Cathy's Art Diary

Fantastic exhibition at the Fashion and Textile Museum of textiles by Andy Warhol. I’d expected it to be late soup can stuff but it all dated from when he was a graphic artist in the 1950s and consisted of fun, novelty prints. You could see the start of Pop Art and his ideas of repetition and colour differences in the pieces. There was a nice mix of hanging swatches of material   and clothes made from it. I loved the humorous design of the material, usually of repeated everyday objects. The clothes were simple 1950s shapes which showed off the designs. I loved a skirt with large apples around the bottom and repeat pattern of buttons. I had also booked a talk on the site the curators, Geoff Rayner and Richard Chamberlain, which was fascinating particularly as they were such engaging speakers. They’d basically had an inclining that he’d done this work from a couple of small clues and they have researched it and bought pieces. What an interesting project. Chamberlain did admit...

Dense online lecture from the Courtauld Research Forum looking at an interview between the art critic Gene Swenson and Andy Warhol. Just occasionally I sign up to an online talk where I wish I knew a bit more about the subject before I’d joined in. The talk looked in depth at the art critical philosophy of Swenson but, I have to admit, I’d never heard of him so I was a little at sea. However I did look him afterwards and will look out for his work and ideas in future. The core of the talk looked at an interview with Andy Warhol which was used as the basis for a profile of the artist in the journal “Art News” and quoted in much of the later works on Warhol. However the speaker, Jennifer Sichel, from the Hite Art Institute at the University of Louisville, has recently discovered the original tapes which show that substantial sections of the interview were left out or adapted particularly around questions of homosexuality. She also looked at how this interview later led to Swenson ...

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...

Interesting exhibition at Tate Modern looking at the life and work of Andy Warhol.   I am not a great Warhol fan but this show did leave me with a greater understanding and appreciation of his work. I hadn’t realised that a lot of the work does involve painting on screen prints so it was more textured than I expected and seeing the repeat screen prints made me realise how each image is subtly different due to variations in the print quality. I loved his drawings which had a simple Matisse like feel to them, expressing a person in a few lines. It was a fun idea to recreate the foil walls of the Factory which gave you a real sense of the light effects of the silver walls on the floor and how his big, bold art works would have been reflected in the walls. I came away feeling that his work had become a cliché but, seeing it in person and put in context, realised how ground breaking he was. Closes 15 November 2020 Reviews Times Guardian Telegraph Evening Standard

Fascinating series from BBC4 exploring national museum collections at a time of enforced closure. I thought these were wonderfully produced programmes with a real sense of capturing a moment when two exhibitions I had hoped to visit went into lockdown. I believe the next two episodes will look at aspects of particular galleries and museums collections rather than specific shows and I’ll return to review those once they are shown later this week. Episode 1 looked at the Andy Warhol show at Tate Modern introduced by Alastair Sooke. I found the eerie shots at the start of the empty turbine hall and static escalators moving and melancholy and liked Sooke’s spin on the show as Warhol as a commented on the 21 st century even though he worked in the 20 th and parallels he drew to these strange times. I like the fact he was in the gallery walking around it as we would have done and there was a good mix of close up images and of him interacting with the work. It is interesting...

Colouful exhibition at the Halcyon Gallery of print series by Andy Warhol. The show looked at how Warhol understood mass imagery and included good commentaries on the series shown. Some of the sets remove the uniqueness of a work but others give deeper insight to the original subject. I liked the set of prints of Ingrid Bergman which were commissioned by a gallery when she died. Rather than using repetition Warhol chose four different pictures of her   three from films and one of her as herself. I liked the way he layers the screen-print, his own drawing and blocks of colour. I was also fascinated by the prints which incorporated diamond dust such as the Superman print where the dust was used as an outline of the superhero next to the main screenprint. My favourite set was the four based on Ucello’s St George and the Dragon as it’s a picture I love and it was interesting to see how the detail he chooses work in different colours and textures. Closed on 16 Febru...

Fun exhibition at the Halcyon Gallery looking at the early illustration work of Andy Warhol.   I hadn’t realised that when Warhol moved to New York he began by working as an illustrator for fashion brands and he became one of the city’s most successful commercial artists. I’d also not know that he lived with his mother and 25 cats all but one called Sam!   I loved a wall of shoe pictures called “A La Recherche du Shoe Perdu” from when he worked for a shoe manufacture, with the captions transcribed by his mother. The colour was added to the prints at painting parties which he held.   There was also a copy of his first book “Wild Raspberries” a satirical cook book with tongue in cheek recipes such as Baked Hawaii and a set of lithographs from 1953 of star crossed lovers.   Closed 10 June 2018  

Colourful exhibition at the Halcyon Gallery of graphics, portfolios and original works on paper and canvas by Andy Warhol. These works spanned Warhol’s career from a picture of a shoe from 1955 which I quite liked through to some series of works from the 1980s. The later works were big bold series of works. I rather liked the “Cowboys and Indian” series off figures from the Wild West and the upstairs room was dedicated to the 1982 series of 10 prints called “Endangered Species”. My favourite pieces were a series of takes on the Ucello picture of St George and the Dragon as it was interesting to see Warhol tackle an art historic subject. By varying the colours it made you look more closely at the composition. Closes on 4 March 2017

Fascinating exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery of work by Andy Warhol. Warhol was only given a camera in the 1970s even though photographs had inspired him for much longer. I loved his street pictures of New York and he showed a good eye for composition and juxtapositions of people and things. He also did a series of pictures where he duplicated the image and had them sewn together to create a repeated picture like the screen prints. I loved one of items on a pantry self and another of the side of an ice cream van. Of the three exhibitions on at the moment I found this the most interesting possibly because it was a visual artist working in another visual medium. Reviews Independent Evening Standard