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 

 

 

 

 

 

Colour Me Green (Knight)

Jennifer Caroline Campbell thinks about The Green Knight and two predominantly green coloured works by Ruoru Mou and Gal Schindler in a new group exhibition. 

 

Feeling now, now, never, now. A stream scattered with sudden gushes, babbling. Trying to move through time feelingly is an ongoing trying, a skimming-sliding. Squelching in corners, sometimes stumbling and dusty, dry slithers searching for shampoo quenching. 

 

A smudge of lip-balm is pressed onto dry skin, inside of elbow grinning. Reclined and propped, blushing in icing. Minty paste pushed around, sticky eye lashes breaking through the flattened scape, tickling slick and batting. Cold and warm vitamins whipped up and patted on. Like a curly swan she steps lusciously out onto the floorboards. 

Gal Schindler, No explanations, 2024, oil on wood, 120 x 180 cm

 

She presses against the window. It is tall and full of hard flat pains, neatly stacked, locked in place. The jammed mechanism appears unmovable, but a fleshy reflection slams through, seen glinting in a glob of tomorrow. She drags it into now-ness. 

 

Today’s sunrise is a slice of jelly to slide under. Green residue growing quickly, unclean nutrients congealing nourishingly. She collects soon-to-be-luminous liquid in a darkening glass bottle, greedy and greasy with Aphrodite’s kisses. Elastic fingers clasp the antidote. A glowing poison with which to unpick the packed airless measure.    

Ruoru Mou, greasy film, gelatine, glycerin, restaurant grease, food colouring, leather dust, leather mould, foam, micrometer, 243 x 110 x 2.5 cm

 

Art school (a place, time or state of mind) is a bridge, between ways of feeling and living, a rupture and a chasm, packed with algae. Contamination is remedy, green without envy. Nettles flower through crumbling parameters, not in an afterglow, pooling in fissures. Learning and listening is loud, growing new glows, to hunt out un-tepid terrain. Feeling as navigation, for shaping paths away from churning production lines.  

 

Falsely named snowy, in hysteric attempts to drain it, this landscape of microcosms is in fact swimmingly green.

Ruoru Mou, greasy film (detail), gelatine, glycerin, restaurant grease, food colouring, leather dust, leather mould, foam, micrometer, 243 x 110 x 2.5 cm

‘When we, together all, find that our reach has exceeded our grasp, we cut it down, we stamp it out, we spread ourselves atop it and smother it beneath our bellies. But it comes back. It does not dally; nor does it wait to plot or conspire... and as the sun rises, green shall spread over all, in all its shades and hues.’

Words spoken by Essel in The Green Knight (David Lowery, 2021)

 

 

 

On Feeling, curated by Peter Davies 

Approach Gallery, London E2

until the 3 August 2024

Studio K.O.S – Artist Educators

Rosemary Cronin visits Where Have We Gone, Studio K.O.S. at Morena di Luna, Maureen Paley's space in Hove

 

At the private view for Hard Candy, Transition Projects’ latest show at the gallery attached to SPACE studios in Mare Street, East London, I mentioned to one of the other artists that I run the Fine Art Outreach pathway at Chelsea and Camberwell College of Arts – ‘I didn’t know you did that?!’ was the reply. It’s often a tricky line to walk as an artist to balance both studio practice and teaching so I tend not to talk about the teaching in the art context – but here I am now… unveiled. Yes, I too am an artist educator!

 

So I was absolutely thrilled that I saw the current show at Maureen Paley’s Morena di Luna showcasing the work of Studio K.O.S., a collective founded by artist teacher Tim Rollins as a project for young people growing up in the South Bronx. The group created works using whatever they had to hand: bricks from torn-down buildings in the neighbourhood, used school materials, textbooks, and notebooks. With a strong political motivation and shocked by conditions in the South Bronx, Rollins developed a unique learning environment that ultimately turned into the artist group the Kids of Survival (K.O.S.).

Studio K.O.S., A Midsummer Night’s Dream (after Shakespeare and Mendelssohn), 2023, watercolour, ink, mulberry paper, collage and mustard seed on music score on wood panel, each 30.5 × 23 cm

 

The beautiful Regency setting of Morena di Luna is always a joy to visit and the watercolour works in this show particularly sang with the sunlight streaming through the windows, the wild watercolour posies that cover manuscripts from Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Nights Dream, as the gallery explains ‘Decorated with colourful “flowers”, these forms serve as physical manifestations of Puck’s power.’ These works draw on workshops conducted throughout the last decade and have all the etherealness you expect of Shakespeare – but there’s a playful freedom in the works, one that matches the energy of a really good creative teaching session – where things are abundant in making, focus, energy and joy. There is careful intention in the colourway, but there is a devil-may-care attitude in how the colours sit on top of the original manuscript – and it works.

Studio K.O.S., A Midsummer Night’s Dream (after Shakespeare and Mendelssohn), 2023, watercolour, ink, mulberry paper, collage and mustard seed on music score on wood panel

In an artworld where vapid works can go for large sums, how special would it be to own a piece that has been truly transformative in its making? Tim Rollins sadly passed away in 2017 but his legacy survived, arguably because he placed such power in the hands of collaborative making. In August 1981, Tim Rollins, then 26 years old, was recruited by George Gallego, principal of Intermediate School 52 in the South Bronx, to develop a curriculum that incorporated art-making with reading and writing lessons for students who had been classified as academically or emotionally 'at risk.' Rollins told his students on that first day, 'Today we are going to make art, but we are also going to make history.' When asked to elaborate on what he meant by 'making history,' Rollins says, 'To dare to make history when you are young, when you are a minority, when you are working, or non-working class, when you are voiceless in society takes courage. Where we came from, just surviving is "making history." So many others, in the same situations, have not survived, physically, psychologically, spiritually, or socially. We were making our own history, something that wasn’t given to us. We weren’t going to accept history as something given to us.'

Studio K.O.S., The Scarlet Letter / All About Love (after Nathaniel Hawthorne and bell hooks), 2023, collage on wood panel, 26 × 20 cm

Literary texts were a backbone for Rollins’ sessions, the works on show include The Scarlet Letter / All About Love (after Nathaniel Hawthorne and bell hooks), 2023, a ‘mash-up’ of pages from The Scarlet Letter an 1850 book by American author Nathaniel Hawthorne. Set in the 17th century, the novel follows Hester Prynne, a woman who conceived a daughter out of wedlock and was forced to wear a scarlet letter ‘A’ for adultery. The pages are collaged with excerpts from bell hooks’ All About Love, with delicate monogram-style lettering painted carefully. This series was made in collaboration with the University of Massachusetts and Upward Bound High School. In this workshop, participants studied hooks’ text, writing down words that resonated with them. Funnily enough it was the text on my teacher training course that I resonated with most… one that dares to unpack the essence of love and care.

Tim Rollins and K.O.S., By Any Means Necessary (after Malcolm X), 2008, matte acrylic and book pages on canvas, 183 × 183 × 4 cm

I unveil another mask of myself, that I fell in love with art after being part of an arts project at Tate Modern for teenagers… we were never told we were put together because we were ‘at risk’ but because I had my own personal chaos in a tempestuous family home, art was my salvation, the gallery a space where I could breathe and be. Within the works on show you can feel the careful absorption, the mental clearing that the K.O.S. sessions perhaps created for the young people. The works in the final room of the gallery pack a punch with a large-scale piece made in 2008 by Tim Rollins and K.O.S. By Any Means Necessary (after Malcolm X), with large graphic symbolism that is both confident and considered, sitting across from more collage works created using text from Martin Luther King and James Baldwin. 

Angel Abreu and Ricardo Savinon were original K.O.S. members as teens and now form Studio K.O.S. now that Rollins has passed away and Abreu described, “We conducted a series of seances of sorts in which MLK and Baldwin were conjured to collaborate with us.” During workshops, excerpts from both books were read and participants were encouraged to use blades to scalpel the texts and create poetry by subtraction, addition, and omission. Here, cutting, pasting, and obliterating foster novel modes of interpretation.

Studio K.O.S, The Fire Next Time (after James Baldwin), 2022, collage on panel, 7.8 × 12.7 cm

The show and overall practice of the collective is brave, and perhaps speaks to a current artworld trend of social purpose, justice and socially engaged practice. However one should note that Paley had worked with Rollins and Studio K.O.S. for a long time before the trend became popular – this is not a fad and I tip my hat to Paley for recognising and showcasing a collaborative practice that is so important. We need more galleries to be as supportive of such purposeful and networked projects, then perhaps we wouldn’t be so quick to separate the role of artist/teacher.

Rosemary Cronin, May 2023

Studio K.O.S, Where we have gone
Morena di Luna, Hove
13 April – 16 June 2024

Big Biba & Ruby Keeler

 Cathy Lomax is swept up by the 1970s visions of Hollywood glamour at 'The Biba Story' and 'Do a Ruby Keeler' at the Fashion and Textile Museum in Bermondsey. 

 

Biba, the name rolls across the tongue, evoking images of sumptuous fabrics, peacock feathers and impossibly glamorous women. I feel sad that I didn’t get to visit Big Biba in the 1970s. This glorious shop, a temple of style and cool, which was open for only a relatively short period, was situated in a stylish art deco building that had previously been department store Derry and Toms on Kensington High Street. So, I was excited to see the exhibition devoted to Biba at the Fashion and Textile Museum in Bermondsey. 

Biba, a clothing brand designed by Barbara Hulanicki, may only have been extant between 1964 and 1975, but its influence, and most importantly the clothes, were iconic. The label is evocative, and continues to be familiar to a new generation from shared images and features about the time when London was swinging. The Biba look, as epitomised by house model Ingrid Boulting, was long thin arms, flat chest, low waist and straight hips. For Hulanicki 'Ingrid was the perfect shape. The idea was that one was trying to get that shape on to people who weren't that shape'. (It is notable that Biba clothes are very tiny, maybe post-war women who had grown up under food rationing were predominantly a different shape from our current more healthily round average shape?) Archetypal Biba clothes have regulation puffed shoulders and are made from tactile velvets and jerseys with sprinkles of sequins. Prints are also plentiful and feature stylised art deco shapes, while colours are brown and mauve and rust and plum and forest green, or what Hulanicki calls, ‘Auntie colours’, after her inspirational Aunt Sophie. 

 

The exhibition opens with an enlarged image of a feature about 'career women' in the Daily Mirror, for which Hulinicki supplied a little gingham dress (inspired by one Brigitte Bardot wore and recreated for the exhibition), which resulted in thousands of orders and initiated Hulanicki’s mail order business. This leads to a corridor of naked women holding up circular glass shades – art deco style lamps that were familiar items in Bib Biba. Deco is the leitmotif of the Biba style (or maybe more accurately what might now be termed the less time-period restricted Hollywood Regency style). 

Leopard print acrylic fun fur coat, 1973, on loan from Lilli Anderson

The atmospheric runway leads into the darkened first room which is peopled by Biba clad mannequins wearing a myriad of outfits in the house colours. A particularly striking group features a nipped waist trouser suit and oversize coat in animal print against a large image of a glamourous 1970s Twiggy sitting all alone in the Big Biba restaurant. The caption tells us that Biba produced some of the best and least expensive fake-fur fashions for men and women and accessories to furnish the home.

And this is important because the Big Biba shop was a department store which alongside the iconic fashion, sold furnishings, wallpapers, makeup and even food – all in the distinctive Biba style. The Biba makeup line, which was vital to create  the Biba look of smoky eyes, long enhanced lashes, dark lips and primary coloured nails, was so popular that it outlasted the rest of the empire and was sold across the world. 

Looks available by mail order from Biba catalogue, 1968.
Illustrated models sport the Biba makeup look

 

The Biba style reflects the revival of 1940s fashion in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Yves Saint Laurent presented a 40s-inspired collection in 1971, but it was Biba who created the best high street examples (although Biba, magpie-like, borrowed from all the decades of the first half of the 20th century). And this is important, Biba was not haute couture; it was accessible and within the price range of young women who were exercising their liberation from the corseted constraints of 1950s fashion. This means that although the clothes were way beyond the fast throw-away fashion seen today they were not necessarily built to last. This is apparent in the clothes on display which do not hang from the dress forms like cossetted high fashion – these clothes have been worn, loved and re-worn. This is apparent in the list of names that the items on display have been borrowed from, which rather than big institutions and collections are dominated by individual women, who I like to think have loved and cherished their favourite items of Biba. Despite this everywoman quality Biba and Hulanicki did not shirk on design, and this is reflected in the stylish catalogues produced from 1968-69 which were photographed by names such as Helmet Newton.

Black waistcoat suit unlined, in heavy linen texture rayon cream linen collar and cuffs. Cream buttons; flared skirt, 

April 1968, on loan from Annie Hawker

 

Alongside the Biba show don’t miss the gloriously titled Do a Ruby Keeler, a small exhibit devoted to Shirley Russell’s designs for the 1971 Ken Russell film The Boyfriend. Packed with archival items it reinforces the link between the early 1970s and the high style of classical Hollywood. Russell was especially influenced by the the films of Busby Berkley (which often starred actress Ruby Keeler) and was a pioneer in her use of vintage clothing, which she also sold through her shop The Last Picture Frock in Notting Hill.

 

This exciting period in British fashion could be seen as being compromised by its overwhelming nostalgia for a past glamorous period. Nostalgia is an interesting term which is currently attached to a denial of contemporary mores, often in a reactionary way. But Biba’s nostalgia was a way of denying the consumerist and conservative 1950s by looking back to the fantasy emanated by a disappeared Hollywood glamour. It is fascinating that it is now Biba that inspires a nostalgia for its own particular egalitarian glamour as well as, I would suggest, a less commercially cynical period of young fashion.

 

The Biba Story, 1964-1975 and Do a Ruby Keeler

Fashion and Textile Museum, 83 Bermondsey Street, London SE1

Until 8 September 2024

Amanda Ziemele, the Latvian Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale

Embracing the performative possibilities of oil and canvas, Amanda Ziemele’s Latvian Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale provides Toby Üpson with a romantic escape from all that is overwrought and excessive. 

Installation view: Amanda Ziemele’s Latvian Pavilion at the 60th International Art Exhibition – 
La Biennale di Venezia. Photo: Liga Spunde

The early mornings in Venice are bright. Lullabies of white noise. From April 17 to 19 — the preview days of the 60th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia , titled Foreigners Everywhere — the sun rose between 06:21 and 06:25. At 06:30, or thereabouts, I sat, perched on the balcony of my rented room, eating muesli from a chipped bowl, watching the sun’s rays calmly tip-tap over the copper clad roof of Campanile di San Marco. A dreamy experience, a sense of which I would like to recall with you now: 

Imagine, we are meandering through Venice’s narrow streets. It is bright and white and there is not another soul about — an anomaly for this busy city. We shimmy down a walkway-come-catacomb emerging into a sun filled square. It's a magnificent reprieve, like the taste of fresh air. With nobody about, here a sense of liveliness is provided by loose sheets of cotton delicately hung from homely windows, by loose leaves and/or petals drifting from a sole magnolia tree, by loose fly-posters, worn and weathered and weary from life, juddering off the available walls. There is a bench at the centre of this scene. Held by the mystique of this quiet place we waltz towards this. Reclining, we glance left, we glance right, up and down spotting a battered hardback lying on the ground, its title indiscernible. Thumbing spine, cover and back we open the book at random. No narrative arrives, its old pages just rivulets of smoke grey. Following the flow of these never-lines, we get lost in hospitable thinking, in the transcendence found in pure form. That is, here, basking in the spring’s morning sun, we dream with and through the abstract and anomalous, with and through the beauty which composes this encounter. It is all Romantic sublime, like a literary text, a moment that leads us beyond turgid social life. 

Installation view: Amanda Ziemele’s Latvian Pavilion at the 60th International Art Exhibition – 
La Biennale di Venezia. Photo: Liga Spunde

Installation view: Amanda Ziemele’s Latvian Pavilion at the 60th International Art Exhibition – 
La Biennale di Venezia. Photo: Liga Spunde

‘O day and night, but this is wondrous strange... and therefore as a stranger give it welcome’, lines of Shakespearean dialogue, reshaped by Edwin A Abbott in his 1884 novella Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, set the tone and title for Amanda Ziemele’s Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale. Representing Latvia, her large, three-dimensional paintings subtly sit about the Pavilion — much like those loose sheets, loose leaves and loose fly-posters enlivening my dreamt-up square above — creating a welcoming zone within the bluster of the Biennale and its opening week. 

Installation view: Amanda Ziemele’s Latvian Pavilion at the 60th International Art Exhibition – 
La Biennale di Venezia. Photo: Liga Spunde

Ziemele’s paintings are fun, fleshy gestures floating in space. With their skeletal stretchers exposed for all to see, they not only defy any known geometry, be this spatial or shapely, but wave a disregarding hand towards notions that treat painting as a flat pictorial means. Here paintings twist and contort, they wink, blink, rise and fall or simply dance about the Pavilion. Honest and overtly self-conscious, the abstract simplicity of these forms reminds me of the blockade lines and loops which constitute the text-based work of Lawrence Weiner. That is, much like his unashamed text on walls Ziemele’s artworks are what they are: sculptural paintings, suggestive and protean. Indeed, as Ziemele’s folds of formless colour — cheeky blue, bright orange, green, terracotta, pearl, and Ikea teal — dot the walls, the ceiling and the floor of the Pavilion, gleaming in the Venetian light, they speak softly through the impasto of their brushstroke veins, lulling us to pause, to think and explore all the possible reaches found through their multi-dimensionality. 

Installation view: Amanda Ziemele’s Latvian Pavilion at the 60th International Art Exhibition – 
La Biennale di Venezia. Photo: Liga Spunde

This oil and canvas allusiveness is poetic. With each painting working out from itself, they do not dictate a thought, rather each invites us to take flight from the noise of our imminent context — for me, the Biennale and its overly mediated foregrounding of ‘hot’ politics. To make another comparison, as I look upon the wall-mounted painting Double Crisp (2024), two Pringles-like petal curves of taupe pearl positioned aside one of the Pavilion’s gridded windows, I am reminded of the ineffable magic found in Emily Dickinson’s transcendentalist poem Two Butterflies went out at Noon — an ambiguous 12 lines, formally self-conscious, dashed through with disinterested joy — a dreamy construction, one critical of a social climate yet with a waltzing lightness that creates an affinity across readers. This is a tone I appreciate. It is one that avoids the political pageantry that undermines much of what I encountered at the Biennale, and here, as the Pavilion’s title suggests, it is a tone which welcomes the wondrous stranger, providing a generous space to rest and think and meet and shelter together. To riff, there are foreigners everywhere and Ziemele’s Pavilion is a place to host us all, no aestheticized labels attached.

 

Installation view: Amanda Ziemele’s Latvian Pavilion at the 60th International Art Exhibition – 
La Biennale di Venezia. Photo: Liga Spunde

Not knowing about Ziemele’s practice before being welcomed into the Pavilion, I did some Googling. Most of Ziemele’s works emerge from a place of site-specificity, or in dialogue with specific situations. In previous projects, such as Sun Has Teeth — an exhibition at the Latvian National Museum of Art, 2023 — her large canvas blobs drifted amongst the whitewashed woodwork of the museum’s attic exhibition space. Like mesmerising butterflies or clouds of pastel colour, the works in that exhibition rested weightlessly in the air of the museum, not only inviting viewers to look differently about the place but reanimating the quotidian structure of the museum’s ceiling. 

 

Departing from the flat forms seen in her previous exhibitions, Ziemele’s Pavilion feels artistically ambitious. Collaborating with the architect Niklāvs Paegle to establish a spatial choreography that echos the physicality of the Pavilion, most notably seen in the visual relationship between the Pavillion’s large gable window and the supports for each canvas, here Ziemele uses both oil and canvas gesturally to create an animate zone, or a ‘living organism’ to quote the press release. This exhibitionary choreography does not feel like a meek transformative imposition. Rather each of Ziemele’s loose forms accentuates the agency already structurally woven into the architecture of the Pavilion allowing the very frames of this otherwise bare cube to resound, becoming an active part of the exhibition’s being. To get all meta for a moment, by working with and from the formal space of the Pavilion, the totality of Ziemele’s presentation can be seen as a fractal projection her individual paintings; with its structural body newly animated, the space twists and contorts, tip-tapping with colour, dancing differently under the Venetian sun. 

Detail view: Amanda Ziemele, Morning Sunshine (Pottering Along), 2024, oil on canvas. Latvian Pavilion at the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. Photo: Liga Spunde

Situated at the heart of the Arsenale’s long march of National Pavilions, Ziemele’s brushstroke architectures offer us a reprieve from the excessive curation and gluttony of the busy Biennale. Like an anthology of poems, read on a bright spring morning, complete in itself or imparting pleasure through its parts, the Pavilion does not demand overwrought readings, it welcomes momentary sojourns, be these contextually critical or just affinitive, in the most hospitable manner.

 

The Venice Biennale is open until Sunday 24 November 2024