William Blake - Tate Britain (until 2 February 2020)

William Blake, The Ghost of a Flea, c1819-20

William Blake is at Tate Britain until 2 February 2020

From The Proverbs of Hell

(William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1793)

Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.

A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.

All wholsom food is caught without a net or a trap.

No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings.

The most sublime act is to set another before you.

One thought, fills immensity.

Always be ready to speak your mind, and a base man will avoid you.

The head Sublime, the heart Pathos, the genitals Beauty, the hands & feet Proportion.

Exuberance is Beauty.

Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement, are roads of Genius.

Enough! or Too much!

Exhibition Reviews

Laura Cummings (Observer) “William Blake – a rousing call to arms”
Matthew Collings (Evening Standard) "Be drawn into a weird and wonderful fantasy universe".
Alastair Sooke (The Telegraph) "An incandescent imagination smothered by dull curating".

William Blake, The Sick Rose (plate 39 of The Songs of Experience), 1789-94

O Rose thou art sick. 

The invisible worm, 

That flies in the night 

In the howling storm: 

Has found out thy bed

Of crimson joy:

And his dark secret love

Does thy life destroy.

William Blake, Albion Rose, c.1793 (aka Glad Day)

William Blake, Urizen struggling in the waters of materialism, 1794

William Blake, God creating Adam, 1795

William Blake, God judging Adam, 1795

William Blake, Nebuchadnezzar, 1795-c.1805

William Blake, Michael binding Satan, c.1805

William Blake, The Ancient of Days, c.1827

Robert Frank, 1924 – 2019

Robert Frank, Elevator - Miami Beach, 1955

Robert Frank died on 9 September 2019 

Frank’s The Americans was published in 1958/59. It is, I think, one of the great works of art of the Twentieth Century.

The pictures rewrote the rules of photography… Their blurry casualness and tilted frames jazzed nearly every photographer of note to come along in the 60’s. (Woodward, G., 1994)

Anybody doesnt like these pitchers dont like potry, see? Anybody dont like potry go home see Television shots of big hatted cowboys being tolerated by kind horses.

Robert Frank, Swiss, unobtrusive, nice, with that little camera that he raises and snaps with one hand he sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film, taking rank among the tragic poets of the world.

To Robert Frank I now give this message: You got eyes.

And I say: That little ole lonely elevator girl looking up sighing in an elevator full of blurred demons, what’s her name & address? (Kerouac, J. 1959)

When Garry Winogrand was asked to talk about other photographers’ work that he found interesting he picked out Robert Frank’s picture of a gas station:

It’s… a photograph of nothing, there’s nothing happening there. I mean, the subject matter has no dramatic ability of its own whatsoever and yet somehow it looks, what it is, it’s the most mundane—and there’s nothing happening, there’s no physical action… When [Robert Frank] took that photograph he couldn’t possibly know—he just could not know that it would work, that it would be a photograph. He knew he probably had a chance. In other words, he cannot know what that’s going to look like as a photograph. … I don’t give a rap about gasoline stations. . . (Winogrand, G. 2012) 

Robert Frank, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1955

Robert Frank, Covered Car - Long Beach, California, 1956

Robert Frank, Car Accident - U.S. 66, between Winslow and Flagstaff, Arizona, 1956

Robert Frank, Bar - Miami BeaNew York City, 1955

Robert Frank, Los Angeles, 1956

Robert Frank, Rodeo - New York City, 1955

Robert Frank, Indianapolis, 1956

Robert Frank, U.S. 90, en route to Del Rio, Texas, 1955

Cobb, Jelani (2019) “How Robert Frank’s Photographs Helped DefineAmerica”, The New Yorker

Dawidoff, Nicholas (2015) “The Man Who Saw America”, The New York Times Magazine

Gefter, Phillip (2019) “Robert Frank Dies: Pivotal DocumentartyPhotographer Was 94”, The New York Times

Hopkinson, Amanda (2019), “Robert Frank obituary”, The Guardian

Kerouac, Jack (1959) [Introduction to Robert Frank (1993) The Americans, Manchester: Cornerhouse Publication)

 Murphy, Michael David (2014) “American Beauty”, Medium

O’Hagan, Sean (2019) “Robert Frank: the outsider genius whosephotographs laid Bare America’s soul”, The Guardian

Winogrand, Garry (2012) “Monkeys Make the Problem More Difficult – ACollective Interview with Garry Winogrand (1970)”, ASX: American Suburb X

Woodward, Richard B. (1994) “Where Have You Gone, Robert Frank?”, The New York Times

Michael Wolf, 1954 – 2019

Michael Wolf died 24 April 2019

From an appreciation by Sean O’Hagan:

Michael Wolf, who has died suddenly, aged 64, was perhaps best known for his 2013-14 series, Architecture of Density, in which the facades of Hong Kong’s massive tower blocks, each one housing thousands of people, appear as dramatic geometric abstractions of light and colour… Wolf identified the abiding theme of his work as life in cities and his other signature work, Tokyo Compression, captured the claustrophobic experience of the Japanese capital’s subway system during rush hour. Here the hyperdensity of the postmodern city gives way to a series of portraits of individual endurance, with each face pressed tight against the glass of an ominously overcrowded carriage, offering a Ballardian glimpse of a daily ritual that, in Wolf’s portraits, is by turns intimate and unsettling. (Read full article, here.)

Read obituaries:

Marc Feustel (The Guardian)

Tiffany May (New York Times)

Michael Wolf, Architecture of Density #39

Michael Wolf, Architecture of Density #105

Michael Wolf, Architecture of Density #45

Michael Wolf, Architecture of Density #119

Michael Wolf, Night #20

Michael Wolf, Transparent City #1

Michael Wolf, Transparent City #12

Michael Wolf, Paris Rooftops #8

Michael Wolf, Tokyo Compression #75

Michael Wolf, Tokyo Compression #5

Michael Wolf, Tokyo Compression #18

Stewart Geddes – Andelli Art (until 15 May 2019)

Stewart Geddes, Spitzer

Stewart Geddes is at Andelli Art until 15 May 2019

Artist's statement (from the Andelli website): 
‘I’m interested in the act of painting itself; the way paint behaves and its abundance of different material properties – wetness, transparency, abrupt changes and incremental ones, grittiness and smoothness, quiet moments, shrieking moments, and so on. By focussing on the substance of paint the material is released to communicate directly, so colour can be experienced as colour, and surface as surface and the meanings that can ensue from that.
I’ve recently established an improvised form of painting in which, having decided on a palette, I only partially know what my hand is about to do.
I love this urgent need to make ‘live’ choices as the painting unfolds. It’s a strategized form of risk-taking and an attempt to ‘tap into’ surprising outcomes in an effort to evade caution and break into new territory. Delightfully, the strategy doesn’t usually lead to chaos and incoherence, but when it does, it places me in a position where I care very little, which can be creatively useful.
After this comes a more reflective period, when the painting hangs around in the studio while I wait to come to terms with what I’ve done and move it forward.
I’m currently working with a pictorial language of traversing, meandering lines that run around indeterminate organic-like forms. They establish multiple spatial relations in which forms appear to inhabit deep recessional spaces yet simultaneously assert their place on the painted surface. 
I’m wondering if these are analogous to places of departure and arrival? They certainly have a relation with the semi-conscious workings of my mind.’

Stewart Geddes, Winchell

Stewart Geddes, Pinna

Stewart Geddes, Kombu

Stewart Geddes, Brumwell

Stewart Geddes, Eukary

Stewart Geddes, Sedimichra

Warhol Women – Lévy Gorvy, New York (until 15 June 2019)

Andy Warhol, Blondie, 1981

Warhol Women is at Lévy Gorvy, New York, until 15 June 2019

Andy Warhol, Triple Mona Lisa, 1963

Andy Warhol, Judy (Red), 1978

Andy Warhol, Licorice Marilyn, 1962

Andy Warhol, Mint Marilyn (Turquoise Marilyn), 1962

Andy Warhol, Red Jackie, 1964

Andy Warhol, Ethel Scull, 1963

Andy Warhol, Portrait of Julia Warhola, 1974

Andy Warhol, 40 Jackies, 1964 - installation view

Warhol Women at Lévy Gorvy, installation view

Reinhard Mucha: Full Take – Sprüth Magers (until 11 May 2019)

Reinhard Mucha, Untitled (SEX), [2019] 1979

Reinhard Mucha: Full Take is at Sprüth Magers, until 11 May 2019.

This was one of the most enjoyably baffling exhibitions I have seen in a while.

From Sprüth Magers’ press release:

If there is a common theme in Düsseldorf-based sculptor and conceptual artist Reinhard Mucha’s work, it is his patient and visually striking exploration of our collective amnesia. Employing a subtle sense of humour, he creates sculptures and installations that seem to retain both time and history, and that the viewer will not forget quickly.

The use of footstools, pedestals, fluorescent lamps and showcases pervades Mucha’s entire oeuvre. They are concrete references to the basic architectural forms of the (museum) exhibition space, while at the same time undermining the institutional authority of the very space whose architecture becomes an integral part of the work. With Mucha, an exhibition is always self-exhibiting; lighting often illuminates only itself. Here it is not just the institution (museum) showing art, it is art showing the institution.

Mucha is often placed in close aesthetic proximity to Joseph Beuys, not least on account of his explicit, often antagonistic references in the naming of his works or his use of felt and found objects from German post-war everyday life. But this parallel is misleading. Mucha’s work has nothing in common with Beuys’s artfully shabby works, nor does it seek to conjure anything. On the contrary. Sensitive and sophisticated, it more closely resembles Minimalism and Conceptual Art and artists such as Blinky Palermo, Donald Judd, Frank Stella and Bruce Nauman. Hardly any other sculptor has so consistently used the zero-point of sculpture after Minimalism as a conceptual stepping stone. Mucha’s sculptures are much more than sculptures; they are melancholic apparatuses that archive history. They are sad machines confronting the largely doomed task of saving the more recent present from oblivion. They are batteries that have absorbed real-life and artistic energies to capacity and now only release them in small amounts. They are discreetly controlled stagings of showing and concealing, of history and anonymity. And last but not least, they are works that enter the world with a unique presence and an unusual resistance.
Read reviews:
Mika Ross-Southall (Hyperallergic)
George Vasey (Art Monthly, No.425, April 2019, p28)

Reinhard Mucha, Oderin / Untitled (MÄNNER FRAUEN), [1987] 1987 / 1981

Reinhard Mucha, "Wind und zu hohe Türme", Für Marcel Breuer, [2019] 1982

Reinhard Mucha, Ahlener Programm / Kleeth, [2019] 2007 / 2019

Reinhard Mucha, Bohmte, 1985

Reinhard Mucha, Hameln, 2014