Cathy's Art Diary

Strange but compelling exhibition at White Cube Mason’s Yard of new work by sculptor David Altmejd. From the first room with one large humanoid figure with the ears of a hare looking down in a yoga pose I was hooked. Downstairs were smaller works both of more hares, representing the Jungian archetype of the trickster, alongside strange humanoid heads with multiple eyes. The latter were nightmarish but I read them as having a sense of movement like a stop motion film. I think the edition of glass eyes is what gives them their eery quality. Closes 21 January 2023  

Interesting exhibition at the Thomas Dane Gallery of small works by Cecily Brown of studio scenes. I had come across Brown as the huge new paintings at the top of the Courtauld staircase so it was interesting to see smaller works by her. These were dense images which were slightly hard to make out so your eye and brain started to find subjects within them. They felt quite course close up but an interesting effect. There were a few of nudes which had a Sickert feel to them. Closed 17 December 2022

Beautifully presented exhibition at the Moretti Gallery of a newly discovered painting by Zoffany. This was a stunning picture of the actor Edward Townsend on stage from 1792 which has only been changed hands three times since it was painted having staying in the Zoffany’s family after his death. It was in amazing condition and just glowed on the canvas. I loved his embroidered yellow waistcoat. The picture was shown with an excellent commentary on its ownership and a look at recent technical analysis by the Courtauld. Closed 16 December 2022  

Stunning exhibition at the David Gill Gallery of glass pieces by Barbara Nanning. This was a wonderful selection of work arranged as installations on mirrored tables made with innovative techniques which were well explained. I think my favourites were the clear pieces shown here but I also loved some with gold interiors. Each was beautiful but they also benefited from being viewed as an installation.   C losed 22 December 2022

Delightful exhibition at the Christea Roberts Gallery of   work by American artist Jim Dine. The show featured prints and paintings of plants and flowers dating from 1976 to the present day. The upstairs gallery featured larger work including some complex monoprints of dense jungle scenes. Downstairs were smaller workers including a series called “ The History of Gardening” from 2002 in bright colours with annotations. My favourites were long prints over for sheets called “Rachael Cohen’s Flags”, in honour of his grandmother, showing a row flowers. Closes 21 January 2023

Fascinating, well-presented exhibition at Philip Mould & Co of work by the 19th century artist Sarah Biffen. Biffen was born with no arms or legs but became a famous miniaturist with her work being bought by George IV and being mentioned in novels by Dickens. T he show was arranged chronologically and by topic and took us through her earlier life as a travelling fairground act to having her own studio. It featured a lovely selection of her work as well as fascinating archive material. Alison Lappa, the contemporary artist with a similar condition who featured in a sculpture on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square had acted as consultant to the show which gave it an extra layer of understanding. Closed 21 December 2022 Reviews Times Telegraph  

Interesting exhibition at the Brazilian Consulate of photographs of Brazilian football since 1958. OK I admit will go to anything but my main reason for going into this show, as well as the fact its poster caught my eye as i I walked past, is that it’s always good to pop into this building with its wonderful decoration which used to be the headquarters of P&O. The show has 42 images and cleverly split the two displays by date but also by the move from black and white to colour. There were some wonderful action spots but it would have been good to have more fulsome labels for the uninitiated even just the photographers name. Closed 23 December 2022

Incompressible exhibition at Somerset House of three videos and an installation. I’m afraid the handout was so convoluted, that despite reading it a number of times, I’m still not sure what the point of the show was and therefore didn’t feel invested enough to watch the videos. I’m afraid when a phrase in the handout ‘fictional activism’ has to have an asterisked note below I lose the will to live. The show was curated by ‘exploratory producing platform’ A—-Z in response to an interpretation of The Tempest as a critique of colonialism but I had no idea what that had to do with the art. Now if the installation shown here has been a comment on the World Cup I’d have understood but evidently it was a ‘violent investigation into the art world’. Closes 19 March 2023

Disappointing exhibition at the National Theatre showing the best entries in this year’s Linbury Prize for young theatrical designers. I say disappointing as I usual enjoy this show, but this year the write up of the entrants were poor and didn’t always link the people well to the work they had done. Most of the displays were just photographs with not much explanation. There were however some small set models which I always like. I usually come away from the show having learned about performances I wish I’d seen but the only one this year was Hobson’s Choice set in a Sari shop. Closes 9 January 2023  

Surprising exhibition at Belmacz of some of the erotic drawings of Duncan Grant on loan from Charleston Farmhouse. I say surprising as I didn’t know they’d lent any plus I didn’t know the Gallery! I just walked past on my way to Oxford Street and found them. The show was curated by two contemporary artists, Jakob Lena Knebl and Ashley Hans Scheirl, who had designed the space and included some of their own work from the 1980s. I had already seen the exhibition of drawings at Charleston and I think if anything some of these were more acrobatic! They also seemed to include more women. They were beautiful displayed and it was good to find some of the works in a different context. Closed 23 December 2022  

Strange exhibition at Almine Rech of works in a narrative sequence by Haley Josephs. The narrative seemed to be about a dream and someone coming out of that dream into a landscape, I think. They were in strange, neon colours and I’m not sure I understood the story. However I was just out of and an excellent Freud show after which anything would have looked a bit odd. Closed 22 December 2022

Charming exhibition at Gagosian Grosvenor Hill of photographs by Bruce Bernard of artists who appear in the other exhibition in the gallery, Freud, Auberbach, Bacon and Andrews.   These were gentle and often funny photographs of the artists in their studios. It was fascinating to see them against paintings that you know well such as Bacon with “Street Scene (With Car in the Distance)”. The Freud pictures were most telling as they showed him larking around with his daughter Bella and Celia Paul, not a view we often have of him. I spotted in these light hearted works that he has on the boots he wears in the later naked self-portrait. I’d missed the note to say there were no photos in the gallery and a nice guard came up to tell me and watch me delete the two I’d taken (not this one it’s from the web). He then had to come back to ask me to delete them from the recycle bin and he had to show me how to do it! All fine very nicely and politely but it was a first for me in my wande...

Stunning exhibition at Gagosian Grosvenor Hill looking at the work of Lucien Freud and his Soho artist friends. The show told the story of the links between four artists, Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews, with a fabulous selection of works by them. With this year being the centenary of Freud’s birth there are a lot of shows on but this one has a number of works I’d not seen before. The pictures were hung well to set up a gentle dialogue between them. My favourite hang was a row of pictures by Auerbach, Bacon and Andrews which all included steps. Upstairs was a room of portraits of and by the artists as well as. Closes 28 January 2023 Review Times  

Colourful exhibition at Sadie Coles of new work by Brazilian artist Lucia Laguna. There works look like collages but are painted as one image albeit based on a collage of images. These all referenced the view from her studio windows and blend the urban and natural world. The images she blends are provided by her studio assistants then painted by her. I love the mix of images in these and the vibrant colours. The more you look at them the more detail you see yet those details work together well to form one image.   Closed 17 December 2022

Monumental exhibition at Hauser and Wirth of new work by Amy Sherald. These were big, bold, bright paintings of Black Americans some reappropriating art historical imagery. I loved how real they looked while still obviously being paintings. On Wikipedia her style is described as simplified realism which I love.   All of them set large figures with grisaille faces against a single bright background mainly in blue but I loved a lime green one. One gallery had slightly smaller works including one referencing the famous photo of a couple missing in Times Square in VE Day but replacing them with two Black men kissing.   The other gallery just had four big paintings but they were magnificent. I loved this pair of motorbike riders and a wonderful one of a man on a tractor referring back to 19th American rural painting. Sherald is best known for painting the official portrait of Michelle Obama. Closed 23 December 2022   Reviews Times Telegraph

Clever exhibition at Ordovas on Lucien Freud and horses. The star of the show was “Mare Eating Hay” from 2006 of a mare called Sioux who was Freud’s favourite horse when he painted at Wormwood Scrubs Pony Centre. Sioux went to his funeral and stood at the back of the chapel then led the procession to his grave. There was a charming photograph by his assistant, David Dawson, of him painting her. The show also looked at Freud’s love of gambling on the horses and included portraits of people he met through this interest including a portrait of his bookmaker, Irving Tindler, painted in lieu of a gambling debt. Downstairs were a selection of prints and etchings by Freud with some beautiful portraits including two of his dog. Closed 16 December 2022  

Vibrant exhibition at Unit London of work made during lockdown by Stephen Wong. These were effective landscapes despite being painted in rather artificial colours. They combined large sublime scenes with tiny figures also too small to see.   The large works were of Hong Kong where the artist lives and are based on plein air sketches done on long walks through the country around the city. I loved their scale as well as the colour. The smaller works are of Great Britain composed from Google Earth during lockdown. Each has a small toy car hidden in each picture and are shown with the car sitting on the top of the frame. Some have an odd perspective but they looked wonderful as a set. Closes 27 January 2023

Interesting exhibition at Unit Gallery of new work by Stacey Gillian Abe. These were large pictures of black women painted in Indigo blue to highlight the role the dye played in the East African Slave Trade. I loved the way Abe caught the different shades in the skin despite using blue. Some of the detail on the pictures was embroidered giving them a lovely texture. I particularly like the fine lines linking some of the figures. The pictures filled the space in an enjoyable but   challenging way. Closes 27 January 2023

Striking exhibition at Pace Gallery in Hanover Square of new work by Nigel Cooke. These pieces had an abstract expressionist feel to them but the colours were built up in a more logical fashion providing light and shade within the abstract composition. The title references both world maps and the Greek Titan who held the world on his shoulders and evidently express the artists travels and encounters with wildlife. I must admit I’d not have got that from looking at them but I loved their bold colours and painterly quality. Also liked their large format. Upstairs there were oil paintings but downstairs there were similar works in paper which were paler and more delicate. Closes 7 January 2023

Interesting online lecture from the National Gallery introducing their Lucien Freud exhibition. I’d already seen the show a few weeks ago but this talk made me determined to see it again as I learned a lot more about what it was trying to convey. Daniel Herman, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Projects at the National Gallery took us through each section and made links to the galleries collection which I had not spotted. My biggest takeaway was that the naked self-portrait references Michelangelo’s self-portrait in the Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel where he shows himself as the skin of St Bartholomew. In the picture Freud holds a palette knife which he didn’t use as a reference to the flaying of the saint.

Fascinating online lecture from the Paul Mellon Centre focusing on John Singleton Copley’s picture “Watson and the Shark”. This talk was given by Nika Elder from the American University of Washington, as the last in a series of talks entitled Georgian Provocations. This picture keeps cropping up in talks at the moment, as it is set in the Caribbean and features a black figures, so it was interesting to hear a bit more about it. Painted in 1778 in England but by an American artist who had recently crossed the Atlantic, it shows the real life rescue of Brook Watson from sharks when he was 14. It is unclear if Watson commissioned the work but he certainly went on to own it. He lost a leg as a result of the incident but the picture shows him whole and naked in the pose of a classical statue but on its back. It is making him into a classical, heroic and perfect figure. Elder went on to discuss the possible wider meanings of the picture from the sharks representing the Spanish, to an ...

Charming exhibition at Foyles on Charing Cross Road of illustrations by Tom de Freston. The show featured work from two books "Julia and the Shark" and "Leila and the Blue Fox", both by his wife Kiran Millwood Hargrave, with a mix of prints and original work shown in a nicely designed space with his characters cropping up between the exhibits and around the walls. There were good explanations of his working methods. Each finished image is a collage using various techniques to build depth. I loved the finished product particularly the more abstract pieces like the one shown here which had layers of paint over a map. I also liked his sweet small drawings of the animals and people in the stories. Closes 27 November 2023

Enjoyable online lecture from ARTscapades with Simon Jenkin’s introducing his book on European cathedrals.   The talk was a lovely travelog through a journey Jenkins had taken around the continent to view cathedrals with fabulous illustrations. Through this he also took us loosely through the chronology of ecclesiastical architecture. He also looked at how these buildings developed via pilgrimage and crusades. I liked the fact he came up to date with the quirky Sagrada Família in Barcelona. He introduced me to lots of buildings I didn’t know and made me what to tour Europe too. I particularly loved his illustrations of sculptures on West Fronts.  

Comprehensive online course from the National Gallery examining aspects of their current Winslow Homer exhibition. Over three weeks six speakers guided us through Homer’s life and work. Week one started with Chris Riopelle curator of the current show guiding us through it. I have heard him talk about it before but you learn something new each time. This was followed by John Fogg from the University of Birmingham talking about Homer’s experiences in the American Civil War and the effect on his art both during and after the war. Week two took us to Europe with Frances Varley from the Courtauld leading us through what art Homer may have seen when he was in Paris in 1866 and how it influenced his work on his return. She saw this as a period of experimentation and recovery from the Civil War. We then moved to England and his time at Cullercoats with Christine Riding from the National Gallery placing the work in the context of his whole career and in the fashion for artists to work in wo...

Stunning sculpture trail in Trafalgar Square of painted globes by different artists exploring the Slave Trade and its effects. These globes had been shown around the world in small trails but all 98 were brought together in the square for two days. There were some wonderful pieces with interesting art but the bulk of the images was the most powerful thing. A lot of artists were there chatting and people were really responding to the work. It was particularly moving to have them outside the National Gallery and they set up interesting dialogues between the architecture around them, each other and the current Forth Plinth sculpture. I was stunned by GE’s “When Colours Collide” which from a distance looked like it had a mirrored surface but when you got close you realised   it was painted. I loved Joshua Donkor’s “Ancestral Foundations” with beautiful portraits and QR codes to recordings of the sitters. My favourite was Alison Turner’s “At the Hands of The Enslaved, Our Societ...

Vibrant exhibition at The Gillian Jason Gallery of contemporary portraits by 10 female artists. I was struck by the bright colours of these mainly large pictures as you enter the gallery and they work just as well in the downstairs space. I liked Olivia Valentine Baynham’s portrait of herself and an artist friend in Klimt like print dresses as well as Naila Hazel’s bright works particularly “Mayhap” of people in the middle of the pandemic reflecting their thoughts on the situation. My favourite was this wonderfully joyous self-portrait of Precious Opara called “In the Bliss of it All”. Closes 17 December 2022  

Interesting exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery looking at the history of photography. I found this a useful run through developments and themes in photography but wasn’t sure how alternative I found it. The idea was to leave out some of the better known names in order to think beyond Europe and North America to give “a fuller, richer and more dynamic version of photography’s evolution”. However I found a lot of the big names were there plus I’ve seen quite a few shows recently of non-Western work so some of the other names were familiar to me. I liked the way it was roughly chronological but then used that to gently theme the work. The early section did introduce me to new names to look up and it’s always interesting to see the influence of women in the early days. A later section looked at how photographs can help to form identity and I loved this quote from Martyn Ewoma, artist and critic, “A nation is made up of and defined by its people, as such, how those people are...

Strange exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery using computers to combine and analyse photographic portraits from South India. The show combined images from the artist Aarti Akkapeddi’s family album and from a South Indian archive. Akkapeddi had dropped similar images then merged then into one. These were displayed in the pattern of a kolam, a pattern drawn in rice flour to welcome people to the home. The amalgamated image was shown in the middle of the group which formed it. I liked the effect and the idea but I wasn’t sure what the aim and conclusion of it was. The commentary said it looked at issues of seeing photos as data points. I wasn’t sure if the combined images were to be seen as giving those around it a stronger identity or diminishing them. Closes 19 February 2023  

Tender exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery of work by Chris Killip who died two years ago. I’d not come across Killip’s work but I loved these bleak but dignified pictures of life in the north of England in the 1980s. He emerged himself in communities at one point living in a caravan on a beach where people were foraging for coal spill. My favourites were the early ones from his home in the Isle of Man at a time when the community was split between the agricultural workers and financiers coming in. There was a stunning picture of an auction which was full of faces. I also loved this one from Durham in the miners’ strike. I love the man juxtaposed with the crowd of police yet their faces are the same. A section on a fishing community at Skinningrove in North Yorkshire reminded me of the current Winslow Homer show at the National Gallery and his work in the village of Cullercoats. Closes 17 February 2023 Reviews Guardian Telegraph    

Interesting online lecture from ARTscapades looking at the evolution ideas of the artist’s studio. James Hall of the University of Southampton and author of “The Artist’s Studio” led us through changes in studios from the Renaissance thought to contemporary artists. He explained studios started as luxurious spaces which developed from the ideas of studiolo and contained plaster casts, paintings and drawings as well as comfortable furniture. It was a space where clients came to see your work and sit for portraits so it needed to be welcoming and comfortable. In the 19th century this started to move to the idea of the squalid Bohemian space and an area for creativity, which came out of more painting for the speculative market rather than commissions, x-religious building being available cheaply after the French Revolution and the ideas of Rousseau. He also talked about how art began to move out of the studio partly with the growth in painting en plein air as technological developm...

Fascinating online lecture from the National Gallery outlining the latest scientific research on Leonardo’s “Virgin of the Rocks”. The format of the event was an interview with Marta Melchiorre of the gallery’s scientific department by Carlo Corsato from the learning department, leading her though some of the newest scientific techniques to analyses painting in a non-invasive way and what they have shown us about this painting. I’m not sure I understood all the science but I was intrigued by the results. Most fascinating were new ways of mapping the chemicals in pigments across a painting and, in this case, a zinc map showed up the underdrawing more clearly as the drawing material contained the chemical. This showed more of a very different composition under the one we see now which had been partly discovered in 2004. Melchoirre discussed how this drawing of the virgin looking down at the child supported by an angel closely follows a drawing in the Metropolitan Museum which also...

Interesting online lecture from the Wallace Collection using their collection of Canaletto’s to explore why visitors went to Venice in the 18th century and what pictures they bought when they were there. Leila Parker from the gallery explained how Venice was a hub for tourists on the Grand Tour who came for the spectacle of the architecture and the pageants. She outlined some of the annual events such as Ascension Day when the Doge, on his ceremonial barge, sailed out to the edge of the sea and threw in a ring to symbolise the marriage of the city and the sea. She then used the paintings to take us on a tour of the city showing the main sites which tourists, then as now, wanted a record of.  

Lovely display at the Sam Wannamaker Theatre at the Globe of work by Rutgers BFA theatre designers from New Jersey, USA, who are currently in residence there. Costume design and costume technician students had to design and create a cocktail hat that embodies a Shakespearean character which would work under candlelight. I loved these two for Olivia and Titania. My favourites though were by scenic and lighting design students who were tasked to create an object that with the addition of a single light source there a Shakespeare related shadows. These were small open boxes, each beautiful in their own right, which, when you pressed a switch, produced a shadow on the back which seemed was stunning created from the seat in front. I loved this one for Julius Caesar created from sheets of the US constitution. No end date given

Interesting joint exhibition at Bankside Gallery of work by Quentin Blake and Linda Kitson. These artists’ work is different however the link between them is that they have been friends for over 50 years since they met at the Royal College of Art. Blake was showing imaginary portraits done with ballpoint pens. The works could easily be characters for books and were mainly made up of dense, intersecting lines and each one being a single colour. I preferred the slightly sparser compositions. Kitson showed delicate sketches of mountains in Italy and France along with older ones of London. These were alongside her more recent works done on iPad mainly of London Building sites. They were in startlingly, strange, bright colours but they were really effective. I particularly liked ones looking up through construction work or juxtaposing buildings. Closes 20 November 2022  

Strange but compelling installation at Tate Modern by Chilian artist Cecilia Vicuña. These are two large hangings like a mobile over child’s cot but stretching from floor to ceiling of the Turbine Hall. At first glance I’m afraid they made me think of bad macrame but they definitely benefited from reading the description and stopping to enjoy the soundscape that accompanied them. From the description I learned that a   quipu is an ancient recording and communication system used by the Quechua people of the Andes from 2500 BC through to the time of the Spanish conquest. It means knot' consisted of a long textile cord from which hung multiple strands knotted into different formations to encode as much complex information. The work includes items found by the banks of the Thames by women from local Latin American communities. It is a work which could be easily dismissed at a cursory look but it is worth pausing and spending time with it. It might have had more visual effect if ...

Calming exhibition at Tate Modern of sculpture by Czech artist Maria Bartuszov á . This was a lovely peaceful show after the buzz and colour of Cezanne. Most of the work was made of white plaster in organic shapes displayed in white rooms. A lot it was created using plaster and balloons and I heard one man reminiscing about doing the same in school with papier-mâché. I loved the works, in all sizes, which she called “Inside Eggs” which layered thin round platter moulds one inside the other. I also liked the large reliefs such as the one shown here with an embedded branch. There was an interesting room on her later public works. In 1960s and 1970s Czechoslovakia it was a requirement for a certain percentage of the budget for new developments to be spent on commissioning public at art. What a great idea! Closes 16 April 2023 Review Guardian Telegraph Evening Standard