East End Review

Tag: Howard Griffin Gallery

  • Art review – Jazz by Thierry Noir: instrumental street artist comes to East London

    Jazz
    Jazz: installation image at Howard Griffin Gallery

    Thierry Noir is the artist most famous for the cartoonish and colourful illustrations that he painted directly on to the Berlin Wall in the late 1980s. Elongated faces with cartoon lips set against blocks of bright colour were vivid splashes of paint against a concrete symbol of communist drabness and repression.

    As a political statement, and a template for the street art movement that he partly inspired, Noir’s graffiti stood as a powerful assertion of creativity in opposition to oppression. Berlin at the time was a bastion of culture, its art and music immensely influential, and the time forever associated with the punk and avant-garde rock that its natives and many expatriate artists made in the interzone of the western part of the partitioned city.

    For Jazz, at the Howard Griffin Gallery, Noir turns to this legacy and music more generally for inspiration, drawing his familiar figures strumming guitars and pounding drums on canvases and pieces of cardboard, packaged and ready for sale. Alongside the framed visual works and the 3D sculptural versions that are placed throughout gallery, Noir has also collaborated with artist-luthier Chris Tsonias to produce musical instruments that are shaped and painted like the figures from his paintings.

    Under a large canvas reminiscent of a cartoon musical version of Matisse’s La Danse (1909) the apparently playable musical instruments are arranged in place with prices available on request. The concentration of images and the attention to detail on show is impressive, but like so much street art, when it’s taken out of its public context and placed in a gallery something fundamental is lost.

    It’s an installation that is reminiscent of Keith Haring’s Pop Shop (1986), and Noir’s visual cues – brightly coloured block flat drawings of stretched heads and stooped postures – cover the gallery’s ceilings and floor, and the walls that hold the individual art works.

    It is true that Noir shares much with Haring, in political resonance, bravery and bold style, but also in relentless marketability. For all of Haring’s cultural activism, his images are now plastered all over the t-shirts in Uniqlo. For all of Noir’s statements of liberty and artistic freedom, the opening drinks are poured from his own branded Hennessey bottles, the corporate sponsors of the show.

    This is art from which the street has been stripped, and when that happens all that’s left are the images. Whilst impressive and immersive they are a little empty when placed in such a relentlessly commercial and sanitised environment.

    Jazz by Thierry Noir is at the Howard Griffin Gallery, 189 Shoreditch High Street, E1 6HU until 26 July
    howardgriffingallery.com

  • London Underground photographs on display at Howard Griffin Gallery

     

    'Woman on Phone' by Bob Mazzer
    ‘Woman on Phone’ by Bob Mazzer

    Bob Mazzer’s photographs capturing shadowy scenes from the London Underground in the 1970s and ‘80s caused a sensation when a selection were first published on local blog Spitalfields Life last summer.
    Now, following international acclaim, the Howard Griffin Gallery in Shoreditch presents Mazzer’s debut solo exhibition and a new photobook published by Spitalfields Life showcasing his work documenting the sprawling commuter network.

    “Talking about the exhibition and the book I realised that demand was coming from the people on blogs and Facebook, not so much the art market,” Mazzer says.

    “It has been really gratifying because that’s who I did the work for really, the man in the street. The internet is a very democratic beast.”

    Aldgate-born Mazzer’s first camera was an Ilford Sporty celebrating his Bar Mitzvah at the age of 13 and he has his art teacher to thank for opening a darkroom at Woodberry Down Comprehensive and inspiring him to attend Saturday Art Club at the Hornsey College of Art.

    “I suppose it was quite an avant-garde thing to do then, having a darkroom in school in the mid-1960s,” Mazzer says.

    “I’ll always remember Euan Duff, a great photojournalist, turning up in his Land Rover and stomping around the darkroom swearing.

    “You had the likes of Terence Donovan and David Bailey doing their thing on the fashion scene and then you had Don McCullin and Tony Ray-Jones who were really doing incredible stuff pushing the boundaries of the documentary genre.”

    Mazzer eventually left London to go live on a hilltop in rural Wales “with a bunch of freaks and hippies being happy artists” before returning to live in Wood Green after the death of his mother.
    Finding a job as a projectionist in a porn cinema called The Office in King’s Cross, Mazzer instinctively began shooting scenes from his late-night commutes.

    “I was always looking for unusual, quirky or funny stuff, that moment of recognition between two strangers, and it turned out to be this unwitting social history, a record that no one else had,” he explains.
    From wild-haired punks to chain-smoking City suits and weary tourists, Mazzer’s images of an altogether gloomier and grubbier London Underground certainly stand in stark contrast to today’s strip-lit, security-conscious operation.

    “Young people are always so surprised that we used to be able to smoke on the Tube,” Mazzer says.

    “It’s a different world now I guess, with everyone plugged into their iPhones and iPads. Having said that, I still find it a very relaxed, cosmopolitan, egalitarian space. There’s social harmony there –
    despite the odd bomb.”

    Bob Mazzer: Underground is at Howard Griffin Gallery, 189 Shoreditch High Street, E1 6HU until 13 July.

  • Shoreditch artist John Dolan’s unusual success story

     

    Mr Dolan drawing on a Shoreditch Street with his dog George
    Mr Dolan drawing on a Shoreditch Street. Photograph: Rob Weir

    So, you think Shoreditch has started losing its edge, having been drowned out over the past couple of years by middle class trendies driving the eccentric and eclectic mix of art, fashion and location lifestyle into corporate regeneration?

    Well, not necessarily. For an example of the older Shoreditch look no further than the area’s most notorious street artist.

    Former jailbird John Dolan’s debut exhibition took place last month at Howard Griffin Gallery in Shoreditch.

    Dolan, 42, has led what he describes as a “rough life” – he has spent time on the streets and has been in and out of HMP Pentonville over the years.

    After he rediscovered a long neglected gift as an artist he began creating a series of finely drawn, detailed monochrome cityscapes that he then posted to famous street artists around the world who added their own splashes of colour to the drawings.

    Before the doors to Dolan’s exhibition opened to a mass of fellow artists and collaborators, local film directors and industry peers, I chatted to John about what landed him in jail and his ambitions for the future.

    When did you first start getting recognised?

    About two months after sitting down in the street I got published in Shoreditch Unbound, which was around September 2012.

    How did you end up in prison?

    I used to suffer from depression, years ago. I was looking after my granddad for about seven years and I started to break into sandwich shops, bars, and offices. I knew the places that kept money in them at weekends, so I’d steal cash so I could go on shopping sprees in the West End. Bit of retail therapy to cheer myself up, that was it, basically.

    What are your future ambitions?

    To have a show in New York.

    Do you think living on the street has shaped you in a positive way?

    Any hardship in life makes you a better person and make you respect yourself.