Art
Sami artist, Britta Marakatt-Labba, campaigns for environmental protection and indigenous rights in Norway through the medium of embroidered landscapes and maps of epic beauty and subtle detail. The two hours I spent viewing a large retrospective of her work – ‘Moving the Needle’ – at the Nasjonal Museet in Oslo last weekend counts as my most enjoyable 2 hours wait for a hotel check-in. Sometimes delay really does generate pleasure.
Despite part-inspiring one of my favourite Clash songs, ‘Spanish Bombs’, until visiting Andulucia this summer I knew nothing about the legendary Spanish poet and playwright, Federica Garcia Lorca, other than the intriguing reference in Joe Strummer’s lyric: “Oh please leave the ventana open / Federico Garcia Lorca is dead and gone”. Today in the small tourist village of Pampaneira, a dense huddle of whitewashed stone houses cramped onto impossibly steep terraces on the southern edge of an escarpment of the Sierra Nevada, I was intrigued again by Lorca – this time generating enough impetus to read up a bit.
A day off in New York meant the chance to return to the Museum of the American Indian and two fascinating exhibitions: ‘Native New York’s’ half-millennial history of indigenous people on the east coast, and Mowhawk artist, Shelley Niro’s, extraordinary retrospective, ‘500 Year Itch’.
I have become a regular visitor to Hamburg this year, as it is a convenient stopping off point on the train journey from London through to Copenhagen, Stockholm and Oslo, where work takes me frequently. Usually I arrive late and leave early, but recently I discovered what I had been missing, after an early doors trip to the Hamburger Kuntshalle gallery. Most exciting were the landscapes of Caspar Friederich, an artist I had never previously encountered, but whose ‘Hill and Ploughed Field Near Dresden’ now lights up my soul every time I turn on my iPad.
Prior to the anthropocene, a daffodil’s message that it was ready to be pollinated might have drifted many miles, attracting thriving populations of bees and ladybirds from a wide neighbourhood. Today a flower’s range is likely to be restricted to a couple of hundred metres, as dirty air dampens their scent and mobile phone traffic messes up the subtle electronic signals that pollinators use to identify and map the right flowers to visit. This and so much more I learned at wonderful ‘Swarm: artists respond to the pollinator crisis’ exhibition at the little Vestry House Museum in Walthamstow this weekend.
I was in Ottawa for just under 24 hours, but it made a great impression, particularly the Canadian Museum of History. The quality of First Nation artwork on display is extraordinary, utilising vibrant colour and strongly tied to nature infused with human imagination. Thus, adorning totem poles are variously Thunderbirds, Lightning Snakes, and even Supernatural Codfish. And while the totems were statements of power and, thus, perhaps it is not surprising that they were made ornate, echoing the philosophy of British nineteenth century designer, William Morris, practical function appears not to have been an obstacle to imbuing even the most commonplace objects with beauty. The head-baskets used daily to carry crops are designed with grace, and clubs used to stun seals and fish are shaped and decorated in homage to the fellow animals they are designed to kill. A jet-black, jewel encrusted bowl on display is one of the most beautiful objects I have ever seen.
‘Loving Vincent’ is stunning animated oil painting, with every scene lovingly reproduced in the style of its subject and featuring many of the characters from Van Gogh’s greatest works. It is like the artist had painted his own life story, except had this been an autobiography one suspects that the subject would not have been treated so sympathetically. For Vincent, we learn, inspired much love, but never quite enough to overcome his own lack of self-worth.
It was probably the post-wedding hangover, but while I struggled with the room of abstracts, everything else about the Oxford Ashmolean gallery’s ‘American Modernism’ exhibition was pure joy.
Peter Von Tiesenhausen is an ecologically-minded artist, who salvages to create. His extraordinary ‘Relief’ – a mountain-scape sculpted from the clapperboards of an abandoned community hall – conveys beauty and sadness in equal quantities and is going to stay in my mind for a long time. As will the Art Gallery of Alberta’s retrospective exhibition ‘Undaunted: Canadian Women Painters of the 19th Century”. Who knew there was such a great gallery in Edmonton!
Tate Britain’s latest exhibition, ‘Impressionists in London – French artists in exile 1870-1904’, would be as much at home in a museum as in a gallery. My companion wanted more information about the brush-strokes, but markontour was happy to explore the social history of late nineteenth century London through the medium of some wonderful paintings inspired by fog. I wonder if a modern-day Monet is painting Delhi, Beijing, or even diesel-blackened London?
It was a pleasure to sneak into the Astronomy of Photographer of the Year exhibition at the Greenwich Royal Observatory yesterday and see Steve Brown’s wonderful…
Tate Britain now opens its weekend doors from 8am for members, which markontour is taking as a sign of progress in otherwise dark times. So it…
The best bit of the Tate Britain’s compelling ‘Artists and Empire’ exhibition comes right at the end, in the ‘Legacies of Empire’ room. Here, Hew Locke’s clever guerilla art sees him adorn a statue of Bristol’s founding father, Edward Colston, in cheap plastic gold trinkets, a modern equivalent of the tat that imperial traders exchanged for slaves. For, as Locke explains in an accompanying Restoration, Colston and Bristol’s wealth was built on human trafficking.
There are many reasons to admire Manet, but on a recent trip to the Courtauld Gallery in London markontour found a new one: the painter’s celebration of Burton beer.
For anyone lucky enough to live in London, thanks to the Imperial War Museum you have a full year to be inspired by a fifty-year retrospective of Peter Kennard’s work, under the fitting title of “Unofficial War Artist”. Unlike the political-grafitti of younger artists inspired by Kennard, particularly Banksy, Unofficial War Artist is not an exhibition for laughs, and yet I came out uplifted by the sheer integrity of an artist who for five decades has used his incisive wit and imagination to further the causes of peace and equity.
It’s E17 Art Trail time again, the annual community-led arts programme where the good people of Walthamstow turn their homes, shops and pubs into temporary art galleries. This weekend we only had time to sample of a few of the highlights in the Village, but the Art Trail runs until 14 June so there’s a bit of time to explore more. Here follows markontour’s highlights written, in keeping with the departure lounge ethos of this blog, on a train to Stoke for a Sunday of boating.
Buenos Aires is beautiful city of green spaces and white, colonial buildings and, while I can only draw on a couple of days worth of evidence, it is clearly a place to have fun. Here follows the initial markontour guide, hopefully to be substantially updated at some point:
The Sheik Zayed Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi is, quite simply, the most breathtakingly beautiful modern building I have ever had the pleasure to visit. Best…
Brooklyn Museum is one of those places where I would like to hide behind an exhibit and get locked in overnight. Clocking in at New York’s…
The William Morris Gallery has done it again, with another great guest exhibition. This time Alke Schmidt’s Tangled Yarns has taken over the space at the…
Richard Sharland's new exhibition, 'What The Light Was Like', drew us to Manchester this weekend and made for a fantastic Friday night in the north west.…
An Easter weekend glide through Nottingham on our narrowboat to catch up with close friends who recently moved back here, has reminded me how much I like the city where I went to university and where my football team continues to inflict pain on its loyal fans.
Jeremy Deller’s exhibition for the British Pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennale, English Magic, is subversively witty and political, but most importantly it is currently on…
I had one of those wonderful big city moments yesterday, when you are passing through a routinely familiar area, barely logging the surroundings, only to be…
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