We met at 10 am at Harrow-on-the hill and took the train to the end of the line. It is only a short walk from Aldgate to the Whitechapel Gallery.
We chatted at a very nice independent cafe before we entered the avant-garde establishment.
The title of the paid for exhibition was Radical Figures. I couldn’t decide whether that referred to the artist or the images. Certainly there were several paintings that had no discernible figures.
The exhibition was made up of 10 new artists (well they were new to both Ray and I). I am always interested to see what is written by the gallery about the show. This one was no exception. Sheer bullshit would best describe the following comments, “Since painting was pronounced dead in the 1980s, a new generation of artists has been revitalising the expressive potential of figuration. Charging their vibrant canvases with a social and political undertow, they echo the words of Philip Guston: ‘I got sick and tired of all that Purity. I wanted to tell stories’.
The first artist inside the door was Cecily Brown. “The rollicking surfaces of Cecily Brown’s (b. 1969, UK) canvases congeal into figures, whose sources range from pornography to art history, before dissolving back into painterly marks.”
If you like surrealism you would probably enjoy “Nicole Eisenman’s (b. 1965, France) protagonists occupy a brightly lit universe that is both dream and nightmare“.
The poster for the exhibition featured Michael Armitage’s Kampala Suburb. The blurb described him as: “Michael Armitage’s (b. 1984, Kenya) narratives of politics and violence in East Africa, equivocally conveyed in the lush, exoticised style of Gauguin.”
It didn’t take very long for us to make the tour of this exhibition so we took the opportunity to wander around the rest of the gallery. There was a room that was occupied by different spaces divided by cardboard plainly painted in either brown or green (boring) around the edges of the room and random distances apart were things hanging. They were all every day objects like chairs scissors etc. In other rooms in the gallery other artists were trying to impress with their novelty.
After finishing at the Whitechapel we decided to walk to Victoria Miro’s gallery in Wharf Road. On the way we stopped in a trendy lunchtime cafe and had an excellent Pastrami sandwich and beer.
We arrived at the Miro gallery and saw a series of videos by Christine Rebet. Ray complained that there was too much boiling. When I asked him what he meant he described the technical term from the animation industry of the jerkiness you get when you don’t have the images in perfect alignment when you film them shot by shot. I agreed with him. The 5 to 8 minute films were interesting but I wouldn’t go back to see them again. When you look up V. Miro’s web site Christine Rebet is not even mentioned. It’s as if she had never had a show there.
We walked back to Bank Station passing the Beer Gallery on the way. Unfortunately the exhibition was not opening until Friday.
We parted at Oxford Circus where I disembarked to visit John Lewis. I had bought a valentine’s present and it turned out only to be useful if you warmed the oil in hot water. If you didn’t you can’t get it out of the bottle. John Lewis refused to refund or exchange it.
I walked on disappointed by the store and walked back to Baker Street. On the way I passed the Marylebone Elm to see if there were any buds on the tree.
Unfortunately the shot I took wasn’t clear enough for me to decide on the new year’s sap was yet rising.