The Queen of Hungary reviews

More Gathering Storm photos

2009-09-26T07:04:00.001-07:00

'Gathering Storm' at Bayfield Hall

2009-09-26T06:36:00.000-07:00

Everything looked wonderful - house, paintings, people - loads of visitors streamed over the lawn on an implausibly warm autumn evening, the lowering sun sliding into the plummy chandelier-lit Long Room; the paintings, hung on two L-shaped boards devised by my brilliant father, looked beautiful; Amanda Geitner gave a superb speech introducing the work that she and Frances Kearney had selected and, as you will see from the photos, not only did everyone have a good time but paintings were sold - in very creditable numbers!

Thanks to Caroline & Roger Combe for their tolerant aimiability while the show was on, Alec and James Douet for their patience, might and ingenuity, and Haydn, Tudor & Morgan for their skilful wine-pouring.

There is no such word as PERFORMATIVE

2009-07-26T03:18:00.000-07:00

As an artist who occassionally does a piece of Live Art and has had much to do with the Live Art Development Agency and other Live Art & Performance types, I have vaguely wondered what 'performative' means, how it is different from 'performance' and if I or my work are/is performative. Now I can reveal - THERE IS NO SUCH WORD! So please stop using it!

Outhouse

2009-07-26T02:16:00.000-07:00

18 - 20 Colegate, Norwich NR4 1BQ
Open 12 - 6pm Tuesday - Sunday
Till 21 August

For those who don't know it Colegate is an architecturally cranky old street in Norwich. It's 400 yards of wobbly buildings of red brick and timber, skewed windows and a mix of social and commercial uses - the elite Strangers' Club for Norwich merchants, the Octogon where I believe you can leave your children to be guarded, a carpet shop in a C19th preacher's hall (that might have gone....) and the splendid Queen Anne mansion that used to house the Broads Authority. This lovely and hefty place has massive elaborate plaster ceilings writhing with burlesque ornament and also bogs, kitchenettes and corridors cruelly stripped back for bureaucratic action.

Outpost has taken over the building for a programme of short residencies to coincide with CAN 09 for 21 European & British artists. Presumabably it's all building up and could be a rewarding visit by the end of their tenure. As yet there's little to see - the homely evidence of work in progress (hammerings, wrapped things). The collective CutUp has put a wall of stained wood pierced by various old speakers obliquely across a room next to the entrance and this works well in the space, responding to size and proportion and giving a sense of life to the house. Elsewhere an artist was starting to unwrap and prepare a table for her castings of cat candles; on the stairs are some attractively aged-looking crimson prints of a building that use lipstick as pigment; in an attic shelves had been put up for a performance involving a meal that moved round the house.

I was however too distracted by the building to get much absorbed by the artwork. Why are the ceiling mouldings so assertively wrought, and who can have thought that to paint the flat bits compost green was somehow in period? How did the City Council (I presume) seperate the lobe of its brain that deals with historic preservation from the lobe that deals with partitioning areas for the making of tea, and get the idea that there is no alternative to formica?

I would like to see in the rest of the residencies more work like the speakers wall that confronts the archtecture and history of the building, and not work that acts like the council and ignores the beautiful elephant that is 18 - 20 Colegate.

Outhouse

2009-07-26T02:10:00.000-07:00

Colin Wilkin: Recent Paintings at St Jude's Gallery

2009-07-19T06:48:00.000-07:00

Colin Wilkin - Recent Paintings
St Jude's Gallery, Itteringham, Norfolk Nr11 7AF
18 July - 1 August 2009-07-19
Open Thursday - Saturday 10 - 4pm

Aaaand another review with a vested interest to declare; until their recent move from next door to my house to remote(ish) Itteringham in North Norfolk, I had come to depend on St Judes for all my birthday present needs. Their Modern British aesthetic has a coherent visual logic - the plates have decorative tones that recall the fabrics, which go with the notebooks, which allude to the mugs. They didn't consult me before they left and I want them back.

The new gallery looks like something out of one of the Ravillious prints they stock - in an archetypical English village cupped in a woody valley with wobbly brick houses, friendly pub, diminutive yet perfect manor house.

Colin Wilkin comes from perfect English landscape too, walking and cycling round the Suffolk/Essex borders where he lives and works. He paints on a white ground, using watercolour with no body colour so the paintings are palest blues, greens, pinks and greys. I thought at first they were prints, because that's what I associate with the gallery, and also because the line drawing is so fine - his father was an engineer and there is a diagrammatic quality to the draftsmanship.

They are also map-like and exquisitely precise, even though he draws in the rough and wild open air. Sometimes the chemistry of the atmosphere dampens the paper and gives the colour greater strength. The colours are not naturalistic, it is almost as though they stand for real-life colours in a shaggier, rougher world.This precision is intriguing because he describes the process of making in a sort of existentialist way; he draws not only what he sees but peripheral and sensual stuff - the path his feet took, the sound of the shingle, raindrops from a vertical dimension.

After the first draft he puts them out of sight until they become unfamiliar, then revisits them over several days. They are therefore quite Cubist in structure and thought, insinuating different planes and dimensions of the visible and the non-visible like the layers of marked tissue paper of a sewing pattern.

Frances Kearney: Untitled III and IV

2009-07-13T09:22:00.001-07:00

Review of Frances Kearney's exhibition Fishing for Trout

2009-07-13T07:11:00.000-07:00

Frances Kearney: Fishing for Trout
11th July - 31st August 10 - 6pm Mon - Sat
Norwich Arts Centre, St Benedict's street, Norwich NR2 4PG

When Frances Kearney moved back home to Norfolk a few years ago she became freshly aware of the fragile land around her North Norfolk home. While this series of 12 large A0 photographs showing now in Norwich Arts Centre is not autobiographic, it deals with the imaginative world of the young girl for whom the reedbeds, the shallow marsh pools and the deserted buildings are a background to intense imaginative play.

Reference to Emerson in unavoidable in the reedbed pictures. Like Emerson, the figures are most carefully chosen and posed. Fixed between the large skies and massed vegetation and the minute details of hands and feet, the young girls play just at the far end of childhood, lost in a world of inner drama and poetry. The viewer, perhaps with memories or children of their own, is stuck outside the scene, looking on helplessly as running flames and open waters menace the oblivious children.

Empty buildings in some of the pictures reference the decline of Nature, as per the quote of the title, taken from Cormack McCarthy's 'The Road' whose final paragraph depicts the act of catching the flashing dappled trout as an image of intense living. The gazebo frame on the marsh in which a girl seems to sob recall the grid Bacon placed his anguished people. A girl stands in a sheet of water on a thing like a large military wheel. She has butter on her hands. Will the birds eat her?

The pictures are primarily beguilingly beautiful, but beyond this they are fastidiously constructed. I have to declare an interest - I've often sat in on Frances's post-shoot selection, pouring over each shaft light, turn of the head, looming of the clouds. Everything is deliberate, even the accidents. The composition and its components are comparable to Dutch still lives in which each object is loaded - the half-peeled lemon, the glass, the crumpled cloth.

Make sure you don't miss this really gorgeous exhibition by one of Norfolk's most talented and distinguished artists.

Next week's review: Colin Wilkin at St Jude's Gallery

In the NAC bar while it was still quiet

2009-07-12T08:28:00.000-07:00

Early in the evening before a great sticky nattering crowd rambled in after the opening of EAST International. Among them was Gustav Meitger, whose solo exhibition 'Decades' will open at the Serpentine in September; Linda Morris, luminous grande dame of Norwich Gallery; 2 Neutrinos, many vegetarians, and one of my sons who wanted to borrow a fiver,

People

2009-07-12T08:20:00.000-07:00

Designer Jenny Hudson (rear), Sarah Wigglesworth, architect of famous Metropolitan straw bale house, and husband Jeremy.

Opening view of Frances Kearney's solo show at Norwich Arts Centre - launch party for Contemporary Art Norwich 09. Part of Frances's glass obscures SCVA's Amanda Geitner chatting to artist Chloe Mandy. Take my word for it.

Landscape Exhibition and Painting Class at Bayfield Hall

2009-07-07T04:54:00.001-07:00

The latest venture by the Queen of Hungary gallery is 'Gathering Storm', an exhibition of 7 landscape painters at Bayfield Hall, Norfolk, which opens on Saturday 19th September. Selected by Amanda Geitner, Head of Exhibitions at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Art, and Frances Kearney, whose solo exhibition at Norwich Arts Centre is one of the highlights of CAN 09. Artists include Emily Cole, Chloe Mandy, Chloe Steele, James Hawke, Emily Jo Sargent, Jin Lee and Rob Stockton.

There will also be a 2 day course oflandscape painting given by Chloe Mandy, a curator's talk on Saturday and a childrens' workshop on Sunday. To subscribe to the course and for all other details go to www.stephaniedouet.com

Opening performance at the Queen of Hungary

2009-07-07T04:09:00.000-07:00

I'd met Sandra when we were in a show in Sheffield and thought her work incredibly interesting. She came over from Belfast specially to make the work for the gallery's opening exhibition in 2001.

In Sandra's show, her performance was live-streamed from the cellar into Norwich Arts Centre's auditorium before we moved into the actual building where Sandra began her unforgettable performance stretched shelf-like against the wall, as in the photo. She is utterly brilliant and one of the Live Art scene's stars.

Norwich Arts Centre was absolutely wonderful all the years the gallery ran, patiently lending equipment, advice and support.

Outside the Queen of Hungary

2009-07-07T03:53:00.000-07:00

In 2004 we could no longer let people into the building (insurance costs). Dominique Rey and I put on a series of shows that could be seen from the street - 'Onlooking'. It was an effective way to show work, with information about the artists printed on the door and an opening view to kick off with.
Jerwood Sculpture Prize winner Benedict Carpenter showed new sculpture while Chris Jackson made an amazing cave which half-filled the space with a greyish gloom.
Graham Seaton, short-liste for the Jerwood Sculpture Prize in 2008, made this miniature city in the picture.

The cellar at the Queen of Hungary

2009-07-07T00:36:00.000-07:00

The Queen of Hungary is owned by an Atmospheric chemist and his Minnesotan wife who incredibly kindly let me use their home for site-specific installations.

It is a medieval weavers' hall whose cellar dates back to medieval times, and has original earth floors and flinty walls. The steel plate at the back is pitted with bullet holes from its time as a target for a Boys' Brigade in WW2.

Ally Wallace showed a massive polythene sheet filled with air by a circulating fan that bulged in waves like a giant larva.
Gayle Chong Kwan projected a video she'd made woith a local line-dancing club with the staccato sound of tapping feet like gunfire.

The Queen of Hungary reviews

More Gathering Storm photos

'Gathering Storm' at Bayfield Hall

There is no such word as PERFORMATIVE

Outhouse

Outhouse

Colin Wilkin: Recent Paintings at St Jude's Gallery

More coming reviews and a question

Frances Kearney: Untitled III and IV

Review of Frances Kearney's exhibition Fishing for Trout

In the NAC bar while it was still quiet

People

Landscape Exhibition and Painting Class at Bayfield Hall

Opening performance at the Queen of Hungary

Outside the Queen of Hungary

The cellar at the Queen of Hungary