Naum Gabo at Tate St Ives 2020
Naum Gabo at Tate St Ives 2020
The Naum Gabo exhibit at Tate St Ives started in March this year and has been extended to run until this September. I went along in early March and here are my takeaway impressions and some photos of what you might expect if you have a chance to visit.
We are so lucky in Cornwall not just to have an amazing local wealth of creative and artistic talent locally, and an immense history of modern art in the area, but also to have facilities like Tate St Ives to visit ‘on a rainy day’, to stretch the mind, educate and inform us without even leaving the Duchy (County to you and me!).
When the Naum Gabo exhibition in St Ives started in early spring I went along with my (slightly short attention span and tantruming throughout the exhibit) son to take it in.
My visit was, as such, quite short and so will be the information in this blog as a result, but short turned out to be very sweet. I found this was an exhibition I could go to see, learn and enjoy immensely, because the work here is very fast to comprehend and enjoy. Even if you look at it in amazement for the sculptural skill, visual impact, mathematical precision and calculations, or, as I did, the complete surprise surrounding the manufacturing techniques available in the era, you can be impressed by the forethought and modernity of it that still makes it feel futuristic and timeless today.
His work combined geometric abstraction with a dynamic organization of form in small reliefs and constructions, monumental public sculpture and pioneering kinetic works that assimilated new materials such as nylon, wire, lucite and semi-transparent materials, glass and metal.
Two preoccupations, unique to Gabo, were his interest in representing negative space—”released from any closed volume” or mass—and time. He famously explored the former idea in his Linear Construction works (1942-1971)—used nylon filament to create voids or interior spaces as “concrete” as the elements of solid mass
Source: Tate/ Wikipedia
What I enjoyed about Naum Gabo: Constructions for Real Life.
The first extensive presentation of Naum Gabo’s sculptures, paintings, drawings and architectural designs to be held in the UK for over 30 years
Tate St Ives
I didn’t know that Naum Gabo had lived in Carbis Bay during WWII and been considered one of the St Ives Artists. This felt great to me as it drew a link for me between the location in which I now live. I have a pull towards the geometric visual style in my paintings, and the relationship of the three dimensionality in this sculptural work that resonates with the three dimensional direction I am currently taking in my own work. I could feel a connection with the sculptures and plans. I can feel the organic
I made a mental note to myself to look up: Hyperbolic parabaloid, tensegrity structure and history plastic manufacturing (although these days I’m researching more into plastics re-use)… and you might add to that Constructivism (and give that to your child to do as homework for the school holidays!).
I couldn’t believe how well some of the pieces have survived – the geometric acrylic sheet sculptures that have remained in immaculate condition are nearly 100 years old. You could be mistaken for thinking they were made in the 1970s, influenced by Star Wars or some other space odyssey, but in fact perhaps the reverse is true, perhaps films and architecture drew on the work of Naum Gabo as the innovator.
The precision of the hyperbolic paraboloids, the mathematical calculations that went into them and the precise execution of the pieces. The hyperbolic paraboloids make for beautiful sculptures which are perfectly hand tensioned, each string or wire having the same degree of tension.
For me this is a stunning exhibition, beautifully presented, amazingly well preserved and extremely educational and inspirational. If a 3 year old can lie on the floor having a tantrum because they don’t want to leave, that’s a good sign for taking older kids or the rest of your family along.
Inspirations from Tate Modern
Inspirations from the Tate Modern, November 2015
On my day out to see Ai Weiwei’s exhibition I took the opportunity to do some further research and to look for painting inspirations in the Tate Modern. Limiting myself to the free exhibits I was interested in narrowing it down to just the Energy and Process and Making Traces rooms. I was a bit disappointed in the painting selection, but there were a few key items that took me, and one completely unexpected body of work encompassing drawing, sculpture and performance by Rebecca Horn that was a real surprise.
First of all, the paintings.
Giorgio Griffa, Segni Orizzontali, Acrylic paint on canvas, 1975
This piece was of interest to me initially because the painting isn’t attached to a canvas stretcher, it’s simply painted straight onto canvas and pinned to the wall. There is a relationship between Griffa’s use of the canvas material as a raw object to how I apply gloss paint in the more process-led paintings where it wraps around the surface sides of the painting to amplify the three dimensionality of the painting’s surface.
Cy Twombly Untitled (Bacchus), 2008
I was particularly looking forward to re-acquainting myself with the work of Cy Twombly; massive, expressive canvasses with giant gestural marks of free flowing paint. Immersively large scale and full of impact.
I’ve always enjoyed doing large canvases, they are expensive to make and quite a big gamble to undertake given the cost involved to do one but when I do it pays off, the bigger paintings always lend themselves to space and freedom well for me and I feel able to stretch out and explore the space. I never like to waste resources or money so I know if I don’t get it right I won’t be a happy bunny.
Tomma Abts, Zebe, 2010
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Making Traces exhibit
Mark Rothko (late 1950s)
Rebecca Horn
This is what the plaque says about House of Pain and Waiting for Absence, both 2005 (having read this after seeing the pieces):
‘to look inside bodies and meditate one’s own way into them… you approach a hidden centre, maybe the solar plexus, and follow the circular motion or energy threads of breathing’.
There were some other items in the exhibit that were quite scary and intimate. A video of Rebecca in the 70s making a drawing wearing a cage of pencils on her face, a Cockatoo headpiece that had ‘wings’ to envelope/embrace a partner into a kiss (this was really voyeuristic and a bit shocking) and then also, the piece that to me was the most raw and shocking item, a sculpture called Overflowing Blood Machine, 1970. This was bloody and to me, almost torturous looking, perhaps this was what gave such an impact of all the items that perhaps the mechanics had been inspired by medieval creations and inventions.
Overflowing Blood Machine was a plinth with transparent tubes that encased a wearer. I thought this looked less like a therapeutic hospital device than one of dystopia and torture or perhaps even unnatural genetic engineering or some other sinister device. The wearer (a performance artist) is ‘tied down on top of a glass container, tubes are wrapped around his body. Blood is slowly pumped from the glass container through the plastic tubes. This garment of veins encases his body, wrapping him in a pulsating skin.’ I think this is the stuff of horror movies, see what you think from the photos!
I’m now looking forward to my next gallery visit, but first some more painting of my own!
This blog post was first published by myself 23rd Nov 2015 at http://trudiemooreabstractpaintings.blogspot.com/2015/
Ai Weiwei at the Royal Academy of Arts, London 2015
Ai Weiwei at the Royal Academy of Arts, London 2015
I picked up my camera and headed off to the Big Smoke for a day of treating myself to art gallery mooching.
I didn’t know an awful lot about Ai Weiwei before I spotted his exhibition was on at the Royal Academy of Arts, but I did know that it would be good with well executed work that would make me think harder and deeper not only about the work, but about its context.
He's the Beijing Andy Warhol... he wants to shock you
Never Sorry
Never go unprepared
The show opens with the first big piece, Bed, 2004 which is a piece recycled from Qing Dynasty timber, like much of Ai’s work, reclaimed salvage.
Headphones on
Detail from Kippe, 2006, on show at the RA, November 2015
For Ai Weiwei he felt that he couldn’t understand the event and the devastation of it and the Government’s response without going to see it for himself and so he travelled to the area with a team and they started to collect names of those children who perished which were collated and read out by followers of his blog. The blog was later shut down by the Government for revealing “state secrets”. This resulted in Ai Weiwei being beaten by police and denied the ability to give evidence in support of one his assistants, he was then hospitalised for bleeding on the brain.
Moving on from Straight, we move into a room that talks about Ai’s struggles with the Government, his oppression as an artist and the Government’s attempts to constrain his work by bulldozing his studio. Ai had criticised the Beijing Olympics internationally, fought for those who suffered as a result of the earthquake and for over 300,000 children who had been harmed by infant formula. He utilised this as an event to commemorate the studio and hold a feast of river crabs. Of the items in this exhibit, He Xie, 2011 is a pile of 3,000 crabs clambering over one another, I think is the most interesting part. The translation for river crab ‘He Xie’ means harmonious, which is a concept of the Communist party’s slogan ‘The realisation of a harmonious society’ and this is taken to denote censorship within Chinese society. The feasting on river crabs, to which he was then, due to the Government, unable to attend becoming a piece of performance art and defiance by those attendees. The crabs shown were anatomically correct and made of hand painted porcelain, a mischievous edge I believe is shown in the escape of one of the crabs up the wall. I later felt like one of the clambering crabs on the tube in the midst of the madness.
More references to surveillance, challenging traditional values and oppression follow, the use of craftsmanship carefully executed in the work, Ai’s art business giving work to skilled individuals using high value materials, marble, tea, crystal, Han urns and the highly crafted Treasure Box, 2014. All traditional Chinese items.
The exhibition becomes renewed when we get to one of the last galleries featuring the S.A.C.R.E.D. 2012 diorama depicting torturous aspects from Ai’s incarceration such as interrogations and being watched using the loo. These could be viewed from the side, but if you were tall enough (I barely was and I am average height) you could peer in from the top by standing on a step and experience the pieces in an ‘out of body experience’ kind of a way as though you were either Ai witnessing his own life, or a video camera surveilling the situation. This room was decorated in a blingy, gold-coloured wallpaper of handcuffs and Twitter logos with Ai’s face as the bird. I feel it is demonstrating that he can overcome the authorities and this treatment by still getting his message out through Twitter. The image of this was quite sinister, Ai playing the Government at its own game and by putting his face on the wallpaper as the bird, he’s become the more powerful force. The fact that the paper is only printed gold and not actually made from gold shows that the luxury material itself is unnecessary, but also refers to mass production techniques and mass distribution through social media.
More photos of Bicycle Chandelier
Finally the mass production is addressed again through the giant Bicycle Chandelier, 2015 commissioned to be re-fashioned with crystals for the Royal Academy, made from Forever Bicycles historically ridden all over China but ridden less in recent times due to increasing modernisation while riding a bike in China has become a luxury and not a utility. This piece suits the elegance and luxury gold leaf of its position under the atrium roof, the commissioning of the piece by the RA feeling like an act of extravagance by the gallery itself, possibly funded by sales of merchandise in the gift shop as you exit. I wondered whether Ai Weiwei embraces corporate souvenir sales to help fund his mission (given that some of the books themselves are his work) and the partnerships with galleries seeing it as a necessary way to enable art, or whether the monetisation of art, art galleries and the link to consumerism is seen as an additional issue, perhaps one not to be addressed given the number of problems he is already tackling.
I first published this blog on Thursday, 12 November 2015 at http://trudiemooreabstractpaintings.blogspot.com/2015/11/ai-weiwei-at-royal-academy-of-arts.html