Cathy's Art Diary

Quirky exhibition at the Newport Street Gallery featuring work by Damian Hirst, Shepard Fairley and Invader. Fairley and Invader are both street artists and I'll admit I'm not very knowledgeable on street art so I didn't know their work, however this exhibition shows their work alongside collaborations between both of them and Hirst. At times it felt like an amusing mickey take of each other such as this work by Hirst and Invader using the latter's iconic symbol. Works included butterfly pictures and different takes on Hirst's spot pictures.   I would have liked a bit more explanation, but I gather this comes in an interview with the artists in the accompanying catalogue but I'd afraid I wasn't up for a big purchase. Evidently there was an extract in a free exhibition newspaper but as I went in the last week there was no sign of these. Closed 29 March 2026 Review Guardian

Delightful exhibition at the Garden Museum of watercolours by Charlotte Verity. The pictures were all of the gardens at Bottengoms, where Ronald Blythe, the 96 year old author lives, bequeathed to him by John Nash. The garden was inspired by Cedric Morris’s garden whose work was in the main exhibition in the museum. The pictures were black and white and almost abstract at first look but as you looked at the detail you were drawn in and saw a house amongst trees, telephone lines and details of buildings through the flowers. I loved some pictures of flowers where the image had been created by painting the background not the flower leaving the shape of the flower as a reverse silhouette. Closes on 10 June 2018

Colourful exhibition at the Newport Street Gallery looking at eight years of John Copeland’s work from 2009 to 2017.   The pictures are large figurative works based on found photographs and painted in thick paint. They drew me in to make up stories about the people in them despite the strange titles which didn’t seem to give you any clue as to the subject. I preferred the group scenes to the female nudes as the nudes had rather meaty faces, with maybe a touch of Francis Bacon in the approach. I liked the business of the group pictures especially the two of figures around tables.   Closed on 28 May 2018 Reviews Times  

Calming exhibition at the Newport Street Gallery showing this collection of paintings by Rachel Howard made between 2005 and 2008.   These were abstract works but represent the fourteen Stations of the Cross and found their genesis in the famous photograph of an Iraqi detainee standing on a box undergoing torture at the hands of US military personnel. The show started with her direct interpretation of this picture which shows a covered figure in a hood with their arms outstretched.   The pictures themselves are consist of stripes of paint from the top of the work and have a slightly out of focus feeling. They made me think of a mix of Rothko for the minimalism and Riley for the stripped effect. As you know I’m not a great abstract fan but I loved the muted colour and organic feel of these works. Although they were all quite similar they had a calming, slowing effect.   Her method, descripted in the leaflet, is that she lets varnish and pigment separate in g...

Fun exhibition at the Newport Street Gallery looking at the career of Dan Colen who has been exhibiting since 2001. From the first room which contained a huge US flag on a full sized crumped flag pole I was hooked. Of course it had visual links to the recent Jasper Johns exhibition. Who could resist a giant Scooby Doo puppet which gentle moved and dipped. I had to go back and look at this a second time after I’d finished the show. I was entranced. How about a Pollock like large canvas but made with chewing gum, bit yucky but it looked great! I was fascinated by the two Viscera picture made up of layers of pigment in fractionally different shades which seemed to pulse as you looked at them. An effect similar to Bridget Riley stripes and I couldn’t look at them for very long. All through the gallery there had been large silhouettes cut through the walls which were unexplained until the last room where there were large models of the artist and cartoon figures on the floo...

Strange exhibition at the Newport Street Gallery of work by Ashley Bickerton. This work was a strange mix of colourful works. The first room was a series of wall mounted installations looking like medical machines and complete with carrying cases/covers. The commentary said they are investigating what an art object is. I’m not sure I understood. The next room had coloured sharks with a large sculpture in the middle with five snake head self-portraits. The blue shark looked like it was hanging from the ceiling but was in fact standing on the floor supported on bronze ropes. I liked the rafts in the next room used as frames for objects representing masculine stereotypes. Upstairs I loved a wall of orange port holes full of pigment or types of objects such as one full of mobile phones, another with stones and one with yellow plastic cutlery. I don’t know what it meant but I liked it. There were also large portraits in elaborate frames with a Renaissance feeling as t...

Fun exhibition at the Newport Street Gallery of work by Gavin Turk. This was a good overview spanning 25 years of Turk’s work. I’d seen odd pieces by him before but never really looked at the development of his art. I like the way he plays with the idea of the creative act and uses his own signature to look at identify and value in art. I liked the large Pollock style canvas’s which turn out not to be random splats but hundreds of his signatures one over the other. These work beautifully with the large mirrored cubes which multiplied the images around the room. I found the room of figures a bit creepy as I have a bit of a thing about wax works. These were a series of models of him in different guises and in different materials. I loved the great bronze one with a shower head which regularly pumped water over the figure. I wasn’t too sure about the tramp like one with no display case. My favourite room was the last one which featured works which play with the idea of r...

Enjoyable exhibition at the Newport Street Gallery of work from throughout Jeff Koons career. I know there is a serious point behind these works about consumerism, mass culture taste etc but whatever the point they make me smile! I love the fact that so much of it is very ordinary objects but not made of the usual materials. Who can resist an inflatable lobster balanced on a chair but made out of aluminium and steel! There was one of the classic Koons balloon animals made of stainless steel which completely filled the double height middle room in the gallery which meant you could not only look round it but also down on it. I liked the steel reworkings of marble statues and again it was lovely that you could walk all around the works and look at the detail. I loved the huge pile of Play-Doh in the last room. It looked so realistic but was made of 27 individual pieces cast in aluminium held together by their own weight. I loved the juxtaposition of the bright colours an...

Colourful exhibition at the Newport Street Gallery of works by abstract artist John Hoyland. These were very large, bright pictures mainly in blocks of colour. I was interested to see that works he did in his country studio in Wiltshire had a different more muted palate. I’ll be honest though I have no idea why the show was called Power Stations. I quite liked the pictures but wasn’t really moved by them. However it was a good chance to see this new gallery set up to show work from Damien Hirst’s art collection. It has the standard white box rooms but I liked the double height gallery with a small walkway along it on the upper floor joining two galleries up there. It was interesting to be able to look down in the pictures and it would be really interesting to see sculpture there. Closes on 3 April 2016. Reviews Times Guardian Telegraph Evening Standard