Three London art shows in November

November 2015.  London exhibitions.  My top three picks:


•  Ai Wei Wei at the Royal Academy.
Ends 13 Dec 2015.

•  Artist & Empire at Tate Britain.
Starts 25 Nov.  Ends 10 April 2016.

George Stubbs, Cheetah, Stag and Two Indians, 1770-80, Manchester Art Gallery

•  Lee Miller: A Woman's War, at the Imperial War Museum.
Ends 24 April 2016.

© Lee Miller Archives

Enjoy!

Three October art things in Cambridge

What art to see in Cambridge this month:  My quirky picks

1)  Shaggy Dog Stories, by Tom Hackett.  Yellow dogs in wheelbarrows.  On a balcony in the Lord Ashcroft Business building at Anglia Ruskin University on East Road.  More about them on the surrounding walls.  You can touch them!  They feel sort of slimy, like dry soap.  

2)  Kerstin Hacker's haunting photographs of births, babies, midwives and mothers on a Czech maternity ward.  Strange, beautiful, sad, wrenching.  At Changing Spaces, that little gallery next to CB2 on Norfolk Street.

 More here:  http://changing-spaces.org/2015/10/kerstin-hacker-maternity-ward/

Ends 1 Nov.

3)  Oh, and my own talk at the Festival of Ideas on Saturday, 24 Oct, at 2 pm.  :-)  Come along to the Fitz and join me for Power and Resistance in Sculpture in the Aftermath of World War One.




http://www.festivalofideas.cam.ac.uk/events/power-and-resistance-sculpture-aftermath-world-war-one

Month: October 2015
Place: Cambridge, Cambridgeshire

Three works from Sub-ti-tled, a Changing Spaces exhibition

We keep seeing exhibitions 'pop up' in abandoned shop fronts and empty stores around Cambridge.  They're organised by Changing Spaces, and their latest show is Sub-ti-tled at 6-16 King Street -- some of you may remember this as the Wallace King furniture shop.

The carpets and parquet flooring of the furniture store are still in evidence, and one living room-style displays recalls the ghosts of former retail.


View of gallery with Melina Juergens' photography among furniture, and Issam Kourbaj's work.

Issam Kourbaj

Issam Kourbaj, Farewell My City of Joy, 2003

Hanging right next to the shop window is Issam Kourbaj's strange work.  At first sight, it looks like an abstract painting, made up of painted rectangles.

But it isn't.  It's made up of bits of books.



Book covers made of marbled cardboard, book covers torn from their volumes, embossed book covers, book covers encrusted with pigment.







In between, there are also book pages, their printed lines of text struggling to remain visible beneath splotches of paint.



And just because we tend to photograph such works from the front which makes them seem flatter (and more 'painting-like') than they really are:  here are some angled views.  See the materiality.  See the depth of the supporting canvas.  See what the foreshortened view does to perception.







Issam Kourbaj is artist-in-residence at Christ's College, and Anne-Claire Morel is one of Christ's Visual Arts' Scholars.  Here are details from her exhibited work:

Anne-Claire Morel

Anne-Claire Morel, Almighty Me, 2013, plaster and clay

These tiny heads remind me of Anthony Gormley's sculpture installation Field.

Mark Box

Photographer Mark Box shows a sample of his large-scale portrait photographs:  floating heads starkly outlined against white backgrounds.  I met Mark in the exhibition, and he told me that the Movember photos took 230 hours to make, from start to finish.


Mark Box, Movember I, 2012, digital giclée print


View of Gallery 616, King Street, with Mark Box's photographs, Lynne Brown's  pastel works on paper, and Issam Kourbaj's assemblage

Sub-ti-tled

11 artists in total are showing at the exhibition.  Four of them are Christ's Visual Arts Scholars -- a fantastic initiative within Christ's College!  They have their studios above 1-16 King Street.

Read one art-history student's thoughtful comments on the exhibition:  Review by Robert Hawkins in Varsity.

Rob Hawkins writes:  "Of course, the difference between making art at Cambridge and making it in an art school is the lacking sense of immersion, of constant criticism and subsequent improvement."

What Hawkins perhaps doesn't know is that Cambridge does actually have a thriving art school:  the Cambridge School of Art.  In fact, two Cambridge School of Art graduates are involved with Sub-ti-tled:  Mark Box (exhibiting his photography) and Anji Main (curator of the show and also director of Changing Spaces).  Both are, I'm proud to say, former students of mine.  :-)

Check out Cambridge School of Art exhibitions at my pinterest board!

Last chance to see it!!  The exhibition ends on Sunday, 24 Feb.

Related posts:

Book art in Cambridge 

Alison Litherland's cows  (another Changing Spaces exhibition)

Permalink:  http://artincambridge.blogspot.com/2013/02/three-works-from-sub-ti-tled-changing.html 

Imps galore! Rebecca O'Hanlon's photograph

This is a photograph by photography student Rebecca O'Hanlon at Anglia Ruskin University.

It caught my eye as I walked through this corridor:




At first I thought it was a painting. It's composed so carefully.




An irritable woman sits at a desk in front of a white space. She is surrounded by little people -- imps? sprites? pixies? They climb around on her and near her and teem across her desk.

She flicks at one, without looking.



Upon closer inspection, we see that the little people are all the same person. A plaque on the wall next to the work contains this artist's statement:

"In this composition I use my 'Mini-Me' technique to help me illustrate the differences that exist in a subject's personality between when they are at work and when indulging in free time. ... it is the conflict between the need to conform at work, and the release found in free time that I try to capture in this composition."

I have to say that I did not see this in the work.  And when faced with conflicting communications -- artist's work vs artist's statement -- I tend to say:

Trust the art (not the artist).

   Sorry, Rebecca O'Hanlon... :-)

For me, the work is more whimsical and layered than the artist's statement with its focus on one individual's personality and its blunt opposites (work/free time) suggests.

Bizarrely, this composition reminds me of the German children's rhyme about little elfs called Heinzelmännchen who creep into your house at night and tidy everything up.

Source: Daniela Dreuth's Kinderohren-blog

Except the imps in this photo aren't tidying. They're busy having fun.


There's also a mystery here: a picture within a picture (within a picture within a picture...).




The umbrella-flyers are my favourites.




They remind me of another German children's story, taken from Heinrich Hoffmann's 19th-C. book Der Struwwelpeter. It's the story of the Flying Robert.

Source: Wikisource.

And the photo is also a tiny bit like Victorian fairy paintings with their wild and weird little people:

Richard Dadd, The Fairy Feller's Master Stroke, 1855-64, Tate. Source: Japanese wikipedia.

Magical.

Who: Rebecca O'Hanlon.
Where: Anglia Ruskin University, in the first-floor 'bridge' corridor between the Helmore Building and the Lord Ashcroft Building.
To find it: Enter Helmore from East Road. Go to the first-floor Costa café. Go through the double-doors at the end. Turn immediately right and go through another set of double-doors. You will see the art!

On display until 30 Jan. 2013.

Visit Rebecca O'Hanlon's photography website.

Like Rebecca O'Hanlon on Facebook.


Related posts:
Realism plus fantasy:  An extraordinary painting by Ulyana Gumeniuk

Woodcuts in a corridor:  John Lawrence illustrations for Philip Pullman



Permalink: http://artincambridge.blogspot.com/2013/01/imps-galore-rebecca-ohanlons-photograph.html

Four great blog posts to read

13 Dec 2013

1.  An interview with the artist @ Useless Beauty Designs

Susie blogs engagingly about sewing, knitting and crochet in Cambridge -- and sometimes about art as well.

The artist Heloise Toop (photo © Useless Beauty Designs)

A taster from her interview with Cambridge painter Heloise Toop:

'You have a distinctive, and clearly well-developed, style. Do you feel having developed something so effective and coherent relatively early on in your career restricts you or liberates you?
I am very flattered that you think my style is well-developed. I have never thought it was!   I struggle through a lot of paintings trying to find my way as I go, and to me, I'm still attempting and discovering new things all the time.'

Click here to read the rest:  Interview with Heloise Toop

2.  To touch or not to touch @ Yoga with Your Slippers On

Sally is a Cambridge yoga teacher and posts quirky thoughts about yoga, illustrated with her son's fun drawings.  Recently she branched out into art.

A taster of her post on touch:

'Many sculptures and objects made of bronze, bone, stone, wood, are clearly meant for contact and we ossify them, petrify them, betray them by separating them from human touch. We are insane to think that we can save them by this behaviour.' 

Click here to read the rest:  Touch!

3.  Stairwell art @ Sir Cam's Camdiary (Flickr photostream)

Sir Cam takes gorgeous photographs in and around Cambridge.  And sometimes they're photos of art.

Here's a thumbprint of a photo of an abstract painting  in the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge.

I really want to see this painting at the English Faculty now -- if only to read the artist's name on the bit of paper underneath!

A taster from the comments:

• 'gorgeous composition of lines and colors....'   

• 'I like the continuation of the line of the banister through the purple diamond on the painting, a very good composition. Grand job.'  

Click here to see the large version of this photo (© Sir Cam) and to read the rest of the comments.

4.  Natural wonders @ Joined-Up Pictures

In Mexico.  © Noel Myles.

This is Graham Dew's photography blog.  A few months ago he posted this wonderful review of a Cambridge exhibition (that ends on 20 December).

A taster: 

 'I spent a very enjoyable evening last Thursday at the [preview] of Noel Myles' new exhibition Paradise which has just opened at the Alison Richards Building on the Sidgwick site of Cambridge University. [...]  Perhaps the most fascinating thing about his pictures is the length of time you can be engaged in his still movies.'

Click here to read the rest:  Looking at still movies.

If you enjoy these posts, don't forget to leave a comment for their authors!


Would you like to recommend  any other interesting blogs on art and Cambridge?  Let me know in my own comments and spread the blog love.


Permalink:  http://artincambridge.blogspot.com/2012/12/four-great-blog-posts-to-read.html

Patrick Thurston at Williams Art Gallery

A photography exhibition

I stumbled into Hot Numbers on a misty November morning, in need of a cappuccino and cake, and what did I find?

Patrick Thurston's wonderful photography.



Even better, the photographer himself was there and I had a delightful chat with him about his art.

This was a retrospective of the past 50 years of Patrick's career at the newly refurbished Williams Art Gallery on Gwydir Street.  Amazingly, this was the first time that Patrick has had his photos hung in a gallery.  Where had they been seen before?  Well, in newspapers and colour supplements.  For years, Patrick Thurston took photos for what used to be called the Weekend Telegraph.

Why I took no photos of the photos

Photographers are very concerned about their copyright as their works have not traditionally been protected by the same laws that govern painting or literature.  I'm especially mindful of this issue.  This is why I have no glossy pictures for you today.  Instead I decided to use the tiny pictures in the exhibition leaflet to give you at least an idea.



The pictures below do not reflect the rich textures and sharp lines of the actual photographs. They are but ghostly memories.

I urge you to check out Patrick's webpage for a glimpse of the real thing!!

My three favourites

London Rooftops.


No sky is visible.  The chimneys form an abstract pattern of red and brown.  This photo reminds me of the murals under the Newmarket Street roundabout.

Tramcar, Rome.  1964.


Only the tram is visible, the rest is a blur.  This makes the tram look like a creature, zooming at incredible speed into the unknown.  Very mysterious.

Patrick Thurston Self-portrait.


The combination of self-conscious self-portrait and ornate mirror frames is Baroque and postmodern all at once.  (Well, postmodernity owes a lot to the Baroque period of art...)  The play of shapes and the layers of history are very evocative.  Reflections within reflections.  Also, this is an analogy of mirror and photography.

What I learned

We are all (amateur) photographers these days so what can we learn from a professional?

1)  Close-ups work.  For example, the close-up of a rusty chain link.  Textures and   shapes come to the fore.




2)  Detail not overcrowding.  For example, the tram where everything else is blurred out.  No need to include lots of background 'noise'.

3)  On the hop.  For example, the man patiently sweeping the church.  Animate a scene.

I asked Patrick about digital vs analog photography.  He still has three analog cameras and six lenses:  more gets too heavy to lug about.  The tram was taken with a lightweight Leica in Rome in the 1960s.

This is the classic Leica 1963.  Not sure that this is the exact one Patrick Thurston had but I thought I'd include it here, anyway.  

More

Interview feature in the Cambridge News.

And again, don't forget Patrick Thurston's own webpage!

Our newspapers are full of photographs but people send letters and emails to the editor only about the articles.  Why not comment on a photo?

By the way, Hot Numbers is now a combined café and art gallery -- how cool is that?  (Current exhibition at the gallery:  Justin Hawkes.  I saw it today -- more soon!)

Permalink:  http://artincambridge.blogspot.com/2012/11/patrick-thurston-at-williams-art-gallery.html