Cathy's Art Diary

Bright exhibition at the Redfern Gallery of new work by Danny Romeril. There was a mix of large and small paintings based on imagined or remembered places, mainly shop fronts. I particularly liked the tiny postcard sized works which drew you into the imagined space. A quote on the exhibition webpage from Romer says “I like to work in the in-between space of the known and the unknown, if the places are real they are abstracted through the painting process to become unfamiliar again.” Closed 21 February 2025

Interesting exhibition at the Redfern Gallery looking at the career of Pop Art pioneer Peter Sedgley. The show included work from 50 years in paintings on paper, canvas, panel, light and kinetic form of work which played with the eyes and seemed to move. I must admit I am not fond of this type of work but do find it clever and innovative. Closed 30 November 2024  

Interesting exhibition at the Redfern Gallery of work by three artists who have drawn from their experiences of Armenia to explore the role of landscape in cultural memory. I didn’t really understand the link in the show but I did like the work. My favourites were Eleanor Ekserdjian’s landscapes particularly the painted less abstract ones although I also like her vibrant black and white works which felt more like drawings. Sam Chatto did lovely ceramics which, like Ekserdjian’s work, there was conventional small pots and more sculptural work. Nouneh Sarkissian work was the most colourful with small vibrant pieces called Windows which I took to represented views through windows. Closed 12 July 2024  

Gentle but insightful exhibition at The Redfern Gallery of new work by Susannah Fiennes. I'd not come across Fiennes work before but loved it. Mainly they are small works looking at people going about their daily lives. The figures are stocky and faceless but their body language and grouping together says everything. She tenderly catches how people interact. Some show just two figures and were done in lockdown but others show the joy at people being able to get back together again. I particularly like the ones of parties. I thought they had a slight feel of Henry Moore drawings and I had a sense that she painted them then thought of an obvious title for the image. Closed 17 November 2023    

Fascinating exhibition at The Redfern Gallery of work by Mark Lancaster. The work was a wonderful mix of styles from a very classic Yorkshire landscape to bright geometric abstracts. I was so intrigued I looked up the artist while was there to find he had worked as a designer for Merce Cunningham’s dance company and then with Andy Warhol. The latter made sense when I found a series of 12 small Marilyn Monroe pictures in different styles. I was grabbed by a take on a portrait of Vanessa Bell by Duncan Grant which I love. This was so different and yet so recognisable. I wonder why he did it? Closed 8 June 2023

Interesting exhibition at the Redfern Gallery of works on paper by Surrealist Eileen Agar alongside five contemporary artists invited by the gallery to respond to Agar’s work. I must admit I’ve not been to the current exhibition of Agar’s work at the Whitechapel Gallery so am not that aware of her work. The works here, like the one shown, were mainly colleges often overlaying a cut out frame over another work. The five artists chosen to respond to her work were all women, LINDER, Lucy Stein, Florence Hutchings, Nadia Hebson and Oliva Fraser. I had only come across the latter before. I liked LINDER’s photo montage work combining female figures and objects particularly a work called “THE Sphinx” which superimposed a couple of classical heads over each other. I also like Florence Hutchings paintings of everyday settings. Closed 17 July 2021

Lovely exhibition at The Redfern Gallery of a prints from the 1980s by Patrick Procktor. The show focused on a series of prints of China in a subtle palette including lithographs, etchings and aquatints. I liked their very focused, clear compositions. Alongside these were other prints and I loved one of a view of Venice from above the dome of San Giorgio from 1977 and one of the Royal Naval College at Greenwich from the river. Closes 14 May 2021  

Beautiful exhibition at the Redfern Gallery of landscape paintings by David Inshaw. Inshaw started as a pop artist but moved into a more realistic style and joined the Brotherhood of Ruralism with Peter Blake. The pictures have a feeling of Paul Nash, lovely views which just edge into a surrealistic feel.   He is best known for his picture “Badminton Game”,   acquired by the Tate in 1971. I think I was partly drawn to these as a number of them showed the countryside I grew up in and I loved the picture shown here of Silbury Hill from the air. There was also a stunning picture of a bird flying over the Marlborough Downs.   There was also a lovely set of large, meticulously drawn trees.   Closed 29 November 2019

Interesting exhibition at the Redfern Gallery of work on paper by Desmond Morris. Morris is best known as a zoologist who has hosted various television series however he is also a well-known and prolific surrealist artist. I heard him talk about his work at Charleston Festival a few years ago. I love his sense of colour but I’m afraid I just don’t understand the images. I am sure they are very deep and meaningful but that just passed me by leaving me with just odd images. I did like a collage one which included an old legal document but that was for the document not the image.   Closed 9 June 2018  

Nice sales exhibition at the Redfern Gallery of British artists working since the mid-20th century. There was a wide mix of styles in this show which included paintings, sculpture and prints. I was intrigued by a John Piper large ceramic plate as I hadn’t seen ceramics by him before. It had a deep green border and two crescent shaped heads facing away from each other. I liked a lovely picture of a deserted gravel pit by Prunella Clough and a small cubist style picture in browns and greys of roof tops and telegraph poles by Keith Vaughan. My favourite pieces were some linocuts by Lil Tschudi making great use of blocked shaped and geometric patterns in real scenes. “Fixing the Wires” showed two men up a ladder mending telegraph wires which cuts across the work in striking diagonals all in lovely shades of blue.

Interesting exhibition at the Redfern Gallery of sculpture and drawings by Norman Dilworth. This was an interesting assortment of work from small scale sculptures made up of cubes and boxes set at angles to create complex shapes to wall sculptures of metal were the spaces left empty by the holes in the structure became part of the composition. My favourite was a wall of what looked like real and mock 3D letters which looked like an optician’s eye chart. However on the whole I felt I needed a bit more explanation of what the work was trying to do to appreciate it better. Closes on 2 March 2017

Interesting exhibition at the Redfern Gallery of work from throughout Margaret Mellis’s career from her painting of the 1930s though to her driftwood reliefs of the 1960s and 70s. I liked the paintings of bottles which used bottles to form almost cubist shapes and to show how shapes relate to each other. I also liked a picture of a fish, a pan and a palette from the 1950s. I wasn’t so sure about the geometric abstracts in bright primary colours which felt slightly out of place with the rest of the work. However I did like the driftwood reliefs. I loved the worn texture of the component pieces and the way she composed these into a scheme. Closes on 12 November 2016  

Delightful exhibition at the Redfern Gallery looking at romantic works from the 1920s to the present day. This was a beautifully hung show which set up gentle dialogues between the pictures helping your brain make connections between them. In some cases there were pictures by an artist and photos of them and there were lots of ballet references. I loved black and white photographs of Ballet Russe dancers taken from magazines with coloured enamel swathed over them in a very natural fashion by Linder. Also a photograph of the dancer Michael Clark by Snowdon shown in high heels with a sleek dog. Oh and how can I forget some lovely Cecil Beaton photographs including one of Gilbert and George. There were lovely set designs by Christopher Wood and a nice Keith Vaughan of a Yorkshire lane. My favourite however was a picture of two books on their side and a turquoise mug with red flowers in it against a plain background by Alessandro Raho. Closed on 27 February 2016.

Interesting exhibition at The Redfern Gallery featuring work by modern British artists. This was a good overview of work by artists in the latter half of the 20th century. It felt like you thought of an artist and lo they appeared! I loved a Winifred Nicholson of a Paris street from a window with her signature bunch of flowers in the window, really delightful. There was a nice Keith Vaughan portrait of Mahler and a Christopher Wood of a pickpocket. Oh and an Elizabeth Frink of a wild boar. My favourite was a view of Florence by Paul Fieler from 1954 which was done in thick paint with an almost abstract feel to it. Also oddly for me I also liked a purple and grey geometric abstract by John Wells from 1963, maybe the Black Square exhibition has had its effect!

Interesting exhibition at the Redfern Gallery of work by Linda Karshan. The show was in two parts with drawings in the series “Signs of Men” and etchings from “Footfalls” upstairs. The pictures were geometric abstracts mainly of repeating patterns. In the later series it was fascinating to see what a small change in an image, such as blurring the joins between squares, made to the image. There were a few where I was playing spot the difference! Downstairs there were works from the collection of Victor Skipp, a collector of Karshan’s work, which were being sold in aid of Kettle’s Yard.

Exhibition at the Redfern Gallery of work by the American abstract expressionist Paul Jenkins. He was inspired by Pollock and Tobey and developed a style of pouring paint to create pictures although there was work in various media in the show. As you know I’m not a great abstract fan but I liked a long picture called “Phenomena Sight Saturn Lodestone” which had an amazing texture. Also great for texture was a round picture in an open square frame called “Phenomena Compass Window” which was a great swirl of colour with a big thick lob of paint in the middle. I had thought the light was good in the gallery which has a lovely room like by natural light from the ceiling but when the assistant put the lights on the pictures sprang to life.

Exhibition of contrasts at the Redfern Gallery looking at the early work of Brian Rice. This was a mix of slightly sludgy brown abstract landscapes and bright sharp geometric abstracts. Of the landscapes I liked one of a pollarded tree with cubist shaping although I was not as fond of the rather mushy pictures by the door. In contrast the bright geometric pictures were like pop art posters. I liked the circular pictures with a repeated design in each segment giving a kaleidoscope effect. Oddly these pictures sat well together and you did have a sense of one hand painting them.

Stunning exhibition of painting of the River Thames by Kurt Jackson at the Redfern Gallery. As someone who was born and brought up near the Thames in Oxfordshire and now lives overlooking it in Woolwich I found this exhibition really beautiful. The works covered both urban and rural aspects of the river with an impressionistic feel. Some pictures were more distinct than others but they were all lovely! Painting is so much about sight but I liked the way her also wrote on the work what his other senses were telling him as he worked for example naming birds he could hear singing or in one just putting “mouthful of damsons”. He also included some ceramics with stencils of river bank plants and I badly wanted the earrings in the shape of the river! I made do with a signed book!