The role of
the curator is a curious one. I never know whether to love, hate or admire
someone who can have such an enormous effect on who, what and even how the
public view artists, art and bodies of work. Artists are at the mercy of many
elements but a sympathetic curator with a genuine knowledge and love of the
work they are curating can do much to subtly introduce a brilliant piece with careful
placement or elevate a whole swathe of inconsequential nonsense by swamping an
exhibition like the water pump from John snow’s infamous Cholera map.
For those of
you unfamiliar with the graphic that is often touted as the poster boy for
visualisation, Snows map is famous as the tool that identified an outbreak of
Cholera in Soho in 1854 as having originated from a single infected water Pump.
This is all very convenient for demonstrating that mapping the deaths of humans
with dots on a map reveals much more than written statistics in interpreting
data. Very convenient but sadly not true. Snow had already surmised that water could
be the carrier of the disease and after collecting data to support his hypothesis,
used the map as a marketing tool. The sewer commission had already produced a
map with the death locations but Snow’s genius lay in the decision to leave a
lot of stuff out. He incised old grave sites and sewer locations and without
the clutter his theory that cholera had spread out from the water shone out
unimpeded.
I digress but
for good reason. Monika Kinley has done a great job curating here and it is not
simply because a lot of her friends are great artists. It is not even because
the original small 1983 show in her home was so diverse and vibrant. It is
because she had an idea, a hypothesis, a structure on which to hang the work.
It is not an exhaustive list but the show demonstrates that she completely
understands that Portraiture is not the destination when an artist sits down or
stands up to paint. It is the jumping off point, a reason to explore and express.
Just as a great love song can transcend the person it was written about and be just
as much about the condition itself, a great painting can speak to many people
about the same heady experience and communicate much more than a superficial
skin deep quality like appearance.
The
exhibition starts with this painting
Giuseppe Arcimboldo
Summer
Oil
on Canvas, c1527-1593
It is a
brilliant way to wrong foot and disinhibit people of the notion that
abstraction is a degradation, a modern notion that much like the Emperor’s new
clothes is all a load of baloney. It is not. In this case it is actually a load
of fruit. Arcimboldo is often lumped in with the mannerists because of the
strong relationship between nature and humans in his work but he was also a
product of the Renaissance. This was a guy born just eight years after Da Vinci.
Summer uses only summer fruit in its
depiction of a human figure and while it is not his best work (check out ‘The Librarian’ for proof that 400 years
later Picasso did not only look toward Africa for inspiration) it reminds us
that artists make faces not only as a way of sticking their tongue out at us
but also as a way to communicate riddles. Riddles incidentally both those
painting and those viewing may not understand.
Arcimboldo
was commissioned by the court in Vienna but even he knew that life was about
experience outside of the constraints of a frame and that he could use his work
to do more than represent .His comments like many here enlighten us about the
human condition, it’s absurdity and beauty, its dark canyons and bright prairies.
The works are carefully and cleverly laid out with Plymouth’s own George, of
Gilbert and George, represented by Exhausted
a child like black daubed scrawl on sixteen panels behind Paul Neagu’s Ceramic Skull an Escher like honeycombed
catacomb corridor full skull. The squareness of each anchoring them in place.
Clive Barker’s Head of Francis Bacon is
like a great nose on which a face lies and this is displayed near John Davies Dogman an acrylic head with eyes so
lifelike that you almost forget the ludicrous proboscis below them.
Gilbert and George
Exhausted
Mixed Media, 1980
Paul Neagu
Ceramic Skull Ceramic and Glaze, 1973
Clive Barker
Head of Francis Bacon
Bronze and Brass, 1978
John Davies
Dogman
Polyester Resin fibreglass and Steel, 1972
There are
also two great Auerbachs here. Until the Freud exhibition I have to confess
that I was not very familiar with his work but the two heads he has captured
here are curiously exactly what you would expect after seeing Freuds portrait.
The first Head of Bridget is charcoal
on paper and the other Head of Laurie Owen
oil on board, but in both his agitation is palpable. They both have rough
torn edge borders with mounting holes apparent and evidence of being scraped
right back. The Head of Bridget has
her forehead rubbed away in highlight, the rolled paper stretched like sea foam
where it has rolled together. In Head of
Laurie Owen the same turbulent ocean is rendered though more geometrically
in bold deep strokes, the gashes of dark sea, oil deep black and ominous. Owen
himself looks like a strange homogenous hieroglyph of Robert Powell and Willem
Dafoe, more manly, butch and Jesus like than either of them.
Frank Auerbach
Head of Bridget
Charcoal on Paper, 1973-4
Head of Laurie Owen
Oil on Board, 1971
There is a
great little Freud Small Head on the
opposite wall to Bridget and a Freud
like gangster on the same surface in Nigel Henderson’s Head of a man. All violence, solidity and weight, the tension
between the oil and photography that made it not quite resolved and hovering
like the menacing aura of a dangerous human just above the surface. There is
great contrast too. I love the frame of Sava Sekulic’s Napoleon and his Daughters the wooden board itself floating in a
beautiful subtle box frame, the image itself resonating with my own early
memories of the 1970’s as being predominantly brown but in a million different
shades, where even seemingly mundane pursuits like making a macramé plant pot
holder in Primary school are magnified by time into a towering achievement made
magical by the fact that when disassembled even the vegetation free household
could furnish three flare wearing individuals with funky belts. This is offset
by Hew Locke’s shimmering psychedelic garden centre silhouette of the monarch, Jungle Queen II all New York graffiti yellow,
pink, green and blues and David Whittaker’s The
Year List a great crossroads of style at which traditionalists and fans of
the less formal and more messy can meet and find common ground.
Lucien Freud
Small Head
Oil on Canvas, 1973-4
Head of a Man
Oil and Photographic Processes on card, 1956-61
There is much
to be commended in the way in which the work has been selected and displayed to
give it cohesion, but the overriding sense is one of relief. Relief that the
brevity has been finely balanced so as not to burden one with too much, but
also relief that distractions have been left out and that in future maybe more
curators will try to be as generous as Monika Kinley in sharing an idea without
drowning us in sewer locations.
Sava Sekulic
Napoleon and his Daughters
Oil on Board, 1975Hew Locke
Jungle Queen II
Mixed Media, 2003David Whittaker
The Year List
Oil and Acrylic on Canvas, 2012