In search of an Italian identity
Carla Scarano visits two exhibitions in Florence: The return to Italy of Salvatore Ferragamo in 1927 and the Dawn of a Nation after WW II More →
exhibitions
SP-Arte, Sao Paulo. Review by Barbara Lewis.
SP-Arte
Bienal Pavilion, Sao Paulo,
April 11-15
Review by Barbara Lewis.
It’s testimony to the vibrant creativity and style of Sao Paulo that its international art festival – SP-Arte – can transform an object as potentially mundane and outdated as the tea trolley into a pinnacle of design.
A celebration of 90 years of the “carrinho de cha” – or tea trolley in Portuguese – took a commanding place in the design section of the sprawling exhibition in Oscar Niemeyer’s Pavilion Bienal in Sao Paulo’s Ibirapuera Park, the green lungs and heart of an outsized city of tower blocks and traffic jams.
The Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion, to give the Bienal Pavilion its more formal name, since 1957 has been the headquarters of the Bienal de Sao Paulo Foundation, which organises the world’s second oldest art biennale. Venice’s is the oldest.
The pavilion also hosts the central exhibition of the annual SP-Arte, already as rich a cornucopia as most ardent art-lovers can digest.
Adding to the abundance, this year’s fair included for a second year running a section on the work of prominent architects who also design furniture – in homage to Niemeyer, whose ultimate chair in which to lie back and think creatively was also featured.
Among the living architect-furniture designers, Brazilian Bel Lobo gave us Bela, a striking wooden desk.
Its classic simplicity connected it with the beginning and end of the tea trolley line-up just across the pavilion, which, from Gregori Warchavchik’s 1928’s cart to Zanine de Zanine’s 1918 version, placed the emphasis on confident, stylish lines.
A criticism in the local and art press of the SP-Arte was that it was a bubble, ignoring a turbulent political backdrop in the month the nation’s first working class president was ordered to jail as he fights corruption charges, meaning he is likely to be barred from contesting elections later this year.
It is true the joy of an exquisitely designed object can lose its charm when its price tag places it beyond the reach of all but a few.
Less escapist – or perhaps still the indulgence of the privileged – was another novelty, this time in the performance space, where living installations brought together artists of varied backgrounds to act for the duration of the fair. The actor huddled next to the heap of dirt – or is it ashes? – and ceramic urns might have been as genuinely exhausted as he looked.
On top of escapism, another charge is that an arts fair branded international was overwhelmingly Brazilian, including only a handful of big-name foreign art studios, such as Berlin’s Neugerriemschneider, represented by a shiny steel structure of bikes and a mirror in which we “BEHOLD OUR FUTURE EXECUTIONERS”.
Should that be too bleak for your taste, Sao Paulo’s Marko Brajovic studio’s Eden Tree is a possible remedy. Commissioned by Perrier-Jouet, Eden Tree is a mirrored, golden multi-sensory forest, through which you wander and absorb magical music, as a kind of objective correlative of the emotion of drinking from the Belle Epoque Perrier-Jouet bottle.
With a great deal of luck, the world might have more to justify such celebrational moments when SP-Arte’s annual fair returns next April or even in time for the full biennale in September. In the event it doesn’t, art can still console.
Barbara Lewis © 2018.
T-Shirt: Cult-Culture-Subversion. Review by Barbara Lewis.
T-Shirt: Cult-Culture-Subversion
Fashion and Textile Museum, London,
Until May 6.
Of all the things we wear, the T-shirt has the ability to be both humble and exclusive.
To underline the point, the Fashion and Textile Museum’s shop accompanies its exhibition on the T-shirt from the fifth-century, when it was a variant of the tunic, to now, with designer examples on sale for around 100 pounds.
After a display that serves to convince us of just how cool T-shirts can be, we might even buy one, but only if it fits with the message we want to convey because another great thing about T-shirts is that they allow us to wear our hearts on our chests.
While a muscular Marlon Brando made a plain white T-shirt his own, T-shirts are most likely to become a statement when they scream a political message.
One of the arch-proponents of allowing her clothes to do the talking is Katharine Hamnett who greeted Margaret Thatcher wearing the slogan: 58% DON’T WANT PERSHING, in protest at the prime minister’s decision to allow U.S. missiles to be stationed in Britain.
Equally famous are Vivienne Westwood’s contributions, as collected over three decades by one Lee Price, who became hooked after wandering into Westwood’s shop World’s End in King’s Road when he was about 12. He later worked for her and says wearing her T-shirts is the ultimate conversation starter.
But if words are eloquent, pictures can also speak volumes, aided by digital technology that transforms the way images are transferred on to T-shirts.
One of my favourites was the pug-face T-shirt. David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane face equally seems destined to become emblazoned on backs and fronts the world over.
Whether witty, ironic or political, in 21st-century Britain, a T-shirt has become a self-conscious style choice, though the exhibition also takes us back to more innocent, straightforward times when the original wearers of the T-shirts sporting the characters of The Wizard of Oz were doing no more than wearing the very first promotional T-shirts and expressing their enthusiasm for a favourite film.
The exhibition concludes (unless you count the shop) with a section on last words.
They lay down the challenge of trying to come up with even more compelling ultimate statements, but it is hard to cap “We’re all Doomed”.
Barbara Lewis © 2018.
MASP, Sao Paulo. Review by Barbara Lewis.
MASP (Museo de Arte de Sao Paulo)
Imagens do Aleijadinho until June 6 and permanent exhibition.
One of the joys of the MASP in the Paulista Avenue, Sao Paulo’s equivalent of the Champs Elysees, is that when you pay for entry (every day except Tuesday) everyone else is too busy making or spending money to block your view of old and new masters.
Even then, Hieronymus Bosch’s Temptation of Saint Anthony – one of at least 16 surviving versions of the original – still attracts more than its fair share of attention. It’s a testimony to the cross-cultural and cross-temporal reach of an artist Renaissance art biographer Giorgio Vasari dismissed as fantastic, absurd and grotesque that the Paulistas pore over every detail of his work.
That’s not to say they don’t appreciate the rest, which ranges from fierce Tang dynasty (618-907 AD) gate guardians with their, to us, comic snarls, to contemporary Brazilian art.
In between, there are outstanding examples of van Gogh, Picasso, Cezanne and Mantegna. Mantegna’s heart-felt Saint Jerome Penitent in the Desert is in contrast to Bellini’s depiction of The Virgin with Standing Child, which is markedly less tender than many madonnas of the Italian Renaissance, as the intelligent, informative commentary to the exhibition observes.
In each case, the notes are on the back of the works suspended functionally in chronological rows, a system that serves to maximise the number on display from an even more extensive collection stored in the vaults.
Leaping through the centuries, it seems as if every great European artist is represented.
From van Gogh, The Stone Bench, stark, massive and tomb-like, depicts the bench in the grounds of the asylum at Saint-Remy where the painter confronted his inner tumult and perhaps contemplated his own end.
There’s also Matisse who can turn a Plaster Torso into a sensual riot by casually pairing it with a vase of flowers, while Picasso is represented by the cubist, muscular Bust of a Man as well as a louring Portrait of Suzanne Bloch.
I was also pleased to stumble on a surreal Max Ernst: Bryce Canyon Translation 1946, which seemed at home on Brazilian iron-red soil.
From Brazil itself, there is much to savour, including the work of Artur Timotheo da Costa (1882-1922), one of the country’s greatest artists. Together with his brother Joao, who also became a painter, he began his working life as an apprentice at the Brazilian Mint, designing stamps and making prints.
His two works on display The Boy and The Lady in Green tell the story of the clash his talent transcended between a black underclass and the white, European colonisers.
The Boy, beautiful, black, natural, noble in a simple white shirt against a neutral background stares sorrowfully or is it defiantly – or are we making assumptions? The Lady in Green, stifled in layers of opulent fabric, in a claustrophobic bourgeois interior, appears bored, vexed, trapped.
Da Costa’s grounding in the Mint is a link to the work of Switzerland’s Ferdinand Hodler (1853-1918), which also a connection with officialdom.
His portrait of a Logger exerting every muscle to fell a tree was commissioned by the Swiss National Bank for bank notes, but the painter was dissatisfied when it was reduced in scale, so instead it was exhibited full size to critical acclaim.
The links and interactions between Europe, South America and Africa flow through the exhibition. Sometimes the result is authenticity, sometimes the truth is artistic or emotional not literal. There is also parody and plenty of political and social statement.
Dutch painter Frans Janszoon Post (1612-1680) travelled to Dutch Brazil and was inspired to paint didactic works relaying an idealised version of colonial rule, such as his Brazilian Landscape with Anteater. The exotic anteater lurks in the foreground of a lush undulating paradise.
Edouard Manet only managed to convince his middle class family to allow him to become a painter after a trip to Rio de Janeiro that was followed by his failure to pass the entrance exam to the naval academy.
The works that eventually ensued included the curious Mr Eugene Petuiset The Lion Hunter – a fictitious, parodied imaging of life beyond Europe.
Born in Montevideo, Joaquin Torres-Garcia, studied art in Spain and his work straddles Europe and Latin America, as well as the classical and the modern.
His Church in Terrassa is peaceful and small in scale in contradistinction to the towers of steel and glass all around the MASP, which itself is a monumental modern block.
Brazilian Benedito Calixto endeavoured to preserve the Brazil of the recent past with his nostalgic depictions of the low-rise Sao Paulo coastline of yesteryear.
Agostinho Batista de Freitas brings us more or less back to the present Sao Paulo with his naïve View of MASP 1978.
He also gives us Piolim Circus 1971 in which the clown draws the crowds as the art gallery does not: one solitary visitor climbs the stairs to the exhibition, while the masses are entertained at street level by Piolin the clown, misspelt as Piolim by the artist whether by design or accident.
Self-taught, de Freitas worked in a toy factory and was dismissed for drawing during working hours. He found his place at the MASP after selling one of his drawings to Pietro Maria Bardi, then a director of the gallery.
A floor below, a temporary exhibition is devoted to an artist who never made it into a gallery in his life-time.
Instead Aleijadinho, or the little cripple, the son of a Portuguese artisan and his slave, blended Brazilian, African and European culture in religious statues for the churches of Minas Gerais during the gold rush in the 18th and 19th centuries.
They mark both continuity and departure from the Mantegna and Bellini in the gallery above: continuity because the Church patronised and inspired western art for centuries; departure because Aleijadinho brings the distance of an outsider.
The results, carved in wood, vary between an agonised, more or less conventional Our Lady of Sorrows, elegantly clad and multiply stabbed, and another version pared down to little more than an artist’s mannequin doll with a crude metal halo – arguably with equal emotional force.
Barbara Lewis © 2018.
“Indomitable Spirit” – an Exhibition at One Canada Square, Canary Wharf, by Jane McChrystal.
“Indomitable Spirit” – an Exhibition at One Canada Square, Canary Wharf.
Jane McChrystal.
Henry Moore enthusiasts could do worse on this rainy Easter Week than to head for Canary Wharf and see this exhibition, which tells the story of the creation of the Draped Seated Figure, now known as “Old Flo” (https://londongrip.co.uk/2017/12/old-flo-returns-to-the-east-end-of-london-by-jane-mcchrystal/), and her changing fortunes over the past fifty years.
There are some charming photos of Moore at work in his studio at Perry Green, Hertfordshire and a film of him directing Old Flo’s delivery by crane to the plinth on the Stifford Park Estate in 1963, which would become her home for the next thirty four years. Viewers will note a startling contrast between cavalier attitudes towards health and safety demonstrated in the film by the artist and his team and the extreme caution employed by workers in their hard hats and hi-vis jackets photographed during the carefully orchestrated operation designed to deliver her to Cabot Square last October.
For me, however, the highlight of the exhibition was a study for Shelter Scene: Bunks and Sleepers. Moore spent many evenings during the blitz observing East Enders as they sheltered from the bombs in the underground, before returning to Perry Green where he produced the series of moving drawings which became the inspiration for the Draped Seated Figure. The shelter scene is one of those drawings, and the original study on show in Canada Square conveys a depth of compassion and admiration for the unfortunate shelterers, which can never be captured in any reproduction.
Other people I viewed the exhibition with were struck by the dynamism of a finely worked maquette, which formed part of the preparation for the final plaster figure to be cast in bronze, and left an impression that the figure might pull away from her seat and walk off at any moment.
I think anyone who visits Indomitable Spirit will have a far richer experience of this monument to the endurance of Londoners during the blitz, than can be gained from viewing her “cold” against the backdrop of Cabot Square and its elegant fountains.
Indomitable Spirit, Henry Moore, Draped Seated Woman is on show until 6th April 2018 at Lobby, One Canada Square, Canary Wharf, London E14 5AB
Jane McChrystal © 2018.
Hireth: A Cornish Landscape, Royal Cornwall Museum. Barbara Lewis.
Hireth: A Cornish Landscape
Royal Cornwall Museum,
Truro.
The Danes have given us “hygge” as a not directly translate-able concept particular to their culture. The Cornish offer “hireth” to refer to an intangible feeling, a longing for the familiarity and comfort of a place.
In its efforts to explain the emotional resonance of the word, the Royal Cornwall Museum’s exhibition on Cornish landscape art cites the late great John Berger who wrote of how seeing an old friend in a crowd full of people made him instantly remember what it was like to be in that person’s company.
Running for an unspecified length of time, the Hireth exhibition recreates the experience through a series of landscapes and a Hepworth bronze that convey Cornwall’s essence.
We range from straight, albeit evocative landscapes to the near- and totally abstract.
Cliff scene, Tintagel Gaspard Joseph Latoix (1858-1910) is a traditional landscape on a perfect summer’s day, dreamy but for the geological exactitude of the Cornish cliffs.
Gulls Newlyn Harbour from Frank Gascoigne Heath (1873-1936) captures the surging energy of gulls flocking towards their prey.
Modern and closer to the abstract, The Wave from Bryan Wynter, who died in 1975, replaces the gently lapping sea with the terrifying power of a single wave, while Michael Strang (born 1942) takes us right into the texture of a bank of wild flowers with Cornish Hedge, Castallack.
Cornish Hedge, Castallack.
Photo by Barbara Lewis.
Many of the artists in this exhibition, Hepworth included, were not born in Cornwall, which arguably makes them all the more able to articulate the spirit of the place.
Paul Feiler was born in Germany in 1918 and came to England in 1933. He was sent to Canada for internment and later became one of the many artists who gravitated to St Ives.
His Winter Sea with Black Rocks is the diametric opposite of summer seaside: abstract, dark and full of ice.
Barbara Hepworth’s wave-like bronze Involute II is relatively speaking warm and supple.
Involute II. Barbara Hepworth
Photo by Barbara Lewis.
We also have the intriguing 1967 Abstract Landscape from her pupil Breon O’Casey – an oil-on-wood composition comprising three blocks of intense matt colour.
After roaming the landscape for inspiration, he apparently preferred to work in his “windowless studio” where he recreated his memory of what he had seen. Above all it’s about colour – white and shades of green.
Green permeates the exhibition. Bob Bourne’s (born 1931) Cornish Hillside is a smooth, verdant patchwork that also conveys the contour of a landscape that sucks you in once you leave the rugged coasts.
Curves and slopes turn to inclines as you enter Cornwall’s villages and towns.
Tom Early in Truro, 1949, depicts the helter-skelter, perspective-defying sensation of steep Cornish streets.
In a similar spirit of primitivism, Alfred Wallis’ Penzance Harbour Entrance captures the angles of boats jammed together inside the harbour wall.
Cornwall isn’t just picturesque, it’s useful and this collection of distinctive art records the landscape devastation of China clay mining with Harold C. Harvey’s (1874-1941) almost documentary recording of A China Clay Pit, Leswidden.
If that has whet your appetite for local history, the galleries downstairs lay out Cornwall’s mining heritage and its variety of mineral wealth from tin and copper to a lump of haematite reminiscent of a giant blood clot from deep within the Cornish landscape.
Barbara Lewis © 2018.
Celebration of the East London Federation of Suffragettes
Announcing a Celebration of the East London Federation of Suffragettes in Mile End, 29th May – 20th October, 2018
As Londongrip’s readers are no doubt aware, 2018 marks the 100th anniversary of the Representation of the People Act, the first step on the road to suffrage for women and the outcome of more than fifty years’ struggle, which would end with the Equal Franchise Act in 1928, when all women over the age of twenty one were given the vote.
The East End of London was a crucible for radical ideas and activism, including the women’s suffrage movement, fired in part by the deprivation and inequality experienced by so many of its inhabitants. 400 Old Ford Road in Bow served as the headquarters of the East London Federation of Suffragettes and the home of its leader, Sylvia Pankhurst, from 1914-1924.
A celebration of their achievements will take place in Tower Hamlets from May onwards, including a recreation of the Women’s Hall, which was housed in Old Ford Road, together with an exhibition of the life and work of the ordinary women whose role in winning the vote has been obscured by history so far. The exhibition will be staged at the Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archive in Bancroft Road. Further details appear on the website of the East London Women’s Museum, as well as a complete programme of events* taking place elsewhere.
A large group of volunteers is needed to set up and run the exhibition. They will participate in all sorts of activities, from constructing the Women’s Hall to serving food from a pop-up kitchen. Other volunteers will be responsible for running a series of public events linking the problems endured by people of the East End in the early Twentieth Century, such as poor housing and food poverty, with the experiences of many who live in similar conditions today.
Descriptions of all the roles open to volunteers can be found on the website of the East London Women’s Museum*. Anyone who takes part will have a chance to shine a light on the unique contribution made by women of the East London Federation to the cause of women’s suffrage. The Federation was a dissident group which broke away from the Women’s Social and Political Union in 1914.
The WSPU believed firmly in the necessity to keep women of “quality” at the forefront of the struggle. They also suspended their campaign during the First World War to put their full weight behind the war effort. By contrast, the working class women of the East London Federation intensified their efforts to improve the lot of women, as part of a mission to bring social justice for all. Immensely practical, they worked to ensure that children were fed and cared for properly throughout the war and with notable entrepreneurial flair, even founded a cooperative toy factory to take advantage of the absence of German toys from the English market-place.
Jane McChrystal © 2018.
*eastendwomensmuseum.org/the-womens-hall
Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town, by Barbara Lewis.
Zeitz MOCAA (Museum of Contemporary Art Africa), Cape Town.
Various exhibitions.
South Africa’s oldest working harbour in Cape Town has a new addition.
Since September, 2017, its recently-developed Silo District has been home to the Zeitz Museum of Contemporay Art Africa, MOCAA for short, a giant silo of post 2000 art by the artists of Africa and its disapora, assembled by German entrepreneur Jochen Zeitz.
For a white visitor, it’s an epic, breath-taking, unsettling feast; unsettling not least because every visitor on the day I went was also white, as is Zeitz, the former CEO of Puma, and because it feels as if we are the chosen audience for works that amount to a “cri de coeur” and at times a diatribe about the traumas caused by colonialism.
There is humour, joy and defiance – and there is devastation, oppression, violence, abuse of power, by men over men and men over women.
I began my visit in the transportation tunnels in the silo’s basement, from whence the grain used to be shipped – a suitable place to be weighed down by dread.
Theoretically, the exhibition there – Luanda, Encyclopaedic City – ended in January, but it has spilled into February.
The work of Angolan Edson Chagas, it comprises 23 stacks of images from his photographic series Found Not Taken and is the first exhibition of the installation since it won the Golden Lion at the 2013 Venice Biennale.
Anyone who wishes can take the posters of broken furniture and ramshackle buildings in brutal, urban settings, and assemble them in their own order.
There’s an appropriate irony: the attendant sitting at a table with a pile of “confiscated posters” because one visitor had attempted to grab the lot.
More uplifting, in the atrium above, South African artist Nicholas Hlobo’s giant rubber dragon “iimpunulu zonke ziyandilandela” is in flight until July 30.
It is of course a very African lightning bird, whose prime associations are masculinity and violence, but it’s hard for a visitor from London not to draw comparisons with Louis Bourgeois’ giant spider Maman, which once filled the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, as we look up at enormous wings in a cathedral-like industrial space carved out of the silo’s heart.
We can glimpse Hlobo’s dragon again and again as we take the lift or the winding spiral stairs through floor after floor of the more than 6,000 square metres of exhibition space.
The main inaugural exhibition, which runs until February 19, is entitled “All things being equal” – a reference apparently to a recurrent question from the artists: “All things being equal, how will I be represented in the museum?”
One response is that things are rarely equal, especially in Africa. Another is that the works are all given equal dignity as glorious explanations of what it is to be another human being – or to quote the museum’s Executive Director and Chief Curator Mark Coetzee: “If we understand each other better, which is really what art does, we create a world we all want to live in.”
Just as the basement exhibition demands no particular order, the works of “All things being equal” bear up to random viewing.
I started, I think, at the beginning with Jody Paulsen’s “Here to Stay”, a fun felt thought collage of phrases such as “Highbrow Gameplan”.
Paulsen says he is not political.
That can only be true in so far as any modern African art can possibly ignore its context and, if there is a trend, as you navigate your way through the galleries and up the spiral staircases, it is the cumulative sense of politics, stacking up like the grains of the past.
Just along from Paulsen, another South African artist Athi-Patra Ruga, has a more daring, political edge he places a Godiva-like figure comprising pink fishnets, heels and balloons on a zebra in a series entitled the Night of the Long Knives, full of dream-like luminosity and menace.
The messages become more explicit in the Proposed Model for anti-apartheid, gay rights and AIDS activist Tseko Simon Nkoli Memorial – a big, raunchy, reclining figure, made of golden roses, surrounded by dressing room lights.
U.S.-based Frohawk Two Feathers’ approach is subtler in presentation, but the politics are still overt as his old-style maps and 18th-century officers parody what he dubs the Frenglish empire.
Julien Sinzogan, born in Porto Novo, the capital of Benin that served as a hub for slave trading, also takes us into some of the worst of the colonial past.
Bon Vent a Tous juxtaposes traditional African boats with tattered sails and mighty galleys, while La Jetee (The Jetty) shows line after line of shackled slaves about to be led away to row.
If you feel a need for some art for art’s, not politics’ sake, Ghanain artist El Anatsui almost provides it, though it would be wrong to deny the resonance of an artist who has spent so much time transforming the materials colonisers introduced.
World-renowned for lavish hangings made of aluminium bottle tops, The Circular Series is both related and a departure. He creates mysterious, metal, moon-like discs by taking prints from a wooden table marked by years of labour.
Kenyan artist Wangechi Mutu’s work is often violent but she can also be lyrical.
An installation “Poems by my great grandmother” is made from a root and a skull, but the animal and the plant are long dead and their remains rotate gently and hypnotically in shadowy light.
We’re brought back to the brash present with South African Frances Goodman’s Ophiophilia – a seething mass of snakes made from acrylic nails for a double-cringe factor.
Then, another South African woman artist Lungiswa Gqunta delves into the struggles of living memory fought with weapons made from everyday objects.
A diptych of matches, paper and petrol explores the statement: “Together hand in hand, with our matches and our necklaces, we shall liberate the country.”
Nearby hangs “Divider”, made up of beer bottles, hung on ropes like nooses or wicks, ready to be ignited.
The most strident, theatrical take on Africa’s violent history is the work of Kudzandai Chiurai of Zimbabwe in an exhibition entitled Regarding the Ease of Others that runs until March 31.
Now Mugabe has gone, this scathing critic of the regime has added contemporary force. He is a fearless articulator of the assertiveness of a new generation of men and women, flexing their gleaming muscles of power.
The dark world he depicts is stalked by death, shot through with religion and its antithesis, and in it, women, in trouser suits, dress shirts and killer heels, may be as ruthless as the men.
If it all becomes too much, there are still antidotes of a kind to be had.
Swaziland-born artist Nandipha Mntambo’s exhibition Material Value focuses on cow hide in all its forms.
Following on from a distinguished line of macho male artists, crowned by Picasso, who were in thrall to the bull, she gives us a female take on the epic struggles of man and beast, which are at least as culturally significant in Africa as in Iberia and Latin America.
In Portuguese-occupied Mozambique, the “Praca de Touros” was where black Mozambicans fought for the entertainment of the Portuguese and it is where Mntambo portrays a female bull-fighter, dressed in cow hide but with no actual bull to confront.
After that we wander past sculptures made from the tails of countless dead animals and at hanging rows of hide dresses redolent of the female forms they might adorn, of historic, colonial dress and of the animals the skins should be covering.
If you have the emotional energy, British-born NigerianYinka Shonibare’s work is in residence until May 28 in the Dusthouse, which filtered the air of the adjoining industrial structures to protect the workers and prevent the buildings exploding.
Her version of “Addio del Passato” tells the story of Lord Nelson’s rejected wife set to the music of Verdi, while we look down over four floors of stained glass windows and ponder colonial pyrrhic victories and in Cape Town, recall the true heroism of another Nelson: Mandela.
At last we emerge on to the roof to views of Table Mountain and a terrace of course occupied by art in the form of an “intergenerational dialogue”, Now and Then, on display until August 27.
Togo-born artist El Loko, who died in 2016, created a “cosmic alphabet”, meant to communicate across any barrier. It is inscribed on to glass discs that make up the roof terrace floor on which stand living South African sculptor Kyle Morland’s abstract metal sculptures. They are made of discarded material in one more reminder that traditional aesthetic hierarchies are overturned.
Breathe in the view and the atmosphere and then whizz down through the shoot-like lifts or take the twisting staircases, then pause before the gift shop for a last look at Zimbabwean-born South African Michele Mathison’s triptych in burnt wood of a devastated, apocalyptic Bushveld.
Barbara Lewis © 2018.
Coincidences, Galleria Riccardo Costantini Contemporary. Review by Barbara Lewis.
Coincidences
Piero Mollica,
Galleria Riccardo Costantini Contemporary,
Via Giolitti, 51,
Turin,
Italy.
Until Jan 27.
Stroll through the streets of Turin or look out from the city’s rattling trams and you’re confronted with wall after wall of windows framed by whatever architectural embellishments were fashionable at the time of construction, from the standard shutters of residential apartment blocks to ornate neo-classical gods and gargoyles on civic buildings.
We look at them all anew after a visit to Turin-born photographer Piero Mollica’s exhibition Coincidences in the Quartiere via della Rocca, close to the River Po.
At the bijou Galleria Riccardo Costantini, the simplest of settings compliments Mollica’s sharp, shiny transformations of modern architecture from around the world into abstract art with the focus on the patterns made by windows and other aspects of construction.
Rather than being home to human activity or recognisable shapes, buildings become rhythmic geometry and the people who inhabit them shrink from view.
Most of the constructions appear impenetrable, as the forbidding facades of city life, with windows more like mirrors than apertures.
A work entitled Think Different, after Apple’s slogan, is an exception. It zooms in on Post-it’s San Francisco offices, whose windows are human and different rather than rendered uniform and abstract. The blinds are fully closed, askew or half way up and revealing a pattern of Post-it notes.
In Paris, Mollica’s focus reverts to the more or less pure abstraction that is central to this exhibition. From the Arab World Institute’s jagged angles, he creates a giant “French Y”, which is the title of the photograph.
On the outskirts of Tel Aviv, a detail of the Design Museum at Holon, by contrast to the slick black and grey of the Arab World Institute, is all about warm brown curves, chilled slightly by their juxtaposition to concrete-grey.
In Berlin and San Francisco alike, Mollica makes high-rise blocks appear to be folds of material or wallpaper, while Hong Kong’s sky-scrapers shimmer and curve like giant women in clear, Asian light.
None of it is reassuring. Rather, it’s an immaculate and valid response to the increasingly artificial and superhuman scale of city life.
Barbara Lewis © 2018.
The Boy Who Loved The Sea and Other Stories
Jenny Vuglar visits the strange worlds created by Paula Rego currently on show at the Jerwood Gallery, Hastings More →
Humans and Nature
May 8, 2018 by Michael Bartholomew-Biggs • design, exhibitions, fashion, year 2018 • Tags: Carla Scarano, design, exhibitions, fashion • 0 Comments
Carla Scarano looks at two V&A exhibitions exploring interactions between human beings and the natural world More →