I really enjoyed my visit to the Hayward Gallery on Sunday. It's a fine, if somewhat unusual in design, art space as it is but when it's filled with so much great, often joyful, art it is a pleasure to visit. The fact it's usually a good excuse for a stroll along the South Bank and a riverside drink makes it even better.
Even if, this time, I limited myself to a can of Coke with my omelette and chips in the Fishcotheque afterwards. I'd not had to travel far to visit the Hayward (a 63 bus there, another one back) but some of the artists displayed in their Mixing It Up exhibition had made much longer journeys. They came from Belgium, Canada, China, Colombia, Germany, Grenada, Iraq, South Africa, USA, Venezuela, Zambia, Zanzibar, and Zimbabwe.
As well as Birmingham, Bracknell, Bradford, Cardiff, Dundee, Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Swindon. As well as a handful from London itself. But all thirty-one contemporary painters live and work in the UK and Mixing It Up was a look at contemporary British painting in 2021. That's about all they have in common.
Though as I think more about it, and as I wrote more about it, I started to notice themes in the show. Use of colour and allegory. They will become apparent as you read on. There are hyperrealist works, there are abstract works, there are faux-naive works, and there are works of considerable technical accomplishment. There are good works, there are great works, and there are one or two (but very few) bad works. I'll try not to dwell on them. As we're still in Covid times to a degree, there's an advised route for visitors to take in the exhibition and, for the most part, I tried to stick to this. My consideration will, more or less, do the same.
Lubaina Himid - The Captain and the Mate (2017-18)
Lubaina Himid - Her Print on Me (2017)
Up first, Zanzibar's Lubaina Himid. Now based in Preston, Himid's make wonderful use of colour but the bright outfits, seas, and skies of The Captain and the Mate belie that it's part of a series Himid has been making that explore an atrocity on board a 19c French slave ship. An outbreak of disease causing most of the captured, and soon to be enslaved, Africans on board (as well as some crew members) to go blind.
The looks in the eyes of the painting's protagonists, when observed closer, suggest something is not right and Himid wants us to think who we would be in this scenario and how incidents like this continue to affect the world today. Her Print on Me seems tamer and more domestic but, again, does this painting draw on power balances?
It's hard to say. But I know I like it. Sophie von Hellerman (born in Munich, based between London and Margate) uses colour in a much wispier way. Perfidious Albion is based on a story her grandmother told her about being chased by a British Spitfire plane during World War II and both that and Tropical Island are almost dreamlike.
Sophie von Hellermann - Perfidious Albion (2021)
Sophie von Hellermann - Tropical Island (2019)
Sophie von Hellermann - Hysteria (2020)
That's no accident. Von Hellermann aims to paint not just dreams but the way our dreams are conjured up by collections of stories, events, and memories. This is probably most apparent with the wraith like figure who appears to have knocked a chair over in some haunting episode in last year's Hysteria.
While Von Hellermann paints dreams, you could make a fair case for Mohammed Sami being a painter of nightmares. It's perhaps not surprising when you consider he was born in Baghdad, in 1984, and that his work is inspired, if that's even the right word, by the mayhem Iraq was thrown into following the US led invasion of 2003.
Mohammed Sami - Electric Chair I (2020)
Mohammed Sami - Refugee Camp (2020)
Mohammed Sami - Infection II (2021)
Alongside a refugee camp that resembles a dense, and perhaps impenetrable, forest there's a spidery painting called Infection II that could speak of the recent pandemic. But when you view the figure in the background, as if seen through a window, with one arm aloft it appears to be a person either in the process of executing somebody or, possibly, being executed.
They're both great paintings and both have unclear allegories - as with so much at Mixing It Up and so much in painting generally. Electric Chair I looks a bit more straightforward although that chair looks more like a throne than a chair on which you'd be put to death. It IS a throne but it is Saddam Hussein's throne so it's very likely the orders to put you to death came from that throne or, indeed, an office chair in the White House.
While Saddam Hussein, or George Bush and Tony Blair, ordered death from comfy chairs, other Iraqis, as we see in one of Sami's other paintings, used their chairs to bolt their doors shut, fearful for theirs and their families lives.
Lisa Brice, South African born but now working between London and Trinidad - alright for some, aims to reimagine 19c and 20c paintings of women in an attempt to liberate women from the male dominated art world and the male gaze. The intention here is to show the female sitters not posing but relaxing between poses. There's a lovely use of blue in the cat, the stepladder, and the stool used as a makeshift drinks table but if I didn't know this painting had been made with the aim of subverting my lurid gaze I may simply have ogled it luridly.
Lisa Brice - Smoke and Mirrors (2020)
Kudzanai-Violet Hwami -= Bira (2019)
Kudzanai Violet-Hwami - Family Portrait (2017)
The Zimbabwean born Kudzanai Violet-Hwami explores displacement and identity in his work. In Bira, a man in a Western business suit drinks from a traditional African vessel in front of map of 'Rhodesia' and Family Portrait suggests, with its amendments and scribbling out, a family torn asunder by crisis. Possibly the economic crisis that hit Zimbabwe so hard in recent years?
Again, it's hard to say. Many paintings in this show ask questions but few, if any, give answers. That's fine. That's art's job. That and, still, creating images that are pleasing, or interesting, to look at. Jonathan Wateridge, born in Lusaka but living and working in Norfolk, has certainly managed that. Couch was probably the most transfixing thing in the entire exhibition and yet all it shows is a young woman lying on the titular piece of furniture.
Jonathan Wateridge - Couch (2015-16)
But just look at how well made it is. I genuinely thought it was a photograph when I first approached it. For a start, it's such an everyday, even mundane, image to create. Secondly, the detail of the women's face, her top, the crease in the couch made by her elbow, and even the blinds. It's all utterly astonishing.
Wateridge's other works could not live up to it but they're still pretty good. Patio belongs to the same hyperrealist school, although Wateridge is eager to explain that his images are constructed as meticulously as theatre set designs, and the more recent Night Swimmer is of a looser, more expressive, borderline Fauvist, style.
Jonathan Wateridge - Patio (2016)
Jonathan Wateridge - Night Swimmer (2020-21)
They're both good but Couch is the winner for me. They head nicely into Hurvin Anderson's bold offerings. Greensleeves features three trees from significant places in Anderson's life. There's a mango tree from Jamaica (where his parents were born and grew up), an apple tree from Birmingham (where he was born and grew up), and a pear tree to represent the area in South London where he has his studio.
I like trees and I like colour so there's lots there for me. But I think I prefer two of his other works. Ascent has splodges of purple and what looks like an orange tree and Camera Shake is concocted of stark yellow or golden lines in front of a doomy black background.
Hurvin Anderson - Greensleeves (2017)
Hurvin Anderson - Ascent (2019)
Hurvin Anderson - Camera Shake (2019)
What it all means I haven't a clue. But they look good. As does the work of the Grenadan born, Truro based, Denzil Forrester. Forrester has been making paintings in and around London's dub reggae scene since the eighties and Brixton Blue was even commissioned by TfL for Brixton tube station.
It's a good fit, too. It's got that vibrant feel that you get when you emerge from the underground into the beating heart of Brixton. There's a lovely use of angles and colour and it simply seems full of life.
Denzil Forrester -Brixton Blue (2018)
Denzil Forrester - Watering Hole (2019)
Caroline Coon - Rugged Defensive Play (2020)
Caroline Coon - Found Dead (2017)
Which could be said for one, if not both, of Caroline Coon's paintings
shared here. There is much made of the 'erotic physicality of
professional football as an intricate and ritualistic performance' with
Rugged Defensive Play (that title!) here but there's also plenty of
colour, and of life, too. Found Dead, as its title suggests, looks at a
very different experience.
But it's an equally good painting. There's something of the old fashioned horror film about it. Which could, quite plausibly, be applied to Peter Doig's Shadow too. Or maybe I just find lighthouses a bit creepy. Edinburgh born Doig has been based in Trinidad for two and a half decades and the Shadow of his painting is Winston Bailey (Shadow's his stage name), a revered calypsonian who died the year this painting was made.
Peter Doig - Shadow (2019)
Peter Doig - Night Bathers (2019)
So it's something of a tribute. Night Bathers could easily be set in Trinidad too and very likely is but Doig remains intentionally coy when asked about his work, preferring to leave the interpretation to the viewer. Which menas he fits in very well at Mixing It Up. For my money this is just a lovely coloured painting of people sunbathing on a glorious looking beach.
But at night. For some reason. Whatever. It looks good. Doig once sold a painting for $11,300,000 which was then a record for a living European painter. That's nice for him but there are many other artists in this show whose work I preferred to Doig's.
Allison Katz for one. The Montreal born Katz may make the sort of paintings that students like to hang on their walls but that's no reason to knock her. Monkeys, snowy rooftops, and the use of grains of rice all combine to make spectral, yet evocative, images that I would expect to be more popular than they are.
Allison Katz - Slippy (2017)
Allison Katz - Adult Services (2019)
Issy Wood - Study for nothing but time (2020)
Issy Wood - Untitled (Sighthounded) (2019)
Perhaps they are. But I didn't recognise her name. That was true of many artists on show at Mixing It Up. Including both Issy Wood (born North Carolina) and Caragh Thuring (Brussels). Sourced from auction catalogues, Wood makes use of china, antiques, and various other oddities to create her art and she often paints on velvet rather than canvas to create a feel of luxury.
It's one I didn't pick up on and although the big blue eye and dogs that reminded me of the optical illusion that is created if you stand to the side of Holbein's Ambassadors at the National Gallery her work didn't detain me for long and neither did Thuring's. Which, instead of velvet, are painted on linen and cotton. They're as ambiguous as anything you'd expect once you've got this far into the show but, by now, I was starting to pick and choose my favourites and, after Wateridge, Coon, and Forrester, Wood and Thuring fell a tiny bit short for me.
Caragh Thuring - The Fulfilment Guild (2021)
Caragh Thuring - I had it very fantastically arranged (2021)
Graham Little - Blue Bulb Lady (2019)
Graham Little - Untitled (Fox) (2017)
Graham Little too. Again, a good artist up against tough competition (not that it is a competition - except in my mind). Little's aim, I read, is to redirect our attention away from the human subject and on to the codependency of the objects around them. I'm not sure he's succeeded. The fox painting hasn't even got a human in it and though the blue of the bulb in Blue Bulb Lady is nicely rendered most people looking at that painting would say it's a portrait of a lady, not of her codependency with an admittedly rather fetching little light bulb.
I'd argue that Gareth Cadwallader, born in Swindon but based in London, does that a lot better. The fragile nature of the egg is enhanced by its precarious position on the table and the person handling it, you'd imagine, is keenly aware of how easy it would be for the egg to smash into pieces on the floor. That's closer to codependency and it's a an aesthetically pleasing image to boot.
Gareth Cadwallader - Egg (2017-18)
Louise Giovanelli- Cameo (2021)
Louise Giavonelli - Host (2021)
Louise Giovanelli is the only artist who has the distinction of having her artworks randomly dotted around the Hayward and, because this is roughly chronological, she's the only artist who gets the same treatment in this blog.
Cameo is based on a freeze frame from Alfred Hitchock's 1963 film The Birds. It shows the moment when Tippi Hedren falls prey to her avian aggressors. I'd have not guessed that, and I still have no idea what the pensive monk and his tonsure in Host represent, and to me it looks like one of those things you press your face into that have lots of metal bars and leave an impression of your face afterwards.
Despite, perhaps because, of that I rather like it. Lydia Blakeley is claimed to paint things that are often markers of a particular English identity. Animals. Dead fish and living cats. In all honesty, I don't have a lot to say about her work. It's not bad - but it's not great.
Lydia Blakeley - Assiette de Posson (2020)
Lydia Blakeley - Cat Flap (2020)
Andrew Pierre Hart - Blue night of a super moon (boss experiment) S1:e3 (2021)
Andrew Pierre Hart - The Listening Sweet (2020)
I definitely prefer the work that Andrew Pierre Hart and Tasha Amini. Both London born artists have something of the night, something dreamy, in their work. Though political claims are made for Pierre Hart's work I can't really see that. Instead, with both artists, I see a visual imagining of the liminal space we inhabit between being awake and being asleep.
Hypnagogic art for hypnagogic times. Tasha Animi's Sleep Relay (below) is perhaps the best, and an almost literal, example of this.
Tasha Amini - Sleep Relay (2019)
Tasha Amini - Outline (2021)
Daniel Sinsel - Untitled (2021)
Daniel Sinsel - Untitled (2020)
Next to them, Munich born Daniel Sinsel's untitled works look slight - but they are curious and engaging nonetheless. There's a suggestive aubergine, some visual illusion thing going on, and a sense of playfulness though the nods to Caravaggio are, to me, so obscure as to be invisible.
Vivien Zhang (born Beijing, lives and works in London) and Samara Scott (hailing from London, based in Dover, crikey - don't people move around?) both create colourful, eye catching, works. Zhang's algorithm designed stencils are, intentionally, not too hectic but Scott's work (which makes use of such unlikely materials as plastic, shampoo, sponge, toothpaste, hair gel, avocado oil, vaseline, toilet cleaner, mouth wash, and soap) are even better.
Vivien Zhang - Spring (2021)
Samara Scott - The Glades (2019)
Samara Scott - Flowers and Fruit (2021)
They're watery, they're translucent, and they've been installed in glass frames in which you can just about see through and out to London and the South Bank as well as catch a glimpse of your own reflection - should that appeal. I tried hard not to get myself in the photos but, clearly, failed.
Still, one can't be too precious when looking at an artwork that not only portrays but is actually made of an old pair of socks. Colombia born Oscar Murillo sticks to far more traditional media with his 'manifestations' (although he does include cut ups of old works he's made) and there's something of the
abstract expressionist about him - although the curators insist the work should give us the sense of vibrancy and colour we get when attending a demonstration.
Oscar Murillo - manifestation (2019-20)
Oscar Murillo - manifestation (2019-20)
Rachel Jones - lick your teeth, they so clutch (2021)
Rachel Jones - lick your teeth, they so clutch (2021)
Not sure about that but I liked them anyway. As I did Rachel Jones and Jade Fadojutimi. This corner was clearly the non-figurative and abstract, messy abstract, section of the show. If these works are allegorical you'd need to be pretty perceptive to work out what about.
Never mind. Just enjoy the colours and the patterns. Jones's works, all called 'lick your teeth, they so clutch', are the largest in the entire show and she's on record as describing her paintings as things you 'feel' with your eyes. What appears abstract is, supposedly, multiple rows of teeth. Despite neither 'feeling' them with my eyes or being able to make out the teeth in them I liked them.
They so clutch. Whatever that means! Fajoutimi's at it too, when it comes to fancy ways of describing her work. She talks about painting as a place where you can 'bathe in the conversations between colour, texture, line, form, composition, rhythm, marks and disturbances' and once you've navigated yourself through that unappetising word salad and take in When Teddy Left and Cavernous Resistance you'll see that they are rather delightful. I thought of Op Art, I thought of Basquiat, and I even thought of stained glass windows.
Jade Fadojutimi - When Teddy Left (2017)
Jade Fadojutimi - Cavernous Resonance (2020)
Rose Wylie - Hold the Right Rail (2021)
Both Rose Wylie and Alvara Barrington I've written about before (Wylie twice and Barrington very recently when he showed at the South London Gallery a short walk from my home). Wylie's been going down in my estimation and Barrington up. Wylie's faux-naive style was quite joyful at first but now, to me, it feels like an end in itself rather than a means to an end. She's nearly ninety so I guess it's unlikely she's going to suddenly change direction but, I dunno, it feels a bit tired.
One of the more disappointing contributions to Mixing It Up. Caracas, Venezuela born Barrington likes to mix popular culture with high art and everyday materials so here he's given us his tribute to the late rapper DMX (who passed away earlier this year) as well as some pieces of wood with a rose painted on them in a very shitty, quite literally, shade of brown.
Alvaro Barrington - Stop Drop (2021)
Alvaro Barrington - A Rose for Rose (2021)
Louise Giavonelli - Wager (2021)
Merlin James - Untitled (for V) (2021)
Merlin James - Two Figures (2020)
I liked it. It stood out. Merlin James leads us out of abstraction, with the minimal scorched earth imagery of his Untitled (for V), and back into figuration, via Two Figures and, after yet another Louise Giovanelli curtain, Gabriella Boyd serves up what looks like either a very unwell person, an emaciated toad, or Mr Blobby with a fever lying in a hospital bed in an attempt to make a point about care services that is undone by looking too silly.
Louise Giavonelli - Praire (2021)
Gabriella Boyd - Blessing iii (2020)
Matthew Krishanu - Weapons (2021)
Matthew Krishanu - Two Boys on a Log (2019)
Matthew Krishanu - Boy and Mountains (Kashmir) (2020)
I much preferred Bradford born, London based, Matthew Krishanu's work. He's made a series of paintings, there were about six in total - just three reproduced in this account, that show two young brothers out on adventures in various locations. These paintings are as much about place as they are about person. They focus on scale, the enormity of nature, and the interaction we have as children, and sometimes lose as adults, when confronted with this wonderful world.
I loved them. Finally, Somaya Critchlow's paintings are most defnitely for adults and not for children. They look at a very different kind of nature. Using models from reality TV shows and the hip-hop scene, she's interested in how black/Black sexuality is depicted in society and I think what she's trying to do, to be honest the tits distracted me, is to make points, or at least meditate, on ownership of both imagery and of our bodies.
She's one of many starts of the show but for me, and yet again I know this is only a competition in my mind, the winners are Krishanu, Amini, Coon, Forrester, Sami, Hwami, and, top of them all - primarily for that amazing couch painting, Wateridge. I really enjoyed looking at the state of British painting today and I came away from the Hayward convinced that the brushes, canvases, and easels of the UK paint world are in good hands for another few decades at least yet.
Somaya Critchlow - Obligation II (2019)
Somaya Critchlow - Untitled (2020)
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