Stella at The Saatchi

Today I went to the Saatchi Galllery at County Hall to see the latest exhibit. It's called Hi Paul and is by Stella vine and just 10 days ago it was in the Girl on Girl show at Transition. The painting is going to be part of the new display at the gallery which is going to be called New Blood and this is what Stella and me came up with to go on the label -

Stella Vine's work deals with her fascination with the trashy and the dark. Underlying this is a sometimes contradictory love for her subjects. Hi Paul Can You Come Over... examines that pivotal moment in the standing of the British Monarchy, the death of Princess Diana and the horror of her crash. All the conspiracy theories are summed up in this painting as a wild eyed and tiara clad Diana cries for help whilst painterly blood drips from her luscious lips.

Apart from this art trip I can't think of anything else that I have seen recently that has made a big impression on me (apart from of course the superlative Love N Bullets at Transition). Sophie von Hellerman at Vilma Gold's new gallery is very predictable and quite dull. I do like the sound of the new show coming up at The Nunnery where a whole lot of artists have responded to a Lowry painting. It opens on Thursday 19th Feb. Will report on it soon.

Hi Paul Can You Come Over... - Stella Vine

Arty Girls

Arty 14 is here, available from all good London art gallery bookshops (see Transition gallery web site). It is all about Girls and goes with the Girl on Girl show that I am part of which is currently on at Transition. We think (me and my collaborator Alex Michon) that it is the best yet. It has a good attitude, lots of art (not enough art in the last issue I thought for an Art fanzine) and the lo-fi looks that we love.

To give you a little taster I am going to reproduce part of an article called The New Girly:

"In the catalogue to the groundbreaking show the americans: new art the curator Mark Sladen says that some of the work on show was “playful and downright girly” adding that “the derogatory overtones of the word (girly) have been undermined sufficiently for it to be reclaimed” this comment was very liberating and opened up a whole new aesthetic.

In the girls issue we have asked all the artists about their thoughts on girly and we have thought long and hard about it ourselves, this is what we have come up with.

Girly is an adjective describing all things associated with femininity i.e frills, pretty colours, decoration, dolls, romance, flowers etc. The new girly is not however gender specific, its about an open mindedness, a mix of high and low, a gathering and reclamation of things that have traditionally been thought of as inferior, frivolous and weak. It is about a shift in power and a change in the world order, with the shy equal partners to the brash. Above all it is totally subversive."

Fell in Love with a girl (and a boy)

Went to see the White Stripes on Tuesday at Ally pally along with 7,000 other people. I must admit that this is the first gig I have been to for a while, and I’d forgotten that whole thing about not being able to see because someone really tall stands in front of you! Anyway despite this small quibble it was great. I was reading in the paper today a kind of exit vox pop of the gig and the general opinion seemed to be that he (Jack) was a fantastic guitarist but that she (Meg) was rubbish and only had a very limited repertoire of drum beats. Someone even suggested that a few more people in the band would improve things. STOP. How can people be so stupid? If Meg were drum soloing all over the place the whole thing would tumble over into the wrong side of ‘70s prog rock. The simplicity of her beat is essential. Also the whole fantastic duo, sister / brother incest thing is a vital component (as is Meg’s rather bizarre one arm drumming, one arm on hips stance). Some people are appalling, it really is like punk never happened, can people really just be concentrating on musicianship and ignoring the romance of the myth and the power of conviction. Anyway, it was a good gig, minimal, powerful, charged atmosphere, a little Led Zeppelin (who I have always hated but now have to admit that Robert Plant’s voice was interesting) a little bit Cramps and they even eventually played all their hits.



Meg - Cathy Lomax - Oil on Canvas and Metal - 2003

Of course I also meant to say that I went to this gig with my friend Paul who writes about it on his blog (I've been told that I have to do links like this as it is blogger etiquette)

Girl on Girl

There is a new show opening at Transition next week (Friday 16th if you fancy coming along) called Girl on Girl. This deliberately provocative title has obviously been chosen in order to get as much publicity as possible although some of the work in the show is a little risque. The basic idea is that it is by women and about women but it is definately not a feminist thing. The artists involved are Delaine Le Bas, Alex Michon, Liz Neal, Stella Vine and of course me!

I'm currently trying to write something to go alongside my work for Arty (the art fanzine) and as usual writing about my own work is really really hard! I am painting a collection of bad girls from Patty Hearst to Courtney Love the idea being that I create a kind of landscape of unnatural women (ie not focusing on the usual feminine attributes). Of course there is more to it than this and I have to try and articulate what it is. I think it is something to do with visual imagery, representation and myth making but pinning my thoughts down is very tricky.

Anyway here is a little preview of one of my "bad girls"

So two great shows have just finished Fanclub at Rosy Wilde and Snow at Transition. If you didn't manage to see them in person here are a couple of pics to show you what you missed.



You can also still buy stuff from the Fanclub shop

Ruins/Souvenir

Lots happening at the moment. On Friday there was the private view of Ruins/Souvenir at Transition. The show looks great and is soo different from the last show (Temporary Fiction). I've already described a bit about Souvenir but thought that it might be nice to show a few of the photos, remember they are all for sale - £5 each and the show is on until 30 November at Transition - 110a Lauriston Road, London E9





All the photos are anonymous while the show is on , so you have to buy one to find out who it is by. Artists involved in the show include: Melanie Manchot, Harry Borden, Hans Scheirl, Stella Vine, Sarah Doyle, Nicholas Hughes and Malcolm Garrett

What's Goin' On

So after a very long absence In am back. I haven't been away anywhere just seem to have been very busy and have lost the blogging habit. Loads going on at the moment at the gallery, we have a fantastic show on until 2 November called Temporary Fiction and opening on 7 November is a two part project called Ruins/Souvenir. Ruins is a collection of prints by Pirenasi gathered together by the artist/curator Hugo Worthy to form a "simulacrum of a conservative exhibition space" while Souvenir is an installation of snapshot photos by over 100 artists and photographers put together by the artist Paul Murphy. The Souvenir snaps are being sold at a very reasonable price to raise money to fund future projects at the gallery £5 unframed and £40 framed. The exciting bit is that the photos are only going to be identified by their locations and the artists will only be revealed at the end of the show.

Capri

Last weekend was the Frieze art fair and to accompany this there has been a frenzied amount of art activity in London. The east end saw F-est and Capri which are two gallery umbrella organisations. Capri is a grouping together of the younger east end galleries and includes Transition. The party held on Saturday night in Vyner street was fab with many galleries contributing cars suitably arted up for the Capri rally. The two galleries in the street Modern Art and Mobile Home seem to have got together to provide work which was almost identical - little paintings that looked like photos. Very clever but ultimately really quite boring and sterile. Anyway there was free beer and dispite the cold everyone was very upbeat.

Frieze

The Frieze art fair was huge. Held in a specially designed tent in Regents Park which creaked and shuddered with every gust of wind in contained stalls from every trendy gallery in the world. Because of this many artists were grossly over represented - stand up Sophie Von Hellerman - as their Berlin, New York and London galleries all fought to show their best pieces. I had read the Adrian Searle piece in the Guardian before I went so I was already clued up on the star attractions (precocious performance children, big grassy slope etc.) However the most exciting moment for me was my first sighting of Charles Saatchi in the flesh (he has been into Transition before but I wasn't there) He was at a Berlin gallery and looked like he was going to buy a load of messy sculpture by someone who I thought was called Urs Fischer but I have just looked him up in Google and it wasn't him at all. This brings me to a gripe - what is it with the really confusing labelling at the moment in art, it just is not allowed anymore to have the artists name under their work there has to be a map or sometimes no indication at all of who has done what. Anyway the whole Frieze thing was very elitist and although I started off enthusiastically by the end I was really depressed - art can not be sold like a packet of washing powder. My favourite things were the Tokoyo galleries which seemeed to have a much younger fresher outlook and the Franz Koenig bookshop was excellent (pity no Arty on sale though).

St Martins' MA

It is time once again for the St Martins' MA Fine Art show. On until Wednesday 10th it is an eclectic mix of stuff a lot of which has a slightly dry conceptual bent. The undoubted highlight is Alex Michon's Billy Fury / Momento Mori which can be found on the ground floor. I do I'll admit know the work very well (and have written a little piece about it which you can find below) but it still shines out like a beacon amongst the mish mash of over thought, academy pleasing trash. It is also worth checking out Nicky Magliulo's video provokedly titled Elton John Is A Cunt .

Memento Mori/Billy Fury

Alex Michon’s Billy Fury, Memento Mori is a drawing space, a wholly inhabited fantasy world spun around the pivotal axis of the English 50s pop icon Billy Fury with a Jean Genet prison cell sub plot. These references are Michon’s own personal inspirations and knowledge of them is not essential to an understanding of the work, it’s the infectious, obsessive space that the work puts you in that is its point.

Billy’s early death was caused by a congenital heart defect and this vulnerability is friable in the heartfelt scratched out drawings which cover every wall surface of this miniature gallery /cell. Nostalgia is the hook but it is not the ultimate point, this is compulsion and obsession, a need to make work and breathe life into a world that would otherwise lie dormant.

In 1688 a physician from Muhlhausen called Johannes Hofer proposed that the term nostalgia should be used to define the medical condition of homesickness. ‘So that thus far it is possible from the force of the sound Nostalgia to define the sad mood originating from the desire to return to one’s native land’ (1). Michon’s work evokes this original definition of nostalgia in so far as we feel we know this/her world and whilst viewing it we want to be part of it.

Whilst creating a new work /world, Michon in the mould of Sybil, Christine and Eve White adopts another personality, she lives in another world, which is in this case the Denmark Street, Tin Pan Alley of Larry Parnes and his stable of stars. Billy’s world becomes intertwined with the homo-erotica of Jean Genet’s Our Lady of The Flowers as the low camp of hundreds of twinkling fairy lights illuminate butt smoking Indians and winsome bequiffed boys.

Memento mori are reminders that we will one day die and were a devise often inserted into 14th Century paintings (2). Pop stars have a unique position in modern society in that they are worshipped, identified and empathised with, their every move is something we can live through -“There were people whose interest in Maria Tambini seemed to rise with her decline. Over the years she had uncovered an audience who were attracted to her suffering” (3). Their failings and frailties are our own modern day memento mori.

Memento Mori/Billy Fury is a reminder of the frailty of the individual as they expose everything of themselves to a hostile world / institution. It is affecting, touching and courageous.

1: William Fiennes - The Snow Geese – Picador 2002
2:Such as Hans Holbein’s - The Ambassadors – (1533) - The National Gallery, London
3:Andrew O’Hagan – Personality. The text refers to the rise of fictional singing star Maria Tambini.

Arty + Rosy Wilde

I am back from my various summer and holidays ready to start a new year of art projects. The new issue of Arty - Nature, will be out next week and is available from all the usual outlets. I have also had some work in a show at the new Rosy Wilde Gallery in Whitecross Street, London and have a couple of pieces in the new show - Vaguely Romantic. It is a really interesting gallery with a very distinctive style, run by the artist Stella Vine it focuses particularly on figurative painting and drawing - think Karen Kilimnik. The new show at Transition is opening next week and features the work of the artist Mark Croxford.

Goria: Nadia Hebson

This is the new show at Transition and runs until 27th July.

Nadia is predominantly a painter, she paints exquisite portraits on copper which are a tantilisiing mixture of traditional and contemporary - John Currin mixed with Hans Memling. For Goria however she has made an installation which places her paintings within an evocative environment.

For Goria, Transition has become a theatre set through which the viewer is invited to walk. There are towering trees and clouds of mist which finally part to reveal small, jewel like paintings. These are self portraits of an emotional artist with tears trickling down her face. There is also a minature grotto celebrating or remembering something long forgotten and inviting us to enter - but of course we are much too big.

The whole experiece is quietly affecting and really quite beautiful.

Peter Blake @ Tate Britain

I went to hear Peter Blake talking at the Tate (Wednesday 18th June). I've always liked his stuff with his Elvisy, poppy motifs, in fact his toy shop was one of the first art works I ever liked. More recently I saw a piece about how his On the Balcony was put together, at the Transition show at The Barbican - I hadn't realised its connections to the Royal Family. Anyway it dawned upon me as I sat in the Tate Britain lecture hall that loads of his themes and interests are also mine.

The talk coincided with the launch of a new Peter Blake book - one of the Tate's contemporary artist series and there was free wine and nibbles (which is unheard of at one of these events ). During the talk/Q&A Blake came across as a very nice, affable man with a penchant for story telling, he even apologised for talking too much. He was amazingly open in describing his working methods and influences even saying that if he sees an artists work that he likes he rushes back home to make his own version of it. His work over the years mirrors everything he likes, admires and wants and this enthusiasm is reflected back in his paintings, sculptures and collages. He said when I saw "things I was interested in I couldn't not do work about them"

Blake is now in his 80s and has officially retired which he says means he isn't worrying about the art world but just doing what he wants when he wants although this doesn't mean his work rate has slowed down. He described the making of a set of illustrations for Under Milk Wood as something he is doing as "a hobby in the evening".

Peter Blake gives me hope for the future, he is still there doing what he wants with as much enthusiasm as ever.

The Tate's website has this event archived

Arty-tecture

I’ve been very busy!
I’m currently curating a show called Arty-tecture at Transition (110a Lauriston Road, London E9) which opens on Friday 13th (my lucky day!) To accompany the show there is a new issue of Arty (an art fanzine that I edit) which is also titled Arty-tecture.

The theme is the cross over point between art and architecture, and specifically creative, dreamlike places. The show includes work by:
Alice Anderson, Emi Avora, Grania Cumming, Viviana Duran, Carol Ho, The House of O’Dwyer, Tom Hunter, Ben Ford-Smith, Antonio Gianasi, Sam Griffin, Antonia Low, Cathy Lomax, Paul Murphy, Marcus Oakley, Kavel Rafferty, Peter Robathan, Heidi Stokes, Andrew Thomas, Edward Underwood, Yolanda Zappaterra

You can find out more about the show and the artists at www.transitiongallery.co.uk

Arty has stuff by many of the same people as well as others such as Sex Lovemat and Paul Lewis. Below are some images from Arty by Emi Avora, Marcus Oakley and me.

I’ve been to a whole host of shows over the past few weeks which I haven’t written about so here is what I think of a few of them

Days Like These - Tate Britain

I had been looking forward to seeing this show, I’d even came over to see it once before but found it closed as I was a day too early! Inevitably because of my high expectations it was disappointing and even the inclusion of a few of my current favourites didn’t stop the overall dull and depressing atmosphere.



Richard Hamilton’s controversial inclusion was an interesting idea that really didn’t work, he seems to be desperately trying to keep up with the latest trends but his video, drawings and Marcel Duchamp piece were uninspiring and vacuous. George Shaw and Peter Doig’s paintings are great but they were hung in a room with Shizuka Yokomizo’s exceedingly plain series of Stranger photographs – a curatorial thread I really couldn’t follow. In fact the curating as a whole was half hearted and the presentation was far too slick, this show says nothing about the current trends in British art.

As much as I may have criticised the current Becks Futures in an earlier review it did have that homespun, anti-corporate, diy thing going for it, something Days Like These attempted to reflect by the inclusion of Margaret Barron. Barron paints on pieces of sticky tape, which she then fixes on to a surface close to the scene she has painted. The show info. delighted in telling us that they couldn’t vouch for the longevity of the outdoor paintings, but there were also meant to be some inside the gallery. I really wanted to find them but hard as I tried I couldn't track them down.



There were also lots of film and video pieces and it is one of these that was the star of the show. Nick Relph and Oliver Payne’s film Gentlemen was brilliant. It was as I wrote in my notes as I watched it “so punk, so angry, so lethargic – poetry with images”. The film consists of mainly out of focus shots of tinsel, bright lights and urinals with a cutting voice over, and is a kind of love/hate message to the tacky, corporate culture of London’s famous streets. There is a kind of Oliver Twist / Steptoe feel to it; a mixed mocking of the old culture whilst still hanging on to an affection for it. The very feeling that infuses current English sensibilities.



Despite Relph and Payne’s beacon of light the whole show was very unsatisfying and didn’t work, it was trying to do everything and ended up saying nothing.

The Jerwood Painting Prize

This is another show I wanted to and expected to like. I have seen the last five shows of this annual painting competition and they have always been an interesting and varied mix of young and older painters. This one was just terrible! The work on show just seemed really old fashioned – John Wonnacott! John Hoyland! Shani Rhys James’s revoltingly coloured figurative compositions follow in the footsteps of Paula Rego but are completely superfluous in a world that already has Paula Rego. The most successful room features minimalist compositions by Marc Vaux – metal frames containing an inner frame of brightly painted wooden bars - and Alison Watt’s large paintings of fabric folds.



So what apart from the establishment reputation of the painters is my beef? Well… where is the humour? Where once again is the obtainable diy aesthetic? Why is everything roughly the same size – monumental (last year there were some gorgeous tiny paintings by Pamela Golden)? And most importantly where is the excitement?



If you have read my earlier blogs you may know that I entered this prize and was rejected, well I am not surprised. These painters are from a different art world; they are all very firmly routed in the routine commerciality of Cork Street and have nothing to do with pushing boundaries. This prize is not for me!

Paperworks @ Kate Macgarry

At last a show I liked! This is a new gallery to me, I was enticed to see it by this shows candy coloured email list of the participating artists and the inclusion of Lily van der Stokker (who I have read about but never seen).



The gallery is in the newly fashionable Redchurch Street (London E2) and is a small but beautifully formed space. The work as suggested by the title is all on paper (apart from kathrin Bohm’s screen print and installation) and is a mixture of quirky watercolours, cutout constructions and collages. I really loved Michael Harrison’s Cat watercolours. These are not cute, chocolate box cats but sleek, mystical, Egyptian style cats. The works are called things like Teaser and Crossed Destinies. I also liked Luke Gottelier’s bunch of watercolours entitled Cowslips, they are colourful, joyful and non-reverential. My favourite pieces however are by the fore mentioned Lily van der Stokker, little coloured pencil sketches entitled things like Grandmother and Grandfather (design for wall painting with seating). They are I expect exactly what their titles suggest and are executed in a heart-felt style.



An uplifting show, I look forward to the next one in this inspiring space by the charmingly off beat Francis Upritchard.

http://www.katemacgarry.com

FA Cup Final

Arsenal 1: Southampton 0

Yesterday I was at the FA Cup Final in Cardiff. It was fantastic, the roof was shut and the noise of the crowd was deafening. The atmosphere was great with the Southampton fans really going for it; loads of face paint, ginger wigs and yellow and blue. The best thing of course was that that Arsenal won, there is nothing like that moment when your team lifts the cup. So despite the missing players and the match reports it was a really exciting game and Arsenal played with a real determination. The brilliant Thierry Henry was deservedly voted man of the match and did everything save score, a privilege that went to Robert Pires.

What a day!

Sense And Sensibility - Transition Gallery

Today me and Paul Murphy (the show's curator) started to install the next show at Transition - Sense and Sensibility. The private view is on Friday 9th and the work looks really interesting through its bubble wrap and plastic bags. So far we have filled in holes in the walls, pulled off sticky fixers and painted, tomorrow we will actually put it up!
I have also launched the Transition web-site which is at http://www.transitiongallery.co.uk.

Chantal Joffe @ Victoria Miro

Women

4th April – 7th May 2003

Chantal Joffe is a painter and for this show she paints women and babies. In the accompanying catalogue there is an essay by Sacha Craddock, which I really hoped would tell me something about the paintings’ place within contemporary art. It didn’t. I recently read a review of the new Saatchi Gallery in the Guardian by Adrian Searle in which he quoted and ridiculed the catalogue notes calling them verbose and overblown. This is I fear a general art world malaise. Craddock’s essay is very short yet it took me five readings to understand it’s point, which is – these works are not portraits, they are of created fictional characters and there is no narrative. The press release rather blows this by telling us that the paintings have ambiguous origins that they shift between “portraits of friends and looking like anonymous icons torn from the media”. There is one (it could be Large Head of a Woman in a White Blouse although I am not absolutely sure) which looks very much like an old photo of a pre-royal family Diana - hardly a created fictional character then. The press release writer obviously couldn’t be bothered to decipher the catalogue notes and who could blame them.

The paintings themselves are lusciously painted with thick brush strokes and quirky little details. I especially liked the little room filled with babies (not in the catalogue presumably because the show is called Woman) This peculiar, brief period of life has been a neglected artistic area and Joffe’s paintings describe it particularly well. I loved the detailed recording of the cheerfully patterned baby paraphernalia, her babies are strapped into these bouncy chairs and car seats clad in their ubiquitous stretchy baby gros. The obsessive attention to baby detail makes me feel that the subject must be very close to Joffe, the artist’s loving eye trapped within a world of twenty-four hour baby exposure.

The Women didn’t have quite the same emotional intensity as the babies and thus were less convincing, they were rather uncomfortably grouped and seemed a little blank. I wish that the babies had been the focus of the show although it may have been the intimacy of their small gallery setting that contributed to their success.

***

Scritch Scratch @ Transition

Mark Croxford, Annabel Dover, Delaine Le Bas, Alex Michon, Marcus Oakley

Last night was the fantastic private view of the brilliant Scritch Scratch. The show examines a particular type of drawing, that cares nothing for the formality and tradition of the medium. It also looks great, and has a really unified feel to it.

Alex Michon's

drawings on brown card are scintilatingly current, juxtaposing the war with an arcadian idyll. While her "Material Interventions" are all homespun nicey, nicey with added blood.

Delaine Le Bas's

three framed drawings once again include stong images of for instance skeletons amongst their highly coloured surfaces. Her fabric and glass piece is powerfully entitled "Fucking Hell it Makes my Heart Bleed" and contains a complex series of violently graffitied layers.

Annabel Dover

has one large painting in the show - "Christening Gown". A shimmering dress proportioned to fit a ghostly, giant baby. It hovers in front of the viewer as they enter the gallery, its goya-esque white brushstrokes seemingly lifting it away from its rollered black background.

Mark Croxford

shows a series of architectural mirror drawings. Their over painted terracotta surfaces scratched away to reveal the magical, silvery mirror beneath.

Marcus Oakley's

work is presented in two clustered installations and has a quality of visionary innocence about it. Each cluster is a mixture of framed drawings, paintings on found board and sewn textile pieces. Some of the paintings have quirky slogans in speech bubbles. A country cottage says "Summer means new love" and a cartoony animal says "peace". The most telling slogan is above a tree lined landscape and says "Everyone knows this is nowhere", this is powerful work.

Of course I am a little biased as I did curate the show but... it is really good. Don't miss it .

Transition, 110a Lauriston Road, london E9

Becks Futures @ The ICA

8th April 2003

I don’t dislike the ICA, in fact I really like it and I think that they have put on lots of really good shows but…

This years’ Becks Futures has work by nine artists and as a friend said “it is the first group show I have been to where all the work looks like it was made by the same person”. There were a lot of quite boring videos and lots of very quirky projects and ultimately it was all pretty hollow.

The stand out things are:

1: Francis Upritchard – Funny Girl

I like Francis Upritchard especially since I recently found out that she is a girl rather than a boy. I saw her work at The Bart Wells Institute a few months ago and it was very funny. For Becks she has made a crappy little mummy complete with a B&H packet in its top pocket which moans and quivers, next to this are some vases which have a kind of Egyptian look about them (these are the things I saw before, the vases are 'found' but the egyptian cats heads on them are added by the artist) She is also showing a glass vitrine documenting evidence that Prince Charles is an Anti-Christ (complete with the only paintings in the show)

2: David Sherry – Artist as Christ

David Sherry sewed balsa wood on to his feet and videoed the process. This video is in the show it and is horrible, I could only watch it for a few minutes but, it was memorable. The same artist also had a plain old computer printer set up which spits out sheets of written text and illustrations. There is a notice inviting the audience to help themselves (I always like a freebie) It turned out to be a diary of a month the artist spend trying not to touch another human being.

3: The inclusion of Iventory in the Show

Inventory is a magazine / journal. The fact that this makes it able to be included in the show is exciting. Unfortunately I have never been able to understand much of it and the documented work displayed here is quite boring

I've left the Tresco paradise and am now back in lovely East London. On my way home I managed to fit in a visit to St Ives (see the review of The Tate below) which was worth it for the amazing train journey alone. I was sad to leave The Scilly Isles (and Cornwall in general) but its good to get back to civilisation (as the nice Tresco bike hire man said).

'Daying' at Transition has now finished and at the weekend I am going to start putting up the next show 'Scritch Scratch' which I am curating. It is going to be really interesting with an eclectic mix of contributors and is very succinctly a new appraisal of drawing. I will give more details in my next entry.

The Tate St Ives

http://www.tate.org.uk/stives/default.htm


The Tate St Ives is a good looking building (kind of reconstructed 30s industrial) and the beachside location is stunning but it seems to operate on a reverse tardis principal with much less room inside than is apparent from the outside. Consequently I’ve always found shows here a bit of a let down (I remember a particularly insipidly small Rothko one), this current display however seems to work.

There are three major things going on in the gallery at the moment.

Terry Frost

– a retrospective, a room of new work and another small room of his selections from the Tate collection. I found his new work a little bland and the old work a little tired; I did however enjoy his collection selection, which included Reinhart, Delaney, Kandinsky and Barnett Newman.

Pier Arts Centre Collection

– The Orkneys’ Pier Arts Centre is being renovated, so for a year some of its collection of ‘St Ives’ artists is on loan to the Tate. Initial thoughts are that this is a standard selection of St Ives’ work (although it does include some gems by Alfred Wallis, Ben Nicholson etc). What however makes it different is the way it’s shown. The artist Julie Roberts (one of the three showing in ‘Painting Not Painting’) has designed Barbara Hepworth wallpaper, which lines the gallery. The shock of the non-white walls is one thing but a patterned wall in an art gallery is quite fantastic! The wallpaper image is of Hepworth in baggy boiler suit equipped with a hammer and chisel sculpting away at one of her trademark organic, oval shapes. The colours are beautifully nostalgic and the handmade, screen printed surface is a homely English version of Warhol’s cow paper. It lifts the art hung upon it to a new level and for the first time I can feel the excitement that the incoming Nicholson felt when he first saw Alfred Wallis’ paintings whilst his own fireworks and Coty paintings are revitalised and compelling.

Painting Not Painting

– Julie Roberts, Jim Lambie and Victoria Morton. This is a commendable effort to investigate the diverging practices that make up contemporary painting. Jim Lambie is really more of a sculptor and his ‘zoobop’ must surely be one of the most over exposed art pieces of the 21st Century. If you haven’t yet seen it, it is a custom made floor covering made up of strips of different coloured tape which together form a kind of psychedelic, stripy lino. Victoria Morton does abstract canvases. The catalogue essay attempts to place her in some new kind of category where the artist works into the space of the canvas using gestural marks but I’m not sure I go for it. Colours are nice though. The most interesting work for me is that of the fore mentioned wallpaper designer, Julie Roberts. I haven’t heard of her before but judging by her cv she’s been around a while and despite my disappointment when I read that she is interested in examining the depiction and role of women in art (a prejudice of 20th Century Feminist art that I should get over!) her work was fascinating. Roberts has painted the walls of a small room with watercolour so it resembles faded Victorian wallpaper. Upon this are hung a series of her precisely made drawings of the victims of Jack The Ripper based on research made in the public records library. Although fairly gruesome (one in particular) they gave a peculiar dignity to these women who are only remembered because of their deaths. The understatedness of the installation is a fantastic subtle contrast to the bombastic nature of Lambie’s ‘Zoobop’.

The message I took away was that painting has expanded its boundaries and anything can now be included within its remit, including sculpture, drawing and installation. This is I think a very positive development.

Overall the gallery is as interesting as its ever been, so head down to St Ives before the summer surf crowd take it over.