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Hi, I'm Paul Carvill, I'm a web developer. I'm currently working as Technical Lead at LBi, Europe's largest digital agency.
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Archive for the ‘Exhibition’ Category
Georg Baselitz at the Royal Academy
Saturday, November 24th, 2007Walter Sickert’s Camden Town Nudes
Sunday, November 18th, 2007Walter Sickert’s Camden Town Nudes at the Courtauld Institute.
Walter Sickert – The Camden Town Nudes
Sunday, November 18th, 2007Walter Sickert’s “Camden Town Nudes” are being displayed together at The Courtault Institute, within Somerset House.
This short series of gloomy, ambiguous paintings displays a remarkable atmosphere of listlessness, exhausted prostitutes in dull, grubby rooms. I had thought they were influenced directly by the report of a murder of a prostitute in 1907. However, Sickert had already painted and sketched some, with airily innocent titles such as “A Summer Afternoon” and “What Shall We Do About THe Rent?”, the latter of a naked, prone woman on a bed, a clothed man, arms folded, looming over her, as if in resigned conversation. Given the alternative title Sickert later applied to it, “Camden Town Murder 1″, the opportunity for reappraising and rereading are clear.
I think it is this provocative, playful ambiguity that is the real strength of the series. One sketch, although otherwise the same as the finished painting, is entirely altered by replacing the standing man with a woman. The composition remains the same, but it becomes a relaxed chat between two women, their relationship unclear but both quite comfortable with one’s complete nudity.
Motifs through the series include the women’s exhausted, outstretched hand as she lays on the bed; the attention to detail of the room’s furnishings – the shapes on the wallpaper, the glint of sun on the iron bedstead. More worrying, though, is the near total absence of any facial features on the women – their face is invariably reduced to a smudge of paint. Is their identity insignificant, or do they symbolise a wider membership of women? Or is their very anonymity a comment on the shadowy and nameless underworld they inhabit?
The studies of the rooms themselves are highly accurate, if not richly detailed. Sickert rented rooms and used models for his work. Another nice feature is the range of styles he uses in such a small series – 16 paintings here, including the sketches and drafts. One is drawn in pastels, a thick, spidery layering resulting in a sympatheti porrait if a behatted kady looking in a mirror at her rumpled bedsheets. The next one on the wall is a pool of dark green and browns so murky it barely constitutes a figurative study. He appears to work quickly, with rapid, long brush strokes cleasrly visible. His nudes are detached and unemotional; all but one are plump yet delicately positioned.
A great opportunity to admire these painting together. Plus it’s on the top floor, and the Courthauld Institute is a thing of semcircular beauty.
Georg Baselitz
Sunday, November 18th, 2007
Georg Baselitz likes drawing dicks, doesn’t he? Men with their dicks out. Brendan Behan with his big dick out. Brendan Behan with his little dick out. An unidentified pervert with his dick. A scrawled, but identifiable, Hitler with his dick out. Lots of dicks, then.
His show at the RA contains all these dicks, and much else besides.
He’s from East Germany, and the communist opression of his early years might account for the welter of flagrant sexuality, disability and exhibitionism on display, all classed as perverse under the post-war regime. His career breaks down into remarkably strong themes, and Baselitz explored and developed each in great detail. Here we have groupings of pandemonium, inversions, fragmentation. There are also common threads through all his work – alienation, mutation, and the horror of war. Also, a minor point, nearly all his frames for the first twenty years of his career are exactly the same size. A uniformity enforced, perhaps, by the austere environment of postwar Germany?
In the ‘inversions’ section, Baselitz attempts to subvert the very essence of painting by producing and/or framing his work upside down. An interesting idea. But if you don’t agree with his premise, or even find it aesthetically pleasing, you won’t get far with it.
Probably the best painting here is the blood red version of “Oberon”, a genuinely eerie piece where the viewer comes under the inspection of four dead-eyed, ghostly aliens. It really feels like you are on the operating table, and it has echoes of illicit Nazi experimentation. It will give you the fear.
Interesingly, and exeptionally, Baselitz’s later work is his most interesting. Here it comes under the category of “remixes”, and it’s a suitable analogy. It is incredibly hard for an artist to appraise their own canon, but he has been able to detach himself enough to select a series of motifs which he then takes forward with new work, and a new style. With increased use of pen and ink, and starker, white backgrounds, this later work is the most iconic of his career. Feet, eagles, Hitler, dicks and upside down framing all occur again and again here. While the subject matter is not new, it shows an intelligent and accurate summation of his life’s work and is a valid addition.
Related links:
Guardian Newsroom – Martin Rowson
Tuesday, August 28th, 2007I don’t want to come across like a company man, but I feel the need to recommend a rather special service provided by The Guardian to employees and the public alike. The Guardian Newsroom is a publicly accessible exhibition centre and archive situated directly opposite the Guardian’s offcies in Farringdon.
In their own words, the newsroom “…preserves and promotes the histories and values of the Guardian and the Observer newspapers…”, and it is truly a remarkable resource for anyone even remotely interested in the production, provision or contents of the news.
Currently showing in the exhibition space is a retrospective of the irascible and scathing Martin Rowson’s cartoons during “The Blair Years”. Tracing the downward arc of Blair’s premiership, strongly tied to his special relationship with George W Bush and the war in Iraq, these cartoons articulate Rowson’s deep loathing of our highly compromised erstwhile leader. Blair is repeatedly drawn as a diminutive, twitching, duplicitous green goblin, hanging from Bush’s monkey tail and, towards the end, lurking in the looming shadow of the imposing chancellor Gordon Brown.
These pictures are shocking and visceral, and the “wall of shame”, where Rowson comments on various politician’s ands readers’ angry responses to them shows how far they went in provoking and needling the government at the time. At one point Blair had to be restrained by Alisdair Campbell from writing a letter of complaint, with the wise words “they’ll think you’re a nutter”.
Rowson has presented some of the works here alongside chalk drawings directly on the walls of the room, and these, together with seeing the original, painted cartoons in all their Tippex-ed glory, make this exhibition very rewarding indeed.
Monday to Friday 10am to 5pm
Saturday 12pm to 4pm
Free admission.
Martin Rowson’s cartoon are available online here
The Newsroom also provides education facilities
There is also an online archive of the Newsroom