Cathy's Art Diary

Useful lecture at Tate Modern introducing the Cezanne exhibition. I’d already done the show but was going again with a friend who was upsold the exhibition ticket with added talk so I thought I’d go with it to. It was given by a gallery volunteer called Roy who said he was also an art historian. It would have been interesting to know a bit more about him. It was a nice touch that he came round saying hello to the audience as we sat waiting. I gather from what he said he’d written the talk himself and I liked the structure of outlining the events in Cezanne’s like in each decade then looking at the paintings in the show and a few extras to tell the story. He implied that the relationship with Zola might have been more than I’d read into it when I visited the show the first time so that gave me something new to think about as I then went round again. He also explained ‘constructive brushstrokes’ which led me to look more closely at the techniques used.   Selected dates until ...

Quirky exhibition at the British Museum which commissioned Egyptian graffiti artist Nofal O to respond to the centenary of the opening of the tomb of Tutankhamen. The work, round three walls of a small gallery was big and bold and nicely offset by a statue of the pharaoh. Evidently the artist’s work can be seen all around Cairo and often references Tutankhamun. Closed 29 January 2023  

Clever exhibition at the British Museum looking at how the meaning of hieroglyphs was deciphered   and what that discovery told us about Ancient Egypt. I say clever because it managed to tell a few stories at the same time without it feeling muddled. The first room briefly looked at how the meaning of the symbols was lost as Egypt was conquered then you moved into a section on how Western and Arabic scholars had tried to decipher the objects they found. I was interested to see Alberti was amongst them. The core of the show looked at the finding of the Rosetta Stone with the stone itself taking centre stage and the race between Thomas Young in England and Jean-Francois Champollion in France to work how it could help to unlock the secret then how further travel and research enabled Champollion to work out a more complete picture. Finally the show looked at some of the things which were learnt by being able to read the symbols and subsequent script using wonderful objects. I ...

Fascinating exhibition at the British Library looking at the stories surrounding Alexander the Great and how they developed. The show began by looking at the birth and education of Alexander, both real and mythical, then moved onto his conquests. It then went on to the myths surrounding his further travels and then his death. Being the British Library the show was heavy on books and documents but I would like to have seen more objects both about him and seeing him in his time. As my companion on the day said he’d have preferred a British Museum take on the subject. That said I was interested that’s the stories basically came down to four ‘books’ in different version including Plutarch’s “Life of Alexander” and the “Romance of Alexander”. The show has various versions of these each being used to show a different aspect of the story. They varied in date but my favourites were the illuminated manuscripts. There was lavish use made of texts from the areas Alexander conquered so th...

Interesting online lecture form ARTscapades introducing the Making Modernism exhibition at the Royal Academy. The curator Dorothy Price introduced us to the four main female artists featured in the show by taking us around the first room of portraits and self-portraits. This was an excellent way of setting up the narrative. I have since been to the show and liked the fact this gave me a good grounding to what I saw but also left you to discover the other rooms on children, relationships, places and still-lives for yourself. I was particularly interested in hearing about the friendships between some of these women and how they had to overcome challenges in their lives to pursue their art.  

Insightful online lecture from the National Gallery to mark the end of their Lucien Freud exhibition. Mark Woodhead, artist and educator for the National Gallery, reflected on the show which he said he had visited every week during its time at the gallery. He picked a selection of works from the show and that had been expected to be in it   comparing them to works in the gallery’s permanent collection. It was particularly interesting to hear an artist’s view. Most interesting was to hear that the gallery was unable to use a number of pictures that they had planned to include. One was due to it being up for auction in November so was unable to travel and others were due to be lent by Russian organisations and individuals and were unable to come in light of the war in Ukraine. The hang of some of the rooms had had to be rethought out. I did visit the exhibition again after this lecture and found it had given me a lot more to think about when looking at the works.

Inaugural exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery for a new international prize for emerging artists. Sponsored by the gallery and M&C Saatchi Group there was a prize for each of six regions plus an overall jury winner. The jury winner Samuel Nnorom, the African winner, who works with West African cloth having been inspired by his time in his mother’s tailoring workshop. He wraps the cloth around balls of foam and sews them together to create an wall installation. Refreshingly most of the artists were painters and my favourite was the UK winner, Felix Chester, who had done exquisite small paintings celebrating the LGBTQ+ community. Evidently he had a self-portrait shortlisted for the BP Portrait Award in 2019 so I’m off to Google that.   Closed 17 January 2023