Turner Prize shortlist includes artist who uses ‘salvaged' antique dolls in work
Peterborough artist Rene Matic was among the four shortlisted artists announced at the Tate Britain on Wednesday for their first institutional solo exhibition, called As Opposed To The Truth, which touches on ideas of the rise of right-wing populism and identities.
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Telegraph
4 days ago
- Telegraph
Edward Burra - Ithell Colquhoun: Tate's eccentric double-bill feels like a revelation
Tate Britain's latest offer? Two exhibitions for the price of one. For the first time since 2013's Gary Hume-Patrick Caulfield double-header, separate yet similarly engrossing shows occupy the lower-floor galleries at Millbank, accessed with a single ticket. (The order in which you see them is unimportant, but some stamina is required; allow a couple of hours.) The juxtaposition isn't obvious but neither is it forced: although it's unlikely they ever met, the 20th-century British artists Edward Burra and Ithell Colquhoun were born only a year apart, to upper-middle-class families, and were both associated with Surrealism. They also shared preoccupations, such as an interest in same-sex relationships and a concern for the British landscape – as well as (to varying degrees) the paranormal and the occult. A ramshackle, sickly character from Sussex, Burra (1905-76) specialised in stylised, graphic watercolours with a satirical edge, often depicting people on society's margins. (For the artist Paul Nash, a friend, he was a modern Hogarth.) In part because watercolour was his preferred medium – thanks to lifelong rheumatoid arthritis and anaemia, he found it easier than painting in oils at an easel – he's often considered an idiosyncratic, tangential figure within British modernism. Regular visitors to Tate Britain may be familiar with his composition The Snack Bar (1930), in which a chalky-faced barman suggestively slices a firm, pink ham (it remains on display upstairs), but this show of more than 80 paintings – Burra's first London retrospective in 40 years – contains so many exhibits from private collections (almost 50) that it feels like a revelation. Accompanied by music drawn from his collection of 78rpm gramophone records (he was a big fan of American jazz, which inspired a trip to Harlem during the 1930s), the exhibition tautly traces Burra's career, from his teeming early pictures of bohemians and pert-bottomed sailors living it up in France – Le Bal (1928) is a standout – to his brooding post-war visions of an enchanted British countryside blighted by motorways and concrete. Each picture is a mini-world of incident and observation, often saturated with seediness and innuendo. The conflicts of the 1930s and 1940s cut Burra deeply, darkening an already dour disposition, and inspiring in his work a menacing new strain (sometimes charged with sadomasochism), as the flirting, gurning hedonists of his earlier paintings are replaced by hooded wraiths and sinister men in birdlike masks. Colquhoun (1906-88), an avowed occultist, was more interested in magic and the power of female sexuality than in macho menace; whereas Burra fetishised the male form, Colquhoun – who may have been bisexual, and was married only briefly, during the 1940s – painted imagery evoking impotence and castration. Who knew that a trimmed cucumber could be so troubling? This show, first seen earlier this year (at Tate St Ives) in Cornwall, where Colquhoun lived during her latter decades, takes her obsession with magic seriously – devoting space to diagrams of tesseracts and tarot-card designs, and teasing out impenetrable alchemical concepts such as the 'Divine Androgyne'. Don't let this put you off. Inspired by the crisp art of Salvador Dalí, which she encountered in London in 1936 (at an exhibition of Surrealist art in which Burra also participated), Colquhoun's mature paintings – often produced using 'automatic' techniques – have a flaming, dream-like intensity. In Dance of the Nine Opals (1942), a ring of opalescent rocks inspired by a Cornish stone circle appears to revolve around a golden tree of life before pink-tinged mountains. Fantastical pictures like this – like much of Burra's original output (which, although the shows aren't in competition, probably edges it) – deserve greater prominence in the history of 20th-century British art.
The Guardian
4 days ago
- The Guardian
Edward Burra / Ithell Colquhoun review – sex, jazz, war and the occult, all confusingly jumbled
They make a truly odd couple. She's an occultist who once appeared on BBC television explaining to the nation how to make surrealist art at home. He's a jazz enthusiast whose slices of modern – and often queer - life are full of roly-poly grotesques. What on earth have Ithell Colquhoun and Edward Burra got in common, and why has Tate Britain handcuffed them together for an uncalled for, unneeded and ultimately baffling double header? I loved Colquhoun's exhibition at Tate St Ives when I reviewed it earlier this year, but this version of it is much more flatly laid out and her experiments in releasing the unconscious are shouted down by all the drunken, drugged, omnivorously shagging people in Burra's 1920s and 30s clubs and bars. Yet he also gets edited and reinvented in a way that left me largely cold. Burra was modern but reactionary, a brilliant social observer who also retreated into a private world in his hideaway in Rye, Sussex. This exhibition claims his art is largely about 'queer culture' yet his actual sexuality is mysterious – not that you'd know that from the show. He painted in watercolour, wildly stretching this medium's possibilities. He is an odd, cussed, unique figure. How reactionary? Well, he sympathised with General Franco's far-right forces in the Spanish civil war. He didn't share the widespread belief of his generation that the Spanish fight was a struggle for humanity's future against the rising forces of fascism. Yet Tate Britain puts Burra's Spanish civil war art at the heart of its fitful show without acknowledging his well-known position. In fact it goes further and tries to present him as a great artist of modern conflict. I don't see it. Burra's big, busy, booming watercolours seem to treat the war as a gaudy spectacle, a horrorshow ballet, and have more pity for broken architecture than slaughtered people. Harlequins and devils cavort in the ruins but there is no precision about the war's victims – look to Picasso's Guernica for them. In Burra's Beelzebub, a naked big-bummed devil presides with sensual joy over a nude battle of muscular erotic soldiers in a crumbling bombed-out cathedral: an emphasis on the destruction of churches and killing of clergy as supposed leftist atrocities was typical of pro-Franco imagery. A wall text quotes Burra on the eve of the war: 'It was terrifying: constant strikes, churches on fire, and pent up hatred everywhere.' It is the hatefulness he sees in the Spanish workers and Republicans he's condemning, with their strikes and anti-clericalism. Burra was out of his depth. He was a party animal not a political pundit. In its first couple of rooms, this show reveals how wondrously hedonistic he can be. In his depictions of Paris nightlife in the late 1920s he is amazed and delighted by French freedom. Women do naked erotic dances at the Folies de Belleville, men dance with men and women with women at a dance hall, and sailors chat each other up at a bar. The exhibition, structured as a series of highlights from his career, doesn't explain how Burra, born in 1905, came by his singular style, at once precise, comic, sensual and grotesque. But by the time he went to France it was fully formed. Hogarth was one source. The British tradition of caricature dynamises The Tea Shop, from 1929, in which two prudishly polite women in the foreground, one in spectacles that stress her myopia, look idiotically at us, unaware that the waiting staff behind them, male and female, are stark naked. They're a couple of squares who don't get the 20s scene. Sign up to Art Weekly Your weekly art world round-up, sketching out all the biggest stories, scandals and exhibitions after newsletter promotion Burra was plugged in to that scene, internationally. Though based in tranquil Rye and suffering with rheumatoid arthritis, he would go anywhere for fun. The jazz records he loved are on show – and playing distractingly – and in his paintings of New York and other US cities, jazz and queerness lead him to riotous venues where you might not have met many white Englishmen. In his 1937 picture Izzy Orts, he takes you to the heart of the night where a sailor stares at you with white, pupil-less eyes, as if in ecstasy. At the rear of the crowd you see Burra himself, his pupils also on the point of vanishing. You can hear the noise, smell the smoke, anticipate, as Burra seems to, the sex. Yet this exhibition insists on sentimentalising him. Burra's paintings of African Americans are presented as acts of allyship with the Harlem Renaissance, but he wasn't doing portraits of Langston Hughes or hanging out with Zora Neale Hurston. His Harlem scenes are Hogarthian city scenes bursting with raw reality and like any caricaturist he's ambivalent. Is he celebrating the tall, bandy legged man smoking in the street with a white eye showing under his green hat, or mocking him? The most pleasurable works in Burra's show are his late landscapes of green rolling Sussex hills which swallow you up. These paintings also depict petrol stations and other modern blights wrecking his beloved countryside, but it seems not just a stretch but nonsensical for a wall text to claim he was 'prescient' about the climate crisis. Was he an occultist like Colquhoun after all, gazing into his crystal ball? Tate Britain creates a fantasy version of Burra, removing his complexities, turning a genuinely important artist into a plastic fiction. Pity the museum that needs heroes. Edward Burra-Ithell Colquhoun is at Tate Britain, London, from 13 June to 19 October
Wales Online
05-06-2025
- Wales Online
Five Turner works to be auctioned on 250th anniversary of painter's birth
Five Turner works to be auctioned on 250th anniversary of painter's birth Born in 1775, Joseph Mallord William Turner was a painter and printmaker during the English romantic period and was most famed for his landscapes, often of a nautical theme The Wreck Buoy, first exhibited 1849, JMW Turner Five of JMW Turner's works are to be auctioned across three sales on the 250th anniversary of the painter's birth. Born in 1775, Joseph Mallord William Turner was a painter and printmaker during the English romantic period and was most famed for his landscapes, often of a nautical theme. Christie's auction company, which sold a Turner watercolour for £5.8 million in 2006, will present several of his works for auction this July. Among the pieces being sold is a watercolour titled, Lake Brienz, With The Setting Moon, during the Old Masters Evening Sale on July 1. It is estimated to fetch between £600,000 and £800,000. There is also View Of Stoke House, which carries an estimated selling price of £20,000 to £30,000, and depicts a figure sketching what is thought to be a self-portrait in the foreground. Article continues below This piece, along with two others will be put for sale as part of the Old Masters, 19th Century Paintings And Drawings From A Private Collection: Selling Without Reserve event taking place on July 2. Another of the pieces in this sale depicts the Cornish coastline around Pendennis Castle and carries an estimated selling price of £60,000 to £100,000. One other Turner work, a pencil and watercolour on paper, will be part of Christie's Old Masters To Modern Day Sale: Paintings, Drawing Sculpture, also taking place on July 2. Article continues below These sales are part of Christie's Classic Week, which forms part of the auction company's programme of events for its London summer season. Earlier in the year Tate Britain announced it would celebrate the 250th anniversary of Turner's birth with a new room showcasing his work and also said it would open a new video installation about Turner's travels across Europe, among other things. Every other year the gallery hosts a prize ceremony for a prestigious contemporary art award named after the painter which is awarded to a British artist annually.
