Exhibition Visits
The Ferens Gallery - Turner Prize 2017
In the Ferens Gallery in Hull is where the Turner Prize winner piece is being held. The prize was won by Lubaina Himid who creates a variety of paintings, prints, drawings and installations which revolve around black identity.
The winning piece called Fashionable Marriage, 1986, is made from; wood cutouts (various types of wood), acrylic paint, newspaper, rubber gloves, glue, plastic (dinner plates), paper, tissue, foil, wicker baskets, selection of books, cardboard, canvas and charcoal. The piece was inspired by the painting Marriage a la Mode 4 (The Countess’s Morning Levee) 1743 by William Hogarth.
Himid's piece takes the characters from the painting and includes all of the art mediums she likes to use, including newspaper cut outs and historical figures such as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.
Other pieces within the exhibit included several newspaper articles, in which Lubaina Hinmid painted over the top of them leaving words to express her feelings behind how the black community are portrayed within the media. Besides that, there was also over one hundred ceramic plates painted to show the history of the slave trade and a large canvas painted to show the story of how all but one slave on a ship went blind.
Out of all of the pieces created i really liked the large installation. However, my favorite piece was the newspaper clippings due to the creative way Himid makes her voice heard.
Leeds Gallery-Xanadu by Lothar Götz
Lothar Götz is a well known geometrical abstract artist, who uses a range of vibrant shapes and lines to rejuvenate and fill up blank spaces, mainly including architectural structures.
Xanadu has been painted on the Victorian staircase of the Leeds Art Gallery, linking the the two floors together and guiding visitors to the newly renovated top floor art exhibits.
On the walls of the staircases are large canvas sheets in which Lothar Götz has used his technique of using frog tape, back painting and acrylics to create the large scaled piece. When previously working along side Lothar I have learned that he used the shapes and directions of the space/room around him to know exactly how he wants to paint the piece and to know what shapes and lines he wants to include.
When looking closely at the piece you can see that either side of the staircase is mirrored and symmetrical in the centre, using the same proportions, lines and shapes. However, the colours are not.
In the Leeds Art Gallery brochure Lothar Götz states, "Staircases provide the veins of a building, immersing the visitor spatially in a different way to that of the traditional gallery space. I am interested in how an artwork can be experienced by one's whole body, the image changing constantly as one moves up or down the stairs. I want to turn the staircase of Leeds Art Gallery into a colourful contemporary artwork, juxtaposed with its Victorian architecture."
I really like this piece due to the colourful abstract technique which has been created. Also due to the fact that I have studied his work for a while and worked along side the artist himslef.
Abject Gallery - Joshua Raz
Joshua Raz was the winner in 2016 of the prestigious London gallery HIX award which was judged by a panel including Webster and former S12 gallery director Fru Tholstrop. Within Raz's work it questions the authority of imagery and how well that imagery is able to articulate reality, with the fleeting-flood of imagery we see on a daily basis; Raz's paintings highlight this gulf and identify how painting contains the knowledge that is produced by the hand.
Beneath veils of accessible narrative, beneath sleek interfaces and narrowed periphery, the complexities of true fact continue to bubble. Yet when substituted for a simplified version, fact becomes simulation, a malleable imposter laking the integrity of the original. And so reality is experiencing a period of atrophy. In neglecting to question artificial narrative and intelligence and one's own increasing artificial existence, the significance of reality is withering.
In Raz's practice he considers the dependability of the image, and by extension its ability to articulate reality. His paintings contemplate both the empirical and implicit qualities of an image, object or environment . This results in an oxymoronic surface, one that osculates between cohesion and chaos.
Palm trees marry opposing ideals. the provenance of palms means that as an image they project of a quasi-utopian idyll in which on results in shadows of palms: the plant has become inextricably linked to the notion of paradise. Yet through decades of image appropriation, palms have become domesticated; their implicit values diluted. They have been reduced to an outline and now tread the boundary between the real and the artificial.
Each body of paintings is treated holistically; a painting's individual concern are subsumed by the overarching concerns of them as a conglomerate
- (taken from handouts in the gallery)
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art- Bridget Riley
When visiting the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (one) i came across artist Bridget Riley, whose work I can relate to on multiple levels.
From reading about her work in the gallery, Riley has used her paintings to investigate the nature of perception and the act of looking. Light and shad in the present world is what influences Bridget Riley as well as the traditions and history behind painting itself.
During Riley’s work in the sixties she used geometric shapes and black-and-white paint to produce painting which would provoke physical sensations. Riley soon began to introduce an array of colours into her work to explore perception.
The majority of Bridget Riley’s work is painted in oil on a linen canvas and explore the same principles. When looking into her work I have found a likeness to my work due to the use of geometric shapes and bright colours.
The contrast between colours and shapes work really well on the canvas. Some of Riley’s work also feels to be like optical illusions as if looked at fro too long they seem to move, which I find very interesting and unique.
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