Category Archives: fine art

2023 ➤ Don’t let zeros dazzle you in front of Doig’s broody paintings

Posted on 10 Feb 2023 | Leave a comment

Courtauld Gallery, Peter Doig, collecting, exhibitions , fine art , London,

Canal 2023, by Peter Doig at The Courtauld. Photo Fergus Carmichael

❚ EXACTLY 40 YEARS AGO as he was graduating from St Martin’s art school Peter Doig told me: “You’ve got to be an entrepreneur these days”. I was writing a powerful critique of the rot that had set into the UK art-school teaching system as prime minister Thatcher’s education cuts torpedoed creativity. For his generation – just before the YBAs devised their own solution – it was becoming ever more difficult for young artists to make their mark and there was plenty of unrest to report in my 1983 survey for The Face magazine.

So, hasn’t he done well since then?! During the past 15 years key paintings by Doig have sold for record prices in the international market – $11m, $5m, $11m, $12m, $17m, $39m and $29m. Averaging those seven sums, and grossing up to estimate the worth of the 12 paintings in his exhibition opening this week in London, yields their possible total value as $212million.

So when I walked into the Courtauld Gallery this morning to view his 12 newest paintings hung in two modest rooms, all I could think of were the zeros. Was I standing amidst 212,000,000 dollars-worth of art? And how do we square those zeros with Doig’s own expressionist take on magical realism, eerily mesmerising landscapes and striking figurative images in which he, his family and friends appear with smudged features as if in dreamworlds, described by one critic as “a troubled Arcadia”? Even his two self-portraits are unsettling. Multiple perspectives also tease. Half the pictures are enormous, some have taken him years to complete, others look as if they’re unfinished.

Their idiosyncratic visual chemistry reflects the itinerant life of this 63-year-old Scottish-born Canadian who has also lived in Trinidad and London. Painterly is the one word that unites the leading critics in their reviews of Doig, yet he achieves this largely without thick gestural brushmarks, and often with washes that let pigments emerge subtly through others in sea, sky and land, suggesting remembrance of lost times. Many touches refer to the impressionist masters displayed in an adjacent space at the Courtauld.

Courtauld Gallery, Peter Doig, Trinidad, collecting, exhibitions , fine art ,

House of Music (Soca Boat) 2019-23, by Peter Doig at The Courtauld. Photo Fergus Carmichael

His colours can be strong, as in Alice at Boscoe’s, where a vivid jungle of red and green foliage dominates and his daughter slowly emerges as the faintest female form slung in a hammock. Similar contrasts make Music (2 Trees) a haunting rumination featuring his wife and other friends. In contrast, House of Music (Soca Boat) relies on whole swathes of hues to intrigue.

The larger paintings include works that were created in the artist’s studio since returning to London in 2021. One such titled Canal has shady characters loitering on the Regent’s Canal tow-path where his son is having breakfast before an unlikely crimson bridge. Another titled Alpinist casts a skier as a harlequin against a brittle snowy landscape, inviting us to consider why.

So there’s plenty of food for thought before those zeros re-enter the mind’s eye, ker-ching… Coincidentally yesterday morning, Peter Doig was telling Radio4’s Today programme how the artist has little or no say in what millionaire collectors such as Charles Saatchi are prepared to charge or spend as paintings pass from one to another in the secondary market. Recalling that in 2021 his picture titled Swamped sold for $40m (!), he said: “I sold Swamped for £800 and of all the paintings of mine that have sold for £250million, the amount of money I got was less than £64,000… There are a lot of people out there who want to profit off you somehow.”

Only last month Doig was awarded £2.5m by a judge in a United States court following a decade-long dispute with a gallerist alongside a collector who claimed to own a painting made by him as a teenager. Doig denies this and is donating the windfall to a not-for-profit organisation.

Concluding his Today interview, Doig said: “The money’s not what it’s about. It has given me a life I would never have imagined – travel and making connections – but who could have imagined showing [here at the Courtauld Gallery] in the room next to Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergère?”

➢ Peter Doig is the first living artist to exhibit
at the Courtauld Gallery since its £57m revamp in 2021.
His exhibition runs until 29 May 2023

➢ Peter Doig speaks to Channel4 News
about his London show

Courtauld Gallery, Peter Doig, collecting, exhibitions , fine art , London, Channel4 News,

Peter Doig with his painting of Alice at Boscoe’s on Channel4 News

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2022 ➤ New Romantics? Here are some who won’t own to that name

Posted on 27 Mar 2022 | 1 comment

BFI Flare Film Festival 2022, Tramps!, Kevin Hegge, Brian Robertson, movies, New Romantics

After yesterday’s Gala premiere of Tramps! – BFI host at left, then director Kevin Hegge, Scarlett Cannon, Jeffrey Hinton, Philip Sallon, Verity Susman (music), Matthew Sims (music) and Brian Robertson (producer). (Photo © Tessa Hallmann)

❚ MAYBE IT TAKES AN OUTSIDER to see a whole decade with a fresh perspective? Saturday night saw the launch of a documentary called Tramps! that attempts to do just that in almost two hours. The much-spun truths and fables of a movement which, even after this film’s premiere, refuses to own its given name, appears to have a new champion. In truth there was not just one group of people who started the emerging movement, there clearly were many who at times intermingled but also grew their own quiet revolutions under a greater umbrella that later came to be called a cult: the New Romantics. This is the story of some of them.

Tramps!, BFI Flare Festival, Mark Dooris, review, movies

FILM REVIEW BY
MARK DOORIS
(Photo Tessa Hallmann)

The Canadian Kevin Hegge’s film opens cleverly to a domestic picture of the model Scarlett Cannon tending to her sun-drenched garden as she recollects her formative years. In this unexpected view of a woman whose powerful and iconic imagery has been documented and used as one of the least compromising style statements of the Eighties (playing “key identity” for the V&A Museum’s major exhibition From Club to Catwalk in 2013), she speaks about simply being there!

Just like the film’s poster, this is well-placed bait that slowly draws you into what will turn out to be a very well-constructed game plan. A definitive film about the so-called New Romantics has yet to be made but this contribution to the BFI’s annual Flare Film Festival offers a well-stacked sandwich of people and events that gives a very personal view of their experiences through a uniquely creative period of history.

Driven by a musical score that both emotes and supports the story, we see unfolding before us spliced and collaged pictures and film clips of a selection of renegades who love and survive in punk’s underlying gloom and spend ten years carving out a brighter world through Thatcher’s hectic Britain. The patchworking together of views and motivations of some of the witnesses proves that the movement was bigger than its over-used title.

Judy Blame steals the show by saying it as it is. The unrepentant gay designer, who has sadly died since being interviewed by Hegge, is often overlooked for his contribution to Eighties style and gay culture. Disc jockey Princess Julia remains a constant through the film, as indeed she should, as a very relevant force in style and club culture to this day.

In a new twist, nightlife entrepreneur Philip Sallon was given credit and indeed respect for his very singular influence on both the scene and indeed the followers who helped change the growing movement. Unlike many previous interviews, this time they let his wit and views be heard rather than using him as the cymbal-clapping monkey who offers only light relief to the story of the times. At Saturday’s screening, the effervescently clad Philip asked the audience to be kind to each other and to look beyond the superficial outer paint to the person within and that, at its core, is what this film itself does.

BFI Flare Film Festival 2022, Tramps!, Kevin Hegge, movies,

Kevin Hegge, director of the documentary TRAMPS! © Kevin Hegge

“If you have a bone of contention with
the movie… make your own movie”
– director Kevin Hegge

John Maybury talks of his film-making career and the people who appear in the clips we see of his days in the legendary Warren Street squat, plus the influence and support that director Derek Jarman gave him to discover and use his skills after being invited to join what turned out to be the cult film Jubilee in 1977. Artist Andrew Logan with his occasional Alternative Miss World competitions is rightly identified as a pioneering force in the new bohemia party scene that was emerging, while the painter Duggie Fields added some graceful recollections of this time gone by, he too having passed on since filming.

Thrown aside are the frilly shirts in favour of the BodyMap duo of David Holah and Stevie Stewart, offered up as the fashion revolutionaries who, hand in hand with Michael Clark and Les Childs, danced to a different beat. Performance artist Leigh Bowery is featured throughout the film for no justifiable reason and images of his eccentricity almost drive the visual impact with its cinematic styling and its Venus in Furs-esque vibe. Ironically, Bowery didn’t emerge as a “face” until the New Romantics movement had gone mainstream in 1985. An intriguing insight is given into the apparent genius of Bowery’s room-mate Trojan (Guy Barnes), his part in the Taboo nightclub set and the impact he might have continued to make if not for his untimely death.

Michael Costiff and his amazing partner Gerlinde are acknowledged for their roles in both the club world and the counter culture that was emerging, as were Miss Binnie and the Neo Naturists who are almost forgotten in most reviews of the Eighties. Sadly many people were lost to the Aids epidemic that cut its way through the careers of others referenced within the film and their contribution to gay culture, as was the demise of many in the drug-fuelled parts of club world. What and who are missing is a list too long to type but a refreshing and often underplayed star emerges in disc-jockey Jeffrey Hinton’s outlook during a pivotal chapter in the history of style.

Curiously, the title Tramps! and its poster are misleading about the ground this film covers and what it offers instead, but as an insight into how key people saw their time in the sun, it’s a winner. And impressively moving.

The Gala evening was not awash with big names from the Eighties and indeed a grave lack of New Romantic superstars was evident at both screening and drinks party after. Sadly the promised Questions and Answers section never really hit the mark and no chance was given for the audience to question the director or cast. That said, Tramps! made a great choice for the closing night of the Flare Festival.

❏ The film is not yet on general release

Blitz Kids, film, New Romantics, Swinging 80s, Michele Clapton, George O’Dowd, Lee Sheldrick , Princess Julia, Kevin Hegge, Tramps!, BFI Flare Festival

Leading the Goth wave in 1980: Blitz Kids Michele Clapton, George O’Dowd, Lee Sheldrick and Princess Julia, on the rooftop at St Martin’s School of Art, photographed by Graham Smith and dressed in Gothic mode for Stephen Linard’s “Neon Gothic” collection in the second year’s Alternative Fashion Show

➢ Previously at Shapers of the 80s: 1981, Who are the New Romantics, what are their sounds and how do they dance?
➢ Previously at Shapers of the 80s:
1980, The year the Blitz Kids took their first steps into the headlines

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Posted in Blitz Kids, Britain, Clubbing, Fashion, Film, fine art, gay issues, London, New Romantics, punk, Reviews, Social trends, Swinging 80s, Youth culture, zeitgeist

Tagged BFI Flare Film Festival 2022, Brian Robertson, Jeffrey Hinton, Kevin Hegge, movies, Princess Julia, Tramps!

2020 ➤ Saatchi hosts those Gen Z degree shows you missed

Posted on 11 Sep 2020 | 2 comments

London Grads Now, SaatchiGallery, fine art, exhibition, UAL,

Hamish Pringle, Wimbledon: Lockdown 2020, digital print on canvas

❚ GENERATION Z ARE REPUTED to feel a bit down about the world bequeathed by their parents and the work of this summer’s art-school graduates has caught that mood – not to mention the lockdown blues. Their tutors seem to agree, at least in the synopses posted on the walls of a selling exhibition titled London Grads Now, hosted by the Saatchi Gallery in its new guise as a charity. [Update – Since extended from three to five weeks.]

This welcome but rum snapshot – many of its 150 artists were allowed to show only one work each – follows in the wake of this year’s cancelled graduation shows and expresses such zeitgeisty themes as political extremism, coronavirus and racial controversy. Many are largely sanguine about the new normals, except perhaps the feisty Black British History Quilt, which celebrates black artists, writers and figureheads including an 18th-century fop, by CSM’s Jahnavi Inniss and also Blackness (The Manifesto) by Michael Forbes at the RCA whose prosaic exhortations are listed on a vast board. Empassioned though this wall of words is, it does prompt the question, yes, but is it art?

Students and tutors have done the selecting and while there are impressively few copycat themes which often infect whole degree shows, there is a trend for titles to embark on narrative excursions, as for example these: Suddenly as if the moon trembled under my feet and every direction revealed itself … or Sleeping with the Enemy: Oscillations of a Fleshly Organ within a Jihady Cavity … or Every passing minute is another chance to turn it all around.

The tutors offer portentous “artist’s statements” to introduce each of seven London colleges spread across as many galleries. Camberwell, Chelsea and Wimbledon’s declare: “In a world gone crazy, I’m a wild one”. In this year of cultural ruptures, conventions have been abandoned as students reflect issues of the moment: lockdown, the lure of nature, identity, gender fluidity and post-colonialism.

Click any pic below to enlarge all in a slideshow

London Grads Now, SaatchiGallery, fine art, exhibition, Slade

Khushna Sulaman-Butt, Slade: Ascension (detail), 2020, oil on linen

London Grads Now, SaatchiGallery, fine art, exhibition, RCA

Alejandro Villa Duran, RCA: Running until the end of the world as only lovers are left alive, Silhouette I, 2020, fabric, hanger

London Grads Now, SaatchiGallery, fine art, exhibition, Goldsmiths

Daniel V Keler, Goldsmiths: Love Letter to a Stone 2019, tube lights, stones, vinyl, wood

Anna Baumgart, Slade School: in her own video, Fitting in with Nanny, Mutti, Mum and Omi

Rowan Riley, CSM: Legs 2020, unbleached filled cotton embroidered with metallic and cotton thread

Claudio Pestana, Camberwell: Fag Attacks The Country II, 2020, mixed media on paper

Topping this page you see an elegant but tough take on Lockdown by Wimbledon’s Hamish Pringle – a human eye photographed peering out from a head helmeted by what looks like a coil of rusty steel but, as Hamish comments below, is actually industrial sandpaper belting. At the foot of the page is a ghoulish family portrait painted on traditional canvas by Wimbledon’s Xinan Yang with the title I Still Care. . . while from Camberwell there is an in-yer-face clash between rustic rapture and urban sexuality in Fag Attacks the Country starring the artist himself Claudio Pestana.

A Goldsmiths tutor talks of reconciling crushed dreams and aspirations and in a wall-hanging textile Slay Within by Anosha Khan we see an axe-wielding dreamer dealing with her nightmares. Elsewhere four fluorescent tubes inscribed with a romantic verse by Daniel Keler titled Love Letter to a Stone actually support half a dozen varieties of rock evoking different eras in the Earth’s evolution.

The Royal College of Art curator dwells on “escapism, resilience, beauty in the mundane” and appropriately Alejandro Villa Duran selects a spartan wardrobe on a wire hanger, titled Running until the end of the world as only lovers are left alive. Quian Jiang’s One Minute of Photographic Time collages 60 separate snaps of a seascape which proves utterly mesmerising the longer you stare… Yang Xu’s Missing you is like Fire is painted in oil on synthetic carpet… while Emily Moore’s Chained is a huge lockdown collaboration in crocheted black yarn.

The Slade School curator reminds us to “breathe in and breathe out” when contemplating lessons learnt recently about cultural identities. This is evident in Khushna Sulaman-Butt’s Ascension, a powerful group portrait painted in oil which maintains tension between photographic realism and caricature. In one of the show’s rare videos Anna Baumgart transforms herself wittily into various female relations in Fitting in with Nanny, Mutti, Mum and Omi.

The Central Saint Martins curators conclude by suggesting that, in this post-truth era, nostalgia could gain new relevance, “not as a malaise in longing for a past moment, but as a proactive and sentimental yearning for continuity”, all exemplified in Legs by CSM’s Rowan Riley. Let’s call this one of the few pieces of sculpture in the show. The legs are made from filled cotton and bear personal messages and familiar quotations embroidered with colourful metallic and cotton thread: “Are you going to Scarborough Fair?” and “This is a portrait of a green-eyed lady”. Either a whopping wallow in nostalgia or a necessary a kick up the 2020s?