Käthe Kollwitz - Ikon

Käthe Kollwitz, Self Portrait, 1904

Portrait of the Artist: Käthe Kollwitz is at Ikon until 26 November 2017.

In his succinct and moving account of Käthe Kollwitz’s life and work, Neil McGregor makes a persuasive case for her being one of the ‘greatest German artists’. (Listen here.)

Kollwitz worked, principally, as a printmaker and took social injustice, pain and suffering as her overriding themes. Her compassionate approach achieves work of considerable pathos – evident, for example, in Woman with Dead Child, 1903. The model for the child was her own son, Peter. As McGregor points out, this proved to be tragically prophetic: his discussion focuses on her sculpture Mother with Her Dead Son, which is in the Neue Wache (New Guardhouse) on Unter den Linden in Berlin, where it serves as a memorial to ‘victims of war and dictatorship’. (See image at bottom of page.) The sculpture was her own memorial to Peter. The story is that at 18, in 1914 at the outbreak of the first World War, Peter wished to volunteer for military service but, being under 21, could only do so with parental consent. Peter’s father at first refused but was persuaded to relent by Käthe. Peter was killed in action a mere 10 days after joining up. Grief, guilt and a fervent pacifism marked the rest of Kollwitz’s life. She died in 1945.

Although her work may seem unrelenting in its representation of pain and suffering, it is also beautiful and, I think, unsentimental in its honesty. This exhibition mostly drawn from the print collection of the British Museum is a rare opportunity to see work by this major artist.

Listen to Neil McGregor’s BBC radio talk: Käthe Kollwitz: Suffering Witness; listen to a review of the exhibition on BBC Radio 4’s Saturday Review (16.9.17, starts at 27mins.)

Read a reviews by Anna McNay and Skye Sherwin.

Käthe Kollwitz, Woman with Dead Child, 1903

Käthe Kollwitz, Not (Want), 1893-7

Käthe Kollwitz, Bust of a Working Woman With Blue Shaw, 1903

Käthe Kollwitz, Death and Woman, 1910

Käthe Kollwitz, Self Portrait, 1924

Käthe Kollwitz, Self Portrait, 1924

Käthe Kollwitz, Mother with her Dead Son in the Neue Wache, Berlin

Käthe Kollwitz, Mother with her Dead Son in the Neue Wache, Berlin

Dan Flavin - Ikon Gallery

Dan Flavin, untitled (in honor of Harold Joachim) 3, 1977

Dan Flavin:  It is what it is and it ain’t nothing else is at Ikon Gallery until 26 June 2016.

Dan Flavin’s artworks were made by arranging commercially available, industrial, fluorescent light tubes: they are amongst the most sensually beautiful artworks of the twentieth century.

Alongside his Minimalist peers – notably Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Robert Morris and Sol Lewitt – Flavin’s art is bracingly free of representation, illusion, expression, symbolism and spirituality: It is what it is and it ain’t nothing else. And what it is, is gorgeous.

In an article about the forthcoming re-opening (14 May 2016) of the San Francisco MOMA with its newly, and hugely, expanded collection (“We expect our colleagues in other museums to be green with envy” - Neal Benezra, director) it was interesting to read that when asked to name her favourite works from that remarkable collection, associate curator Sarah Roberts, cited Dan Flavin’s untitled (to Barnett Newman) two. Thrillingly, this very piece is (apparently) currently on show in Birmingham’s Ikon, where it is also accompanied by numbers one, three and four of that same series. 
This promises to be a spectacular exhibition.

Dan Flavin, "monument" for V. Tatlin 1966

Dan Flavin, pink out of a corner (to Jasper Johns), 1963

Dan Flavin, untitled (in memory of "Sandy" Calder) V, 1977

Dan Flavin, untitled (to Barnett Newman) two, 1971

Dan Flavin, untitled (to Don Judd, colorist) 1–5, 1987

Dan Flavin, installation view, Ikon Gallery 2016 (Photo. by Stuart Whipps)

Martin Creed - Hayward Gallery (and in the lift at Ikon)

Martin Creed, Work No. 845: Things, 2007

Martin Creed: What's the point of it? is at the Hayward Gallery until 27 April.
On a recent visit to the Ikon in Birmingham (see Jamal Penjweny and David Tremlett, below) I took the glass lift down from the top galleries (I love glass lifts) and had the bonus pleasure of experiencing Martin Creed's Work No. 409: For lift and choir of bass, alto and soprano voices. The recorded voices deepen as the lift descends. I immediately rode the lift back up with rising voices; and down again.
This reminded me that Creed's retrospective at the Hayward is on my list of must see exhibitions. I have enthused before about his Turner Prize winning piece (Work No. 160: The lights going on and off - see below) and so have high hopes that the Hayward show will be good. Reviews, have, however, been mixed. His art is one that balances on a knife edge of silliness and banality, but when it comes off it can be a delight.
Read reviews by Tim Adams, Mark Hudson, Sarah Kent and Waldemar Januszczack (he hated it!); watch a video 'preview'; read a transcript of a talk given by the artist in Birmingham in 2008; watch a video of Martin Creed and his band performing in Berlin in 2012.

Martin Creed, Work No. 79: Some Blu-Tack kneaded, rolled into a ball, and depressed against a wall, 1993

Martin Creed, Work No. 200: Half the air in a given space, 1998

Martin Creed, Work No. 1092: Mothers, 2011

Martin Creed, Work No. 264: Two protrusions from a wall, 2001

Martin Creed, Work No. 1315, 2011

Martin Creed, Work No. 88: A sheet of A4 paper crumpled into a ball, 1995

Martin Creed, Work No. 701: Nails, 2007

David Tremlett - Ikon

David Tremlett: 3 Drawing Rooms is at Ikon until 21 April 2014.
David Tremlett has been on and off my radar since the 1970s. I was first aware of him as a Conceptual Artist whose Spring Recordings (1972) comprised a shelf of 81 cassette tape recordings of sounds (mostly wind and birdsong) heard in each of the counties of England, Scotland and Wales.

David Tremlett, Spring Recordings, 1972 (Tate Britain)

20 years later(1992) he was nominated for the Turner Prize - however, alongside Damien Hirst, Alison Wilding and, the surprise winner, Grenville Davey, he was a rank outsider. But his poetic, abstract, pastel wall drawings and fragmentary texts, derived from the locations of his extensive travels, were beautiful.

David Tremlett, Portuguese Wall Drawings (1), 1992

In 2011 his Drawing for Free Thinking was installed on the Manton stairwell at Tate Britain. (Watch a video of its installation.)

David Tremlett, Drawing for Free Thinking, (Tate Britain), 2011

Now he is showing spectacular wall drawings at Ikon. Three rooms are are given over to his geometric abstractions executed in intense pastel pigment, graphite and varnish, and thick, black graphite grease. Gorgeous.
Watch a time-lapse video of the installation - which took more than 2 weeks to complete.

Jamal Penjweny - Ikon

Jamal Panjweny, from Iraq is Flying, (2006-10)

Jamal Penjweny: Saddam is Here is at Ikon until 21 April 2014.

Jamal Penjweny is an Iraqi-Kurdish photographer and film-maker who has produced remarkable work with very limited resources - supporting himself by working as a shepherd and running a café.

This exhibition comprises 3 series of photographs and 2 impressive and affecting films which, I believe, were made using a mobile 'phone.

The photographic series are Saddam is Here, Irag is Flying and Without Soul.

Saddam is Here comprises images of ordinary Iraqi people, each holding a life-size picture of Saddam Hussein’s face in front of their own. As Penjweny says, “Saddam is here. Iraqi society cannot forget him even after his death because some of us still love him and the rest are still afraid of him ... His shadow is still following Iraqi society everywhere.”

Panjweny was born during the Iran‑Iraq conflict in 1981: "War has always been part of my life... Through my photos I try to erase the idea of war." In Iraq is Flying (2006–2010) he does just that: Panjweny got his subjects to 'leap for joy' and created a (literally) uplifting collective portrait of ordinary people displaying innocent joy. 

Personally, I found the most intiguing and disturbing set of photographs to be Without Soul, in which a red line is drawn across the neck of every living person and creature in the photographs. Panjweny says "As a child I would often draw human figures, landscapes, animals and tanks… But at home I was told that it is not a right thing to make images of living creatures as it is a work of God, not of the human being. It is so because the one who gives the shape of the being is obliged to give it a soul in the next life. However, by drawing a line against the neck of the represented one can announce to God that he invalidates the image and is not claiming a position of the creator." For me, however, the images simply spoke powerfully of cruel and arbitrary execution and the innocent victims of war.

Photographs can sometimes give up all their information too quickly; the films, here, were, I thought, more powerful. One documents a market stall recycling Kalashnikovs which, as Laura Cumming puts it, "dangle like dead chickens from butchers' hooks". Another Life (2010) "is a film of young men smuggling alcohol between Iran and Iraq... [it] was made with a mobile phone and some superlative editing. Saddle-sore, stinking of horses, scarred from the bullets of roving border guards, exhausted but desperate to make a living and feed their families, the smugglers burn the crates to keep warm at night. One young man holds up a can of Amstel: 'For this I am shot at?'" (Laura Cumming.)

Read reviews by Laura Cumming and William Davie.
Jamal Penjweny is also featured in Welcome to Iraq at South London Gallery until 1 June 2014. This is a restaging of the exhibition originally shown as part of the National Pavilion of Iraq in the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013 - read a review of the Venice show in Frieze.

Jamal Panjweny, from Saddam is Here (2009-10)

Jamal Panjweny, from Saddam is Here (2009-10)

Jamal Panjweny, from Saddam is Here (2009-10)

Jamal Panjweny, from Iraq is Flying, (2006-10)

Jamal Panjweny, from Iraq is Flying, (2006-10)

Jamal Panjweny, from Iraq is Flying, (2006-10)

Jamal Panjweny, from Without Soul

Jamal Panjweny, from Without Soul

Jamal Panjweny, from Without Soul

Jamal Panjweny, from Without Soul

Jamal Panjweny, from Without Soul