Vacuumed Gerbil Maze

Jennifer Caroline Campbell joins the humming mix of fatigue and hype that is the Frieze London crowd in Regents Park

 

The air is not as crisp as it could be and the leaves show just hint of red beginnings. A sign says ‘Only handbags and laptops past this point’ but my rucksack passes. I’m glad because I know I will need a tangerine break. It’s all about finding glimmers of orange —this is what a friend recently told me in an altered state, and she’s right. A glimmer of orange can be many things: a spark of curiosity, a coded cackle, a syrupy invitation, a snag, a fascination, a puncture, a quenching vision or a partially veiled secret, told under the breath. What kind of glimmers will surface for me at the annual art-cram today?

Benedikte Bjerre, The Birds, 2017, foil, helium at Palace Enterprise Gallery 

My first find is a cluster of baby penguins swaying gently in the air-conditioned breeze. They take the opportunity to dance to the wafting currents made by the keen art seeking humans, who circulate all around them in an irregular stream. This bobbing flightless crew of helium chicks, The Birds by Benedikte Bjerre, feels like an apt start, playing effectively with both the local and wider context. A child runs through them and the whole group responds by leaning outwards and then right back in towards each other, briefly conspiring. I can sense their collective thirst for oceanic freedom, something that will never be fulfilled within this vacuumed carpet grid. As hypnotic as this installation is, I mustn’t linger here, I need to set an efficient pace. I am a worm with huge greedy eyes, and Frieze art fair is a rarely occurring apple. This is the unnatural mindset that takes hold when viewing art in this very particular way. I plan to navigate the space methodically, following the grid lines and leaving no stone unturned. But I soon get disoriented, and my path becomes the silken thread of a drunken spider surfing Brownian motion. Will the apple be juicy or full of brittle safe bets this year? Capital is leaking out, jeopardy is seeping in. And the bigger question looms over like a silent storm cloud, closer than ever, the question of who gets to see art, who gets to make art and who gets to be human. Art is never made or viewed in a vacuum, no matter how white the walls are. The world that surrounds the microcosm of Frieze this year feels particularly violent, cruel and divisive. I wonder what will retain meaning on the art platter in this kind of moment.

Kiki Furlan at Gianni Manhattan Gallery 

I stop in front of a peachy coloured fish, pictured in felt, part of Kiki Furlan’s solo presentation with Gianni Manhattan Gallery. The fish floats in fuzzy beige water, enveloped from its surroundings. Yet it also edges towards uncanny materiality, like a hidden memory surfacing from the shadows, inching slowly into graspable space. I wouldn’t want to grab this fish though, because the inviting softness of the felt is laced with a hint of something unnerving, like the rot on the underside of fruit when it takes you by surprise. This mix of seduction and repulsion is enriched by this work occupying a place between image and object, between illusion and body. Another of these felted pictures is more like a pretend drawing, black felted lines describe a straggly headless figure with clompy shoes, a soft grey backdrop feels close and a hand reaches towards a tiny tree. 

Gal Schindler, Vagueness was the insides of nature, 2023, oil on wood at Galerie Sultana

Nearby I find Gal Schindler’s quenching paintings in Galerie Sultana’s booth. In an instant Schindler’s paintings undo all the sly poison that I have contracted from looking at various female nudes in numerous old paintings. Suddenly its ok to have a human and feminine body, it’s a treat rather than a trap. I vow to moisturise every inch of myself more often. Slick but unruly, Schindler’s figures unashamedly and playfully take up space, licking across the pastel painted surface, while suggesting that they won’t stay put for long. Unfixed within their frames, they often spill over the edges of the canvas, like excessively applied eyeshadow wondering across a steady face. There is a feeling of chance embraced. Hurrying on, I’m caught by a large Florian Krewer painting (Michael Werner Gallery). Two figures in sporty winter clothes share an urban landscape with two dice, mid roll, perhaps just thrown. The ambiguous setting could be a flood lit carpark or empty motorway. Chance might be cruel or kind here, and all is fleeting, speeding uphill on tarmac. I check my watch; time is ticking too fast already.  

 

Umico Niwa’s installation at Someday Gallery

I rejoin the lazy river of movement, skipping past a few booths. My standards are higher now, having found some treasures already, and I’m quicker to dismiss certain artworks this year. No matter how much I agree (and I do agree) with statements like ‘refugees welcome’ or ‘my body my choice’, I have no interest in these words made in neon or stitch and stuck on a white wall. Maybe it’s the influence of the wider context: a destructive and divided world blinded by reductive slogans. Suddenly I’m drawn down close to the scratchy grey carpet by pieces of fruit, dried twigs and burnt leaves, parading and contorting there. This is Umico Niwa’s installation for Someday Gallery. Some of these fruity shrubby pieces cartwheel up metal ramps, arranging themselves in formation, some teeter on sharp edges, and some recline exhausted in corners. This work brings so many things to mind and twists them. I am reminded of making mazes for my pet gerbils when I was nine. At the same time, I think of futile moments spent trying to function in a world that often feels designed to trip me up. This installation also leads my thoughts to connect with things that I’ve read about microbial cooperation (via Melin Sheldrake) and the changeable behaviours of various genders of animal species (via Lucy Cooke). Niwa’s work snags me in just the right way, and I want to sit on the floor with it, to stretch and giggle. I must keep moving though, more orange slithers await my searching eyes.

Rose Wylie, Ballet Backdrop, 2024, oil on canvas in four parts, 366 x 304 cm at David Zwirner 

A Tracy Emin monotype claws out at me unexpectedly, the one open eye of a scratched and scrunched figure holds my gaze. Only the top half of her is visible, held tightly by a black inky swamp. She is one of many, all versions of the same outsider, fiercely holding ground, every mark a corrosion. I hone in on some favourites — paintings by Lynette Yiadom Boakye and Ken Kiff that I was looking forward to seeing. But somehow these works seem disenchanted under the bright lights. Arts fairs can have a strange effect and not all art works thrive here. Swimming onwards I worry that the Rose Wylie paintings (David Zwirner gallery) will have lost their power too. But happily, I’m proved wrong. Wylie’s huge sludgy lines crawl across the canvas with their usual unbridled enthusiasm. Her giant painted girls wear triangular skirts, designer suits and nakedness. They are fragmented, repeated and send out an unapologetic chirping song. It’s like a dressing-up day at the best jumble sale, where everything has become zingy lumpy toothpaste and delicious lipstick is plastered onto parading mouths. 

Georg Baselitz, Bob Flies up into the Sky, 2023, oil and plastic on canvas, 309 x 484 x 5 cm at White Cube 

Just when I thought my headache was going to ground me into pulp, a towering Georg Baselitz (White Cube Gallery) knocks me into a new weightlessness. I gape upwards at the exposed pink bellies of twin birds who glide confidently across a brisk ice sky. Skating swiftly on, I’m strangely welcomed in by a large painting of a quivering reddish tree with specks of mustard (Oliver Bak’s painting with Spruth Magers). Its shadow is like a speckling of cherry stains on dusky low-lying mist. Maybe I need to go outside and look at a squirrel? Maybe a I need to go outside and hold a squirrel? ‘Yes, you do' nods an allied fox, breaking from its usual stealth and making itself visible in a Bill Lynch painting (Approach Gallery). No time for a pinch of park life though, I’ve got to cram some more glimmers into my sagging eyes.  

 

Rory Pilgram, Who do I Choose to Follow, 2023, oil, crayon, pencil & nail polish on paper, 70 x 100 cm at Maureen Paley

I try a booth that attracts me from a distance, but on closer inspection is packed full of formulaic landscape paintings, like giant stagnant jigsaw puzzles. No time for this nothingness. Crawl onwards, I must. Some vibrant works on paper by Rory Pilgram (Maureen Paley Gallery) give me just the vitamin I need. Crayon, pencil and nail polish tell of adventures where horses and humans frequent glowing green and pink lakes under dancing skies, beside galloping fields and whistling sea. Drawings always have a particularly strong voice at Frieze. The architecture of the fair is repetitive, like airport queuing systems, and my already-keen thirst for imperfect human-made lines is ramped up, an antidote to my surroundings. I come across an elegantly splotchy painting of a princess-like lady leaning against an accommodating tree at Almine Rech’s Booth. She wears a powder-blue Miss-Muffet-style dress that is threatening to sail her right up into the fairytale sky above. In the background a pink castle with unblinking windows waits earnestly. This painting is by Genieve Figgis, who lives the Wicklow Mountains near Dublin, and makes fabulous absurd painted retellings of historical subjects, goulash and luscious in equal measure. This painting refuels me.

Naminapu Maymuru-White at Sullivan and Strumpf 

 

Pumped up on these multicoloured fantasies, I worry that a sugar crash is on the horizon. But Naminapu Maymuru-White’s paintings scoop me up just in time. Her works, on display at Sullivan and Strumpf, are all made with white earth pigment on bark and they invite me to dance with my headache instead of resisting it. The cold light of the art fair becomes a thriving shimmer when filtered through her effortless blend of figuration and abstraction. The works are intricate but not fussy, and they flow like a circular story weaving a time-bending rhythm. Maymuru-White lives and works in Yirrkala, Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory, Australia, and is one of the first Yolŋu women to be taught to paint miny’tji (sacred creation clan designs). I almost fall over looking at them, a bit like when standing in front of one of Bridget Riley’s monochrome op art paintings. Riley’s hard lines and aggressive illusionary effect often make me nauseous. In contrast, Maymuru-White’s paintings have a singing touch that both elevates and softens their optical effect. She uses repeat and pattern to transcend the surface of the gently warping bark. I want to spend time with these paintings is a very different setting from here. 

Gabriella Boyd at Grimm Gallery 

 

With a taste for abstraction alight in my belly, I am excited to find two tall paintings by Gabriella Boyd. Previously I have enjoyed Boyd’s paintings for their ability to hover between internal and external, between recognisable and not. These two paintings (named Sun (i) and Sun (ii), part of Grimm Gallery’s display) seem to burst into a new zone, her usual textured and prancing brush marks move further towards an abstract space that could have been sculpted by sudden sunlight. I could step into these spaces, hold the twisted forms and untangle the darting spurts of line. But I would not want to because that would undo this concoction of touched energy. 

Ali Eyal, Look what I Remember, 2024, oil on canvas, 83 x 101 cm at ChertLüdde

 

Despite my now hastening gait, I look for a long while into a splintered goofy landscape populated with bodies that seem horribly soft, like jittery legs after a clanky rollercoaster. Ali Eyal’s painting, Look what I Remember at ChertLüdde, lets me know about both old and present disasters in a new way. Like a child’s memory pulling at an adult’s shirt sleeve, it is a necessary reminder of the brutal steamroller of destruction still rolling in the distance, and all the unimaginable crumbling crying worlds it leaves in its wake. It reminds me of Phillip Guston’s skill with fleshy cartoonised motifs, in the sense that a comic voice can be the jester in the room, speaking about the things that other voices cannot. But in contrast to Guston, this is a small and intricate painting, more wispy than slabby. It interjects an effective unease, while only speaking as loudly as a tea stain. Its sickened landscape, populated by lost shoes and subtly contorting men in beige uniforms, brings the looming question to the surface again, the question of who gets to be human. It is a truthfully distorting window through time and space and a necessary puncture in the art fair bubble. I flick back into the present, blinking. Time is running out. 

  

An oversized, ruddied and bejewelled, extraterrestrial crustacean threatens to devour me. This is Nils Alix Tabeling’s sculpture, and it might jump out of Public gallery’s booth, as fast as a mother tarantula in bristling stilettos. In the centre of her body hangs an intricate gathering of sacred charms that might bewitch me if she desires. She is spiky and influential, like the glamorous but hardy person at the party who can throw shade as casually as a blow dart. Ellen Berkenblit’s painting (at Contemporary Fine Art) gives me a similar feeling of a sharp yet muted aggression. A claustrophobically cropped figure looks towards something outside of the frame, with a seething glare, while a gramophone horn shouts at the back of her head, where her hair is ironed perfectly straight. An untethered light bulb is beginning to flash a red warning while threatening to plug into her collar bone. It’s a freeze-frame of a nightmare and the protagonist is reassuringly tough, her eyes hardened over like a digital insect. My eyes, in contrast, are becoming mushy with overload, unscreened they have let everything in.  

Eva Gold at Rose Easton 

Just as I’m about to escape into the park with my uneaten tangerine and dry mouth, I spot Eva Gold’s installation in Rose Easton’s booth, where an off-white leather sofa faces a mute charcoal drawing of a burning shed. It is as if the drawing itself is waiting to combust. A pile of printouts where a coffee table should be offer confessional notes that feel close to the bone. This curbed outpouring, fictitious or not (or both), clings to my exhausted thoughts like a sour flavour. James Baldwin once said, ‘art has to be a kind of confession’ and he is right. He also said, ‘Artists are here to disturb the peace’. True enough, but this is so often taken the wrong way. Try too hard to be loud and you become invisible, blending into the racket that is the backdrop to current living. Gold gets it just right with this icy twin of a living room, slotted in amongst the art hustle. It is a quiet disrupter and its staged atmosphere of control is a glint of realness, pinning down the entire art fair like a carefully flung shard of plastic. 

Eva Gold, Acts of Violence (after Haneke), 2024, at Rose Easton

I stumble out into the dimming park, where small dogs in fashionable jackets yap into the coming night. I witness a crow drinking coffee from a discarded takeaway cup. Flooded with the afterimages of all that I have seen, and the connected tangle of thoughts, I pop a paracetamol and gratefully head home for a jacket potato.

Jennifer Caroline Campbell

Frieze London

Regents Park, London NW1

9-13 October 2024

A Window on the (Art) World

Cathy Lomax encounters windows, doors, curtains and an ex prime minister at Frieze London 2024

Frieze London, as many commentators have noted, was a little different this year. Laid out in four sections with distinct connecting portals it felt easier to navigate. It also messed with the usual hierarchy of visibility with the ‘focus’ section made up of young galleries at the front of the fair rather than the back. This meant that it was White Cube, Gagosian and David Zwirner that were encountered wearily after trudging through acres of art rather than Someday, Gallery Artbeat and Stars. 

I like to have a theme at Frieze to provide a framework for my art looking, something I decide upon unscientifically after surveying a few stands. The rejigged running order and the connecting points between the different sections of the fair led to my 2024 theme — windows, doors and curtains —domestic devices which facilitate connections and divisions and, in the process, may be both revealing and concealing. I have chosen ten works and one area to represent this theme which are set out as they were encountered.

 

Charlotte Edey, The Tower, 2024, freshwater pearl, glass beads, tourmaline, onyx, obsidian, aventurine, white jade, silk, organza, woven jacquard, soft pastel on sanded paper, sapele panel frame, 124 x 47 x 4 cm

Charlotte Edey, The Tower at Ginny on Frederick, London
Edey’s detailed polished work, which includes tapestries and pastel drawings, aligns with a current renewed interest in surrealism. The gallery press release describes her mark-making as ‘acts of introspection, where materials become windows into deeper psychological states.’ The Tower quite literally depicts windows, and indeed curtains, laid out in a partitioned wooden frame to create something akin to a dolls house or picture book.

Georgina Hill, City Lights

 

Georgina Hill, City Lights at South Parade, London

Hill’s solo presentation City Lights in South Parade’s Focus booth is populated by stained-glass light boxes that illuminate and dim. These immediately link to fanlights, sidelights and transom windows, that is windows in, alongside and above front doors, part of British 19th and 20th century housing vernacular. They all evoke an aesthetic that populates the communal spaces of churches and pubs – places where people gather and commune.  As the Frieze website sets out: ‘Flashing on and off, Hill’s installation is in constant flux, mapping London’s social constellations in colour and texture.’

Paul Anthony Smith, Eye Fi Di Tropics, Saint Martin, 2024, unique picotage on inkjet print

Paul Anthony Smith, Eye Fi Di Tropics, Saint Martin at Timothy Taylor, London & New York

The curtains in this work by Paul Anthony Smith are added to an idyllic view of a Caribbean sunset with Smith’s signature technique, picotage. Borrowed from a process used in textile manufacturing picotage involves picking at the surface with a needle to create raised areas. These textural curtains are added by Smith to remind us that we are looking and we are not actually there. 

Louise Giovanelli, Dado, 2024, oil on canvas

 

Louise Giovanelli, Dado, at Grimm, Amsterdam, London & New York

Giovanelli’s flawless paintings of incidental subjects, such as curtains (which she has painted numerous times), use their subject as a sumptuous vehicle to explore the formal qualities of colour meeting light meeting texture. They are however not mere exercises in technique. Instead, as Giovanelli explains, the ambiguousness invites imaginative thinking: ‘These curtains, once thrown back, offer this promise to enter another realm – and once closed, contain that promise. The painting hangs in a suspended state, leaving us wondering whether the show is over, or in fact just beginning.’

Dirk Braeckman T.S.-0.5.-18 #1, 2018, gelatin silver print reversibly mounted on aluminium support and frame

Dirk Braeckman T.S.-0.5.-18 #1 at Grimm, Amsterdam, London & New York

Braeckman’s numbered works feature images from his daily surroundings. He uses his darkroom as a painter might use their studio, to experiment with images, thereby suggesingt forms and creating atmosphere. The artist’s biography on the gallery website fittingly describes his work as offering ‘a window into an unidentified reality’.

Merlin James, Hanger, 2016, mixed materials, 69 × 109 cm

Merlin James, Hanger, at Maureen Paley, London

In Hanger we see what appears to be the reverse of a stretched canvas — the generally unseen, hidden side. Using a translucent fabric to indicate curtains and darkly stained wooden stretcher bars to form the structure of a window, James creates an intriguing formal work which conceals more than it reveals. 

Kayla Witt, Please Ring Doorbell Twice, 2024 oil on canvas wrapped panel

Kayla Witt, Please Ring Doorbell Twice, at Night Gallery, Los Angeles

Witt uses doors, storefronts, and symbols of wellness culture in her surreal meditations on the marketing of pain and healing. Her door with its sunburst fanlight and fiery window framework is a door sized oil on canvas painting which if it didn’t look so domestic could be an additional escape route from the fair.

Lubaina Himid, Lost Door, 2015 acrylic on wood

Lubaina Himid, Lost Door at Hollybush Gardens, London

The second door on show is by Lubiana Himid, an artist has a history of painting on doors. Her series Five Conversations featured portraits of everyday stylish women on reclaimed doors from Georgian houses which were displayed along the New York High Line and positioned to allow the painted women to converse. Lost Door is a similarly reclaimed door with door furniture intact, but it stands on its own hinged to the wall and slightly (and invitingly) ajar. Painted in earthy tones with animal and camera motifs and repeat patterning, it seems to reference the type of fabric that reads as quintessentially African but in actuality reveals the role of colonisation in the formation of cultural stereotypes.

Ha Chong-Hyun, Conjunction 14-694, 2014 oil on hemp cloth

Ha Chong-Hyun, Conjunction 14-694 at Tina Kim Gallery, New York

Ha Chong-Hyun began his Conjunction series in the 1970s. The conjunction is the physical connection between method and materials. He uses burlap rather than canvas to allow him to approach the canvas from the reverse, pushing thick paint through the loose weave to diminish the trace of human agency. 

Isabel Nolan, For elsewhere, 2024, painted mild steel, 260 x 146 x 1 cm

 

Isabel Nolan, For elsewhere at Kerlin Gallery, Dublin
Nolan’s work which ranges from the architectural – steel sculptures that frame or obstruct our path – to small handmade objects in clay, hand-tufted wool rugs, and drawings and paintings using gouache or colouring pencils, explores the ‘intimacy of materiality’. The linking thread is the communication of being equally enchanted by and afraid of the world around us, expressing humanity’s fear of mortality and deep need for connection.

Manuel Chavajay’s work at Pedro Cera in the Smoke section being viewed by ex-prime minister Rushi Sunak

 

Smoke (and mirrors)

Beyond the big galleries, on the furthest fringe of the tent, lies Smoke, organised by Pablo José Ramírez (Curator, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles), this new themed section features galleries showing ceramic works that explore diasporic and indigenous histories. Each gallery in Smoke is separated not by a wall but by a filmy smoky-toned translucent curtain, with an arch shaped hole cut in it to facilitate drifting between the spaces. When I looked back at my photographs, I realised that I had captured an image of former prime minister Rushi Sunak being shown around Manuel Chavajay’s pots at Pedro Cera (I hadn’t noticed him when taking the picture). On the wall to the right of Sunak, is a painting of what looks like, through the smoky boundary, a curtain (by an unidentified artist). In this chance merging of these accumulated layers and a prominent politician it is hard to resist comparing the curtain, a device designed to obscure a clear view and end a performance, with the world of politics – as alien to the artworld as the glossy environs of Frieze are to the artist labouring in their studio. 

Cathy Lomax

Frieze London

Regents Park, London NW1

9-13 October 2024

Tim

Michael Ajerman’s very personal remembrances of British figurative painter, writer and curator Timothy Hyman RA (1946 - 2024)

RB Kitaj, Tim in Paris, 1982, charcoal on paper

I knew Tim Hyman’s portrait before I knew him. A head drawn in charcoal with a flowing scarf caught in the wind by RB Kitaj seen in a catalogue at my New York art school.

 

When I put the two together… I don’t know. Tim came to the Slade to do a talk on Balthus when I was a student, drawing a medium sizes crowd. I was really keen so I was there, up close, and attentive. Tim brought in so many Balthus catalogues to the talk to share with students. I’d never seen a lecturer do that. Tim believed in books.

 

He showed one slide (yes slides folks) of Balthus’s brother, Pierre Klossowski’s works.  One of his Diane and Actaeon color pencil drawings. I had never heard of Pierre and can still see the image clear in my mind today. That image sent me on an uncharted path. Tim’s mind and finger pointing me in such a new direction, as he had done for so many.  He gave me an issue of London Magazine that evening which had a long article on Balthus that he had written. A treasure.

 

This was before Tim had entered the Royal Drawing School as staff. The RDS seemed to allow Tim to go from a minor visiting art lecturer position to a stronger corner of education. It was clear after a few years that Tim’s approach to drawing was becoming the basis of a house style for the school. Strong personalities can enable that in students.

 

Tim always denigrated anything that had a whiff of the Life Room. Especially Slade F Studio beliefs, even though drawing was so vital to him.  But not THAT kind of drawing.  We both shared a deep interest in RB Kitaj. He would strongly express his view that Kitaj’s peek was early on. Paintings like Eerie Shore (1966) and If Not, Not (1975) were favourites, while believing his batting average of hits went way down afterwards. One time Tim gave a talk on him at the Royal Drawing School and when coming to the pastels of the 1980s Tim asked the audience, ‘Don’t these look poor?’  Me and my big mouth said, ‘I don’t think so.’ Tim without hesitation responded, ‘Well Michael please defend them.’ And I did, he let me plead my case, and then continued. 

 

Years later when I gave a talk at the Courtauld, I showed one of Walter Sickert’s Mornington Crescent paintings. I listed the paintings two very polar titles. All of a sudden out of the dark I hear Tim remark, ‘Michael, the other alternative title would be, My Word Them Onions Don’t Half the Peach.’

‘Say it one more time Tim?’ 

‘My Word Them Onions Don’t Half the Peach.’ 

The audience roared with laughter, and I continued with the talk. I was so honoured that Tim was there, and I truly hope his correction was his tongue in cheek vengeance years in the making for my outburst. 

 

Tim seemed to really change as anyone would after his beloved Judith passed. Conversation was always polite but no topic was taboo. I remember asking him with compassion how he was. If you did not talk about it he might throw in a dagger like, ‘Are you aware my wife has passed and I am in mourning?’  At a posh opening he did not come to the dinner. The last time I saw him at a painter’s opening he came to the pub. There was pub food and he seemed elated in the fish and chips and other finger foods. 

‘Have I ever told you about my first sexual experience?’  

‘No Tim you haven’t.’

 

I’m sitting here thinking of Tim’s painting of himself looking up at the moon. London, him, and the moon. Tim’s love for London was almost lustful. There is a clear scent the city represented energy, history, and Judith.

Michael Ajerman

Overlapping Circuits / Divided Selves, Luci Eyers and Timothy Hyman, at Transition Two, 2018

Tangled Tales Through the Forests of Fem

 In which Alex Michon visits three London shows with a focus on the female 

 

 

Penny Slinger, Exorcism: Inside and Out 

 

‘Prince Charming, Prince Charming’, Rapunzel replied, 

‘I have no intention of being your bride.

We will not get married. We will not elope.

I’ve cut off my hair and I’ve braided a rope.' 

 

Following on the heels of the Tate’s blockbuster Women in Revolt, London is witnessing a recherché des femmes perdue moment, forgotten feministas foraged out from the field of forgetfulness are taking their rightful place on the art stage. One such artist is Penny Slinger, who was featured in the Tate show. Slinger graduated from Chelsea College of Art in 1969, having developed a visual language she describes as ‘feminist surrealism’ she explores the notion of the feminine subconscious and psyche, using her own body to examine the relationship between sexuality, mysticism and femininity.

 

In Exorcism: Inside and Out, her solo show at Richard Saltoun, slinger presents what she describes as ‘a surreal romance in photo collage’, representing what she has called her ‘deepest excavations’ as an artist. This work transforms the gallery into a totally immersive psychodynamic space with wall length photo collages enhanced by tangled vines running from the ceiling and trailing along the floor. In this strange fairy story forest, the women in the photo collages are reminiscent of the dreamlike groupings of models in the work of fashion photographer Deborah Turbeville. As my current research encompasses both 1970’s fashion magazines and fairy stories I felt a deep connection.

 

Slinger’s collages in the exhibition appeared to represent a young woman’s journey towards self-actualization. Many spaces are dominated by phallocentric symbolism — in He Crows, He Crows, an oversized head of a cock pokes out from round a corner, while in Tribunal, a naked female figure stands exposed, surrounded by an all-dressed all-male jury. These are counterbalanced by images where the female protagonist comes into her feminine power such as in A Rose by Any Other Name, with a bright red gigantic rose spreading its petals between a woman’s naked thighs, and Through the Glass which features a tender communion of entangled women. There are many images of stylish brides which appear to have been left at the altar — one of which is predominately featured in the accompanying video. However, I read this supposed abandonment as a rejection of the marital myth of the happily ever after. 

 

In a ‘Feminist Study of Tangled’, in the European Academic Research journal (May 2015) Mubeen Khalid explores how the Disney adaptation diverges from the Grimm Brothers Rapunzel and breaks away from previous patriarchal Disney representations. In the original fairytale Rapunzel is a stereotypical damsel in distress who needs to be rescued by a hero. Tangled presents an independent heroine who: ‘neither wants to spend her whole life in the tower, but nor is she interested in eloping with prince charming, rather she is ambitious to see the floating lanterns and life outside the tower’. The stereotype of masculinity is also challenged in Tangled when men show feminine qualities, such as when the King cries. The very title of the film is genderless. This rhymes with Slinger’s assertion in the show’s press release that the ‘journey of the embodied soul is not sexist; we all, male and female alike, need to discover who we are. It is like a detective story, in which we both, protagonists and victims, must follow the clues and unravel the plot’. 

 

Slinger’s collages are set within the spectral, crumbling grandeur of Lilford Hall, a Jacobean pile in Northamptonshire (which reminded me of the gothic Manderley in Rebecca). Using posed photographs of herself, her girlfriend Suzanka Fraey and her ex-boyfriend, the filmmaker Peter Whitehead, Slinger uses the building as a metaphor for the psyche, describing the process as one of self-psychoanalysis. In the language of dreams a house represents the personality with the various rooms signifying its various aspects. 

 

Slinger’s Exorcism was also the inspiration for her collaboration for Dior’s autumn/winter 2019 Haute Couture show. In a celebration of the clients, friends and seamstresses who make up the story of the House of Dior, Slinger fabricated a huge tree which inhabited the stairwell of the show, photographs from her worldwide travels adorned every surface with textures of fire, water, air and earth. For the runway she also designed a wearable gold doll’s house covered in 24 carat gold leaf which embodied the gold of the alchemical journey ‘which opened to rival the body of the woman within’.

 

This is how I like my feminism, with aesthetically engaging fairytale subplots, and fashion references subtly incorporating anti-patriarchal messages. Slinger’s work has a fearlessly fresh and contemporary feel. So much of historical feminist art appears to embody a fear of female beauty, often disfiguring it to make its point. For me it is this fear which has been exorcised from Slinger’s work and as a result the point is made all the stronger. 

 

 

 

France-Lise McGurn, Strawberry

 

‘What are little girls made of?

Sugar and Spice and All Things Nice 

That’s What Little Girls Are Made Of’ 

 

Strawberry, France-Lise McGurn’s first solo show at Massimodecarlo, is another immersive exhibition with joyously pastel-coloured paintings, both on canvas and rendered directly onto the walls. McGurn’s work is irreverently cute and sexy. Fearlessly sensual and not afraid of being pretty. As the artist says, ‘everything is strawberry flavour, it’s the sweetener’ – medicine, vapes, condoms, ice cream, lip gloss. Here sweet strawberries are symbolic of desire, pleasure and sexuality whilst subverting ideas around the erotics of painting, psychosexual imagery, Britishness (think strawberries and cream) and different facets of contemporary living. 

 

Former glamour model and nurse Abi Titmuss is cited by McGurn as a muse for many of the paintings (if not all of them). Titmuss is a signifier of that peculiar ‘slap and tickle’ prurient British curiosity. Here McGurn disrupts this to make Abi the star of her show, reclaiming her femininity divesting it from any pornographic intent. The fluidity and sketchiness of the paintings hover like half remembered dreams. Disney also makes an appearance here in paintings of a little deer — Faline, one of Bambi’s childhood friends from the 1942 animated film, an image that also evokes Babycham.

 

The gallery is dominated by a sparkling chandelier and in the middle of one of the rooms a series of tete-a-tete, worn and paint smeared, white chairs, add to the cute salon style suggestions of glamour, sex and subculture.

 

In much art theory, ornamental imagery is regarded as artificial, naive and misleading. Rosemary Galt, writing in Pretty, Film and the Decorative Image (2011), contradicts these notions seeing them as a reactionary position which can be traced back through Western history to the anti-visual scepticism of Plato’s rejection of the image as a false phantom of the philosophical idea. For Galt, this rejection of the pretty – the colourful and the seductive – is ‘yet another patriarchal rejection of the feminine’.

 

McGurn’s joyously decorative and slightly subversive images, redolent of sun-bleached Californian mansions, present a lusciously fresh take on the power of the pretty to subvert and disturb notions of the feminine in painting. 

 

 

Jacqueline Utley, Mirror Flower Mother

 

 

‘The house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.’

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

 

In The Poetics of Space, French philosopher Gaston Bachelard applies the method of phenomenology to architecture in terms of poetic examinations of lived experiences. Focusing on the personal and emotional responses to buildings and domestic spaces, he sees the home not so much as a space of inhabitation, but as a hidey-hole for imaginative day dreaming, and the place where we keep our earliest emotional and psychological furniture. 

 

Many of Jacqueline Utley’s paintings in Mirror Flower Mother encompass a similar contextual emphasis to what Bachelard defined as ‘intimate immensity’. Utley’s paintings are located within a feminine topophilia of gendered spaces that women have occupied for living, working and making work. In Sisters, Flowers, Mothers, groups of women are depicted sewing, sitting, chatting or daydreaming, the ceiling opens out onto a star filled sky whilst a white dove and a bunch of white flowers in the left corner of the composition add to a feeling of contemplative stillness.

 

Utley’s paintings do not shout or scream, they represent nonetheless an alternative vision of feminine strength and power, that of collaboration and dreaming. Utley has talked about how she started making these paintings in response to women painters in museum collections born around the start of the twentieth century. Engaging in collaborative practice-based research projects on work by overlooked artists, Utley also works with the artist Hayley Field as Obscure Secure, conducting research into women artists in public collections to widen understanding of underrepresentation.

 

The echoes of early 20th century painting can be detected in Utley’s paintings but only lightly, the influences appearing as faint echoes. These paintings with their stillness and studied quietude also have a quixotic spell binding magic where musings seem to come to life. For all their silence, Utley has stated that in her paintings she often starts out with imagining what the conversations of her female figures could be about. The painter’s own family history of women working in textile mills has fed into her interest in researching women workers from the early part of the century.

 

Flowers are recurring themes in the paintings; flowers in vases from earlier works often appear in her work, suddenly unmoored from their vases they magically float through the liminal spaces. They stand in as reminders of the space outside the paintings and aesthetic signifiers of what Bachelard calls ‘poetic consciousness’. For Bachelard the desire to make images is a basic human drive, the creative imagination seeks to transcend what is, to transform reality into poetry. As Bachelard states ‘If we see leaf, flower, and fruit within the bud, this means that we are seeing with the eyes of our imagination. It seems that here the imagination is a wild hope of unbounded seeing.’ Thus, Utley’s flowers can be understood to add multiple flights of imaginative musings and interpretations alongside her female groupings. 

 

Quoting the French Poet Oscar Milosz, Bachelard references the house as a metaphor for mother which also chimes with Utley’s title for the show:

 

‘I say Mother. And my thoughts are of you, oh, House.

House of the lovely dark summers of my childhood.’

 

 

All three of the shows visited and discussed here, have each in their own ways, presented subversive, unexpected and aesthetically intriguing aspects of femininity.

From the roses bursting out of Slinger’s thighs, to McGurn’s suggested sweetness of strawberries, to Utley’s floating dream-like flowers, may a thousand blossoms of feminine definitions continue to bloom!

 

Alex Michon

 

 

Penny Slinger - Exorcism: Inside and Out

Richard Saltoun, London

3 July - 7 September 2024 

 

France-Lise McGurn - Strawberry 

Massimodecarlo, London

5 September - 2 October 2024 

 

Jacqueline Utley - Mirror Flower Mother

Niru Ratnam, London 

30 August - 28 September 2024