” which entered the National Gallery collection in fragments from the Degas auction when ...

Fantastic online course from the Wallace Collection looking at how the Easter story has been depicted in art. Over two mornings Richard Stemp used a set of Limoges plaques from circa 1600 from the Wallace collection which are based on Durer’s Small Passion Woodcut set published in 1511 as the base of his narrative of the events of Holy Week and how they have been shown in art. He outlined where the gospel accounts differed and how artists had dealt with those differences. In addition he followed events via Duccio’s Maesta 1308-11, Giotto’s Scrovegni Chapel 1305 and Tilman Riemenschneider’s “Altarpiece of the Holy Blood” 1499-1505 as well as other examples of narrative works. He also pointed out little known works from the Wallace Collection showing these events from manuscript fragments, majolica works and even a suit of armour. I can’t wait to get back there and poke around some of the more crowded rooms to look for these gems.

Disappointing online talk from London Art Week looking at the early life of Thomas Lawrence. I say disappointing because, as the title suggests, it was meant to be on the early life of Lawrence based around a new book by Amina Wright who was one of the speakers. She started well and I was intrigued to hear more about how Lawrence was a child protegee, initially working from his father’s inn. However the chair of the event, Andrew Graham-Dixon, interrupted her narrative on a number of occasions making it hard to follow. The other two speakers were interesting, Lowell Lisbon, on Lawrence’s drawings and Ben Elwes on finding a lost self-portrait from these early years but there was not as much concentration on the astonishing story of his early life as I’d have liked and, as someone who didn’t know a lot about the artists I didn’t feel I came out of it knowing a lot more.

Thoughtful online talk from the National Gallery taking three pictures of women from the collection where they are not named and represent a type not an individual while obviously being a portrait of a real person. Holly Morrison, Kate Devine and Jenny Staff each took a picture and talked us through different ways to looking at it. These including “The Old Woman/The Ugly Duchess” by Quintin Massys from 1513, the portrait of a black woman shown here by an unknown French 19th century artist and “Miss Lala at the Cirque Fernando” by Edward Degas in 1879. Although in the latter picture we do know the subject they discussed whether Degas was painting her as a type rather than wanting to capture her individuality . This was an interesting contrast to the second picture, which I didn’t know and has been on long term loan to Dublin, where we aren’t burdened by what we know about the artist when we look at it. The Massys may represent a satirical type or a portrait of a real woman with Pag...

Enlightening online talk from the Churches Conservation Trust looking at images of the Annunciation in English churches. Canon Jeremy Haselock, Vice Dean of Norwich Cathedral, led us through some of the problems of depicting the Annunciation and how Medieval artists overcame these including the lack of description of the scene in the bible, the delicacy of depicting the event while still maintaining the purity of the Virgin Mary and what emotional response to give Mary.   He also talked about the cult of the House of Mary both in Loreto in France and Walsingham in Norfolk, both buildings or copies of the building in which the Annunciation was said to have taken place and both great centres of pilgrimage.   Most interesting was his description of an English iconographic phenomena, which I had not come across before, the Lily Crucifix which combines the lily of the Annunciation and a crucifix as it was said that the date of the Annunciation and the Crucifixion fell on the ...