NICOLE PRICE
Context
Pamela Golden
Pamela Golden takes elements from historical accounts or anecdotes and fills in the rest of the storyline.
Her paintings, though tiny (often only 8 x5 cm) still have a loose quality to the painting and the brush marks can be seen.
The Morning Dip, 2013
The Irish Lassie, 2013
Christian Boltanski - Inventory of Objects Belonging to a Young Man Modern Art Oxford
This was one of five inventories proposed by Boltanski, and it was the only one that had photographic documentation rather than the actual possessions.
It explored the idea of presence and absence and has the feel of a memorial. The mundanity of the everyday objects is given a melancholic air with the style of black and white photography and the scrutiny given to each item. Boltanski saw it as a sort of ‘inverted portraiture’
‘The Inventories say nothing about anyone. Their only interest is that anyone who looks at them sees his or her own portrait in them’ Boltanski 2007
Lucy McKenzie
Lucy McKenzie art looks at blurring the boundaries between art and design, as well as art and life.
McKenzie uses traditional techniques such as trompe-l’oeil painting. She has painted a series of paintings which have the appearance of cork pin boards with various items attached to them. An example is Quodlibet (Fascism) (2012). Here she has painted a mood board to explore the aesthetics of the twentieth-century Italian Fascist movement. Attached to the pin board are paint sample booklets, architectural drawings for a bathroom, as well as images of different types of marble – all suggesting ideas for interior decoration.
In grouping these images, McKenzie is alluding to how a ‘Fascist’ may choose to decorate his / her bathroom. McKenzie is combining politics, mundane daily life and design.
Quodlibet XX (Fascism) - 2012
Vija Celmins
Vija Celmins exquisite drawings of postcards and letters rethinks the postcard as a keepsake.
'Hiroshima'and 'Bikini', with either their title or dark images, reference destruction.
Hiroshima 1968
Bikini 1968
Whitney McVeigh
Whitney McVeigh's multi media practice looks at the ideas of identity and memory.
McVeigh is interested in nostalgia and that longing for home and sees the body as a vessel for human memory. Using found objects she creates installations that have an intimacy and a narrative as if you are gleaning a greater understanding of someone, yet the found objects are gathered from a variety of souces.
Solitude a Breath Away 2013
Hunting Song 2013
Hunting Song 2013
Gerhard Richter
In 1964 Richter started to use snapshots, mainly from the family abum, as source material for his paintings. He described them as 'devotional pictures'.
The conventional groupings share a common visual currency and when painted they still retain the immediacy and intimacy of the snapshot. Richter is depicting the scene as if through a camera lens but is putting the image within the context of painting. They are not copies of photographs, Richter says of these paintings 'I am not trying to imitate a photograph; I'm trying to make one'. Richter explains that even when he creates a close translation of the original image, it is a handmade copy and inevitably he changes and manipulates the image. Once painted Richter blurs the image by dragging a dry brush across the still wet surface. This renders the individual's features indistinct. Richter explained these paintings from photographs. 'Being painted (they) no longer tell of a specific situation, and the representation becomes absurd. As a painting it changes both it's meaning and its information content'.
Many of Richters photos were taken during WWII so there is a haunting resonance as the history of what was going on in Germany and the knowledge of what became of the people in the picture cannot be separated from it. Tante Marianne 1965, this blurred painting shows Marianne, his aunt holding Gerhard Richter as a baby. She was later starved to death in a Nazi euthanasia camp.
Familie am Meer 1964
Familie 1964
Tante Marianne 1965
Renate und Marianne 1964
Luc Tuymans
Luc Tuyman's paintings refer to traumatic events in history, painted in muted tones of greys and pinks, but nonetheless still unsettling.The images are painted from source materials of photos, maquettes, drawings.or television or cinema stills.
In Tuymans solo show The Shore, at David Zwirner gallery, the souce images are taken from online, iPhone photos or photographs that have been re-photographed many times. The paintings seem to glow with the light that eminates from digital sreens. There are portraits, landscape and interior, all painted in the loose brushstrokes predominantly muted hues. One portrait depicts Issei Sagawa, a convicted cannibal. The soft colouring and loose style feels at odds with the horror of his crime. The painting The Shore is taken from the 1968 film A Twist of Sand, and depicts the opening scene where people are just about to be shot. It is painted in uncharacteristically dark tones, and references Goya in its colouring and subject matter. The same treatment is given to traumatic images as to an interior, it is how news and historical events are seen on our screens and in the mass media, in the same way as fiction or any other visual representations.
Scottish Enlightenment Thinker 2014
The Shore 2014
The Obelisk 2014
Wilhelm Sasnal
I recently saw Wilhelm Sasnal’s exhibition at Sadie Coles HQ. it was a diverse group of paintings. The subject matter varied from snapshots of history, everyday life and decorative images, some small scale and some large canvases.
Working from assorted photographic imagery, films, art reproductions or even photos from his phone, the images are pared down and manipulated and simplified. The painting of Columbus is reduced to large areas of black and swathes of yellows on his face. He has become more of a symbol than a portrait. The translation from one type of image into the painting leads to this symbolism and realism merging together and the painting holds echoes of its source but has become its own narrative.
Sasnal says "for me reality is a jigsaw puzzle that’s being put together, but we only see parts – knees, say – and it’s permanently changing. I don’t know where history ends and where the present moment begins. It’s like liquid, or sometimes like mud.”
Christopher Columbus 2014
Piano Bar 2014
Untitled (After Stubbs) 2014
Miho Sato
Miho Sato reproduces visual material she takes from a variety of sources.
She transforms them to images devoid of detail, but painted with a delicacy and simplicity that holds your attention. Sato is looking at the ideas of representation and the images we are constantly being subjected to through multi media.
School ground 2012
Encounter 2007
Sea 2005
Beach 2005
Fabiola: Francis Alÿs at the National Portrait Gallery
This is an installation, created by Francis Alys comprising of around 300 images of Saint Fabiola.
They were collected by Alys over a number of years and are nearly all painted by amateur artists. All the work is based on a single image, of an original painting, by an obscure French artist Jean- Jacques Henner (1885). That painting is now lost.
Fabiola is the patron saint of nurses, but also prayed to by divorcees and unhappy or battered wives, as she had an unhappy abusive marriage.
Visually the effect of the mass paintings is mesmerising. It brings up questions as to who painted these images and why.
For me I am interested in the duplication of the image and in how a piece of art lives on in the art of others. I am fascinated in the hypnotic effect of the endless images, all similar but with subtle stylistic differences, which emphasize the number of different artists that painted these images.
In relation to my practice this installation has made me think about repetition, duplication and the effect on the viewer of a large number of similar images in close proximity.
Love is Enough William Morris and Andy Warhol
Love is Enough, exhibition at Modern Art Oxford is an unusual pairing of these two artists.
It has been curated by Jeremy Deller and these are cited as his two greatest artistic influences. Deller finds connections between the two, highlighting their mass produced printmaking.
Alibis: Sigmar Polke 1963-2010 Tate Modern
Sigmar Polke 's exhibition was a hugely eclectic mix of works, quite overwhelming when seen on mass. He was very experimental and worked in everything from traditional oil paints to installations involving potatoes.
I was particularly interested in Girlfriends I. Polke took a photographic image and made a photolithograph print from it. The image was blown up so that it appeared to be made up of dots. Polke used found images and projected these blown up on to a canvas. Once on a huge scale the dots making up the image could be clearly seen . He then hand painted every dot to create the painting. For Girlfriends 1965/1966 the original source came from a newspaper or magasine image.
I was also drawn to Polke's paintings on printed fabrics, in particular the Watchtower series. They have dark historical undertones in their subject matter. The works are a mixture of photographic techniques, paint and found fabrics. They are large scale and each one of the seven pieces varies in the materials in which it is rendered.
Girlfriends 1965/1966
Watchtower 1984
Marlene Dumas, The Image as a Burden Tate Modern
I loved this extraordinary exhibition of work by Marlena Dumas .
I was captivated by her series of oversized portraits in the room The Eyes of the Night Creatures. I am interested in Dumas's relationship between photography and the painted image. The paintings express so much more than a photograph could do.
Marlene Dumas says:
'My people were all shot
by a camera, framed,
before I painted them.
They didn't know by what names I'd call them...
...
My best works are erotic displays
of mental confusions
(with intrusionsof irrelevant information).'
I was captivated by Dumas's watercolour portraits hung in groups such as Rejects 1994 and Black Drawings 1991-2. There is so much emotional complexity captured in the simple watery heads.
In Magdalena (Out of Eggs Out of Business) 1995, so much is encapsulated in this solitary figure. There are references to ageing, femininity and motherhood.
In The Mother 2009, the composition and simplified shapes heighten the emotional resonance of this piece, and it has strong links with the photograph that the image is based on. The figure takes up a much smaller area of the overall painting, giving a feeling of isolation and melancholy.
Genetic longing 1984
Black Drawings 1991-2
Magdalena (Out of Eggs Out of Business) 1995
