Cathy's Art Diary

Novel exhibition at the Royal Academy showing the work of three of the Royal Academy Schools students. Lolly Adams, Djofray Makumbu and James Sibley explore “staging through methods of set building, costuming and moving image production” according to the blurb. I must admit a lot of the blurb was pretentious and incomprehensible like “Presented here are fragments of the narrative vehicles in which each artist escapes across the causeway, towards finished work.” Please teach students to present their work in a simple way. Looking at the handout since I realise the random old phone in the floor was a soundscape by Djofray Makumbu. It would have been used to have a label on it to encourage its use. That said I liked Lolly Adams bits of costume design and animated avatar wearing it but my favourite was James Sibley’s recreation of the cupboard under his grandparents stairs created to the size it appeared to him as a child. Closed 3 November 2024  

Interesting small exhibition at the Royal Academy looking at the processes to create a work of art. Using items from the Academy’s own collection it   looked at art from the sketching of the first ideas, use of drawings to build compositions and   though the materials used. There was a nice case of sketchbooks including a contemporary one from Eileen Cooper and it was interesting to see a traveling watercolour box used by Turner and a palette set up by Reynolds for a pupil. I was fascinated by a set of tracings from a book of costume designs but Millet with he used as models for some of his paintings. My favourite piece was a preparatory lithograph for Dame Laura Knight’s poster for the 1937 summer exhibition. C loses 31 December 2024  

Vibrant exhibition at the Royal Academy looking at art in Ukraine in the early 20th century. The work was beautifully hung against bright complimentary walls in chronological themes. I loved the edition of a room of theatrical designs. I discovered lots of artists I had not come across before and found myself particularly drawn to Alexandra Exter and Vadym Meller. The show was clearly described and set the art against the history of the country at the time. It built a narrative distinguishing it from the Russian art of the time but I found the outline very similar with Avant Gard artists being encouraged around the time of the Revolution but the suppression of most of those artists in once Stalin came to power. Closed 13 October 2024 Reviews T imes Guardian Telegraph  

Sweet exhibition at Unit of new work by Gori Mora exploring “safe spaces” for queer people. I think I was meant to be slightly shocked but I just thought they were sweet as they had a cartoon like quality. I couldn’t help but think it was Tom of Finland meets Beryl Cook and incidentally I’m annoyed with myself for missing the recent exhibition which did bring those two together. I was intrigued to find they are oil paint on Perspex which I’d not come across before. It gave   a very shiny finish to them which added to the campness but made them hard to photograph. Closed 23 September 2024  

Beautiful and fun exhibition at Unit of new work by Damian Elwes recreating and reimagining the studios of famous artists. I loved the detail in these pieces leading you to spot props the artist had used or landscapes through windows which had influenced them. They gently mimic the style and palate of the artist and recreate their art hanging on the walls or on an easel yet again keeping Elwes style. At first I was annoyed they weren’t labelled but there was a good webpage and links to stories about the pictures and actually it was more fun to just look and work out who they represent. There were just two that foxed me which weren’t on the site. My favourite was this clever Francis Bacon.  C losed 23 September 2024

Excellent two day online course from ARTScapades looking at the history of the Silk Roads and how ideas as well as goods travelled along them. Susan Whilfield from the University of East Anglia guided us through starting with an overview of the history of the routes and the religions which operated along them. She pointed that the routes were a lot wider than usually thought and stretch into Japan at one side and Scandinavia at the other. She then went on to talk about silk itself and how its trade and production travelled along the routes starting in China. She talked about the different qualities of silk that were produced. One the second day she looked at the role of pilgrimages, both Christian and Buddhist, in spreading ideas and bringing goods and souvenirs back. I was fascinated by a Buddhist statue which had been found in Scandinavia with signs that it had been displayed in the same was as they displayed Norse gods. Finally she focused on four objects looking at their t...

Ethereal exhibition at the Pontone Gallery of new work by Chris Rivers. These striking pieces examine the 12 signs of the Zodiac and the 4 elements representing them as imagined images of space. The Zodiac works all include a gold circle and stars added as blobs of metal giving them a textural quality. The paint is then expressively applied giving a sense of atmosphere. I notice a few had sold but it’s a shame they hadn’t been bought as a set as they work so well together. Closed 21 September 2024

Exquisite small exhibition at the British Museum putting their new acquisition of a drawing by Rembrandt of a sleeping child in context. The show looked at pictures of children in Dutch and Flemish 6th and 17th centuries works in the context of art and social history. They ran chronologically placing Rembrandt in the centre of the timeline. I loved the early drawings by Henrick Goltzius as well as his engraving of Frederick de Vries who was his apprentice while the boys artist father was in Venice. It was done to send to his father to Sue him there but was well! There was a good selection of Rembrandt drawings from the collection featuring children and the commentary talked about how he often saved drawings of everyday life to reuse the images in religious works. The focal drawing, shown here, was so delicate. Finally the show looked at followers of Rembrandt and a new find for me were some beautiful, coloured interiors by Adriaen Van Ostade. Closed 6 October 2024   ...

Fascinating exhibition at the British Museum of new contemporary acquisitions celebrating a grant from the Rootstein Hopkins Foundation which has enabled them to buy over 300 works. The show had some beautiful pieces but also acted as an overview of art since the 1960s. I was impressed at how many of the artists I knew but I was also introduced to some great new finds. The show was gently themed bringing together works influenced by art history, pictures of people, still-lives, landscape and abstract work. Needless to say it was the art history section which I loved most. As ever in the print room galleries the labels were comprehensive but simply written. Highlights included the first in the show by Cornelia Parker of wine glasses, Jake Garfield’s take on Zoffany’s Tribuna of the Uffizi and Charlotte Verity’s watercolour monotypes based on plants in her garden in lockdown. My favourite was this exquisite Japanese ink work by Joy Gerard based on a photograph of a demonstration...

Amazing exhibition at the National Gallery looking at Van Gogh’s two years in Provence. It was so good I almost don’t know what to write about it! The individual works blew me away so it was hard to follow the narrative. I’d done an online talk on the show earlier on the week so thankfully I didn’t have to! It was arranged in gentle themes emphasising how Van Gogh used the same subject to express different moods and how he repeated images but never copied them. The core of the show focused on the Yellow House and how Van Gogh saw it as a way to display his art. It was magical to have a room of pictures that had been shown there and don’t get me started on the fact they had two Sunflower paintings hung with “The Lullaby” as a triptych suggested in a letter to his brother. It was a great idea to have minimal labels and a booklet with more information to carry round. Make sure you pick it up on the way in. It’s also fascinating to read where the pictures come from. You’ll never s...

Clever and beautiful small exhibition at the National Gallery looking at how David Hockney has been inspired by Piero Della Francesca. It brought together Francesca’s “Baptism of Christ” with two paintings by Hockney from 1977 in which it features, “Looking at Pictures on a Screen” and “My Parents” and hung them like a triptych. It did make you look more closely at all three. They were shown with archive material from the gallery around Hockney’s 1981 exhibition there in which “Looking at Pictures on a Screen” featured and including a letter from him to the gallery requesting private access to Van Gogh’s “ Sunflowers” and permission to photograph art works. I loved the reply from the then director denying the later due to how disruptive it might be. Oh dear I’d just taken at least one picture of each of the works in the show! This also made me think that the title of that “Looking at Pictures on a Screen” means something quite different now! Closed 27 October 2024 Reviews Ti...

Charming exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum showcasing the ceramics collection of Henry Willett. Usually to be seen at Brighton Museum and Art Gallery the collection aims to tell a popular history of the British Isles through the pottery found “on the mantlepieces of many cottage homes”. I have seen the collection in Brighton, donated in 1903,   but not really looked at it in any detail. Here it was shown with pieces Willett had given to the Victoria and Albert Museum and shown under the 23 categories he had defined. I do love ceramics and was intrigued to see such a wonderful cross section of popular subjects from crime, through celebrity to religion. Highlights included this portrait of Princess Charlotte, a jug commemorating the guillotine and of course a Sussex connection in a jug advertising a builder in Lewes. Closed 25 September 2024  

Excellent exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum highlighting Sir Elton John and David Furnish’s photographic collection. I’d seen highlights of the collection before at Tate Modern but it was good to see a more comprehensive show. It was gently themed starting with fashion, moving through celebrity, the male form, documentary photography and ending with abstract pieces. It did feel like the more popular work came first but that might just be my taste. The pictures and rooms were well described and I found lots of stories to follow up. The emphasis was very much on the works not the collectors. I was quite pleased with how many photographers I recognised from other shows. I think my favourite picture was this one by Hiro (Yasuhiro Wakabayashi) of Shinjuku Station in Tokyo and I was surprised to find it had been taken in 1963 as it felt very contemporary. Closes 5 January 2025 Reviews Times Guardian Telegraph Evening Standard    

Interesting online lecture from ARTscapades introducing an exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum on the 1924 Paris Olympics. The co-curator Caroline Vout from the University of Leiden led us through the main themes of the show and some of the highlight exhibits. She showed us how the show started by setting the scene of what Paris was like 100 years ago and how it hosted the games. She then looked at some of the personalities o the games including the runners made famous by Chariots of Fire some of whom were students at the University of Cambridge giving local interest. Next she talked about how the games reflected modernity but also drew on classical themes particular around the presentation of ideal bodies in a period after the destruction of the First World War. I had wanted to see the show but ran out of time so this talk was the next best thing and gave a good sense of what it was about.

Fascinating online lecture from the National Gallery introducing their exhibition on Van Gogh. Christopher Riopelle and Cornelia Homburg led us around the show explaining the themes including lovers, gardens and architype portraits, and the choices they had made when hanging it. They emphasised how they wanted to put the art rather than Van Gogh’s life at the centre of the narrative. They talked at length about the Yellow House and how he decorated it and how it became a place to show art in a new way. The best fact I learned was that Arles is full of Roman artefacts and yet Van Gogh doesn’t paint them. There was an excellent Q&A session at the end with some intelligent questions and illuminating answers. I have since been to the amazing show and he talk had been very useful in setting the scene and in pointing out the works on loan which are rarely on show.

Charming and informative exhibition at the King’s Gallery looking at royal portrait photographs since the 1920s. The show worked on many layers. It was a history of the royal family over the period, a look at the development of the technology and style of photography and a discussion of how photographs can be used to promote an image. It was nicely displayed with good, clearly written labels. I could have done with a family tree particularly for the late Queen’s cousins which might have helped with the multiple names used for one person eg Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon = The Queen ( till 1952) = The Queen Mother. The show cleverly used the name which was used at the time the picture was taken. Review Telegraph

Interesting online lecture from the National Gallery looking at the life and work of Henri Rousseau. I have never quite understood Rousseau whose works seem to stand out in a world of their own against contemporary works be they by the Impressionists or the Realists. Lucrecia Walker led us through a selection of his work spending some time with the gallery’s own “Tiger in Tropical Storm” from 1891. She pointed out how difficult his work is to analyse as it is so out of its time and that he often wrote about his own work in a confusing way calling himself a Realist. Much of the work shows exotic, imagined scenes even though he never left France. She also looked at the people who championed him particularly Picasso and we looked in some detail at the banquet he hosted for Rousseau which was attended by most of the avant garde of the time. There seems to have been a fine line between admiring him and mocking him. I’m not sure I understand him any better but at least I now realise...

Charming exhibition at Ditchling Museum of Art and Craft in the life and work of the illustrator Raymond Briggs. The show was beautifully described with lots of quotes from Briggs and included a rich selection of original artwork. It was accompanied by a lovely video of an interview with him. The show also looked at his technique and compared different approaches. From the opening case of memorabilia inspired by his books I was hooked. I loved seeing the portraits of his parents painted on cupboard doors from his house. I hadn’t realised how groundbreaking his books were with “Father Christmas” being one of the first British picture books to use the comic strip format. Closed 27 October 2024 Reviews Times Telegraph

Fun selling exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery marking the summer with photographs of the British seaside. I knew a few of the photographers represented from an exhibition with a similar theme at the National Maritime Museum a few years so there was some of Martin Parr’s observational pictures and one of Simon Robert’s pictures of piers. New to me were Anna Fox’s vividly coloured images of Butlins at Bogna Regis but my favourites were Luke Stephenson’s series “99 x 99s” recording how ice cream makers across the country make the 99 ice cream unique. Closed 8 September 2024

Enigmatic exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery showcasing work by Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide. Most of Iturbide’s career has been spent documenting indigenous populations in Mexico, offering a glimpse into their rituals, traditions and struggles. This sounds quite dry on paper but the images were quirky with an eye for the strange but beautiful. My favourite picture is this one which took me a while to work out. It is a man carrying two mirrors which create images within images. I think it’s one of the best photographs I’ve ever seen. Her later work has moved away from photographing people to look at abstracted images of cacti and other plants in a series called Naturata. Closed 22 September 2024 Review Guardian    

Pointless exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery of books relating to the subject of love. This was a display of photobooks, novels and fiction publications which were intended to encourage an understanding of love that is open to interpretation. They were just laid out around the room with no guide into them or themes. The large info board said it was co-curated by Develop Collective a three-year programme (2023-2026) that mentors and commissions emerging creatives aged 18-24 through a series of talks and workshops connected to a photography-based outcome each year. I’d be interested to see what they work on next as this is early in the process but it needs to have more substance. Closed 22 September 2024  

Moving exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery marking the 1967 book “House of Bondage” by Ernest Cole. Cole published the book in exile in America and it is seen as one of the most important photo books   to record life in Apartheid South Africa and revealing its brutality and injustice to the world. The pictures were shown in the same chapter themes as the book and all the commentaries were in Cole’s own words which added an immediacy to them. The images were clear and effective and told the stories of the people shown simply.    The sheer inhumanity of the stories being told still beggar belief. I kept wondering what had happened to individuals. The most bizarre pictures were of rush hour trains which highlighted the illogical absurdity of making the black populations live a long distance from the cities while providing the Labour needed in them without reasonable train provision. Closed 22 September 2024 Review Telegraph