Frieze!

Sometimes I have a sneaking suspicion that London is run by an underground group of art-loving, booze-hound, film-going foody types given that last week saw Frieze Art Fair, the London Restaurant Festival, London Film Festival, and London Cocktail Week vie for Londoners’ admittedly limited attention spans.

I managed to make it to a fortified wine tasting event as part of Cocktail Week and dinner at the Criterion as part of the London Restaurant Festival - both were excellent.  But I drink sherry and eat out all the time: Frieze happens only once a year (thank god).  The tent in Regent’s Park is already well on its way toward being dismantled, but people will be talking about the art, the sales, the inexplicably impossible waiting times to purchase a coffee for, oh, the next three days.  I don’t know what it is about London that so encourages cultural ADD, but if the last few weeks have been anything to go by, it’s all but impossible for any one thing to hold public attention for more than seven days. 

Anyway, I digress.  The thing about Frieze is that if you’re not buying you have to be absolutely ruthless.  I stomped around the fair in two hours on Friday afternoon, daring something to spark my interest.  That said, the object that most took my fancy was a beautiful, dark-grey worsted wool suit worn by one of the eighteen-year old sales monkeys at Victoria Miro, though I have a sneaking suspicion it wasn’t for sale…  Funnily enough, my other favourite works were also at Victoria Miro’s stand.  I’d forgotten that Alex Hartley was represented by VM and it was a pleasant surprise to see two new works on display.  I first saw his work at a solo show at the Fruitmarket in 2007.  I love the way he integrates photography with sculpture and installation alongside larger buildings and architectural concerns.  In many ways Hartley works as an architect would in that he scouts for the perfect location, but then transforms the site not with a literal building, but by taking photographs and then transforming the photographs with low-relief sculptural elements added to the surface of the prints.  Hartley’s been working on a rather conceptual project for the Cultural Olympiad, which perhaps explains why he’s been off the radar for a bit, so it was a nice surprise to see a few new pieces.

At Plan B, I spotted a new Adrian Ghenie and though it was a decent example of his work, it wasn’t half as spectacular as the pieces on show at Haunch of Venison last year.  Not sure what happened there…

Bortolami’s stand was lovely, full of pieces from Brooklyn-based artist, Richard Aldrich.  I’d never heard of Aldrich before and spent a bit of time perusing previous exhibitions.  His work looks a bit hit and miss, but I think Bortolami did a superb job of curating his pieces for Frieze.  There’s a rather charming  ‘slide painting’ where a blank canvas is broken up by a single, back lit 35mm slide.  There was another large Aldrich canvas which I loved: a pale, peachy salmon-coloured wash takes up most of the canvas, punctuated by a little wall of turquoise and something like a stone-circle at the bottom of the frame.  I don’t know what it is or what it’s supposed to be, it’s not the most exquisite piece of work I’ve seen, but it’s confidently done and quite captivating.  I stood looking at it for a good 3 minutes, which in Frieze time is a bloody eternity.

Another piece I loved was a set of works by Julius Koller for Galerie Martin Janda.  Slovakian artist Koller, again someone I’m relatively unfamiliar with, has a bitty, almost anthropological approach to making art.  The series of six objects, created between 1966-78 from what I can deduce, ranged from a marked-up loo roll, to a stamped piece of paper, to an intricate drawing of a town scape on a piece of found paper and was completely captivating – like finding a time capsule from a lost civilisation.  Koller died in 2007, and I later found out that the entire collection of works was bought by the Tate for their permanent collection.  It's amusing that I like so little of the Tate's collection, yet their buyers (at least one, anyway) clearly have good taste.

Perhaps my favourite piece, though, was a work called 'when what was when' by Claire Harvey at Amsterdam-based Galerie Fons Welters.  An entire wall had been given over to a display of small glass slides, each featuring an oil-painted figurative character.  The whole thing was slightly surreal and a little bit bonkers: one bit of the display consisted of a foot-long wooden shelf piled up with sand and an egg nested in the sand next to one of the little glass slides.  But the piece was also whimsical and clever – the slides were stuck to the wall with white tack and many of the figures seemed to interact with the very material fixing them to the wall.

There were a few other pieces that I liked (some images below), but nothing really took my breath away.  Having said that, the quality of the work this year was definitely better than last year. But to be honest, Frieze really isn’t about quality; it’s all about the money, baby.  And given that people will be talking about sales figures for at least the next two days, no doubt this year’s Frieze will chalk up to be a totally massive success. 

Coventry and Ghenie at Haunch of Venison

Paid a visit to Haunch of Venison's new show on Friday, featuring the work of Keith Coventry and Adrian Ghenie. I'm always slightly apprehensive before I walk in to a modern art gallery. I really, really want the work to be good, but experience has so often brought disappointment. I suspect the Tate Modern is largely to blame. Let me explain. Because the Tate is the biggest, most prominent, extensively funded space for the display of modern art in the entire country, one might expect it to - like one's parents before one is old enough to realise parents have affairs and neglect to use contraception - hold some degree of authority and expertise. Yet in the last two years, all but one of the Tate Modern's exhibitions have filled me with dread, apathy at the very least.

But since HOV has moved into its new home, I've arrived at each exhibition with a tingle of dread and departed with a satisfied sense of encountering artists of both great talent and great wit. Once upon a time a painter could get away with simply being a master of his craft. Michelangelo and Rembrandt didn't have to look far for their subjects. Though we like to think we have raised art as a profession above base comercialism (hahahahahahahahah!), from the Renaissance onwards, painting only made sense if there was someone to purchase the painting. So work did not tend to be created and then sold, for this was an inefficient waste of time, but rather only painted if there was a guaranteed buyer - hence commissions. Family or individual portraits, paid for by the sitter; or religious iconography, paid for by the church. So when we look at an old master painting, say Vermeer's Girl With a Pearl Earning, we tend to focus on the artist's wonderful technique, his use of tone, lighting, and brush strokes, and ignore his clever social commentary - if only because there isn't one. No matter. This isn't what portrait painting is about in the Renaissance.

Modern artists have a harder time of it in some ways, then, because they are expected to not only be excellent technicians, but also to be incredibly witty. Taken to the extreme with something like Duchamp's urinal, we have only the idea and no art. I think this is why you so regularly hear comments such as, 'my kid could have made that' or 'yes, but is it art?' And while we'll all draw our own lines as to what does or does not constitute 'art', these two painters, Keith Coventry and Adrian Ghenie, represent all the best possibilities of modern art: bringing together technique and wit in compelling and unique ways, creating beautiful works of art that restore ones faith in modern art.

Coventry typically works in series which is a lovely thing for an observer. It provides a sense of harmony and visual cohesion. Walking into the first room, a gorgeous sequence of paintings following the ROYGBV spectrum catches the eye. It's not until you walk up close that the thick, impasto strokes morph into the face of Jesus. In fact lots of faces of Jesus, as all the paintings in the spectrum of colours are of Jesus - paintings from a recent (2009) series called 'Repressionism'.

The other series I loved was 'Echoes of Albany', painted between 2004-2008. This series of more than 40 paintings is a collective interpretation of the infamous bachelor apartments, Albany, just next to Burlington Gardens. These little snippets of life at Albnany feel like clues to the mysteries surrounding the famous inhabitants of Albany and their equally salubrious lifestyles: paintings of Byron and Gladstone are interspersed with contemporary scenes of prostitution and drug-taking, all in Laura Ashley tones of pink and mauve.


While it was good to see the Coventry, Adrian Ghenie was a revelation. While the exhibition blurb talked about Ghenie's 'enduring fascination with European history, addressed through ideas relating to memory, trauma, and extremism', this almost seems to undermine the exquisite painterly quality and fantastical nature of the subject matter of the paintings.

Ghenie loves paint, that much is clear. Photographs simply do not do justice to Ghenie's skill as a painter, his exploration of technique and his perfection of a form that works perfectly with his incredibly visual and surrealist form of narrative painting. He drips and pours paint, then scrapes and removes the paint from the surface, building up layers in some areas, eroding in others. Again, the guide talks about Dadaism and Duchamp as being the primary inspirations for the work, but what is so wonderful about the paintings is that they are in no way prescriptive, but rather open to any number of interpretations. A spectacular painting entitled 'Duchamp's Funeral' looked to me like something out of Bram Stoker's Dracula. This fluidity in technique and subject is surprising, beautiful, and inspiring - this is work which must be experienced, not seen - reproductions simply do not do credit to Ghenie's work. Go and see it for yourself.