Catherine Yass: Lighthouse - Alison Jacques Gallery

Catherine Yass, Lighthouse (North north north west), 2011

Catherine Yass: Lighthouse is at Alison Jacques Gallery until 11 February. 

Yass's photographs and films focus on the Royal Sovereign Lighthouse (50° 43'.40 N 00° 26'.13 E), 5 miles out to sea from Eastbourne on the East Sussex coast. The lighthouse was completed in 1971, replacing a light vessel which had marked the Royal Sovereign Shoal since 1875. The structure includes a cabin section - a perfectly square platform resting on a circular column - which contained accommodation for the keepers who manned the lighthouse before its automation in 1994, when it was converted to solar power.

The photographs and films use inversion and reversal  to produce a series of beautiful and spooky images.
Read Catherine Yass's Best Shot.

Catherine Yass, Lighthouse, 2011. Detail from 35mm film transferred to digital video.

Catherine Yass, Lighthouse, 2011. Detail from 35mm film transferred to digital video.

Catherine Yass, Lighthouse (East), 2011

Catherine Yass, Lighthouse (North), 2011

Catherine Yass, Lighthouse (North north west, distant), 2011

Catherine Yass, Lighthouse, 2011. Detail from 35 mm film transferred to digital video.

Damien Hirst: The Complete Spot Paintings, 1986 - 2011 - Gagosian

Damien Hirst, N-Methylurea, 2005

As a taster for the Tate Modern's forthcoming Damien Hirst retrospective (4 April - 9 September), Gagosian has launched its ambitious, if slightly batty, global exhibition of the Complete Spot Paintings, 1986-2011. The exhibition will take place at once across all of Gagosian Gallery’s eleven locations in New York, London, Paris, Los Angeles, Rome, Athens, Geneva, and Hong Kong, opening worldwide on 12 January and continuing until 10 March. If you have the time and money to pop into all 11 exhibitions you may be lucky enough to win a signed spot painting specially dedicated to you! Hmm...

Hirst on Spots:

I had an argument with an assistant who used to paint my spots. A fantastic argument. Because it's, like, nothing comes out of my studio unless I say it comes out of the studio. You've got loads of people working. You've got people you care about that you've known for long periods of time. When she was leaving, and she was nervous, she said, 'Well, I want a spot painting. I've painted loads for you. I've painted these spot paintings for a year, and I want one'. A year in the studio, getting paid a fiver, a tenner an hour, whatever it is. So I said, 'I'll give you a cheque for seventy thousand quid if you like. Why don't I just do that? Because you know you're going to sell it straight away. You know how to do it. Just make one of your own.' And she said, 'No. I want one of yours.' But the only difference between one painted by her and one of mine is the money.

[...]

I only ever made five spot paintings myself. Personally. I can paint spots. But when I started painting the spots I knew exactly where it was going. I knew exactly what was going to happen, and I couldn't be fucking arsed doing it. And I employed people. And my spots I painted are shite. They're shit. I did them on the wrong background, there's the pin-holes [from the compass] in the middle of the spots which at the time I said I wanted, because I wanted a kind of truth to it. Under close scrutiny, you can see the pocess by which they were made. They're shit compared to... The best person who ever painted spots for me was Rachel [Howard]. She's brilliant. Absolutely fucking brilliant. The best spot painting you can have by me is one painted by Rachel.

Hirst, Damien and Burn, Gordon (2001) On The Way to Work, London: Faber and Faber: "Interview 4: Outbuilding, Combe Martin, Monday, 30.08.09", pp82 and 90.

Jerry Saltz on Hirst's Spots:

Hirst's spot paintings are spiffy riffs on Sol Le Witt’s sixties formula: authorless paintings that can be made by anyone. Each one looks cheery, fresh, and modern. The grids are machinelike, the color lifelike—bingo, a brand. I wouldn’t mind owning a spot painting at all. Yet the idea of owning more than one is unimaginable. You see one, and you really have seen them all. (Read Spots and Sharks andMaggots and Money: How Damien Hirst took over the world, by Jerry Saltz)
Read review by Adrian Searle, watch TV interview with Charlie Rose.

Damien Hirst, Methoxyverapamil, 1991

Damien Hirst, 1-Bromododecane, 1996

Damien Hirst, DL-P-Chlorophenylalanine Methyl Ester, 1998

Damien Hirst, Bromchlorophenol Blue, 1996

Damien Hirst, Levorphanol, 1995

Damien Hirst, Spot Painting, 1986

Damien Hirst, Ethyl Laurate, 2003

Damien Hirst, Eucatropine, 2005

Damien Hirst, Cupric Nitrate, 2007

Damien Hirst with Spot paintings, Gagosian, 522 West 21st Street, NY

Eve Arnold, 1912 - 2012

Eve Arnold, Bar girl in a brothel in the red light district, Havana, Cuba, 1954

Eve Arnold died on 4 January, 2012.

Arnold, the first woman member of Magnum, was best known for her portraits of both the famous (especially Marilyn Monroe) and the unknown as well as for photojournalist assignments from Harlem to China, and Russia to South Africa.

Asked by Sarah Brown of the BJP, how much power photojournalists actually have to change the things they see, Arnold [brought] her hand up to eye-level, a tiny gap between forefinger and thumb, "very little," she said. "You know in the beginning we thought we were going to change the world. I think people live in so much visual material these days, billions of photographs annually, that they grow numb after too much exposure. But it's hard. You see something and it's your profession and you want to do something about it." (Quoted from BJP obituary by Oliver Laurent)

Read obituary by Amanda Hopkinson, read/listen to an interview with John Tusa for BBC Radio 3, and listen to her Desert Island Discs!

Eve Arnold, Josephine Baker, 1950

Eve Arnold, Marilyn Monroe, 1955

Eve Arnold, Malcolm X, Chicago, 1961

Eve Arnold, Anthony Quinn and Anna Karina on the set of Guy Green's The Magus, Mallorca, 1976

Eve Arnold, Retired Woman, China, 1979

Helen Frankenthaler, 1928 - 2011

Helen Frankenthaler, Mountains and Sea, 1952

Helen Frankenthaler died on 27 December, 2011.

Frankenthaler has an assured place in C20 art history: her 1952 painting, Mountains and Sea, is credited with launching a new movement: Post-Painterly Abstraction or Colour Field Painting. William Agee has described the genesis of the painting:

In August 1952, Ms. Frankenthaler traveled to Nova Scotia, where she continued her practice of doing small landscapes. She painted in watercolor and oil on paper, working freely from nature. These studies helped to keep her limber and flexible, like a dancer or athlete tuning up or, as was the case here, a painter preparing for a major new effort.

On the afternoon of Oct. 29, back in New York, she tacked a large—roughly 7-by-10-foot—piece of untreated canvas to the floor of her studio to begin the largest painting she had ever undertaken. Her mind and her arms were filled with memories of the spectacular Cape Breton landscape. After roughing in a few charcoal marks as an initial guide, she poured highly thinned oil paint from coffee cans directly onto the canvas, as if she were drawing with color. She had no plan; she just worked, with control and discipline. At the end of the afternoon, when she had finished, she climbed on a ladder and studied the painting. She was not yet sure what she had done; she was “sort of amazed and surprised and interested.” … It soon became clear that what she had done was invent a new way of making art. (Quoted from article by James Panero in The New Criterion)

The story goes that Clement Greenberg took Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland to Frankenthaler's studio, in 1953, to see Mountains and Sea and they saw her pouring and staining method as the bridge between Pollock and what was possible. By allowing her colour to be in the weave of the canvas rather than on top of it Frankenthaler exemplified the 'flatness' that Greenberg was to identify as the essential condition of Modernist Painting in his 1960 essay of that name; an idea, and an achievement that was lampooned by Tom Wolfe in The Painted Word (1975).

Frankenthaler continued to produce lyrical and luminous abstracts through six decades - an achievement that was celebrated by an exhibition, Frankenthaler at 80: Six Decades, in 1980.

Read obituaries in The Guardian, Los Angeles Times,  and The New York Times.

Helen Frankenthaler, Western Dream, 1957

Helen Frankenthaler, Nature Abhors a Vacuum, 1973

Helen Frankenthaler, Viewpoint II, 1979

Helen Frankenthaler, A Green Thought in a Green Shade, 1981

Helen Frankenthaler, Driving East, 2002

John Chamberlain, 1927 - 2011

John Chamberlain, Tambourinefrappe, 2010

John Chamberlain, the artist who made sculptures out of crushed cars, died on 21 December, 2011. Read obituaries in The Guardian, and in The New York Times.

Chamberlain found his material in 1957 when he made Shortstop from  2 car bumpers, run over repeatedly by another vehicle, and welded together. Although best known for the car junk work, Chamberlain also made work in diverse materials, including urethane foam, sheet metal and paper bags as well as making prints, paintings, photographs and films such as The Secret Life of Hernando Cortez (1968) featuring the Warhol superstars Taylor Mead and Ultra Violet. 

Common material is what an artist should use because it doesn't get in the way of doing an uncommon thing. (John Chamberlain quoted by Michael Auping in Ammann, J-C et al (1984) Art of Our Time: The Saatchi Collection, [Vol.] 2, London: Lund Humphries, p14.)

Read a statement by Chamberlain, made in in 1982, on the Chinati Foundation website, and watch a video of him making (or 'directing') work on the Gagosian Gallery website.
A comprehensive retrospective of Chamberlain's career will be presented at the  Guggenheim Museum in New York from 24 February to 13 May, 2012.

John Chamberlain, S, 1959

John Chamberlain, Superjuke, 2011

John Chamberlain, Dolores James, 1962

John Chamberlain, Untitled (Couch), 1990

John Chamberlain, Essex, 1960

John Chamberlain, Turm von Klythie, installation in Q205 shopping mall, Friedrichstadtpassagen, Berlin

Lygia Pape - Serpentine Gallery

Lygia Pape, Untitled, 1954-56

Lygia Pape (1927-2004), together with Lygia Clark, was a founding member of "Neoconcretismo" in Brazil in the 1950s; a later member was Hélio Oiticica. Neo-concretism was an interpretation of European geometric astraction, in particular the "Conrete Art" of Max Bill as exhibited in São Paolo in1950. Lygia Pape: Magntized Space at the Serpentine Gallery presents work from throughout Pape's career, including early drawings and poems from her Concrete period to her Neo-Concretist Livros and Caixas series, as well as ballets and performances such as Divisor and O ovo.The exhibition continues until 19 February, 2012. Read a review by Adrian Searle and watch his video introduction to the exhibition.

Lygia Pape, Livro do Tempo (Book of Time), 1961-63

Lygia Pape, Eat Me: Gluttony or Lust?, 1975 (still from film)

Lygia Pape, O Ovo (The Egg), 1967

Lygia Pape, Divisor (Divider), 1968

Lygia Pape, Tteia 1,C (Web),2008 (installation view at the Serpentine Gallery, 2011)