Journal

Julie Mehretu: Liminal Squared

2013-05-22T11:08:33Z

Over the last decade, Julie Mehretu has become an art world star, her work shown at The Whitney and Guggenheim (New York and Berlin), purchased by MOMA (and prominently displayed near Barnet Newman’s obelisk) and fought over by collectors, one of whom even took her New York dealer to court after being denied ‘first refusal’ on a new picture. Now White Cube in Bermondsey, in conjunction with Marion Goodman Gallery in New York, is showing a quartet of monumental new works, fresh from last year’s dOCUMENTA 13, alongside some pieces made earlier on this year.

Her work is being increasingly cited in the narrative of 21^st Century painting - particularly by American curators and museums - as representing a sensibility and practice that’s both postmodern and post-abstract (even while it continues to reference the language of modern abstraction). With their multiple viewpoints and multiple visual languages, her paintings represent the protean complexity as well as the dematerialised nature of our speeded up urban world, its digital trace increasingly obscuring the physical architecture that still lies beneath it.

Mogamma is everywhere and nowhere, a polyglot postcolonial multiplex, simultaneously interconnected and decentred. The manner of its making is also multiple: dependent on the skills of the illustrator and architectural draughtsman, the printmaker charged with colour schemes and the sander and polisher hired to produce the final ‘super-cool technical surface’. Alongside this technical fabrication (and the rapid rate of production it engenders), Mehretu filters her evolving images through the computer screen, a seemingly continuous process of correcting, adding and erasing her carefully layered creations that make the image’s final state all but impossible to locate.

Mogamma overlays a place (a government building in Tahrir square) with an idea (a communal arena containing diverse beliefs) and ties them to a moment of violent disruption. Through this multiple lens Mehretu references - both compositionally and metaphorically - the past, present and future. The architecture functions as both historic space and compositional grid; the haptic markings, random ink rubbings and ghostly erasures, replicate the strategies of high abstraction as well as symbolically disturbing the once classically ordered city square (the locus of authority and control); and floating above it all, like a plethora of web maps, her bold smooth lines and free floating shapes serve both to energize and disrupt any single reading of her ‘vertiginous panoramas’, suggesting the instantaneous connectivity, the dizzying complexity and disorientating noise, of our digital world. This is no longer a space or place but a stream of disembodied moments, an indelible trace on the future.

Read the rest of the article on abstractcritcal.com

Julie Mehretu: Liminal Squared, White Cube Bermondsey, London 1 May – 7 July 2013.

A studio in Vermont

2013-04-30T14:19:13Z

My studio in Vermont, located in the Wolf Kahn building beside the Gihon river. March - April 2013

A Month in Vermont

2013-04-30T13:46:10Z

Thanks to the Vermont Studio Center, I‘ve been able to spend a month exploring and responding to the beautiful terrain of the Green Mountains, working each day by the flowing waters and cascading rapids of the Gihon river. The month began in heavy snow and ended with the first signs of spring, as the ice flows slowly dissolved and the rivers rose up with the roar and rush of melt water.

Arriving from London with two rolls of paper and a few drawing materials I set out to find a way of recording this parcel of time by interacting with the river’s alchemy, pacing out the days - sometimes icily cold, sometimes warm and wet as the season changed - with images made both with the water and of the water.

Responding to its vibrant sounds, both its pulsing rush and gentle whisper, was a way to reconcile its irresistible force and glittering surface with the mutating course of its submerged history. The resulting series of images, each made in one continuous sitting, developed their own non-verbal language: a kind of writing on water, in water.

Johnson Vermont USA: International Artists residency, March 30th - April 26th 2013.

A new year

2013-01-10T13:26:34Z

A cloud floats by: a suspended moment, a weightless presence, an unformed thought, a singular impression on the face of the earth.

A small lithograph to begin the new year, printed by the Curwen Press, January 2013.

Francesco Clemente

2012-12-07T13:00:24Z

The movement between East & West is integral to Francesco Clemente’s life and work. His identification with India in particular, and long periods spent working in Madras, gave his work an original and mystical dimension when shown in the west alongside the new expressionist painters of the 1980s – especially so as modern Indian art had little international visibility at the time. Since then the resurgent subcontinent and the global art market has brought a new generation to the attention of western collectors & curators, leaving Clemente’s hybrid vision looking outdated. The material and spiritual traffic between East & West has changed, something Clemente appears ill disposed to, judging by the somnolent procession of faceless backpackers moving across one of his new canvases. And yet he was jut such a traveller seeking enlightenment when he set out in the 70s.

The signs of cultural transmission – the sketchy mandalas and snatches of sanskrit - seem both overly familiar and cursorily executed. The diverse symbols loosely scattered across his large canvases diminish rather than increase their mystical charge: in ‘The ark’ a classical temple sits on a vessel above a swollen sea of eastern script, while in ‘Sand bites mandala’ (below) the diagram’s sacred heart is subverted by mobile technology (perhaps signifying the desire for new systems of connectivity to replace the old).

Clemente wants ‘to generate the fragmentary language not of one mind but of many minds, not of one truth but of many contradictory truths, not of one culture but of a dynamic mix of cultures’, but his simultaneous overlaying of western thought (in ‘Letter to Carlyle’) and romantic imaginings (Blake & Fuseli) serves only to confuse rather than illuminate his references. The former delicacy and poetic richness of his watercolours and work on paper has given way to late work that - on this showing at least - seems both hurried and overblown.

Francesco Clemente; Mandala for Crusoe.

Blain Southern, London 30 November 2012 – 26 January 2013

Cross Country

2012-11-21T14:43:37Z

cross country explores the subtle graphic and spatial interplay between the work of three artists who each recover, through the cryptic tracery of lines and marks, crossings and erasures, the tactile experience and remembered contours of their chosen territory.

The large wall piece, a ‘spatial re-enactment’ in white chalk created for this project by Andrew Vass, concentrates on ‘the performative nature of drawing, the trace in relation to spaces, as a direct response or an internalized choreography’.

Alongside, Kate Palmer shows three of her recent portrait format drawings which relate to her snowboarding experiences, while Luke Elwes extends through his new work on paper an enquiry into the mind as landscape and how mark making becomes a means of crossing it.

New work by Andrew Vass, Luke Elwes & Kate Palmer

Broadbent Gallery, London

29 November – 15 December 2012

Tess Jaray

2012-10-24T09:00:21Z

It is the surface of Tess Jaray’s work that first invites attention, with its flat, unmodulated, intense colours carefully designed to ‘glimmer and shimmer but not glitter’. But where the surface was once punctuated, rhythmically patterned, now it is punctured, opening up through its shadowed tracery a delicate spatial distance between two colour fields, the one occluding, or revealing, the other. The surface appears to hover over some unquantifiable depth.

Each picture is finely balanced, carefully wrought and self-sufficient. They aspire to formal purity (and seem to edge closer to this Platonic ideal through her recent use of screen printing and computer aided design) while acknowledging the impossibility of perfection. After all, a perfect square, a perfect design, has no vitality; it denies the trace of human experience. Approached as formal problems, they proceed intuitively, their personal geometry and chromatic energy serving to distil rather than dissipate their emotional charge.

The recent work in her show at the Piper Gallery falls neatly into three parts, each separated (despite their superficial similarity) by marked differences in scale, temperature and feeling. The first and largest group is made up of small squares, busily hung and clustered together much as they were when they left her studio walls. Individually hot and intense, they read collectively as a vibrant riff on Malevich’s Red Square, with each new iteration visibly disturbed and animated by the impact of the last. Some are stronger than others however: those with two or three colours work best, while those with four or more lose their tautness.

The second is a quartet of mid-size pieces (‘After Damascus’ in green, purple, yellow and red), which each deploy two colours of roughly equal intensity, with an oriental flavour which is distinctive to her work. Some recede, others advance; some carry you inward through windows or grills, while others rise out of their flat landscape to suggest patinated objects, mosaic forms or architectural plans.

This sensual oscillation between line and curve, form and opening, gives way in the last part to a triptych of three large squares, the vertical tension in each being emphasised by their unequal division into two separate parts. The hues are quieter, cooler, the effect more austere and poignant. While there is a passing nod to Newman’s zips and Matisse’s openings, the language is substantially her own; stripped of the radiant intensity of the smaller works, their expanses of milky light and opaque shadow conjure a space where brilliant day gives way to the silent hours of dawn and dusk, before finally retreating into darkness, into that physical and metaphorical realm ‘in the middle of the night’.

Note: the short quotes are her own, from “Painting: Mysteries & Confessions’ (Lenz Books 2010)

Tess Jaray: Mapping the Unseeable, Piper Gallery London, until 9 November 2012

Vija Celmins

2012-10-20T19:38:09Z

Although Vija Celmins has a dedicated following, her work is not particularly well known in this country. She is not a limelight seeker and this small display at Tate Britain (made possible with the support of Anthony D’Offay) is only the third time that her work has been seen in the UK. And as John Berger says in The Shape of a Pocket : ‘You have to see them. Words can’t get round them. And reproduction sends them back to where they came from. (Most of her works originate in photographs.) You have to be within touching distance of them’

Small in scale, her darkly quiescent images, with their surface construction rigorously worked up over long periods of time in graphite & charcoal, draw you inexorably in to their force field. Space, time and memory are condensed in the swelling seas, pulsing stars, and shimmering webs she finds herself drawn to over and over again. They are remarkably self-effacing: there is, in her own words ‘no ego, no expression, no angst, no composition’, and yet beneath their austerity, their apparent blankness and denial of meaning, they pulse with contained emotion. If in a superficial sense they are ‘not about much’, they nevertheless represent the summation - the ‘compression’ to use her own word – ‘of what I know’.

Vija Celmins, Artist Rooms, Tate Britain

Rothko/Sugimoto

2012-10-14T12:46:35Z

In a recent book on the Sublime, the artist Hiroshi Sugimoto says this of his seascapes: ‘A sea memory, I am quite sure that it’s a memory of the sea. Not a cloud in the sky, a sharp-edged horizon, waves surging in endlessly from beyond. When I saw that vista, it was as if something in my infant consciousness awakened from a long dream. I looked around at my hands and feet. And then I seemed to be looking down on myself from above. As if I were there merged into that seascape… a place from some ancient level of common memory’.

Rothko/Sugimoto: Dark Paintings and Seascapes

Pace Gallery London, until November 17, 2012

RA Now

2012-10-10T12:16:25Z

Christopher Lebrun, recently appointed President of the RA, writes that by ‘showcasing work from current Royal Academicians, RA Now reads like a who’s-who of contemporary art and architecture: Tracey Emin, Antony Gormley, David Hockney, Anish Kapoor, Zaha Hadid and Cindy Sherman to name a few’.

Describing it as ‘RAs from Anish to Zaha’ gives it a desirable international gloss, in a way that the less sexy but more accurate ‘RAs from Ackroyd to Wragg’ could not. There is an element of over claiming here: if it’s a ‘who’s who’, there are certainly some obvious omissions: Riley, Auerbach, Hirst, Doig, Offili…

On the other hand it covers a much broader range than ever before and shows the RA finally reaching parts of the national (if not international) art scene it had previously failed to do. There is some strong British work by, among others, Tony Bevan (left), Stephen Chambers, Basil Beattie, Hughie O’Donoghue, Tess Jaray, and Maurice Cockrill, which have room to breathe in these galleries in a way they never do in the summer shows.

However, because the work has been donated to raise much needed funds, the quality is uneven, with some insubstantial pieces (from Hockney Emin, and Kapoor for example) appearing tokenistic. By trying to combine a survey with a sale also has the unintended effect of divorcing quality from value. Are visitors to conclude that Jenny Savile (£100,000 for pencil drawing) is a much more important artist than Hughie O’Donoghue or Basil Beattie (right), whose paintings range from £8000 to £12000?

RA Now, Royal Academy London, 11 October to 11 November 2012