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New Statesman
02-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
Jenny Saville's human landscapes
Such was the noise generated by a cluster of exhibits at Sensation – the 1997 show at the Royal Academy that announced the Young British Artists to a fascinated-appalled public – that it is easy to forget that there were more than 40 artists on display. Hirst, Emin, the Chapman brothers, Marc Quinn's self-portrait head made from his own blood, Chris Ofili's elephant-dung Virgin and Marcus Harvey's portrait of Myra Hindley simply drowned out many less strident voices. One of those belonged to Jenny Saville, who had five pieces in the show. However, while many of her fellow YBAs have, since that high-water mark, seen a steep downwards trajectory in terms of creativity (though not necessarily fame) Saville's career has followed the opposite path. In 2018, when her painting Propped (1992) – a massively fleshy naked self-portrait showing a ham-thighed Saville on a stool (in reality, she is not a large woman) – sold at Sotheby's for £9.5m, it became the world's most expensive piece by living female artist. And this time it seemed that the market was acting not on whim or media wattage, but on worth. Propped is one of the paintings included in the National Portrait Gallery's new survey of Saville's work. It is an appropriate venue because all her work is a form of portraiture although not of the conventional kind. She prefers to work from photographs rather than the live model and when she draws and paints faces she gives them titles that anonymise the sitter further, such as Stare, Witness or Figure 11.23; when she paints the naked body they are named Odalisque or Couples Study; when it is simply headless but stretched or pitted flesh it becomes Trace or Hybrid. All, however, show real people – or bits of them – but rather than read their personality through their gaze, clothing or setting, Saville writes it in their skin. The abstract expressionist painter Willem de Kooning, an artist Saville greatly admires, wrote in 1949 that 'flesh was the reason why oil paint was invented', and it is a dictum she has taken to heart. Her pictures are about both elements – flesh and paint – and her interest is rarely in the conventionally beautiful but rather in human mass and how best to depict it. For clues she has looked not just at De Kooning but at Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, Titian and Chaim Soutine, scoured medical textbooks and observed in operating theatres. However, the artist she most resembles in many ways is a less hallowed name, Henry Tonks, the First World War surgeon who produced numerous pastel drawings of soldiers following rudimentary reconstructive surgery. In Saville, as in Tonks, the surface of the skin and the subcutaneous layers are intertwined. Saville has expressed an interest in bodies 'that emanate a sort of state of in-betweenness', such as in her paintings from the 1990s of bodies with marks drawn on them by a surgeon as a guide to operating, or a hefty back and bottom bearing the impress of recently removed bra straps, waistband and knickers. As she told an interviewer about her fascination with imperfect flesh: 'As we go through life, traces or memories both physical and psychological are left on the body; they almost help to produce your body.' This kind of scrutiny makes her a non-judgemental observer. She has also followed Mark Rothko in stating that her pictures should be viewed from a distance of 18 inches. While with Rothko this fills the viewer's field of vision with colour that begins to throb after a few moments, with Saville, a painter who more often than not works at a large scale, it means submersion in flesh. It is rarely a comfortable experience but Saville's particular gift is to make sure it is not a repellent one. One and a half feet is too close perhaps but it forces the viewer to confront the abstract nature not just of her paint but of flesh itself. From her early paintings to her more recent huge and vibrantly coloured heads, Saville treats the body as a form of landscape. Limbs are less objects for propulsion or lifting than elements of corporeal scenery, offering valleys and crests, enclosures and vistas. In some of her head paintings from 2020, such as Cascade and Virtual, she emphasises this non-figurative strand. Like Georg Baselitz's work, they are painted upside down and the controlled marks of her early work have here turned riotous – slashes and rubbings of roughly mixed pigments surrounding disembodied eyes. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe The sense of the body as something liminal is most evident in her mother and child pictures which she started to paint following the birth of her own two children in the late 2000s. Although they clearly refer to innumerable depictions of the Madonna and Child, Saville's contain an element of struggle – the naked mother (herself in several) trying to hold on to a wriggling child. The squirming infants are engaged in a battle not to cling on their mother but to escape from her; having been born, they fast-forward to separation. Poignantly, in Aleppo (2017-18), her response to the war in Syria, that struggle has ended prematurely in death. The mother and child has become a pietà. In this picture, as in many, she leaves the drawn outlines of rejected poses, the preparatory studies familiar from Renaissance cartoons. The reason for these pentimenti, she says, is that she is 'trying to get simultaneous realities to exist in the same image'. They don't always work: for example, One Out of Two (Symposium) (2016), a monochrome, Freud-like drawing of naked women on a bed, is overlaid with terracotta swirls that neither enhance the drawing beneath nor indeed refer to it, but are simply a wilful addition, as though Saville felt the picture needed something – more energy? more diversion? – but couldn't quite decide on exactly what. Right from the start of Saville's career, there has been much talk – some by the artist herself – of her work being a response to the old debates about naked vs nude, objectification and reclaiming women's bodies. This retrospective, however, suggests something simpler. She is interested above all in the act of painting and how 'to charge the paint with a sculptural force'; it is why she treats the human body as a canvas as much as a subject. Sometimes, when artists make frequent references to the art-historical canon, it is little more than an impertinence. But not with Saville, who has taken a venerable tradition and moved it on. She is a painter of substance. Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting The National Portrait Gallery, London WC2. Until 7 September [See more: Anna Wintour still rules Vogue] Related
Telegraph
11-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
London was the centre of the art world. Now it's the English countryside
Where would you start looking if you wanted to find the heart and soul of British culture? Is there somewhere you can pinpoint, like the source of a great river? 'That's easy!' I used to think, considering these questions. 'The city is where art gets made.' From the Italian city-states that birthed the Renaissance to the metropolises of Paris, Berlin and Vienna from which Modernism emerged, dynamic urban environments have provided the settings for important cultural vibe shifts. The same is true of Britain, isn't it? Elizabethan theatre flourished in playhouses on the fringes of the capital. Four centuries later, the Young British Artists flocked to empty warehouses in the East End. A symbiosis between art and cities makes sense. To thrive, significant new art requires certain conditions: the circulation of stimulating ideas; proximity to ever-shifting entertainments; networks of like-minded creative types on the lookout for inspiration. These things are commonplace in cities. Yet, to deny that culture can also coalesce in the countryside would reflect terrible metropolitan bias, as I realised while visiting Tate Britain's enthralling new double exhibition devoted to the 20th-century artists Edward Burra and Ithell Colquhoun, both of whom had a profound sensitivity to the British landscape. Towards the end of his life, Burra depicted rural locations that he believed were menaced by modernity. After the war, Colquhoun settled in Cornwall and produced visionary paintings inspired by topographical features such as standing stones. Both were products of their times. A generation earlier, the British avant-garde – led by Wyndham Lewis and his fellow Vorticists – had been an urban affair. But hankering after rural spots gradually became de rigueur for progressive artists. (The same period witnessed the British folk-song revival associated with the musician Cecil Sharp.) In 1907, the artist Eric Gill settled in the Sussex village of Ditchling. A little later, the Bloomsbury set began congregating at Charleston, a few miles to the east. In the 1930s, Paul Nash lived in Dorset, in the coastal town of Swanage, where he cavorted with fellow artist Eileen Agar (the pair became known as the 'seaside surrealists'), and painted Event on the Downs (1934), with its mysterious face-off between a tree stump, a cloud, and a levitating tennis ball. By the end of that decade, Ben Nicholson had moved to the Cornish enclave of St Ives. In 1945, the exiled 'degenerate' German artist Kurt Schwitters ended up in Cumbria (following in the footsteps of the artist and writer John Ruskin, who lived in the Lake District from 1872 until his death). During the 1970s, Henry Moore – who for decades had been collecting pleasing pebbles and flints, which he often used as a starting point for new work – made a series of dramatic prints depicting Stonehenge. It isn't only aspects of British modernism: various earlier cultural moments could be considered rural phenomena too. Romanticism wouldn't have happened without a newfound interest in awe-inspiring native mountain scenery: swathes of the country, once written off as desolate wilderness, were now 'sublime'. Several artists from the British Isles responded to this fascination for rugged landscapes, including, famously, JMW Turner – who was struck by Snowdonia during a trip to north Wales in 1798 – but also Francis Danby and John Martin, and, of course, James Ward, whose colossal, 14ft-wide Goredale Scar (exhibited 1815), an epic, primordial vision of limestone cliffs in Yorkshire, dominates Tate Britain. And what was the 19th-century Arts and Crafts movement if not a reaction against the Industrial Revolution? Perhaps, like an ancient chalk figure cut into a hill, the spirit of British culture should be located far beyond the city's gates. That said, we shouldn't romanticise the countryside as a bucolic paradise where artists perpetually work and play. The truth is that rural settings aren't especially conducive to generating culture; country people aren't known for embracing change or new ideas. Still, according to Adam Sutherland, the longstanding director of Grizedale Arts (an arts organisation based in a valley in the Lake District), every so often something of lasting cultural importance 'blows up' in the countryside – and these 'little explosions', as he put it to me recently, are 'all interconnected', and even represent 'a kind of rural movement'. Are we witnessing another rural 'explosion' today? I suspect so. Signs of a so-called 'rural renaissance' have been evident for a while – since the success of Jez Butterworth's rambunctious 2009 play Jerusalem, which was set in the middle of nowhere in Wiltshire, and debuted shortly after the artist Sarah Lucas (the most gifted – and urban – of the YBAs) had swapped Shoreditch for Suffolk. More recently, the BBC's brilliant 'mockumentary sitcom' This Country, which shone a light on everyday ennui in a Cotswolds village, ran for three series between 2017 and 2020. During the pandemic, people moved out of cities in droves, and 'gorpcore' – an outerwear fashion trend associated with hiking – became a thing; judging by the footwear sported in my patch of east London, it's still going strong. Nature writing by the likes of Olivia Laing and Robert Macfarlane, whose latest best-seller, Is a River Alive?, was published last month, remains popular. Within visual art, too, there's been a 'turn' towards the rural. In 2021, two artists, Matthew Shaw and Lally MacBeth (whose study of enchanting folk customs, The Lost Folk, will be published by Faber & Faber next week), set up Stone Club (membership: £7), as 'a place for stone enthusiasts to congregate'. Next month, the finale of the National Gallery's bicentenary celebrations – a 'day-long spectacular' in Trafalgar Square orchestrated by the artist Jeremy Deller – will involve hundreds of participants including Boss Morris, a troupe of 'progressive' Morris dancers. A few years ago, this would have prompted sniggers. But Boss Morris have performed at Glastonbury and the Brits. What is motivating this interest in non-urban modes? The root cause may be economic. Thanks to sky-high rents, younger artists can no longer afford to be in the capital. Many are clustering instead in seaside towns where a relationship with the natural world is more pronounced. Is St Leonards the new St Ives? Since there isn't much of an art market in these places, they're also finding other ways to work, e.g., by creating art that's useful, and embedding themselves in local communities. Rural art is as much a mind-set as a cultural product. Above all, though, the rural renaissance is surely a reaction to the Digital Age, and a call-to-arms for those of us who are sick of staring endlessly at screens. Back to the land!
The Guardian
03-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Hamad Butt: Apprehensions review – beauty and violence from a lost and dangerous YBA
Flies crawl about in a triptych of glass-fronted cabinets, while in another installation you gradually realise the fragile bottles you're looking at are full of poisonous gas, lethal to humans. Does this remind you of anyone? Hamad Butt is the Damien Hirst who got away, the Young British Artist of the 1990s who didn't win the Turner prize, make millions or lose his youthful talent and turn into a bloated mediocrity. Now he is a cult figure precisely because he is none of those things and can instead be presented as if he was a complete unknown, whose art expresses his queer Pakistani identity rather than being part of a fin-de-siecle art movement of sensation and creepy science. I couldn't find any reference, even in the moving array of Butt's working documents on show, to the fact he studied at Goldsmiths alongside Hirst, Collishaw, Wearing and more. If we need to detach this brilliant artist from that generation to celebrate him, it's better than forgetting his work. But as soon as you walk into this convincing retrospective you're back in 1992. Occupying the whole of the Whitechapel's main ground floor gallery is Butt's three-part installation Familiars. Like a giant executive toy, spherical glass vessels are suspended from the ceiling by thin threads in a long row. Pull the first one back, as it is weirdly tempting to do, and you'd set them going by action and reaction. Except it would surely shatter these vessels and kill you, or at least make you very ill. The coloured gas inside each sphere is mustard-coloured, as in mustard gas. This is gaseous chlorine, first used as a chemical weapon by Germany in 1915 and in these static, sealed bottles it looks lovely, golden, glowing in the gallery lights. It's disturbing but, let's be honest, darkly thrilling to be only a thin glass wall away from a first world war soldier's death here in an art gallery. To put it another way it's sublime. One of the sculptures in this installation is actually entitled Substance Sublimation Unit, a play on chemistry and aesthetics. The other two elements of this epic sculpture look equally hazardous: a ladder with rungs that light up with blazing gas like a stairway to hell, and three curving, blood-red glowing spikes. To feel such beauty and violence in a gallery may strike you as shockingly new or oddly nostalgic. In the archives room there's a 1995 Jak cartoon from the Evening Standard, depicting a dodgy geezer selling gas masks outside the Tate – a reference to a leak from this installation when it was in a show called Rites of Passage, alongside Louise Bourgeois. Hamad Butt was not alive to laugh at Jak's cartoon. He died in September 1994, at the age of 32, from Aids-related complications. In a video interview, lying on a sofa at his family home in Ilford, he's still talking vividly about his future projects, months before his death. What a compelling presence he is, how deeply intelligent and imaginative. His gripping art makes you aware of how quickly and suddenly you can stray from civilised normality to mortal danger. His installation Transmission glows with gorgeous, if clinical, blue light – but look for too long, or without the protective glasses you are offered, at its ultra-violet bulbs and you risk damaging your eyesight. The bulbs rest on a circle of opened books made of glass, on which the monstrous people-eating, world-conquering flora from John Wyndham's novel The Day of the Triffids are engraved. In another classic trope of Young British Art, that of appropriation, his design of a Triffid, with its fat vegetable body, long sucker and libidinous tongue, is borrowed wholesale from the cover of the original Penguin paperback of The Day of the Triffids. Sign up to Art Weekly Your weekly art world round-up, sketching out all the biggest stories, scandals and exhibitions after newsletter promotion The labels prompt you to see Hamad Butt's art in relation to his tragic early death, so Transmission is about the Aids epidemic, and his Triffids – which also feature in a hilarious animated video – are images of the HIV crisis. However, in the video interview, he says 'transmission' refers in the first place to the transmission of light. He clearly did not want his art to be understood only one way. Today figurative painting is back in fashion, so this exhibition includes Butt's early canvases before he turned conceptual. On the sofa on screen he explains he had to stop because he was too in thrall to Picasso and Matisse. You can see Picasso's shadow over his paintings of sensual Minotaur-like men. This exhibition risks removing him from his wider context, but it can't go very wrong with such art. It's right to include his paintings, drawings and archives because we possess so little of such magnificent promise. Hamad Butt died so long before his time, yet his work is a living thrill. He is the Young British Artist who is for ever young, for ever lethal. Hamad Butt: Apprehensions is at Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, from 4 June to 7 September
The Guardian
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Guardian view on Tate Modern at 25: a monumental success
The novelist Ian McEwan tells a good story about the opening party for Tate Modern on 11 May 2000, when he was introduced to the then prime minister, Tony Blair, by the Tate director, Nicholas Serota. Mr Blair shook the author's hand and told him that he was a big fan of his work and had some of his paintings in Downing Street. Yoko Ono, Jarvis Cocker and Neil Tennant were also there, along with Queen Elizabeth II. As the gallery celebrates its 25th anniversary, it is hard to imagine such an extravaganza happening today. Back then, London was the only major European city not to boast a world-class gallery of modern art. This repurposed power station was set to become the UK's cultural powerhouse. Hulking on a once unloved stretch of the South Bank, its 99-metre tower signalled a message of regeneration and possibility to the rest of the world. And the world responded. They had prepared for 2 million visitors in its first year – 5 million came. Following Cool Britannia and the Young British Artists in the 90s, Tate Modern blasted away the last vestiges of British stuffiness about contemporary art. To disguise the gaps in the collection, Mr Serota replaced chronological hanging with a thematic one (to much critical dismay). Instead of imitating competitors like the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Tate Modern rewrote the rules and set the tone for 21st-century museums. From the momentous Matisse Picasso in 2002 to Cézanne 20 years later, it has delivered enough masterpieces to appease those sniffy about helter‑skelters and swings. But its greatest triumph is undoubtedly the 300 sq metre Turbine Hall. The cavernous space has encouraged artists to expand their imaginations to fit. Louise Bourgeois's giant spider, Maman, which first greeted visitors, returns for the anniversary celebrations. From its earliest event, held for London taxi drivers, Tate Modern's manifesto has been to make art accessible to all. Children draw on the floor, students hang out, families picnic. Mr Blair might have called it 'the people's palace'. It has also sought to expand the canon, adding more global and female artists to its collection, alongside major exhibitions of Frida Kahlo, Georgia O'Keeffe and Yayoi Kusama, the last of which broke record numbers in 2023. A Tracey Emin retrospective is billed for next year. It hasn't all been champagne and blockbusters. As with most cultural institutions, Brexit, the pandemic and a funding crisis have taken their toll. The gallery's BP sponsorship, which ended in 2016, provoked a series of protests from climate activists. And its success hasn't done any favours for its less glamorous sister gallery, Tate Britain in Millbank. It is a very different picture in the world at large than when Tate Modern first opened its doors. Where once we were basking in the post-millennial glow of Olafur Eliasson's setting sun (The Weather Project) in 2003, now we seem to be flailing in the darkness of Mirosław Bałka's big black box, which transformed the Turbine Hall into an anxiety dream in 2009. The National Gallery also marks a big anniversary this year: on 10 May it turns 200. Tate Modern is still a whippersnapper by contrast. Over the first quarter of this century it has become part of the establishment without losing its edge – a hard act to keep up. But it is the job of modern art to evolve and challenge the status quo.
Euronews
27-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Euronews
Tracey Emin's Sex and Solitude: An unmissable exhibition of love, loss and healing in Florence
ADVERTISEMENT Florence is a city that worships the body - smooth, perfect, immortalised in marble. But Tracey Emin has never been interested in perfection. In Sex and Solitude , her first major solo exhibition in Italy, she brings a different kind of body to Palazzo Strozzi - one that aches, bleeds, collapses, and survives. Wander into the courtyard of the Renaissance palace, built in 1489, and you'll find her colossal bronze sculpture I Followed You to the End (2024). The lower half of a fragmented female figure, two crumpled legs, dominates the space - a stark contrast to Florence's many triumphant bronzes, such as Benvenuto Cellini's Perseus with the Head of Medusa , standing victorious in the Loggia dei Lanzi. Emin's sculpture, which was previously shown at London's White Cube Bermondsey last year, denies heroism. Instead, it is raw, broken, and heavy with vulnerability. Inside, Sex and Solitude unfolds as a non-chronological journey through more than 60 brilliant works spanning the 61-year-old artist's career - from early pieces that solidified her reputation as one of the most audacious voices in contemporary art to new works created in the wake of her battle with cancer. Paintings, drawings, film, photography, embroidery, sculpture, and neon come together across 10 thematically curated rooms. From personal pain to public view Emin first made waves in the 1990s alongside Damien Hirst , Sarah Lucas and Marc Quinn, as part of the Young British Artists (YBAs), embracing an unapologetically personal approach to art. She turned her own experiences - heartbreak, childhood trauma, desire, self-destruction - into installations, paintings, and neon declarations that blurred the line between art and autobiography. 'She's a forerunner of feminist artists for sure,' Arturo Galansino, the director of the Palazzo Strozzi and curator of the exhibition, tells Euronews Culture. 'She touches on themes that are really relevant for all kinds of people, all kinds of life experience. And why? Because she's very sincere, because of her openness. There is no filter, there is no structure. We can identify ourselves in her sorrow, her pain, her strength, her bravery." Love Poem for CF by Tracey Emin (2007), on display at the Palazzo Strozzi Credit: Ela Bialkowska Stepping into the first room of the exhibition visitors are greeted with Love Poem for CF (2007), a neon work dedicated to Emin's great love of the '90s, gallery owner Carl Freedman. The giant piece glows in soft pink, its flickering light illuminating the space as it displays the raw intensity of her words: "You put your hand / Across my mouth/ But still the noise / Continues / Every part of my body / is Screaming / Smashed into a thousand / Million Pieces / Each part / For Ever / Belonging to you". As Galansino explains: "Neon is one of the most famous languages used by the artist. Neon is related to her youth in Margate, which was full of neon, in the shops, in the bars, in the restaurants. It's a part of her autobiography. And her writings have become really iconic. The strength of these texts is undeniable, and Tracey proves herself as both a great writer and a great poet." Words are at the core of Emin's art - not just in her neon pieces or appliquéd blanket pieces such as I do not expect , but in the way she titles her works. They're declarations, accusations and raw confessions. Neon always has a seedy connection. But then I think it's sexy too. It's spangly, it's pulsating, it's out there, it's vibrant... For me it's always had a beautiful allure Tracey Emin Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made (1996), displayed at the Palazzo Strozzi Credit: Ela Bialkowska The photographic series, 'Naked Photos', displayed at the Palazzo Strozzi. Credit: Ela Bialkowska In the next room is one of the show's centrepieces Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made (1996), a notorious performance-installation in which Emin locked herself in a room at a Stockholm gallery, stripped naked, and painted continuously for three and a half weeks (the time between menstrual cycles) under the watchful eyes of the public. For Emin, it was an act of artistic rebirth - after years of not painting following an abortion, she reclaimed her creativity. The installation has been faithfully recreated for Sex and Solitude - complete with paintings that appropriate iconic works by male artists like Picasso , Munch and Rothko , along with empty beer cans, a bowl of oranges, and hanging underwear. A three-piece photographic series, Naked Photos , documenting Emin's time spent in the room, accompanies the installation. Displayed on the wall behind the installation, a quote from Emin reads: "I stopped painting when I was pregnant. The smell of the oil paints and the turps made me feel physically sick, and even after my termination, I couldn't paint. It's like I needed to punish myself by stopping the thing I loved doing the most. I hated my body; I was scared of the dark; I was scared of being asleep. I was suffering from guilt and punishing myself, so I threw myself in a box and gave myself three and a half weeks to sort it out. And I did." A wide view of the room titled "Coming Down From Love" inside Tracey Emin's 'Sex and Solitude' exhibition Credit: Ela Bialkowska 'I waited so Long' 2022 by Tracey Emin Credit: Tracey Emin/Palazzo Strozzi Elsewhere, themes of love, sexual desire, suffering, spirituality, the afterlife, motherhood, and healing run wild. Her figurative paintings - torn by energy, colour, and abstraction dominate the show and its two defining forces: sex and solitude . One particularly attention grabbing painting, scrawled with a frustrated urgency, declares: "I WANTED YOU TO FUCK ME SO MUCH I COULDN'T PAINT ANY MORE." In perhaps the show's most intimate room, Emin turns her focus to the isolation and indeed solitude experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic - a period of collective uncertainty that held a uniquely profound significance for her. In the summer of 2020, she received a life-altering cancer diagnosis. A haunting series of paintings from this period depict interiors and self-portraits in a melancholic blue-grey palette. They take on a quiet, ghost-like quality. After extensive surgery, including the removal of her bladder, uterus, cervix, part of her bowels, and half of her vagina, Emin is now cancer free. Every image has first entered my mind, travelled through my heart, my blood—arriving at the end of my hand. Everything has come through me. Tracey Emin Tracey Emin poses ahead of the opening of her show 'Sex and Solitude' at Florence's Palazzo Strozzi Credit: Palazzo Strozzi Wide view of the final room of Tracey Emin's 'Sex and Solitude' at the Palazzo Strozzi Credit: Ela Bialkowska For longtime admirers of Emin, the unmissable Sex and Solitude reaffirms her lifelong commitment to turning personal pain into raw, unflinching art. For newcomers, it's an introduction to an artist who has made vulnerability her greatest strength. But what seems like an intimate glimpse into her world is, in fact, an invitation to examine our own. As Emin has said before: "I want people to feel something when they look at my work. I want them to feel themselves. That's what matters most." Sex and Solitude runs until 20 July 2025 at Florence's Palazzo Strozzi.
