TIM JOHNSON – THE LUMINESCENT GROUND

Posted on 2013-12-09

Early works in this exhibition include ‘installation’ photography and text pieces made during a trip to England, France, Germany and the Netherlands during 1970–1971, photographic documentation of performances, and paintings and video inspired by Australian punk band Radio Birdman. The paintings with which Johnson came to prominence during the 1980s, arising out of collaborations with aboriginal artists such as Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, are key to our understanding of his artistic practice overall, and the spirit they embody continues to inform his new and recent work.

Now Johnson’s paintings are an extraordinary combination of influences and references. They are populated by Buddhist deities, Bodhisattvas, Native Americans as well as aboriginal figures, Tibetan monks, Vietnamese farmers, extra-terrestrials and Christian angels, floating in a pictorial space articulated by Papunya dots and circles, and fragments of landscape – often oriental hills and cloudy skies – that betray a world view that is at once conceptual and visionary. Johnson’s work can be contextualised within a postmodern narrative, with an appropriation of motifs from diverse cultural sources demonstrating a release from aesthetic purism, and a generosity of spirit, whereby Johnson, in many recent paintings,
invites others to join him in the creation of an artistic gesture.

Buddhist images come courtesy of Nava Chapman, a self-styled “artist, teacher, dreamer, seeker. Slave to Love and Beauty,” while the ongoing UFO series orbits around space craft meticulously drawn by American artist Daniel Bogunovic, with Johnson providing cosmic backgrounds. Questions of artistic authorship, of art and exactly what it means are dwarfed by considerations of known unknowns, by illuminating leaps of faith.

Opposite – Clifford Possum (2002)

Exhibition runs through to February 9th, 2014

Ikon Gallery
1 Oozells Square
Brindleyplace
Birmingham
B1 2HS

ikon-gallery.org

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DAVID OSTROWSKI

Posted on 2013-12-09

David Ostrowski’s paintings are the results of a total analysis of the very nature of painting. He consistently strives to undermine composition, style and “typical gestures”, experiments with speed and imperfection. Errors are integrated into the process of pictorial composition, successful sections are painted over. Errors and coincidences are played off against each other in order to achieve unforeseen beauty.

Ostrowski deletes, overwrites, layers, makes decisions. “I imagine going into the studio. A neon sign hangs on the wall, flashing the word ‘surprise’. When I ask myself, who painted my own works, I know it’s a good painting.” In the process of painting, consideration is constantly being given to which elements, even the smallest markings, could be removed or added. Ostrowski works with oil and lacquer; large areas of white dominate. Color is employed sparingly with the help of gestures that appear as unmotivated as possible. Ostrowski’s limited color palette is not something he actually prefers, but he does indeed approach this new, reduced color palette as the result of his intense analysis of this preference.

Every now and then he wears blue pants. His working materials are things he finds in his studio: paper, strips of wood, newspaper, dirt. Having almost no options is considered an opportunity; even the lack of studio space is processed in the work. “Fuck painting a lot.” The music in the studio is the only emotion that gets captured on the canvas. Ostrowski’s large formats are mirrors of his own self: they depict the vast emptiness, the apparent lack of motivation, sometimes aggression, but especially beauty. What is presented to us as a result is permanent reflection. It’s about something. It’s about nothing.

Opposite – F (Love), 2013

Exhibition runs through to January 31st, 2013

Simon Lee Gallery
12 Berkeley Street
London
W1J 8DT

www.simonleegallery.com

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PAULINE BOTY – POP ARTIST AND WOMAN

Posted on 2013-12-02

One of the few female artists associated with the British Pop Art movement of the 1960s alongside Peter Blake, Derek Boshier and David Hockney, Boty has been largely overshadowed by her male Pop counterparts since her untimely death aged just 28. This exhibition, which comes to Chichester from Wolverhampton Art Gallery, reinstates Boty at the forefront of the movement, featuring paintings, collages and ephemera from public and private collections including rarely seen pieces that have not been exhibited for 40 years.

The exhibition follows Boty’s artistic progression from her early experimentation with various media such as painting and stained glass to a series of sexually and politically-charged paintings and collages. It demonstrates how her oeuvre enriches the male-dominated sphere of Pop Art with a female perspective, exploring themes of female sexuality, gender, race and politics, and contemporary events such as the Cuban missile crisis and the assassination of JFK.

Born in South London in 1938, Boty first studied at Wimbledon School of Art and then the Royal College where she met David Hockney, Sir Peter Blake, Derek Boshier and Peter Phillips. Sociable, charismatic and popular, Boty was a striking figure, dubbed the ‘Wimbledon Bardot’ on account of her extreme good looks. Yet her glamorous appearance often meant that she struggled to be taken seriously, despite her passionate engagement with politics and the intellectual life of the college.

Exhibition runs through to February 9th, 2014

Pallant House Gallery
9 North Pallant
Chichester
West Sussex
PO19 1TJ

pallant.org.uk

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MATT JOHNSON

Posted on 2013-12-02

Johnson’s sculptures have always been marked by a restless nature, one that exhibits an ongoing struggle to bridge a conversation between the present and the past. This is evident through his use of references to canonical classical sculpture where traditional sculptural materials and those in their natural form are sifted through a contemporary lens. Not only does his work point to the origins of what it means to make a sculpture in the 21st Century – to put one rock on top of another, to approach an understanding of human knowledge by pointing to metaphors between meaning and material – but there persists in it a questioning of what one may learn from a collective history of research, trial and error, poetry and imagination.

In the main gallery space Johnson has created a sixteen-foot long, almost ten-foot tall model of an Apatosaurus dinosaur in sections of salvaged old-growth Californian redwood, which, crucially to the artist, is one of the contemporary subspecies of trees that coexisted with dinosaurs. The figure looms down at you but, however dramatic its large frame, it is unthreatening: a scaling up of the kind of children’s flatpack puzzle one finds in museum gift shops and enlarged to the approximate scale of a baby dinosaur.

In the adjacent room the artist’s battered old yellow bicycle appears to have sunken into and been reclaimed by a rock. This ostensibly impossible embedding represents a material infusion – a warping of metal and ancient Arizona granite that through some time-accelerated osmosis have taken on each other’s positions in space and time. Granite appears elsewhere in the show, in the form of a 16-inch carved nose that appears to be the missing relic of a colossal figure. Johnson carved the nose from a granite stone leaving the backside raw and uncarved, implying this feature was broken off. Lichen appears to have taken growth on the raw stone, suggesting this was no recent severing.

Exhibition runs through to December 21st, 2013

Alison Jacques Gallery
16-18 Berners Street
London
W1T 3LN

www.alisonjacquesgallery.com

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JAKE AND DINOS CHAPMAN – COME AND SEE

Posted on 2013-12-02

The Chapmans began collaborating in the early 1990s and first gained attention for their work Disasters of War, a three-dimensional recreation of Goya’s series of etchings of the same name, for which they reconstructed Goya’s scenes of brutal violence using miniature plastic figurines that they carefully reshaped and painted by hand. Goya, and the Disasters of War particularly, have remained a continued presence in the Chapmans’s work. In 2003, they famously acquired a set of Goya’s etchings and altered them, painting clown and cartoon heads over the original faces of the figures.

Their large Hell landscapes, such as Hell (2000) and The Sum of All Evil (2012-13), are at once monumental in scale and minutely detailed. These apocalyptic landscapes, teeming with miniature figures, depict scenes of excessive brutality involving Nazi soldiers and, in more recent works, McDonald’s characters. The grotesque and often surreal violence of the scenes is offset by the overwhelming detail and painstaking labour evident in these and many of the Chapmans’s works.

Exhibition runs through to February 9th, 2014

Serpentine Gallery
Kensington Gardens
London
W2 3XA

www.serpentinegalleries.org

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DAMIEN HIRST & FELIX GONZALEZ-TORRES – CANDY

Posted on 2013-11-24

This is the first time that paintings from Hirst’s Visual Candy series have been presented together exclusively, and a candy spill work by Felix Gonzalez-Torres will serve as a counterpoint to the paintings. The exhibition showcases the ways in which each artist used the signifier of candy during the early 1990s, exploring questions of pure aesthetics and identity.

Featured in this exhibition is Gonzalez-Torres’ “Untitled”, 1992, a unique sculpture made of candies individually wrapped in variously coloured cellophane. Copiously piled in corners or spread across the floor as glittering carpets, the work can be manifested repeatedly in different forms and can continually change shape through every presentation. Although unique, the nature of the work is such that it can exist in more than one place at a time, and it will be installed in three different forms within the gallery.

The viewer is invited to actively participate, freely choosing whether to touch, take or consume the candy, engaging in a vibrant and multisensory experience. These sweets may be replenished regularly by gallery staff, creating a dynamic and varied ebb and flow. The volume and form of the work is thus altered throughout each day, continual change becoming the only element of permanence that defines the ‘life’ of the work.

Gonzalez-Torres once described how the candy spills were about learning to ‘let go’, a ‘refusal to make a static form [or] monolithic sculpture, in favour of a disappearing, changing, unstable and fragile form.’ Indeed, the candy spills imply that change enables the means for our continued existence; that life itself is in a permanent state of flux. Linear time collapses, as past, present and future coexist within these works, which have the possibility to be continually replenished or to simply disappear; the expansiveness of any moment, beyond the physical, is suggested.

Exhibition runs through to November 30th, 2013

Blain|Southern Gallery
4 Hanover Square
London
W1S 1BP

www.blainsouthern.com

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