Kenneth Noland: Stripes/Plaids/Shapes

Kenneth Noland - Galore, 1966

"I think of painting without subject matter as music without words." 

- Kenneth Noland.

Installation View

To Pace to see the first solo exhibition in London by American abstract colour field painter Kenneth Noland in more than twenty years. Noland trained for two years at the legendary Black Mountain College in North Carolina where he developed an interest in the potential of colour in his work under the influence of luminaries such as Anni and Josef Albers, John Cage and Ilya Bolotowsky, a proponent of De Stijl art theory, which would become an influence on Noland's later works. Noland went on to develop a distinct, colourful, personal visual language that includes symbols such as Circles, Chevrons and the Stripes, Plaids and Shaped canvases displayed in this exhibition. The striped paintings appeared like landscapes with vast horizons. Galore, (above) was an instant favourite. The diamond shaped canvas support and the slanted beautifully coloured stripes were reminiscent of mouth-watering sticks of rock that you find at seaside resorts. I thought the stripe paintings were most interesting where Noland overlapped the horizontal stripes with verticals to create a new dimension or 'plaid' paintings. There was a lovely tension created where the lines intersected, which unsurprisingly called to mind the works of Piet Mondrian. The surfaces of these paintings are interesting to observe as you can see the textures of the humble paint roller against the plainer surface of the masked out stripes. Another interesting development was in paintings such as Untitled 1976, where he has added a reflective gloss stripe against the matt background to vary the surface texture and tension, or in Field of Green where Noland allows the duller, dominant background colour to bleed into the vibrant stripes. I was really impressed by both Noland's colour palette and the shaped canvases which played strong optical tricks on the senses, giving a sense of distortion and disruption to the surface of the painted works and disorientation in the viewer too. Glean, and Field of Green, are great examples of this and were quite hard to photograph in this respect. One of my favourites in this series in the exhibition is Elongate, which is shaped like a shard of rose quartz crystal edged by a slice of grass green and navy blue on either side. This is another very strong museum quality show by Pace like that of Creating Abstraction last year, and I look forward to seeing what other exhibitions are on their schedule for the remainder of the year.

Early Flight, 1969

Glean, 1977

9 PM, 2003

Interface, 1973

Galore, 1966

Sea Shade, 1971

Via Mojave, 1968

Field of Green, 1978

Elongate, 1981

Untitled, 1978

Untitled, 1976

Untitled, 1981

Minted Morning, 2003

Yellow Slant, 1980

Untitled, 1972

Reappearance, 1981

Kenneth Noland: Stripes/Plaids/Shapes

until 4th March

Pace

5 Hanover Square

London

Liza Giles: The Shape of Things

Liza Giles - Black/Grass Triptych, 2022

"My works are driven by an impetus to 'switch off' and re-engage with our instinct. I want my art to speak honestly to its observer in a pure and simple way. My work is essentially about how it makes you feel." - Liza Giles.

These energetic paintings caught my eye on Cork Street. I was captivated by the bold geometric abstraction tempered by the occasional expressionistic brushstroke and drip/spatter of paint to soften the hard edges. They were reminiscent of the work of American Abstract Expressionism by the likes of Robert Motherwell and Franz Kline. These paintings at Flowers gallery are the work though of Liza Giles whose paintings I had never previously encountered. I immediately picked up on her strong visual language of blocks of shapes and semi-circles resembling lobster claws. Another aspect of Giles' work I was drawn to was the collage-like nature of the compositions. The canvases are triptychs and quadiptychs, but look as though they have been cut and pasted together. Unsurprisingly I discovered the canvases evolve from smaller preparatory collages which Giles paints and then cuts up, rearranging the pieces until she is happy enough with a particular composition to develop them into a painting. Being an artist who works in collage myself I was eager to inspect the smaller collages, but sadly they were mounted in the gallery's administration space off limits to the public, so I was unable to examine them at close quarters. This was a real shame as these smaller preparatory works looked just as interesting as the large canvases. Further investigation into Giles's oeuvre is needed. 

Raw Sienna (Composition 3/22), 2022

Untitled, 2022

Grass Triptych (Composition II), 2021

Black Quadiptych (Composition IV), 2021

Flowers Blue Triptych, 2022

Flowers Blue Triptych, 2022 (detail)

Installation View

Installation View Collages

Black/Sap/Olive/Grey Quadiptych, 2022

Liza Giles: The Shape of Things

until 11th March

Flowers

21 Cork Street

London

W1S

Magdalena Abakanowicz: Every Tangle of Thread and Rope

 

"I am interested in constructing an environment from my forms.

I am interested in the scale of tensions that arises between the various shapes which I place in space.

I am interested in the feeling when confronted by the woven object.

I am interested in the motion and waving of the woven surfaces.

I am interested in every tangle of thread and rope and every possibility of transformation.

I am interested in the path of a single thread.

I am not interested in the practical usefulness of my work.

Magdalena Abakanowicz, 1971

I'd first encountered the large, sculptural textile works of Magdalena Abakanowicz in an exhibition devoted to art textiles back in 2015 (here). The sheer scale of that suspended piece had impressed me, dominating the central space of the main gallery at the Whitworth. Given my increasing interest in art textile practitioners then it was no surprise that I should find my way to this current exhibition at Tate Modern - Magdalena Abakanowicz: Every Tangle of Thread and Rope - celebrating an artist who deserves to be much better known. Such is the current interest in fibre art that last year alone I was able to enjoy significant exhibitions by other mainly female artists working in textiles. Artists such as Olga de Amaral (here), Lenore Tawney (here), Louise Bourgeois, (here) and Sue Fuller (here). All were very impressive enough, but the textiles here fall into a category of their own because their monumentality and the scale of Abakanowicz's vision and ambition. The exhibition begins chronologically documenting her first commercial pieces using printed textile techniques, and then the gradual incorporation of the loom as she moved into weaving, creating the most gorgeous textural tapestries. As a child Abakanowicz spent long periods wandering around the forests and fields of her aristocratic family's country estate absorbing the smells and textures of the trees. Also significant on her later work would be the animal skins and trophy heads collected by her father on hunting expeditions. As an art student during post-war Communist led Poland Abakanowicz had to follow the strict party line which didn't include any form of abstraction. She managed to negotiate her own aesthetic path through the Communist doctrine though, when censorship eased in the mid-1950s and she was freer to work the loom creating beautiful tapestries. To me these resemble large abstract expressionist paintings with the added richness and depth of textural fibres derived from fleece, cotton, horsehair and rope. This exhibition builds beautifully charting this development and then you walk into the third room where you encounter a forest of these works which were termed 'Abakans' by a bewildered critic. The vast tapestries of the late 1960s and early 1970s have now leapt off the gallery walls and hang suspended in time and space, clustered and arranged like a petrified forest or the forests explored in her youth. They are visceral, resembling flayed animal pelts or pieces of meat with fibrous tufts bristling along them like spines. they brought to mind the paintings of hanging meat by Bacon and Soutine. Abakanowicz at this stage had become fully engaged in what is known as 'loom-thinking' - improvised, instinctive, experimental weaving without preparatory design. In this she exploits and pushes the weaving process to bring new techniques and achievements to the discipline using different densities of materials and tensions on the loom but managing to blend them all seamlessly. Displaying her huge works in environments of "situations" as she liked to call them, but we now know as installations, was central to Abakanowicz's vision and such groupings only adds to the power of her work. As you emerge from the 'forest', the works hung and gathered in the next room are just as gargantuan but have had an injection of colour. There are rich burnt oranges, acid mustard yellows and vivid scarlets, very different to the earthy, muddy palette of the 'forest'. These circular-shaped pieces take their inspiration from bodily parts. There is a massive pair of blackened lungs, and other colourful pieces based around bodily orifices with fabric contorted into labial folds. This is a wonderful exhibition. As with the Sophie Tauber-Arp exhibition (here), Tate Modern are doing fantastic job of introducing the public to very talented but sadly overlooked female artists.

 

Magdalena Abakanowicz: Every Tangle of Thread and Rope

until 21st May

Tate Modern

Bankside

London

SE1