Cathy's Art Diary

Striking installation at Tate Modern by Bob and Roberta Smith. I’d made a special point of going to see this display as I live quite close to Thamesmead , a modernist large-scale housing project built in the late 1960s. Based on interviews with residents in 2019-20 it documents the histories and identities of Thamesmead and its communities. It records memories from the past and hopes for a post-Covid future. Alongside the text on this huge billboard are bright landscapes of the area to represent the illuminated pages of a medieval book or codex. I loved the placing of the work at one end of the bridge between the two buildings of the gallery so that you could see it from a distance and it gave sense of being in an urban space. Closes 7 May 2023    

Touching exhibition at the Royal Academy by Bob and Roberta Smith looking at the relationship his mother Deirdre Borlase had with the Academy and how that reflected the experiences of other women. Bob and Roberta Smith is the pseudonym of the artist Patrick Brill RA and his mother, Deirdre Borlase, who had found that if she submitted work under an initial rather than her first name it was more likely to be accepted to the Summer Exhibition as it was assumed the work was by a man. There were some lovely works by her in this show such as a still life of a kitchen cabinet and gasometers in Battersea. I loved Smith’s funky labels for the work. As well as showing his mother’s work there were new works based on things Smith has learnt from her and on her life mainly paintings of words. He also looked at the two female founders of the Academy, Angelica Kauffman and Mary Moser, in two sculptures. Jessica Voorsanger, Smith’s wife and Etta Voorsanger-Brill, his daughter also contrib...