Adriaen Coorte: Butterflies Through Other Eyes #10

 

Adriaen Coorte - Three Peaches On A Ledge with Red Admiral Butterfly - 1693-1695

Lizzie Riches: Butterflies Through Other Eyes #9

Enigmatic butterfly themed paintings by Lizzie Riches

Joseph Cornell Wanderlust

 

The real purpose of my visit to the RA however, was to see Joseph Cornell Wanderlust, which I thought was a very good exhibition. Cornell is such an inspirational artist, and has probably influenced every other artist like myself who worked/works in the box-frame format. It has been over thirty years since the last survey of Cornell's work, so this exhibition is long overdue. It is a really wonderful show full of self-contained miniature worlds in a variety of boxes which display the gamut of Cornell's imagination. Surprisingly, as his shadow boxes are so evocative, Cornell never travelled outside of the United States, but trawled second-hand bookshops, flea-markets and dime stores to find source material for these magical boxes. I guess the sense of travel and magic conjured up in the boxes are a reaction to, and antidote to the very humdrum life that he was forced to lead, having had to support his family financially from an early age with the premature death of his father.

 

The elements and objects of the boxes are beautifully selected and composed like 17th century Dutch still life paintings. Personal favourites were the constellations series and of course the birds.

 

 

 

The scale of some of Cornell's pieces are tiny, which creates a sense of intimacy and drew you closer into he work. The sheer range of objects and paper ephemera that he adapted for use in his collages and boxes was interesting to see. And it is a real testament to the power of his imagination that he was able to conjure up and evoke places and environments which were alien to him so vividly.

 

 

Joseph Cornell Wanderlust

until 27th September

The Sackler Wing

Royal Academy of Arts

Piccadilly

Serpentine/Serpentine Sackler

It was a real pleasure recently to cycle through Hyde Park on a lovely sunny day and to interrupt my journey to see two very interesting exhibitions which employ the figure as their focus. At Serpentine Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Verses After Dusk, is a show of her imagined portraits loosely rendered in oils.

I really admired the drawing techniques and mark-making in her series of etchings.

Whilst over at Serpentine Sackler is an exhibition of Duane Hanson's hyper-realistic
figures.

I thought these were good fun, and the attention to detail is incredible. The hands in particular were really well rendered. The only element in which they failed to fully convince was the hair/wigs which mostly look obviously false, and a little worse for wear with age, on some of the sculptures. Many of the figures really did fool the eye from a certain distance though, and were credible representations of blue collar workers.

Lastly, there was this year's colourful temporary pavilion outside the original Serpentine gallery, designed by Spanish architectural duo Selgascano, which proved to be a hit with adults and children alike, if not perhaps architecture critics.

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Verses After Dusk
Serpentine Gallery
Kensington Gardens
until 13th September

Duane Hanson
Serpentine Sackler
West Carriage Drive
until 13th September

Serpentine Pavilion
Kensington Gardens
until 18th October

Yayoi Kusama: Butterflies Through Others Eyes #8

Wonderfully psychedelic butterflies covered in Kusama's signature spots.

Sonia Delaunay

Made the journey to Tate Modern to see this Delaunay retrospective. I didn't know too much about her life/work apart from her marriage to Robert Delaunay and her colourful abstract paintings of concentric circles, and some of the graphic/typographic work that she had collaborated on with the poet Blaise Cendrars.

Delaunay's early figurative work was influenced by Gauguin and displayed a clear love of colour. It was only after meeting and marrying Robert Delaunay that they developed and applied the theory of simultaneous colour contrasts - Simultanism, to their work that Delaunay abandoned figurative art and embraced total abstraction. The creation of the patchwork quilt below, for her son was key to the future direction of her art and application of simultanism to other disciplines such as fashion, textiles and graphic design. I loved the roughness and obvious hand-made qualities of the quilt, and also a patchwork dress that she wore, and a patchwork waistcoat in the exhibition.

Also key to her simultaneous theories were technological advances in the early twentieth century such as the installation of electric lighting on the streets of Paris, and the 'halo' effect of colours these new street lights displayed. These were explored in her Electric Prisms series, below. The effects of rhythm, movement and colour were also explored on canvas, courtesy of the craze for the tango which swept Parisian dance halls in paintings like that below.

I really enjoyed seeing Delaunay's application of simultanism to graphic design and typography. Again it was the relatively unsophisticated and obviously hand-drawn qualities that I admire, and the fact that her hand-drawn type flows freely and doesn't fit neatly into a grid. The playfulness and experimentation of the illustrative typography on the Vogue cover below is great, but would not necessarily sell many copies on todays newsstands without the requisite supermodel/celebrity on the cover.

Typography and words obviously excited Delaunay from her collaborations with poets such as Cendrars and Tzara, and there is also evidence from photographs of her apartment where she would paint poetry on doors to create what she termed 'door-poems'. This idea was developed further and given movement with the application of text to fabrics in Delaunay's fashion designs for her Dress-Poem series. I would really have liked to see actual examples of these dresses in the exhibition.

It was whilst living in Spain having fled Paris because of the First World War, and finding herself in straitened circumstances that Delaunay was forced to put all of her artistic efforts into applied art. She opened a shop - Casa Sonia, from which she sold simultaneous printed fabrics, furniture, clothes and accessories. The shop was hugely successful and other branches were opened in other cities. It was the application of her work to other disciplines which was to enable her to fund and develop her abstract painting. Delaunay embraced working across a variety of disciplines and continued to design textiles, clothing and accessories on her return to Paris with husband Robert in 1921. I really like the fact that her work could be and was, adapted for and applied to a variety of surfaces. Delaunay is an important figure in that she broke down the distinctions between the fine and applied arts so successfully. She is shown on the cover of Vogue by illustrator Georges Lepape, in one of her dress designs with a motor car painted in the simultaneous style.

These are examples of some of Delaunay's geometric textile work which remind me of the designs on moquette fabrics seen on London Transport.

In terms of colour and style Delaunay has clearly left a legacy subconsciously or perhaps more deliberately on textile and fashion designers, (to be explored in a further post), and also contemporary artists like Bridget Riley and Beatrice Milhazes. It would be great to see a group exhibition of women artists who's work is based around the use of abstraction and colour.

I took much away from this exhibition in terms of potential for future development in my own work. It made me aware of other possibilities which remain to be explored. I felt really uplifted by the colour and rhythmic qualities of Delaunay's work, and recommend a visit to this exhibition.


Sonia Delaunay
until 9th August 2015
Tate Modern
Bankside
SE1