‘A Sort of Night to the Mind, A KIND OF NIGHT FOR OUR THOUGHTS’ exhibition @ Arch 402 Gallery, London

This is an interesting mixed show of contemporary painters in London at the Arch 402 Gallery, some abstract, some semi-abstract, figurative and cross-disciplinary. This is showing until 10 June, 2011 (gallery hours: Wed-Fri 11-6, Sat-Sun 11-3 PM).

Roger Kelly, 'Separator' 2011

Phillip Allen,  Edwin Aitken,  Andrew Bick,  Simon Burton,  Varda Caivano,  Leigh Clarke,  Nigel Cooke,  Moyra Derby,  Pamela Golden,  Mark Hampson,  Beth Harland,  Mark Harris,  Vincent Hawkins,  Claude Heath,  Paul Housley,  Roger Kelly,  Bob Matthews,  Andrea Medjesi-Jones,  Jost Münster,  Martina Schmid,  Joel Tomlin,  Phoebe Unwin,  Julian Wakelin

'A Sort of Night to the Mind, A KIND OF NIGHT FOR OUR THOUGHTS', an exhibition of twenty-three UK based artists engaged with painting. Curated by Moyra Derby and Bob Matthews, the exhibition will also host a series of talks and educational events led by some of the featured artists.

 
Two alternative translations of Honoré de Balzac’s description of illusion from the 1832 short story ‘The Purse’ provide the title for this exhibition. First shown at The Herbert Read Gallery  at the University for the Creative Arts in Canterbury, ‘A Sort of Night to the Mind, A KIND OF NIGHT FOR OUR THOUGHTS’ demonstrates the recurring relevance of illusion and in counterpoint, materiality. Illusion and materiality can be argued as so inevitable in the context of painting as to hardly warrant remark, but at the same time they muster such historically resonant responses and strength of feeling that they can feel like a prompt to take sides. However it is an interest in the productive play between these two qualities of a marked surface that has brought this group of works together, an acknowledgment of the imaginative potential of oppositions; “In the half light the physical tricks used by art to make things seem real disappear completely.... At that hour illusion reigns supreme; perhaps it comes with the night? Is not illusion a kind of night for our thoughts, a night which we furnish with dreams.'

Andrew Bick, oil on canvas, 2010

James Turrell at Gagosian Gallery, London, UK

Abstraction's evolution in the of James Turrell at Gagosian, London until 10th December 2010. 

James Turrell, Sustaining Light, 2007
Wood, computerized neon setting, glass piece
Aperture: 62 1/4 x 46 1/2 inches (158.1 x 118.1 cm)
 (C) James Turrell/Gagosian Gallery

 

'Through light, space can be formed without physical material like concrete or steel. We can actually stop the penetration of vision with where light is and where it isn't. Like the atmosphere, we can't see through it to the stars that are there during the day. But as soon as that light is dimmed around the self, then this penetration of vision goes out. So I'm very interested in this feeling, using the eyes to penetrate the space.' James Turrell

6-24 Britannia Street
London 

WC1X 9JD
Hours: Tue-Sat 10-6

If you haven't seen Turrell's work here is a video:

 

Painting against Mussolini: Art and the Fall of a Dictator, Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art, London

Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art in London, from 22nd September - 19th December 2010

these dark painting from Mafai and Garelli are worth seeing. we are often more aware of the painting from this period of Max Beckmann and other New Objectivity paintings that stood against Fascism than Italian painting from that time. They should be appreciated more and still retain much of the original power all these years later worth a trip to North London...

Mario Mafai, Fantasia - Interrogation, 1941-43

                                                           Franco Garelli, Shooting, c. 1944

'Throwing Shapes' @ Coleman Project Space and Cafe Gallery, London

7 October - 7 November 2010

This is an interesting exhibition of a group of diverse artists working with abstraction in London. Defining 'hard-edge' abstraction in its diverse forms from installation to raw canvas. Here's the blurb, not sure how much I believe... Coleman Project Space presents a two-venue initiative curated by Rebecca Geldard with Vanessa Jackson, Clare Goodwin, Alasdair Duncan and Kilian Rüthemann.

'Jan & Dan', Claire Goodwin, 68 cm x 50 cm, Medium: Mixed media, Catalogue No: CGP1259

'Throwing Shapes' is a group exhibition on the itinerant nature of abstract painting’s core motifs. The conversational starting point for this colourful dialogue between venues, and works in various media, is a large-scale wall-painting commission by Vanessa Jackson at CGP London’s Cafe Gallery.

While the title elicits the notion of sharply defined forms flung, or Modernist-indebted visual strategies, it also references dance and music. ‘Throwing shapes’, like the term ‘abstract’ for an art context, has become a generic expression. It is now synonymous with human movement to music/sounds of all kinds but was initially used to describe the repetitive physical actions associated with electronic dance music: a simple sign language for those under its influence.

• Vanessa Jackson, Dimensions not supplied, Medium: Installation, Catalogue No: CGP1248

This sense of reduction and recycling of forms and trends - given the recent nu-rave revival traceable through music, art and fashion, for example - is key to the exhibition remit. 'Throwing Shapes' does not attempt to survey the new, however, or plot fixable paths between the past and present, rather identify some curious conceptual territories emerging from artists’ re-negotiation of these basic forms; locate points at which specific aesthetic languages shift, mutate or break down.

Alasdair Duncan’s “signs for the future” pitch the viewer between the language of propaganda, painting and the perfunctory signage of everyday life. The London-based artist’s colour-rich, optimistic motifs, borrowed equally from the Bauhaus as the Highway Code, will appear here in two site-specific vinyl and sculptural works at Coleman Project Space.

Zürich-based Clare Goodwin also mines the past in a strangely positive way, her human-titled paintings conveying both the gritty reality of an era and sense of nostalgia one can have for a time that is not their own. Seventies design graphics and Op-art strategies appear rudely cropped into seductively hard-edged, conceptually adulterous compositional unions.

It makes perfect sense that Vanessa Jackson’s ritual play on canvas with geometric systems should find its way onto public surfaces given her interest in the democracy of mathematical approaches to art. Where Jackson’s ambitious three-floor mural for Sadler’s Wells in 2008 provided a lyrical framework for the performative dimension of the site, here the big white box of CGP London will become test-cell for the optical and kinetic possibilities of forms placed “arm-in-arm, hip-to-hip” in space. 

Swiss artist Kilian Rüthemann is known for his minimal, mostly temporary sculptural alterations to architectural spaces. For this, Rüthemann’s first London exhibition, the Basel-based artist will show a film in Coleman Project Space’s acclaimed Shed Space. Here, the virtual realm of the computer program provides the contextual fabric for his study of line and form as dictated by the flight paths of birds at sunset.

Times: Thursday - Sunday from 12 - 5pm.

Coleman Project Space

Anni Albers
Anni Albers paintings and prints are at Alan Cristea Gallery in London, these are maze like patterns and eye popping geometric constallations that show she was a true original at the Bauhaus. There are a number of series on show across a long career in Europe and United States, helping to set up, with her husband the painter Josef Albers, after World War II, the Black Mountain College, that 'powerhaus' of avant-garde thought in art, music and performance that influenced the next generation of creatives emerging in the 1950's and 1960's.


'Orange Meander'
1970
Screenprint
Paper 80.8 X 60.9 cm
Image 42.0 x 42.0 cm
Edition of 75



Josef Albers, Homage to the Square, Guarded, 1952
Oil on masonite. JAAF: 1976.1.1341. 60.96 x 60.96 cm (24 x 24 inches) ©2003 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

For Josef Albers also see the following exhibitions:

Utopia matters: from Brotherhoods to Bauhaus at the Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin. January 22, 2010 through April 11, 2010

Josef Albers: Innovation and Inspiration at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. February 11, 2010 through April 11, 2010