During this first London trip of third year I was able to visit three exhibitions that sounded interesting to me;
Oceania exhibition and the Royal Academy of Arts
This exhibition took us on a “voyage” through art and history and encountered an area covering a third of the world’s surface. Over thousands of years people settled many of the countless islands and archipelagos that lie scattered across the Pacific Ocean. What links all these places is water, as evoked here by the instillation Kiko Moana by the Mata Aho Collective, four Mäori women artists from New Zealand.
I really enjoyed looking at these historical pieces, and felt very aware of its importance and wanted to remain respectful, as I knew there were human remains in the exhibition. It was a very vibrant and eye-opening exhibition, and the first of its sort that I had ever visited.
https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibition/oceania
Julie Mehretu SEXTANT at the White Cube
This exhibition featured large-scale paintings and etchings, the exhibition highlights Mehretu’s use of gestural abstraction as a conduit for evocative and charged emotion and intellectual enquiry.
Glenn Ligon has described the artist’s work as ‘traversed by history […] grounded in urgent political and social questions while simultaneously troubling the limits of abstract painting.’ In these new paintings, which continue from the ‘Conjured Parts’ series begun in 2015, Mehretu employs a broad spectrum palette to create powerful, animated, complex canvases. Marking a continued departure from her earlier work which focused on a layered language of mapping and architectural detail, these paintings take the immediacy of a news photograph as their starting point. These include images of such recent pivotal junctures as the rallies of independence in Catalonia; the voracious wild fires of California; the violent white supremacy rally and counter rally in Charlottesville, Virginia; the instantaneous outbreak of Muslim ban protests throughout the United States; and the Grenfell Tower fire in London.
I found the context of the exhibition to be interesting, as well as what was displayed, but I had a hard time figuring out how they both told the same story because of the medium the pieces were created in. However, this did spark my interest to look more into abstract pieces in the future to gain better knowledge of how and why they represent certain situations and topics.
https://whitecube.com/exhibitions/exhibition/julie_mehretu_masons_yard_2018
From The Inside Out at the Drawing Room
This exhibition was a collection of pieces by the four female artists Nilbar Güreş, Marie Jacotey, Athena Papadopoulos, and Emma Talbot, who utilise expanded forms of drawing to navigate a passage from personal experience to the outside world. The exhibition explores the capacity of drawing to convey the complexity and diversity of female experience.
Working across media and scale, Marie Jacotey is inspired by social interactions and the stories of friends, strangers, literature and popular culture. She portrays these contemporary relationships and conversations in drawings interspersed with text in a comic-strip form, drawing functioning as a means to tell highly personal and self-reflective stories.
Also drawing on pop cultural, literary and autobiographical references, Athena Papadopoulos uses a wide range of materials (including cosmetic products and animal matter) and in her structural and collage works. Combining these with found text and image, she weaves herself as subject into a narrative thread that explores issues around contemporary gender politics and social relationships.
Emma Talbot’s work explores an interior psychological space. Using a highly stylised figure motif to describe the self, she articulates internal personal narratives as visual thoughts of her own experience, her memories and psychological projections. Her drawings, made in watercolour, pencil and ink on paper or silk, often incorporate her own writing and other sources that describe her sense of the world.
Telling stories of the invisible and inaudible, Nilbar Güreş places everyday life realities in theatrical settings. Her works discuss ideas of gender, sexuality, race, class and the systems that sustain oppression and control. Employing a diverse range of media such as drawing, embroidery and appliqué, her works are imbued with a poetic and humorous inventiveness as well as a critical and political underside.
This was by far my favourite exhibition of the three, simply because the context of gender and femininity related so much to my work, and has inspired me to play around with space and sculpture a lot more with future work to develop my ideas.
https://drawingroom.org.uk/exhibitions/from-the-inside-out-exhibition
saratrouble 