Gallery run 7th February

Posted on February 12, 2020 by julessharples

Stan Douglas at Victoria Miro Gallery. Split-screen film with two narratives.
A returning astronaut occupies two realities simultaneously. One is hostile one is friendly.

Kings Cross cranes.

Li Qing at Almine Rech with double-paintings (amongst other works) which suggest “this” or “that” of various experiences.

Melvin Edwards at Stephen Friedman. Metal chains, locks , and here barbed wire symbolise imprisonment and containment, pertinent especially to slavery.

Hedda Sterne at Victoria Miro Gallery with horizontally divided paintings suggestive of seascapes with added layers to complete the composition.

Isa Genzken at Hauser And Wirth with an in-flight experience.

Alina Szapocznikow at Hauser And Wirth with resin sculptures depicting human forms and states.

An My Le at Marian Goodman Gallery with photos that evolved from Vietnamese photo- journalism, focussing on politics.

Massimo Bartolini at Frith Street Gallery with a sound organ artwork. The rotating drum yanks at pull-chords for loud blasts and catches hanging metal strips for delicate chimes.

Gallery run 18th December

Posted on January 3, 2020 by julessharples

The Old Kent Road tank has had a new paint job. Photographed at the beginning of today’s run. Thank you @julianlowepaintings for telling me about the new paint job.

Egg-shaped sculpture by the River Lee. Who is the artist?

Ed Baynard at Stephen Friedman Gallery with stylised still-lifes.

Jessi Reaves at Herald Street with re-purposed household items elevated to high art.

Bruce Conner at Thomas Dane Gallery with rapidly changing images, some forming coherent sequences others seemingly random.

Ana Jotta at Greengrassi with intriguing combinations of objects that also have a theatrical feel to them.

Glenn Sorensen of Corvi Mora with images that seem like glimpses of nature.

Chris Gilvan Cartwright at Bloomberg New Contempories.

Xiuching Tsay at Bloomberg New Contempories.

Gallery run 29th November

Posted on November 30, 2019 by julessharples

Richard Deacon at Lisson Gallery with strained, stressed and, here, undulating forms.

Tony Cragg at Lisson Gallery with stacked forms with highly worked and intricate surfaces.

Bright oil pattern on a sunny day.

Hilary Lloyd at Sadie Coles with images and sounds from her adopted Thamesmead.

Erik Lindman at Almine Rech with attractive, shard-like paintings with glimmers of light and colour set in plain backgrounds.

Merlin Carpenter at Simon Lee Gallery with bright well-worked paintings offering some surreal twists.

Ged Quinn at Stephen Friedman Gallery with images that carry interesting surface markings that work with and against the 3d landscapes depicted.

Mark Bradford at Hauser and Wirth with amazingly intricate paintings that have underlying stacked paper structures.

Fiona Banner at Frith Street Gallery with sea-like images and objects plus a marvellous text detachable from a giant pile at the gallery entrance.

Gallery run 7th November

Posted on November 9, 2019 by julessharples

1361 Art Marathon. Weekly runs tracked on GPS with stats, plus drop-ins at 8 galleries.
Eight pictures posted weekly plus the updated map.

1362 Patrick Staff at Serpentine Gallery explores some of the problems humankind faces. Acid rain is simulated in the gallery with this metal drum filling up with lactic acid and acetic acid. For those into biology, these are mild organic acids important in cell metabolism.

1363 Peter Doig at Michael Werner.
Gallery 12 on my map.

1364 Alvaro Barrington at Sadie Coles HQ with evocative paintings.
Gallery 13 on my map.

1365 Claire Tabouret at Almine Rech with elegant portraits.
Gallery 15 on my map.

1366 Cy Twombly at #GagosianLondon with classic style sculpture made from simple materials and some then cast in bronze.
Gallery 14 on my map.

1367 Lisa Brice at Stephen Friedman exploring alternative representations of the female figure.
Gallery 21 on my map.

1368 Grayson Perry at Victoria Miro Gallery with pots and woven carpets that explore social themes.
Gallery 22 on my map.

1369 Betty Parsons at Alison Jacques Gallery with beautiful painted wooden sculptures.
Gallery 28 from my map.

Gallery run 17th September

Posted on October 8, 2019 by julessharples

Harmony Hammond at White Cube Official with great abstract works based partly on the materiality of canvas and other fabrics.

Dora Maurer at White Cube Official with colourful shaped canvases.

Mona Hartoum at White Cube Official . When by chance a woman was leading a tour of this show, I did a quick google search and her characteristic curly hair revealed it was in fact the artist. Fascinating tour I had tagged onto and here is something the artist described as being almost a self portrait… any guesses?

Goshka Macuga at Kate Macgarry with works that on first sight seem based on the theme of weaving. However, the deeper reference is computing and the artist explains that there are many connections between the information needed to weave fabrics mechanically and that of the old computer punch cards. Surprisingly the pioneer of such technology was a not a male we have heard about, such as Charles Babbage, but rather a woman living in the early 1800’s.

Cui Jie of Pilar Corrias with paintings of Chinese viewing platforms and architecture.

Yoshimoto Nara and David Shrigley of #StephenFriedman with cartoon-like drawings that depict clever or witty ideas.

Jasmine Thomas Girvan at David Zwirner with intricate figurative sculptures shown alongside the paintings of Chris Ofili.

Chris Ofili at David Zwirner with figurative paintings including this great piece.

A wheel of sorts and it’s a big one.

Gallery run 7th June

Posted on June 7, 2018 by julessharples

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Helen Beard at Newport Street Gallery with brightly coloured figures in intimate settings.

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Sadia Laska at Newport Street Gallery with artwork referencing the New York music and cultural scene.

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Boo Saville at Newport Street Gallery with vividly painted found images from Google searches on the internet.

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Seung Taek Lee at White Cube with great sculptures made from brightly coloured vinyl sheet stretched over sculptural supports.

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Julian Schnabel at Pace Gallery has painted expressive black marks reminiscent (to me) of ploughs and pitch forks, on blown-up prints that originally celebrated country life. The prints were made by a Royal Academician and for those in the know Pace shares a building with the RA who are celebrating 250 years and this body of work is a nod to that anniversary.

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Adboulaye Konate of Blain Southern showing at Stephen Friedman Gallery in a group show that celebrates African art and culture.

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Florence Mytum at Slade postgraduate show. The stone structures of the art school’s architecture have been softened with extruded sponge.

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Gabriela Giroletti at Slade postgraduate show.

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Charlie Barlow at Slade postgraduate show with clusters of spots all over the corridors and even into the loo.

Gallery run 9th March

Posted on March 10, 2018 by julessharples

The day begins with a jog up to White Cube Gallery in Mason’s Yard. Minjung Kim has used traditional Korean craft techniques to lay down layers of ultra-thin mulberry tree paper into rhythmic compositions. The paper has many uses outside of art in the artist’s native country including as window panes, due to its strength even in thin layers allowing light to diffuse between the various natural fibres. Downstairs, the artworks are vividly coloured. The paper has been dyed and applied in layers, with each piece burnt along one edge in a ritualistic gesture by the artist, one that we are told is accompanied by the smell of incense and a discipline of complete silence. The overall effect on the artworks is to create textured regions of intense colour reminiscent of flowers and natural vegetation.

In Sprueth and Magers just across Piccadilly, Anthony McCall is displaying a light installation. His use of a smoke-like mist in these light-works, allows the experience to be a 3D one rather than just the conveyance of an image from one flat medium, a digital Jpeg in a projector, to a screen on the far wall. Yes, the screen is still present as the final destination for the image, but the light wends its way through wisps of smoke, like in those cigarette-friendly cinemas of one’s youth, catching the little eddies of particles on the way, creating straight shimmering beams of light across the room. The image itself is simple enough, a single line that is curved into an ellipse, sometimes perfectly rounded, sometimes dislocated into a stepped join between end and beginning, but the transition between the two is captivating as the digital projector slowly cycles from the one to the other.

At Grosvenor Hill a few hundred metres further on, is the Gagosian Gallery. A burst of applause echoes from within the furthest room. Glenn Brown had given me a great tutorial twenty years ago and he is instantly recognisable as the same chap. With his address to a group of visitors in the background and my own sketchy knowledge of some of his main artistic concerns gleaned during that generous four hour tutorial, the work on display takes on an extra depth. The painting is ultra flat as many of us would be familiar with, whilst the waxy trails of paint from the historical canon he explores, are simulated with intricate brushwork. These labour intensive works used to net the artist just a couple of pounds an hour, a fact which he presented as a footnote to the precarious business of being an artist, during the aforementioned tutorial. It was interesting to hear from this address that whilst the paintings are still labour intensive, twenty years later, the intricate sketching style of some of the accompanying drawings is actually very quick to execute. Here, expertise of his medium appears to have allowed the artist to bend some of those time constraints of the beautiful painted works, and create an image that takes on the same rapid fluidity as those very lines he has imitated.

A second major gallery sits just round the corner and is the home of Almine Rech. Gunther Forg has several large photographs on display of variously imposing buildings. These are neo-classical in style and each is emblazoned with a title depicting the particular institution it houses. Whilst the titles such as GEOLOGIA and MUSICA are true to the original photographs, rendered in various block capitals in concrete or metal, and sitting above the grand entranceways, they nevertheless form a more extended and general index of knowledge, one which is familiar to us from library shelves and TV documentaries. Meanwhile, the buildings have a grand scale themselves, both in their photographic representation and in their actual physical size. Presented together along one wall, the images appear monumental and we get that rare sense of an illusionistic space that is actually bigger than the expansive gallery it has been presented in.

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Minjung Kim at White Cube who makes images from thin layers of mulberry tree paper.

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Tonico Lemos Auad of Stephen Friedman.

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Bjarne Melgaard of Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac with recently finished work that fills the room with an aroma of linseed oil and paint from their drying surfaces.

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Sturtevant at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac.

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Anthony McCall at Sprueth Magers with slowly moving light projections, which uses a smoke-like substance in addition to a screen, to capture the image. The public are encouraged to move through the space and disrupt the image.

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Bosco Sodi of Blain Southern with a piece at Philips.

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Glenn Brown of Gagosian showing paintings where the brush marks of oil paint are simulated with a flat almost photographic surface.

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Gunther Forg of Almine Rech.

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Sculptures on Grosvenor Hill.

Gallery run 1st December

Posted on December 2, 2017 by julessharples

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Sprovieri and BlainSouthern are amongst the latest venues to be checked out on this week’s run. The first on this list, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, is showing work by Arnulf Rainer, Lee Bul and Medardo Rosso, whose displays are in the various ornate rooms and hallway spaces that fill a classically styled building. Due to the precious nature of Medardo Rosso’s sculptures, a specially sealed room has been created. It has curtains on both its doorways and a heater that raises the temperature to considerably higher than the freezing day outside. Apart from this unexpected warmth, the sculptures themselves offer a real pleasure for the viewer. They actually appear to have emerged from chunks of matter bringing with them a strange life-force to the blocks of inanimate material from which they are cast.

At Sprovieri, the artists Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, who are enjoying a current major retrospective at the Tate, have three paintings on display. Each of these paintings explores the relations between the surface plane of a painting and its picture plane, in other words the physical surface of an image and the illusory perspectival space that lies just beneath it. This dual space of a painting was truly liberated 100 years ago with Russian Suprematism, we are told in the press release. To use an extended metaphor of my own, the angular forms of the new avant-guard movements managed to haul themselves out of the illusionistic world of landscape and still-life, to sit on the paintings’ surfaces, rather as the first amphibians, in fact, had found themselves liberated from water and free to roam land! In this particular show the artists have employed angular forms that are reminiscent of Suprematism but painted in muted pastel hues and beneath these shapes are various rural landscapes. This duality not only adds narrative interest, but also demonstrates as a fate accomplis, the simultaneous existence of the two different painterly spaces the artists were keen to depict.

At Blain Southern, a gallery my friend has recommended to visit, James White is displaying paintings of glasses and associated objects. Catching a glimpse of them through the window last week, they looked like black and white photographs but this week they are revealed as highly realistic monochrome paintings. Every cut in the crystal of various glasses unleashes a new cascade of white paint executed in small brushstrokes. Close up their materiality is clearly discernible but from afar they dissolve into an overall impression of light.

The rest of the run is dictated by the cold weather, since a dead phone (and need for mince pies) necessitates a jog to Hampstead, albeit through some lovely parkland, and then back again in search of Apple HQ and a new battery. The process of queuing for the item actually provides the necessary warmth to bring the phone back to life and to photograph some remaining artworks. At Hauser and Wirth, Jakub Julian Ziolkowski is displaying some vivid paintings, whilst at Raven Row, and with the battery still surviving, Gianfranco Barruchello has produced drawings that resemble mind maps. A container is made with a few pen strokes and encloses several pinkish spheres. From here a cartoonish figure starts to come to life, as though the imagination has bestowed upon these spheres the power to regenerate into a network of vital organs. Perhaps the artist has tapped into yet another type of space then, a third type in addition to the picture surface and illusionistic spaces previously described, a space where the artwork is a trigger of images without needing to provide all the details itself.

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Arnulf Rainer at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac with abstract works from the 50s and 60s.

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Medardo Rosso with early 20th century works at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac.

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Kehinde Wiley of Stephen Friedman Gallery with paintings of brave boat steerers adopting heroic poses from famous western paintings.

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Ilya and Emilia Kabakov at Sprovieri with compositions experimenting with relations between the image and picture planes.

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James White of Blain Southern with intricate painted monochromes featuring transparent materials in close-up often invoking narratives.

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Jakub Julian Ziolkowski of Hauser and Wirth with images by his invented alter-ego, who depicts nature as it is sensed rather than seen.

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Monika Sosnowska of Hauser and Wirth with sculptures from industrial materials, including steel reinforcement bars here.

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Luciano Fabro showing iconic works from the 60s at Simon Lee Gallery.

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Gianfranco Baruchello of Massimo De Carlo showing at RavenRow. Detailed drawings resemble mind maps.

Gallery run 20th October

Posted on October 20, 2017 by julessharples

At Stephen Friedman Gallery Rivane Nauenschwander has produced an installation based on the Brazilian version of the board game known in the UK as risk. Flags represent the individual countries that the players would normally roll dice for in their pursuit of world domination. Long all-nighters with friends playing this game have imbued this artwork with a particular aura for me. Round the corner in Grafton Street Sprueth Magers have been doing a refit to their gallery. It looks very slick and the formerly creaking floorboards have now been lovingly preserved and firmly secured. Gary Hume has experimented with gloss paint on paper and the effect is very interesting. The painted surface takes on a mottled form due to the paper support yielding in some way to the gloss, yet it still looks as though it has the solidity of a worked and beaten metal support.

Further down Grafton Street at David Zwirner, Sherrie Levine is displaying work made by re-photographing some iconic images made in a 1940 project to document rural American life during The Great Depression. The display itself is striking with about 50 images hung in a perfect grid on the gallery wall. After visiting this hub of three closely placed galleries the next stop is Grosvenor Hill where Almine Rech and Gagosian have created a new hub comprising two expansive white spaces. The former gallery is showing Ernst Wilhelm Nay. The abstract paintings are reminiscent of seeds and foliage yet they are not restricted to this interpretation. This ambiguity lends them an additional magic which also complements their perfect balance of colour.

The word is out that Almine Rech and Gagosian have teamed up with the estate of Tom Wesselmann. Both galleries have produced identical press releases describing the artist’s shaped canvases that predominate in his series of bedroom paintings. Various bedside objects such as clocks and designer lamps interweave the limbs, feet and hands that the artist has sketched and then blown up into full size paintings. In the Gagosian on Davies Street a subtle black and white maquette of two painted boards placed in front of one another simulate the two ends of a bed. A large pair of elegant feet obscure the rest of a body whilst the lamp peers out from further behind. This completes the Mayfair region for today and now it is time to embark on the old favourite route along the Regent’s canal whereupon one arrives at the gas storage frameworks that offer a familiar landmark for Hackney.

Two of the new galleries exhibiting at Frieze this year are Campoli Presti and Hales gallery, whilst a new artist has been taken on at Herald Street, called Jessi Reaves. These additions offer the chance to see three new artists in this region of the city which is really the birthing place for new talent and with its exceptionally high rate of Turner Prize nominations is also sustainable in its own right with no need to interact with or be fostered by the Mayfair galleries to the west. Jessi Reaves is an American artist and hence of international importance, who makes sculptures from old furniture. The assistant in the gallery invites me to sit down on the rebuilt comfy chairs and this highlights the critical space that the work operates in, being utilitarian in some respects but stripped of any designer chic. Concluding this exploration after a quick stop at Beigal Bake is a visit to Hales gallery. Since its early days on Deptford High Street as a well respected gallery cafe, it has now become important internationally. Frank Bowling is one of seventeen artists on their books and he is showing colourful abstract paintings incorporating small objects offered up by friends, as well as cutting and sewing, which all contribute to a complex and interesting surface.

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Rivane Neuenschwander of Stephen Friedman Gallery with an installation based on the board game risk. Each flag represents a risk territory. On the back is written “war”. This would be “risk” in the Uk version.

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This paving slab on Grafton Street appears to be made up of two parts?

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The gallery is open again! Gary Hume of Sprueth Magers uses his trademark gloss to produce a mottled finish on paper in his new works.

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Sherrie Levine has rephotographed and appropriated American Depression photos of farmers by Russell Lee. What was once an attempt to boost morale when they were made in 1940 has now become historical document. Shown at David Zwirner gallery.

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Ernst Wilhelm Nay at Almine Rech Gallery. Beautiful images with natural motifs but in bright colours.

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Brice Marden of Gagosian using terre verte, green earth pigment, from several well known paint suppliers, has produced 9 canvases of varying greenness.

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Tom Wesselmann at Gagosian with Bedroom Paintings.

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Jessi Reaves of Herald Street with sculpted furniture, cut up and reassembled.

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Frank Bowling of Hales Gallery with abstract compositions on stitched canvases.

Gallery run 23rd June

Posted on June 23, 2017 by julessharples

Today’s run is about 30 miles taking a large loop out to Chiswick, where my friend Suzanne from our ACME studios is showing. After looking at her works, which are studies of Brixton market, I head north to Acton and then east along the Grand Union Canal. As there are no galleries here I visit some places I have worked in, though of no relevance to Gallery Runner.

Eventually I arrive at Hyde Park and see the beautiful new pavilion by Diebedo Francis Kere. It looks like a chieftain’s palace with slatted roof and stained block-wood sides whilst being structured around an immaculate white metal frame that gives it further credentials as a piece of cutting edge architecture. Then I head on to the Royal Academy. After having photographed a couple of great works by Danny Rolph and Frank Stella, that I remember from my previous visit last week, I note the number of my painting and check the front sales desk to see if it has a red dot next to it yet. No, is the answer to that one.

Round the back of the RA on Old Burlington Street is Stephen Friedman Gallery. It has been influential in this year’s RA Summer Exhibition because of the contributions from its own artist, Yinka Shonibare, both by his curating and from his artworks there. In Stephen Friedman Gallery itself there is an unlikely but fascinating exhibition of material-based artworks that explore stretched canvas through a multitude of distortions and interventions that have been enacted upon it by sixteen artists.

Finally today I check out the RA School’s degree show. Work by Josephine Baker-Heaslip catches my eye due to great patterns she has created with stacked bricks whilst containing them in their entirety within wooden cut-out structures that hold the various brick forms in place. The bricks themselves have been painted on some of their faces with earthy but bright colours and make lovely artworks. After a quick half pint and the time now seven and a half hours past my departure time this morning, a marathon already achieved, there is a last hour remaining for the return home.

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Suzanne Baker exhibiting images made on location in Brixton Market.