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The Guardian
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years review – a wild walk between life, death and sheep-shearing
Rural life hits you in the face like the stink of cow dung as soon as you step into the Royal Scottish Academy. Andy Goldsworthy has laid a sheepskin rug up the classical gallery's grand staircase – very luxurious, except it's made from the scraps thrown away after shearing, stained blue or red with farmers' marks, all painstakingly stitched together with thorns. This is the Clarkson's Farm of art retrospectives, plunging today's urbanites into the raw sadness and beauty, the violence and slow natural cycles of the British countryside. Goldsworthy may love nature but he doesn't sentimentalise it. At the top of the stairs there's a screen and through its gaps you glimpse the galleries beyond. It feels mystical and calming, until you realise it's made of rusty barbed wire strung between two of the building's columns that serve as tightly-wound wire rollers. It made me think of Magnus Mills' darkly hilarious rural novel about hapless fencers, The Restraint of Beasts. Later you can relax looking at seductive, purple abstract watercolours – until you discover they are made with hare's blood and snow. The show is titled Fifty Years, which might make anyone feel old, and Goldsworthy may have been goaded by it. He fills the gallery's main floor with new and recent work, while you'll find an archive of his 20th-century career downstairs. But how could he exhibit his past achievements except in photos and video? Since the 1970s Goldsworthy, who was born in Cheshire and grew up on the outskirts of Leeds, has been making art with nature, in nature, even for nature, since some of his interventions could only be experienced by birds or sheep before the colour faded from a rubbed stone or a mat of leaves decayed. Other outdoor works are more permanent, using dry stone walling to make sheepfolds and little houses in sculpture parks and nature reserves. In Cumbria you'll find his monumental Grizedale Wall snaking between the trees. What makes this a work of art? It's simple. There's no practical reason a farmer would place an elegantly curving stone line in a forest. But by making it, Goldsworthy insists you ask what art is. He's a peasant dadaist. In photos of an early action he throws bunches of sticks in the sky to see how they fall – a fresh air reworking of Marcel Duchamp's 3 Standard Stoppages in which chance determined how a string fell. An entertaining video shows what happened when Goldsworthy brought a giant snowball from the Scottish Highlands to London's Smithfield meat market in June 2000: the meatpackers have fun moving it about with a forklift. Inside the snow, the artist gently explains, is a core of hair from Highland cattle. He's not saying meat is murder so much as what we consume is divorced from any sense of natural life. Sign up to Art Weekly Your weekly art world round-up, sketching out all the biggest stories, scandals and exhibitions after newsletter promotion It is our connection with nature he wants to reawaken, not in a quiet contemplative way but as a shock. Earth and blood are the same, he suggests in the most powerful room. It is dominated by a whole wall made of cracked red clay that he collected by hand in Dumfriesshire's Lowther Hills. The epic scale and fiery colour seem more American than Scottish. Goldsworthy shows you this is a big country, too. The work is called Red Wall – but I don't think it's a political joke. The redness is all. In the same room a three-screen video records an alchemical performance in which Goldsworthy rubs a rock in a Dumfriesshire river to reveal a layer of iron-rich pure redness; the red appears as bloody clouds in the green water. Iron reddens the earth and reddens our blood. We are part of nature's cycle. Our bodies will return to the earth – at least, if you live in rural Dumfriesshire as Goldsworthy does. When you die there you still get buried, in a churchyard, according to Goldsworthy's grand project Gravestones, for which he has taken photographs of Dumfriesshire churchyards under stormy skies. Goldsworthy's 'gravestones' are not headstones but the pebbles and rocks that have to be removed when fresh graves are dug. He wants to create a vast monumental field with them, to show that there is animate nature and inanimate nature – blood and stone. We return to the earth, leaving our imperishable elements. He tests his idea in an installation here. Stones from graveyards form a continuous floor, like a rocky seashore, completely filling a room except for a narrow walkway. The stones have literally been cut short, neatly sliced through, to form a straight boundary between the artwork and the observer. It's typical of this artist's poetic precision. You wonder how he cut the stones in two so neatly, and accurately measured the perfect line they make. Then it hits you. This is the straight smooth absolute line between life and death. That's true in the country, and the city, too. Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years is at the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh from 26 July until 2 November 2025
Asharq Al-Awsat
09-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Asharq Al-Awsat
‘Anything Goes': Yoshitomo Nara on His Creative Process as London Exhibition Opens
Artworks by Yoshitomo Nara go on display in London this week in what organizers say is the largest European retrospective of the Japanese artist. The show, running at the Hayward Gallery by the River Thames, features more than 150 works - drawings, paintings, sculptures, ceramics and installations - nodding to the longtime influences of Nara's works including music, nature, the importance of home and the peace movement. "This is about 40 years' worth of my work," Nara told Reuters at a press preview on Monday. "When I look at my work, I don't think what I'm trying to say has actually changed in that time. Whatever period I look at reflects a part of myself, which is why this exhibition is not done chronologically." Nara, 65, is best known for his portraits of child-like characters with big gazing eyes. "I think all the pictures I've created are like my reflections," he said when asked about them. On display are plenty of those kinds of paintings and drawings as well as sculptures. "Anything goes," says Nara, who was born in Aomori Prefecture in northern Japan and lived in Germany early in his career before moving back home, said of his creative process. "I don't think about what I'm doing, but when I've done something good, I can feel the reason behind it almost like a kind of hindsight." The show is an expanded version of a touring exhibition previously put on at the Guggenheim in Bilbao and Museum Frieder Burda in Baden-Baden. "What's quite interesting, I think, for audiences in London and in Europe overall (is)... we don't actually get to see Nara's work in person that often," exhibition curator Yung Ma said. "We've all seen his paintings and drawings on our I think all these kind of images, they don't do the works justice. So it's actually quite important to come and see because you can actually then understand (that)... he's a really good you can actually really see the texture of the works and the colors and the layering of the paint." The exhibition runs from June 10 to August 31.
Reuters
09-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Reuters
'Anything goes': Yoshitomo Nara on his creative process as London exhibition opens
LONDON, June 9 (Reuters) - Artworks by Yoshitomo Nara go on display in London this week in what organisers say is the largest European retrospective of the Japanese artist. The show, running at the Hayward Gallery by the River Thames, features more than 150 works - drawings, paintings, sculptures, ceramics and installations - nodding to the longtime influences of Nara's works including music, nature, the importance of home and the peace movement. "This is about 40 years' worth of my work," Nara told Reuters at a press preview on Monday. "When I look at my work I don't think what I'm trying to say has actually changed in that time. Whatever period I look at reflects a part of myself, which is why this exhibition is not done chronologically." Nara, 65, is best known for his portraits of child-like characters with big gazing eyes. "I think all the pictures I've created are like my reflections," he said when asked about them. On display are plenty of those kinds of paintings and drawings as well as sculptures. "Anything goes," says Nara, who was born in Aomori Prefecture in northern Japan and lived in Germany early in his career before moving back home, said of his creative process. "I don't think about what I'm doing, but when I've done something good I can feel the reason behind it almost like a kind of hindsight." The show is an expanded version of a touring exhibition previously put on at the Guggenheim in Bilbao and Museum Frieder Burda in Baden-Baden. "What's quite interesting, I think, for audiences in London and in Europe overall (is)... we don't actually get to see Nara's work in person that often," exhibition curator Yung Ma said. "We've all seen his paintings and drawings on our I think all these kind of images, they don't do the works justice. So it's actually quite important to come and see because you can actually then understand (that)... he's a really good you can actually really see the texture of the works and the colours and the layering of the paint." The exhibition runs from June 10 to August 31.
