Last weekend I was in Primrose Hill and spent some time at the Museum of Everything. Housed in a former dairy and recording studio, its Exhibition #1 showcases a huge selection of work by ‘non-traditional’, self-taught artists from around the world, many of whom have regular day jobs. So here are a dental technician, truck driver, transport worker, slipper manufacturer, bricklayer, scrap merchant, Prussian governess, a couple of butchers and three Reverends amongst many others.

Both the work and the overall experience are totally refreshing, exciting and inspiring – making you feel like you want to do more yourself.

Curator James Brett and the guests he invited to select the work, have assembled a show that celebrates the non-celebrity, the everyday and unrecognised. Instead, these artists make work borne of the pure joy of making, it is not self-conscious, contrived or created with any financial motivation. In an interview with The Art Newspaper Brett said ‘here, the best work has nobody guiding it; and I love his reasons for collecting (‘I didn’t get into this intellectually, I got into it emotionally.’).

The art is more than just a form of self-expression but often a kind of therapy or self-consolation. Anna Zemankova’s delicate embroidered pieces fall into this category. She began making them when feeling depressed and menopausal, always working in the wee hours.

The artists all work intuitively, in a very pure, personal and human way, not copying traditional techniques but developing their own unconventional methods. An example is Judith Scott. As part of the Creative Growth studio she created strange sculptures, objects wrapped in so much wool that they become lost and take on another identity.

Other stand-out artists for me were:

Nek Chand whose human and animal forms are made of broken crockery, bottle tops and other detritus, now accumulated into a Rock Garden:

Morton Barlett, one of the most ‘established’ outsider artists, known for his unsettling, vulnerable hand-made dolls. Here’s a fascinating article about him.

Charles AA Dellschau who created thirteen books illustrating flying machines after a chance UFO sighting in 1899. The official website is here.

Bill Traylor, a former slave who, aged 83, started to paint the people, animals and events of his life.

Posted in art, review

Some friends and I visited the major solo exhibition of Anish Kapoor last Thursday. It was a masterclass in the use of material, form, colour and surface texture in which immense power, movement, absolute stillness, stickiness, dryness, weight and delicacy are all juxtaposed.

The monumental work Svayambh, (from a Sanskrit word meaning ‘self-generated’) is a gliding, destructive piece made of red oil paint mixed with wax that moves slowly through the galleries across the entire breadth of Burlington House, mutilating itself as it goes.

There was more drama and spectacle with ‘Shooting into the Corner’, a really exciting piece. We gathered round and waited for a few minutes for the countdown of the cannon firing. It really makes a booming noise and is sensationally anarchic in its splaying of crimson wax high up onto the plaster work of the Royal Academy ceiling – surely the old RA’s will be rocking in their graves! What’s great is that you really feel like you have seen a live piece of performance art even though the only performers are the person firing the cannon and the cannon itself.

Here’s the cannon on YouTube.

After all the drama of these two pieces, I loved the quietness of ‘When I Am Pregnant’. A pregnant tummy form protrudes out from the wall, seemingly effortless as there are no joins in plaster work or signs of its making. The urge to touch it was almost overwhelming, just like when you see a friend who is pregnant there is always an urge to ‘cup the tum’. To me the piece really captures the essence of human form and makes it tangible. Similarly captivating were ‘Yellow’ and ‘Hive’ both for their scale and form which make you want to climb inside and inhabit them.

The exhibition is on until 11^th December so do try and see it if you’re in London.

Posted in art, colour, review

Elsewhere at Frieze here are the most memorable pieces I saw:

Conrad Shawcross’ ‘Slow Arc in a Cube II’ at the Victoria Miro stand. The transience of the patterns that it created were mesmerising and reminded one of the impermanence of imagery, ironic within an art fair.

A silver bird in a tray by Irish artist Dorothy Cross, show by the Frith Street Gallery. Equally transfixing.

Raqib Shaw at White Cube  elements of traditional handpainting.

Shaw’s work combines a number of traditional techniques from applied arts and crafts such as fabric handpainting, ‘cloisonné’.

Rudolf Stingel
He creates very textural, wallpaper-like images. His work looks like the canvas has been molded with a flock wallpaper or even block printed on top of plaster to give indentations / reliefs. Seeing him again at Frieze reminded me of his silver foil room installation at the Whitney in New York in 2007.

Posted in art, craft, review

With a lot of the more established galleries playing it safe and wheeling out the usual suspects, undoubtedly the most imaginative and thought-provoking work at Frieze this year was to be found within Frame – a section perhaps inspired by Zoo and even the organisation and space of which was a breath of fresh air. What stood out for me here was Alan Kane at Ancient & Modern.

The title ‘Collection of Mr. & Mrs. L.M. Kane’, and installation of his parent’s art collection within Frieze were a playful move. Their trinkets, and kitsch homely objects taking out of context and into a gallery setting and presented using the art world’s language, questioned and satirised its reverence of the ‘important’ collector.

Even if it’s mass-produced tat, we’re all collectors. Here’s my attempt!

Posted in art, review

Yesterday I was having a trawl through our library and my hard drive, searching for something or other and whilst doing so, found so many objects, images and names that have inspired me I thought I’d jot some down for fun. In no particular order, here’s what I love…

Photography, Cyan types, William Henry Fox Talbot, pattern, Karl Blossfeldt, colour, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, fashion, pastels, black houses, Sonia Delaunay, wallpaper, gold, Josef & Anni Albers, Henri Matisee, Georgia O’ Keefe, Stella Ross–Craig, silver, Brick Lane and the Hugenot houses of Spitafields, paper-making, Paul Smith, black, Zika Ascher, Missoni, purple, Vitra, Ratti, blue, William Morris, Karel Martens, Lucienne Day, felt-making, The Albergs, The Eames, bronze, Rothko, Barbara Hepworth, Frida Khalo, Tracey Emin, Rachel Whiteread, yellow, Lucie Rie, Hans Coper, grey, weaving, Roger Hilton, Gary Hume, Howard Hodgkin, David Hockney, brown, Pierre-Joseph Redoute, neon, Palladio textile range, Terence Conran, Rogers House – Wimbledon, copper, Josef Frank, lino cut, the South Downs, Li Edelkoort, Jaime Hayon, Raoul Dufy, paper art, Katsuyo Kamo for Karl Lagerfeld, print-making, pink, Miuccia Prada, blossom, Tokyo, Brancusi, Wysteria

Posted in architecture, art, colour, design, fashion, pattern, textiles