Gallery run 5th May

This week’s run is the big one up to Highgate which I do when a new show is on at the Camden Arts Centre near Hampstead. There is just enough time to get round the 6+ hour circuit and with the sun shining, I set off. First stop is Brick Lane to pick up an apple strudel from Bagel Bake and build up the carbs. Then north to the Regent’s Canal…Islington….Finsbury Park….Parkland Walk. This is a stunning disused railway line with trees and graffiti. A mother panics briefly as her child has lagged behind, but quickly reappears thankfully and jogs on past me. A bicycle bell then rings behind me and as I step to one side a child thanks me as she shoots past catching up with her mum. Then onwards to ….Highgate….Hampstead Heath….two ponds and Louie’s and more carbs. Then the steep decline of Arkwright Road before arriving at the Camden Arts Centre. As I read the blurb on the hallway wall before going into the gallery, the assistant sneezes. “Bless you” seems a good thing to say. Going into the gallery, the name Paul Johnson seems familiar to me from the list of artists I have memorised from the galleries on my running circuits. Bruce Haines gallery possibly. This is confirmed by the BH gallery’s homepage, news splash. Sculptural shapes dominate the space, some carefully manufactured and others made from stacked detritus. Together they create a strong unified installation. In the gallery next door Greta Bratescu, who is still making work in her nineties, has a retrospective with some beautiful little drawings accompanying photographs and stitched fabric. Then it is south to Lisson Gallery. Anish Kapoor is showing new work including a concave mirror with the top half edited out using an unreflective layer. The effect is striking as the reflected objects move in relation to this stationary surface responding to the viewer’s own movements. Further down Bell Street at the other gallery, Djurberg and Berg are showing cartoon-like characters that have submitted to base desires and appear to be having a great time in their rectangular tableaux world. At Gagosian Gallery further south I enter the darkened setting of a Picasso show featuring bulls and minotaurs. An attendant shakes his head as I point to the phone and therefore no photo but a great show and some beautiful paintings. In Simon Lee Gallery there is the smell of fresh paint. The paintings have been covered in a silver surface which has then been raked off to reveal colourful underpainting. Then the final leg south to the building that jointly houses Greengrassi and Corvi-Mora. Downstairs Brian Calvin has made pop-art style portraits that are very expressive but beautifully simplified. Upstairs Giuseppe Gabellone has made a carefully crafted crate from bamboo and carved supporting units into which some organic shapes gently nestle. That is the ninth and last photo of the day.

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Parkland Walk is a disused railway route turned into a nature reserve.

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Hampstead Heath pond which I passed on the way back south from Highgate.

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Paul Johnson of Bruce Haines Mayfair showing at Camden Arts Centre with sculptures mingled with consumer detritus.

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Greta Bratescu at Camden Arts Centre. Drawings and thought provoking objects from the nonagenarian artist.

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Anish Kapoor of Lisson Gallery with beautifully crafted concave mirrors and other objects.

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Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg of Lisson Gallery with objects and cartoon-like figures doing whatever they want with no inhibitions.

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Garth Weisler at Simon Lee Gallery with layered paintings all presenting a pleasing silver grid line surface.

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Brian Calvin showing at Corvi Mora with simplified but expressive faces.

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Giuseppe Gabellone at Greengrassi with what looks like a flat-pack object, but presented on a crate that follows the organic outlines with some of its wooden structure.

Parkland Walk, 23rd June

As usual this run is a loop, but unlike the Regent’s Canal circuit described elsewhere, it extends further north to take in Parkland walk. Parkland Walk is a nature reserve created from an old railway used until 1970. Amongst its trees and wildlife, graffiti and nature have rounded off the sharp angular forms of station platforms and decorated the arched bridges that carry criss-crossing roads overhead. Meanwhile, walkers and cyclists barely notice the gentle gradient of this green corridor that rises slowly up to Highgate from Finsbury Park.

From here, the beautiful green space of Hampstead Heath provides the next section of the loop before I arrive at Camden Arts Centre which despite its name is well north of Camden on the Finchley Road. It is hosting Anya Gallaccio and as I wasn’t allowed to get a photo of another group-show inside, am relieved to see her artwork stretched out across the garden, where no photography restriction could possibly apply. As an object it looks like a long, woven, rope structure and even has some similarities to a hammock. This impression is reinforced further by it being draped across the trees in the garden, having extended from the roof terrace space above the garden cafe. With its clear structure of frayed, brown rope that has been joined with knots and cross-links, the real subject of the artwork seems to switch back towards the trees on which it is resting. Somehow the artwork serves as a reminder that the living material over which it is currently draped has an intricacy and strength all of its own.

Whilst Parkland Walk and Anya Gallaccio’s artwork have united to create a theme of nature and its regeneration into cultural artefacts, the next piece at Michael Werner Gallery remains obstinately removed from nature. Jorg Immendorf has painted two figures of children in a cartoon-like idiom that oppose nature through their puffed out cheeks and inflated torsos. They represent a sort of distorted or lost innocence. As the artwork was painted during the Vietnam war, the theme of lost innocence is also historically relevant, though the precise meaning of the image still remains hard to pin down. Formally, the painting is a cut-out round two figures and a pool of water they are sitting in.

Soap suds cascade down these yellow cartoonish torsos and collect on the surface of water, still buoyed by the vigour of a sponge that created them, and then a marvellous little piece of logic unites the yellow of the skin with the blue of the water to determine that the submerged body should necessarily be tinted green. This green and yellow colour palette sets up a system based on the false initial premise of the bright yellow human flesh and lends a sense of disquietude to the image but also a beauty. Then with false premises of my very own it is necessary to make all haste through the busy metropolis and visit the next stop which shall be the RA Schools show in Piccadilly.

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Parkland Walk between Finsbury Park and Highgate. On the way to the Camden Arts Centre.

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Guillermo Kuitca at Hauser and Wirth. The fragmentation cubism-lines become a floor plan.

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Anya Gallaccio of Thomas Dane Gallery showing at Camden Arts Centre. Part of Making and Unmaking show.

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Victoria Morton at Sadie Coles HQ. Colourful images with beautiful recurring motifs.

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Jorg Immendorff at Michael Werner. The babies are iconic symbols of innocence amidst his fierce campaigning against the Vietnam war.

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Nairy Baghramian at Marian Goodman Gallery. The pole structures hold the elements together

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Anna Paterson at RA Schools Show 2016. Oil, pastel and print on aluminium. Another interesting artist at the RA schools show.

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Joseph Grigely shows The Gregory Battcock Archive at Marian Goodman Gallery. Gregory himself is photographed in front of the first plane painted by Alexander Calder for Braniff Airlines in 1972.

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Rafal Topolewski at RA Schools Show 2016. Yellow, Orange and Black and Turn. Great paintings.