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Colour Chart: Reinventing Colour, 1950 to Today Being an artist has often meant being a colourist. The twentieth and twenty-first centuries may have seen a dramatic shift in how we respond to and value colour, early experiments in photography giving a new lease of life to black and white before the sudden surge of colour printing and film, but its popularity as both medium and meaning remains. Pop art, performance art, conceptual art, abstract art, video art, installation art and even word art have all been made out of, inspired by, colour and the extensive new exhibition Colour Chart: Reinventing Colour snaking around the top floor of Tate Liverpool this summer is testament to this.
Richard Long: Heaven and Water There is a seeming antithesis between the realities of an invasive ‘Time Team’ archaeological intervention at Stonehenge (as witnessed at the end of May on UK TV) and the gently caressing manner in which Richard Long’s works address the English landscape, and indeed the planetary land mass. He too denotes these in terms of stone circles, rocks, or pathways gently laid on the surface, always on the surface. How would Astronaut Long have visited the lunar surface? Far more gently than even gravity absence, allows. On earth, for Long, there is seldom any disruption by digging or excavation. Considered to be the founding father of the contemporary glass movement in Australia, Klaus Moje has played a pivotal role in shaping the history of studio glass practice in America and internationally for the past 30 years. In his own work, Moje has made or contributed significantly to innovations that have transformed the process of fused glass, while impacting generations of artists as an educator, spokesperson and international advocate for the medium. To mark Moje's 50 years of working with glass, during which the artist has gained increasing attention from peers, collectors, galleries and museum curators, in 2007 the Portland Art Museum in Portland, Oregon, selected 68 objects to showcase in a major survey of his work.
The British Council Collection; Passports Relatively unknown inside of Britain, the British Council in fact plays an extensive role in nurturing and bringing to attention native artistic talent. This is achieved through numerous means including grants, exchanges, and exhibitions, the last of which are facilitated by its even less well-known art collection. Comprising over 8,500 works acquired since it’s inception in 1935 (a year after the foundation of the Council itself), the collection is in fact rivalled only by those of Tate Britain and the Arts Council in the extent and quality of its holdings of British art from the last hundred years.
Rodchenko and Popova: defining constructivism This superbly researched and hung exhibition is nonetheless somewhat long overdue insofar as it recognises the par status of Liubov Popova’s work to that of Alexander Rodchenko in the formation and development of the Constructivist Movement in Russia. The first evidence of Popova’s talent was at the 1915 Petrograd Exhibition entitled, The Futurist Exhibition: Tramway V. This was the exhibition that brought Malevich and Tatlin together; Popova and her friend Nadezha Udaltsova sent in paintings that they had completed from their Paris sojourn under Cubist influence. Here, Popova’s work The Traveller was of notably high quality. As Camilla Gray points out, it was Popova who was the most outstanding painter of the post-abstract schools in Russia.
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Artists in the Bush: Land Issues in the Art of GW Bot, Wendy Stavrianos and Helen Geier The landscape has inspired all Australian artists since the first explorations of the continent, and Settlement in 1788. The Land is also central to Aboriginal culture, and increasingly their perceptions and culture are being explored within Australian culture as a whole. The past 20 years, has seen increased interaction with Indigenous art, with the establishment of artist collectives and the proliferation of Aboriginal art for the market. White artists have themselves experienced significant inspiration from Aboriginal art and culture as the work of GW Bot, Wendy Stavrianos and Helen Geier reveals, indeed they have been humbled by it. Garden & Cosmos: The Royal Paintings of Jodphur This exhibition examines comprehensively two particular styles of Indian painting, which developed between the 17th and 19th centuries in Jodphur, Rajasthan, Northern India. The first of these is one of ornate florescence that focused on the combination of the joys of courtly existence amidst the surrounding, verdant forests, which can be clarified as a garden of creation. The second range of paintings from Jodphur became preoccupied with metaphysical content and areas of philosophical speculation, most particularly with the perceived origins of the universe, i.e. the cosmos. Uch Emchek or 3M-Check: Central Asia’s First Art Residency Programme
Whitechapel rising: the new opening The Whitechapel Gallery in East London was founded in 1901, Whitechapel itself was at that time a remarkably cosmopolitan part of London, where large numbers of late 19th century immigrants settled, principally Eastern European Jews and Russian political exiles. These migrations however had formed part of a much longer-standing tradition whereby Huguenot, Portuguese, Spanish, Irish and earlier waves of Jewish immigrants had traditionally on arrival in the Port of London by sea or by train from Harwich, made for this honeycomb of streets, workshops and markets. Arguably this street culture was fragile, but it was also robust by the character of its immigrants who had experienced untold hardships across Europe to reach East London.
This is a remarkable new compendium on the life and work of the Russian film-maker Andrei Tarkovsky who died early in 1986 of cancer, at the age of 54, in Paris. The Editor, and author of four key articles in the book, Nathan Dunne, organised the valuable international symposium at Tate Modern in 2008. At Studio International we also reviewed another smaller publication on Tarkovsky entitled Andrei Tarkovsky: Elements of Cinema by Robert Bird, a further valuable study, particularly strong on theoretical aspects. His essay ‘The Imprinted Image’ is a significant contribution also to the above work on review. Although it is almost a quarter century since Tarkovsky died, there has been a long wait for these two complementary and comprehensive works. Idealised notions of feminine beauty have, from the beginnings of human history, been a yardstick by which a culture measures living, breathing women, as well as an emblem of a society's values, desires and dreams. As an embodiment of womanhood, Eve in the Garden of Eden presented a view of women encompassing, simultaneously, attraction and repulsion, good and evil and pleasure and pain. From Eve through to the many tales of women of mystery and power–historical, mythological and literary – that have collected through the ages, there exists a strong line of women who have served as muses, whether for a particular artist, writer or musician, or for an era, generation or subculture.
Victor Majzner, Painting the Torah “Without the Torah there would be no Judaism. The Torah makes temporal reality purposeful and the spiritual experience tangible” Victor Majzner published a limited edition book, Painting the Torah (2008), to incorporate Jewish experience in to his art practice. Majzner has deservedly received critical attention from his early work in the 1960s to the recent exhibition, Wounded – Land, Memory, Destiny (2004); Painting the Torah can be seen to be a culmination of many aspects of his work as an artist in formal and symbolic terms.
Baroque 1620–1800: Style in the Age of Magnificence. Victoria and Albert Museum, London Baroque is above everything, the word for a particular style in music, ceramics, furniture, drama, carving and of course, architecture. There was never such a term until after the period had receded into history. But as this well curated exhibition shows, it spread across the globe from Europe to Latin America, to Asia, almost as a pandemic in cultural terms. It spanned the years from the l600’s into the early eighteenth century. In 1905 Sickert returned triumphantly from Venice ready to take on and lead the new generation of British artists: ‘sent from heaven to finish all your educations’ as he modestly put it. The subsequent story of the Camden town pictures and the group that formed around him is now well known, most recently covered in the 2008 Tate Britain exhibition also curated by Robert Upstone. The smaller exhibition space at the DPG is well suited to more in depth shows of certain periods of an artist’s work, and rather than focus on these more familiar works this display covers the preceding nine years, examining the pictures Sickert made on his four major trips to Venice (1895–96, 1900, 1901, 1903–4).
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A man praying, then standing on his head … Four grown men flexing their muscles in what resembles an outdoor weight-lifting competition ... A rapid stream that looks like any other until proximity reveals just visible human bodies, alive. An unmade bed in a bare room with a simple photograph adorning the wall … A collage of banknotes … These are just some of the twenty or so photographed or actual exhibits and performative acts at the recent launch of Uch Emchek or 3M-Check (uch meaning ‘three’ and emchek ‘breast’ in Kyrgyz), Central Asia’s very first rural art residency programme.
