Jenny Saville at Modern Art Oxford and the Ashmolean Museum

‘Cultural’ summers in Oxford tend to be narrated by group leaders, reliving the town’s history for summer schools and tourists, and are punctuated by Shakespeare plays on the college lawns.  So the unequivocal dynamism of the current display of British artist Jenny Saville’s works both at Modern Art Oxford and at the Ashmolean Museum (on until 16 September 2012) has therefore been particularly welcome.

Saville paints a lot of flesh and the flagrant frontality with which she does so is perhaps one of the reasons she is often compared with Lucian Freud. If you saw the National Portrait Gallery’s recent exhibtion of Lucian Freud Portrait’s you will remember the triptych of paintings of the ‘Benefits Supervisor’.

Lucian Freud, 'Benefits Supervisor Sleeping'

These kind of contours find their echo in Saville’s paintings.

The tone of Saville’s latest series of drawings, the ‘Reproduction’ series, strike a different chord. It is the palimpsests of images and themes from art history’s older players which call out from these. Forms from Picassos and Manets wink out from the wonderfully loose and exploratory drawings in the first room of Modern Art Oxford’s exhibition and the explicit referencing in Saville’s two drawings in the Ashmolean testify to her transcendent draughtsmanship.

Those in the renaissance room of the Ashmolean hang gracefully alongside the museum’s relatively new acquisition of Titian’s ‘Triumph of Love’ and the paintings of other Venetian legends. Notably, there is no jarring with such lofty neighbours. That period’s great exploration of the theme of the Madonna and Child is taken up in these incredible drawings and Saville draws on her own experience of motherhood. Saville’s expressive lines act as loose harnesses for her wriggling babes; the seeming reality of their dynamic with the formidable women from whose embrace they writhe, enables the theme of motherhood more generally to carry us through time, to the present day. It is quite a feat and the effect is, to repeat an aptly used word, monumental.

In his laudatory review of these exhibitions, Waldemar Januszczak berates the loss of Saville’s work to a selective, moneyed audience in the recent past and her consequent 'public' absence makes her ironically conspicuous amongst the crowd of her more media-happy YBA peers. These two exhibitions in Oxford are free and are inspiring viewing, go and see them!

It is really worth listening to Saville’s video interview in Modern Art Oxford too. She has a wonderful way with words and very easy voice. 

 

Modern Art Oxford has a little café which rolls on to the street which might be worth popping into after. 

Francis Bacon's Studio

The parallels between museums and places of worship have often been drawn and the deference with which art is treated can be remarkable (of course, this goes some way to explain its tumultuous history).

In any case, the clear resonance of such comparatives cut through the hushed silence of the ritual-makers when I visited the exhibition of Francis Bacon’s studio at Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin recently.

In 1998 the entirety of Francis Bacon’s chaotic studio was immaculately relocated from London to Dublin. So if you potter past the pastelled, sea-whisked impressionist studies and side rooms of Constable ‘sketches’, into the last rooms of the Hugh Lange gallery, this is what awaits you:

A real mess.

Archaeologists, conservators and curators noted down the location of dust particles, paintbrushes, photos and well-leaved books in the studio – some 7,000 items – and tagged and labelled away in order to re-create the exact clutter around which the artist breathed, moved and painted.

In the first room of the exhibition there is an amusing video interview of Bacon from a South Bank show in 1985 playing on a huge screen which you can see from t.13.50 here: http://www.ubu.com/film/bacon.html.  

In the video, Bacon implies that his mess was fundamental to his creative process. Primed with this insight, the suggestion that the configuration for inspiration lies ahead, the visitor makes the full circuit around the walls that encase the room, we peer through the selective glass panels, intrigued. And the thought cannot escape you: his studio is being visited like a religious shrine and its contents have been preserved and are now treated like religious relics. 

Confezioni Paradiso

Last night Confezioni Paradiso, a tiny but very cute textile boutique in Bologna, hosted a private view of a series of black biro illustrations by Virginia Mori.

Mori's illustrations wallow in a pool of quotidienne surrealism and are slightly unsettling (when I asked about Mori's 'thing' the very kind and elegant Ms Paradiso told me I could speak to her myself as she was outside, I must admit I did not jump at the chance) but their setting was so palatable I relaxed into the experience. Instrumental sounds crackled along the walls and got muffled in hand made 'Paradiso' textiles hanging there, wooden crates held lots of brown paper packets of nibbles to have with il vino, each sealed with a little copy of a Mori illustration and passers by were welcomed in and sat on the doorsteps, probably not chatting about Mori's impressive biro technique at all, in a very nicely understated way.

Afterwards I popped into Camera a Sud - I don't want to paint any verbal picture because it will sound kitsch, which it is not - but it often seems to be the perfect place for vino e cibo a Bologna.

Camera a Sud

Arte Fiera, Bologna

As soon as I set foot in one of those ‘exhibition centres’, typically found just outside of a city centre, I feel like passing out. Unfortunately Artefiera Art First Bologna, one of the world’s oldest art fairs, takes place in just such a sprawling space. Nonetheless, enticed in by a gifted entry to the preview, I went to have a see. Hall after hall with stand after stand of contemporary galleries flashed their wares and if it hadn’t been for the company and the glass of prosecco in my hand I most probably would have given up in time for apperitivo in Bologna’s city centre (Margarita note to follow). But one of the nominally British stands wanted an extra pair of hands to help over the weekend and so, after acclimatising to the bright lights, I was moved to revise my first impressions.

I’m pretty sure it was the privilege of time which did it (that and of course hearing about the peculiarities of how the Italians buy art). In the same way that when you go to an exhibition you only expect to see it once and so you make frantic efforts to look at things with as much force as you can muster and feel obliged to see everything put before you, so too with an art fair one feels a compulsion to look at everything on offer. No wonder you might feel jaded by the whole thing. But when you have the chance to see things as few or as many times as you like, up close or from a distance – i.e. when you have the luxury of time on your side – it is oh so much easier to mould your very own experience of it.

Stands you couldn’t bear to look at (for instance because gore in art just isn’t really your thing), you make a point of passing when you next go by for a second, third or fourth time. And those stands with pieces you lusted after but felt pretty intimidated by at the same time you can summon up the courage to revisit. And you enjoy them all the more each time you go. Continua (the gallery that is very cool-ey located in San Gimignano in Tuscany) was one of the latter stands. It had an incredible selection of amazingly cool works including a piece by Moatar Nasr made up of over 12,000 matchsticks with different coloured tips arranged into a floral pattern and yes, there was a Kapoor too.  John Martin Gallery had another piece which really grew on me, Neale Howells’ Mama with a Gun (2011), so much interest in it too (see current exhibitions at John Martin Gallery in London and Edward Cutler Gallery in Milan).

Of course pieces with the loved and hated ‘novelty’ and ‘shock’ factors often associated with contemporary fairs also peppered the halls. I grew very fond of one of these: a pair of clay busts with videos of the moving features of said clay heads projected onto them many times over from the vantage point of two other clay pieces. It was so clever, so fun and all the more enjoyable to watch since there was a steady stream of children laughing without inhibition at them.

The fair itself was one of a constellation of art events held in Bologna the last weekend of January. The atmospheric highlight was certainly la notta Bianca di Arte fiera on the Saturday evening. Bologna’s wide porticoes mediate perfect moseying opportunities all around the city centre and it was really very cool to see them light up as the buzz and movement in and out of galleries big and small spilled into them that night.  But for me at least, one of the very best things about Arte fiera, as with so many other art events, and certainly one of the endlessly curious things was watching or listening to other people’s reactions (often softly spoken and hesitant) to things that they see and for this at least may be it is the first impression which really counts.

Building the Revolution: Soviet Art and Architecture 1915-1935

Using a single platform to analyse a number of media can be a tricky thing and traditionally art historians have stuck to studying one dimension or another. Not so in Building the Revolution: Soviet Art and Architecture 1915-1935, an exhibition which showcases examples of Constructivist art and images of Russian avant-garde architecture in a very manageable, almost cosy space in the third floor galleries of the Royal Academy. Despite the proximity of display one doesn’t come away with an impression of overlap, direction of influence, let alone of dynamic reciprocity between the two art forms. This was not my only contention. The relationship between the two is not clearly explained and the idea of dialogue between the two not convincingly forged but, perhaps more importantly, the aesthetic of neither is given centre stage. It is the photographs of extant Soviet structures by the English photographer Richard Pare, taken in the 1990s and early noughties, which steal the show. Fine. But in that case name the exhibition better.  

Although Pare’s photographs are often sublime, I liked them a lot, I wasn’t persuaded that their presence on nearly every wall of the exhibition was useful in arguing for the strength of the Soviet art forms themselves. And that was the original premise for the exhibition (In her lecture, now available on the RA website, curator MaryAnne Stevens made the disclaimer that this exhibition is not a laudation of the new ideals of the Soviet Socialist state but was intented as an appreciative look at the dynamic art emerging at a specific period in history). Yes, of course seeing many of these structures through Pare’s lens accents their best features and encourages a new way of looking at them. We are familiar with Pare's kind of aesthetic, characteristically light and open, so it is easy to converse with and their significant size commands our attention. But they do not, I felt, leave ample room for the original Soviet aesthetic to speak for itself. It is also a shame that more is not made of the archive cards onto which photographs contemporary to the actual period are stuck. Their display can completely elude you if you forget to look down your nose.

Yet it was definitely an interesting exhibition– but perhaps this was only because it was a foray into unknown territory, my only way in was scant knowledge of related Italian futurist art – and much of the material on display is here in Britain for the first time so we must make the most of it. 

Gerard Richter. Panorama.

I had an inkling as to the assortment of Richter’s ‘looks’ but a stroll through the overridingly chronological path of the rooms of the Tate Modern’s exhibition Gerard Richter. Panorama revealed just how various an artist he is. One can be forgiven for falling short of reading up on the media, themes, theories and history explored and expounded by the 80-something year old German. It is, after all, quite something: stainless steel and annotated photographs through to oil on canvas; figural and abstract works; nods, deferent and not so deferent, to the art and theory of old and modern Masters; familial, experiential and world wide history. Quite a list. Richter’s intellectual investment is clear and whether you fancy yourself as an art critic, art historian or, perhaps preferably, neither, there is a wealth of material to get excited about.

It is surprising then that one does not feel completely saturated, nor indeed confused, as you wind up the ‘Cage’ rooms. Perhaps this is because an incredible display of technical virtuosity lends coherency to Richter’s oeuvre; it abounds and captivates right through to the end. Added to this is the fact that, just when you start to think you have seen too many photo – realist paintings or abstract works, the curators make timely breaks from the homogeneity of these beautifully measured paintings and present you with a stack of mirrors, or another of Richter's 'sculptural' pieces.

The plentiful abstract paintings are symptomatic of Richter’s signature use of the squeegee and his erasure technique but – and quite possibly I missed a trick here - I came away feeling that the exhibition script flaunts these specialised, individual terms without explanation. Another puzzling thing was how Richter painted his mesmerising ‘Seascape’ and his eminently effective birds-eye cityscapes, but perhaps that is not one which can be answered. I decided he must have to run forwards and backwards rather a lot but that sounds a bit Charles Cecil-esque. So, lots of reading up after....It’s only on until Sunday 8^th Jan (there are late night openings on Friday and Saturday) but see it if you can, ‘tis a GREAT show. 

According to The Times on Friday, 18th November 2011, the online dealer Viagogo has reported that £16 tickets for the below show are now being sold for £165 ... !