At the The Edge of Things, Agnes Martin, Jo Baer and Mary Corse, Pace Gallery until 14th August
This is a very white exhibition, as can be seen from the examples below. In the words of the booklet, these three painters “paint what we don’t yet know. They make paintings about how the eye sees, not what it sees – altogether sidestepping the problems of illusion, illustration, even expression. For them, a painting is not an image that says or shows us something, it’s an object that does something to us.”
Baer’s pictures have a dark blue border round them; some of Martin’s have patterning that resembles tiny bricks and one has faint, wide pastel stripes. Mary Corse did the one immediately below.
I’m generally not a fan of minimalism, so not the target audience, perhaps – I should say however that the other visitors to the gallery there at the same time as me were very enthusiastic, as are the comments on Twitter etc. that I’ve read.
Couplings, Francis Bacon, the Gagosian Grosvenor Hill until Aug 3rd
I’m not sure I fully understand the rationale behind this exhibition – the title and the Bacon quotations cited seem to suggest that the pictures are those that involve more than one person, or entity; as Bacon says, (I paraphrase) once you have two people in a picture, you have a narrative. One of the paintings, though, is Bacon’s famous picture of Peter Lacey, who is alone. Who cares, though? Great show, including some of his best figure studies (the early 50s ones are the best, for my money).
Is this an appropriate frame for the contents? Hmm…. Love the bedsheets.
Detail of the above.
The above picture with admirers.
Not keen on this one, of naked figures working on an allotment(?); I include it as an example of later work.
Bacon’s marching men, apparently unaware of the polar bear lurking on top of the glass cube….
Sorry about the levity – I am a genuine fan of Bacon and thoroughly recommend this show.
Sea Star, Sean Scully, the National Gallery until 11th Aug
A fabulous exhibition, free like the Bacon and the white one, based on Scully’s response to Turner’s “Evening Star”, which is also on show. I’m not sure about the connection – but Scully’s work, as in Venice two years ago, has sections of fabulous slippery, syrupy paint applied with a looseness of brush technique. The green square in the centre of the painting below, for instance, has a richness of brushmarks that almost makes it a painting within a painting. I’ll stop now, before I get into Pseuds Corner country.
Sometimes, he does these inset squares in the larger picture…
A couple of details, showing the brushmarks I’m on about.
Bermejo, National Gallery
No photos of this, I’m afraid. He clearly loves doing armour; a pair of soldiers in the resurrection are clad in armour that makes them look like samurai.
Loveless, Dir. Andrey Zvyagintsev 2017
Fascinating film. Bourgeois Moscow couple, marriage collapsing, at each other’s throats, ignoring the suffering of their son. He goes missing and the film shows the attempts of the voluntary organisation that searches for missing children to find him. The police can do no more than take details; the actual searching is done by the volunteers. In this respect, it strangely resembles a public information film – but not too much. The sulphurous relationship of the parents keeps the focus tight. There is a great cameo of the boy’s grandmother, a blistering, hate-filled babushka living in a rural cottage, visited by the warring couple and the volunteers, on the off chance that the boy may have fled to her – some hopes!
Some of my efforts to finish, as usual:
Judgement
Judgement (Detail)
Headless 1
Headless 2
Blackpaint
23/07/19
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