Tag Archives: artist

Son of missionaries at the Camden Art Centre in Hampstead

Posted on by
Reply

MATTHEW KRISHANU WAS born in Bradford (UK) in 1980. His parents were Christian missionaries. His father was British, and his mother Indian. Their work took them to Bangladesh, where Matthew and his brother spent some of their childhood years. Matthew’s formal education in art took place at Exeter University, and then at London’s Central St Martin. Today, the 1st of June 2024, we viewed a superb exhibition of his paintings at the Camden Art Centre in Hampstead’s Arkwright Road. The exhibition continues until the 23rd of June 2024.

Many of the paintings on display include depictions of two young boys – the artist and his brother – often in a tropical setting that brings to mind places on the Indian Subcontinent. The paintings vary in size, but all of them are both pleasing to the eye and full of interest. His paintings of trees and other plants are impressionistic. Like many of the other pictures, they were inspired by the artist’s childhood in Bangladesh and later visits to India.

One room with several paintings contains works that must have been inspired by the artist’s memories of being brought up in a missionary family. The paintings in this gallery are depictions of the colonial legacy of Christianity in the Indian Subcontinent. Another indication of the artist’s upbringing in a Christian religious family setting is the appearance of small images of the Last Supper in several of the paintings, including those which are not specifically portrayals of religious environments.

Although, there is no doubt much that can be read into his paintings, Krishanu’s works are both approachable and engaging. I liked them immediately – as soon as I saw them. It is worth a visit to Arkwright Road to see this well laid-out exhibition.

An artist from Vienna who lived in Hampstead (north London)

Posted on by
Reply

HAMPSTEAD HAS BEEN home to many artists – both painters and sculptors. Some of these are well-known, such as John Constable, George Romney, Stanley Spencer, Henry Moore, and Barbara Hepworth – to name but a few. Others are less widely known. Amongst the lesser-known is the late Marie-Louise von Motesiczky (1906-1996), some of whose paintings are on display in a special exhibition in Hampstead’s Burgh House until the 15th of December 2024. In addition to the works in the temporary exhibition, Burgh House’s permanent collection includes a few of her paintings.

Marie-Louise was born in Vienna (see: www.motesiczky.org/biography/). Her mother’s family were well-connected with Vienna’s flourishing intellectual circles in the early 20th century. Her grandmother, Anna Von Lieben, was one of Freud’s first psychoanalytical patients. At the age of 13, Marie-Louise left school, and began studying art in Vienna, The Hague, Frankfurt, Paris, and Berlin. In 1927, she joined the master classes held by the artist Max Beckmann (1884-1950) in Frankfurt-am-Main. This painter became an important influence in her life and work.

After the Anschluss (the Nazi annexation of Austria) in March 1938, Marie-Louise and her mother, Henriette, left Vienna. They went to Holland, where, in 1939, Marie-Louise had her first solo exhibition. Soon after this, she and her mother left for England, and settled in Amersham. There, she met the Bulgarian writer Elias Canetti (1905-1994) and his wife. Canetti was to become an extremely close friend of Marie-Louise. At Burgh House, we saw her portrait of him on display.

When WW2 was over, Marie-Louise and her mother moved into a flat in West Hampstead, which they rented until 1960. Then, they purchased a large house in Hampstead, number 6 Chesterford Gardens (a short road linking Frognal and Redington Road). While living there, she painted many portraits of her ageing mother. Some of these were on display at Burgh House.

Marie-Louise is now highly acclaimed as a 20th century artist in the country where she was born. Although the paintings I saw today at Burgh House are often imaginative and pleasant enough, I began to understand why she has not become as well-known as some of the many other artists who lived in Hampstead. However, everyone has different tastes in art. So, a good way to judge this artist’s work would be to pay a visit to Hampstead’s lovely early 18th century Burgh House.

Women with many heads on canvases at an art gallery in central London

Posted on by
Reply

TODAY, WE VIEWED an exhibition of paintings by an artist born in India, who spent most of her life in the British Isles. The artist is Gurminder Sikand (1960-2021), who was born in Jamshedpur, but moved to the Rhondda Valley in South Wales with her parents in 1970. Her artistic training was first at the Cardiff College of Art and Design (in 1979-80) and then at the City of Birmingham Polytechnic (now Birmingham City University), where she was awarded a fine art degree. In 1983, she and her husband moved to Nottingham. Her work began to attract wide attention after one of her pieces was selected as the winner of the East Midlands Art Prize by the South African artist Gavin Jantjes.

In an obituary written by her husband, published in thegauardian.com on the 14th of February 2022, it was noted that her work:

“… was characterised by images of strong women. This was true of her many self-portraits, her paintings influenced by Indian folk art, her watercolours of women hugging trees (inspired by the Chipko anti-deforestation movement), and latterly her drawings of muscular female figures whose physiques reflected Gurminder’s workouts at her city-centre gym in Nottingham.”

The paintings we saw today (22nd of May 2024) at the Maximillian William gallery in London’s Fitzrovia were some of Gurminder’s earlier works, created between 1986 and 1992. Most of the 19 works include depictions of women. All of them are slightly mysterious, but also eye-catching. Many of them include women with several heads. I wondered whether in creating these she was thinking about Hindu deities that are often shown as having many arms. As far as I am aware few, if any, Hindu deities are shown in images as having more than one head, but seeing Gurminder’s women with many heads made me think about the multi-limbed deities in Hindu imagery.

Trees also figure prominently in many of the paintings we saw. Regarding this and her painting style, the gallery’s press release has this to say:

“Images of women drawn from Indian mythology recur throughout Sikand’s work. Her interest in the figure of the goddess – particularly the Hindu goddess Kali, who both destroys and creates the world anew, and is often pictured with a garland of human heads – is evident in her depictions of women metamorphosing into nature. In Sikand’s paintings, women are seeds buried in soil, hang on tree branches to provide shelter, or are even the earth and sky themselves. These amorphous relationships between the figure and nature were further inspired by the Chipko environmental movement, which began in north India during the 1970s, when villagers – mostly women – embraced trees at risk of deforestation, a protest that also highlighted their primary role as caregivers. Sikand’s female figures are often portrayed as strong: appearing resolute with multiple heads or acting as protectors over her landscapes.”

Although Gurminder left India when she was only 10 years old, and was then immersed in British life, culture, and education, her Indian heritage never deserted her, and is expressed in her wonderful paintings. I enjoyed viewing this well-displayed exhibition, and I recommend seeing it before it ends on the 29th of June 2024.

An artist in Turkey with a famous Albanian ancestor

Posted on by
Reply

ALI PASHA OF TEPELENE (1740-1822) was born an Albanian in what is now Albania. He ruled the Ottoman pashalik of Yanina (Ioannina in Greek) with a large degree of autonomy. One of his descendants was Naciye Hanim. She married Lieutenant Colonel Abdurrahman Ziya Bey,

Naciye and her husband had only one child, a daughter called Melek, who was born in 1896 (in Istanbul) and died in 1976 ( in Munich, Germany). She became a renowned painter, sculptor, and writer (books and articles). I would not have heard of her had we not visited the magnificent Sakip Sabanci museum of art at the village of Emirgan on the European shore of the Bosphorus. At this place there was an excellent exhibition of Melek’s life and works. With information both in Turkish and English, it was an enlightening experience.

From an early age, Melek showed signs of artistic ability. She was brought up in an intellectual atmosphere. The Turkish poet Niğar Hanim encouraged her to take up painting. Her first lessons were with her uncle the soldier and painter Kâzim Bey. Later, she attended the Académie Julian in Paris. She also attended the School of Fine Arts for Women in Istanbul. While in Paris, Melek worked with various well-known French artists in their studios. Soon, she was recognised as an accomplished artist. This is evident from the many portraits and still-life’s on display in the exhibition.

In addition to painting and sculpting, Melek was a prolific writer of articles and books. She was also involved ed with Turkish politics during the period when the Ottoman Empire was dying and Ataturk’s modern Turkey was in its infancy. Her first book was published in 1938. In 1959, she published a book in French to introduce western readers to the delights of the Topkapi Palace complex in Istanbul. Many of her publications are on display alongside her paintings and one sculpture.

Melek married twice. First with Mr Celal in 1917. They had a son, and Celal died soon after that. In 1956, she married Dr Lampé, a physician. He died before she did. Melek died whilst being treated in a hospital in Munich.

Melek was one noteworthy descendant of Ali Paşa of Tepelene. There were others, who became famous Turkish intellectuals, including the writer Ebüzziya Tevfik(1849-1913), another writer Abdülhak Şinasi Hisar (1887-1963) and the author and poet Nâmik Kemal (1840-1888). These people of Albanian descent were not alone in shaping Turkey – both Ottoman and modern – in various ways, both peaceful and otherwise. I had heard about some of them, but Melek and her art are a wonderful discovery.

A COMMANDER OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE AND THE ARTISTIC INTERPRETATION OF COLONISATION

Posted on by
Reply

THE ARTIST YINKA SHONIBARE was awarded the prestigious CBE in 2019. In case you do not know what these three letters stand for, it is ‘Commander of the British Empire’ – not that Britain has much of, if any, empire left to boast of. For much of its long existence, places in the British Empire witnessed many injustices and inhumanities. This was especially true before the abolition of the slave trade in the early 19th century. Yinka Shonibare, who was born in London in 1962 and brought up between that city and Lagos in Nigeria, uses his artistic skills to explore Britain’s lengthy history of imperialism imaginatively and creatively. Even without knowing that he does this, his art works are in themselves visually exciting and fascinating to the viewer. The pieces on display until the 1st of September 2024 at the Serpentine South gallery in Kensington Gardens are well worth seeing both for their inherent beauty and for the way that Shonibare expresses his interpretation of Britain’s colonial past and its legacy.

For more information about the exhibition, please visit: www.serpentinegalleries.org/whats-on/yinka-shonibare-cbe-suspended-states/

From the screens of Instagram onto the walls of commercial art galleries

Posted on by
Reply

DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE the power of Instagram.

Today (the 2nd of April 2024), we visited Beers Gallery in Little Britain, a street which is close to St Bartholomew the Great church and Smithfield meat market. Until the 13th of April 2024, they have an exhibition of delightful paintings by Florent Stosskopf, who was born in Rennes (France) in 1989. Based in Brittany, he has qualifications in web and graphic design, as well as holding an Advanced Technician diploma from L’école Multimedia. Yet, he is a self-taught painter. His current exhibition at Beers is called “The Mocking Bird”. The gallery’s press hand-out says:

“The title, he informs us, is a loose reference to elements of his own autobiography that he found mirrored in the song ‘Mockingbird’ by Eminem.”

Be that as it may, the paintings are full of bold colour and vibrancy. It was a joy to see them.

We had never heard of Florent Stosskopf. We asked a lady who worked in the gallery how her establishment had got to know of this artist. The answer astonished us. She told us that it was after he began posting pictures of his paintings on Instagram (see: www.instagram.com/stosskopf_florent/)  that he began to be recognised as being a painter worth exhibiting in commercial galleries.

Many people with artistic tendencies and varying degrees of skill post images of their creations on Instagram. Even I use Instagram to try to promote some of my books. However, just posting on Instagram is not enough. To become truly successful by using Instagram, you need real talent, and that is what Monsieur Stosskopf has in a large amount.

AMAZING SCULPTURES AND COLLAGES BY A BRITISH POP ARTIST

Posted on by
Reply

HUMOUR, IMAGINATION, PLAYFULNESS, wit, social criticism, and creativity – these are all words that can be applied to the works of the artist Peter Blake, which are on show in a superb exhibition at the Waddington Custot gallery in London’s Cork Street until the 13th of April 2024.

Blake was born in 1932 in Dartford (Kent). He studied art at Gravesend Technical College, and then at the Royal College of Art in Kensington. He is a leading British exponent of Pop Art, which, according to Wikipedia:

“… is an art movement that emerged in the United Kingdom and the United States during the mid- to late-1950s.The movement presented a challenge to traditions of fine art by including imagery from popular and mass culture, such as advertising, comic books and mundane mass-produced objects. One of its aims is to use images of popular culture in art, emphasizing the banal or kitschy elements of any culture, most often through the use of irony.”

One of Blake’s most familiar works is the album sleeve for the Beatle’s LP “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”, which he designed along with Jann Haworth, his wife between 1963 and 1979. I wonder how many Beatle’s fans know that Blake was involved with making the image on this.

The exhibition at Waddington Custot is dedicated to Blake’s sculptural works. There has not been one during the last 20 years. Although there are many of his sculptures in the gallery’s three interconnecting rooms, many of his ingeniously witty collages are also on display. Employing images from comics, old books, and other printed matter, these collages are so carefully assembled that unless one looks at them closely and extremely obliquely, it is difficult to realise that these artefacts are not prints but collages.

The sculptures are with only a very few exceptions, wonderful assemblages or tableaux constructed with found objects. For example, one of these is a shelf overloaded with miniature booze bottles, all positioned beneath a miniature image of Leonardo da Vinci’s depiction of the Last Supper. There are several model sailing boats, on which Blake has placed plastic models (toys) of people expressing a range of behaviours. Other sculptural assemblies are more complex and need to be seen rather than described. I mentioned ‘exceptions’ at the beginning of this paragraph. This refers to four objects – they look like large stones (one of which is a carved stone head) – which Blake called “Found Sculpture”. Each of these is mounted on its own plinth. By doing so, the artist has ‘elevated’ these natural objects to the status of ‘fine art’, and as the gallery’s hand-out said, they challenge:

“… conventional notions of artistic materials …”

I loved the exhibition. Every exhibit is both interesting and beautiful … and great fun. As the show’s hand-out correctly stated, Blake’s sculptures are:

“… by turns quirky, endearing or engaged with conceptual concerns.”

His creations:

“… offer starting points for imagined narratives, each with a glimmer of Blake’s typically gentle, English sense of humour.”

And this is quite correct. Skilfully conceived and executed, Blake’s works provide nourishment for both the eye and brain in a delightfully digestible form.  If you view the exhibition with an open state of mind, you are bound to gain great enjoyment from it.

An exhibition in London at a gallery called Parafin

Posted on by
Reply

ONE OF THE MANY advantages of living close to central London is that it does not take long for us to reach the numerous commercial art galleries in Mayfair and Marylebone. Many of these hold exhibitions of modern and contemporary art, which is often fascinating to see. My mother was a sculptor, many of whose works were abstract rather than figurative. Being brought up in close proximity to someone so interested in the contemporary art world (of the 1960s and 1970s) might well have been a source of my lifelong interest in seeing works of contemporary artists (as well as modern artists who no longer live). My enthusiasm for viewing art has been enhanced by two people close to me. My wife has always had an interest in art in general and ‘modern art’ in particular. Our daughter, who works in the world of art and its propagation, has added to our enjoyment of experiencing artistic creations by recommending galleries with exhibitions that often prove to be most fascinating.

Recently, our daughter suggested that we see an exhibition, “As Above So Below”, by an artist with whom she is working. Creations of British born Tania Kovats (born 1966) are being displayed at an exhibition in a small Gallery, Parafin, in Woodstock Street (close to Bond Street Underground station) until the 24th of February 2024. Although she is known for her work in a wide range of artistic activities, she best known for her drawings and sculptures. The present exhibition includes many drawings and a few sculptural creations. The gallery’s ‘flyer’ (or handout) explained that:

“… Kovats’ enduring themes are the experience and understanding of landscape, geological processes, patterns of growth and the intersection of landscape, nature and culture and how art can speak to our critical climate crisis.”

This summarises what the artist is trying to convey with her artworks. Everything on display at the exhibition was pleasing visually and meticulously executed, but just by looking at the works I was unable to grasp anything about them but their beauty. Fortunately, the gallery’s flyer helps to explain the artist’s intentions.

Many of the works on display relate to the sea and evoke it beautifully. One exhibit, also connected with the sea, was a series of images of numbered, but un-named, graves of 20 migrants who lost their lives crossing the sea from Africa to the Italian island of Lampedusa. Near this artwork, there was another work – a line of used school shoes. This is Tania’s memorial to her son’s childhood, and (to quote the flyer):

“… explores how growth houses loss, and is built into the child’s progress towards individualisation.”

The passage of time is depicted in another work in the exhibition, “Luna”, in which a series of pictures depicting the phases of the moon as they change during a lunar month.

I am very pleased that our daughter recommended this exhibition by an artist, who we had not encountered before. Although I greatly enjoyed the exhibition, now that I write about it and reflect on what I saw and read, I feel that I would like to see the show once again because at a second viewing I will gain much more from it than during my first visit.

A twentieth century American artist who seemed to have lost his way

Posted on by
Reply

THE EARLY WORKS OF artists, who became famous for their successful experimentation in style and expression (such as Matisse, Picasso, Van Gogh, Miro, and Hockney), began by making quite conventional figurative pictures – always competently executed. Such was also the case with the artist Philip Guston (1913-1980), who was born in Canada, son of Jewish parents who had migrated from Czarist Russia. Born ‘Goldstein’, he later changed his surname to ‘Guston’. His family moved to Los Angeles (USA) in 1922. His childhood was filled with trauma: his father committed suicide, and soon after that his brother was killed in a motor accident. He began to be involved with art as a way of dealing with these sad events. In the 1930s, he engaged with political activity, fighting racism and anti-Semitism at a time when the Ku Klux Klan was enjoying some prominence. Several of his paintings depict hoods, such as were worn by the Klan.

There is a retrospective exhibition of Guston’s works at London’s Tate Modern until the 25th of February 2024. The paintings are exhibited chronologically on the walls of eleven interconnecting display areas. Like the artists listed at the beginning of this piece, Guston’s early works are figurative and very beautifully painted. Many of these powerful images reflect his concerns about the adverse political developments he observed during the 1930s. Later, in the 1940s, he became friends with artists like Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning, and he moved successfully from figurative painting to abstraction. He became well-known as an abstract artist. After that, in the 1960s, his art seemed to my eyes to go downhill.

Guston’s later works, which are partly figurative and partly abstract, and created in and after the late 1960s, were undoubtedly created to send messages to the viewer. However, I found them to be crudely executed in comparison with his earlier abstract and much earlier figurative works. Whether this crudeness was deliberate or reflected a decline in the artist’s ability I cannot say. These later works express the artist’s personal crises and his reaction to injustices and other global catastrophes, but they did not do much for me from an aesthetic point of view. Had I left the exhibition without seeing them, my admiration for Guston would have been higher than it is having seen them.

A Brazilian artist and the River Ganges at Varanasi

Posted on by
Reply

MARINA RHEINGANTZ IS an artist whose works I had never seen until today, the 31st of October 2023. Her exhibition, “Maré”, which means ‘tide’ in Portuguese, is on at the White Cube Gallery in London’s Masons Yard until the 11th of November 2023. Most of the exhibits are painting, but there are also an embroidery and a tapestry.

Marina was born in 1983 at Araraquara in Brazil. She lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil. The works on display at White Cube tend towards being abstract, but they are not completely devoid of naturalistic content. As the gallery’s handout explained:

“Guided by observations of tidal rhythms, ocean beds and meteorological conditions, Rheingantz infuses landscapes of water with a quasi-sentient vitality … Expansive in scale and richly textured, Rheingantz’s landscapes deconstruct topography into its loosest arrangements.”

Although separated from him by many years, Marina’s paintings are almost as atmospheric as the great JMW Turner’s most impressionistic works. However, she has gone further than Turner in her almost abstract depiction of natural phenomena.

For example, this is evident in two paintings (detail from one of them above) she created following a recent visit to Varanasi (‘Benares’) on the Ganges River in India. These depict in an impressionistic way the orange embers that bodies being cremated on the burning ghats spit out onto the surface of the river. Other pictures on display express her perceptions of places as far afield as Brazil, Mexico, and Morrocco.

Not far from Piccadilly and the Royal Academy, White Cube Masons Yard is well worth a visit, It would be a shame to miss viewing the artworks created by Ms Rheingantz.