East End Review

Tag: Giuseppe Marasco

Yayoi Kusama, Victoria Miro gallery, review: ‘Infinity in a pumpkin’

Portrait of Yayoi Kusama. Photograph: Noriko Takasugi

Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama reflects on the cosmos and something beyond the physical in an exhibition of new work at Victoria Miro galleries.

After negotiating a snaking queue to get in, I was met by a spectacular display of sculptures, paintings and installations – including mirrored rooms and pumpkins galore.

“Pumpkins have been a great comfort to me since my childhood,” the artist explains. “They speak to me of the joy of living.

“They are humble and amusing at the same time, and I have and always will celebrate them in my art.”

This collection of mirrored environments, sculptures and paintings reproduces some of the intense mental states the artist has encountered since childhood.

Mirrored, polished bronze pumpkin by Yayoi Kusama

Kusama gets you to see infinity in a pumpkin. The new installation All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins is a room full of mirrors populated by florescent yellow plastic pumpkins. When the viewer steps inside, their reflection makes them repeat into eternity.

Pumpkin Mirror Polished Bronze is a sculpture that has all the sheen and polish of a Harley Davidson, with a complement of matt polka dots. These dots, a hallmark of her work, are an utterly democratic unit of expression, something anybody could create themselves.

Another mirrored room, Chandelier of Grief, is centred on a chandelier rotating in the centre of a hexagon. Looking up is like viewing a constellation of stars or cherry blossoms.

As those queuing are ushered in, most were armed with their mobiles. Kusama’s work lends itself to shared experiences – as opposed to the feeling that someone else has intruded into your own personal experience.

All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins. Installation by Yayoi Kusama

Inside the mirrored rooms, one senses a shift from the personal, individual experience inside an expansive sublime plane, to what is ultimately a communal experience.

The queuing and the amount of time one is given inside the mirror rooms (I was allotted less than three minutes!) impresses upon you the fact of this shared experience, providing a heightening of the senses as you try to grasp as much of an impression as you can.

Yayoi Kusama: Sculptures, Paintings and Mirror Rooms
Until 30 July
Victoria Miro, 16 Wharf Road, N1 7RW
victoria-miro.com

July 5, 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
Get The Picture: George Blacklock and Gary Oldman, Flowers Gallery

George Blacklock, Detail from Pieta XI, 2006, oil on canvas, 153 x 122 cm (c) George Blacklock, Courtesy of Flowers Gallery, London and New York

Slipping Glimpsers is the admirably titled joint exhibition by Dean of Chelsea College of Art George Blacklock and the filmmaker and photographer Gary Oldman.

Said title is a nod to Expressionist painter Willem De Kooning and refers to a process of continually observing one’s own thoughts and sensations during the process of painting.

Intuitive observation and retrieval is the common thread linking the two artists, who became firm friends 30 years ago. They formed a band together and worked on the 1984 BBC film Honest, Decent and True.

In this two-man show, Oldman exhibits photography from film-sets whilst Blacklock displays paintings of densely populated pictorial spaces, filled with a sonorous quality.

George Blacklock, Pieta XI, 2006, oil on canvas, 153 x 122 cm (c) George Blacklock, Courtesy of Flowers Gallery, London and New York

Blacklock’s painting Pieta XI (2006) is a sensorial transcription of Michelangelo’s Pietà sculpture.

The painting transmits an unreservedly tactile, physical, and personal account of the internal psychological effect of the sculpture.

There is interplay between layers of varying material viscosities; Prussian blue with a yellow veil over a red ground accompanied by white accents.

The yellow sweeps over blue creating green to blue tones. Colours are encouraged to bleed, overspill and resurface as pentimenti.

Intertwined forms, colour and line are put into tension and dance as these forms fuse and evolve.

It is a ‘linguistic’ inventiveness reminiscent of the playful and visually plastic pictographic writing system of the Mayans.

Slipping Glimpsers
14 April – 14 May 2016
Flowers Gallery
82 Kingsland Road, E2 8DPz
flowersgallery.com

April 13, 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: Harun Farocki – Parallel I-IV (2012-2014)

Parallel IV by Harun Farocki

J.R.R. Tolkien observed it was mankind’s right and nature to create worlds, seeing in us a ‘divine spark’ that impels us to make myths and languages.

Harun Farocki closely studies the phenomenology of computer game-generated worlds in his large-scale video installation Parallel I-IV (2012-2014), on display at the Whitechapel Gallery.

The installation successfully communicates the rapid evolution in visual innovation, technological and conceptual limits and leaps over 30 years of computer game graphics.

Parallel I by Harun Farocki

Early forms of trees, water or fire are cropped and shown in succession, with nostalgia playing a powerful role in providing visual pleasure for the viewer.
The first set of parallel films compare games to cinema and film. There’s a real sense here that the detail and information in games could eventually replace film as the main source of mediating and recording the world, particularly as they offer a greater degree of choice and design.

In Parallel II, a game set in the Wild West, the voiceover asks the question ‘how far can a rider ride?’ as an infinite horizon in a world with no natural borders opens up. We are then shown in a programming mode how the invisible borders of this ‘infinite world’ are defined and how your cowboy figure can fall off the edge of the world, like an astronaut catapulted into space.

Each game world needs to be explored to elicit its rules. This happens in part through loops of interactive dialogue that are impressive in their textural authenticity to human speech.

Farocki observes the different rules and qualities of these infinite worlds, the logic traps, glitches and redundancies. Philosophical observations are made, curious accidental traits pulled out and phenomena pondered and enjoyed.

Harun Farocki: Parallel I-IV (2012-14) is at Whitechapel Gallery, 77-82 Whitechapel High Street, E1 7QX until 12 June
whitechapelgallery.org

Parallel I by Harun Farocki

January 20, 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
Sculptor Kate Lyddon impresses at Mark Tanner Sculpture Award show

Piece by Kate Lyddon on display at Standpoint gallery

Showcasing the work of emerging and mid-career artists, Standpoint gallery is a place where, as a practising artist or gallery goer, your tastes and complacency are regularly challenged.

The Mark Tanner Sculpture Award is one of the most significant awards in the UK for emerging artists, offering £8,000 towards new work and a solo show. The prize is focused on work that demonstrates a commitment to process, or sensitivity to material. Last year’s winner Kate Lyddon, whose solo show is now on display at the gallery, is better known for her narrative and characterisation work in drawing and painting but has emerged into a sculptor.

According to the gallery’s Curatorial Director Fiona MacDonald the judges, including the departing Director of Tate Britain Penelope Curtis, were “impressed by [Lyddon’s] intuitive sense and use of materials, and the immediacy of her characterisation.”

MacDonald sees in Lyddon’s work “a kind of polarisation between the possibility of innocence and loveliness/sweetness, and the dark, odd, disturbed and disgusting aspects of human behaviour.”

Personally for me the most interesting aspect of Lyddon’s work is how she works with ‘a loose subject’, using aesthetic seduction and repulsion, chaos and order.

Her characters exist at the extremes of possibility, or the “surreality of our existence, how that experience manifests in human behaviour and social interaction… the madness and crudeness of the world,” according to MacDonald.

Lyddon doesn’t seek out ‘characters’, but allows many varied overlapping impressions and experiences of people, all of which surprise her as she works.

Glamorous outerwear is fused with grotesque features, and these sculptures are clothed in the ritualistic fashions of tribal belonging: sports team costumes, military uniforms or carnival fancy dress, worn wrong.

She is further informed by responding to materials’ limitations and the problems they throw up, disrupting clear narratives, and leading her away from initial subjects to unexpected solutions.

Kate Lyddon is the sort of challenge I look forward to, and the kind of artist always likely to to do well at a forward-thinking gallery like Standpoint, particularly with MacDonald at the helm.

Until 30 May 2015
Standpoint
45 Coronet Street, Hoxton, N1 6HD
standpointlondon.co.uk

May 18, 2015