East End Review

Tag: Bow Arts

Bow Open Show – art review: ‘Exploring East London’s vast cultural history and identity’

Photograph by Felicity McCabe of 11-year-old Ilhan Abdillahi Geel near Gargarra, Somaliland

As a new summer of art gets underway, the Nunnery Gallery have brought back their annual show The Bow Open, featuring work from 24 innovative artists all belonging to the Bow Arts collective.

This year’s eclectic offerings are curated by Anj Smith, an artist whose captivating – and often unnerving – detailed paintings weave the mystical with the everyday.

The decisively topical exhibition plays with a wide range of mediums discussing issues of family, nationalism and gender to inventively explore East London’s vast cultural history and identity.

Ladies and Gentlemen by Ryan Hodge

No piece of work is entirely alike. An embroidered stretch of dazzling, chaotic silk and beads from Lizzie Cannon draws you in, while a metre away, Emily Whitebread’s audio What Is England chips away at the concept of patriotism with a series of disconnected but poignant spoken words connoting England.

Looking further from home, Felicity McCabe’s photography, captures the dramatic and troubling effects of climate change in Somaliland, juxtaposing the image of a woman in bright clothing, blowing in the wind with a crooked, dead tree.

Triptych by Michael Achtman

Another fascinating journey is encapsulated in Michael Achtman’s triptych image as an accompaniment to his film April In The Country, following a blind woman’s trip to the Western Isles in search of her mother.

Themes of gender and sexuality also take prominence in the exhibition. Ryan Hodge’s digital print Ladies and Gentlemen, offers a snapshot into transgender life struck through with lashings of shocking pink and Jaime Valtierra’s rich oil painting Not Always but Anytime peeks into the intricacies of female desire.

There’s also recent St Martin’s graduate Mette Sterr, who says she’s interested in “blurring the boundaries between the animate and the inanimate”. This is certainly seen in her gothic photography, which on this occasion features an ageing mermaid staring gloomily through heavily made up eyes into the camera lens, with her man-made, costume tail trailing into the distance.

Deeply personal and subtly provocative, the discursive pieces on show reveal not only the breadth of artistic talent available within one small space, but the shifting, eccentric character of the area itself. Expect more fruitful discussion and surprises with live performances, talks, and tempting gin cocktails set up for later this August.

2016 Bow Open Show, Nunnery Gallery, 181 Bow Road, E3 2SJ
bowarts.org

Sssshhttt by Mette Sterre

Fictional Memory by Lauren Mele

July 7, 2016
Get the picture: ‘Library Looting’ by Willem Weismann

Library Looting by Willem Weismann on display at Nunnery Gallery until 20 December

‘Library Looting’ by East London Painting Prize winner Willem Weismann works as an absurdist narrative that needs to be pieced together by the viewer.

The painting, on display at the Nunnery Gallery as part of the artist’s solo show Alphabet Soup, comments ironically on library closures by imagining a scenario where books are so precious that they become the subjects of a heist.

Books, in this invented cartoon world, function as a symbolic double for the work of painting. They offer intimate conversations and represent a romantic view of the world, one of the few endeavours left in which a single individual can effect change.

Worries of proportion and other obstacles are thrown aside to get straight to the fun of painting. The handling of the paint is satisfyingly impastoed, thick set like the relief of woodblock prints, or Van Gogh like. A plurality of strong bold colours is set against calm, less busy sections.

As you peer through the bookshelf you can pick out a body being dragged away, a foot can be seen on the left, next to the rock that presumably knocked them unconscious. The face is hidden (distracted by a book), to stop attention from being drawn away from the rest of the painting.

Highly finished details offer clues, such as the beer can bong, a crowbar, ski mask and take-away pizza which could suggest a young squatter hiding away or a librarian’s last stand.

Amid this, ‘Library Looting’ raises questions about the purpose and place of painting as an activity in the face of shifting technologies. ‘Obsolete’ objects such as old style cordless phones, CDs and Walkmans stand out. To what extent do these double for painting itself and reflect anxieties about its status within the arts?

Alphabet Soup is at Nunnery Gallery, 181 Bow Road, E3 2SJ until 20 December.
bowarts.org

December 11, 2015
East London Painting Prize shortlist announced

OMG I Love You by East London Painting Prize fainlist Marie Jacotey-Voyatzis

A shortlist of 23 artists has been announced for this year’s East London Painting Prize.

Work by the artists is to go on show at Bow Arts Trust’s new artists’ studios The Rum Factory, a Grade II-listed former rum warehouse in Wapping that used to be part of News International’s printworks.

The prize winner will announced on 13 May, and will receive £10,000 in cash and a solo exhibition at the Nunnery Gallery in Bow.

The East London Painting Prize, now in its second year, celebrates the diversity and talent of artists who live or work in East London and is run by Bow Arts Trust and The Legacy List.

Last year’s winner was Nathan Eastwood, whose winning painting, Nico’s Café, was an Edward Hopper-inspired image of an elderly man eating alone in a greasy spoon café.

One of the judges Lizzie Neilson, Director of Zabludowicz Collection which supports the prize, said: “We had to be hard-nosed to get to this succinct group but I think there is a strength is showing the best of the best. Seeing these excellent paintings in the flesh was a fantastic experience and left me invigorated, as the breadth of painting practice in the East End of London is just staggering.”

Rosamond Murdoch, Director of Bow Arts Trust’s Nunnery Gallery, added: “East London is a hotbed of talent and the painters shortlisted for this year’s prize are a distillation of that quality.”

The shortlisted artists are:

Hackney

Michael Ajerman, Steven Allan, David Caines, Anna Freeman Bentley, Andrew Hladky, Kate Lyddon, Cathy Lomax, Lee Maelzer, Judith Rooze, Mimei Thompson

Newham

Peter Donaldson, Marie Jacotey-Voyatzis

Redbridge

Luke Rudolf

Tower Hamlets

Hannah Brown, Cyrus Shroff, Caroline Walker, Willem Weismann, Emily Wolfe, Vivien Zhang

Waltham Forest

Benjamin Doherty, Katrin Maeurich, David Ben White, Josephine Wood

April 23, 2015
Mary Barnes: Boo-Bah – art review

Mary Barnes. Courtesy of Dr J. Berke. Photograph: Ollie Harrop

The Nunnery Gallery on Bow Road, hosting the first show of Mary Barnes’s artwork since the major 2010 retrospective at Space Studios, isn’t far from Kingsley Hall in Bromley-by-Bow, where Barnes spent 1965-1970 covering the walls with her paintings, using her own faeces and later grease crayons.

Kingsley Hall was briefly home to anti-psychiatrist R.D. Laing’s Philadelphia Association, which sought to provide spaces where people suffering from mental illness could live without being treated as insane. Barnes admitted herself in 1965.

Laing contended that madness, rather than being an illness, was a reasonable response to chaos and injustice in society, with ‘anti-psychiatry’ in its more extreme forms coming to glamorise insanity, the mentally ill seen as exceptionally perceptive. Art was encouraged, both as ‘treatment’ and as a way of communicating such perceptions.

“My first paintings were black breasts over the walls of the Hall,” wrote Barnes in 1969. “Joe gave me a tin of grease crayons. ‘Here, just scribble’. I did, on and on.” Joe – Joseph Berke, Barnes’s doctor at ‘the Hall’ – was also known to Barnes as ‘Boo-Bah’; the Nunnery show is named in his honour.

Untitled by Mary Barnes. Image courtesy Dr J. Berke. Photograph: Ollie Harrop

Barnes made and exhibited paintings until her death in 2001. Perhaps surprisingly, the Boo-Bah paintings are disciplined and composed. Small Figure, an early work, is made up of hurried, smudgy lines, but they are deployed deftly to reveal a little girl whose hunched awkwardness is expressive, moving and characterful, not clumsy.

The row of colourful Untitled’s on the opposite wall bear similarly visible artefacts of their creation but their connected flow and intricacy of pattern have all it takes to trap a viewer’s stare.

Barnes’s later works, done in oil pastels, have more solid blocks of colour and more figuration. They feature vividly drawn personages whose psychedelic colouring adds to their mystery, as though they were figures from an unknown religion.

Small Figure by Mary Barnes. Image courtesy of Dr. J Berke, photograph: Ollie Harrop

The exhibition is informative about the institutional origins of Barnes’s career and raises questions about untutored art, and art used as therapy. Do you look at Barnes’s paintings as symptoms of her illness or as one would a standard art-show? In this respect, some of anti-psychiatry’s eliding of distinctions is refreshing and brings clarity.

‘Outsider art’ – graffiti, ghost bikes, Christmas lights – is often more interesting and informative about contemporary culture than gallery shows. To see a suggestive blending of the one with the other, get thee to the Nunnery.

A discussion of Barnes’s work, including Dr Joseph Berke on the panel, will be held at the Nunnery Gallery on 24 February.

Mary Barnes: Boo-Bah is at Nunnery Gallery, 181 Bow Road, E3 2SJ until 29 March
www.bowarts.org/nunnery

Volcanic Eruption by Mary Barnes. Image courtesy of Dr J. Berke. Photograph: Ollie Harrop

February 16, 2015
East London Painting Prize opens for entries

Last year’s winner: Nathan Eastwood collects his prize. Photograph: Bow Arts

Applications for the East London Painting Prize are now open, giving East London artists the chance to win £10,000 and a solo exhibition at the Nunnery Gallery in Bow.

Artists have until 8 March to submit their applications, with the prize open to both established and emerging artists of any age living or working in the boroughs of Hackney, Newham, Tower Hamlets, Havering, Waltham Forest, Barking and Dagenham and Redbridge.

Now in its second year, the East London Painting Prize aims to explore and celebrate the diversity in painting practices and different approaches to the medium.

Last year’s winner was 41-year-old Nathan Eastwood, who said winning the prize had been a “huge boost”, allowing him to spend more time painting and producing new works.

His winning painting, Nico’s Café, was an Edward Hopper-inspired image of an elderly man eating alone in his local greasy spoon café, in grey and white tones.
Rosamond Murdoch, Gallery Director at the Nunnery, which is part of Bow Arts, said: “It’s never been harder to be an artist in London.

This prize offers the chance for us to gather a world class panel of judges to select the best in contemporary painting today and challenge the art audiences of London.”

The winner of the East London Painting Prize will be announced at a group exhibition featuring work from shortlisted artists to be held in East London this spring.

www.bowarts.org/elpp

February 10, 2015
Exhibition review: Empty Streets – Noel Gibson’s East London (1967–1975)

Detail from Brick Lane by Noel Gibson. Courtesy of Tower Hamlets Local History and Archives

On moving to Stepney in the 1960s, the Glasgow-born artist Noel Gibson said he found “paintings at the doorstep”. The streets and buildings of East London became his muse as he set about creating urban landscapes that captured the soul of an area undergoing rapid change.

A selection of these paintings are now on display at the exhibition Empty Streets – Noel Gibson’s East London (1967–75), at the Nunnery Gallery in Bow.

Gibson, who died in 2005, was originally an abstract painter, and perhaps it is this impulse to look beyond strict realism that makes these paintings of pubs, bridges, houses and streets so compelling.

People are strangely absent, giving the East End the eerie air of a ghost town. Yet this absence serves as a reminder of human activity. Metal frames of market traders’ stalls lie empty in Hessel Street, Stepney, while on Canon Street Road the spire of a church pokes through the ominous gap between two houses.

Colour adds to the enigma. Grey skies and pavements contrast with rusty autumnal hues. Or else the canvas is left blank, as in a painting of Brick Lane, which leaves the chimney of Truman’s Brewery to stand unopposed. Even in the most wintery scenes there’s a brightness to the streets and buildings. According to curator Gary Haines, Gibson used yellow ochre for houses to show that they were dying but were not yet dead.

Gibson tends to apply paint loosely, leaving parts of the canvas exposed. This gives East London a faded quality – appropriate given he was capturing a period of flux; a time when new communities were being established and many old buildings being demolished.

In the gallery’s cafe, miniature reproductions of the works are juxtaposed with photographs of what lies there today. Given that only 45 years have passed, it’s somewhat surprising that most bear no resemblance to the paintings whatsoever.

History buffs will find much to chew on here, though it would be unfair only to ascribe documentary significance to these paintings. Gibson claimed to “love these buildings”, and this feeling of warmth is palpable in each canvas. When such a positive and unfaltering appreciation of London is communicated so effectively in paint then that is surely something to be celebrated.

Empty Streets – Noel Gibson’s East London (1967–1975) is at the Nunnery Gallery, 181 Bow Road, E3 2SJ until 21 September

www.bowarts.org/nunnery

September 9, 2014
Painting the past in Another Country exhibition

Skeleton by Matthew Krishanu

Another Country is the first exhibition to be held at The Nunnery, a new contemporary gallery located a stone’s throw from the Olympic Park. Since opening its doors in January, The Nunnery has showcased the work of two highly acclaimed, award-winning artists Cara Nahaul and Matthew Krishanu.

These artists have come together to explore the themes of travel, dislocation and memory. They both use photographs from their childhood as starting points for their artwork. While Krishanu uses photos from his own childhood in India as inspiration, Nahaul uses photographs of her grandparents in Malaysia.

The deft strokes, bold shapes and fresh colours of both artists leave the viewer wanting to know more about the distant lands they depict. But not only are these vibrant compositions easy on the eye, they also explore the artists’ deeply personal relationships to their past.

Krishanu explain: “The paintings are about stepping into ‘another country’ – one created from a combination of old photographs, memory and imagination.

“The show was initially inspired by the LP Hartley line ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there’. I like the idea of being able to enter the past through a painting, as if it still exists. For me memory is about restructuring and re-imagining the past. Essentially, it is an opportunity for me to tell stories in paint.”

While Khrishanu’s paintings depict his experience of growing up in India and embarking on childhood adventures and games with his brother, Nahaul’s paintings explore the far-off lands of her grandparents which she felt quite distant from.

Nahaul says: “I was struck by this idea of looking at my own past as something foreign – a physical space unknown and elsewhere. I embrace this dislocation and I try to reflect that in the paintings.”

In using paint as a way to access the past, both artists explore the complex relationship between the past and memory. Furthermore, by using art to re-imagine the past and transform old memories, the exhibition unearths the ever-shifting, circuitous nature of memory.

Both artists have been keen to maintain the community spirit of Bow Arts – the educational arts charity which runs The Nunnery. Since the exhibition opened, Krishanu and Nahaul have worked with several local schools, organised talks and are planning an exhibition tour on Thursday 6 March.

Another Country is at The Nunnery, 181 Bow Road, E3 2SJ until 6 April

March 10, 2014