Tracey Emin: I Followed You To the End

Tracey Emin 

I was in Bermondsey to see a different exhibition but decided whilst in the area to visit White Cube to see this show by Tracey Emin. I like Emin's textile works, but am not I must admit totally convinced by her paintings, and this exhibition did little to convince me otherwise despite her now positioning herself firmly as a painter. It's as if by sculpting in bronze and focusing on painting she is trying to leave a 'true' artistic legacy, equating her work with those of the greats in art history. Although not the biggest fan of Emin's paintings which I find very slight, I acknowledge her importance in the world of contemporary art and role as a mentor and inspiration to a generation of younger artists with her art school and residency programme. Emin's subject always appears to be herself, her frustrated love life, the anger at the abuses she has suffered in the past at the hands of men, and more recently meditations on her own mortality given her serious health issues. All of this is channelled into this body of recent work, and all of which with the exception of one was created this year. They are boldy expressionistic paintings, full of loose dripping brushwork in which the colour red features significantly. The red is strongly suggestive of blood and seems indicative of the pain and anguish the artist has/continues to endure physically and emotionally. It also seems to represent a meditation on her own mortality. The figures inhabiting these works are mainly reclining women executed in slight, ghostly line work, all firmly placed in a bed or domestic bedroom setting with the addition of a male in a few for company, or the artists cats watching silently, perched on top of a chest of drawers. A few paintings contain Emin's signature confessional text inscribed onto them explaining why she doesn't want to have sex, or why men have reduced her to this condition, all mourning the lack/loss of love in her life. As well as the paintings there are two sculptures and a short film. The sculpture in the main gallery space represents the lower half of a female form bent over and prone, a massive, hulking thing. Much more successful is the smaller sculpture entitled Ascension reminiscent in pose of a Rodin piece and again in context with the paintings suggestive of death and the soul ascending to the afterlife. I didn't stick around to see the film although it was only a minute long as I had no desire to see the artist's stoma, having had enough of Tracey's blood and gore by then. A few days later I encountered more of Emin's work in the form of the bronze portrait plaques on the doors of the National Portrait Gallery. I was there to see their current exhibition Frances Bacon: Human Presence. Anybody wishing to experience the work of another artist concerned with similar themes of love, loss and mortality, and handling it with more skill and gravitas, should visit the last room of the exhibition to see Bacon's powerful masterpiece Triptych May-June, 1973, a posthumous portrait of his lover George Dyer after having taken his own life two days before a major Bacon retrospective was due to open in Paris. It is a far greater meditation on love and loss, expertly handled and executed and almost too powerful bear looking at. 

Tracey Emin: I Follwed You To The End

until 10th November

White Cube Bermondsey

London

144-152 Bermondsey Street

London

SE1

Lucienne Day Silk Mosaics 1975-1993

Lucienne Day - Black Window, (detail)

"I do regard them rather like my children... I love to hear how they're getting on." - Lucienne Day 1994.

Clothing and lifestyle store Margaret Howell on Wigmore Street, Marylebone, made for a really welcome change of venue to the usual museums and galleries I frequent in search of inspirational exhibitions of art and design. On this occasion it was to see the dazzling colours and geometric textile constructions which make up the silk mosaics displayed here by legendary textile designer Lucienne Day (1917-2010). Lucienne Day was married to the equally talented furniture and industrial designer Robin Day. Lucienne Day first made her presence felt at the Festival of Britain exhibition in 1951, winning praise for her strikingly modern printed textile designs on furnishing fabrics for retailers such as Heal's. These designs were pioneering in a period of post-war gloom. Day's designs combined abstracted plant forms with geometric motifs to create forward-looking fabrics which are still influential today in the works of contemporary artists and designers such as Angie Lewin. Day's surface pattern designs were also applied to other surfaces including ceramics, wallpapers and carpets. 

Lucienne Day - Calyx, 1951

There was a gradual decline in textile manufacturing in the 1970s and finding a new outlet for her talents Day began to create one-off textile wall hangings which use the basic techniques of construction as patchworks quilts, which are basically strips of fabric stitched together to create patterned cloths. Day consciously chose to dissociate her work with the centuries old tradition of quilting for whatever reason despite the obvious similarities, instead choosing to title her creations as silk mosaics. The term Silk Mosaic was coined because the individual units of the patched pieces were so small that they recalled the tesserae in Roman mosaics. This allusion was particularly apt because the vivid colouring of the glass tesserae were mirrored in the richly-coloured dyed silks of Day's Silk Mosaics. Although Day created the designs, she did not sew them herself, rather she outsourced their hand-crafted construction to talented seamstresses. Day also selected the silk fabrics herself, choosing the colours and textures of the fabric to purposely exploit the slubby yarns and two-tone iridescence of shot silks (woven from different coloured warp and weft) adding further levels of depth to her designs. The fabrics in the designs have held their colour well over the years, and as mentioned earlier they really do sing and appear to shine like stained glass or jewels. I find that I prefer the less literal, more abstract designs of Day's silk mosaics. The more representational pieces look a little too twee for my tastes. The technique seems to work better with Day's abstract geometric designs. I found that there were certain similarities with the work of another textile designer, the great Anni Albers, in Day's silk mosaics, and there was even one piece here which shared the same title, Meander, as my favourite textile design by Albers. This was my first introduction to this aspect of Lucienne Day's work and I found these works to be every bit as engaging as her printed textile designs of the 1950s. I shall be certainly seeking out further examples of these gorgeous geometric gems.

The Castle and Other Stories - 1979

White Door, Mid 1970s

Black Window, Mid 1970s

Mexico - ca. early 1980s

Little Tangram (Pink), 1983

Little Tangram (Pink), 1983

Museum II, 1990

Purple Shadow, 1990

Meander 1, 1980s

Tangram 3, 1985

Memory Game, 1993

Circling the Square 3, 1981

Circling the Square 2, 1981

Midnight Sun, Mid 1980s

Three Daughters of Mexico, 1992

Patchwork Quilt, 1954

Causeway, 1967

Whirligig, 1979

Whirligig, 1979

Boathouse, 1983

Boathouse, 1983

Lucienne Day Silk Mosaics 1975-1993

until Sunday 3rd November

Margaret Howell

34 Wigmore Street

London W1