Langdon Clay - Polka Galerie, Paris

Langdon Clay, A and P Car, Buick Le Sabre, 14th Street between 7th and 8th Avenue, 1974

Langdon Clay: Cars is at Polka Galerie, Paris until 5 October 2017.
I first came across the picture above in 1978 - I still have the flyer for the exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum, 26 July-24 September 1978. I loved it then and, nearly forty years later, I love it still, as I love Clay's whole series: Cars: New York City, 1974-76.
Below is my selection of his pictures; see the selection at Polka Galerie, here.
Click on images to enlarge.

Langdon, Clay, Sign of Good Taste car, Plymouth Duster, Hoboken, NJ, 1975

Langdon Clay, St. Vincent's Car, Cadillac Coupe De Ville, St. Vincents Hospital, 13th und 7th Avenue, 1974

Langdon Clay, Charlie Robert’s campaign car, Chevrolet Bel Air, Hoboken, New Jersey, 1976

Langdon Clay, Blind Vette, Chevrolet Corvette, nahe Bloomingdales, 1974

Langdon Clay, Tritone Car, Buick Electra 225, West Village, 1975

Langdon Clay, Bent Car, Dodge Dart Kombi, Soho, 1976

Langdon Clay, Silver Fish, Chevrolet Impala Custom Coupe, in front of Con Edison Substation, 1975

Langdon Clay, 161 car, Chrysler New Yorker, north of 14th Street off 7th Avenue, 1974

Langdon Clay, Zizka Cleaners Car, Buick Electra, 1975

Robyn Denny - Newlyn

Robyn Denny, Away (Here and Then Series), 1968-72

Robyn  Denny is at Newlyn Art Gallery & The Exchange until 6 January 2018.
RobynDenny was a significant figure in the development of post-war British abstract painting. In David Mellor’s judgement, “For eight years between 1961 and 1969, Robyn Denny painted what are arguably some of the most accomplished abstract paintings made in Britain in the twentieth century.” He is best known for his geometric abstractions of the 1960s and 70s. In 1973 he was the youngest artist to be given a retrospective at the Tate. His dedication to abstraction, however, meant that he became increasingly unfashionable and, together with contemporaries such as Richard Smith, all but disappeared from public view. (In an interview, entitled ‘The Invisible Man’, Richard Smith recalled: "Robyn Denny keeps saying, 'Our time will come, Dick. Our time will come.' And he's been saying this for years and years.")
As a student in the 1950s (St Martin’s, 1951-4, RCA, 1954-7), Denny belonged to the first generation to be influenced by the American Abstract Expressionists, principally through exhibitions at the Tate (1956 and 59), and shows by Pollock (1958) and Rothko (1961) at the Whitechapel.
Denny’s early work was characterised by gestural painting and typographical abstraction. The apotheosis of the latter was a mural commissioned for Austin Reed (‘great, big, wide, biggest’) in 1959.
In 1960 Denny was a key player in the organisation of ‘Situation’, an exhibition which responded directly to the scale and innovation of the American painters. The criteria for inclusion in ‘Situation’ were that paintings should be ‘abstract (that is, without explicit reference to events outside the painting) … and not less than 30 square feet.’ All accounts report that the exhibition was poorly attended, but the label recurred in ‘New London Situation’ at the Marlborough Gallery in 1961 and in an Arts Council exhibition, ‘Situation: an exhibition of recent British abstract art’ in 1962.
The paintings of the 60s were typically, large-scale, featuring geometrical forms, suggestive of doorways, with flat planes of colour in precisely adjusted, usually, muted colours. Later work changed the emphasis from vertical to horizontal and included areas of brilliant colour. In 1981 Denny moved to Los Angeles and made paintings which were typically monochromes out of which outcrops of scratched, coloured marks would emerge.
It is wonderful that this overlooked artist is now being shown in this exhibition.
Waldemar Janusczak has tweeted re this exhibition - "Go see everyone. I love Robyn Denny's work." Well, me too - but I fear I am unlikely to get to Newlyn in the next few months; I hope the exhibition will tour.

Robyn Denny, Line Up 2, 1962

Robyn Denny, By Day 4, 1967

Robyn Denny, Aday 2 (Here and Then Series), 1968-73

Robyn Denny, Sweet Nature 4, 1976-77

Robyn Denny, Travelling 1, 1976-77

Jean-Michel Basquiat - Barbican

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled, 1982

Basquiat: Boom for Real is at Barbican Art Gallery until 28 January 2018.

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s star burned bright and brief. In 1976, aged 16, he and Al Diaz, working as SAMO (‘Same Old Shit’) spray painted cryptic messages on buildings in Lower Manhattan; in 1979 their partnership ended, marked by the graffito SAMO is dead. In 1980, he showed work in a mixed exhibition in New York, was picked up by a gallery and met Andy Warhol with whom he went on to collaborate. Through the early and middle 1980s he exhibited widely in America and internationally and was written about in the art press; in 1988, he died of a drug overdose, aged 27. In 2017, Untitled, 1982 sold for $110.5 million (£85 million).

The paintings he made in the 1980s pulse with energy and bristle with ideas; texts and images combine and collide in an expressionist explosion. He was a hip-hop Cy Twombly. This will be an exhilarating exhibition.

Read reviews by Waldemar Januszczak, Joe Lloyd, Sarah Kent, Mark Hudson, Jonathan Jones; read an interview with exhibition curator Eleanor Nairne.
Click on images to enlarge.

Jean-Michel-Basquiat, Untitled, 1980

Jean-Michel-Basquiat, Skull, 1981

Jean-Michel-Basquiat, Leonardo da Vinci's Greatest Hits, 1982

Jean-Michel-Basquiat, Hollywood Africans, 1983

Jean-Michel-Basquiat, Pablo Picasso,  1984

Jean-Michel-Basquiat, Self Portrait, 1984

Jean-Michel-Basquiat, Glenn, 1985

Jean-Michel-Basquiat, King Zulu, 1986

Postscript
Banksy has paid his own hommage to Basquiat with a couple of pieces on the Barbican walls -

Banksy, 2017

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

Rachel Whiteread - Tate Britain

Rachel Whiteread, Untitled (Clear Torso), 1993

Rachel Whiteread is at Tate Britain until 21 January 2018.

I am, generally, more drawn to the forms and textures of the everyday than to the stuff of fantasy; Rachel Whiteread’s work speaks directly and poetically about the fascination and strangeness of the often-overlooked objects and spaces of mundane reality. Her life’s work has followed a consistent and focused practice of casting ordinary objects and the spaces they define. She takes familiar objects but makes them strange, she makes the invisible visible, she makes the very air solid – in concrete, plaster, resin, rubber or metal. The strategy may be consistent but the variety of scale and character is exhilarating. From the largest works -  House (1993 – now demolished), the ‘nameless library’ that is The Judenplatz HolocaustMemorial (2000) in Vienna and the WaterTower (1998) in New York – to the smallest, the spaces beneath chairs, Untitled (One Hundred Spaces) 1997, and the form of hot water bottles, eg Untitled (Clear Torso), 1993.

This exhibition promises an exciting survey of 25 years of remarkable work.

Read reviews by Waldemar Januszczak, Laura Cumming, Adrian Searle, Sarah Kent, Mark Hudson, Martin Gayford; read Rachel Whiteread talks to Sue Hubbard (Artlyst)

Rachel Whiteread, Untitled (Amber Bed), 1991

Rachel Whiteread, Untitled (One Hundred Spaces), 1993 (detail)

Rachel Whiteread, Untitled (Floor), 1995

Rachel Whiteread, Untitled (Stairs), 2001

Rachel Whiteread, Untitled (Hive) I, 2007-8

Rachel Whiteread, Due Porte, 2016

 Selected larger works (obviously not in exhibition)

Rachel Whiteread, House, 1993 (demolished, 1994)

Rachel Whiteread, Water Tower, 1998

Rachel Whiteread, Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial, Vienna, 1996-2000