February 23rd, 2010 Art and design: Art | guardian.co.uk
A new exhibition at Tate Britain reveals the great sculptor in darker, and deeper relief
The pleasing curves, the Yorkshire lilt, the sculptures that fit so organically with the landscape that they could have been hewn by nature herself. All of this is as true of Henry Moore as it is familiar, but a new exhibition at Tate Britain chisels away at his reputation, and reveals a darker – and deeper – relief. Curator Chris Stephens concentrates on Moore's middle years, between his early discovery of "primitive" forms and the late era, when outsize commissions for plazas and campuses made him the country's top wage-earner. During the blitz, sketches of enforced Tube huddling cemented Moore's reputation, but here we see him engage with the wider tumult of his troubled times, painting to raise funds for the Spanish civil war and responding to disturbing ideas about sex and bodies that emerged with early analysis. Moore's seemingly heartening mother-and-child sculptures often face away from each other, and he has an unsparing eye for the pit props that cage miners in physically, and for the heartstrings that psychologically imprison his reclining nudes. The fractured shards of modernity that Moore carved out are here presented as forming a sculptural equivalent of The Waste Land. But unlike with Eliot – who produces nothing but head-scratching until you've genned up on Virgil – with Moore the clever ideas are an optional extra. You can still simply stroll round a sculpture park, and feel strangely calmed by those curved faces which bring the Moomins to mind.
Posted in Art, Art and design, Editorials, Henry Moore, Sculpture, Tate Britain, The Guardian | Comments Off
February 22nd, 2010 Mark Brown
Curator says first major exhibition devoted to British artist since 1988 will show that there is more to him than his female figures
Henry Moore, Britain's best known and most important sculptor, is often seen as a buttoned-up Yorkshireman whose work is as easygoing and safe as it gets. But a new exhibition opening tomorrow reveals his demons: this is a man much darker, edgier and more complex than we realise, say curators.
Tate Britain tomorrow opens the most important exhibition of Moore works for a generation. It hopes to surprise those who think they know Moore – and he is mostly known for his enormous postwar outdoor sculptures – as well as introducing him to a whole new audience.
More than 150 works, including stone sculptures, wood carvings, bronzes and drawings, have been gathered for what is also one of Tate Britain's longest exhibitions in recent memory – it will run for almost six months. A spokeswoman said it was "an experiment" and the hope was the show would attract more overseas visitors during the summer.
Chris Stephens, the show's co-curator, called it reassessment, or "a revisiting". He said the exhibition was setting out to show there is much more to the artist than his easily recognisable gently rounded female figures and abstract forms. Familiarity with the artist had almost bred contempt, he said. "We think we know Henry Moore because he is still so visible and recognisable and also still so popular."
Instead Moore was producing art that was informed by the trauma and horrors of the first world war. And when it came to sex, he was sculpting pieces that were wholly sexually driven and erotically charged. "The sort of things we accept without question about Francis Bacon or Picasso but they also run through Henry Moore's work as well."
Stephens believes Moore's first world war experiences – three quarters of his battalion died and was gassed at the battle of Cambrai – had a profound effect on his art. It brought a darkness and psychological complexity to his work.
Moore, son of a Yorkshire coal mining engineer, was always reluctant to talk specifically about what informed his art, he was from a class and generation who just did not go on about their emotions or their feelings.
After the war Moore became a superstar artist, creating huge works in places like Harlow and Stevenage that were emblematic of the new welfare state, of the reconstruction of Britain.
24 years after his death, he remains popular but not as regarded as some believe he should be. "The conundrum is that he is still incredibly popular, incredibly familiar," said Stephens, "and yet he somehow lacks a critical respect. We wanted to return to what was it about Moore that made him the most important sculptor of the modern age."
Moore may be one of Britain's greatest artists yet the last big show devoted to his work was a memorial show at the Royal Academy in 1988, two years after his death.
For exhibitions at the Tate – an institution Moore is bound up with and to which he donated a large amount of work – you have to go back to a drawings retrospective in 1977, his 70th birthday retrospective in 1968 and before that the 1951 Festival of Britain retrospective.
"It is a generation since his last major show yes and often it takes a generation," said Stephens. "You need a lapse in time sometimes, it allows you to bring new ideas and ways of looking at art."
Richard Calvocoressi, director of the Henry Moore Foundation, said: "It is no exaggeration to say that this is the most important Henry Moore exhibition in the 33-year life of the foundation. It is true that we've done exhibitions in the last three decades all over the world, in China, Brazil, the United States but this is unquestionably the most important show in the last 30 years. It is not a retrospective and it's all the more exciting and intelligent for that."
The exhibition also asserts that Moore, as Official War Artist during the second world war, produced drawings – known as the Shelter Drawings – that he claimed were made from his own observance when, in fact, they were copied from photographs in Picture Post.
While this makes it seem that Moore was a dissembler, according to Stephens the revelations enhance Moore's reputation even more. He might not have wanted it known but by reproducing the photographs he was using mechanical reproduction techniques that artists such as Bacon and Richard Hamilton used.
• Henry Moore, Tate Britain 24 February – 8 August
Posted in Art, Culture, Exhibitions, Henry Moore, News, Tate Britain, UK news, guardian.co.uk | Comments Off
February 22nd, 2010 Mark Brown
Curator says first major exhibition devoted to British artist since 1988 will show that there is more to him than his female figures
Henry Moore, Britain's best known and most important sculptor, is often seen as a buttoned-up Yorkshireman whose work is as easygoing and safe as it gets. But a new exhibition opening tomorrow reveals his demons: this is a man much darker, edgier and more complex than we realise, say curators.
Tate Britain tomorrow opens the most important exhibition of Moore works for a generation. It hopes to surprise those who think they know Moore – and he is mostly known for his enormous postwar outdoor sculptures – as well as introducing him to a whole new audience.
More than 150 works, including stone sculptures, wood carvings, bronzes and drawings, have been gathered for what is also one of Tate Britain's longest exhibitions in recent memory – it will run for almost six months. A spokeswoman said it was "an experiment" and the hope was the show would attract more overseas visitors during the summer.
Chris Stephens, the show's co-curator, called it reassessment, or "a revisiting". He said the exhibition was setting out to show there is much more to the artist than his easily recognisable gently rounded female figures and abstract forms. Familiarity with the artist had almost bred contempt, he said. "We think we know Henry Moore because he is still so visible and recognisable and also still so popular."
Instead Moore was producing art that was informed by the trauma and horrors of the first world war. And when it came to sex, he was sculpting pieces that were wholly sexually driven and erotically charged. "The sort of things we accept without question about Francis Bacon or Picasso but they also run through Henry Moore's work as well."
Stephens believes Moore's first world war experiences – three quarters of his battalion died and was gassed at the battle of Cambrai – had a profound effect on his art. It brought a darkness and psychological complexity to his work.
Moore, son of a Yorkshire coal mining engineer, was always reluctant to talk specifically about what informed his art, he was from a class and generation who just did not go on about their emotions or their feelings.
After the war Moore became a superstar artist, creating huge works in places like Harlow and Stevenage that were emblematic of the new welfare state, of the reconstruction of Britain.
24 years after his death, he remains popular but not as regarded as some believe he should be. "The conundrum is that he is still incredibly popular, incredibly familiar," said Stephens, "and yet he somehow lacks a critical respect. We wanted to return to what was it about Moore that made him the most important sculptor of the modern age."
Moore may be one of Britain's greatest artists yet the last big show devoted to his work was a memorial show at the Royal Academy in 1988, two years after his death.
For exhibitions at the Tate – an institution Moore is bound up with and to which he donated a large amount of work – you have to go back to a drawings retrospective in 1977, his 70th birthday retrospective in 1968 and before that the 1951 Festival of Britain retrospective.
"It is a generation since his last major show yes and often it takes a generation," said Stephens. "You need a lapse in time sometimes, it allows you to bring new ideas and ways of looking at art."
Richard Calvocoressi, director of the Henry Moore Foundation, said: "It is no exaggeration to say that this is the most important Henry Moore exhibition in the 33-year life of the foundation. It is true that we've done exhibitions in the last three decades all over the world, in China, Brazil, the United States but this is unquestionably the most important show in the last 30 years. It is not a retrospective and it's all the more exciting and intelligent for that."
The exhibition also asserts that Moore, as Official War Artist during the second world war, produced drawings – known as the Shelter Drawings – that he claimed were made from his own observance when, in fact, they were copied from photographs in Picture Post.
While this makes it seem that Moore was a dissembler, according to Stephens the revelations enhance Moore's reputation even more. He might not have wanted it known but by reproducing the photographs he was using mechanical reproduction techniques that artists such as Bacon and Richard Hamilton used.
• Henry Moore, Tate Britain 24 February – 8 August
Posted in Art, Culture, Exhibitions, Henry Moore, News, Tate Britain, UK news, guardian.co.uk | Comments Off
February 19th, 2010 Maev Kennedy
From office blocks to shopping streets, Moore's sculptures are part of the fabric of Britain – so much so that we no longer notice. A new Tate retrospective wants to make us look again
As a new Tate retrospective prepares to open, it can be difficult to judge the reputation of Henry Moore, in his own lifetime one of the most famous and wealthy artists in the world. It's not that Moore has vanished from the public stage in the years since his death in 1986 – far from it, in fact. Moore's problem is that he has become so ubiquitous as to become near-invisible.
Stand on London's Bond Street, just beneath a massive work by Moore – the four-panel Portland stone Time-Life Screen, installed in 1953 as part of the building of the same name – and you guess that of the thousands of people who pass by every day, barely one looks up, still less admires. The nice American couple I found waiting to have their photograph taken on a park bench between a bronze Churchill and bronze Roosevelt looked startled at being asked what they thought of the Henry Moore. "But that's not by him, is it?" the man said in surprise. "Isn't Moore the guy who punches holes through everything?" If only they'd looked up. Like so much of Moore's work, the Time-Life Screen has become so familiar as to disappear into the background texture of 20th-century British urban life.
It's the same story just down the road in Millbank, where smokers shelter behind the gigantic bronze Locking Piece, and use it as a windbreak. Half a mile away there's another thumping great bronze, the two-section 1962 Knife Edge, opposite the House of Lords – a site chosen by Moore for its high visibility. Half a mile again, and you find Moore's very first public commission, made when he was a teacher at the Royal College of Art, the singularly un-airy West Wind high on the facade of the London Underground block over St James's Park tube station. Take a train to Stevenage and you can locate his first family group – one of many made after the death of his mother and the birth of his only child, Mary, named after her – outside a school, and another that used to be out in the precinct but now takes refuge in the civic centre in Harlow.
An elegant interactive website maintained by the Henry Moore Foundation lists scores more works on public display across 30 sites in Britain alone, from the 1944 Family Group in Aberdeen Art Gallery to the memorial to his friend Christopher Martin in the grounds of Dartington Hall, and even more all over the world, in stone, plaster, bronze, wood, on paper, in tapestries – around 800 works in all.
As the Turner prize-winning artist Simon Starling writes in the catalogue to the new Tate show: "From the beginning, Henry Moore seemed omnipresent – a state-endorsed, global player, the first of his kind perhaps. His huge bronzes seemed to drop from the sky in great meteor showers and felt to my young mind rather clumsy and anachronistic, even provincial." Starling, who won the Turner in 2005 for pieces including Shedboatshed – the shed he dismantled, built into a boat, paddled down the Rhine to a museum and reconstructed as a shed – has also made work directly responding to Moore's, and not necessarily with an admiring eye.
In 2006–07, Starling created a work called Infestation Piece for the Toronto Art Gallery of Ontario, a museum and a city with a complex relationship with Moore. In the late 1950s, a go-getting mayor, Philip Givens, commissioned a major Moore sculpture, The Archer, for its new City Hall. Starling's Infestation Piece is a Moore replica, lowered into the lake until it became encrusted with an invasive species of mussels: a hint that the sculpture itself is a form of alien in the landscape.
The Toronto Art Gallery is the Tate's partner in organising this exhibition. Both museums have world-class collections that were acquired in Moore's lifetime, but Toronto's is much the larger – and the story of how that happened is a fascinating insight into attitudes to Moore in his lifetime. Moore donated major sculptures, drawings, maquettes and other works to the Tate, of which he was a trustee. In the late 1960s, there was discussion of creating a special Henry Moore wing at Tate Britain, which would certainly have attracted many more donations – but the project was seen by some artists as memorialising Moore himself, and attracted bitter criticism. One of the show's curators, Chris Stephens, has written of the episode in an article for the Tate magazine, and of what he terms the "final insult" when in 1968, the year of Moore's 70th birthday, a letter appeared in the Times condemning the proposed wing. It was signed by 41 artists, including his former studio assistants Anthony Caro and Phillip King; not much of a birthday present. Moore donated more than 900 pieces – including some of the works he must have intended for the Tate – to Toronto in 1974, before eventually making another donation to the Tate with no strings attached.
In much the way that his public art now seems commonplace, it is easy to see Moore as invincibly nice and decent: the seventh of eight children of a Yorkshire mining engineer, a scholarship boy who never forgot his working-class roots, whose work speaks of home and family, peace and plenty, a man with socialist sympathies and a pacifist heart. When their London home was damaged in the blitz, the Moores moved to a modest two-storey rented farmhouse, Hoglands, at Perry Green in Hertfordshire – still a surprisingly remote and rural corner of the home counties. They eventually bought the house and the surrounding fields. Moore added workshops no grander than his neighbours' farm sheds, and extended the house slightly, but it has none of the grandeur you might expect of an artist who became a millionaire many times over while he lived there. Indeed, the Henry Moore Foundation, which now maintains the estate as a museum, archive and outdoor sculpture park, was established not just to ensure his legacy but to mop up some of the millions he would otherwise have spent in tax.
Visitors to Perry Green can tour the house, the handsome antique-filled dining room, the bright drawing room with Scandinavian-design modern furniture where grander visitors were received – and the claustrophobic sitting room where the Moores actually spent most of their leisure time, a space filled with rickety furniture that you wouldn't be surprised to see in a charity shop. The house reflects the popular image of the artist as "an easygoing, avuncular figure who produced an equally easygoing form of modern sculpture", as Stephens says – an image which the exhibition will attempt to destroy. There is, the curators aim to show, a lot more to Moore than monumental decency, despite his undergoing the national beatification which befell John Betjeman and has almost smothered Alan Bennett.
The exhibition will bring together more than 150 works, from the early white marble Dog carved in 1922, to a Reclining Figure in seductively polished elm, completed in 1978 when Moore was 80. There will be works in stone, bronze and plaster; working drawings and finished works on paper – including the famous blitz sleepers in London's Underground – and his cramped and contorted miners, who are given an archaic grandeur by the artist. Stephens sees anger, darkness and violence in many of these works – born, he believes, from the first-world-war experience that marked Moore for life: the artist was gassed at Cambrai and was among just 52 survivors from a 400-strong battalion. There is a sinister edge to many pieces, he argues, and a raw sexuality in all those holes and protruberances.
The elm reclining figures are exceptional. Moore himself never saw them together: the first was begun in 1935, and in his lifetime they were scattered across different collections. The surrealist painter Gordon Onslow Ford, who bought the 1939 version of the sculptures, wrote: "I felt that I was in the presence of the mother earth goddess." The critic David Sylvester was one of many who saw something almost menacing in its form – "the sacrificed and resurrected god of a fertility rite". Such views are a timely reminder that the artist was once seen as so threateningly modern that Roland Penrose's neighbours reacted in outrage when he put a Moore Mother and Child in his Hampstead front garden. And when an Essex new town commissioned a work entitled Harlow Family Group, it provoked a public demonstration by people fearful that the sculpture was an obscene jeer at Harlow's "pram town" nickname.
"In contrast to the dominant idea of Moore, we propose that he presented the body as abject, erotic, vulnerable, violated and visceral," Stephens writes. "They are part of a wider challenge to reason, of the redefinition of the human body as discontinuous, fluid and driven by deep unconscious forces, and of a world characterised by apprehension and anxiety, the uncanny and the absurd. Moore's is a troubled and troubling art that digs into the very essence of modern experience." That would be news to the tourists in Bond Street and the Millbank smokers – but maybe it is indeed time they looked again.
Posted in Art, Art and design, Culture, Exhibitions, Features, Henry Moore, Heritage, Sculpture, Tate Britain, guardian.co.uk | Comments Off
February 16th, 2010 Mercedes Bunz
More than 20 newly digitised documentaries are to be released online for the first time after a link-up between the BBC and the Henry Moore Foundation. The material will be released on 24 February to coincide with the opening of the Tate Britian's major Henry Moore retrospective that runs until 8 August 2010.
"Visitors to Tate Britain's Henry Moore exhibition will be able to watch clips of Moore, including footage of him in his studio with some of the works featured in the show. We'll also be showing highlights on Tate's website", said Jane Burton, the creative director of Tate Media. "Tate is delighted to have played its part in making these wonderful archive programmes available to the public."
The material encompasses documentaries, interviews and reports spanning nearly five decades of Britian's most famous sculptor. It includes six classic programmes made by pioneering producer John Read for the BBC. Read's first film portrait of Moore was broadcast in 1951 to coincide with a Tate Gallery exhibition, and his "Henry Moore: Art is the Expression of Imagination and Not the Imitation of Life" is considered to be the UK's first television arts documentary. It shows the artist creating the "Reclining Figure" filming the entire process from sketch to the final bronze sculpture.
The material will form a part of a permanent resource in execution of the BBC's commitment to support and enable the cultural life of Britain, particularly through digital access to archive content and investment in arts and music programming. In January, the BBC has launched the interactive website A History of the World in 100 Objects in collaboration with the British Museum and 350 museums across the UK.
"The BBC archive is full of riches and these remarkable programmes are among the most precious. They comprise a treasure-trove of unique footage of a great artist, most of which has been unseen by the public for decades." said Roly Keating, the BBC director of archive content. "We're very grateful that thanks to the support and enlightened partnership of The Henry Moore Foundation, working with Tate Britain, these programmes can be rediscovered and freely enjoyed by audiences across the UK, now and in the future."
The material can be seen by visiting at the BBC's archive website and at the Henry Moore Foundation site.
Posted in Art, BBC, Blogposts, Culture, Digital media, Media, Sculpture, Tate Britain, guardian.co.uk | Comments Off
February 16th, 2010 Mercedes Bunz
More than 20 newly digitised documentaries are to be released online for the first time after a link-up between the BBC and the Henry Moore Foundation. The material will be released on 24 February to coincide with the opening of the Tate Britian's major Henry Moore retrospective that runs until 8 August 2010.
"Visitors to Tate Britain's Henry Moore exhibition will be able to watch clips of Moore, including footage of him in his studio with some of the works featured in the show. We'll also be showing highlights on Tate's website", said Jane Burton, the creative director of Tate Media. "Tate is delighted to have played its part in making these wonderful archive programmes available to the public."
The material encompasses documentaries, interviews and reports spanning nearly five decades of Britian's most famous sculptor. It includes six classic programmes made by pioneering producer John Read for the BBC. Read's first film portrait of Moore was broadcast in 1951 to coincide with a Tate Gallery exhibition, and his "Henry Moore: Art is the Expression of Imagination and Not the Imitation of Life" is considered to be the UK's first television arts documentary. It shows the artist creating the "Reclining Figure" filming the entire process from sketch to the final bronze sculpture.
The material will form a part of a permanent resource in execution of the BBC's commitment to support and enable the cultural life of Britain, particularly through digital access to archive content and investment in arts and music programming. In January, the BBC has launched the interactive website A History of the World in 100 Objects in collaboration with the British Museum and 350 museums across the UK.
"The BBC archive is full of riches and these remarkable programmes are among the most precious. They comprise a treasure-trove of unique footage of a great artist, most of which has been unseen by the public for decades." said Roly Keating, the BBC director of archive content. "We're very grateful that thanks to the support and enlightened partnership of The Henry Moore Foundation, working with Tate Britain, these programmes can be rediscovered and freely enjoyed by audiences across the UK, now and in the future."
The material can be seen by visiting at the BBC's archive website and at the Henry Moore Foundation site.
Posted in Art, BBC, Blogposts, Culture, Sculpture, Tate Britain, guardian.co.uk | Comments Off
February 3rd, 2010 Lindsay Poulton
In exclusive footage filmed inside his studio and during the installation of his new Tate retrospective, the artist reflects on how being in the Caribbean has helped him to find a new fluidity in his painting
Posted in Art, Art and design, Chris Ofili, Culture, Editorial, Painting, Tate Britain, guardian.co.uk | Comments Off
February 1st, 2010 Laura Cumming
Tate Britain, London
The retrospective of Chris Ofili's paintings now filling several galleries at Tate Britain is exactly what you might expect – opulent, glittery, dazzling, gorgeous. If you have seen even one of his works you can probably extrapolate the massed effects of 60 more. But what is surprising, and dismaying, about this show is just how indispensable these effects turn out to be when Ofili starts working without them.
An early star, not yet 30 when he won the Turner prize in 1998, Ofili is the most famous black artist in British history. This has nothing to do with the dung. Rudy Giuliani may have accidentally ramped Ofili's reputation by threatening to prosecute the Brooklyn Museum for showing his black virgin propped on dried elephant ordure, but the mayor ought to have observed that this Anglo-African Catholic was applying the identical substance to paintings concerned with slavery. The dung is innocent, evenly distributed. Over here, naysayers were more confused by the references to blaxploitation movies and gangsta rap.
But those days are gone. The controversial works now belong to museums, blue-chip collectors and history itself. Seventies centrefolds, Don King, Ice T, Captain Shit and the Legend of the Black Stars, all mixed up with racial stereotypes in a manner commonly considered provocative: these look like period pieces of the recent past.
But are they provocative, humorous, ironic? Everything is kept in play. Ofili's even-handedness, anarchic to some, non-committal to others, is so accomplished that one visitor was troubled by the absence of anything to roil the sheer optical pleasures.
The Tate has them in abundance. Here is Ofili's fantastic Afromantic idyll, keyed in the red, black and green of Marcus Garvey's pan-African flag. An Eden of ganja, ripe bananas and heat glowing in a haze of glitter, the paintings are enormous, intricate, abundant, panoramic glorifications of love.
She reclines like an odalisque, a constellation of red and green dots bursting from one nipple like stars. The contours of his body twine with hers: behind, before, above, between, below. The scene pulses with rapture.
The method was laid down almost from the start. Beads, glitter, map pins, sequins, paint used like ink, batik, henna decoration; applied in African cave art dots. Teeming excess and all of it multiplied by the use of resin beneath which images appear suspended as if underwater or trapped in amber – and then Ofili would add another layer by painting on top.
You can see this put to tremendous effect in a work like Spaceshit (1995)with its planetary shapes formed of tiny dots, each semi-transparent so that the painting acquires spacey depths. From a distance, they come across as intergalactic drifts; nearer, they look like Monet waterlilies reprised for modern times and eventually like hard, bright particles. The closer you stand the more there is to see, until you lose sight of the overall picture. Each painting has its own prolific micro-life.
Precise yet stoned, sophisticated yet simple: that is the basic proposition, a dichotomy between the highly disciplined technique and the blatantly swoony effects. You have to wait for the physical appeal to fade (if it ever does) to get down to what is really going on. And most often it seems to be just that: something unresolved, ongoing.
For some, this is Ofili's great strength, this improvisational mix of all and every-thing, like an open-ended poem or song. But it puts everything on the same level. A painting may include afro heads rushing about like fireworks or tiny photographs of the murdered schoolboy Stephen Lawrence and yet the glorious gaudiness is the main event, the constant. It is not that one painting looks like another, for Ofili has quite a range of effects involving density, motion, brightness, mood; it is more that the tone scarcely varies.
And this is exposed, quite literally, in the recent works painted in Trinidad where Ofili now lives. Almost every distinguishing characteristic has been pared away – layering, resin, glitter and all – to leave nothing but unadorned paint; and images that have nowhere to hide. A couple of islanders strumming banjos in the blue-black night, Judas dangling from a noose apparently added as an afterthought; the raising of Lazarus in the style of Matisse; a deep purple nude accepting a sundowner in what appears to be a stylised cocktail ad.
Ofili experiments with styles, experiments with inky blackness so that one sometimes has to peer into the surface to make out the forms. He makes an obvious verbal/visual pun on Der Blaue Reiter – two ultramarine horsemen in a midnight-blue forest – with Blue Riders. The colours remain rich, but the paintings are crude, mannered, struggling to make anything at all of their chosen content. They feel uniformly powerless and inert.
In the past, it has sometimes seemed as if imagery itself presented a quandary: not so much how but what to paint, hardly an unusual dilemma for an artist. Now Ofili seems to be fixed upon the latter, with these narratives, myths and local scenes, but uncertain with the former. Put politely, it's a bold departure.
But it sends you back to question the past. Did all those proliferating dots, swirls and patterns ever add up? Was it all as playful as people claimed? For answers consult the centrepiece of this show, The Upper Room (1999-2002), with its 13 magnificent panels arranged in a darkened chamber like the figures at the Last Supper.
Each depicts a monkey holding a cup, though the outline of the largest is dissolving in the golden surface, beneath a gilded dung clod of a halo. Each glows, quite literally, with its own luminous colour. Solemn and reverential, yet plainly tinged with the absurd, they keep a tension between monkey business and Bible story that defies explanation.
Rothko claimed that his numinous oblongs represented God; perhaps a monkey can stand in for Christ. Yet that does not seem to be what's going on in this spectacularly intense yet vague installation. The adoration of colour is obvious in each beautifully worked surface, the devotion is all there in the making. This is painting as an act of worship.
Posted in Art, Art and design, Chris Ofili, Culture, Exhibitions, Features, Reviews, Tate Britain, The Observer | Comments Off
January 26th, 2010 Charlotte Higgins
No elephant dung, no glitter, no textured, collaged surfaces. It's all a bit of a shock. But do we like Ofili's new work?
I'd seen some of Chris Ofili's new work in the lavish new Rizzoli book he has helped put together. Even so, after walking past so many greatest hits and old friends in the galleries at London's Tate Britain, where his latest career survey opens to the public tomorrow, I got a jolt when I walked into the final pair of rooms, filled with his most recent work. In the first, the paintings are entirely blue – deep, midnight shades of indigo, ultramarine and bilberry. In the second, the paintings are screaming with acid colours: strident purple next to citrus orange; a tintinnabulating turquoise; egg-yolk yellow. And there is no elephant dung. And no glitter.
I have to confess I'm a bit of an Ofili fan. I've always loved the unashamedly stuff-encrusted surfaces of his paintings. So it's a bit odd to see works stripped of their jewels, so to speak.
I'm still figuring out whether I like the new work, which is steeped in the landscape and mysterious atmosphere of Trinidad, where Ofili has lived and worked since 2005. The moment I walked into the final room of the show my heart, I have to confess, sank. Then I looked at the paintings a bit more, and concluded that I kind of liked them. Then I was sure again. There's something slightly off-key about them. In fact, I just don't know. A couple of the recent works were shown in New York in 2007, and the Village Voice critic wrote:
To my mind, what makes Ofili consistently perverse – aside from his habit of turning ostensibly religious subjects into lewd jokes – is that his paintings often flirt with being outright terrible. In the wrong hands, the hyperstylized retro look he employs in these new works could, with just a few bad choices, easily turn into overweening poster art, glib parodies fit only for suburban malls.
I admit to a similar fear. On which side of the good/bad divide do the new Ofilis sit? I'm still digesting them. Adrian Searle has given his view in today's G2. What I love is that Ofili is keeping us on our toes – and is unafraid to change, and, quite possibly, fail.
Posted in Art, Art and design, Blogposts, Chris Ofili, Culture, Exhibitions, Tate Britain, guardian.co.uk | Comments Off
January 26th, 2010 Charlotte Higgins
Turner prize-winning artist evolves from dealer in shock to purveyor of colourful perception, as new exhibition shows
In pictures: Chris Ofili retrospective
Think of Chris Ofili and you would be forgiven for imagining the following: elephant manure; the weeping profile of Doreen Lawrence; a black, dung-breasted Virgin Mary that enraged the mayor of New York.
But, when a major, mid-career retrospective opens on Wednesday at Tate Britain in London, visitors will see a new Chris Ofili.
His recent work may, frankly, come as a shock. There is no dung and no glitter. There are no richly-collaged, jangling surfaces. Instead, in the last room in the exhibition, unexpected swathes of colour lash down the canvases: imperial purple dissonant against citrus orange, saffron squealing against sea green.
With the exception of two paintings previously exhibited in New York, none of these eight works has ever been seen in public. They come fresh out of the artist's studio. The exhibition is the first major survey since 1998 of the often controversial 41-year-old's work. Almost a third of the 45 paintings on display have never been shown in the UK before.
All the big hits are here, including the Doreen Lawrence painting, No Woman No Cry, which was exhibited in Ofili's Turner prize exhibition in 1998. There is also a fresh chance to see the famous installation The Upper Room – 13 paintings of chalice-bearing monkeys, a reimagining of the Last Supper.
But it is in the final two rooms of the exhibition that audiences will see a different artist from the one whose last solo show in Britain was in 2002 (when the Victoria Miro gallery showed The Upper Room).
These works reflect new surroundings. Ofili has left the crowded London art scene and, since 2005, has been working in Trinidad and Tobago, living in a cottage in the hills above Port of Spain.
"I felt in some way things had closed down," the Manchester-born artist says in the Tate exhibition catalogue. "London was an exciting place to work at one point, because socially it was very progressive – a catalyst... But it got to a point where the social aspect became claustrophobic ... It also got to a point where I felt the work was really known in a public sense, that the division between public and private was like a thin membrane. And I didn't feel that gave me a greater sense of freedom."
The penultimate room sees Ofili, like Picasso, going through a "blue period". Giant canvases swirl with a dictionary-defying battery of midnight shades: ultramarine, indigo, smoke, bilberry. The colours are so deep and dark that images are hard to read. The only texture comes from the flat paint surface: sometimes velvety, sometimes reflective.
In one, Iscariot Blues, two men play musical instruments under a bridge while a hanged man dangles from a gibbet – all are enveloped in tendrils of lush foliage.
In these and the most recent paintings, the one recognisable aspect of the work is the mysterious figures that inhabit the paintings. Ofili has always created his own semi-mythological dramatis personae, whether the cartoonish, faux-superheroic character he called Captain Shit in the early work, or the simian saints of the Upper Room.
In a painting that has something of William Blake about it, a shower of egg-yolky, lemony blossoms is surrounded by an almost-black ground. On further inspection, the blackness resolves itself into a curious and possibly terrifying creature that appears to be devouring the flowers.
Ofili calls this figure The Healer, and imagines it gorging itself on the blossoms of the yellow poui tree, which flower in Trinidad with intense vividness and fall overnight. "I imagined that The Healer feasts on the poui flowers feverishly, and in the frenzy many of the flowers fall off," he has said.
The Ofili who was once painting phalluses and porn stars in a King's Cross studio is now painting en plein air – he began The Healer, he has said, outdoors during a lunar eclipse, inspired by "the forms in the clouds hovering over the hills that night".
Where once he was bringing all the clamorous life of London into his exquisite paintings as a self-conscious visual analogy of gangsta rap (aggressive lyrics, sweetly sung), he is now more likely to spend his days kayaking or observing the beauty of a Trinidadian waterfall.
In other words, Ofili is still transforming what surrounds him into paint, but these days that's the thick, fertile vegetation of the Caribbean rather than the urban jungle.
He has said of his new environment: "It has a mystical quality to it. The landscape is hilly, the vegetation is dense and you have the constant feeling that things are happening on the other side of the hill or deep in the forest."
By moving to Trinidad he has also retreated from the public gaze. In 1999, the year after he was the first black artist to win the Turner prize, his work attracted controversy when the then mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani, objected to the exhibiting of The Holy Virgin Mary at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. The painting was touring as part of the Sensation! exhibition of works owned by Charles Saatchi.
In 2005, the Tate bought the installation The Upper Room for £600,000, when Ofili was a trustee of the gallery. The Charity Commission published a report critical of the institution's mismanagement of the conflict of interest involved in the purchase.
Posted in Art, Chris Ofili, Culture, Exhibitions, News, Tate Britain, The Guardian, UK news | Comments Off