Art & Photography

Saturday, 25 April 2015

Sonia Delaunay - Tate Modern


Sonia Delaunay, Propeller (Air Pavilion), 1937 (Detail – click on image to see whole picture; see, also, installation shot below)

Sonia Delaunay is at Tate Modern until 9 August 2015.
Sonia Delaunay arrived in Paris, aged 20, in 1905 (from Ukraine, via St Petersburg and Germany). She absorbed the avant-garde currents of the moment, including the wild colour of Van Gogh and the Fauves (1904-8), the formal radicalism of Cubism (1908-14) and the Futurists’ romance with speed and technology (launched in Paris, 1909).

Along with her husband Robert she developed a strain of Cubism which emphasised colour (in contrast to the muted tones of Braque and Picasso) and was named Orphism by Guillaume Apollinaire. Drawing on the colour theory of Eugène Chevreul, who identified the phenomenon of simultaneous contrast, the Delaunays developed a purely abstract art which dispensed with form in favour of rhythmic patterns of vibrant colour: Simultanism.

Sonia Delaunay moved easily between mediums and is notable for remarkable work in painting, collage, book binding, textile design, applied design and fashion. Although the chauvinism of the history of art has generally only acknowledged her as a footnote to accounts of her husband Robert, this exhibition will show that, in fact, Sonia was one of the key figures in one of the key periods of European Modernism

Read reviews and features by Adrian Searle, Laura Cumming, Kathleen Jamie, Alastair Smart, Karen Wright, Lara Prendergast, Ben Luke; read interviews with Juliet Bingham, curator of the exhibition: All You Need to Konw About Sonia Delaunay and Sonia Delaunay - Planes, Prints and Automobiles.
Click on images to enlarge.

Sonia Delaunay, Yellow Nude, 1908

Sonia Delaunay, Electric Prisms, 1913

Sonia Delaunay, Simultaneous Dresses (The Three Women), 1925

Sonia Delaunay, Rhythm Colour no. 1076, 1939

Sonia Delaunay, Simultane Playing Cards, 1964

Sonia Delaunay, Syncopated Rythmn, 1967

Installation view showing 2 of the Air Pavilion murals, 1937

Installation view

Sonia Delaunay, clothes and matching Citroen B12, 1925
Two models wearing fur coat designed by Sonia Delaunay and manufactured by Heim, with the car belonging to the journalist Kaplan and painted after one of Sonia Delaunay’s fabrics, in front of the Pavillon du Tourisme designed by Mallet-Stevens, International Exposition of Modern Industrial and Decorative Arts, Paris 1925

Sonia Delaunay, paint scheme on Matra 530A, 1968

Carol Bove - David Zwirner / Henry Moore Institute

Carol Bove, Untitled, 2014 (detail) Peacock feathers on linen

Carol Bove: The Plastic Unit is at David Zwirner until 30 May 2015; Carol Bove / Carlo Scarpa is at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds until 12 July 2015.
New York sculptor Carol Bove is a new name to me, but images of her shows at David Zwirner and HMI look impressive. The work has a Minimalist, formalist appearance but uses a wide range of materials - including wood, steel, concrete, brass and... peacock feathers! - and assumes an equally wide variety of forms. She evidently takes particular care over the relationships of the individual pieces in the gallery installation. In the Leeds show her work is shown alongside furniture, sculpture and architectural models by Carlo Scarpa (1906-78). According to HMI's exhibition text, both artists are bound by concerns for the object and its environment, the nature of encountering sculpture and the ways by which objects are given meaning.
Read a review by Adrian Searle; read Carol Bove's guide to being an artist!

Works at David Zwirner
(Click on images to enlarge)

Carol Bove, Lingam, 2015 Petrified wood and steel

Carol Bove, I, quartz pyx, who fling muck beds., 2015 Concrete and brass

Carol Bove, Noodle, 2015 Stainless steel and urethane paint

Carol Bove, Self Talk, 2015 Stainless steel and urethane paint

Carol Bove, Cow, Watched by Argus, 2013 Steel

Carol Bove, Open Screen, 2014 Steel

Carol Bove, The Plastic Unit, installation view

Works at Henry Moore Institute

Carol Bove, Hysteron, Proteron, 2014 Brass and concrete

Carol Bove, Heraclitus, 2014 Seashell, feather, found objects, steel and concrete

Carol Bove / Carlo Scarpa installation view

Tuesday, 31 March 2015

Roger Ackling - Annely Juda Fine Art

Roger Ackling, Voewood, 2013 (Sunlight on wood)

Roger Ackling: Simple Gifts is at Annely Juda Fine Art until 7 May 2015.
This exhibition presents Roger Ackling's last works - he died in June 2014. As I wrote on that occasion:
Roger Ackling drew with light. His working method remained remarkably consistent from the 1960s until his death - indeed, Sylvia Ackling reported that he often said that he was 'always making the same work.'(1) His method was to focus the rays of the sun through a magnifying glass and burn lines onto pieces of found wood or card. The modestly scaled pieces have about them something of Minimalism, something of Conceptual Art, something of the Wabi-Sabi aesthetic he admired. They are simple, beautiful, perfectly imperfect. (See full entry below with images and links to obituaries.)
The works in this exhibition are mainly made with driftwood and salvaged material collected by his friends and family along the beaches of Norfolk and given to Ackling: 'Simple Gifts'.
The publication of an overview of Ackling's work (Roger Ackling: Between the Lines) has been proposed as a Kickstarter project - click here to help fund it and watch a short video about Ackling and the project.
(1) Sylvia Ackling (1998), 'Lines of Latitude', in Roger Ackling: Set Aside, London: Annely Juda Fine Art, [p53]

Roger Ackling, Voewood, 2010 (Sunlight on wood)

Roger Ackling, Voewood, 2013 (Sunlight on wood)

Roger Ackling, Voewood, 2013 (Sunlight on wood with metal)

Roger Ackling, Voewood, 2010 (Sunlight on wood)

Roger Ackling, Voewood, 2013 (Sunlight on wood)

Roger Ackling, Voewood, 2012 (Sunlight on wood)

Friday, 27 March 2015

Albert Irvin, 1922 - 2015

Albert Irvin, Cathay, 1979 (7' x 10')

Albert Irvin died 26 March 2015.
I am very sad to hear of the death of Albert Irvin. I met Bert in the 1980s when he was teaching at Goldsmiths and I worked in the art library there. He was a charming, generous man and a great painter. He was completely dedicated to his art - passionate about colour and the very stuff of paint: Turner was his 'home-bred god'.
Irvin left art school in 1950 and so was of the generation to experience the fresh impact of American Abstract Expressionism, notably through exhibitions at the Tate (Modern Art in the United States, 1956, The New American Painting, 1959) and the Whitechapel (Jackson Pollock, 1958). Irvin responded to the gestural energy and large scale of the American painting and in due course fully embraced total abstraction, developing his own distinctive formal language.
For me, the work of the late 1970s and early 1980s is particularly wonderful: to enter a gallery of these large, open, gorgeously coloured paintings is a joyous experience.
The paintings illustrated here are some of my personal favourites.
Read obituary by Mike Tooby.
Watch a short video of Irvin talking about his work in the Tate and on the occasion of his retrospective at King's Place Gallery.
Read an article by Sam Cornish at Abstract Critical.
See more work at Albert Irvin website and at BBC - Your Paintings.