Sigmar Polke - Tate Modern

Sigmar Polke, Girlfriends, 1965/6

Whenever I read a positive article about Sigmar Polke I am filled with enthusiasm. I love the idea of an artist who makes work about sausages and socks; I am highly sympathetic to the ethos which is typically ascribed to his work: curator Mark Godfrey described him as an alchemist in reverse, "Gold seems to be turned into shit… We see [his work] more in terms of contamination and poison. It’s not really about transformation to raise things up – almost everything becomes toxic." His work is messy and confusing: "Polke’s paintings could be cantankerous and awkward and weirdly ugly, and could also leave you standing on the brink of beauty, wallowing in gorgeous colour." (Adrian Searle.) I like its roots in 'Capitalist Realism', his and Richter's sceptical response to Pop; I love the idea of its bloody-minded resistance to easy consumption. Which is also, unfortunately, just my problem - when I have actually seen his work I am often left feeling I don't quite 'get' it and frustrated. However, I will go to this retrospective (enthusiastically reviewed by Adrian Searle and Richard Dorment) and try again.

Read reviews by Adrian Searle, Waldemar Januszczak, Richard Dorment and a preview by Holly Williams. 

Sigmar Polke, The Sausage Eater, 1963

Sigmar Polke, Alice in Wonderland, 1971

Sigmar Polke, Heron Painting II, 1968

Sigmar Polke, Polke as Astronaut, 1968

Sigmar Polke, Portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald, 1963

Sigmar Polke, Untitled (Quetta, Pakistan), 1974-8

Richard Serra - Gagosian

Richard Serra, Dead Load, 2014, forged steel

Richard Serra is at Gagosian, London until 28 February 2015.
Four tremendous steel sculptures by Richard Serra are on show at Gagosian's Britannia Street gallery and a five metre 'drawing' is on display at their Davies Street gallery until 22 November. I haven't seen the latter but can vouch for the power of the sculptures. As the artist explained in an exchange with Adrian Searle the selected works offer "different ways to approach a field or a space or a context". Dead Load presents the literal embodiment of massive, dead weight; Backdoor Pipeline is a huge, curved, elliptical tunnel through which the viewer can walk to experience the interplay of convex and concave and the changing play of light and dark; Ramble is a room full of 24 upright slabs of steel of varying dimensions between which one has to navigate a route; finally, London Cross is perhaps the 'classic' Serra in which one threateningly enormous wall of steel is balanced, above head height, diagonally across another. Thrilling stuff.
Read Adrian Searle's review. Watch a video tour of the installation. (All photographs by Mike Bruce / Gagosian.)

Richard Serra, Backdoor Pipeline, 2010

Richard Serra, Ramble, 2014

Richard Serra, London Cross, 2014

Richard Serra, Double Rift #2, 2011 (Painstick on handmade paper - at Davies Street gallery)

Turner Prize 2014 - Tate Britain

Ciara Phillips, Things Shared, 2014

The Turner Prize is 30 years old. This make me feel old because I have been an attentive follower of it for all that time. For me the golden years were probably 1991 to about 2003 - the years in which it was at it most controversial but also (in my view) featuring the most energetic and exciting artists - Ian Davenport, Fiona Rae, Grenville Davey, Sean Scully, Peter Doig, Damien Hirst, Gary Hume, Angela Bulloch, Tacita Dean, Tracey Emin, Steve McQueen, Richard Billingham, Martin Creed to name a few. (Watch a short video: 30 years of the Turner Prize; read the History of the Turner Prize.) In recent years it has felt less vital.
And this year? I did not know the work of any of this year's artists prior to their nomination (Duncan Campbell, Ciara Phillips, James Richards,Tris Vonna-Michell) but that merely confirms that my finger is no longer on the pulse of current British Art in the way that it used to be. Three of the four nominees work in film/video - it's not my favourite medium (not least because it can be so awkward and uncomforable to view in a gallery) but I have seen fantastic work. However, the signs are not good; or, rather, some of the reviews have not been good:  
… peculiarly laboured and joyless… entirely vacuous… (Laura Cumming on James Richards and Ciara Phillips respectively); Waldemar Januszczak doesn’t mince his words: Whatever you do, do not go to see the 2014 Turner prize exhibition at Tate Britain. I repeat: go somewhere else. Even by Turner prize standards, this is an unusually awful show. And because it is so yawn-forcingly, heart-crushingly, buttock-clenchingly bad, there is the active danger that you might imagine all contemporary art this year was as grim as this. It wasn’t. So don’t go.  
To be fair, JJ Charlesworth and Louisa Buck do find positive things to say, as does Jonathan Jones of two of the artists. Obviously, one should go and judge for oneself - however, with a fantastic array of shows currently in London (Kiefer at the RA, Polke at Tate Modern, Turner at Tate Britain, Constable at the V&A, Serra at Gagosian, Tuttle at the Whitechapel...) the competition is overwhelming!
Below are brief profiles of the artists drawn from the Tate website with links to short videos about them (click on their names).
The Turner Prize 2014 is at Tate Britain until 4 January 2015; Duncan Campbell was announced as the winner on 1 December 2014.
Read reviews by Laura Cumming, Waldemar Januszczak, J J Charlesworth, Jonathan Jones, Louisa Buck and a 'post-review' - review of the reviews by J.J. Charlesworth.

Duncan Campbell has been nominated for his contribution to Scotland’s pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Responding to Chris Marker and Alan Resnais’ 1953 film Statues Also Die, Campbell’s It for Others included new work by choreographer Michael Clark. 

Campbell makes films about controversial figures such the Irish political activist Bernadette Devlin or the quixotic car manufacturer John DeLorean. By mixing archive footage and new material, he questions and challenges the documentary form.

Duncan Campbell, It for Others, 2013

Ciara Phillips has been nominated for her solo exhibition at The Showroom, London.

Phillips works with all kinds of prints: from screenprints and textiles to photos and wall paintings. She often works collaboratively, transforming the gallery into a workshop and involving other artists, designers and local community groups. Phillips has taken inspiration from Corita Kent (1918–1986), a pioneering artist, educator and activist who reinterpreted the advertising slogans and imagery of 1960s consumer culture

Ciara Phillips, Things Shared, 2014

James Richards has been nominated for his contribution to The Encyclopaedic Palace at the 55th Venice Biennale.
Richards weaves together his emotive films from a diverse range of found and original footage to explore the pleasure of the act of looking. Found VHS video and new imagery undergo varying levels of manipulation and repetition and, with an accompanying soundtrack, heighten the emotional and psychological range of the original. Born in 1983 in Cardiff, Richards was nominated for Rosebud, which includes close-ups of art books in a Tokyo library – the genitalia scratched out to comply with censorship laws.

James Richards, Rosebud

Tris Vonna-Michell  has been nominated for his solo exhibition Postscript (Berlin) at Jan Mot, Brussels. 
Through fast-paced spoken word live performances and audio recordings Vonna-Michell (born Southend, 1982) tells circuitous and multilayered stories. Accompanied by a ‘visual script’ of slide projections, photocopies and other ephemera, his works are characterised by fragments of information, detours and dead ends.

Tris Vonna-Mitchell, Postscript (Berlin)

And finally...

Tracey Emin - White Cube

Tracey Emin, Nude awakening: 'Good Red Love', 2014

Tracey Emin: The Last Great Adventure is You is at White Cube (Bermondsey) until 16 November 2014.

Three years on from her retrospective at the Hayward (2011) Tracey Emin is showing an ambitious and substantial body of new work in White Cube's vast Bermondsey spaces. The show includes bronze sculptures, drawings, paintings, large-scale embroideries and neon works and is, in her own words, "about rites of passage, of time and age, and the simple realisation that we are always alone."

Reviews have been (generally) very positive, although Jonathan Jones' five star notice in The Guardian is perhaps a little gushing: "a lesson in how to be a real artist… [Emin] is now clearly the most important British artist of her generation." On the matter of technique, he observes:

"Drawing is a cruel art. Like any skilled medium with a long history, it imposes rules, traditions and standards that an artist cannot simply ignore. To make a drawing is to try to get something right, just as much as playing a piece of music is.
In short, you can either draw or you can’t draw.
Tracey Emin can." (Discuss!)
Read reviews by Jones, Karen Wright, Alastair Sooke, Laura Cumming, J.J. Charlesworth and Ben Luke; read interviews and features by Rachel Cooke, Chris Harvey, Margaret Harrison and Suzanne Moore; read Emin's responses to questions in a webchat.

Tracey Emin, I Want You Because I Can’t Have You, 2014

Tracey Emin, Good Body, 2014

Tracey Emin, So Pretty, 2014

Tracey Emin,  Feel You Coming, 2014

Tracey Emin, The Last Great Adventure is you, 2014

Anselm Kiefer - Royal Academy of Arts

Anselm Kiefer, The Language of the Birds, 2013

Anselm Kiefer is at the Royal Academy of Arts until 14 December 2014.
It is a pointless exercise (but not unenjoyable) to argue the toss about who might be the 'greatest living artist' - but, for my money, Anselm Kiefer is a contender. 
This exhibition at the RA promises much (see Rachel Cooke's review: only with the help of a blindfold would you be able to wander the Royal Academy’s stupendous retrospective of his work and leave feeling anything less than drunk with amazement). Kiefer is nothing if not ambitious both in terms of physical scale and his deployment of materials (lead, steel, straw, clay, copper wire, wood, seeds, sand, ash, oil paint...) and in the cultural richness of his themes. Born in 1945 Kiefer's preoccupation has been confronting the trauma and guilt of Germany's Nazi history - a history which for the post-war generation was effectively suppressed. Kiefer draws on references which include German Romanticism (Caspar David Friedrich), mythology, the Kabbalah, Nazi architecture and the poetry of Paul Celan whose parents perished in Nazi labour camps and who was himself interned. This is serious art. My ticket is booked.
Read reviews by Rachel Cooke, Waldemar Januszczak, Alastair Sooke, Sebastian Smee, John-Paul Stonhard,and Jonathan Jones; read accounts of Kiefer's astonishing 'studio' complex by Michael Prodger and Mark Hudson. (Click on images to enlarge.)

Anselm Kiefer, Black Flakes (Schwarze Flocken), 2006

Anselm Kiefer, Interior (Innenraum), 1981

Anselm Kiefer, Nothung, 1973

Anselm Kiefer, Operation Sea Lion (Unternehmen Seelowe), 1975

Anselm Kiefer, Osiris and Isis, 1985-87

Anselm Kiefer, Velimir Khlebnikov: Fates of Nations: The New Theory of War. Time, Dimension of the World, Battles at Sea Occur Every 317 Years or Multiples Thereof, Namely 317 x 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 . . . . . . . ., 2011-14