Latest news with #HelenChadwick
The Guardian
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Delightful and disgusting – Helen Chadwick: Life Pleasures and Caroline Walker: Mothering review
You'd be hard pressed to find a more alluring opening to a show than this: a bubbling pool consisting of 800kg of molten milk chocolate oozing seductively, filling the gallery with a sweet aroma and a soft, steady gurgling. On the walls brightly coloured, circular photographs of orchids, gerberas, sweet peas and chrysanthemums repeat the circular shape of the chocolate pool. But for artist Helen Chadwick – whose Life Pleasures show at the Hepworth Wakefield is the largest retrospective of her work – pleasure is never that far from pain. It is not long before that thick, gloopy chocolate starts to smell sickly, the scent overwhelming the senses; the mechanism inside making the liquid bubble artificially. On closer inspection, the petals in the photographs are suspended in a variety of less pleasant liquids – industrial hand cleaner, window spray, washing up liquid – and the suggestive shapes of tonsils, testes and vaginas begin to emerge. This push and pull – the delightful and the disgusting – is found throughout Chadwick's practice. In Carcass, a huge, colourful column of rotting food taken from the Hepworth cafe fizzes and disintegrates; in Loop My Loop a glossy lock of hair is intertwined with a pig's intestines; in Piss Flowers urine is used to create beautiful, organic blooms, and in Agape a glistening pair of tonsils glow through a lightbox to gory effect. The artist uses an unusual array of materials to elicit responses in her audience. She wants us to feel not think. She taps into our subconscious, into our feelings of desire, asking us to probe why a furry table or a pile of juicy worms simultaneously attracts and repels. Chadwick's MA degree show in 1977, In the Kitchen, bought her early acclaim and the images of women dressed as kitchen appliances still feel relevant. In the two subsequent decades, Chadwick was prolific, and despite her untimely death at 42, Life Pleasures is a celebration of a full and mature practice. The show categorises pieces under headings such as Feminism and Fetish, The Self as Subject and Landscapes of the Body to bring Chadwick's interests to the fore. In the Kitchen and many other works in the exhibition often appear in 'women artist' group shows, but Life Pleasures demonstrates the impact of Chadwick's practice when seen as a whole and highlights her ability to take classical concepts, tip them sideways, inject humour and produce something relatable and enticing. The autobiographical projects Chadwick produced aged 30, Ego Geometria Sum: the Labours, saw her create 10 sculptures from significant moments in her childhood and then take photographs of her carrying each sculpture. In the exhibition, the sculptures are in the centre of a space with the 10 photographs on pink walls, separated by long, shiny pink curtains. The photographs – the Labours – are named after the Greek myth in which Hercules was ordered to perform 12 perilous tasks and Chadwick completes her own tasks by lifting or holding her sculptures. This demonstrates strength but her contorted body also symbolises the way in which these moments from her past have shaped her. The most impressive work is The Oval Court, originally made for Chadwick's first major solo exhibition at the ICA in London in 1986. Across the floor is a low platform in a soft blue, covered in 12 photocopied images of her body as she folds around animals, food, fauna and an eclectic selection of objects. Five gold balls shimmer on the surface of the 'ocean' of Chadwicks, and on the wall 11 columns drawn from St Peter's Basilica are topped by Chadwick's weeping face. The columns and the gold are regal, while Chadwick's nude body gorging on food and wrapped up in random materials celebrates humanity enjoying earthly pleasures. Opening at the same time is Caroline Walker's Mothering, an exhibition that sits neatly alongside Life Pleasures, not least because mothering is almost the embodiment of pleasure and pain. But there are other satisfying links, such as Walker's own self-portrait where – unlike Chadwick – she is not holding a childhood moment but a child who will shape her just as much. And like Chadwick, Walker is interested in the experience of women; she has spent many years painting women at work. Mothering captures her time spent observing a maternity unit at UCL hospital, London, and her own personal experiences. Motherhood is exquisitely observed by Walker, who manages to document the quiet, dark shuffle of the sonography suite; the hazy, repetitiveness of night feeds; the coffee table clutter and half-consumed glasses of water that plague a new mother's life. One of the largest pieces is Daphne, a painting of the artist's daughter as a toddler captured through the lounge window. It is dusk and the exterior of the house has a blue hue, but inside the lounge is awash with warm, orange light and home comforts. Daphne stands silently, perhaps anticipating the return of her mother who is on the other side of the window. The two are separate for a moment – two individuals in a big world – but even unseen by Daphne, Walker is watching over her. Neither are ever truly alone. In footage of Chadwick's degree performance of Domestic Sanitation, the viewers are predominantly men. On today's press trip it is entirely women, which hints at the success of work by artists such as Chadwick and Walker: if you allow women to be seen, if you focus on their desires, you make space for them to exist in the public consciousness. Helen Chadwick: Life Pleasures and Caroline Walker: Mothering are at The Hepworth, Wakefield from 17 May until 27 October
The Guardian
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Gods arrive from India, myths grow Tinguely and meat gets sensual – the week in art
Ancient India: Living TraditionsAmbitious blockbuster that shows how Hindu, Jain and Buddhist art assumed their shapes and inspired the world. British Museum, London, 22 Mayto 19 October To Improvise a MountainThe conceptual painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye selects art that inspires her, from Bas Jan Ader to Walter Sickert. Leeds Art Gallery until 5 October Helen Chadwick: Life PleasuresRetrospective of the brilliant artist who saw the sensuality of meat and made piss-holes in the snow. The Hepworth Wakefield, 17 May to 27 October Heiress: Sargent's American PortraitsSmall but loving show of Sargent's supremely stylish and characterful paintings. Kenwood House, London, until 5 October Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely: Myths and MachinesThese wildly inventive artists also happened to be married to each other. It must have been fun at their house. Hauser and Wirth Somerset, Bruton, 17 May to 1 February Helen Chadwick's prolific if tragically short career is getting its first big showing in more than two decades. It includes a vast chocolate fountain filled with 800kg of molten Tony's Chocolonely and her Piss Flowers, white bronze sculptures cast from the holes she and her husband made by peeing in thick snow. Laura Smith, curator of the retrospective at the Hepworth Wakefield, says: 'She was trying to disrupt societal conventions, including gender normativity … She was really pioneering and wasn't afraid of art being sexy or funny, either.' New museum Fenix Rotterdam shows the realities of migration alongside esoteric art Treasures of sacred art from India are very much a live tradition Lee Miller's unseen war shots are on show at Photo London Anna Perach makes extreme, wearable carpets How Linda Rosenkrantz recorded the NY art crowd's secrets in the 60s Pioneering American video artist Dara Birnbaum has died aged 78 Street artist Nicolas Party has unveiled a huge mural at Bath's Holburne Museum Sign up to Art Weekly Your weekly art world round-up, sketching out all the biggest stories, scandals and exhibitions after newsletter promotion Australia is sending its first all-Indigenous team to the Venice architecture biennale Koyo Kouoh, set to have been the Venice Biennale's first African cuator, died aged 57 Portrait of a Young Man by Vincenzo Catena, about 1510 You can tell we're in Venice. It's something about that open blue sky speckled with light puffy clouds – like the equally airy skies in other Venetian paintings by Giovanni Bellini and Titian. Catena, a less famous Venetian painter than them, was probably Bellini's pupil. In fact, in this portrait he sticks with his teacher's style at a time when it was getting old. Why change it if it works? Whoever posed for this frank, bold full face painting was probably delighted to be recorded with such bright-eyed precision, in a world when only an oil painting, drawing or sculpted bust could preserve a face. Catena does a faithful, useful job of holding up a mirror to this man. National Gallery, London If you don't already receive our regular roundup of art and design news via email, please sign up here. If you have any questions or comments about any of our newsletters please email newsletters@
The Guardian
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Body of work: the transgressive art of Helen Chadwick
Helen Chadwick, who died unexpectedly in 1996 at the age of 42, has long been an artist more name-checked than exhibited. Her devotees include the lauded feminist mythographer Marina Warner, for whom she's 'one of contemporary art's most provocative and profound figures'. Yet she is habitually relegated to a footnote within British art: one of the first women to be nominated for the Turner prize in 1987 and an outstanding teacher of YBAs such as Sarah Lucas, Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst. She remains best known for Piss Flowers, her white bronze sculptures whose stalagmite protuberances are phallic inversions of vaginal recesses, cast from the holes she and her husband made by peeing in thick snow. (The artist's hotter urine went deeper, creating larger cavities. She described the work as 'a penis-envy farce'.) It's easy to see how her transgressive interests might have quickened British art's pulse. Yet her meditations on the sacred and profane, sex and death, were expansive, propelling diverse experiments across installation, photography and performance. Now, her prolific if all too short career is getting its first major showing in more than two decades. At a time when gender binaries are being dismantled, Laura Smith, curator of a retrospective at the Hepworth Wakefield, Helen Chadwick: Life Pleasures, and editor of the accompanying book, hopes to make Chadwick's relevance to a fresh generation clear. 'She was trying to disrupt societal conventions, including gender normativity,' Smith says. 'She was really pioneering and she wasn't afraid of art being sexy or funny, either.' The exhibition opens with the decidedly fluid Cacao, one of Chadwick's most affecting evocations of how opposites such as desire and abjection entwine. It's a huge chocolate fountain set to be filled with 800kg of Tony's Chocolonely, which will gush from a central liquid erection. Needless to say, this brown pool evokes more than confectionery. 'It's joyous and kind of gross,' says Smith. 'It bubbles like a swamp. Basically, it farts.' Chadwick was also an inveterate craftsperson. The images of her MA graduation show of 1977, In the Kitchen, where she's encased in sculptural costumes of white goods, are often used to represent feminist art of that decade. What the pictures can't tell you is what went into those creations, including performances with wearable beds and latex nudity suits cast from their wearers' bodies. According to Errin Hussey, who's overseeing an exhibition in Leeds of her archive, 'the costumes really show the dedication she had. The intricacy of detail and planning that went into the textile and metalwork on just one shoe is amazing.' For her first major work, Ego Geometria Sum, she devised a novel way to embed shots of herself on to the plywood surfaces of sculptures by painting them with photographic emulsion. The Oval Court, part of the exhibition that led to her Turner nomination, took the experimentation further. She created its dreamy blue-and-white collage with a photocopier, making direct images of her own body alongside an apparent cornucopia of flowers, fruit and dead animals including lambs and a swan. Complementing this lusciously libidinal work is Carcass, a glass tower that, when originally shown at the ICA in 1986, was filled with dead animals' bodies, plus weeks of kitchen waste. When the gases generated by its live decomposition caused its glass to crack, and the gallery attempted to remove it, the lid blew off, spraying rot across the art space. (At the Hepworth, its vegetarian recreation features a gas valve so it can be 'burped like a baby' each night.) In what would be her final decade, frustrated by the heat she was getting from fellow feminists about her use of nudity, she abandoned depicting her outer body and looked within instead. Moving on from questions around objectified gender towards a polymorphous, fluid sexuality, in these works things are forever collapsing into their opposite, like Piss Flowers' erect recesses. As Smith reflects: 'In her thinking nothing was black and white.' Viral Landscapes, 1988-89In this work created after Chadwick stopped depicting her outer body, photography of Pembrokeshire's coast is overlain with images of cells taken from her urine, blood, cervix, mouth and ear. In the Kitchen, 1977 (main image)Chadwick's earliest works hinged on feminist concerns about constructed identity. For her MA degree show she and her performers donned sculptural costumes of white goods and made a tongue-in-cheek speech about 'kitchen lib' to a soundtrack of clips from daytime radio aimed at housewives. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Piss Flowers, 1991-92Chadwick's Piss Flowers first made a scatalogical twosome with her chocolate fountain sculpture Cacao at her exhibition Effluvia at the Serpentine Gallery in London in 1994. The press had a field day but the show attracted record numbers to the venue: 54,000 visitors in six weeks. The Oval Court, 1984-86In this sculptural installation featuring collage on a large, low platform, the artist created a vision of baroque excess using blue-and-white images of her own body, flora and fauna made with a photocopying machine. Unlike the finger-wagging Vanitas paintings Chadwick drew on, its vision of life's transient pleasures mixed with death has a luxuriant, unbridled energy. Loop My Loop, 1991Chadwick had a genius for evoking the slippage between desire and disgust. Here, she entwines the age-old lover's keepsake, a lock of golden hair, with pig intestines. Airy romance meets bodily urges; the human entwines with the animal. Where does one begin and the other end? Helen Chadwick: Life Pleasures is at Hepworth Wakefield, 17 May to 27 October; the book of the same name is published by Thames & Hudson (£30); Helen Chadwick: Artist, Researcher, Archivist is at Leeds Art Gallery to 4 November.
Times
26-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
The forgotten genius who taught Damien Hirst and inspired Britart
In 1996 the artist Helen Chadwick's career was on the rise. In 1987 she became one of the first women to be nominated for the Turner prize. In 1994 she broke the Serpentine Gallery's attendance records with her exhibition Effluvia, which included what are still her two most famous works — Cacao, new that year, a slightly quease-inducing bubbling fountain of melted chocolate, and Piss Flowers, 1991-2, bronze casts of the oddly floral shapes made in the snow by first her, then her husband's, streams of urine. A year later, her 1992-3 photograph series Wreaths to Pleasure — flowers carefully arranged in viscous liquids such as hair gel, bubble bath, oil, antiseptic cream and milk — went on display at the Museum
