Cathy's Art Diary

Beautiful exhibition at the Marian Goodman Gallery of stunning portrait photographs by Rineke Dijkstra.  I loved the clarity of these photographs with their sharp focus and insight. I felt I wanted to know more about the people and their stories. The first room were standard family pictures of which my favourite was the one shown here which I hoped was of a former dancer and her daughter, an aspiring one. I loved the two sets of pictures of sisters in each case including lovely clear pictures of them taken once a year over a period of 7 or 8 years. You see the girls mature and change to be recognisable but quite different by the end. There was also an excellent video installation where Dijkstra had filmed groups of people looking at and discussing Rembrandt’s Night Watch. They describe the picture and muse on aspects of it, without seeing the painting you build a picture of it in your mind.   Closes 25 July 2020 Review Guardian

Fantastic exhibition at Marian Goodman Gallery which looked at our relationship with animals. This show combined contemporary art with older examples under some loose themes. I loved the links it made and the great use of illustration. There were 70 contributors. It won me over straight away as the first thing I looked at was the Durer print of a rhinoceros! I loved the animal and bird feet prints which took you round the show and the clever use of the old cartoon of Animal Farm alongside various editions of the book. It was all so well thought out and presented. There were some wonderful things. I liked Stephen Balkenhol’s figures carved from one block of wood particularly a man with a birds head. Also Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photographs wildlife photographs which turned out to be of museum panoramas with taxidermy animals. Other nice older pieces were some of Maria Sibylla Merian’s illustrations as they’d recently been featured in a show at the Queen’s Gallery. Also...