Cathy's Art Diary

Interesting exhibition at Pallant House of recent acquisitions by influential contemporary artists. The works come from two major recent additions to the collection, maquettes and preparatory drawings from the Cass Sculpture Archive and part of a gift of 120 works on paper presented by Cristea Roberts Gallery in 2021. It was nice to see a print by Joe Tilson whose pictures of Venice I love in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibitions. I liked Paul Winstanley’s gentle print of a net curtain and Tony Cragg’s “Pillars of Salt” shown here. I loved it’s combination of repetitive interlocking shapes. Closes 16 October 2022

Delightful exhibition at Pallant House Gallery on the life and work of Glyn Philpot. I’ve loved Philpot’s work for a while but never seen it presented in such a comprehensive way. I was fascinated by the way he moved from being a society portrait painter to becoming Modernist artist. From the start to the end you felt you were in two different worlds and yet you could see the connection. There was a wonderful sense of friendship with him working with and for various people throughout his career such as Sir Philip Sassoon and Oliver Messel and you can’t help but be moved by his relationship with his model Henry Thomas. I love shows like this which introduce you to lots of new and interesting people, most of them rather beautiful young men. Philpot was not just a painter so it was good to see some of his sculpture included as well as reference to his decorative work and costume designs.   A sign of a good show is sometimes that you are left wanting more and this was the case...

Interesting small exhibition at Pallant House Gallery of work on paper and in ceramics made by artists in St Ives. Starting with Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson, who moved to the town at the outbreak of the Second World War, they were later joined by others including William Scott, Patrick Heron, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Terry Frost and Denis Mitchell. The show looks at the effect of the landscape on their art and the network of personal and creative relationships. I love the fact this show included ceramics by potters Bernard Leach and Janet Leach alongside the drawings and prints. Closes 31 October 2021    

Delightful exhibition at Pallant House Gallery of miniature art galleries. Pallant House has had a miniature gallery from 1934 since 1997 which was commissioned by Sydney Burney. He asked 34 contemporary artists including Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell and Augustus John to paint miniature works of art. I’ve always loved this piece partly because I love the artists he chose but also because who can resist a doll’s house! The gallery commissioned a new version for the Millennium with the model made by St John Wilson who had designed the new wing of the gallery and they commissioned miniatures from their artist friends, many of whom they had designed studios for. They include Frank Auerbach, Peter Blake and Prunella Clough. Finally during the first lockdown they commissioned Wright & Wright architects who are working on proposals for a new Collections Centre for the gallery and works from 31 contemporary artists including Grayson Perry, Edmund de Waal and Maggi Hambling. Also movin...

Fascinating exhibition at Pallant House Gallery looking at how Ben Nicholson’s art was shaped by objects he kept in his studio. This was a beautifully laid out show with excellent explanations. I loved the fact it included objects from the studio as well as the pictures that feature them. As a lot of the art is abstract I’m not sure I would have spotted those objects if they’d not been there. I loved a striped section of one work which you realised was a jug which was in the show nearby. The show also explained the changes in his art well including how his first relief came about due to the accidental loss of gesso from a prepared canvas. It also looked at the different places he lived and how that influenced his work. My favourite picture was the attached of Mousehole from 1947. I loved the way it combines a real landscape with abstract shapes based on things in his studio almost giving the impression of looking out through a window with object on the window ledge. Closes 24 ...

Delightful exhibition at Pallant House Gallery of original designs by textile designer Sheila Bownas. Bownas’s work was largely unknown until an archive of her work was auctioned in 2008. It was also interesting to read that companies often bought designs but did not use them.   I would love to see some of these designs reused. I liked one of her early works of people sitting on a London bus as well as one of children in red and blue playing against a bright yellow background. The 1970s designs were more abstract and bold. They made the friend I was with and I reminisce about the wallpapers of our youth!   My favourite design was the one shown here of white gates on a navy background.   Closed on 20 May 2018  

Fun exhibition at Pallant House looking at Pop Art in Britain and how artists responded to rapid social change.   This was a nicely curated show drawing on the gallery’s significant collection of work from this period but I’ve done a number of exhibitions about the individual artists recently   (Blake, Paolozzi, Caulfield and Hamilton) and I didn’t feel it added to those. I was predicting at the start which pictures would appear and was right.   It did find the section on the 1961 Young Contemporaries show interesting as it showed you this group of people at the start of their careers not as the Grand Dames of the art world they have become. It was also a nice touch to start the show with lovely photographs of the artists by Snowdon.   There was a good section at the end looking at the importance of prints in this period as a way of popularising art including a lovely set by Paolozzi.   Closed on 7 May 2018   Reviews Times Telegr...

Interesting exhibition at the Pallant House Gallery looking at paintings by Leonard Rosoman of John Osbourne’s controversial play “A Patriot for Me”. When the play was performed at the Royal Court in 1965 Rosoman was so fascinated by it and its exploration of gay life that he went every night for a week to draw. Three years later he revisited the drawings to create this series of paintings. The pictures were colourful and vibrant and captured the excitement of this show performed at a time when attitudes to sexuality and censorship were changing. I loved the two of a scene of a drag ball one of which captures the moment as the curtain rises on the stage full of colourful characters. They were shown with studies for the individual characters. I was interested to spot that 11 of the 12 pictures were bought by john Osbourne and the 12th by Dirk Bogarde.   Closed on 29 April 2018

Fascinating exhibition at Pallant House looking at how modernist artists used the idea of the antique in their work. I am currently doing a course at the V&A on classicism and I like modernist art so inevitably I loved this show! It pointed out how classicism had a revival after the horrors of the First World War being seen as a return to order and reviving ideas of idealism. The show had a good mix of mediums with great pictures but also good use of posters, books and photographs. There were some wonderful pictures which I’d not seen before including one of the Toilet of Venus by Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell done as part of a decorative scheme for Dorothy Wellesley’s dining room. It was three statuesque full female figures in great shades of yellow and orange. There were also some old friends such as Meredith Frampton’s portrait of Marguerite Kelsey from the Tate. I loved a room dedicated to the 1935 Olympian Party held at Claridges with costumes designed by Oli...

Fabulous installation at Pallant House in Chichester by Pablo Bronstein. To complement their current exhibition on classicism in modernist art (which I’ll review in a minute) the gallery had commissioned Bronstein, known for taking inspiration from classical architecture, to create this installation for the downstairs hall, one room and the main staircase. It’s a fabulous use of wall paper with huge classical designs in fabulous colours. My favourite was the downstairs room in a wonderful dark turquoise with large imagined classical structures seen from different angels with a large key design border and big Roman rosette motifs. The whole thing was wonderfully over the top and yet it worked so well. I wanted it as a dining room! Closes on 19 February 2016

Small exhibition at Pallant House in Chichester of work by sculptor Laura Ford. Ford creates fantasy figures often morphing people and animals. There were a series of large bronze figures in the courtyard including a wonderful childlike figure with a birds head and a part woman, part tree. However I preferred the ceramic figures in the gallery and fell for a lovely green donkey, however my friend had to point out to me that it had three back legs! All the figures had the interesting sense of on your first look seeing a conventional figure but on second look you spot the strange. Closes on 19 February 2016.  

Small exhibition at Pallant House Gallery of drawings and prints of nudes from their own collection. Even with just a few pictures this show set up interesting dialogues between the works. There was a nice Sickert drawing near an Auerbach dry point picture of a very similarly posed figure in a Sickerty dark space. I liked a picture by Michael Andrews of three versions of the same figure in various stages of abstraction. There was also a lovely Keith Vaughan of two views of a seated male figure.

Interesting installation at Pallant House Galleries by Michael Petry. I am not sure I saw all this show as it is not due to open until 4 July so there may be more to come but I have to say I liked what I saw anyway! The idea is that it echoes the grand staircase and historic mirrors in the gallery. Over the stairs there was a lovely colourful glass chandelier with twisted rods in a similar shape to the bannisters and scattered round the house were clear versions of these shapes in odd places. I loved the small frames round the bottom of the staircase with speckled glass to look like antique mirroring. I hope you go back and see if more appears!

Interesting exhibition at Pallant House Gallery of works collected by George and Ann Dannatt as well as pictures by George himself. I was particularly interested in this as I work for the RICS (Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors) and George Dannatt was a chartered surveyor! He met Patrick Heron, the artist, when he went to survey his house in Cornwall and through him he met other artists in the area. As you know I’m not that fond of abstract work but it was interesting when looking at George’s work that I did get a sense of structure or was that just me projecting?! I liked some of the other work too particularly a long picture by John Wells “Compositional Variation III” with layers of beige and grey but with one splash of a rather unusual bright blue.

Nice display at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester of some of the mosaic sculptures of Nek Chand. I first came across Nek Chand at an exhibition about him at the Hayward Gallery about a year ago. He is an Indian artist and the creator of the Rock Garden of Chandigarh. The figures were beautifully displayed in the café garden at Pallant House and it was great to see them outside where they are meant to be seen. I loved the line of geese and also of bent figures with baskets on their backs.  

Rather dark exhibition at Pallant House in Chichester looking at record cover designs which used goth, art nouveau and surrealist images.   The prints were all published by the Edinburgh Printmarkers. I was probably getting a but tired by the time I got to this display but I wasn’t very moved by it. I had only heard of one or two of the bands the covers were for so it didn’t grab and maintain my interest. Sorry but that’s the hazard of a gallery with 6 exhibitions!

Very small exhibition at Pallant House in Chichester of posters for the 1972 Munich Olympics. When I say very small I really mean it, one side of a corridor! The posters were designed by the leading Pop Artists of the day such as David Hockney. I found then interesting as Munich is the first Olympic I remember quite well and so these showed the design trends of my childhood. Also a good attidote to the post 2012 Olympics come down!

Interesting exhibition at Pallant House in Chichester bringing together art works by pop stars to complement the current Peter Blake exhibition. I would have liked this exhibition to be bigger because it was quite fascinating, I did know of some pop stars who painted but not how many and how many had come from art school backgrounds. I loved the vibrant works by Ian Dury and the Stuart Sutcliffe sketch book.

Small exhibition at Pallant House in Chichester looking at the work Derek Boshier did for David Bowie and the Clash. This exhibition complemented the current Peter Blake exhibition but I must admit was rather put into the shade by it. Again this was work I didn’t know but it lacked the humour of Blake’s work and looked drab in comparison. I am sure if I’d seen it in a different context I would have been more interested. I did like the series of photos and silhouettes for Bowies Lodger album.

Fascinating exhibition at Pallant House in Chichester looking at work relating to pop music by Peter Blake. I found this very interesting as I must admit my knowledge of Peter Blake’s work in this field didn’t extend much further than Sergeant Pepper. I hadn’t even realised he had done the cover design for Band Aid, sorry! However now I know a lot more. I was particularly interest that he had taught Ian Dury and that this had led to a life long friendship. I was very moved to see Dury’s rhythm stick as designed by Blake. Going back to Sergeant Pepper again it was lovely to see items which had been included in the iconic picture such a the small Snow White figure. Reviews Independent