London Galleries - visited 25th March 2017

 

Tate Modern

My first (fleeting) visit to the Switch House. I visited the “Living Cities” display . The first room curated photographs by the Finnish artist Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, who photographed Byker in Newcastle in the late 1960s and 1970s. The black and white back to back photographs are incredibly evocative and show an area that is poor but very vibrant. They underlined to me the importance of capturing these glimpses of the everyday of yesteryear; demolition, buildings gone forever, time gone forever, the minutiae of everyday life. What happened to those people whose homes were demolished? Where did they go? The children she photographed must be around the same age as me. Where are they now?

Julie Mehretu : Mogamma, A Painting in Four Parts: Part 3

The second, larger, room, contained two works of particular interest to me. The first was by Julie Mehretu, an artist I’d not come across before. Her “Mogamma, A Painting in Four Parts: Part 3” is a narrative around protest and political unrest. The precise architectural drawings of the Mogamma (the Egyptian government building) are partly obscured with shapes and images from other sites of public unrest. The other one was “Los Moscos” by Mark Bradford , again an artist new to me. This work takes materials found on the street around his studio in Los Angeles and create a kind of map of the (an?) urban area. The entire work is constructed from paper fragments.

 

 

Mark Bradford : Los Moscos

Both of these works depict place, but quite differently. Mehretu’s layering comes across as quite direct; figurative images of a definite place are obscured by marks that could be maps or leaves or footprints, or any one of a number of other things. Bradford’s work gives a more abstracted sense of place that could be any big city. The effects of the two are quite different. Methretu’s work is almost understated compared to Bradford’s, with the latter’s dark colours punctuated by neon brights. For me there was a direct resonance with the previous day’s crit – trying to depict a place or a journey without being too literal. Mehretu has mixed figurative and abstract. Bradford has used found paper and based his piece on the shock value of the colour he’s used. What can I take from these? Objects, layering, figurative, abstract. Bradford’s assemblage technique. Moving away from the obvious. Both works are fragmented – this term keeps coming up again and again and I need to think about how it could work for me.

 

White Cube, Bermondsey

Two very different exhibitions here, again by two artists new to me.

Ibrahim Mahama : Crop Estate

Ibrahim Mahama’s exhibition is titled Fragments – that word again. It contains huge wall hangings created from used cocoa sacks and tarpaulins from the artist’s native country, Ghana. The immediate effect is quite dark and depressing, but after a few minutes of reflection the work begins to appear more nuanced and detailed. For me, it deals with decay, leaving behind the past – not dissimilar to some of the themes in Konttinen’s work. The works also smell foisty. This is an intrinsic part of the materials and this was the first time I’d ever know an art work to smell – and for the smell to effectively form part of the narrative. Another room contains the installation “Non-orientable Nkansa” - masses of shoe-shine boxes. I’m not clear if these are genuine items or if they’d been constructed for the – sculpture? Installation? I’m also not clear if this is art. It seemed to more like political comment – but then art is about commentary. Whatever, it must have taken an awful lot of effort to balance it, both politically and aesthetically.

 

Ibrahim Mahama: Non-Orientable Nkansa

 

There was a lot to take in with these works; colours, textures, smells. Re-purposing of objects. Transience – time, people. Objects from another country, another culture. The gallery handout (White Cube, 2017.) also points to investigations into capitalism and trade transactions. I liked the sacks; the texture, colour, darkness (a metaphor for economic corruption?), the stories they could tell, the stories they did tell. The evocation of hidden narratives. The fact that the sacks are sewn together irregularly, with holes. Interestingly, Mahama calls the sack works “paintings”.

 

Josiah McElheny: Crystal Landscape Painting (Rocks)

 Josiah McElheny’s exhibition, The Crystal Land, consists of three different parts. The most interesting from my viewpoint were the “Crystal Landscape Paintings”. These are not paintings in the traditional sense, either – they are sculptural glass forms within mirrored and lit compartments, reflecting to infinity. These pieces don’t speak directly to any of my practice, but .they are fascinating and absorbing. You’re not sure how they work. It’s difficult to tell how many forms are in each compartment because of the reflections. This gives rise to ideas of uncertainty, temporality, the infinite nature of the universe and time, the actual and the perceived.

                                            

Drawing Room

 

Piece by Sonia Boyce

 

The last port of call was the Drawing Room, a gallery dedicated to contemporary drawing,  for the Drawing Biennial 2017 . This is an exhibition of A4 works on paper by established artists, to raise money for the gallery, which is in a former warehouse in a less fashionable part of Bermondsey. To be honest I was a bit galleried out by this point, but it was interesting nevertheless. I didn’t recognise all the artists’ names, but there were pieces by Sonia Boyce, Bob & Roberta Smith, Grayson Perry, and (by coincidence) Julie Mehretu. The styles were so diverse that it is difficult to make coherent comment. One thing I did think was that some of the pieces were not very polished. It seems a shame that someone will bid for a piece just because it’s by a famous artist, but I suppose that’s how it goes. There was a work of fragmented squares by Rowena Hughes, with the squares becoming misaligned and tumbling randomly. That kind of idea might help move away from the rigidity of squares I always seem to return to.

 

What to take from the day

Artworks come in all shapes, sizes, colours, media. I take this as an affirmation to continue with what I’m doing and follow my own aspirations. Temporality, fragmentation, place, experiences, narratives – these themes are of concern to many artists. In writing this post the concept of fragmentation keeps recurring and I need to take this on board.