sorta reminds me of:
Showing posts with label Art. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Art. Show all posts
FCB Cadell
On Thursday morning I had the absolute privilege of being invited to a private viewing & tour of the FCB Cadell exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art Two in Edinburgh, given by the Gallery's curator. I didn't know a huge amount about Cadell before I went to the exhibition, aside from the fact that he was one of the Scottish Colourists and had a bit of a penchant for still life... but I ended up leaving the gallery with a new-found love of Cadell, and a slightly softened attitude towards still life painting (I still resent SG art for ruining much of the joy that still life may have held for me by our constant instruction to produce carbon copies of Cézanne… grrr)
ANYWAY, here are some delightful Cadell paintings for you.
bleak but beautiful
Nathan Coley, There Will Be No Miracles Here.
Currently at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.
this is my own (not-very-good-taken-on-an-iphone-picture) so here is a better one that I found on the almighty google that shows Coley's piece in a better light (literally? it is made of lightbulbs after all...)
speak memory, speak
So because I've pretty much exhausted all of the major current art exhibitions in glasgow (yay! unemployed graduate!), I was tripping around the smaller galleries to check out what was going on, and came across the Memory exhibition at the Compass gallery. There was an awful lot there, but I really just wanted to post about one artist, Scott McMurdo.
for me personally, McMurdo's piece The Compulsion of Memory sums up the concept of memory perfectly; his work is shadowy and vague, and there is something slightly disquieting about the way he tenderly touches on the loss of memory with the older and younger figure, it feels as if there is so much left unsaid, so many memories hidden amongst the shadows of the room.
nb. the title of this post is to remind me to finish reading Nabokov's memoirs, which I was supposed to read for class about a year ago and still haven't finished now that I've graduated...
Mission/Missions (how to build cathedrals), 1987.
Cildo Meireles.
Meireles's installation was created as a means of exploring the cost of conversion to christianity for the indigenous people of Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil. Mission/ Missions is laden with symbols of exploitation and tragedy in the South American colonies; constructed using 200,000 cattle bones, the canopy hangs ominously above a luminescent pit of pennies, the two connected by only a fragile stem of communion wafers.
Breath Taking
Jessica Lloyd-Jones, Fresh Air.
While I was in Aberdeen last week I stumbled upon the Breath Taking handblown glass exhibition at Aberdeen Art Gallery, a Crafts Council touring exhibition. I actually kind of avoided it at first, for some silly reason I thought it wouldn't be that interesting but I'm SO GLAD I wandered into the exhibition room, it was incredible! The sheer skill of the glass blowers was completely awe inspiring, and there wasn't even a boring old wine glass in sight! Breath Taking was playful and ironic, and turned any previous opinion I had of glass blowing as a tired old craft completely upside down. It was WOW.
http://breath-taking.org.uk/
public art
I saw this incredible installation, Ring, by Arnaud Lapierre on Phaidon's blog and just had to repost it.
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| Exterior view of Ring |
Made up entirely of mirrored glass cubes, Ring reflects back a broken and distorted version of the Place Vendome, Paris, to the viewer, showing the historic buildings in an entirely new light. What I love about Lapierre's piece is its dynamism, Ring shows us a constantly changing scenario; it adapts with each passing hour. The public are also free to venture inside Lapierre's installation, with its warped reflections offering an escape into an entirely different world. I've been looking at it for so long that it's given me a bit of a headache, but I like to think that's sort of the desired effect of Ring.
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| The interior view of Ring |
Ring was installed during FIAC 2011, and was on display in Paris's Place Vendome from 20 - 23rd October.
Hopefully it'll pop up in London soon!
Tracey Emin at Aberdeen Art Gallery
For you
"neon makes people happier" - Tracey Emin
I'm so glad I got the chance to see one of Emin's Neon series at the Aberdeen Art Gallery this week, it really changed my appreciation of Tracey Emin as an artist. It's funny how easily neon lighting, generally reserved for kebab shops and the sort of nightclubs most people tend to avoid, can be turned into a sentimental and really quite heart breaking piece of art with just a few short words.
I'm so glad I got the chance to see one of Emin's Neon series at the Aberdeen Art Gallery this week, it really changed my appreciation of Tracey Emin as an artist. It's funny how easily neon lighting, generally reserved for kebab shops and the sort of nightclubs most people tend to avoid, can be turned into a sentimental and really quite heart breaking piece of art with just a few short words.
Degas at the Royal Academy
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Edgar Degas, Ballerina |
A few weeks ago I saw the Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement exhibition at the RA in london, and it definitely has to be one of the best exhibitions I've ever seen. Regardless of the fact that I was a little biased because Degas is one of my favourite painters, Picturing Movement really was stunning, it was a masterclass in how to successfully curate an exhibition.
The entire upper galleries were transformed to show the processes through which Degas strove to show movement in his painting: from the pioneering work of contemporary scientists and photographers, to the painter's own foray into photography, Degas and the Ballet does not simply cover the completed works of the painter. The exhibition instead shows the build up to each work; the preparatory sketches and influential photographs are placed alongside the finished painting, giving the viewer a fascinating insight into Degas's mind.
Degas would study the ballerina's movement from all angles, as well as challenging himself to sketch the dancers during their rehearsals at the studio in order for him to understand how movement manipulated the body, and how best to show this is in a static medium such as painting. The painting of the ballerina to the left is a particularly good example of Degas's skill and ability to picture movement.
However, my favourite object in the exhibition was actually not a painting by Degas, but the sculpture flight of a gull, made to understand the process of flight by a contemporary of Degas, the scientist Etienne-Jules Marey. I love that it was originally created for science but is really a piece of art in its own right. Which is really what the whole exhibition is about; understanding movement, capturing it, and channelling it into something fixed but beautiful.
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| Etienne-Jules Marey, Flight of a Gull. |
The exhibition runs until the 11th December, go see it if you can!
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