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Times
02-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
The secret history of Shoreditch
You won't find anyone who doesn't use the word 'grim' somewhere in their recollections of what Shoreditch was like in the early Nineties. The east London neighbourhood on the edge of the City was a vista of Victorian factories and warehouses, Second World War bombsites and tired-looking wholesalers. Those who discovered its early charms included the renowned art photographer Nick Waplington. 'We needed hardcore iron bars on every window, everything would be nicked by the junkies,' he recalls. 'There were no cops, it was lawless, grey and desolate — but it was a good place for a studio.' At first Waplington commuted from 'the safety of Camden' to the 10,000 sq ft electricity substation he, along with the artists Jake and Dinos Chapman, used as a studio (and regular rave venue). 'But increasingly I found I was there all the time.' Shoreditch and its environs were slowly populated by the brave and the bohemian. 'There was a definite sense of it being the place to be, but it was still, functionally, quite shit,' says the artist Gavin Turk. Many of the Young British Artists (YBAs) lived and worked in the area — Sarah Lucas and Tracey Emin were pioneers with their live/work/gallery space The Shop, along with future stars like Gary Hume, who occupied a space so large and cold he 'lived in a tent in the middle of it', remembers the artist Darren Coffield. The area became known for its affordability and DIY attitude: when Deborah Curtis had a child with Turk, she opened a makeshift crèche in their warehouse home. The YBA Abigail Lane 'had an 'art salon' at my place because I didn't like going to the hairdresser. I had a large flat, everyone needed their hair cut, I knew a hairdresser.' Several Turner prize afterparties were held there too. • Your guide to life in London: what's new in culture, food and property More artists were lured by the eccentric curator Joshua Compston, who set up a gallery called Factual Nonsense on Charlotte Road in the heart of Shoreditch, opposite the Bricklayers Arms pub. With his vision for an art-driven bohemian community, he would be a bridge, persuading suspicious local landlords to rent to artists, whom he coaxed into the area. The artist and film director Sam Taylor-Johnson has described Compston as 'the dandy romantic of that time'. His happenings included the Fete Worse Than Death on Charlotte Road in 1993 and 1995, a chaotic street party with stalls by the YBAs who lived in the surrounding streets. Angus Fairhurst and Damien Hirst were made up as clowns by the performance artist Leigh Bowery: for £1 you'd get a spin painting, for 50p more a flash of Hirst's wedding tackle. Tracey Emin had a kissing tent and made rum cocktails. However, as the artist Simon Bill says in Factual Nonsense, a book about Compston's short life (he died, aged 25, in 1996): 'By 1999 the [Compston] era was forgotten … because there were young people with new hairstyles moving in.' Shoreditch's fame was due in some part to the nightlife that was flourishing there. In 1999 the promoter Neil Boorman launched the magazine Shoreditch Twat, the twisted child of Private Eye and a parish magazine. 'We never had it so good — design, music, art, fashion, clubs, architecture, technology — a mass convergence of grassroots culture. We will never have that symbiotic IRL moment again,' he says now. 'The geographic locus, the economy booming, property still cheap, everyone contained in a few streets.' Rob Star, the owner of the bar Electric Star, first came to the area in the mid-Nineties to club nights at the Blue Note, including Goldie's Metalheadz, and was also struck initially by the apocalyptic bleakness. 'You had to know where to go to discover what was really going on.' Star moved into a warehouse and threw parties there — for which he would become famous. He even started a festival, Eastern Electrics, in the area. 'It's no exaggeration to say that by the Noughties the area was as influential for nightlife as Berlin. Hackney council had to employ someone full time just to manage all the TENs — temporary event notices.' The haircuts kept coming and changing. A style magazine called Dazed & Confused set up offices on Old Street. Its editors — the photographer Rankin, the publisher Jefferson Hack and the stylist Katie Grand — lured even more famous people to the area. In 1996 Hack persuaded Radiohead's Thom Yorke to play an acoustic gig in an old tramshed. I was there and remember him telling the media twats at the back to shut up. • Best places to live in London 2025 'I wish I'd had my camera,' Waplington says, 'the night I popped over to [the photographer] Phil Poynter and [the stylist and Alexander McQueen collaborator] Katy England's place. Lee [McQueen] was there, Robbie Williams, Chloë Sevigny, Kate Moss … They all did an impromptu fashion show. I thought, is this really happening?' While there was no membership to pay, only talent to declare, Shoreditch was as impenetrable as any St James's gentlemen's club. Fashion was here, led by the phenomenon of talent and tailoring that was Alexander McQueen, who lived and worked in Hoxton Square. London Fashion Week was no longer the weird, ugly cousin ofthe more relevant and glamorous Paris, Milan and New York. The Bricklayers Arms became a fashion centre, full of McQueen's 'bumsters' trousers. A young Central Saint Martins graduate called David Waddington was managing the pub: 'East was no nirvana but it was quite something being at the centre of things.' The journalist Stacey Duguid moved to the area in the mid-Nineties and worked in another old-school Shoreditch boozer that would be reborn as a hip haunt, the Golden Heart. She remembers the moment when she grasped the power of her postcode. 'My flatmate [the fashion designer Marcus Constable] and I had matching black mullets. We all had mullets. Maybe Katy England started that. Very quickly that exact haircut was on the new Gucci ads. Seeing your hairstyle on a major brand campaign was odd.' The bars flourished and grew. The haircuts got madder —Star even had an event series called Mulletover, named after the infamous cut. Banksy arrived from Bristol, bringing graffiti into the mix, or 'street art' as it was now called. The street artists' HQ was the Dragon Bar, owned by Justin Piggott, the brother of Marcus of the influential fashion photographers Mert and Marcus. His girlfriend was Fee Doran, aka Mrs Jones, who styled Kylie. Then in 2005 Nathan Barley arrived on Channel 4. Barely ten years on from the second Fete Worse Than Death, this crucible of talent, spunk and youth was reduced to a parody beyond the self-critique in Shoreditch Twat. Two of the greatest satirists of their generation, a pre-Black Mirror Charlie Brooker and a post-Brass Eye Chris Morris, had been stalking the Shoreditch community and skewered all of it: the irony, the clothes, the language, the technology and obtrusive ring tones, the abject hedonism, the enormous self-regard and, of course, the haircuts and complex coffee orders. In fact, Barley's order looks reserved by today's standards: 'I want a real special coffee today, yeah. Triple size, four shots in it, and the best foam you've ever squirted from your milky pumps.' • Shoreditch and theatreland set for alfresco summer, but not Soho How did the cultural phenomenon of Shoreditch become a seven-part joke on TV at 10pm on a Friday? In one episode, one of the only sane protagonists wakes up after a big night out with his hair covered in house paint and beer bottle tops. Doing the walk of shame he is hailed as a style leader and copied. 'People dressed head to toe in some mad avant-garde designer just to get a quick coffee,' Star says. 'There were some pretty daft fashion trends. But anything out there like that is ripe to be pilloried by people who don't get it.' Yet Nathan Barley did nothing to harm Shoreditch. 'It stayed as a base for so many creative industries until about 2012,' Star says. 'Then it became an enemy of its own success — things combined to take it mainstream and a bit sterile, not least that it was now incredibly expensive to live there.' A few years on and the Shoreditch roots of experimentation and bravery filtered down into even the smallest of rural towns: think fancy coffee shops with exposed brick walls and turntables for vinyl, the Poundland offers on jam-jar-shaped drinking glasses, sweatshirts with 'Shoreditch' written on them in a 'Harvard' typeface seen as far afield as Sydney, and those funny, wonky haircuts on the walls of high street salons that aped the area's famous mullet and Hoxton fin. Now 50 and a vice-president at Coach, Boorman says Shoreditch was the epicentre of cultural cool, 'but there were elements that we needed to be irreverent about'. Indeed, Waplington remembers a certain cruelty. 'One night in the 333 [the socialite] Tamara Beckwith turned up and the whole crowd started a tribal chant, 'F*** off back to Notting Hill.' ' One wonders where the assembled crowd were from — certainly not the former wasteland that was now London's most fashionable neighbourhood. 'She left the club in tears.' The YBAs left too. The next generation of creatives would emerge out of more affordable places: the man fêted as the new McQueen, the designer Gareth Pugh, squatted an old gym in Peckham; they went to Emin's hometown, Margate; or they moved to more affordable streets deeper east. Boorman's personal death knell was 'when a wealthy Shoreditch twat bought a flat above a popular bar and promptly got the council to close it. The later arrivals drawn magnetically to the vibe always proceed to kill it.' And there might be a great place to stop, were it not for a twist in the tale: Shoreditch is still full of great shops, restaurants and denizens who are early adopters of the trends that will shape us normals in years to come. One of those tired-looking wholesalers, Dream Bags Jaguar Shoes, is an arts and party space still going strong 25 years after opening. It might have experimental DJs playing Jamie xx, Fred Again and Bicep on one night, and a poetry collective the next. Shoreditch still has it, it's just that more people know about it now and, yes, it's expensive. But with property struggling, Star has recently returned because he sees the corporate influence declining and creative talent moving back. It's real, Shoreditch is having a second coming. What's bad for the economy is good for struggling creatives. As Barley might say, 'That's well coincimental.'
New Statesman
02-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
Jenny Saville's human landscapes
Such was the noise generated by a cluster of exhibits at Sensation – the 1997 show at the Royal Academy that announced the Young British Artists to a fascinated-appalled public – that it is easy to forget that there were more than 40 artists on display. Hirst, Emin, the Chapman brothers, Marc Quinn's self-portrait head made from his own blood, Chris Ofili's elephant-dung Virgin and Marcus Harvey's portrait of Myra Hindley simply drowned out many less strident voices. One of those belonged to Jenny Saville, who had five pieces in the show. However, while many of her fellow YBAs have, since that high-water mark, seen a steep downwards trajectory in terms of creativity (though not necessarily fame) Saville's career has followed the opposite path. In 2018, when her painting Propped (1992) – a massively fleshy naked self-portrait showing a ham-thighed Saville on a stool (in reality, she is not a large woman) – sold at Sotheby's for £9.5m, it became the world's most expensive piece by living female artist. And this time it seemed that the market was acting not on whim or media wattage, but on worth. Propped is one of the paintings included in the National Portrait Gallery's new survey of Saville's work. It is an appropriate venue because all her work is a form of portraiture although not of the conventional kind. She prefers to work from photographs rather than the live model and when she draws and paints faces she gives them titles that anonymise the sitter further, such as Stare, Witness or Figure 11.23; when she paints the naked body they are named Odalisque or Couples Study; when it is simply headless but stretched or pitted flesh it becomes Trace or Hybrid. All, however, show real people – or bits of them – but rather than read their personality through their gaze, clothing or setting, Saville writes it in their skin. The abstract expressionist painter Willem de Kooning, an artist Saville greatly admires, wrote in 1949 that 'flesh was the reason why oil paint was invented', and it is a dictum she has taken to heart. Her pictures are about both elements – flesh and paint – and her interest is rarely in the conventionally beautiful but rather in human mass and how best to depict it. For clues she has looked not just at De Kooning but at Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, Titian and Chaim Soutine, scoured medical textbooks and observed in operating theatres. However, the artist she most resembles in many ways is a less hallowed name, Henry Tonks, the First World War surgeon who produced numerous pastel drawings of soldiers following rudimentary reconstructive surgery. In Saville, as in Tonks, the surface of the skin and the subcutaneous layers are intertwined. Saville has expressed an interest in bodies 'that emanate a sort of state of in-betweenness', such as in her paintings from the 1990s of bodies with marks drawn on them by a surgeon as a guide to operating, or a hefty back and bottom bearing the impress of recently removed bra straps, waistband and knickers. As she told an interviewer about her fascination with imperfect flesh: 'As we go through life, traces or memories both physical and psychological are left on the body; they almost help to produce your body.' This kind of scrutiny makes her a non-judgemental observer. She has also followed Mark Rothko in stating that her pictures should be viewed from a distance of 18 inches. While with Rothko this fills the viewer's field of vision with colour that begins to throb after a few moments, with Saville, a painter who more often than not works at a large scale, it means submersion in flesh. It is rarely a comfortable experience but Saville's particular gift is to make sure it is not a repellent one. One and a half feet is too close perhaps but it forces the viewer to confront the abstract nature not just of her paint but of flesh itself. From her early paintings to her more recent huge and vibrantly coloured heads, Saville treats the body as a form of landscape. Limbs are less objects for propulsion or lifting than elements of corporeal scenery, offering valleys and crests, enclosures and vistas. In some of her head paintings from 2020, such as Cascade and Virtual, she emphasises this non-figurative strand. Like Georg Baselitz's work, they are painted upside down and the controlled marks of her early work have here turned riotous – slashes and rubbings of roughly mixed pigments surrounding disembodied eyes. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe The sense of the body as something liminal is most evident in her mother and child pictures which she started to paint following the birth of her own two children in the late 2000s. Although they clearly refer to innumerable depictions of the Madonna and Child, Saville's contain an element of struggle – the naked mother (herself in several) trying to hold on to a wriggling child. The squirming infants are engaged in a battle not to cling on their mother but to escape from her; having been born, they fast-forward to separation. Poignantly, in Aleppo (2017-18), her response to the war in Syria, that struggle has ended prematurely in death. The mother and child has become a pietà. In this picture, as in many, she leaves the drawn outlines of rejected poses, the preparatory studies familiar from Renaissance cartoons. The reason for these pentimenti, she says, is that she is 'trying to get simultaneous realities to exist in the same image'. They don't always work: for example, One Out of Two (Symposium) (2016), a monochrome, Freud-like drawing of naked women on a bed, is overlaid with terracotta swirls that neither enhance the drawing beneath nor indeed refer to it, but are simply a wilful addition, as though Saville felt the picture needed something – more energy? more diversion? – but couldn't quite decide on exactly what. Right from the start of Saville's career, there has been much talk – some by the artist herself – of her work being a response to the old debates about naked vs nude, objectification and reclaiming women's bodies. This retrospective, however, suggests something simpler. She is interested above all in the act of painting and how 'to charge the paint with a sculptural force'; it is why she treats the human body as a canvas as much as a subject. Sometimes, when artists make frequent references to the art-historical canon, it is little more than an impertinence. But not with Saville, who has taken a venerable tradition and moved it on. She is a painter of substance. Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting The National Portrait Gallery, London WC2. Until 7 September [See more: Anna Wintour still rules Vogue] Related
Times
18-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Jenny Saville at the National Portrait Gallery review — a must-see tribute
J enny Saville arrived in art with the loudest splash I can remember. One moment she was invisible, the next she was unmissable: a huge talent, painting huge pictures, of a huge subject, in a hugely different manner. Everyone noticed her. This was early in the 1990s and chiefly the handiwork of Charles Saatchi, the most impactful collector Britain has probably produced. Saatchi changed art. He spotted young talents, supported them and displayed them. He was the reason the YBAs happened. He unleashed Saville on us when she was barely out of art school. Her debut at Saatchi's Boundary Road gallery was seismic. It was as if three genres of art — the nude, the self-portrait, the symbolic female monument — were being reinvented by a student from the Glasgow School of Art. She was only 22. Yet here she was taking on swathes of art history with feminist ferocity and doing it brilliantly. The dollops of Rembrantian self-doubt she added to the recipe served to enlarge its impact. Wow.
South China Morning Post
04-06-2025
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
Summer 2025 exhibitions: Rick Owens' unforgettable aesthetic, Jenny Saville's striking self-portraits, a focus on the history of kimonos, and Wolfgang Tillmans asks: are we prepared?
Rick Owens, Temple of Love Rick Owens' autumn/winter 2023 Luxor runway, one of the designer's unforgettable shows at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. Photo: Handout American designer Rick Owens , who has called Paris home since 2003, is the subject and artistic director of an exhibition at Palais Galliera museum. Since moving to the French capital, the Los Angeles-born designer, who established his eponymous label in 1992, has been wowing his devoted fans with unforgettable shows, most of them held at the nearby Palais de Tokyo. The exhibition, titled 'Rick Owens, Temple of Love', will display more than 100 outfits, and also features Owens' personal archives, videos, art installations, and pieces from artists like Joseph Beuys and Steven Parrino. From June 28, 2025, to January 4, 2026. Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting Jenny Saville took the art world by storm in the 1990s with paintings such as Propped (1992), which features in the current retrospective of her work. Photo: Gagosian Advertisement Jenny Saville rose to prominence in the 90s as one of the original Young British Artists (YBAs), who took the art world by storm with their often controversial work. Known for her large-scale figurative paintings, Saville had her first break with her graduation show at the Glasgow School of Art. 'Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting', an exhibition at London's National Portrait Gallery, brings together more than 50 of her works, from oil paintings to charcoal drawings. From June 20 to September 7. Kimono A calendar by Yoshu Chikanobu (1910) is part of the exhibition 'Kimono' at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia. Photo: Handout The word 'kimono' means 'thing to wear' in Japanese, which is no surprise, since until relatively recently the wrapped-front garment was the most common form of clothing in Japan. Normally made from silk and embroidered with motifs such as flowers and birds, the kimono can be considered a piece of art, as the exhibition 'Kimono', at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, demonstrates. Comprising more than 70 pieces, the show also features creations from fashion designers such as Yohji Yamamoto, Issey Miyake Alexander McQueen and John Galliano. From June 4 to October 5. Wolfgang Tillmans: Rien Ne Nous y Préparait – Tout Nous y Préparait Echo Beach (2017) from the exhibition 'Wolfgang Tillmans: Rien Ne Nous y Préparait – Tout Nous y Préparait', showing at the Centre Pompidou, Paris. Photo: Handout Later this year, the Centre Pompidou, one of Paris' most visited museums and one of its most striking architectural landmarks, will close for an extensive renovation expected to last until 2030. Before the temporary closure, the museum will host an exhibition in collaboration with German artist Wolfgang Tillmans, who was given carte blanche to reimagine the second floor of the museum's library. From photographs to videos, music and text, Tillmans' oeuvre will interact with the space envisioned by legendary architects Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers. Not much else is yet known about the show, titled 'Wolfgang Tillmans: Rien Ne Nous y Préparait – Tout Nous y Préparait' (Nothing Could Have Prepared Us – Everything Could Have Prepared Us). From June 13 to September 22.
Times
18-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Seeing Each Other review — Freud, Bacon, Emin and Kahlo all join the party
Looking is what artists do. But at what? At each other, endlessly, on the evidence of this new exhibition at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, which looks back over 125 years at the ways that artists working in Britain have portrayed each other. It takes a broadly chronological approach to pick out specific relationships, friendships and social circles (the Slade School, which admitted women from its founding in 1868, mid-century Cornwall, the pop art scene and the YBAs are particularly rich veins) to reveal webs of connection — some more tangled than others — and to show how artists have used portrayals of their peers and heroes to pay homage. The first image, at the entrance, is a WANTED poster. Created in 2001 by
