BAFTA Art Diary

The film industry is in full swing with awards season counting down to its zenith at the Oscars next month. Before all eyes descend onto Hollywood, London will host the 67th British Academy Film Awards in celebration of film and documentary. The esteemed BAFTA awards are generally viewed as a signifier to Oscar success and with Gravity receiving the most nominations amongst a pool of brilliant talent from 2013 - including 12 Years a Slave, American Hustle, The Wolf of Wall Street and Blue Jasmine to name only a few - this year’s ceremony at the Royal Opera House will guarantee plenty of action and drama on the night.

In the run-up to this weekend’s BAFTAs I pick the most inspiring exhibitions on show in London town; from large-scale installations to intimate works of art, the capital offers a range of celebrated talent equal to that on the silver screen:

Bailey’s Stardust at the National Portrait Gallery 

If you want to know where all the stars are hanging out in London head to the National Portrait Gallery where a landmark exhibition of David Bailey’s photographs chart more than half a century of electric imagery that spans popular culture, celebrity and reportage from around the world.

Bailey's Stardust runs until 1st June 2014 at the National Portrait Gallery. 

Jack Nicholson, 1978 - David Bailey

Richard Deacon at Tate Britain

Discover Turner Prize winning sculptor, Richard Deacon’s material manipulation in a major exhibition presented at Tate Britain. A range of large-scale mixed media sculpture and organic drawings reveal Deacon’s prolific career for sinuous forms over four decades. The gallery’s recent £45million renovation is a masterpiece in the marriage of the historical and contemporary worth exploring on your visit.

Richard Deacon runs until 27th April 2014 at Tate Britain.

It's Orpheus When There's Singing #7, 1978-9 - Richard Deacon

Globe Head Ballerina at the Royal Opera House

Look no further than the venue for this year’s BAFTAs for a dose of contemporary art. In fact, look upwards along the façade of the Royal Opera House to view Yinka Shonibare, MBE’s gravity-defying public art installation Globe Head Ballerina, which takes residence with neighbouring street performers in the heart of Covent Garden on Bow and Russell Street.  Find out more about the installation commissioned by the Royal Opera House in my review Street Dance.

Globe Head Ballerina will be on display at the Royal Opera House until 2017.

Globe Head Ballerina, 2012 - Yinka Shonibare, MBE

Martin Creed at sketch

Whimsical and witty are the main ingredients to Martin Creed’s art practice. What’s the point of it? is a survey of the controversial artist’s signature works currently on show at the Hayward Gallery. To immerse yourself fully in the conceptually curious world of Creed cross over the Thames to Mayfair and pay a visit to the Gallery at sketch where the artist has redecorated with aplomb the restaurant’s famed salon; curating its furniture, furnishings, tableware and artwork as well as designing a custom marble floor. Mixed in with the culinary creations of Head Chef Pierre Gagnaire, the total effect creates one of the most stimulating rooms in the city. 
The Gallery at sketch may be viewed during the day – for dining advance reservations are strongly recommended.

 Martin Creed in the Gallery at sketch 

ICA Off-Site: Dover Street Market at Dover Street Market

Art meets fashion in the latest of the Institute of Contemporary Arts’ Off-Site projects. Returning to its former address in Mayfair, now occupied by fashion emporium Dover Street Market, a collection of rare archival material occupies the exterior and interiors of the emporium across all six floors. Not unfamiliar with in-store art interventions amongst its designer collections, Dover Street Market makes for the ideal canvas in this evocative homecoming where seminal art activity was staged between 1950-1968. More details on the blog - Back to the Future

ICA Off-Site: Dover Street Market opens this week at Dover Street Market through to 6th April 2014.

ICA Off-Site: Dover Street Market

Richard Hamilton at Tate Modern

The late British artist Richard Hamilton is affectionately known as Daddy Pop. A leading member of the Independent Group in the Fifties debating art, architecture and theory, it was at the ICA in Dover Street where the earliest work of Pop art is cited - Hamilton’s very own 1956 collage, Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? showcased in the This Is Tomorrow exhibit. Themes of American consumer culture, celebrity and politics inspired Hamilton to create a number of influential images on art history’s timeline from the twentieth century. London pays tribute to Hamilton with an exhibition at the ICA’s main gallery on The Mall as well as with a retrospective at Tate Modern, which promises to be an immersive mash-up of the artist’s affiliation with the worlds of architecture, product design and film throughout a career that dates from the 1950s to the artist’s final series of paintings created in 2011.

Richard Hamilton opens 13th February at Tate Modern through to 26th May 2014. 

Swingeing London, 1968-9 - Richard Hamilton

Hannah Höch at Whitechapel Gallery

Head East to Whitechapel Gallery to the view the original ‘cut and paste’ works of Hannah Höch. A driving force in the development of twentieth century collage, Höch was a member of Berlin’s Dada movement and transformed everyday printed material into intimate artworks. Over one hundred collages feature in this first major exhibition in Britain and include themes on fashion, finance and feminism in a post-war Germany.

Hannah Höch runs until 23rd March 2014 at Whitechapel Gallery. 

 

Für ein Fest gemacht (Made for a Party), 1936 - Hannah Höch

Click here for a full view of my BAFTA Art Diary map of London


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Art, Culture & Lifestyle 

Images courtesy of David Bailey, sketch London, Whitechapel Gallery
ICA and the estate of Richard Hamilton

A Portrait Of A Duchess

HRH The Duchess of Cambridge, 2013 - oil on canvas by Paul Emsley

It was the morning after the media furore as I walked up St Martin's Place to the scene of much debate and criticism. While the press pack had come and gone only the day before, my Twitter feed on Saturday morning continued to show virtual commentary on the Royal state of affairs that was the first official painted portrait of Her Royal Highness The Duchess of Cambridge. “It’s just amazing…” said The Duchess to Paul Emsley, the award-winning Scottish painter who took brush to canvas for the Royal commission by the National Portrait Gallery, of which The Duchess is Patron.

With less than twenty-four hours since its official unveiling, it was a surprisingly quiet Saturday morning in Room 36 with only a handful of visitors standing face to face with the larger than life profile. Kate shares the space with the neo expressionist style of Paula Rego portraying Germaine Greer, the awkward repose of Thomas Adès by Phil Hale; John Keane’s bright strokes of Mo Mowlam and the requisite Royal military presence in neighbour, Lance Corporal Beharry from the Prince of Wales Regiment, in the illustrative style of Emma Wesley. The darkest canvas of them all, Emsley’s style of restrained oil application and glazing is in contrast to the liberal and fluid gestures that surround it. ‘The singularity and silence of form’ is how the artist describes his use of dark backgrounds – pair this with a limited colour palette of blues and greys, the result is certainly silent and perhaps misjudged for a young subject who only turned thirty this very week. Light, an element Emsley has gained recognition in capturing with his photorealist BP Portrait Award in 2007, has refracted into an unattractive haze that has unfortunately gifted her both unnecessary age and formality. Closing in on the canvas equally disappoints – no revelations are unearthed and the rather mottled skin tones that have had blue tones picked out from other areas in a hopeful attempt at depth, fall quite literally flat on The Duchess’s face. With only two sittings and a series of photographs taken by the artist himself, in a press release published by St James's Palace Emsley explains how Kate wished to be portrayed 'naturally' as opposed to her 'official self'. How then naturally translated into soft focus is a curiosity, however the amount of detail that has been dedicated to her hair and cascading locks – a feature that is globally scrutinized and which the artist surprisingly stresses its importance as being 'strong' and 'recognisable' in a trailer for the National Portrait Gallery (below) - has been executed with such staging and minute attention through a spectrum of grey and luminous copper hues; detail that has been starved from anywhere else across the visage. I found myself transfixed on the unusually defined right eyebrow that somehow escaped this soft focus – a distraction that would have been welcomed in the eyes that suffer from icy up lighting. And so to the mouth: does Emsley's notification that it turned from unsmiling to smiling contribute any more or less to my understanding? He only confirms Kate is in fact smiling, albeit enigmatically. In the words of my esteemed friend and artist Ana Cavic, is she the Mona Lisa?, a question that may be on the lips of art historians forevermore. 

It is however not entirely off with his head for Emsley. While he is the executioner, he is not alone for critical execution. It is reported that Kate was involved with choosing Emsley with the help of National Portrait Gallery Director, Sandy Nairne. Include the countless correspondence between palace and institution it would have been undoubtedly a daunting prospect for the new Royal. Yet given the strong signals that both Kate and her husband, Prince William have worked hard at expressing - that of a young, informal, changing face of the House of Windsor - the definitively conservative choice in artist and image is frustrating. The Sloane Ranger returneth is a message that instantly came to mind as I viewed the portrait, exposing another misjudgment on the part of Kate’s Royal advisors, or lack of if reports are to be believed. The Duchess’s choice of a navy blue pussybow blouse, made famous by former Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, teamed with heirloom earrings, present not only a potentially loaded composition but a stiff and detached icon of twenty-first century Britain through in an irrelevant Eighties filter. Also to be noted are the blouse’s sleeves that expose a possible amendment from their sleeveless state in the artist’s original photographs, which on canvas display very little effort to unify blouse with sleeve. If Austerity Duchess were the intentions du jour of Kate and company then this equally falls flat with delusion. Emsley and the club of traditional portrait artists command far greater amounts for this formal style of work than an emerging contemporary talent, which in my opinion would have been a far suitable choice - if not only for style, but also for substance. A graduate from London’s many fine art schools such as The Royal Academy or The Slade School of Fine Art, of which aspiring artists from around the world fight for student places, would have been a refreshing and powerful statement against the inevitability of Royal protocol. 

What hangs in Room 36 is a portrait engulfed in safety and unexpected dullness of one of the most photographed women in the world. It is a pity an artist, who may have delved into allegorical integration or played with personality through colour or set design, was not elected. As for the choice of frame – a very plain silver number – unsurprisingly has invited damning comparisons to portraits that may be found in establishments on the British high street: a first in the comparison archives for Royal portraiture to date. 

Emsley will now have to accept his portrait of The Duchess of Cambridge will eclipse his more celebrated works. For Kate, an alumnus of history of art, her first painted portrait now joins its very timeline and with Prince William, their duty as future King and Queen will consist of a whole life ahead of them with portraits and various immortalizations in the name of State and institution. In her early years as a new member of the Royal Family and a time that precedes the imminent birth of her first child, she may have wanted to be reminded of this special occasion in a different light in years to come: when she really is old and grey.


 

HRH The Duchess of Cambridge is on display at the National Portrait Gallery, London from 11th January to 1st September 2013 - click here for visitor information. 

Image courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery 

Street Dance

Elegant, poised and seemingly still, a new member has joined the cast of street performers in London’s historic Covent Garden. While many made-up, foiled or glittering creations vie for your attention at eye-level, this performer commands an elevated view on the corner of Bow and Russell Street.

Globe Head Ballerina, 2012

I am of course referring to the celebrated artist Yinka Shonibare, MBE’s public art commission by the Royal Opera House earlier in the summer as part of the London 2012 Festival. Globe Head Ballerina contributes to Shonibare’s growing repertoire of public art after the Fourth Plinth Commission, Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle, installed in Trafalgar Square in 2010, as well as the artist’s conceptual aesthetic of past times. Inspired by a photograph of Margot Fonteyn, prima ballerina assoluta of The Royal Ballet, the sculpture sees a dancer suspended in pose and structure, scaling the façade of the Royal Opera House and encased in a large-scale snow globe. Almost cosmic in appearance, the sculpture's vertical installation draws your eye up to its untouchable vantage overlooking Covent Garden Market and its fellow resident performers.

Never one to disappoint on detail, Shonibare dresses the dancer in Dutch Wax fabrics - with its loaded perception of African identity via colonial supremacy - that are now synonymous with the artist’s range of work. Tailored by the Royal Opera House Costume Department, a tutu and shoes are fitted to a body cast from Soloist, Melissa Hamilton, and keeping with the artist’s tradition of headless mannequins, a replica Victorian world globe rests on the dancer’s shoulders and is a nod to the international work around dance, as art form, that the Royal Opera House has been dedicated to since the mid-eighteenth century. The dancer slowly rotates in her sphere and evokes a sense of wonder and spectacle amongst the buzz and pace of the streets below in the heart of Theatreland. Shonibare explains,

“… a very grown up piece of public sculpture than can be enjoyed by all. It’s like a life-size fairytale ballerina jewellery box that will spin”.

This is not the first time Shonibare has channelled dance into his art works as a medium to explore dialogues of culture and gender, politics and power, all packaged in a seductive scape of colour and sartorial elegance. Un Ballo in Maschera (A Masked Ball), 2004 featured in the artist’s nominated Turner Prize exhibition and Odile and Odette, 2005 in collaboration with ROH2 at the Royal Opera House that involved dancers from both The Royal Ballet and Ballet Black, affirm his interest of physical expression within the context of experimental contemporary art. Public, playful and possessing pulling power in London’s oldest piazza, Globe Head Ballerina is a magnificent partnership of art and art form between contemporary artist and performing arts institution.

Globe Head Ballerina will be installed on Bow and Russell Street until 2017 – visit the Royal Opera House for more details.

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