Hurvin Anderson at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham
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You’re really spoilt for choice for great
painting exhibitions in the region at the moment, with terrific shows by Hurvin
Anderson at Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, and Ged Quinn at New Art Gallery
Walsall.
Ged Quinn at New Art Gallery Walsall
I visited the Ged Quinn show yesterday,
being only vaguely familiar with his surreal and theatrical landscape paintings,
but this exhibition also presented some peculiar still lives and portraits. All
of the work is some sort of riff on different traditions, or genres, and
historical periods in paintings and heavy on complex narrative that can often
be alienating in certain artist’s hands, but not so here. I’m not really
interested in narrative painting, but with these works there was a sense of
inclusivity and openness that drew you in to the strange symbolic buildings,
objects and figures that occupied the appropriated romantic landscapes of hills
and woodland, rivers and forests. You didn’t feel you had to know exactly what
all these things meant or stood for to enjoy the work and bring yourself to it.
A lot of the work reminded me of the late, great Scottish painter, Steven
Campbell, whose dense narrative paintings were also often humourous and
rewarding, but with a more off the cuff technique than Quinn’s more slickly
painted works. A sign of the times.
Ged Quinn
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These qualities were far removed from Hurvin
Anderson’s paintings at Ikon, whose paintings were lush and rich with great and
varied painterly expression, experimentation and command. The landscape in most
of Anderson’s paintings was that of his adopted home of Trinidad, although the
view always seemed to be seen at a distance, through wire fences or windows,
always just out of reach, which created a dark undertow to the light filled
large canvasses.
Hurvin Anderson
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The execution of the paintings was just
very exciting, with a sense that the artist would leave no stone unturned in
exploring the myriad possibilities of oil painting to realize his vision. My
favourite paintings in the show were a suite of works called ‘Peter’s Room’,
set in a barbers shop. These were a series of repetitive paintings with only subtle
differences between many of them, before the introduction of a figure in the
later ones, representing the marking of time in this communal space. The
revealing layers of paint and the zones where edges and shapes met and
overlapped or collided are the things that really excite me (which is like some
sort of sad confession). The painting
that I most enjoyed though, perhaps unsurprisingly, was a large black and grey
urban scene of a street in what rightly or wrongly I’m presuming was Birmingham (top of the post)
Hurvin Anderson
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I’ve been making some spontaneous small
paintings of my own in the studio in the last two weeks, with a view to present
them alongside the larger paintings in January’s ‘Black Highway’ exhibition. If you are in the region I'd recommend these shows.
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