Exhibition: Mel Bochner

Mel Bochner 'Master of the Universe' 

The Whitechapel Gallery are celebrating the work of Mel Bochner from the last 50 years in their current exhibition. Bochner is a conceptual artist who often combines colour and language in his work. There's a range of work on display including his early installations, wall drawings, works on paper and his most recent series of paintings which were created using a thesaurus to generate word chains. His use of typography is truly inspiring and makes this exhibition well worth a visit! 

Where: Whitechapel Gallery 

When: now till December 30th

Cost: Free!

Painters Framing Their World

I was lucky enough to visit the highly acclaimed Frank Auerbach show at the Courtauld Gallery in London two years ago.

The exhibition displayed Auerbach's paintings and drawings of London building sites from 1952 to 1962.  This was a period in history when central London was being hastily rebuilt, following the devastation of World War Two.  Auerbach spent the ten years between 1952 and 1962 sketching on the building sites, quickly capturing his reactions to the construction taking place.  In the drawing below you can see how Auerbach was thinking of using bold lines of perspective to FRAME VIEWS and lead the spectator into his painting.  The resulting works are a WINDOW onto a world of large mechanical construction sites.

Study for Shell Building Site from the Festival Hall

Many of the paintings and drawings are dominated by the thick lines you see above, portraying the huge building girders that make up the frame of a modern building.  Cranes are also used as FRAMING devises in many of the paintings and drawings, their legs once again portrayed in thickly rendered lines.

Shell Building Site from the Thames

In other works (like the one above) Auerbach conveys the devastation to the earth using light, colour and texture to document the vast holes that are cut into the ground.  Here the PICTURE PLANE is used to frame areas of earth at the sides and the vast spaces below.  Auerbach used IMPASTO oil paint (thick areas of undiluted paint) to build up areas to create more depth to the painting.  The whole effect draws the viewer into looking beyond the frame, into the painting and then onto areas the artist wanted the viewer to focus on.

Have a look at these videos, explaining the work and Auerbach talking about the work himself.

Natural Beauty

Dutch artist duo Lernert and Sander have taken the cocept of 'caked in make-up' to a whole new level. The film above shows them both applying a years worth of make-up to the face of model Hannelore Knuts. They repeatedly use everyday cosmetics such as foundation, blusher, eyeshadow and lip gloss to the models face to make the model become less recognisable. It's fascinating to watch the texture of the foundation as it sits heavily on the models face, the blusher and eyeshadow providing the only colour. The duo told the Nowness website: 

"We wanted to apply 365 layers of makeup in one day to see how much is needed to go from a natural look to an outrageous one."

The whole process took 9 hours, during which the model couldn't move and could only eat and drink through a straw. The artists used 7 bottles of foundation, 2 bottle of cream eyeshadow, 3 lip gloss pens and 2 bottles of blusher. All together 228.40ml of make-up.

Further digging has led me to Chocolate Bunny (see video below) where Lernert & Sander melted a chocolate bunny with a hairdryer. By shooting something desirable and cute as a chocolate bunny and then melting it, their aim was to shock - by shaking children out of their state of comfort. 

What you see is what you get. 

BBC - Your Paintings

Neil found this great resource last night from The BBC titled 'Your Paintings'. They are embarking on a new website and programme, cataloging the entire collection of oil paintings held in galleries in the UK.

"Many people don't realise that the UK has tens of thousands of paintings in its publicly funded museums and institutions that are not currently viewable by the public, either because they are in storage or are kept in buildings that are inaccessible to the general public. The vast majority of these paintings have never been published online."

The website aims to have 200,000 paintings (64,000 are online and search-able already!) with tags to help users search by artist, theme or collection.

ps. Don't forget the Google Art Project too!

Laura White

In my final year at Goldsmiths I was lucky enough to have the talented Laura White as my tutor and her new work is fantastic! Laura explores the language of sculpture by using a range of different materials from everyday objects to constructed matter. She is interested with the 'stuff' of the world, from the readymade to the handmade, image to objects, the representational to the abstract, playing with value, profile, association and meaning of individual and collections of objects.

"Laura gathers, makes, places, arranges, manipulates, distorts and re-presented objects and stuff to create new relationships and meanings. Sometimes things are left untouched while other stuff is highly manipulated or crafted from scratch, such a bags of purchased popcorn juxtaposed with hand-modelled clay pots. The constant accumulation of objects and stuff bought from high street shops and the internet is part of the process of making her work and is reflected back in the finished pieces, often as collections."

Contradiction is clear within the work as she questions our relationship and associations with the 'stuff', whether that be those displayed in shops, homes, museums or left stranded on the pavement. To see more of Laura's work click here or visit the staff page at Goldsmiths!