Still Game...

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

--> 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.

Man Gave Names To All The Animals...

 

Tessa Farmer, 'Swarm' 

‘The Nature  of the Beast’ is an exhibition well worth a visit at the New Art Gallery, Walsall. I found myself there last week attracted by it’s theme of animals in art, which is something I’m really interested in. There is something about the mystery, power and appearance of animals and creatures that I find really fascinating, so it was great to visit this exciting exhibition that was all about some of these issues and featured a range of contemporary artists working in painting, drawing, sculpture and photography. 

Olly and Suzi, 'Spider', aquarelle pencil on paper

I was greeted up the stairs by a really large aquarelle coloured pencil drawing of a rather menacing spider blown up to gigantic proportions by artistic collaborators, Olly and Suzi, who work on location together on expeditions across the continents, and even under the sea, attempting to get close to their, often very dangerous, subjects in their natural habitat.  Elsewhere they were represented by some other lovely drawings of swarms of scurrying ants, beetles and cockroaches across large sheets of paper, rendered very directly using inks in an almost calligraphic way. I loved those. 

 Olly and Suzi, 'Ants', ink on paper

 

Olly and Suzi, 'Dungbeetles', ink on paper

There were also some very large and beautiful photographs by Matt Collishaw of squashed butterflies captured at the moment of death as they are pressed between two glass slides. They were suitably simultaneously beautiful and incredibly melancholy. These photos surrounded the surreal taxidermy sculptures of Polly Vernon, where dead foxes and a large deer were being seemingly attacked or occupied by other creatures such as birds, and even an octopus, whose tentacles were being pulled out of various orifices of the poor fox. The deer, however was displayed on its side with its stomach slit open which was now host to a nest of hanging bats. It was incredible. The installation by artist Tessa Farmer (top image) was even better with an army of ants and crabs marching across the floor, which I feared I would squash with my big feet and then be set upon in an insect frenzy, similar to the fate of the  adjacent python overwhelmed by vicious, biting creatures. Above and around you were hundreds of flies, bees and other insects and weird things that were wonderful to observe ‘eyeball to eyeball’, as it were. 

Polly Morgan, 'Hide and Fight', taxidermy and mixed media

Polly Morgan, 'Harbour' (detail), taxidermy, rubber and mixed media

The six life size paintings of prize bulls by Mark Fairington were also impressive, looking photographic in their detail from a distance, but much more painterly up close, but my favourite exhibit was the ‘Sphinx’ by artist Patricia Piccinini, a sculpture representing ideas imagining a future world of cloning and laboratory created hybrid creatures. It was made from fiberglass and so life-like with it’s veiny skin covered in tiny hairs, and genitalia like mouth I found it genuinely disturbing and nightmarish. I've since looked into her website and it's full of equally thought-provoking and disturbing work.

 

Mark Fairnington, 'Wroxall Tracer', oil on canvas,  235 x 367cms

 

 Patricia Piccinini, 'Sphinx', fibreglass, resin, human hair

Well, if I haven’t sold that show to you in this post there is definitely something wrong…!