Tag: Victoria Miro

Stan Douglas: The Secret Agent

Posted on by Sue Hubbard

by Sue Hubbard

ScreenHunter_1774 Mar. 14 08.46It is said that the camera never lies – but that was before things went digital. At the Victoria Miro Gallery, Stan Douglas has created a number of disturbingly hyperreal images with the use of digital technology that give the illusion of documentary accuracy. These theatrical black and white mise en scènes explore the seedy underbelly of post-war North America before what the artist describes “as the sudden call to order and morality” that was achieved by peacetime prosperity. Based on archival photographs a hotel used to house World War II veterans has been transformed into The Second Hotel Vancouver, 2014, an uncanny image where Piranesi seems to meet Edward Hopper.

Small areas of cold white light glow against the foreboding brick walls of this looming Victorian Gothic façade with its dark stairwells and fire escapes. In the empty street below beams from a wrought-iron lamp post flood the crepuscular corners. Like a Christmas advent calendar there's the sense that behind every window of this building is a secret. If we look hard we can catch a tantalising glimpse of a coat hanging on a rack – who does it belong to? – an empty brass bed or a woman at an office desk, who might well be awaiting the arrival of a character from a Raymond Carver novel. Like some 50s film noir these lit windows draw us into the possibilities of the building's many hidden and possible stories.

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Monday, February 15, 2016

Chantal Joffe, Victoria Miro, Mayfair, London

Posted on by Sue Hubbard

by Sue Hubbard

ScreenHunter_1687 Feb. 15 10.27“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, Leo Tolstoy famously wrote in Anna Karenina. But what Tolstoy might, actually, have been implying is that the effects of happiness tend to be bland, the results ubiquitous. It’s those who are not entirely comfortable within the all-encompassing duvet of family life that prove to be interesting. Their quirks and idiosyncrasies lead them to become artists and writers or simply that awkward, interesting child who doesn’t want to join in but rather watch clouds, read a book, draw or make up stories. Tension and a degree of discord between siblings, between mother and daughter, father and son are meat to the creative juices. As the essayist and psychoanalyst, Adam Philips writes: “From a psychoanalytic point of view, one of the individual’s formative projects, from childhood onwards, is to find a cure for….. sexuality and difference, the sources of unbearable conflict… Adolescents,” he goes on to say, “are preoccupied by the relationship between dependence and conformity, between independence and compliance.”

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Monday, February 9, 2015

Chantal Joffe: Beside the Seaside

Posted on by Sue Hubbard

Jerwood Gallery Hastings, East Sussex, TN34 3DW, until 12th April 2015

by Sue Hubbard

CJ518_AnneSextonWithJoy_2008Chantal Joffe made her reputation as a painter with work inspired by pornography and fashion, based on images torn from magazines. She is friends with the fashion designer Stella McCartney, has painted Kate Moss and Lara Stone, collaborated with the fashion photographer, Miles Aldridge, painting his wife the model, Kristen McMenamy, in her Islington studio, while Aldridge filmed the process. She enjoys what clothes do to the body, the excuse they give her to paint zig-zags, polka dots and Matisse-like patterns. Her work, mostly of women, questions how images are constructed and presented, subtly challenging the objectification of the female form, wrenching it back from the traditional ‘male gaze'. Recently she's moved more towards painting friends and family – her daughter Esme, her niece Moll and her partner, the painter, Dan Coombs. The results are works of disquieting intimacy. It's no surprise to learn that she has long been a fan of the emotionally jagged photographs of Diana Arbus, whose studies she describes as having: “everything about the portrait of a human that you can ever want.”

Joffe was born in 1969 in St. Albans, a small town in Vermont, in the US. When she was 13 years old her family moved to England and she went to school in London. But it was not until her foundation course at Camberwell School of Art that she began to find herself by ‘discovering Soutine, and all that paint.' Now she has been invited to show at the Jerwood Gallery in Hastings, the beautiful seafront gallery with a view over the beach full of working boats. Beside the Seaside features a number of new and unseen works made especially for this show and reflects her long-standing links with Hastings where she frequently visits family who live in the town. She often draws on the beach, though photographs commonly provide a starting point. She's not interested in literal truth but rather in what goes on under the surface, the awkward emotions that are held in check and frequently remain unconscious, only to leak through the publicly presented face. Just outside the main gallery is her 2008 painting of Anne Sexton with Joy. An American confessional poet, writing in the 1950s, Sexton was attractive, ambitious, manic depressive and suicidal. Like Arbus she penetrated shallow and socially conventional facades to reveal a brew of anger and suicidal thoughts. Here she is shown with her daughter and we can see just how imbalanced that relationship is. Joy looks away as her glamorous mother clings to her, voracious and needy.

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Monday, July 7, 2014

Two women painters: Jenny Saville at Gagosian and Celia Paul

Posted on by Sue Hubbard

by Sue Hubbard

Jenny Saville. Oxyrhynchus. Gagosian, 6-24 Britannia Street, London WC1X9JD. June 13 – July 26, 2014

Celia Paul. Victoria Miro, 16 Wharf Road, London, N1 7RW. 12 June – 2 August 2014

SAVILLE 2014 DuskTwo current shows at major London galleries illustrate that painting is not only alive and well but a vibrant, intellectually and emotionally challenging force. Both these shows are figurative and both are by women. I first met Jenny Saville when she was 22. She'd just left Glasgow School of Art and Charles Saatchi had purchased her MA show and offered an 18-month contract to support her while she made new work to be exhibited in his London gallery. Interviewing her for Time Out, I found her idealistic and determined that Saatchi ‘wouldn't change her'. Her work was aggressive, personal, raw and highly accomplished. Flesh and the female body were her subjects and graffiti-style texts that subverted traditional notions of feminine beauty were scored, like self-inflicted wounds, into the thick impasto of the body of her subjects. Although part of a generation for whom painting – in particular figure painting – was not considered fashionable, she was soon to be seen as the heir to Lucien Freud.

SAVILLE 2014 OdalisqueNow Gagosian Galley is presenting her first-ever solo show in London: Oxyrhynchus. A number of these new works are inspired by the rubbish dump found on this ancient Egyptian archaeological site where heaps of discarded documents were preserved in the area's dry climate, including Euclid's Elements and fragments of Sappho's poems. This historic palimpsest has given Saville an intellectual armature on which to hang much of her imagery that often involves the complex layering of bodies. Faces and limbs overlap and ghostly reflections create a series doppelgangers or shadow selves. The viewer's eye slips between forms, uncertain which limb belongs to which figure, as in Leonardo's cartoon of The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and the Infant Saint John Baptist, circa 1499, where theownership of individual arms and legs is ambiguous. In the exhibition's title work, (pastel and charcoal on canvas), bodies have been reduced to fragments. A foot sticks from a heap of marks as though broken from an ancient sculpture. Elsewhere there's a pile of breasts. This intermingling and cross-referencing runs through Saville's work; black bodies intertwine with white, genders are blurred. Modern life is not seen as fixed but as complex and fluid. Boundaries and borders dissolve. Saville pays a conscious debt to art history with her references to Degas' Olympia, and her nervy abstract marks that wrestle to find form and space in the manner of De Kooning.

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Monday, September 19, 2011

Ryan Gander: Locked Room Scenario. Artangel

Posted on by Sue Hubbard

by Sue Hubbard

ScreenHunter_09 Sep. 19 08.36 I’m tempted, by way of a review, to leave this page blank. After all I don’t want to be too directive. I’d like to feel that you, the reader, are free to make whatever contribution you consider appropriate. All you need do is apply your imagination. Come on; I’m sure you can do it if you try. The possibilities are endless and as valid as anything I might come up with surely? What’s the point of bothering to spend all day putting a review together when you can write anything you want? Who needs critics? Who needs artists anyway? After all skill is so passé.

Ryan Gander’s Artangel project is called Locked Room Scenario. The Chester born Ryan first grabbed art-world attention with his Loose Associations originally performed at the Rijksakdaemie in Amsterdam, when he was a student there in 2002. His talk took circuitous routes through “desire lines” (imaginary paths across public spaces) to imagining fake furniture and, even more esoteric, Christine Keeler’s Connection to Homer Simpson. His Alchemy Boxes contained models of work by other artists, as well as personal items including Truffaut DVD covers and books. His output has been, to say the least, eclectic and idiosyncratic: drawings, sculpture, films and customised sportswear, a chess set, jewellery and a children’s book have all been spawned by his copious imagination. He describes himself as a storyteller. His work is spun from the personal and the cultural in a complex web of narratives and subplots. It’s as if he is aiming to become the Jorge Luis Borges of the visual art world, leaving us clues where ever he goes. It’s not surprising to learn that he has a passion for Inspector Morse and Sherlock Holmes.

When I arrive at an unprepossessing modern industrial warehouse in the mean streets of Islington, London, just between fashionable Wharf Road – where the exclusive galleries Victoria Miro and Parasol Unit reside – and the canal, I’m met at the gate by an invigilator with a list of names and am checked in. I ask where the exhibition is and he waves his arm vaguely. I enter the building and find a young couple sitting on the stairs listening to their i-pod and wonder if they’re part of the exhibition. I ask, but they don’t reply.

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