Friday, 23 July 2010

Tate Modern

As I was up in town dropping off my Festival Of Quilts entry at Greenwich I took a boat to Bankside and visited Tate Modern as I haven't been for a while. The turbine hall itself is always worth looking in itself as it's so monumental. The Michael Clark Dance Company are currently working there developing a dance piece inspired by it. Seeing him dance as Apollo at Brixton Academy in the 1990's still sticks in my mind so intrigued to see what develops.
Rather then the special exhibitions I concentrated on the collections which are arranged by theme - revisiting infrequently it's interesting to see how they recombine different artworks ( for instance Monet paired with Jackson Pollock!) In 'Energy and Process' I was struck by these huge textile sculptures by Magdalena Abakanowicz , using rope and sisal in what she calls 'Abakans'
In the 'States of Flux' theme , the 'pop' artwork of Jacques Mahe de la Villegle constructed from old posters appealed to me (thinking of all the peeling papers I've been collecting from the hoardings on the Great west Road!)
The 'Material Gestures' theme was where I found most of interest with Anish Kapoor, Victor Pasmore, a quiet room of Agnes Martin and some Rothkos to commune with. Judit Reigl was new to me - the scarred surfaces suggesting archeological layers
The star of the show however was the room of 'Cage' paintings by Gerhard Richter - I spent ages gazing into them seeing all kinds of dreamscapes and landscapes . Best of all there was a book showing the process of painting them - going through all kinds of transitions before the final work was realized - absolutely fascinating.

1 comment:

fabriquefantastique said...

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