East End Review

Tag: Art

Draw talent: Shoreditch art school holds exhibition of work by artists aged 10 to 18

Part of a piece by Shoreditch-based 14-year-old, Ananda. Photograph: Royal Drawing School

Drawing, said David Hockney, helps you put your thoughts in order and can make you think in different ways.

If that is true then drawing should be an attractive proposition for young people trying to make sense of their impending adulthood and the world around them.

Next month the Royal Drawing School will be displaying 250 drawings by members of its Young Associates Programme.

These budding artists are all aged 10–18 and for many it will be their first chance to show work in a professionally-curated public exhibition in Shoreditch.

Axel Scheffler, illustrator of The Gruffalo, one of the most popular children’s book of recent times, was impressed with the work on display at last year’s exhibition, but warned the artists that becoming a professional takes dedication.

“It took me a long time to become an illustrator. I had work constantly after leaving college but it took 13 years as an illustrator before The Gruffalo came along,” he said.

However, Scheffler describes drawing as a “brilliant human activity” and says children should start drawing “as soon as they can hold a pencil”.

“The younger you start the better you will become,” he says. “Drawing is just a great activity to establish a relationship with the world. You observe what’s outside but you can also express what’s inside you and try lots of different techniques.

“For a young person hoping to become an illustrator I would recommend they draw as much as possible and another thing is to be curious about how other people draw.”

Judging by some of the works set for inclusion in the show, the standard looks to be high, with portraits and observational drawings in a range of styles.

The Royal Drawing School was set up in 2000 as the Prince’s Drawing School to address concerns that drawing was falling off the map as an essential skill for art students.

Supported by the Prince of Wales, it received its ‘royal’ title in 2014. At the time Grayson Perry said: “In the 21st century – with all our amazing digital technology – drawing remains a skill that is as important and relevant as ever.

“We don’t have a USB port in our head and drawing is the most direct way we have of expressing our visual imagination to the outside world.”

Royal Drawing School Young Artists Exhibition
Until 29 September
Royal Drawing School
19–22 Charlotte Road
EC2A 3SG
royaldrawingschool.org

August 25, 2016
Moon landing – Out of Nowhere, PEER gallery

Abstract: Jeremy Moon’s ‘Out of Nowhere’. Photograph: PEER gallery

Paintings by Jeremy Moon are like brightly-coloured UFOs that have somehow found their way to earth.

Although an influential figure in abstract painting and the 1960s London art scene, exhibitions of Moon’s work are a rare occurence.

But now PEER gallery in Hoxton and Large Glass on Caledonian Road are jointly presenting a selection of paintings and drawings by the artist, who died in a motorbike accident in 1973 at the age of 39.

PEER is also showing a large sculpture by young Glasgow-based artist, Neil Clements, who has selected the works for both shows.

Clements’ large and airy sculpture is very reminiscent of a 1960s sculpture by Anthony Caro, but has now been reimagined it as a structure for a slide show, with each digitally produced slide depicting paintings by Moon between 1964 and 1968.

Moon was one of the first artists in Britain to experiment with shaped canvases, and was known for his non-representational paintings of bright colour and geometrical clarity.

Comedy and seriousness pack this show. The comedy comes from the paintings’ ability to anticipate our encounter with them as the act of viewing unveils layers of lightness and playful intelligence.

The interplay between the depicted and literal form is a significant development in visual language. Out of Nowhere (1965) plays with the perception and optical, our eyes initially reading the circular voids as painted white holes.

In No 3/73 (1973) the shaped canvas leads the eye from the depicted orange strip on the bottom left hand corner to the literal form jutting out into space after crossing a horizontal black band.

Moon would explore all the possibilities of the paintings through a vast outpouring of drawings, only arriving at a pictorial solution when as many possible options converge. This intentional instability creates a tension and an energy pulling in different directions.

“These are paintings that welcome you into their space,” says Neil Clements, artist-curator and PhD Research Student at Glasgow School of Art, adding: “He worked hard to make it look easy.”

Moon famously hated critics, Clements says. One can see how the singularity, simplicity and intuitive nature, the logic and irrationality of the paintings, wilfully resist categories and language.

There’s an extraordinary freshness to the work in Out of Nowhere, which has been specially restored for the occasion.

Moon’s work feels so contemporary because the paintings look to the future, they open up and push into new spaces. By tilting the rigidity of modernist rationalism something very human comes through, like a flower sprouting through the cracks in concrete.

Out of Nowhere
Until 17 September
PEER
97-99 Hoxton Street
N1 6QL

July 25, 2016
Slave’s Lament – an art film with “raw immediacy” from Mile End auteur

Slave’s Lament runs until 26 June

There’s something ghostly about the intimacy of the art film Slave’s Lament and the accompanying series of Indian Inks by Graham Fagen, a Glaswegian artist represented by Mile End’s Matt’s Gallery.

Notions of cultural redemption, closeness and personal detail take centre stage as Fagen looks at Scotland’s links to the slave trade and colonialism, particularly Jamaica.

The four channel film is a performance of the song ‘Slave’s Lament’, written in 1792 by Robert Burns.

The film matches the words of the poet to reggae music and is a collaboration with singer Ghetto Priest, accompanied by classical musicians.

The song of tear-making poignancy and other worldly sorrow is written in the voice of a Senegalese person transported to a Virginian plantation.

Robert Burns, though known for his abolitionist tendencies, was close to becoming a slave overseer on a Jamaican sugar plantation in the late 1780s.

His finances in a mess and his writing going nowhere, the desperate poet saw a chance to get rich quick and put down a nine guineas deposit to secure his passage.

But the success of publishing a book of his poetry to raise money for the trip caused his life to veer forever in a different direction.

Fagen’s filmed version of the song is haunting, as different tones of the past and modes of action resonate to create the sense of a still lingering presence of a recently lived past.

The video focuses on the singer’s teeth, a striking motif in Fagen’s recent work. There’s a vulnerability to teeth, as the only exposed bones in the human body and our principal source of social exchange.

Fagen’s interest in the depiction of teeth was sparked by casts of George Washington’s mouth, and the discovery that his dentist had taken a philosophy course on the phenomenology of dentistry.

One of Fagen’s Indian Inks

Possessing a raw immediacy, the Indian Inks look like the Mexican Day of the Dead masks, or Venetian Carnival Masques. Each painting is punctuated by an identical starting point of the artist own teeth. These sensory portraits are created by Fagen closing his eyes, feeling his teeth and blindly rendering them.

From there he continues to paint blindly about how he feels, whether it is first thing on a glum Monday morning or the fizzing energy of going out on a Friday night.

The Mighty Scheme: Graham Fagen
Until 26 June
CGP London and Matt’s Gallery
The Gallery by the Pool
SE16 2UA

May 16, 2016
Grayson Perry on how to be an artist

Grayson Perry speaks at UEL. Photograph: University of East London

“It’s a marathon, not a sprint”, the Turner Prize-winning artist Grayson Perry told a flock of young artists in a speech at the University of East London last month.

The artist doled out valuable nuggets on how to conquer the art world, with patience, passion and a ‘plan B’ at the crux of it.

Rule number one is to love what you do. “You’re not going to make good art if you’re loading it up with expectations of income or praise or respect,” Perry began. Expectations will make your art a burden, and most importantly, “it must not become something that tortures you”.

Perry told the audience, mostly composed of fresh-faced students, about the importance of being “a bit raw”. Most of their art so far, he said, is likely to be unoriginal, for becoming a great artist takes time. “Stick with it,” he advised.

Succeeding in the art world will not happen all at once, so a ‘Plan B’ is always a sensible idea. Perry’s own backup plan, he revealed, was in advertising, yet fortunately he’s always been able to live off his art (along with a little help from his wife, the psychotherapist and author Philippa Perry).

Earning a living from art is a defining dilemma of many an artist, and Perry’s answer to this was to sell your work and not worry about the price. “Don’t overprice”, he insisted. At the start of your career, “the work is out there being an ambassador for you”, and you must do everything to get it out.

Like in any career “it doesn’t hurt to do a bit of networking”, Perry added, and recounted how manoeuvring himself into a seat next to Neil MacGregor at a dinner party planted the seed for an exhibition that took place at the British Museum a few years later.

Judging from Perry’s own road to fame, his advice is solid. Perry comes from a working class background and achieved widespread acclaim only in his late thirties. He said he saw himself in some of the UEL students. “I imagine a lot of the kids here, they don’t have conversations about art around the dinner table with their mum and dad. So you’ve got to be really driven, and I think that’s important.”

Perry admitted he is still learning a lot about himself and his art. His next television project will be about masculinity, and the process of making the programme he claims taught him a lot. “I might put on a dress sometimes,” he said, “but I am really quite a man.”

March 16, 2016
Get the Picture: Cris Brodahl at The Approach gallery

Image courtesy of the artist and the Approach Gallery. Photograph: FXP Photography

Judging speculatively from her work, the Belgian artist Cris Brodahl must be a sensitive sort. Brodahl makes monochrome photorealist, film-noirish paintings of sensuous and brooding female forms, influenced by surrealism.

But her new series at Approach Gallery marks a departure for the artist, in the introduction of sculptural form. The passive female beauty taken from 1930s and 40s film is contrasted and paralleled with an active exploration of modernist sculpture. In the painting Lightyears (2015), from which the exhibition takes its name, collaging becomes the physical crack of a door opening slowly where the subject slowly emerges. The canvas is sized and mounted onto an aluminium-cut angled back, offering a blade-like edge.

There is a sense of a yearning here, a yearning to manifest some sort of identity, whether fiction or fantasy. Brodahl slows down time in the way she pauses on details, producing a quiet space away from contemporary visual cacophony.

These are paintings in which mystery is taking place, the different sections of the image, precisely cut like blades of shattered glass, introducing an interruption to the passage through the canvas. Stripped of excess, taking a closer look rewards the viewer by revealing subtle nuances of colour within the monochrome paintings. The way Brodahl’s works are arranged within the gallery is particularly well-considered. Some pieces are hidden from sight, gradually creeping into view after some absorbed observation. This is done through thin partitions and a table-height shelf, and the diagonal slats added to the window in the gallery, evocative of crisp white paper.

Lightyears by Cris Brodahl is at The Approach gallery, 47 Approach Road, E2 9LY until 27 March
theapproach.co.uk

March 10, 2016
Get the picture: ‘Brockley’ by Tim Stoner

Brockley (2015), by artist Tim Stoner

Tim Stoner is a painter’s painter, and his new series, currently showing at Modern Art gallery, is a feast of painting languages and histories.
Determinedly straightforward and reflexive in impulse and expression, Stoner’s paintings can be described as happenings.

It is the collision of different elements from different angles that makes them happen. Here is an artist most interested in those elements that are in tension, where there is a fight, a battle or an antagonistic problem in the painting that has to be worked against.

In Brockley (2015), the interior of a café pictorially echoes Stoner’s first studio at Norwich School of Art (the detail of the table on the left). Different layers and ‘absences’ play off against each other. The outline of distant houses and the interior of the room seem ‘real’, or at least hold more naturalistic information than the floating circular table.

The other tables are more ‘empty’ and play with the perspectival opening up of the space. Colour takes on an individual and autonomous character. The figure on the left brims with a radiant red, while parcelled or sectioned spaces of the painting tell their own stories.

Memory is a material of these paintings, part of a drive toward essentialism and sensory attentiveness. It is reflected in the clarity of the drawing and confidence in the selection of essential details included or taken out.

Brockley recalls the reflective interior light of Rembrandt’s Philosopher in Meditation (1632) while in conscious dialogue with the ‘caveman’.

In common with many of Stoner’s paintings, it flips between intertwining, figurative compositional meaning and the abstract, sensorial meaning of the effect of colour or shape.

Tim Stoner: Wisdom of the Crowd is at Modern Art, 4-8 Helmet Row, EC1V 3QJ until 20 February
modernart.net

February 11, 2016
The Fantasy of Representation at Beers Contemporary – art review

Sad Tommy by Andrew Salgado. Courtesy of Beers Contemporary

The current exhibition at Beers Contemporary, The Fantasy of Representation, combines emerging painters with familiar masters in a show that celebrates the representational and figurative strand of contemporary art.

Curated by Andrew Salgado, the exhibition argues that figuration, the painting of things, can be as inventive and avant-garde as any example of abstraction (the painting of forms, shapes and colours). Here Salgado displays the work of some 20 artists, and his own, in support of his argument.

In the accompanying essay Salgado writes against the assumption that although representational painters should be influenced by abstraction, abstraction has no responsibility to take on the lessons of those painters who paint objects, people and landscapes.

The art historian Edward Lucie-Smith notes in support that abstract work can be just as predictable and tiresome as any picture of a river or tree. They are right, of course, and it is unjust to assume that just because an artist chooses to include representational content in their work that it is less advanced or adventurous than the work of an abstract painter.

Suregum by Scott Anderson. Courtesy of Beers Contemporary

The combination of the techniques of abstraction with carefully chosen subject matter and recognisable references has produced some of the most interesting work of the 20th and 21st century. This point is explicitly made by the inclusion of a Francis Bacon sketch on paper (Head Drawing), a distended head that illustrates exactly how engaging the balance between technique and content can be.

The material qualities of the paintings on show are one of the most immediately striking aspects of the exhibition, and it is fascinating to examine the craters, peaks and thickness of the paint. Looking into the Sun (Kings Blue) (2015) by Daniel Crews-Chubb is such a dense lather of materials pasted to the canvas that I found myself staring at it for quite some time.

But somewhat ironically for a show on representation, the content of the painting barely registered over its material qualities. This is the Achilles heel of the exhibition, and perhaps even of modern representational painting in general.

Hand for Horace Greeley by Aaron Holz. Courtesy of Beers Contemporary

Often the content (what the painting is of) is really quite boring. Doe-eyed women, topless men with a far-away stare in their eyes, the light on a lake – these things feel overdone and far less interesting than how they are painted or exist as objects. Surely truly great representational work, like Bacon’s, exists in the interaction between what is represented and how it is portrayed.

Too much of the work here falls down at the level of content. The clumsy religious theme in Sverre Bjertnes’ The New State (2015), for example, is so overdone that it becomes very difficult to appreciate the skill involved in his painterly technique. Its Hieronymus Bosch-esque landscape, with flat and stretched purple hills cluttered with crucifixes, had me questioning what I could possibly be expected to draw from it. Haven’t I seen these images of psychedelic and unsettling Christianity a hundred times before? What the paintings are of often feels secondary or superficial when comparison to how they are painted.

I think that some of this triteness stems from the unwavering focus on gallery painters, when there is all around us (especially in East London) much more interesting representational work. Walking to the exhibition, I passed street art that I found more poignant, political and urgent than many of the canvases on display. Despite the small size of the exhibition, it could have included so much more that engages exactly with those concerns it identifies – the way that representation can be just as (or even more) current than abstraction.

For all that the exhibition does correctly, and the interesting work it includes, it strays into cliché at points, and rarely looks outside the walls of the gallery or the cliquish art world, towards work that might be just as able to challenge the supremacy of the abstract.

The Fantasy of Representation is at Beers Contemporary, 1 Baldwin Street, EC1V 9NU until 19 September
beerslondon.com

August 27, 2015
INIVA Gallery evening courses begin with A Revisionist History of Art 1946-2015

Iniva Gallery on Rivington Street in Shoreditch

Iniva presents a short course that offers an introduction to international art history from 1945-2015 devised and taught by Dr. Juliet Steyn PhD. Using a chronological framework the five sessions map out the site of global art as a contested arena fraught with geographical, institutional and political tensions.

The five sessions will explore issues of identity politics, the role of institutional frames and the commodification of the cultural sector in contemporary art. A number of artists and thinkers will be considered including: The New Vision Group Gallery, The Kitchen Sink School, John Berger, Stuart Hall, Donald Preziosi, Ingrid Pollard, Hans Haacke, Aubrey Williams, Fred Wilson, Carsten Höller and Francis Bacon.

Course Price:
£195 per person (15% Student Discount Available)
Price includes all 5 sessions, 7.5 hours tuition

Course Tutors:

Juliet Steyn PhD is a cultural historian. She is interested in the workings of cultural institutions and in the formation of the subject and identity. She has published widely on art and cultural criticism focusing on art, the politics of memory and identity.

Juliet was awarded a PhD in the School of Interdisciplinary Studies, University of Kent at Canterbury (1993) and an MA in the History of European Art (modern period) Courtauld Institute, University of London. Until 2013 she was Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Cultural Policy and Management at City University, London, teaching modules on Currents of Criticism and Post-Colonial Agendas.

One session will be taught by art critic and curator Stella Santacatterina. Stella has a specialist interest in the The New Vision Group which was founded by artist Denis Bowen to promote international artists and abstract art. Stella is a contributor to Third Text, Art Monthly, Portfolio and Flash Art.

The first course will run 26 February, 5, 12, 19 and 26 March 2015 from 6 to 7.30 pm.

Booking information:

Jenny Starr
Tel: +44 (0)207 749 1247
Email: jstarr@iniva.org

February 19, 2015
Art to the Streets of East London

Lerato Shadi, Makhuba, performance/installation, 2014. Photo by Erik Dettwiler

Over the years artists have been invited to ‘speak to the street’ and following a 2013 ROSL Visual Arts residency at Hospitalfield Arts, artist Lerato Shadi presents Makhuba, a new work to be created over six days from 9 – 16 December. Thereafter it will remain as a trace of her daily actions.Lerato Shadi uses her own body to investigate ‘the politics of transformation, or transition, from absence to presence, subject to object, inclusion, exclusion and vice versa‘. Makhuba is a companion piece to a work performed in Berlin and Johannesburg in 2012, Seipone, where she wrote about her past, and on alternate days she created and erased words. Her new work will focus on the future. She will conjure a future for herself connected to society, placing herself in the world. She will again write and erase.

Performance for this artist is a journey for herself as much as for those watching. Lerato Shadi explores assumptions about the (black) female body and how performance creates a stage to make the body both visible and invisible. Using time, repetitive actions as well as stillness, she questions ‘How does one create oneself?’. Seipone, meaning mirror in Tswana, reflected on whether you can lose your past and who is in charge of one’s own history. Makhuba, translated as ‘to wave/paddle’, will question whether one can project a different future for oneself, and how in our imaginations we all live very different lives.

Shadi will undertake a performance in Rivington Place’s large window (on Rivington Street). She will write and erase on alternate days over six days from 9 until 16 December, and thereafter her actions will remain as a trace until 4 January 2015.

Live: 9-16 December 2014

Installation: until 4 January 2015

Iniva, Rivington Place’s street facing window

Window performance: Lerato Shadi Makhumba

Live: 9-16 December 2014

Live performance: Monday – Friday, 10am – 4pm

Installation: until 4 January 2015 visible from Rivington Street

Christmas closure: 24 December 2014 – 2 January 2015

Venue: Iniva, Rivington Place, Rivington Street facing window
London, EC2A 3BA

Rivington Place is open:

Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, 11am – 6pm

Late Thursdays: 11am – 9pm

Saturday: 12noon – 6pm

info@iniva.org

Tubes: Old Street/Liverpool Street/Shoreditch High Street

Rivington Place is fully accessible, for parking & wheelchair facilities call +44 (0)20 7749 1240

December 4, 2014
La Grace Du Ciel at Gallery Extreme

La Grace Du Ciel, from 2 December at Gallery Extreme

La Grace Du Ciel is the name of the opening show at a new East London art gallery – Gallery Extreme.

The show is a homage to the cultural icon that is Grace Jones and is curated by her close friend Moussa Sanogo.

This exhibition showcases a group of upcoming artists and their interpretation of what Grace represents to them.

Gallery Extreme can be found at Morrell House in the heart of Shoreditch, within the iconic ‘sub-terrainian’ wonderland that is ninetyeight bar and lounge.

The collection will be available to view for a week from 2 December 2014 – please note the launch evening is by invitation only.

For the guest list please contact bookingsatninetyeightbar@gmail.com

November 27, 2014