Latest news with #DulwichPictureGallery
The Guardian
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘I paint extreme emotions': Rachel Jones on her riotously colourful paintings – and her obsession with mouths
Viewers may find Rachel Jones's paintings 'beautiful', but they should be warned: the artist herself doesn't love that word. 'In our culture, the idea of beauty sadly isn't discussed in a critical, rich way – it's much more reductive as a term,' says the 34 year old. 'I hope that when people describe the work as beautiful, it doesn't just stop there.' Her aim, she says, is to pull viewers in deeper, beyond the surface of the work. Despite her youth, Jones is already preparing to open a major retrospective. Her forthcoming show at Dulwich Picture Gallery will see her large-scale, gloriously colourful abstractions hung alongside works from the museum's collection. It will be Jones's first institutional solo show in the UK, and also the museum's first solo show of a contemporary artist in its main exhibition space. 'The opportunity I have to look at everything as a whole is incredible,' she says. 'It's not often that you get to do that at such an early stage in your career. It's a real gift and privilege to look back at what I've done in the last six years or so.' After graduating from the Royal Academy Schools in 2019, Jones was picked up by Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, had a work acquired by the Tate, and was part of solo or group exhibitions at Chisenhale Gallery, the Hayward Gallery and the Hepworth Wakefield, as well as galleries and institutions around North America, Europe and Asia. In the past couple of years, though, she has slowed down. She is no longer represented by a gallery and has broadened her practice to include sound and performance as well as painting. 'It's good to learn those different ways of making and how they influence each other,' she says, telling me that sound practice has become more embedded in her day-to-day thinking. Her first big sound work, a short opera called Hey Maudie, was performed at St James's Piccadilly in 2023. She is now working on expanding it into a full-length opera. 'I also want to pour more energy into my karaoke performances,' she says, smiling. 'In my personal life, I love to sing karaoke whenever I can, but it's something I haven't been able to explore as much as I would like to in my work.' Jones's cosy studio in Ilford, east London, is stuffed with the accumulation of six years' work. 'Each series of paintings moves forward,' she says, 'but it's happening more drastically in the last year in ways that are quite surprising to me, but really exciting.' She frames such rapid change around learning: she is using colours she is less confident with to give herself a challenge, and pushing herself to be more comfortable using negative space in her paintings, where the canvas is left visible. She works on raw linen now, rather than cotton canvas, giving her works an earthier, organic texture and tone. 'Even if I don't fully understand what I'm doing, I know to trust my impulses,' she says. 'I can wrestle with the process more.' There is a sense of peeling back and then building from the ground up in Jones's attitude, and in the work itself. When young artists receive the kind of immediate acclaim and scrutiny that Jones did after art school, it can be hard to find the space to reflect. Jones has worked hard to cultivate that space, and her experience of quick fame has trained her to articulate her practice carefully. 'There's a huge desire for artists to embed their work in a narrative,' she says. 'I don't think that's as useful as people think it is.' As she tells me about the evolutions and experimentations in her latest work, for the Dulwich show and for a site-specific commission at the Courtauld Gallery opening in September, she talks almost entirely about formal elements, rather than storytelling: new ways she uses her medium of oil pastels or new intentions behind her mark-making, not her personal narrative. But there is also a bit of figuration in Jones's largely abstract practice. From the beginning of her career, she has worked with the motif of the mouth. Her earlier works, such as lick your teeth, they so clutch (2021), now in Tate's collection, are bright colour fields that use the outlines of teeth to frame form and colour. In the new work, the mouth has become a more defining form. 'There is a little bit more vulnerability in the way that I'm using the mouth as a symbol now,' Jones says. Using cartoons as her main visual references, Jones sees the mouths in her latest work as open, maybe yelling or laughing or screaming or crying. 'Those are quite extreme emotions,' she says, explaining the way mouths doing those things are usually attached to a body that is dysregulated or overwhelmed. Jones is so adept at describing her process and intention as an artist, but leaves the meaning of her work more open-ended. Each viewer will have their own response to the work: 'My way is just one way,' she says. 'So many people are intimidated by visual art. I want people to feel like the works invite them to speak.' Rachel Jones: Gated Canyons will be at Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, 10 June to 19 October; her commission for the Courtauld Gallery, London, opens on 25 September
Yahoo
13-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The incredible street art in East Dulwich - one of the UK's best places to live
East Dulwich is well known for its strong art scene, with many of its streets featuring incredible works of art. This leafy and artsy south London neighbourhood was recently named one of the UK's Best Places to Live by The Sunday Times. With its plethora of historic buildings, it was featured in the list on account of its 'prized assets' like its private schools, Dulwich Picture Gallery and Dulwich Park. If you're a lover of street art, East Dulwich is home to a whole host of incredible works of art, including famous works by Conor Harrington and Stik. Dulwich Picture Gallery was begun in 2012 by Ingrid Beazley, a curator at Dulwich Picture Gallery. This unique project invites street artists to reinterpret 17th and 18th-century artworks in their unique styles. It endeavours to bridge the gap between classical and modern art, making historical pieces accessible to the community in a contemporary context. We've put together a guide on some of the street art you can see and where you can see it. Where to find it? Plough Inn car park, 381 Lordship Lane, SE22 8JJ Mad C 2015: Created by German street artist Mad C, this artwork transforms Van Dyck's 1633 portrait Venetia, Lady Digby, on her Deathbed into a semi-abstract mural that preserves the original's emotional impact. The artwork includes a meticulously painted rose, torn apart to represent fleeting beauty and untimely loss, as a tribute to Venetia who died aged just 33. Created by German street artist Mad C, this artwork transforms Van Dyck's 1633 portrait Venetia, Lady Digby, on her Deathbed into a semi-abstract mural. (Image: Emily Davison) Where to find them? Bowling Building, Dulwich Park, College Road, SE21 7BQ Stik (2012): Stik reinterprets Three Boys by Bartolomé Estéban Murillo with his signature stick figures, bringing playful warmth to a centuries-old composition. Stik reinterprets Three Boys by Bartolomé Estéban Murillo with his signature stick figures. (Image: Emily Davison) Thierry Noir (2013): Based on Joseph Receiving Pharaoh's Ring by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, this mural bears Noir's iconic colour-block characters. Based on Joseph Receiving Pharaoh's Ring by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, this mural bears Noir's iconic colour-block characters. (Image: Emily Davison) Where to find them? Frogley Road junction with Lordship Lane, SE22 8EW Kingfisher Mural: At the side of Mary's Living & Giving, this vibrant bird brightens the street and is a striking example of the colourful murals around East Dulwich. this vibrant bird brightens the street and is a striking example of the colourful murals around East Dulwich. (Image: Emily Davison) Catman (2016) – Queen on a Hoverboard: A playful portrait of Queen Elizabeth II riding a hoverboard, pulled by three corgis. Originally painted to mark her 90th birthday, it was relocated in 2022 for the Platinum Jubilee. This playful portrait of Queen Elizabeth II riding a hoverboard, pulled by three corgis, was originally painted to mark her 90th birthday. (Image: Emily Davison) Catman (2024) – Planet of the Grapes: Painted for East Dulwich's newest wine bar, this quirky mural adds fresh flair to Frogley Road, featuring a group of Apes gathered around a table drinking wine. Painted for East Dulwich's newest wine bar, this quirky mural adds fresh flair to Frogley Road. (Image: Emily Davison) Where to find it? Opposite East Dulwich Tavern, Spurling Road, SE22 9AP This depicts two 18th century men locked in a dramatic boxing match. (Image: Emily Davison) Conor Harrington (2013) - Fightclub: This depicts two 18th century men locked in a dramatic boxing match. It was inspired by Charles Le Brun's Massacre of the Innocents. The artist is well known for merging classical oil painting with contemporary street styles.
The Guardian
16-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Soane and Modernism: Make it New review – red phone boxes, Sydney Opera House and a prophet of modern architecture
If John Soane had only created the combined house and museum that bears his name in Lincoln's Inn Fields, London – a domestic-scaled pharaoh's tomb with Alice in Wonderland tricks of scale and perception – his place in history would be assured. But he did far more. There, and in his building for Dulwich Picture Gallery, he helped to form the modern idea of a museum. His (mostly destroyed) headquarters for the Bank of England brought the serene grandeur and spatial complexity of imperial Roman baths to the workplace of financial civil servants. The son of a bricklayer who became one of Britain's most original architects, his restless imagination generated a trove of ideas that others still mine, two centuries after he lived and worked. After a period of relative neglect after his death in 1837 aged 83, his work began to be rediscovered in the 1920s. The best-known homage is the classic red telephone box, its shallow dome and reeded decoration frankly borrowed by its architect, Giles Gilbert Scott, from the tomb that Soane created for his wife and himself in Old St Pancras churchyard in London. Versions of the top-lit vaults he designed in Dulwich can be seen in art galleries all over the world. But most of all, according to a new exhibition at his house and museum, he was a prophet of the modernist architecture of the 20th century. 'People now,' says the show's curator, Erin McKellar, 'don't realise how new Soane was.' His life spanned a 'period of tremendous change', from the mid-18th century into the era when railways and photography were beginning to emerge. He both responded to circumstances and developed ideas that were ahead of his time. He pared back ornament, in at least some of his work, stripping it to essentials in ways you could call modern. The exhibition pairs drawings by Soane and his office, mostly from the museum's collections, with material by 20th-century giants – Frank Lloyd Wright, Ernö Goldfinger, Le Corbusier, the brutalist pioneers Alison and Peter Smithson. There's a drawing of the elegant Kingsgate Bridge in Durham by the engineer Ove Arup, and a beautiful wooden triptych by the architect of the Sydney Opera House, Jørn Utzon, in which the building's curving roofs emerge from the surfaces of a sphere. This object, an artwork as much as an architectural model, was made to demonstrate the geometric principles of this now famous building. The exhibits by 20th-century architects have been loaned by Drawing Matter, an astonishingly rich private collection of drawings and models. Here they are organised by McKellar into themes – light and space, engineering – that show the continuity of Soane's ideas into modernism. A two-storey conservatory he proposed for his country house, Pitzhanger Manor, in Ealing, gridded and glassy, it is matched with a similarly measured and transparent design by Goldfinger. The flint and brick gateway of the same house, whose effect comes from the contrasting textures of its raw and cooked materials more than from decoration, is linked to 'Eaglefeather' a dynamic stone-and-timber house cantilevered over a Malibu slope by Frank Lloyd Wright and his genius apprentice John Lautner. There's a drawing of Scott's phone box. The case for Soane's modernism is not in fact fully made, partly because space doesn't allow it, but more because he was too singular and multifarious to be put in any one category. He could equally be claimed as an ancestor for postmodernism, the movement that saw itself as the colourful antidote to the austerity of the likes of Goldfinger or the Smithsons, or for 20th-century versions of classical architecture, which was more Gilbert Scott's camp. One of the strongest exhibits is an 'urban scene' of 1978 by the Italian Aldo Rossi, a composition of triangles, cubes and cylinders based on his own projects, whose use of simple forms might be compared to Soane's. But it's a stretch to call Rossi, who sought to reinvent the monumental types of antiquity, a modernist. The truth is that Soane was an inventor and a creator, seeking incessantly and sometimes anxiously to innovate, with too many ideas in his head and in his drawing hand for any one style or movement. He had a magpie mind, and dreams of imperial scale. Architects of all kinds like him for the importance he gave to aspects you might call architectural – structure, materials, the use of light, the planning of spaces – over stylistic add-ons. What connects him most with the successors shown in the exhibition is a desire to explore and test the possibilities of their art with drawings and models. So the exhibition works partly as a series of intriguing suggestions as to what might link Soane and modernists. It works best as an occasion for celebrating the acts of architectural drawing, the magic by which pen strokes become masonry. This is evident in its second room, in which sheets of sketches by the contemporary British architect Tony Fretton and the Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza are juxtaposed with Soane's. These are examples of visible thinking, in which elements are worked over and over and one drawing is laid on top of another, with a coherent physical object slowly emerging from the mess. All of which, really, is architecture. Soane and Modernism: Make It New is at the Sir John Soane's Museum, London, until 18 May
New York Times
12-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A Young Painter Puts Black Nudes Among Old Masters
When the English artist Somaya Critchlow was at art school around a decade ago, she once showed a tutor a painting she had made of her cousins sitting on a sofa. When the teacher likened it to the glam-realist style of David Hockney, Critchlow was taken aback. 'This sucks,' she recalled thinking. 'That's not what I want to paint.' Critchlow was developing a deep affinity for the naked form at the time. But that felt at odds with everything she was learning at art school about conceptual art, and everything her feminist mother had taught her about female objectification. For Critchlow, 31, the shift that happened when modernism took over as the dominant form of artistic expression never resonated. She likes her paintings old — Renaissance era, to be specific. Even Matisse's poetic 'Blue Nudes' series, for example, is not her cup of tea. ('No disrespect to Matisse,' she said.) This is perhaps why Dulwich Picture Gallery, a London museum known for its collection of over 600 old master paintings, is the perfect place for Critchlow's debut at a major British institution. Her exhibition, 'The Chamber,' running through July 20, is part of the museum's 'Unlocking Painting' program, which puts contemporary painters in dialogue with the works it owns. Lucy West, a Dulwich Picture Gallery curator who worked on Critchlow's show, said, 'Somaya had so many factors that made her the perfect fit. She grew up close to Dulwich Picture Gallery, so she was a regular visitor as a child. Also, she is a painter who has been endlessly fascinated by the old masters.' The display features six newly commissioned paintings, all of naked Black women, a signature subject for Critchlow. The artist said that she was fascinated by the idea of a chamber as a personal room but also a public space. The exhibition title takes its cue from Angela Carter's 'The Bloody Chamber,' a collection of short stories published in 1979. In the title story, a young pianist marries an aristocrat, then later discovers his collection of sadistic pornography and a torture chamber containing the bodies of his three previous wives. Crtichlow said she had long been fascinated by the way in which Carter used volatile stories to explore ideas about 'women with agency.' Her works were also influenced by Walter Sickert's 1910 essay 'The Naked and the Nude,' Chritchlow said, which draws a distinction between these two states — the former being an art historical trope, and the latter being an intimate expression of the human form. In one Critchlow painting, a woman perches on a chair, looking backward over her shoulder, with her exposed buttocks as the viewer's focal point. In another, a woman cups her breasts while looking in the mirror. Critchlow said she had been apprehensive about displaying her mischievous nudes in the Dulwich Picture Gallery's grand spaces, but when she spoke to the curators about it, 'They were just like, 'Oh, we didn't even think about it because we're surrounded by nudes all day in here,'' she said. 'This show really just allowed me to embrace that storytelling and narratives is a big thing.' She added that she was influenced by the religious stories and myths in works by Peter Paul Rubens and Gerrit Dou, which are displayed alongside her work in the show. She studied those paintings, and others from the Dulwich Picture Gallery collection, while preparing for the commission, she said. 'I got really fixated on oil paint,' she said. 'I ended up doing a lot of research into Goya's palette, Titian's palette, Velázquez's palette.' In the last five years, Critchlow's nude figures rendered in rich earthy tones have attracted attention and acclaim. Her work has been acquired by major museums in Europe and the United States, including the British Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. She started out showing with the New York galleries Fortnight Institute and Efraín López, and had her first British solo show in 2020, at Maximillian William, the London gallery that now represents her. But that show was delayed by the Covid-19 pandemic, and ending up opening in the summer. 'During that time, everything happened with George Floyd, and this moment erupted,' she said. 'My first solo show in London just opened bang in the middle of all that going on.' With Black Lives Matter driving the news agenda, there was a surge of interest in the work of Black painters, including her own, Critchlow said. 'It put me on the defensive about being included in shows about Blackness. My fears of being reduced were being played out in front of me.' It wasn't that she believed these shows weren't necessary, she said, but the haste with which institutions rushed to acquire and showcase work by Black artists 'felt like a trend,' she added. 'It didn't feel authentic.' Easy readings of Critchlow's paintings might throw up buzzwords like reclamation or body positivity, but Critchlow said her work was about neither. 'Because of the politics around being Black and being a woman,' she said, there's some need to see it 'from a purely positive positioning — this need for it to be pure and good.' Look closely enough, and you'll see that there's a sinister quality to her paintings — a dark humor and absurdity in the way that, at times, the women appear just as menacing as they are beautiful. There are of course erotic undertones in her work, too. Her figures appear in tantalizing positions, with captivated gazes inspired by Black porn magazines from the 1960s and '70s. Hilton Als, the New Yorker critic who recently curated an exhibition of Critchlow's drawings at Maximillian William called 'Triple Threat,' is a longtime champion of her work. In an essay for her first solo show at a U.S. institution, at the Flag Art Foundation in 2023, he wrote that 'Critchlow's figures are forceful entities, often alive in their pleasure and the pleasure of being looked at.' What's clear is that these women are not being voyeuristically observed nor deliberately seductive, but are participants in the act of being seen. 'I paint these women,' Critchlow said, 'but I never feel like they're complacent' Instead, her paintings seem to be about making the private public, and rebelling against ideas of purity to explore dark curiosities about the body. Critchlow said that lately, she had been thinking about why Velázquez — the 17th-century Spanish artist with some masterpieces in the Dulwich Picture Gallery collection — didn't paint more conventionally attractive people. 'He looked at the dwarfs in the court,' she said, 'with as much lust and intrigue' as people expect a painter to find in 'more beautiful women.' 'Sometimes, in order to understand something,' she said, 'you almost need to go where it's off limits.'
