Cathy's Art Diary

Colourful and jubilant exhibition at Tate Britain of paintings by Hurvin Anderson. Anderson was the first child in his family to be born in the UK after his family arrived from Jamaica and his work reflects his experience here and travels back to the Caribbean.   The paintings were large and full of colour starting with images drawing on his childhood in Birmingham. I loved one of a municipal swimming pool. There were some striking images of trees. He caught the heat and atmosphere of the Caribbean and I loved an abstract looking piece which you realise is a room viewed via the iron grid which is often used in windows instead of glass to let in the air and a similar idea of a tennis court seen through chicken wire. The final room had new work made for the show including a black and white image of Haile Selassie's arrival in Jamaica in 1966 and two based on a found image of a courting couple on a raft surrounded by a luscious landscape. Closes 23 August 2026 Reviews Ti...

Muddled installation at Tate Britain in the large Duveen galleries by Zineb Sedira. I say muddled as there are a lot of large installations but I didn't feel they hung together. The theme was African cinema using it to explore memory, migration and trauma. Not knowing anything about the subject I would have appreciated a bit more explanation of each section of the work. I liked each piece and they worked well in the space including a recreated cinema and café, large cinema style sign boards and a camper van. I must go back again and give the piece a bit more time and concentration. Closes 17 January 2026 Reviews Guardian Telegraph

Interesting installation at Tate Britain by Mohammed Z Rahman. It marks the Tate owning two works by Rahman and it showcased them in a structure resembling Bengali timber wedding canopies grouping them with other works by the artist. He has envisaged the display as a theatrical production in two acts with the first being about the home and the second act which looks at love in all its forms. In each case the Tate painting introduces the space and leads you in. Closes 6 November 2026

Wonderful exhibition at Tate Britain on the life and work of James McNeill Whistler. The show was beautifully designed starting from the first room which was an invocation of his studio with pieces of furniture and ceramics he had owned alongside his drawing board and brushes. After that it ran chronologically from his talented early work though to his later experiments in painting in black. There were lots of old friends alongside work I'd never seen before and a good mix of painting and prints. As I'd travelled to the galley via Thames Clippers, I was of course drawn to the paintings and prints of the Thames which ranged from the wonderful "Wapping" painting of people in a   pub with the river behind, through the calming Nocturns and various print series. Closes 27 September 2026 Reviews Times Guardian Telegraph

Excellent exhibition at Tate Britain marking 250 years since the birth of both Turner and Constable. I might need to do this show again to get the most from it. It cleverly pitches the two artists at various stages in their lives, noting the parallels and where and how they differed. I think I came out favouring Constable, but a second visit might be different. The show was relatively sparsely hung with a good mix of paintings, watercolours and oil sketches and sketch books. It introduced them with portraits from the date of their acceptance into the Royal Academy alongside their diploma works. At times each artist got their own room to reflect their travels but on the whole they were shown together. There were some noticeable omissions but I guess, in this important year for both artists, galleries are unwilling to loan or have lent elsewhere. The show was probably better for it as it showed greater depth. Closes 16 April 2026 Reviews Times Guardian Telegraph Evenin...

Fabulous exhibition at Tate Modern on the life and work of Lee Miller. I thought I’d done all there was to do on Miller having attending talks by her son, been to Farley Farm and gone to numerous exhibitions but this show led us though her modelling and photography so beautifully and included a lot of never seen before work. It was obvious that a lot of research had gone into the show. It managed to express the joy of her early life as a model and then with the Surrealists without the shadow of the war work that was to come. I got a real sense of friendship, and although a later work, her portrait of Dorothea Tanning made me laugh out loud it was so joyous. Miller had a real eye for the strange in her images which began with the work with Man Ray but continued into the war. I think my favourite work in the show was this one of a boot and bullets. I liked the fact the concentration camp pictures were in a side room and I noticed a number of people couldn’t face them. Given Mill...

Fascinating exhibition at Tate Britain on the work of the surrealist Ithell Colquhoun. Colquhoun’s dates and work had a similar trajectory to the accompanying show on Edward Burra, with a move from the figurative to the surreal but she took a very different path. The early room featured her student work while at the Slade of mythical scenes with shades of Stanley Spencer, but she soon moved into spiritual and mystical surreal work often employing automatic techniques such as staining paper and then developing it into an image. I must admit I found the mystical aspects of the work such as the occult and Celtic traditions a bit of a turn off, but I liked the colour and vibrancy of the images. I was interested to see the phenomena of the Merry Maidens stone circle near Lamorna mentioned as similar ideas had been quoted in the Triumph of Art celebrations in Trafalgar Square which I’d been to the weekend before. Closes 19 October 2025 Reviews Times Guardian Telegraph Even...

Fabulous exhibition at Tate Britain of work by Edward Burra. Burra’s career summed up the early 20th century both in terms of style and subject and this was carefully teased out over six rooms, starting with the vibrant works of the 1920s and a young man discovering himself, through the despair of the Spanish Civil War and Second World War expressed via the surreal, to the relative tranquillity of the post-war years but reflecting a changed world through landscape. My favourite pieces were the early ones showing groups of people in clubs in Paris and New York. You could almost hear the music pumping out of them. Shown with a selection of archive material you got a view of a group of friends enjoying life. I particularly like the pictures of Harlem. He seemed to move suddenly into the surreal with his encounter with violence in Spain before the Civil War. These works were brutal yet drew on some of the earlier imagery.   I liked the inclusion of a room on his theatrical wor...

Dense exhibition at Tate Britain of work by Ed Atkins. Atkins is mainly known for his computer generated videos often based on motion capture of his own body. There was much technical explanation of these which I found hard to follow and engage with. I liked the imagery but found I was giving them little time. I did however like the instances where they were incorporated into installations particularly one using opera costumes which I had seen before at a Venice Biennale. My favourite pieces were his hyper detailed drawings of his hands and feet and a moving display of Post It Note drawings he included in his daughter’s lunch boxes during Covid. Closed 25 August 2025 Reviews Times Guardian Telegraph

Interesting exhibition at Tate Britain featuring a video installation by Hylozoic/Desires. Hylozoic/Desires are two artists Himali Singh Soin & David Soin Tappeser and in this work they examine the legacy of the Salt Line, a planted hedge grown by the British Empire in the Indian subcontinent between 1840 and 1880 which separated the British-occupied Bengal Presidency from independent states to prevent smuggling and enforce the British monopoly on salt. The work consisted of a video, interesting display on the floor, which you viewed from a platform, alongside a piece of scenery used in the video. It was beautifully filmed and blended archive material and an imagined narrative. I had seen another work on the same theme by these artists at Somerset House earlier this year so this added to that experience. Closed 25 August 2025

Dense exhibition at Tate Britain looking at this artists’ organisation from its foundation in 1933 to the mid-point of the Second World War. The show focused on two key exhibitions Artists against Fascism and War in 1935 and For Liberty in 1943 on the bombed site of John Lewis. It also discussed the First British Artists Congress in 1937, an event that foreshadowed many elements of official post-war arts policy. I say dense as there was a lot of information, with fascinating biographies of the artists involved and lots of archive material, as well as examples of their work. I thought I knew this period of art well, but there were lots of new names to investigate and links to people I did know, like Vanessa Bell, who was an advisory council member. I’m off to Google Felicia Browne who did these sketches and was killed in the Spanish Civil War. I wish I’d had more time for this show and will try to go back and read more of the labels. What looked at first like a slightly dull arch...

Interesting exhibition at Tate Britain marking this year’s Turner Prize for contemporary art. It showcased the four quite different finalists and yet I felt they were looking at quite similar themes. The show started with Pio Abad who had investigated and reacted to items in Oxford museums acquired during the colonial era. The work was beautiful and layered in meaning.   I was intrigued to find one work was inspired by the fact he lives in the Grand Stores of the Royal Arsenal in Woolwich which served as the primary storage facility for the military equipment of the British Army and Navy. My flat overlooks them!   Next was Jasleen Kaur’s installations using objects with reflect her multicultural childhood in Glasgow. Who can resist an oversized doillie on a Ford Escort. Then came another installation artist, Delaine Le Bas, exploring their culture, in this case Roma people, with ethereal crepe and a silver room. I’m not sure I really understood it. Finally there were ...

Nostalgic exhibition at Tate Britain looking at photography in the 1980s. The show began with photographs documenting the era which they took to begin with the Grunwick Strike in 1976 which I thought was clever as it established the idea of collective action it was also based around a film processing laboratory. These were my formative years of university and early career so it all seemed horribly familiar. As well as photographs as documents I also got a sense of them as an art medium, with some interesting collage work and a room dedicated to pictures with words added, and as a process in a study or campaign. Other themes investigated were the cost of living, landscape, remodelling history, community and self-portraits. The show included one of my favourite photographs by Martin Parr shown here. There is something so British but weird about it. Closes 5 May 2025 Reviews Times Telegraph Evening Standard

Stunning exhibition at Tate Britain looking at professional women artists in Britain from the 16th to 20th centuries. The show told the story simply and clearly letting the artists’ work and stories speak for themselves without being too preachy. I have done lots of courses reinstating women artists in the canon of art history but there were lots of people mentioned in this show who I didn’t know. Around every corner seemed to be an extraordinary new fact such as that Reynolds had a sister who was an artist, Elizabeth, who kept house for him and copied his work. There were familiar faces too and I did a little dance in front of the Vanessa Bell and it is always good to see the Artemisia Gentileschi self-portrait from the Royal Collection. Talking Royal Collection they also have the newly identified picture by her of “Susanna and the Elders” which I’d been wanting to see. The new names are too numerous to mention and I have a lot of Googling to do. I’ll just mention one. The man ...

Interesting installation at Tate Britain by Alvaro Barrington. The display mirrored Barrington’s life experience in the sections, his Trinidad upbringing, Nottinghill Carnival and a street corner in New York. Each section was quite distinct but they worked well together. The cavernous shape of the first section was changed by hanging a low, corrugated iron false ceiling. The middle represented the vibrancy of Carnival and the last was a caged, shuttered shop where the shutters in each side opened and closes alternatively. My favourite aspect was incidental. I loved the shadows off the cafe on the gallery walls and the use he made of the lunettes which all other artists in that space have ignored. However on the whole I wasn’t convinced. I feel I’ve done the Black/Gay thing enough, could we look at something else now please. I’m not sure this particular display added anything more. Closes 26 January 2025 Reviews Times Guardian Telegraph  

Clever installation at Tate Britain combining the old restaurant murals by Rex Whistler with a video commenting on them by Keith Piper. The murals have presented the gallery with some problems as they include some difficult images particularly stereotypical depictions of people of colour. The video, which is shown in the old restaurant space with the mural, presents an imagined conversation between Rex Whistler and a fictional modern academic in which Whistler describes the context of the painting and she challenges him on the images. It places the work within the context of the upper class Arcadian thinking of the time and introduces you to Whistler’s friends who appear in the mural. However it also points out that the offensive imagery was not a one off in his work. I found the discussion more nuanced than I expected and engaging with well-developed characters and arguments. Given the room was dark to show the video, it would have been nice if the room could be illuminated b...

Sumptuous exhibition at Tate Britain looking at how John Singer Sargent used and represented clothes. I had done a talk on the show online the night before which helped me to pace the show but I got far more from the exhibition itself. The pictures were sparsely hung with good commentaries about how they were composed and the stories of the sitters. I loved the inclusion of real clothes, in some cases the actual ones in the paintings. This made it possible to compare reality with Sargent’s artistic licence. There was a clever room at the end which looked at Sargent’s later work when he moved away from portraits but continued his interest in painting people and clothing. I loved the idea of him venturing up the alps with a dressing up box. It was lovely to find old friends from the Tate but also to make new ones and well as seeing some famous faces, such as Madame X and Dr Pozzi. I loved the balance of artistic technique, fashion and biography in the show. Closed 7 July 202...

Meditative exhibition at Tate Britain of new work by Zeinab Saleh. The works were very new, all being painted this year, and were soft and enigmatic. Some seemed more obvious subjects than others but they seemed to dissolve into more ethereal images. They benefited from long looking. Closed 23 June 2024  

Minimal exhibition at Tate Britain of sculptures by Rhea Dillon. This display is in the Art Now series and was described as bringing the works together “as a conceptual fragmentation of a Black woman’s body.” I must admit I didn’t get that but it was at the end of a long day of art. There were 6 or 7 pieces in quite a large white room and they didn’t seem to speak to each other. Aesthetically I liked the large Perspex cube but without the description I would never have thought it represented lungs “which Dillon renders as breath lost and stolen from Black subjects.” Closes 1 January 2024    

Fascinating  display at Tate Britain of drawings and watercolours by contemporary artist Chris Ofili shown with works by William Blake that inspired him. It was a clever move to have the different artists in different rooms and the show would have worked whatever order you saw them in. Both artists drew from a variety of sources to inspire their work and the colour palette is similar. It is surprising to think the artists were working 200 years apart.   There were good explanations of the works and some Blake’s I’d never seen before. Closes 2 June 2024