Marlene Dumas - Tate Modern

Marlene Dumas, Evil is Banal, 1984

Marlene Dumas: The Image as Burden is at Tate Modern until 10 May 2015.
Marlene Dumas is one of the most interesting painters working today, and this is the first opportunity to see a substantial exhibition of her work in the UK.
Dumas' style is very distinctive: her oil paintings, principally of faces and bodies, typically worked from photographic sources, have the delicacy of watercolours, at once ethereal yet forcefully present. As Adrian Searle puts it, The images coalesce out of almost nothing. Her themes are intimate and compelling: sex, death and politics, love and shame. However, the pictures are not weighted with earnest messages, rather they intrigue and disturb. Exciting stuff.
Read an article by Rachel Cooke and reviews by Adrian Searle, Laura Cumming, Karen Wright, Alastair Smart, Martin Gayford, Waldemar Januszczak, Emily Spicer, Jackie Wullschlager,  Ben Luke, Roderick Conway Morris. Watch a short video of Dumas in conversation with Adrian Searle and of Dumas taking about Rejects.
Click on images to enlarge.

Marlene Dumas, The Painter, 1994

Marlene Dumas, Helena's Dream, 2008

Marlene Dumas, The White Disease, 1985

Marlene Dumas, For Whom the Bell Tolls, 2008

Marlene Dumas, Scope Magazine Pin-up, 1973

Marlene Dumas, The Kiss, 2003

Marlene Dumas, Out of Africa, 2006

Marlene Dumas, Lucy, 2004

Marlene Dumas, Waiting (For Meaning), 1988

Marlene Dumas, from Rejects, 1994-2002

Sotto Voce - Dominique Lévy

Ben Nicholson, 1936 (White Relief), 1936

Sotto Voce is at Dominique Lévy until 18 April 2015. 
Sotto Voce, the second exhibition at Dominique Lévy looks to be as aesthetically thrilling as the first (see below). All the pieces in this show are abstract white reliefs - exhibited on grey walls. Artists featured include: Jean Arp, Ben Nicholson, Lucio Fontana, Piero Manzoni, Enrico Castellani, Fausto Melotti, Günther Uecker, Luis Tomasello, Sergio Camargo and Mira Schendel.

Despite the seeming limitation of an exhibition consisting entirely of white monochromes, the works, which broadly span the period  from the 1930s to the 1970s, demonstrate a rich range of tone (from spiritual harmony to unsettling aggression) and aesthetic affiliation ranging from Surrealism (Arp), to Constructivism (Nicholson), to Spatialism and the Zero Group (Manzoni, Fontana, Uecker). 
Read articles by Sarah Kent, Wessie Du Toit and Natalia Rachlin.

Jean Arp, Composition schématique, 1943

Piero Manzoni, Achrome, 1958

Lucio Fontana, Concetto Spaziale - Attese, 1965

Lucio Fontana, Concetto Spaziale, 1964

Sergio Camargo, Untitled (288), 1970

Günther Uecker, Untitled, 1967

Günther Uecker, Wind, 2009

Dominique Lévy gallery - installation view of Sotto Voce

Postcard from Berlin - Postscript: a Glitch

S-Bahnhof Greifswalder Strasse

On my last day in Berlin my camera developed a glitch. This was annoying in that it meant that almost every picture taken during my visit to the Bauhaus at Dessau (see below) was useless. However, a handful of images turned out to be rather interesting – see above and below.

Just as I was getting quite excited about working with this glitch, the camera appears to have stabilized and returned to normal. Which is really annoying!
Click on images to enlarge.

Bauhaus

Bauhaus

S-Bahnhof Greifswalder Strasse

Dessau Hauptbahnhof

Bahnhof Jeber-Bergfrieden

Postcard from Berlin, 6. (Bauhaus, Dessau)

Day 6 - the last full day in Berlin - was a train ride to Dessau to see the Bauhaus*. Dessau is about 100km south west of Berlin and the train from Alexanderplatz took the best part of 2 hours. It was, however, only a few minutes walk from Dessau station to the Bauhaus itself. It was exciting to walk up to, and into, the buildings so familiar from art history books. Walter Gropius' 1926 buildings were first restored in the 1970s and again in the 1990s. Today the buildings appear as fresh as they must have been nearly 80 years ago. They are managed by the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation and were designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1996.
We were given a guided tour of Die Meisterhäuser - the houses designed by Gropius for himself and the teaching staff, the 'masters'. Our German guide was diffident about conducting the tour in English but was excellent.  The masters occupied semi-detached house: in 1926, these included László Moholy-Nagy and Lyonel Feininger, Georg Muche and Oskar Schlemmer and Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. Each half of the semi-detached houses are mirror images of the other, rotated by 90°. The houses were designed with consideration for efficiency both in construction (standardised, pre-fabricated blocks) and day to day living. It was interesting, and surprising, to see the rich use of colour both inside and out.
The Director's house did not survive the war - it has now been restored, not as a replica of the original but as an 'interpretation' by Bruno Fioretti Marquez. (See feature in dezeen and article by Philip Oltermann.)

Walter Gropius, The Feininger House, 1926

Stairwell in House Kandinsky (restored 2003)

The Gropius House (original 1925/6), interpreted by Bruno Fioretti Marquez, 2014

The tour of the Bauhaus building, itself, was equally interesting and included seeing the Director's office and a student's studio-bedroom.

*Thanks to Sue, Ian, Dawn, Martin and Deb for organising the visit.