Nikolai Astrup: Painting Norway. Dulwich Picture Gallery, London (5 February-15 May 2016)

 By the Open Door (1911)

I am neither arrogant nor foolish enough to pretend to have knowledge of every artist whose work and career have been successful enough to gain acclaim during their lifetime and/or warrant inclusion into art history narratives.  In fact, during all the years I have spent looking at and studying art, gradually defining and developing my own areas of interest and personal stylistic preferences, it has been the discovery of artists completely unknown to me and discovered quite by chance, which have proved to be the most exciting and enduring.  Helene Schjerfbeck, Yayoi Kusama and Marie Laurencin are three such discoveries over the years.  Now I can add Nikolai Astrup to the list.  A weekly scan through the art section of Time Out magazine, drew my attention to this exhibition.  As I am going on a cruise along the Norwegian fjords this summer combined with the vividly coloured painting featured in the review, Midsummer Eve Bonfire (1915) - immediately identifiable as early twentieth century (one of my favoured historical eras) - made the long hike down to Dulwich inevitable.

Midsummer Eve Bonfire (1915)

Astrup (1880-1928) was one of Norway’s most renowned landscape painters and printmakers, yet until now remained completely unknown outside his native country.  Art history has favoured his contemporary, Edvard Munch, probably because Munch left Norway to live and work in major art capitals of the time -  Paris, Berlin, Munich - while Astrup, with the exception of a one year residency in Paris (where he studied at the Académie Colarossi and became influenced by the work of Maurice Dennis, Henri Rousseau and Japanese woodcuts) he lived along the same fjord in North West Norway all his life, only moving along the shoreline from one small village to another.  In fact, this exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery is the first time his work has been seen in the United Kingdom.  Astrup’s paintings of the surroundings in which he lived transformed the Norwegian landscape into a mythical, living entity.  He was an exquisite painter and driven by the desire to create a ‘national style’, Norwegian in feeling and subject matter, combining elements of realism and a conscious naïveté.  His luminous landscapes appear to be simple, beautiful landscape studies but they are shot through with an uneasy strangeness.  The son of a Lutheran pastor, Astrup’s visual language reference aspects of Norwegian folklore as much as they do the Norwegian landscape and the juxtaposition between Christian and Pagan, which the affected Astrup the man is evident on the canvases of Astrup the artist.

Foxgloves (1920)

Two paintings, A Morning in March (1920) and The Parsonage (1928), demonstrates this duality within Astrup’s oeuvre.  A Morning in March depicts a fjord shoreline under the snow and ice.  A bare tree rises up from the rocks’ edge.  The landscape is bleak, the tree almost troll-like in its appearance.  In contrast, The Parsonage is a masterclass in realism.  A beautifully accurate rendering of the artist’s childhood home.  One of my personal favourites from the exhibition is A Clear Night in June (1905-07), another view of the village of his childhood.  The finesse in the execution of this still and calming landscape, with its balance of cool snowcapped mountain and waterfall against the warm, yellow marigolds is riveting.

 

A Morning in March (1920)    

The Parsonage (1928)

Unless you are lucky enough to live within a stone’s throw from Dulwich Picture Gallery, the venue can feel almost as remote as a Norwegian fjord to get to (it took me 2½ by road, rail and tube).  However, any and all efforts to visit it will be more than rewarded for.  The exhibition contains over 90 oil paintings and prints, including works from private collections never exhibited before.  The consistency in both his subject matter and colour palette, ensure a vibrant and cohesive collection of paintings which deserve to be seen by as many people as possible.  Nikolai Astrup deserves the attention and it is only a matter of time before his name becomes as known globally as Edvard Munch.
http://www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk/

A Clear Night in June (1905-07)

Spring Atmosphere at an Old Cotter's Farm (1907)

Giacometti: Pure Presence, National Portrait Gallery, London (15 October 2015-10 January 2016)

Portrait of Annette (1954)

Portrait of Annette (1954) by Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) was to be the third artwork to feature in my “Why I Love…” series.  Having attended many life drawing classes over the years where much emphasis was put on building up the figure using shade and tone to gently (and more importantly) to accurately depict flesh and muscle, with the use of a hard or misplaced line frowned upon, this painting of the artist’s wife sitting in his studio fascinated me.  Giacometti use of line was so frenetic and seemingly uncontrolled, as if possessed by a need to commit his wife’s likeness to canvas almost against his will.  Building up Annette’s body in white, grey and ochre chalk and then repeatedly searching for her contours in black before extending the same line into the space in which she sat then framing both within the canvas itself, Giacometti seemed more interested in the relationship between the sitter and the space than capturing a likeness of his wife, either physically or psychologically.  Historical accounts record Annette as being pretty and vivacious, open and receptive, such qualities at odds with Giacometti’s expressionless almost hollow rendering.  I wondered then if such a depiction was a comment on the nature of their relationship and the artist’s inner contempt for his spouse.  Later research proved that particularly theory wrong (they were happily married for seventeen years from 1949 until the artist’s death in 1966) and she featured predominately in his professional, as well as personal life during that time.  Despite my woeful attempt at psychoanalysis, Giacometti’s style of drawing greatly influenced my own and such way of working suited me well as I struggled with more traditional forms of life drawing.

Regarded as one of the great masters of twentieth century art, Giacometti’s sculptures of spindly, elongated figures are heralded as capturing the existential loneliness of modern humanity in the aftermath of the Second World War.  Such sculptures enveloped by the space that surrounded them almost as tangibly as the void that they inhabited.

Only one is featured in this exhibition, Woman of Venice VIII (1956), used almost as a book mark to distinguish the artist’s early Cubist inspired work, with his later oeuvre.  This solitary figure, taken away from her sisters and the artist’s original group of ten Women for Venice (1956) for the city’s biennale of that year, still imbues both calmness and rage.  Does she stand to protect her loved ones, or is she paralysed in grief or fear?  She is both ugly and beautiful.  She moved me greatly and I found myself drawn back to her many times during my visit to this exhibition.  Perhaps on this artwork I project my own contradictory feelings and thoughts.

Woman of Venice VIII (1956)

Much has been written about Giacometti’s progress from his Surrealist sculptures of the early 1930s through to the elongated figures which evolved from the time he spent working in exile in Geneva during the Second World War.  The premise of this exhibition is that at the heart of this progression (and despite the artist’s declaration in 1925 that he had abandoned working from observation due to his perceived inability of capturing any likeness successfully) was the artist’s continued observance of reality in the form of painted and sculpted portraits of a very small number of sitters throughout his career, most notably his parents, his brother Diego and his wife Annette.

 

                    Diego standing in the Living Room, Stampa (1922)                                   Diego (1950)

Giacometti’s radical change of style and artist intent is evidenced in two paintings of his brother, both contained in the exhibition.  The instantly recognised post-Impressionist, Cubist influenced Diego standing in the Living Room, Stampa (1922), a style much appropriated by artists of that time while beautiful in its elegance, is in stark contrast to a portrait painted twenty-eight years’ later.  Diego (1950) depicts the sitter in a studio location but this time both pose and drawing style is much more relaxed and informal pose.  In his catalogue introduction to the exhibition, Curator of Twentieth-Century Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery, describes Giacometti’s engagement with representation:

“Giacometti’s depiction of a model is essentially connected with the internal process of seeing that person.  His portraits thus stop short of evoking his sitters’ psychology, character or what is known about them.  Rather, they are an intense record of numerous attempts to give objective reality to that which is forever appearing and disappearing: his subjective sensations of a living presence”.

This process of seeing and attempts at objective reality can also be seen in two busts of Diego, one from 1924, the other from 1955. 

 

                      Head of Diego (1924)                                                            Bust of Diego (1955)

Diego acted as Giacometti’s studio assistant and technical for his entire career.  Along with Annette, he was a constantly with the artist.  This intimacy and accessibility no doubt contributed to the intensity of the artist’s gaze.  Such intensity is evident even in his later portraits of his familiar subjects.

The Artist's Mother (1950)

 

Portrait of Caroline (1962)                                      Annette VI (1962)

However, as Giacometti’s reputation increased internationally, so did the opportunities for commissioned portraits.  Undertaken in relatively few sittings (compared to the continuous scrutiny of his family and favoured model, Caroline), any real essence of the subjects seemed lacking in such work.  It is as if the artist was looking at his sitters, but had no real interest in seeing them.  Instead of drawing to search for the truth of the reality before him, any ‘pure presence’ of these sitters is dissipated. 

 

                                        Jean Genet (1954-55)                                         Portrait of G. David Thompson (1957)

Despite this, all the works in this exhibition are enigmatic and compelling and tell a lesser known story of an artist rightly regarded as one of the most distinctive and important of the twentieth century.  His own imperative to draw connected with my own at that time and the way he translated what he saw onto canvas gave me the tools to continue such activity myself.  It also reminds me it is an activity I sorely miss despite its inherent frustrations with my own failings.

From left to right: Alberto, Diego and Annette (1952)

56th Venice Biennale: All The World’s Future (9 May-22 November 2015)

It has been a long-held ambition of mine to visit the Venice Biennale and finally this year, I made the visit.  The entire event takes place at the Giardini, the Arsenale and in various locations across the beautiful city from May through to November.  We visited at the end of October on a gloriously warm and sunny weekend as part of a stay in Venice to celebrate a special birthday. 

Curated by Okwui Enwezor, this year’s event has had mixed reviews and 2015 is not regarded as a milestone year in the Biennale’s one hundred and twenty year history.  One critic said that lacked visual power, originality, wit or bravado.  Another wrote that it was the most depressing biennale he has ever visited and that it was a grim feast of international politics, self-obsession and complaint.  The overall critical consensus appeared to be that the curator’s attempt to present the state of global contemporary art today and giving a platform and voice to countries not previously represented, delivered an assault course of videos about global starvation, industrial pollution and the atrocious conditions of workers in developing countries.  For many critics, Enwezor’s ‘dense, restless and exploratory project’ had taken the soul out of the event, making the experience of visiting a ‘glum trudge than the usual exhilarating adventure’. 

Despite these portents of an impending doomed visit, my excitement and enthusiasm mounted as the water taxi journeyed down the Grand Canal and both remained intact as we wandered leisurely around the gardens.  The sunshine and surprising lack of queues (around 300,000 visitors were expected over the six month run) contributed to what was still a very special and enjoyable visit.

 

As we didn’t have enough time to visit all the Biennale locations, we concentrated on the central and national pavilions in the Giardini and perhaps this protected us from any feelings of disappointment and a predicted doomed visit.  I fast tracked first to see new work from Wangechi  Muti in the central pavilion.  I have been a fan for many years and she was even gracious enough to participate in my email interview to form part of my BA dissertation way back in 2006.

 

  

 

Mutu puts together magazine imagery with painted surfaces and found materials.  Her collages explore the split nature of cultural identity and reference colonial history, fashion and contemporary African politics.  Most recently, her work has extended into sculpture and video.  I find her work incredibly engaging and moving.  Her video piece The End of Carrying All  is a piece made this year and is premiered at the Biennale.  It was haunting, dreamlike and very powerful.  Mutu’s sculptural piece, She’s Got The World in Her also shows the artist’s themes of constant and futile striving and the toll it takes on body and soul.

 

It was my patriotic duty to visit the British Pavilion next, to see the wonderful Sarah Lucas in all her rude, crude and irreverent glory.  For “I Scream Daddio”, the building was completed painted custard yellow and filled with biomorphic sculptures and plaster casts of the bottom halves of women draped over household (made from her friends and herself), each with a cigarette sticking out of an orifice.  Her direct and uncompromising attacks on masculine attitudes to femininity and issues around gender and continue to provoke and confound.    

 

The French Pavilion offered the perfect antidote to Lucas’s full on visual assault.  Celéste Boursier-Mougenot’s “Revolutions”, gently moving trees, both inside and outside the Pavilion, were haunting and quite beautiful.  Although obviously mechanically enhanced, these were real, fully grown trees with root balls exposed, which made their movement even more surreal.  Inside the Pavilion, what looked like concrete steps turned out to be expanding foam on which to sit and watch another tree move around the atrium to faintly heard music.  Exquisitely executed and wonderfully relaxing, a totally immersive artistic encounter.

 

 

 

Like Sarah Lucas (but with no hint of humour or irony), Australian Fiona Hall wore her politics loud and proud in her installation “Wrong Way Time”, for her country’s pavilion.  In near darkness,  her collections of objects and ephemera (some made by indigenous women), took on the air of a museum of antiquities and seemed a little naïve and sometimes obvious use for addressing her concerns on global politics, world finances and the environment.  I was still positively drawn to some of her work, particularly a collection of small bread sculptures placed across maps which corresponded to a particular world problem – a slaughtered elephant laid across a map of Africa, tiny cut out figures of swimmers put on the Mediterranean Sea between Libya and Italy, demolished buildings placed on maps of war torn cities  In a politically drenched installation, these did manage to resonate.

 

 

 

 

The show stopping pavilion was without doubt Chiharu Shiota’s “The Key in the Hand” for Japan.  Exploring notions of the link between memories of people across time, Shiota displayed two wooden boats linked by webs of red yarn from which thousands of keys were suspended.  The overall visual impact was amazing and walking around the installation opened up new and beautiful vistas.  The intricacy of the piece was quite breathtaking.  I remember seeing an earlier work by the artist at the Royal Academy some years ago.  It was an antique wrought iron bed surrounded by a web of black yarn.  In its execution, this installation mirrors her earlier work, but it is none the less beautiful. 

 

 

 

We only scraped the surface of what this Biennale had to offer and even if it was not critically well-received and generally thought to be one of its weakest incarnations, I was very glad to have visited and witnessed an important art historical event.  I am also completely in love with Venice, so a return visit is definitely needed - let’s see what 2017 has to offer.

Joseph Cornell: Wanderlust. Royal Academy of Arts, London (4 July-27 September 2015)

 

 

 Untitled (Pinturicchio Boy), 1942-52 [Left]      Untitled (Medici Princess), c. 1948 [Right]

 

 

I cannot remember the last time I visited a retrospective exhibition for one artist where every art work on display, from their very early work, mature and usually most iconic work and later, end of career work, was so completely resolved, sophisticated and enchanting as that of Joseph Cornell in this exhibition at the Royal Academy, his first retrospective in the UK for over thirty years.

 

Cornell (1903-1972) was an extraordinary artist.  Completely self-taught and despite having never travelled outside his native USA, he created the most exquisite and sublime art works where notions of travel was the predominate influence.  He was extremely well-read and knowledgeable on a diverse range of subjects such as literature, astronomy, natural history and opera, all which fed into his collages and assemblages.  Although he never visited Europe, Cornell was captivated by bygone imagery and through his collecting (his box constructions were filled with objects he found in thrift shops in his native New York, which he used to wander around during his lunch breaks as a textile salesman), he amassed an exceptional knowledge of astronomical  charts and geographical maps, Italian and Spanish Old Master paintings, historical ballet, early cinema, literature, poetry and ornithology.  There was seemingly no subject which he could not understand, interpret and extract not only selective imagery but also an alternative context in order to construct a fantasy creation and not once did any of his “shadow boxes” as he called them, ever slip into naivety, lazy construction or theatre-set appearances.

 

Untitled (Cockatoo with Watch Faces), 1949

 

Untitled (The Hotel Eden), 1945

 

Cornell was a fascinating character.  He lived with and took care of his mother and younger brother, who suffered from cerebral palsy, for all their lives.  Although reserved in character and often portrayed as an isolated outsider, through personal friendships and a series of successful exhibitions and patronage by the likes of Peggy Guggenheim and Alfred Barr, he connected with leading members within Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art and Minimalism as the movements developed in New York in the 1940s, 50s and 60s.  Despite these relationships, Cornell maintained his independence from any particular group in order to champion a highly personal form of artistic expression.

Play and experimentation, collecting and classification, longing and reverie – categorisations the Royal Academy have used to describe Cornell’s shifting attention and creations of fantastical games, fictional valises and shrines to places and people.  He did not need to travel as his seemingly limitless imagination and creative skills could construct fantastical renders which reality would be hard pressed to compare with.

 

Untitled (Celestial Navigation), 1956-58

Untitled (Soap Bubble Set), 1936

 

Cornell did not draw, paint or sculpt and was not the first artist to use collage and assemblage.  He was though the first to make appropriation and arrangement of found objects and materials as the exclusive medium of his work.  The work on display in this exhibition is only a fragment of Cornell’s output throughout his fifty year career, a career which not only saw the artist enjoy success during his lifetime, but whose legacy has influenced many artists and echoes of which can still be seen within contemporary art practice.  This is a delightful exhibition and a very long time coming for the UK.  A definite must-see during a visit to London this summer.

Untitled (The Life of Ludwig II of Bavaria), 1941-52

Untitled (Minutiae Objects), c. 1930s

 

 

L'Egypte de Mlle Cleo de Merode, 1940

 

 Naples, 1942

 

https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/

 

 

 

Why I Love… A series of posts on artworks which have made a lasting impression on me. No 2: "Self-Portrait with Fried Eggs", 1996 (From Self-Portraits 1990-1998), Sarah Lucas

Self-Portrait with Fried Eggs, 1996

Sarah Lucas has for a very long time (and continues to be) the number one in my top five of favourite contemporary artists (the number two to five of which are Jenny Saville, Wangechi Mutu, Cathy Wilkes and Johana Vasconcelos). A lot of my art studies were focussed on sculptural practices by female artists as well as self-portraiture, so she became one of my go-to artists. I wasfascinated with her confrontational self-portraits and innuendo-filled work as these were practices rarely adopted by female artists. A leading player in the Young British Artist group of the late 1980s and early 1990s, her ‘ladette’ personification critiqued chauvinism and sexism from a very British perspective. Using everyday materials, such as worn furniture, clothing, fruit, vegetables, newspapers, cigarettes, cars, resin, plaster, neon lamps and light fittings, the grungy, abject appearance of many of her works belied the serious and complex subject matter they addressed. Lucas makes constant reference to the human body, questioning gender definitions and challenging macho culture. The use of food to represent or stand in for sexual body parts was a common theme in Lucas's work of the 1990s to reveal and subvert objectification of the body in vernacular language. For example, in Au Natural (1994) Lucas used a mattress, bucket, melons and cucumber to parody stereotypes around sexualised bodies and mysogynistic tabloid culture. Her fleshy and anthropomorphic sculptures of around the same time in contrast underscored sexual, psychological and social tensions.

Au Naturel (1994)

Bunny (1997)

“I use sexist attitudes because they are there to be used. I get strength from them …With only minor adjustments, a provocative image can become confrontational - converted from an offer of sexual service into a castration image … I'm dipping into the culture, pointing a finger: directing attention to what's there” [Sarah Lucas].

Lucas’s first self-portrait, Eating a Banana (1990) changed the artist’s perception of her 'masculine' appearance which she saw as a disadvantage, to being something she could use in her art. Through her self-portraits she presented an identity which challenged stereotypical representations of gender and sexuality in two dimensions as her sculptural and installations did in three dimensions. For me, Self Portrait with Fried Eggs (1996) is the most iconic image in the group of twelve photographs in the series. It would have been my own artistic retort to comments as I was growing up to my own cleavage (or lack thereof)!

Eating a Banana (1990)

Lucas’s ouvre is about the everyday, the abject and the epic. Her work is crude, sleazy and funny. The continued use of visual puns throughout her career have been aggressively impudent and both shock and amuse - they are not for the faint-hearted. Lucas is representing Britain at the 56th Venice International Art Biennale 2015 with her major solo exhibition, “I Scream Daddio”, in the British Pavilion (9 May - 22 November). I first saw Lucas’s work in the 2004 Tate exhibition “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida”. Although I have seen her work in a number of group and solo exhibitions since, eleven years after that first exhibition I am very excited to be visiting I Scream Daddio in October as part of a birthday weekend visit to that beautiful city. It will be interesting to see the juxtaposition of her work in such majestic surroundings.