Cathy's Art Diary

Fun exhibition at Pace of new sculptural installations by Genesis Belanger. Belanger uses porcelain and stoneware, metal, wood, and painting to create tableaux that draw from, and comment on, capitalist production and consumption. Grouping pastel-coloured objects they recreate everyday scenes in a doll like aesthetic which reminded me of the paintings of Wayne Thiebaud. Closed 9 November 2024

Monumental exhibition at Pace of new work by Robert Longo. The show was a mixture of work including a small and large graphite drawing, the large being of a huge flower in murky detail. There was also a film downstairs flashing up images from one day of news, 4 July 2024. I loved the idea but can’t cope with rapidly flashing images in a small space. My favourite piece was a five-panel work, each in a different medium. Longo calls these pieces “Combines”, and this consisted of a film still, a wall sculpture, a painting, a film and a detailed drawing. I found it very effective like a modern altarpiece. Closed 9 November 2024  

Charming exhibition at Pace Gallery of new work by Yto Barrada. The bulk of the works were patchworks and appliqué work where the colours worked with each other to form geometric abstract works however I was fascinated to read that all of the material was dyed at The Mothership, a Tangier-based natural dye garden and eco-feminist research centre. This gave the pieces an added layer of meaning around time. There was a fascinating video installation downstairs on the open air dying and drying process that’s used. A quietly, meditative film. Closed 11 May 2024    

Striking exhibition at Pace Gallery in Hanover Square of new work by Nigel Cooke. These pieces had an abstract expressionist feel to them but the colours were built up in a more logical fashion providing light and shade within the abstract composition. The title references both world maps and the Greek Titan who held the world on his shoulders and evidently express the artists travels and encounters with wildlife. I must admit I’d not have got that from looking at them but I loved their bold colours and painterly quality. Also liked their large format. Upstairs there were oil paintings but downstairs there were similar works in paper which were paler and more delicate. Closes 7 January 2023

Statuesque exhibition at Pace London of work by Robert Mangold spanning three decades. These were large works almost like wall sculptures and reminded me of altarpieces in their size and grandeur. Most were monotone combines shaped canvas’s with a thin line drawn on them crossing the panels. Another combined thin strips of brightly coloured wood into an elongated cross shape. They looked majestic in this white space. Closes 22 May 2021

Thoughtful exhibition at Pace Gallery of new work by Trevor Paglen. I loved the enhanced images of flowers an plants in this show which reminded me of Dutch still lives and indeed, in the excellent video on the website, Paglen points out the work is talking about the fragility of life during Covid and the momento mori aspect of those Dutch pictures. Those works were enhanced using an AI technique and other works in the show discuss aspect of AI. The giant head in the centre is based on the standard head used as a base for facial recognitions. One picture, which at first glance is a series of stripes is made up of tiny pictures in sequence of people from surveillance cameras. Another work references a data set for teaching machines to read handwriting based on children writing out the Declaration of Independence. This show reads like an installation as it has an interactive element of camera’s around the gallery livestreaming people viewing the works while it is open and giving y...

Tranquil exhibition at Pace of three new works by James Turrell. These works are presented in booths and feature elliptical and circular shapes with a glass surface animated by LED which change colour slowly and unperceptively, but you have moments in front of them when you realise they are different that they were a few minutes ago. I found this work very relaxing as it made you stop and take a moment to watch something change slowly and it emptied your mind of random thoughts. Closed 7 March 2020 Review   Times

Calming exhibition at Pace Gallery of three female American abstract artists looking at their work in white and pale colours. At first glance these   worked looked very similar and a bit boring but as you looked closely all the work was more individualist and clever than you realised. I was most drawn to the work of Mary Corse and loved her “White Diamond, Positive Stripe” which at first appeared a constant white but you then realised was fading into slightly different shades. I also like her works on bevelled frames which were wedged at the back. Agnes Martin’s work incorporated thin pencil lines which played with your eyes and Jo Baer’s added a thin brightly coloured painted frame round her white works. Closes 14 August 2019

Interesting exhibition at the PACE Gallery of work by Richard Pousette-Dart. The show consisted of 14 large abstract paintings which I’d describe as pointillist abstraction as they were made up small blobs of colour. Some of them concentrated dark colour in the centre with points of paler colour radiating out from that. Some of these works played with your eyes and were hard to focus on, like a Bridget Riley. There was a nice sense of texture and people, including me, wanted to get close to see the structure and detail which was unnerving the security staff! There was also a display of drawings from the 1940s which had not been exhibited before. These were slightly more figurative while still being abstract. They were quite dark with thick black lines. I would have guessed these were from the 1960s rather than 40s so they were quite radical. Closes on 20 February 2019.

Dark exhibition at Pace looking at the career of Adam Pendleton. I say dark because the work was black and white. Pendleton calls his work “Black Dada” an examination of blackness, abstraction and the avant-garde. The work is based on found images. I liked two large groups of framed transparencies called “Our Ideas #2” and “Our Ideas #3” based on collages using found images. Some of the work is more abstract than others but in others you can see the original images. They looked very striking together.   Closed on 9 November 2018

Strange exhibition at Pace of new work by Julian Schnabel. I was fascinated by the technique used for these pictures but found the end product rather ugly and pointless. Schnabel bought a set of 18th century calendar prints in a second hand shop. He enlarged these scenes onto polyester and then painted on them. Most interesting was that he produced them in his outdoor studio exposed to the elements so you do see rain stains, bleached bits and things on the surface.   However the images themselves just appeared to be the prints enlarged on a pink background with paint thrown on them in a random fashion. I wasn’t sure he’d added anything to the images and I was left with the big question of “why”.   Closes on 22 June 2018

Ragged exhibition at Pace London of new textile work by Richard Tuttle. I’ll admit I didn’t get these works! On first glance they looked like poorly finished applique patchwork. I had a desperate need to take them down and finish off the edging properly! I guess part of the artistic point is in the finish but I found no explanation of it and for me it distracted from any image or idea they were trying to put across. Reading the commentary it says they are looking at “materiality, space, and three-dimensionality” and are geometric abstract works. I guess they did challenge the idea of works hung an walls having to be paintings but I feel that art needs to have either meaning or beauty or craft and I’m afraid for me these had none of those. I did however like the prose poem by Tuttle which was handed out with the list of works entitled “What beauty means to me”. It might be a nice idea for an installation to have this read out in the space with the textile in. A pointer...

Interesting exhibition at Pace London marking ten years of the Calder Prize for contemporary artists who have made exemplary work early in their career which could be interpreted as a continuation of the legacy of Alexander Calder. Work by the prize winners was shown next to work by Calder himself and having been to the Calder exhibition at Tate Modern it was good to see more of his work in a different context. I was most drawn to the work of Zilvinas Kempinas and loved his 2009 work “Flux" which was a circle of tape floating over a platform which was being made to dance in the air with a fan suspended over it. I found it very calming and loved the way it floated in and out of your space. I also liked Tomas Saraceno’s “Cumulus Filaments” which look up the corner of one room and consisted of a thin wire ball shape held in place by thin lines of fishing lines like rays coming out of the ball. It was such a delicate structure to take up such a large space. Clos...

Rather delightful exhibition at Pace gallery of new work by Michal Rovner consisting of a series of LCD screens with gently moving films/pictures. I found these works really intriguing.   At first view they look like abstract pictures and then you realise they are moving gently and when you look closer there are very small human figures moving across them in groups. The backgrounds seem to be painted but have a sense of landscape. On one hand the work is depressing as there is a sense of refuges moving across land and yet I loved their unity and togetherness. However I did want to rescue them! I also found it hard to walk away and leave them on this march which they were never going to resolve.

Dull exhibition at Pace of new work by Adam Pendleton. I say dull as there were just six works and they were all black and white or black on mirror. I liked the effect of black lettering on mirror particularly as it changed depending where you were standing and what else was reflected in it. With one work the way I approached it made the work look completely black as another black work was reflected in the mirror. I think I could have done with a bit more explanation!  

Retrospective exhibition at Pace London of work by Mario Merz. The ground floor room was dominated by a large sculpture/installation of three igloos intertwined called “Movements of the Earth and the Moon on an Axis”. It seems Merz was well known for his igloo creations and this was the last one he made. It worked really well in the space. It looked substantial and yet when you went close the stone in one of them was just leaning against the frame in places. Upstairs I loved “A work, a measure of land that gives a very earthy portrait” which consisted of bundles of grape vines between small concrete blocks on the floor. I love the logical and even look of it but the more you looked the more you tried to work out the irregularities. I wasn’t as convinced by the paintings although I was intrigued by the one which included a raincoat!

Tasty exhibition at the Pace Gallery at the Royal Academy which looks at how contemporary art responded to the way society represents, consumes and obsesses over food. I liked the series of photographs by Roe Ethridge of almost hyper real Masterchef style food which was so glossy it looked inedible.   Also Elad Lassry’ still life photographs of food. I found Mat Collishaw’s picture of the ingredients for the last meals of prisoners on death row very moving. They were set out like Dutch still lives, photographed again black and given a formal frame.   They were beautiful pictures but you couldn’t forget what they were. And of course who can resist a 10 foot tall fork with a meat ball and spaghetti on it (Oldenburg/van Bruggen) or a bronze kebab machine (Keith Coventry).

Fascinating exhibition at Pace London of work by the Romanian artist Adrien Ghenie on the theme of Charles Darwin. The first room was paintings of Darwin including portraits of him at various ages and a self-portrait of the artist as Darwin. These had distorted almost erased faces. They reminded me slightly of the Tonks pictures of shrapnel damaged First World War soldiers.   I liked a large one called “Charles Darwin at the aged of 75” which showed him in an autumnal garden, wrapped in a blanket and sitting on a modern white plastic chair. However the best thing was an installation which was a room inspired by his life. It was very dark and the gallery attendant shows you in with a torch. You then look at a room made of old panels and furnished with Victorian furniture. There are pieces coming off the ceiling and the leg of a table appears to have broken through. It takes its inspiration from Rembrandt’s “Philosopher in Mediation” which I wish I had seen before I saw ...

Luminous exhibition at Pace London in Burlington Gardens of light installations by James Turrell. These consisted of space with a frosted glass surface animated by LED lights in specially constructed white rooms. There were two landscape ones from the Wide Glass series and three portrait ones from the Tall Glass series. As you stood with the works you realized they were slowly and subtlety changing colour. It was fascinating to feel the different effects that the different colours have on you. The green was the most calming but I found the cerise pink difficult to be with, which was odd as I do like pink! You found yourself going back to the rooms you had already been in to see how they had changed with the different colour. Review Evening Standard

Wonderful exhibition at Pace Gallery at the Royal Academy showing new work by the sculptor Kevin Francis Gray. The centre piece was “Twelve Chambers” twelve life sized nude figures in bronze. Other than two couples each figure stood alone but were grouped around one another. It was like being at a party with people who didn’t speak to each other. I wanted to take round canapés! Each figure was individually beautiful but became more powerful as a group. All the figures are based on real people who live near the artist and are named. I was not so sure about the marble figure called “The Ballerina” as it was almost too beautifully finished and polished. I preferred the rawness of the bronze. Finally there were four big bronze heads, again of people local to the artists. These were hollow but the inside was burnished so that a smoothly shining surface showed through the features on the face. Again I found these very powerful and they would look lovely in an outdoor space....