Art & Photography

Thursday, 9 January 2014

A New Objectivity - S | 2 Gallery

Bernd and Hilla Becher, Wassertürme (Water Towers), 1973

A New Objectivity:The Düsseldorf School of Photography is at S | 2 Gallery until 17 January 2014.
I am a bit late with this - I had meant to highlight it back in December, but somehow life got in the way. Then I stumbled across an article entitled Has the Düsseldorf School killed photography? by Grant Scott and was reminded to do so.
The Düsseldorf School refers to a group of photographers associated with, what was, the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and the teaching of Bernd and Hilla Becher. Typically, they make large-scale work in a deadpan documentary style and include, amongst others, Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Thomas Ruff, Axel Hütte and Thomas Struth. (I loved Struth's show at the Whitechapel back in 2011 - see below.)
Grant's polemic is not so much aimed at the heroes (my word, not his!) of the School itself but at what he sees as their baleful influence upon the rising generation of photographers - or, at least, the lazy ones! Grant allows that the original disciples of the Düsseldorf School [brought] new ways of seeing but he seems to have little time for the Bechers, whose teaching was so influential. He writes:

the Bechers photographed industrial landscapes and architecture in stark, graphic black and white, documenting Germany’s industrial past of water towers, mining sites and coal bunkers. Their work was cold, clinical, emotionless and documentary, ... [p]hotography without opinion, without comment or personality.

I love their work!
I am not in a position to argue with Grant about the degree of Düsseldorfian influence on young photographers, but I suspect we see photography (and the world) with different eyes and taste. Grant wants photography with more personality, expression and emotion - I want less!
Whatever else might be said about it, the work in this show will comprise big images, by big names which will, undoubedly sell for big money. (S | 2 belongs to Sotheby's.) Gursky, after all did set an auction record back in 2011 when his fabulous Rhine II sold for a staggering $4,338,500 (see below).

Andreas Gursky, Singapore Börse, 1996

Thomas Struth, Calle Sacchere, 1990

Thomas Struth, Iglesia de San Francisco, Lima Peru, 2003

Thomas Struth, Seamless Tube Production, Tenaris Siderca, Campana, Buenos Aires, 2009

Candida Höfer, Iglesia de Saõ Francisco de Assis Salvador de Bahia I, 2005

Candida Höfer, Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica, Amsterdam II, 2003

Thomas Ruff, Nudes OBE 08, 2001

Axel Hütte, Bussaco, 1999

Sunday, 15 December 2013

Martin Sharp, 1942 - 2013

Martin Sharp, Mister Tambourine Man, 1967

Martin Sharp died on 1 December 2013.

Hearing of the death of Martin Sharp took me back to hairy, adolescent days, to what was undoubtedly a formative engagement with visual culture. As a schoolboy ‘agent’ for selling posters (‘Big O’?), recruited from/suckered in by the ads at the back of New Musical Express I pored over the catalogue in which Sharp’s Dylan and Van Gogh posters stood out. But the one that made the deepest impression was his Max ‘The Birdman’ Ernst: this was certainly my first introduction to the work of Ernst – though it was some time before I twigged that the image was not actually the invention of Sharp but culled from Ernst’s brilliant 1933 collage novel Une Semaine de Bonté. Though my taste later turned more to Ernst than Sharp those early posters (and Cream album covers) made a deep impression.

Read obituaries by Marsha Rowe, Richard Neville (ce-editor of Oz, for which Sharp was art editor) and in The Telegraph.

Martin Sharp, Vincent, 1968

Martin Sharp, cover for Cream's Disraeli Gears, 1967

Martin Sharp, Jimi Hendrix, 1967

Martin Sharp, Max 'The Birdman' Ernst, 1967

Sunday, 8 December 2013

Pauline Boty - Pallant House Gallery

Pauline Boty, The Only Blonde In The World, 1963

Pauline Boty: Pop Artist and Woman is at Pallant House Gallery, Chichester until 9 February 2014.
Boty was one of the stars of British Pop Art - alongside Peter Blake, David Hockney, Derek Boshier, Peter Phillips and others. Her premature death, at 28 in 1966, and the chauvinism of art history mean that she is less well known than she should be. Hopefully this exhibition (first shown earlier this year at Wolverhampton Art Gallery) will help to remedy this.
Read an interesting spat about the show's title and its curatorial perspective between Fisun Güner and the exhibition curator Dr Sue Tate here. Read a review of the Wolverhampton showing by Alastair Sooke and an article by Robin Stummer.

Pauline Boty, 5-4-3-2-1, 1963

Pauline Boty, Colour Her Gone, 1962

Pauline Boty, Bum, 1966

Pauline Boty, Nude Woman ina Coastal Landscape (nd)

Pauline Boty, It's A Man's World II, 1965

Pauline Boty, Countdown to Violence, 1964

Pauline Boty in her studio in 1964 with her now lost painting Scandal '63

Photorealism - Birmingham Museum

John Salt, White Chevy - Red Trailer, 1975

Photorealism is at Birmingham Museum until 30 March 2014.
Guilty pleasures: I know that photorealism has been unfashionable pretty well from its origins in America in the late 1960s, that its artists tend to be unhealthily pre-occupied with a narrow range of arguably clichéd and sometimes kitsch motifs: cars, motorbikes, diners, food, shiny things and, in the case of John Kacere, a lifetime's dedication to painting women's bottoms and crotches. Perhaps the only honourable exception to this relentless celebration of banality is Chuck Close who has tirelessly and inventively explored the representation of the human face in ways which are interesting both as overpoweringly intense portraits and as quasi-abstract paintings. But, but ... I rather like this stuff!
Read a (generally negative) review by Alastair Smart, and listen to a (generally sceptical) discussion on Radio 4's Saturday Review (starts at 35mins).