The Artists Studio at Compton Verney

The Artists Studio
Compton Verney
26 September-13 December

Beginning in the 1640s with the first known depiction of an artist’s studio in Britain, the exhibition offers an insight into the way artists have represented their working spaces. Thematically organised, the show considers the studio as display space for the artist and his or her work; the studio within the academy; the studio as sociable space or garret; and as a private room for reflection and creation. Works by artists including Peter Tillman’s, R. P. Bonington, J.M.W. Turner, Thomas Rowlandson, George Morland, Edward Burne-Jones, Lord Leighton, W. P. Frith, and Ricketts and Shannon, offer personal and theoretical notions of how the studio has been perceived. The exhibition moves into the twentieth century with works by Mark Gertler, Jack B. Yeats, William Orpen, Eric Ravilious, Gwen John, William Coldstream, Rodrigo Moynihan and Euan Uglow.*Compton Verney*

Perry Ogden-Reece Mews, Francis Bacon’s Studio

I was looking forward to this exhibit. I had an Idea of what I hoped to see, a glimpse into the private world of the Artist (across medium-possibly to hopeful there) from the earliest documentation of studio life to the contemporary. It was the early representations of studio life in obscure and faded photographs that I found most interesting, so private and still formal. The more contemporary studio documentation felt somehow to familiar to me.

Compton Verney are still experiencing issues with hanging and lighting, shoddy at times in both cases. This is both distracting and disappointing.

Paul Ryan-Studio in your pocket

The sketch book has become the place that generates and holds my work. It provides the enclosure, surfaces, safety, experimentality of a studio. *Paul Ryan*

Gautier Deblonde-Artist’s studios

They are images that capture what the environment reveals about the artists and their works through the image of the space in the absence of the artists themselves but yet could be seen as a portrait of the artist. *Gautier Deblonde*

Luc Tuymans

Ron Mueck

Damien Hirst

Paula Rego

Contemporary artists represented include Art & Language, Shezad Dawood, Jeremy Deller, Andrew Grassie, Lisa Milroy, Paula Rego and Paul Ryan. New work has also been commissioned by Mark Fairnington and Sigrid Holmwood. Holmwood will be artist in residence within the exhibition at Compton Verney for the duration of the show. *Compton Verney*

For me the exhibit did not reach far enough into the contemporary or investigate the realistic nature of the Artists studio today, now so diverse and quite possibly difficult. The term Studio is, I’m almost certain, applied to kitchens, bathrooms, garden sheds and squats, as needs must in an economically uncertain time. To re create a *studio* within the gallery-though I understand its context in relation to the early and traditional craft of the painter (which the Artist in residence employs as an integral part of her practice)-seemed an overly Romanticized version of an environment that I am not convinced many Artists emerging or established work within. This is not a comment on the Artists practice, but rather on a curratorial miss step.
Artist studio reconstruction-Sigrid Holmwood
Such a shame that there was a rope dividing Artist from audience. There was a division for me in this simple object that undermined the point of the exhibit and placed the audience firmly apart from the Artist. Who was *in studio* on my visit.

This was a safe academic visit to the Artists studio-whatever that may be today wasnt investigated enough despite the exhibition information which promised much more.

OTHER NEWS-if you are in Paris:
Rosson Crow-Paris Texas
Galerie Nathelie Obadia

Grand salon, 1976

Boo Saville and Brian Cheeswright

Boo Saville-Indefinate Series, oil on canvas, 2009

The last couple of posts have been just a taste of what I have been looking at lately. Just to share.

Brian Cheeswright-Hag, 2008

Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon-Study for Portrait II (after the Life Mask of William Blake),1955

Matthew Stone ‘cry out’

Matthew Stone. Artist featured on this blog.

CRY OUT (Trailer by Matthew Stone) – Presented by the Theo Adams Company from Theo Adams on Vimeo.

…

a sad transaction.

*There and Everywhere* at Transition. *Lucifer Over London* at The Rifflemaker

‘There and Everywhere’
Helen Couchman, Liz Harrison, David Webb
Transition Gallery
London
E8
6-29th November

Like the numerous luggage labels from different locations pasted onto battered suitcases, artists’ journeys now take centre stage on the cultural landscape. In his manifesto of altermodernity Nicolas Bourriaud proclaims that in our era of globalisation, artists have become nomads ‘wandering in time, space and mediums’. And that their work now ‘arises out of negotiations between different agents from different cultures and geographical locations.’ (Transition)

Untitled (Collecting and Dropping) like the fan around which the piece revolves, is an open work, touching upon a range of overlapping issues and ideas. It raises thoughts about the artist’s relation (as a citizen of the UK residing in China) to tourism, to observation and to being, in turn, herself observed. It also raises thoughts about the inevitably esoteric codes of a foreign culture in which one finds oneself still a stranger, an outsider, no matter how long one stays. (Helen Couchman)

Helen Couchman from the series ‘Collecting and dropping’ photographic print 2007-2009

David Webb
David Webb’s concept for the exhibition began with his grandmothers journey, by sea, from Tanzania to London in 1955. Webb selected Couchman and Harrison to explore the themes of travel and ancestry. Standing out for me are Couchman’s photographs so delicate and yet powerful. See the rest of the series ‘collecting and dropping’ HERE.

Documentation 2004
The exhibit got me thinking about travels and their impact on me as Artist and indivudual, I cant claim to have immersed myself in a new culture, and travel is a gift, but the places I have chosen to visit have indeed opened a door to thoughts of ancestry and altered, permanently, the course of my focus. Documentation made of my travels reminds me of that. The exhibit reconnected me to that experience.

Lucifer Over London
Artists Anonymous
The Riflemaker
21 September – 21 November
London
W1

Artists Anonymous are a collective of three painters, photographers and filmmakers. They describe themselves as primarily painters but all three media are used in their installations. Often the time-based media of performance and film are utilised in the same way as other artists plan and develop projects through drawing. (Riflemaker)

This was my first visit to the gallery, I liked the unrestored feel of the place, it also feels temporary in some ways which will add to its versatility, small but perfectly formed too.

I have wanted to catch an AA exhibit for a while now, and really pleased that I did. I realise that I have included more text than the average post on this blog but having read the exhibition catalogue I felt that the commentary was appropriate here, if edited down.

The artists themselves always appear in their work but as a collective they forego their individual identities to collaborate on a permanent basis. They operate within agreed rules established when they first met at art school in Berlin in 2001. Agreeing at that time no individual would ever work independently of the group. They would always operate as Artists Anonymous. (Riflemaker)

That’s a serious commitment, and one that I don’t think I could make at any point in my career, and it makes this group of artists all the more fascinating to me.

..Doubling and reversal, in and through painting and its mirroring in photography: Artists Anonymous bring painting and photography into direct contact with each other. Instead of the absent photograph providing the model for the painting which is present, their paintings are presented in pairs with their ‘afterimages’, photographs of the painting in negative colour-reversal, presented at the same scale as the painting. That the paintings are produced from photographic sources, then doubled through reversal in the paired photograph, sets these pairings as dialectical loops, in which the original image is no longer important. Colour negatives, in contrast to black and white negative images, have a visual interest that goes beyond their status as ‘negatives’.( JJ Charlesworth 2009)

Not included in the exhibit:

Artists Anonymous suggest that these images should be seen an aesthetic reality in and for themselves. What counts is the experience of the doubling and inversion for itself – an experience which doesn’t prompt the viewer to search for the ‘origin’ of the image, but rather encourages us to be aware of the artwork’s capacity to overcome the subordinate relationship of artwork to reality – whether painterly or photographic. AA’s images do not represent, but present the condition of the image when art attempts to address reality.( JJ Charlesworth 2009)

Its true, I didnt/dont search for the origin of the work, I revel in the image placed in front of me, I look for the double, as an extra layer to my entertainment, but only because I know to expect it. Everyone portrayed seems *caught in the act* but unashamed. The double exists for me as a sinister look at the second layer of the event or character.

“We’re anonymous not because we want to be anonymous as artists or people but because we want the work we create to be anonymous and free from assumptions that viewers might make from meeting anyone of us individually.’Artists Anonymous (Riflemaker)

The exhibition is small in regards to the works on show, which is why I have included some of my favorites from past exhibits as further example and because I am such a fan of the work.

The world of AA is strange, but recognisable. A world of fantastical figures, or of figures in clown masks (but not masked clowns), of erotic or pornographic encounters, of bodies that are disguised or transformed, all bathed in the acidic, kaleidoscopic light of AA’s inverted palette. But while the subjects often seem exotic, these scenes cannot be described as fictions. They do not pretend to refer to a self-contained reality elsewhere, whether fictional or fantastic. They are instead stagings, forms of orchestrated display, like arrested theatre. They are scenes of excess and violence, play and disaster. Scenes steeped in the visual forms of the commodities of urban mass culture – although these are the trash of commodity culture, not the slick products generated by brand industry and the corporate media.( JJ Charlesworth 2009)

Text: *Three dialectical inversions: images and afterimages of Artists Anonymous* JJ Charlesworth 2009

Apologies again for the quality of some of the photographs in this post…BUT I have a new camera now, so that should help.