Summer in winter

December 08, 2021 by famapa in looking at art

I don’t know about you, but looking at art is like medicine for me, so after being ill, the first thing I wanted to do was dose myself up on other people’s creativity. Last Tuesday morning I sat down and looked at what was on, and wrote down a list of 15 (!) exhibitions I wanted to go to. After having established the date order of when to go, I headed into town to see Mixing It Up at the Hayward Gallery. Just as I was mere meters away I thought: “Wait, isn’t the Hayward shut on Tuesdays?!” only to see that it was. I put it down to my post-Covid brain not remembering to check whether they were open or not. My other genius move was that I’d left my list at home, but I remembered what was no. 2: The Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy. So, back across the river I walked, arriving at the RA by lunch time and going straight to the café. There I sat, eating my sandwich, facing this mural by Gilbert Spencer called An Artist’s Progress, painted in 1959. Apparently it wasn't very popular at the time, and one critic called it “The worst picture of the year!.” Ouch. I however enjoyed looking at it and following the story, and how it made a good backdrop for the lunching ladies. Re-energised and rested, I went upstairs to embark on the marathon awaiting me; the Summer Exhibition contains over a 1000 artworks. I took a lot of pictures, and I’m going to post 45 of them here. “45 pictures in one post?! Are you mad?!!” I hear you say. Well, I thought it fitting, as walking through the exhibition itself is quite an undertaking. So, make yourself comfortable (maybe boil that kettle), ‘cause here goes.

*Mexican Man With Green And Red Spotted Shirt* Bill Traylor £96,500

The annual Summer Exhibition has been on every year at the Royal Academy since 1769, and for the past couple of years it’s been held in late autumn/early winter because of the pandemic. It has never been cancelled, not even during the world wars. Each exhibition is co-ordinated by a Royal Academician, and this year’s selection was over seen by Yinka Shonibare. The title of it is Reclaiming Magic, and Bill Traylor’s art worked as a catalyst of what the theme should be. From the guide book of the exhibition: “We begin our journey with the work of one artist, Bill Traylor, from whom the kaleidoscope of ideas in the exhibition has evolved. Born into slavery in 1854, he did not start making art until the age of 85. He was a self-taught artist and has come into prominence in our time as society has shifted its values. Bill Traylor’s work singularly inspired the idea of looking beyond the boundaries of Western art history.”

*Red Man With Pipe*
Bill Traylor £71,500

*Lamp, Abstract Table, Figures And Dog*
Bill Traylor £89,500

Now, if you’re a long time reader of the blog (cast your mind back to the heady days of blogging in 2008 if so), you might remember that I got given a book about him, which blew my mind, so to see his work IRL was incredible. I had no idea he was included, so it was a pleasant surprise, and I spent a long time looking at them, with my heart beating a bit faster.

Untitled (Construction With Figures) Bill Traylor NSF (not for sale)

Almost all of the work at the Summer Exhibition is for sale, and had I been a millionaire I might have considered Red Man With Pipe (see above above - ha!), a mere snip at £71,500.

Right then, let’s move on. The fun thing about the SE is that the works on display is a mixture of works from established, new or amateur artists and members of the public. Anyone can enter.

I didn’t shoot this with anything to give it scale, but it was huge - and cool.

*Prison Culture: Canteen II* by Lee Cutter £3,200

I saw some of Lee Cutters’ carved soaps at the 2018 SE. They are really something.

*George Floyd Remembered* Ian Wright £650

It has never occurred to me that you could do actual portraits with Hama beads.

*Memento Mori* Chrissie Freeth NFS (not for sale)

There’s no doubt I’m middle aged now, as I keep finding that my taste is changing. I now love tapestries, I can listen to opera without wanting to turn it off and I’ve also come round to watercolour paintings. I used to think they were so naff, and now I love how delicate they are. Anyway, I digress. I found the craftsmanship in this amazing.

Now how’s this for a fancy light pull? It’s actually quite large, maybe about 25cm in diameter. It would be so beautiful hanging in the window of a minimalist house.

As would this handle type thing (see, I know all the art critic lingo). I reeaaaaally liked this. I’d love it just jutting out on a wall somewhere random at home. But obviously not in the loo, as that would be beyond middle age.

Pretty obvious who this is, eh? Also, knitted portraits! Totally deserves an exclamation mark.

Red Robin Harry Hill £50

Harry Hill is a British (very British) stand up comedian, who’s very silly and has made us laugh a lot over the years. He’s also a bit of an amateur artist on the side, and this was one of his entries. You can see him talk about it here.

*Renovation of the Headquarters of the Royal Geographical Society, Kensington Gore*
Adam Caruso and Peter St John RA (*Royal Academician*) £360

I’ve always found the architecture room at the SE quite boring, but this year was different, as I’ve become much more interested in architecture since Covid and my lockdown looking-at-buildings walks. £360 isn’t a huge amount of money for something as nice as this, but I don’t have that sort of spare cash. A photo of the print will have to do.

*UCL East Marshgate - Study Model 1:100* Stanton Williams NFS

I know for sure that in another life, Mr Famapa would have been a model maker. He’d be awesome at it.

It wasn’t madly busy, which was nice. I love the quiet in a gallery/museum on a weekday, with the chance to step away from the world outside, especially now as town is all Christmassy and busy.

*Chibok Girls: Nigeria’s Stolen Daughters* Julienne Hanson £750

Went in a bit closer on this, so you can see it more in detail. Another very large knitted piece.

Another wide shot so you can see how much there is on the walls, and also how high up some of it is. I’d be a pit peeved if that was my picture on top of the throughway like that, wouldn’t you?

*6 Works From the Vocabulary Series* Marlene Dumas Hon RA NFS

I love Marlene Dumas’ work. Talk about cool watercolours. Her stuff is so otherworldly. She’s got a big exhibition in Venice next year. I might send myself over there in the post so I can see it.

See number 284? The minimalist green and black piece. Gutted that it was hanging so high up. I really liked the look of it, but struggled to see it properly, and the reflections didn't help either. Shame.

Looooooved this wood cut. Another one I would’ve bought with my Monopoly money.

*Ada Set Of Stairs 40.11* Wolgang Tillmans RA £108,960

This massive inkjet print really stood out. I was wondering how you can even print something that big, and then when I saw that it was by Wolfgang Tillmans, and I understood that if you’re Wolfgang Tillmans you can. I overheard these two ladies saying that they found it a bit scary, as if it was about to fall down on them. I kind of know what they mean.

Tried to get a shot of this lady with her hat and colour combo, but she moved just as I took the picture.

*The Business Of Hanging Around* Terry Wood £14,750

Liked the contrast of the clean painting floating in the air and the ornate moulding in the ceiling.

*Back Of Wendover, The Aylesbury Fragments* Harriet Mena Hill £1,350

Who’s to say that you can’t paint on bits of salvaged concrete?

*Amnesiac Beach Fire (Mod II)* Mike Nelson RA £15,000

Or make a fire in the corner?

*Our Visit To The Contemporary Art Museum Did Not Go Entirely As Planned* Glen Baxter £6,800

This made me smile and think of Gary Larson.

*Troglodytes Of The Northern Desert* Stephen Farthing RA £8,000

Looking at this really messed with my eyes. Some colours put next to makes our brains very confused. This painting was like an afterimage.

Another one that I would’ve bought. It really reminded me of summer nights in the Swedish countryside. Must be the pine trees.

There were quite a few Eileen Cooper artworks in the there (I guess one of the many perks of being a Royal Academician is that you can enter as many artworks as you want) but this one was my fave.

See the half cat half human portrait? Loooooooove it.

*Seeing Red (Again)* Corneila Parker RA £666

This made me smile so much. I think this might be the third version of this concept from Corneila Parker, but she could just run with this forever and ever. It’s a dead cert to get chosen every year, but then she would be anyway, because the lady is a genius. You can read more about the first version Stolen Thunder (Red Spot) here.

Matrix IV, From: Aquatints Antony Gormley RA £2,400

Focus!

Ahhh, that’s better. I really enjoyed the times where I immediately felt something; either instantly liking it or recognising who the art was by, before looking in the List of Works guidebook to check the artist. This was one of those occasions where I instantly liked it. When I read that it was by Antony Gormley it made perfect sense - I love everything he does.

And this was one of those times when I knew who’d made it straight away - Ed Ruscha (kind of obvious I guess, haha).

*So Long And Thanks For All The FIsh* Derek Curtis £2,500

See the little painting on its own above the doorway? How aptly placed. Just that bit away from everyone else. Stupid effin’ Brexit. I hate it.

*Chris Whitty’s Cat* Grayson Perry RA NFS

I don’t hate this though. Such pleasure to also see this in real life, as I watched this being made in one of the Grayson’s Art Club episodes last year. In the first lockdown, broadcast on Channel 4 in weekly instalments, Grayson Perry started an art club, with weekly themes that members of the public could partake in, and send him their art. The end result is an exhibition of lockdown art that is currently travelling the country. There were so many good things on TV to keep us sane in those many months of isolation, but Perry’s show was probably the best.

*A Little Bit Of InfinityB/C/F* Peter Randall-Page RA £4,000 each

Noice noice. Really liking the complex simplicity of these. Whoa, I’m hitting the wall dudes. Are you? This is a flipping monster of a post. Are you still with me? Or are you scrolling going “Next. Next.”? Don’t tell me, as it’s easier for me to pretend that you find all of this interesting, because I’ve spent HOURS doing this post. We’re nearly there guys, only six more pics to go. We can DO IT.

This was a very popular piece, with a lot of nostalgic men looking at it. Made it impossible to get a clean shot of it without anyone in it.

So beautiful this, isn’t it? One thing I think I figured out is that if you’re submitting photographs to the SE, they must be very clean graphically. More like something that you put in your house because it goes well with the interior, rather than it being a good picture (not the case here though, but it falls in that bracket too). I think it’s a bit unfair, as so many of the other art works are really busy, and a thing within itself. It could also be that the photographs that get in are like this because they have to compete with busy paintings and the like, and it’s the only way they’ll stand out. They can’t all be huge like Wolfgang Tillmans’ print (which, hello, was very clean graphically!). I’d love to see what the photos that don’t make it in are like. Are they better photographs? Or is this kind of photography the only kind being submitted? Or does the photographer think about how they can easily sell their work? And actually, I’m equally guilty of thinking of the art in the exhibition in relation to what would look like in my house. I guess it can’t be helped, as if you’re buying art, it’s generally going up on a wall, in a home. Still, I think it’s interesting that there’s such a clear division between photography and the other art forms on display here, but I realise that I’m being hypocritical, seeing as all the pieces I’ve taken pictures of and have posted here, fall in the bracket “clean graphically”. “But I used to be a graphic designer” she whispers. “So I can’t actually help it. It’s deeply embedded in my visual DNA”. Pffffft.

*Fatou* Amoalko Boafo (Private Collection) NFS

I guess it’s harder for photographs to “compete” when there’s such great things around them like this painting for example. I’m sure if I had a go at finger painting it would not turn out like this.

*Experiencing British Art History* Nelly Dimitranova £3,500

OMG. This. This is epic. First it made me laugh as I know this colour chart from Farrow & Ball very well, but then my jaw kind of dropped when I looked closer at each paint chip. Every one of them a drawing of a famous British painting or sculpture. I mean, everyone is in there, honestly. If you take your time, I’m sure you’ll recognise loads of them. I recommend coming back to this and looking at them all properly, as I completely get that you might just have OD’d on all of this by now.

I did tell you. The Summer Exhibition is a real undertaking. So is a blog post with 45 pictures.

But we’ve finally made it to the end. If I find out you just scrolled through it all, I’m going to come and pinch you. And I’ll take a picture of me doing it, and then I’ll enter it to next year’s Summer Exhibition. Boom.

Clever lady

September 17, 2021 by famapa in looking at art

Oh hello! How’s tricks? As is always the case in September, I have a long backlog of pictures from the summer to post. I managed to cram in a lot of culture as it’s pretty much my oxygen, you know? And with winter looming and who knows what, I just wanted to take advantage of things being open. Luckily there’s been a lot of good stuff to see. Me and my fellow culture vulture D went to see the Charlotte Perriand exhibition at the Design Museum last month and were seriously impressed by the seriously impressive Perriand. I have to be honest here, these exhibition posts are so time consuming to write as I want to try and share info about said artist/architect/creative, but it does mean that it can take a really long time before I’m ready to press the publish button. Do you guys find this stuff interesting or am I making things unnecessarily harder for myself? Feedback would be very much appreciated! In the meantime I’m going to cheat, and you can read up more on Charlotte Perriand here.

Still, I guess I have to explain a bit about her here so this post makes sense. So, Perriand was a French designer and architect who was a part of the Modernist movement working from the 1920’s until the end of the 1990’s (!). She applied for work at the Le Corbusier Studio only to be told by the big man himself: "We don’t embroider cushions here.” (insert massive eye roll). But a year later, having seen her installation at Le Salon d’Automne in 1927, where she had recreated the bar area in her own apartment showing her furniture designs (a bit like in the first picture), Le Corbusier asked her to join his studio on the spot (in your face LC!). She, together with Pierre Jeanneret, went on to design the furniture to go with Le Corbuisier’s houses, who was horrified by seeing how his clients would fill his Modernist houses with antique furniture. The gall!

It was clear that these designs would fit the interiors much better.

Maybe you recognise this design of this chair, the Fauteuil Grand Confort? A Perriand classic, that Le Corbusier and Jeanneret got credited for designing, when it actually was all her work alone. Isn’t patriarchy just great?

And here D is trying out a replica IRL. It’s well comfy. And those colours are just delicious. Putting tubular steel on the outside of the seat was a groundbreaking design at the time.

The Chaise Longue Basculante is such a great design; you can lift the seat section up and angle it however you like. Also very comfy, but hard to get out of gracefully, at least at this angle.

It wasn’t clear in this section of the exhibition that this was a replica of an single room apartment that Le Corbusier, Perriand and Jeanneret presented as an installation at the 1929 Salon d’Automne. This was the open plan section looking one way (I didn’t take a pic of the reverse view with the dining area, I thought this was just a section with furniture on show - put together badly 😂). The bathroom and kitchen section is behind the storage units on the left of this picture.

Sterile, n’est pas? It’s crazy to think this was designed nearly 100 years ago. Those guys were so influential, and it’s even crazier to think that architecture and interiors haven’t moved on that much from the Modernist movement. Although personally I’d never choose to sleep right next to the bathroom sink.

On the other side of the wall at the back of the picture above was the kitchen. Apologies for not taking a wide shot here.

I loved this picture from Perriand’s studio in Montparnasse. It just looks so damn cosy. Towards the late 1930’s she turned away from metal manufacturing and started working almost exclusively with wood. She designed the table in that shape as it let you seat more people comfortably than you could do with a rectangular or square table. So clever. Perriand was also very sporty Spice, hence the still rings in the ceiling.

An example of the table in the exhibition, clearly showing how the design of the table legs meant that they weren’t in the way of guests’ legs (I hate when you have to sit with your legs around table legs).

During WW2 she was invited to go and work in Japan, and on the ship on the way over there she spotted this chalk graffiti on the deck, drawn by a Japanese sailor, which impressed her so much…

… that she copied it and enlarged it onto a rug design. As you can see here, her furniture designs had taken on a much more organic form by the early 1940’s.

Love this picture of her messing about.

Some very cool wall lights that you could pivot the angle on. They gave off such a nice light.

And this chair! Wouldn't mind having a couple of them in the house (I wish 💸).

Some Isamu Noguchi rice lamps - from below. Very much looking forward to seeing his exhibition at the Barbican this autumn.

Looking at my pictures now, I realise I skipped so much as I wasn't intending to take pictures of everything to show what was there - here. I just took pics of what I liked the look of. So apologies for an abbreviated representation of all of this. So what is this you may wonder? Well, Perriand designed the ski resorts of Les Arcs 1600, 1800, 1950 and 2000 in the late 1960’s and 70’s. She had the kitchen and bathrooms prefabricated off site, so that they could be craned into position with all the electrics and plumbing all ready to be plugged in. Here’s the kitchen section

and here you can see the bathroom part in it’s own box. I found this film on YouTube that explains a bit more.

Charlotte Perriand was a genius designer and architect, and by the looks of things a great human being too. In her later years she built herself a small chalet in Meribel, and it was my favourite of all the things she created. There were only photographs of it in the exhibition, but have a look here and you’ll see what I mean. So happy we got to find out more about her and her work; I resent how history has always airbrushed women out if it, unless they were royals. Stupid frickin’ patriarchy.

Darkness and light

July 27, 2021 by famapa in looking at art

What in hells bells is going on here you may ask? Well, it’s art daaahling. Or rather a picture of what we had to put on our feet waiting to go into the Ryoji Ikeda exhibition at 180 The Strand a few weeks ago. Sexy, non? Hilarious that we had to wear white overshoes rather than the not quite cool enough blue ones (and let’s not get into the flippin’ insane amounts of single use plastics we’ve been going through as a planet in the past 16 months). Ahem.

This gal certainly got the monochrome memo (actually I’m just remembering that I wore black and white too, haha). So, unusually for an exhibition you could take pictures with phones but NOT with a DSLR. I’ve never come across that distinction before, and it made me feel a bit cheated, but good girl that I am I complied.

So what the hells bells is going on here you may ask - again. Ikeda’s works are mainly a combination of digital and sound work, and here we’re looking at monitors with graphics moving up and down them.

And here we had to walk through a section that was lit by bright fluorescent tubes. As we went through we tried to look up and keep our eyes open but it was impossible, our eyes just kept shutting. So weird to have your body involuntarily do something that you were definitely trying to the opposite of.

I don’t take Oomoo on as many exhibitions as I used to as he doesn’t seem that interested, but I’ll go back with him to this one.

At this point I got a bit miffed and broke the rules and used my proper camera. You can’t always be a good girl.

D looking into the light.

In the main room, with three screens showing all sorts of amazingness.

Close up of a screen.

180 The Strand is a repurposed office block that has become an art venue. I’ve seen several exhibitions here, and none of them have used the same layout or used the same rooms. You always have to walk through it differently. Must be a dream to curate in.

This section was extremely photogenic, so it deserves two pictures.

It’s so strange to not be able to show what any of this actually is like as it’s not static like the pictures make it out to be, but actually quite intense, as the graphics move very fast and the sound that goes with it very loud. This film clip explains it way better and gives you an idea of how intense (and clever) a Ryoji Ikeda exhibition actually is. WARNING: CONTAINS STROBING

I like how this group of fellow visitors look like they’ve been choreographed to all do the same thing at the same time - apart from the guy on the right of course. If you find yourself in London before the 18th of September - GO GO GO! If not, keep an eye out for an Ikeda exhibition near you in the future - it’s worth waiting for.

The Art Brut Man

June 07, 2021 by famapa in looking at art

I booked myself a ticket to the Jean Dubuffet exhibition at the Barbican for the day after museums and galleries opened up again. It felt good to be in a dark, quiet space and to be able to look at art - in real life. As soon as I saw this smoking lady I knew I was going to like it. Dubuffet was a French artist and sculptor who, as a teenager studied painting at Académie Julian in Paris only to quit after six months, ‘believing that traditional easel painting was a sterile language unable to articulate the texture of real life’. He was greatly inspired by the work of those ‘untouched by artistic culture’ and self-taught artists in psychiatric hospitals in Switzerland and France.

Dubuffet was born into a wine merchant family and after having sold the business off when he was 41 he could dedicate himself full time to art. He also started the Art Brut movement, collecting thousands of artefacts by outsider artists, some of which were included in the exhibition, which is a separate blog post of itself.

This portrait was one of many that he made of the guests who’d attend a weekly literary salon of a wealthy American lady in Paris. He would look at the attendants carefully for hours and then go back to the studio and only work from memory. I’d love a portrait of myself in this style, wouldn’t you (ha, or maybe you wouldn't)?

In the early 1950’s he spent some time in Algeria and began creating landscapes of the Saharan desert. Some of his work reminds a me a lot of phone doodles (do you still do them? I hardly ever do them anymore; I think they happened more when we only had landlines and had loooong phone conversations. Not really 21st century, what with FaceTime and Zoom and everything) - you’ll see what I mean further down in this post.

He wasn’t afraid of using unusual materials in his work, and in this collage series he used butterfly and moth wings. He found the colours of them too subtle and added watercolour to them to make them more lustrous.

Dubuffet experimented with all sorts of materials, and would deliberately mess with them to get different effects. This painting was amazing close up.

Who makes a sculpture out of the remnants of a burnt car? Dubuffet.

Who makes a sculpture out of tin foil? Dubuffet.

But he didn’t stop there. Inspired by Jackson Pollock and looking really closely at rocks, he made large drip paintings that replicated rock surfaces, which in turn, more than a half a century later, made a certain blogger think “Hmm, I should really start looking closely at rocks again, because rocks are crazy amazing.”

Took a step back to show the whole painting.

I loved this painting, which I’ve cropped here to show his cars, which I thought were so cool. I love how seeing art like this reminds me that art doesn’t have to be ‘classic’ at all.

So, back to phone doodles. This period of Dubuffets work from the 60’s and 70’s was actually based on a phone doodle he made using one of those four-colour ballpoint pens (he skipped using green), that were all the rage many moons ago. He found the doodle fascinating and developed it further into paintings…

… and walk-through installations and architectural environments, with people wearing costumes designed by him walking around inside them. He called it Coucou Bazar, made some music to go with it, and it looked a lot like this.

I really liked these posters from that era from different galleries. I think my fave is the Pace Gallery one (middle, first row).

From Coucou Bazar he progressed to just black and white work.

I wouldn’t mind a couple of these in our house.

Quick! The gallery attendant looks really cool silhouetted like that. Click.

He painted his last series of paintings in his early 80’s, in the 1980’s, and two young artists seeing his work in a gallery in New York became hugely inspired by him: Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. You can see it, can’t you? I’m so glad this exhibition opened, as I’d never heard of Jean Dubuffet before, which is ridiculous, seeing as I went to see an Art Brut exhibition in Paris two years ago. You live and you learn my friends, you live and you learn.