Wednesday, June 29, 2011

leitmotifs


Untitled 2011

WILHELM SASNAL
Sadie Coles Gallery (London)

Yesterday, I ended up stranded at the Sadie Coles Gallery for a while, waiting for the weather Gods to calm down. The exhibit of these Wilhelm Sasnal paintings would have maybe in an otherwise setting made me stroll in and stroll out again quite quickly. But since I was "forced" to wait in their surroundings I got to contemplate them calmly and as the world slows down you begin to appreciate unexpected things.

Untitled, 2011

"Several of the works address themes of motherhood, reworking one of the most enduring leitmotifs of art history - the mother and child... allude to the sacrificial nature of parenthood, and the way in which children absorb and reshape their parents lives: the mothers appear to have been parasitically invaded."
          Sadie Coles Gallery

Untitled 2003

A bar, 2008

These two paintings are so minimal, I am questioning their intention. The chain is broken are you allowed to escape?

Untitled 2011

This painting is based on a found photograph, the distorted child continues the feeling of the parental hardship. The mother though is staring straight and strongly at us, but she looks more like a warrior than a happy caregiver. The more i look though, I also find a slight insecurity lingering.


Still life of today... Sab simplex... a digestive remedy for children on top of a laptop. Definitely not about glorifying life.

The Sun 2011

When it finally stopped thundering and the rain calmed down, I walked out with this sun in my mind, since the sun was missing outside, why not fill my head with one?

With Love
Kristin

Monday, June 27, 2011

The Shape of Things to Come

Folkert de Jong
Seht der Mensch 2007

New Sculpture
Saatchi Gallery

The heat is on and I am struggling here I sit in my office loft... I don't want to complain though, it is a gorgeous day in London and I am finally back here at my desk to write another post.

The new exhibit at the Saatchi Gallery has been met with the question "Is it any good?". I am questioning the question. Can you actually judge what is good and bad Art? Some of it will resonate with you and some will not. There is perhaps nothing more subjective than Art, and the pleasure of judging is within ourselves. 

Kris Martin
Summit, 2009

David Altmejd
The New North, 2007

David Altmejd
The Healers, 2008

Whatever you do think of this exhibit it is entertaining. Each room has a new surprise from the macabre to the destructive, even sexual agony. But, if you are looking for pure beauty I would suggest that you venture another route.

Dirk Skreber
Crash 1&2


Thomas Houseago
Untitled 2000

Thomas Huseago
Figure 2

John Baldessari
Beethoven's Trumpet (With Ear) Opus #133, 2007

Baldessari's piece is fascinating and quite brilliant, it is about the paradox of communication's incomplete nature - a sculptural sound piece about a deaf composer. If you speak into the trumpet a part of Beethoven's six quartets will be heard.

Berlinde de Bruyckere
K36 (The Black Horse)
2003

This piece has a nauseating effect, the artist has stripped the horse of identity.

Roger Hiorns
Copper sulphate Chartres and Copper Sulphate Notre-Dame 1996
(partial)



Folkert De Jong
The Dance (2008)

"The clones are trading with themselves, their own kind, ripping off each other and dancing towards their destiny: self-destruction"
     Folkert de Jong

Matthew Brannon
Nevertheless (2009)

"Nevertheless, is an adverb comprised of three words: never-the-less. It became my stance against the panic that ensued from the economic collapse. An attempt to answer the question: what can we make when we shouldn't be making anything?"
        Matthew Brannon

Bjorn Dahlem
The Milky Way, 2007

David Batchelor
Parapillar 7 (2006)

Martin Honert
Riesen (Giants) 2007

The German artist Martin Honert creates human figures from a child's point of view. Here is a perspective with me and my youngest son (Marcel). Their 2.72 metres hight is not coincidental but the actual measurements from the tallest man of the 20th century, American Robert Wadlow. We do not know their intention but the word Riesen, do mean "Trek" or "Journey".

With that I am trekking along and wishing you a great evening!
With Love
Kristin
His large-scale human figures manage to capture a vivid immediacy and sense of wonder achieved by recreating the world from a child’s point of view. Instead of looking back from an adult’s nostalgic perspective, the artist bases his works on family photographs and illustrations from schoolbooks, as well as his own childhood drawings, using scale and illusion to "save an image before it dies within me".

A feeling of being afraid in a huge and empty exhibition space originally inspired Honert to make his oversized figures entitled Riesen (which translates as ‘trek’ or ’journey’). The sculpture is composed of two bearded men, dressed in ordinary, contemporary clothing. The fact that they are each 2.72 metres high is not entirely fantastical or arbitrary; Honert took this specific measurement from the tallest man of the 20th century, an acromegalic American named Robert Wadlow. 

Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Suites

Girl with Hair 2007

Louise Bourgeouis
Suites on Fabric
Marlborough Fine Art, London
All photos ©Marlborough Fine Art

"The older an artist gets the more the exhibition maker has to be on guard against mounting an apotheosis, which by implication suggests that the artist's work is complete and that the audience is merely in attendance at the public celebration of fulfilled promise. Good artists always have more work to do, great ones spring surprises.... Wisely, none of the shows has been predicated on the idea that Bourgeois was summing up, heading in a predictable direction, or ready to rest on her laurels. By virtue of her extraordinarily protean old age, she, more than anyone, has insisted that her shows be open-ended."
    "What makes a great exhibition" Robert Storr *essay "Show and Tell"

This is also why her work keeps living and will continue to do so far into our Art history. Louise Bourgeouis kept re-inventing herself until her last days and in her late 90's showing a liberated sexual self. It keeps surprising me how she could be so free and open minded at an age where as far as I know people start closing up and sheltering themselves. Not Louise Bourgeouis she is showing birth, pregnancy, sex, blood, beauty and love. Right now she has reincarnated herself with a new solo exhibition at the Marlborough Fine Art Gallery (London)






From the Fragile Series (2007)

The Fragile series is a commentary on love, delicate and evanescent compared with the drama of the woman artist's struggles with nature. Here the child speaks tracing the maternal form again and again- drawing Mummy the dextrous spider who spins and weaves. These are a child's perceptions of the primary image of its parent, yet their knowledge is the mother's knowledge too, her knowledge of her own body as an unstable form. Resolution is sought in these fused perceptions: Perhaps the artist herself can, through her child, return to the childlike state of freedom and creativity. And she remains after all, a daughter: the spider......
            Marlborough Gallery

Was that Louise Borgeouis's secret? To keep the fluctuation between child and mother and child again, a constant flow of fresh energy and stimulations?



From the Self Portrait series (2009)

Ode A La Bievre (2007)

The Family (2007)

From the Cross-eyed Women series (2004)

Untitled 
Screen print on vintage cloth (2006)

By leaving you to the child-mother-child cyclus, I hope that we also can find it in us to 
keep going until we are past 90... and still be as inspired as ever. 

The open-ended Louise Borgeouis posts will continue - I am sure!

With Love
Kristin

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Roid

Philip-Lorca diCorcia
Spruth Magers London
All photos © Spruth Magers/ Philip-Lorca diCorcia

It is hard to jingle time to write, but here I am trying to twist one out even though my eyelids are heavy and I honestly would like to curl up on the sofa with a glass of wine... But, I also know that it will make me feel a lot better to do a post here. 

I went to the Philip-Lorca diCorcia exhibit at the Spruth Magers last week and the gallery kindly e-mailed me polaroids of the ones focused on the women, from these again I picked my favorites. diCorcia depicts full stories in tiny little polaroids which makes you want to hold onto and get closer to some of them, while with others you want to throw away in despise. (These you will have to go and see for yourself). I suddenly came to think that this sort of depicts what choices we make and what we fall for, also what we are strong enough to bear.

The two rooms in the the gallery always surprises me with their rawness compared to the other pristine Mayfair galleries. They have an unfinished feeling, like they are just there temporarily... but, I think this also makes it more attractive somehow. There is not much space but the shows I have seen here so far, has been memorable. This time the walls have one thin aluminium rail stretching from one room to the next with these small polaroids stacked closely together on top. While moving your eyes from one picture to the other you let yourselves into the scenes depicted and their secrets.



30 years history of diCorcia's polaroids are shown here for the first time.



DiCorcia first came to prominence in the 1970s with photographs that defied definition, existing in the space between documentary fact and movie-style fiction. The meticulous staging of quotidian scenes of family and friends lent the images an unparalleled sense of heightened drama and ambiguity. In the 1990s diCorcia turned his focus from scenes of domesticity to the American tradition of street photography exemplified by photographers such as Robert Frank and Gary Winogrand. In a seminal series that was retrospectively entitled 'Hustlers', diCorcia photographed men who had moved to Hollywood seeking their fortune, only to find themselves working the Sunset Strip as male prostitutes.
          - Spruth Magers





If I remember correctly, I think each of these polaroids can be bought for £3,000.

With Love 
Kristin





Monday, June 13, 2011

Life

Pregnant 2 2004

Ishbel Myerschough
Life
Flowers Gallery (Cork St.)
All photos © Flowers Gallery

There are something so simple and stunningly beautiful about Ishbel Myerschough´s painting series "Life". Yes, because it is portraying honestly and truthfully the way we are living. She is showing how we are growing through life by bearing us naked and by that touching the basic instincts in us all.

Two Pregnant Women 2004

Pregnant pair 2004

These petite pregnancy paintings hang behind the counter, don't be shy, ask if you can see them, they are the strongest of them all. They show quite intimate portraits of herself and her close friend the painter Chantal Joffe who exhibited at the Victoria Miro earlier this year.

Misery 2006

Sleeping 2006

Ishbel Myerschough has been a three time minor prize winner for the National Portrait Gallery's annual BP portrait Award commission. As a result she painted Dame Helen Mirren's portrait for their collection.

6 year old 2010


16 year old 2011

9 year old 2010


Lily 2010


41 year old 2011

Nadia 2007

To be a painter, a figurative painter and a portraitist to boot, might be considered as anachronistic as writing on vellum rather than on a laptop. Yet however often painting is pronounced dead, supposedly killed off by the ubiquity of photography, Ishbel Myerscough mines a fertile seam, embraced by other contemporaries such as Chantal Joffe and Jenny Saville, of intimate, truthful and, at times, uncomfortable paintings that reveal something of the inner world of her subjects. It was Oscar Wilde who perceptively observed that: ‘Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter’, and this must surely be considered the case with all successful modern figure painters from John Minton and Lucien Freud to Alice Neel. It is this disclosure, this frank dialogue of emotional exchange between artist and subject that colours Ishbel Myerscough’s work. 

         -Flowers Gallery
Little girls 2010

Little girls 2010

Big Girls 2010


Bedroom 2008

Should my portrait be painted again, I wish Ishbel Myerschough would do it, wouldn't you?


With Love 
Kristin

I did my first Q&A for a Norwegian Magazine, RocknRolla here, where I will also write a monthly Art Column.