2009-08-20
What I Did On My Holidays: Galleries
I’ve taken a week off work, and so I had free reign to spend a day wandering around London, taking in art galleries. I managed to visit over a dozen yesterday, and so I thought it was worth recording what I saw, and what I thought of them.
Hayward Gallery - Walking In My Mind ★★★★☆ / Deceitful Moon ★★☆☆☆
The only paid show I saw all day, I was pretty impressed with Walking in my Mind. Keith Tyson managed to annoy me far less with an artist’s appropriation of science than I remember from his Turner Prize show a couple of years ago, while Thomas Hirschhorn’s cave was a wonderful space to explore. The same was true of Chiharu Shiota’s threads, although the central dresses weren’t as interesting. Yayoi Kusama’s polka dots - as seen on the riverside - also work well within the exhibition.
There are a couple of clunkers; Bo Christian Larsson’s sculptures in the stairwell left me completely cold, but all in all I was surprised to find it pretty worthwhile. Deceitful Moon, the current free exhibition upstairs, was pretty dull, though; the highlight was the painting with instructions on how to hang it on the Moon. Still, it is free.
Getty Images Gallery - Londoners Through A Lens ★★★☆☆
This was about the only private gallery I visited that had other people in, to the extent it was actually hard to see the photographs. Generally they were interesting (the one from inside the Matchbox factory in Hackney piqued my interest, as did a balloon / parachute factory in Finsbury Park) but there were more celebrity photos than I’d have liked. This might well work better as a book, and if you need a taster, the Telegraph has a selection up.
Aicon - Space Invaders ★★☆☆☆
A group show, the highlight for me was Dan Holdsworth’s Array. Otherwise, mainly forgettable, although the downstairs installation (with a wall filled with favela and camouflaged jumpsuits) sticks.
Haunch of Venison - Keith Coventry ★★★☆☆
Apparently this was meant to have finished, but it was still open when I visited. Unfortunately, his latest work is nothing like his Estate Paintings, which I quite like. The best room had a whole series of small paintings, all in red, mounted on a dark wall; they ran the gamut from 17th century figures and what looked like shots from movies. Another room attempted something similar with a spectrum of colours, but it didn’t seem to work as well.
In addition, there were a few paintings downstairs, including 300 small square portraits of people who had inspired the artist, including “Autechre A/B” and “Boards of Canada A/B”, and some large distorted landscapes; the mountain looked like it would have made a fine ambient album cover. (Is that damning with faint praise? It’s not meant to; I actually quite liked it.)
Royal Institution - Faraday Exhibition ★★★★☆
A little out of place here, being not art at all, but I thought I should record that I visited, and found it quite pleasant. If you wanted to while away half an hour with some artefacts from the early investigation of electricity, you wouldn’t go far wrong with this.
Fourth Plinth - One and Other ★★★★☆
In particular, Margaret S, who treated the plinth as if it were a Scottish mountain.
Canadian High Commission - The Accessible Arctic ★★★★☆
A fairly small collection of nature photography from the Canadian Arctic. As you’d expect from images taken from Canadian Geographic, there aren’t many surprises, but I like icebergs and desolation, so it was a nice break, even if I did have to get everything passed through an X-ray machine.
National Gallery - Corot to Monet ★☆☆☆☆
The rating really is a reflection of my tastes, not the exhibition, which I’m sure other people might find wonderfully interesting. Personally, though, a collection of small sketches and paintings of Italian and French rural landscapes really isn’t going to appeal. Right at the end are two paintings of London, one looking to Westminster and the other towards St Paul’s; they’re the only things I can remember about it.
National Portrait Gallery - BP Portrait Award ★★★☆☆ / Fabiola ★★★★★
This annual prize exhibition always seems a bit strange, given how many of the contestants aim for photo-realism, and my ability to take it in was diminished by its popularity, with people crowded around every painting. Still, there’s plenty to see there.
However, I was far more taken with Fabiola, Francis Alÿs’ collection of copies of a now-lost Victorian portrait of an obscure fourth-century saint. The subtle (and glaring) variations across the two rooms are fascinating, as is the fact that these are all somehow evolutionary branches of the same source image. You can read more in this New York Times review when the same portraits were in that city, and if you can stomach art criticism, there’s this essay. Don’t let t put you off, though.
Proud Central - Queen: The Unseen Archive ★★☆☆☆
Once again, the rating probably reflects me as much as the work: I’ve never been a big fan of rock bombast, which of course Queen were masters of. The photos here capture it well, and they’re good, but they didn’t really have any connection to me. (It’s probably worth noting at this point that I just popped in to Proud as I was going past it.) Still, this did lead me to a question: am I a dork for wishing that, as well as the printing process (“silver bromide print”) there was just a little information on what cameras were used?
Bloomberg Space - Comma 09 ★☆☆☆☆
Paintings with holes cut in them? A stage set? A mannequin covered in lines? Sorry. Didn’t work for me at all.
Association of Photographers - Open 2009 ★★★★☆
Another annual prize, but this one seemed a lot more varied. I liked David Sutherland’s surrealism, Tony Hutchison’s hardware, and Andy Eaves everyday, amongst others. Definitely worth popping in to if you’re in the Shoreditch area and have half an hour free.
Kemistry Gallery - In A New Place ★★★★☆
A very small exhibition of what I could dismiss as design, not art, if it weren’t for the fact I prefer design a lot of the time anyway. Who doesn’t like big geometric rainbows?
