Last Week: Tallis, Pangaea II and Alchemy

Ephrem Solomon

 Sunday lunchtime , listening  on  Radio 3  to the recording of the Thomas Tallis lunchtime concert  we went to last Monday at the Cadogan Hall.  While lovely to hear again, the live performance, especially of Spem in Alium,  was  spine tingling.
After the concert  and  a late lunch, while we were in Chelsea, we went to the Saatchi Gallery - some  interesting work in exhibition 'Pangaea II', my favourites the  woodcuts of Ephrem Solomon referencing Ethiopian society  and the isolation of the human figure

Eddy Ilinga Kamuanga

 

African fabrics: in Kamuanga's paintings  ( above) of the contemporary cultural diversity of Kinshasa  and traded old clothes from market sellers  stitched  by Mahama onto  old cocoa bean jute sacks (below) used to bag farm produce and charcoal. The catalogue refers to the importance of the personalised exchange and the meanings acquired by material over time - reminding me of  Boro  

 

Ibriham Mahama

Armound Boua

Powerful paintings  of forgotten children painted in acrylic and tar on cardboard boxes  then torn scratched, erased.

Alejandra Ospina

 

Paintings of calligraphic marks constructed  from layers of images found on internet, reconstructed into abstract associations, exploring ideas on how the internet has transformed our relationship to images, space, a networked world of information and consumption.  



Diega Mendoza  Imbachi

 Very large scale drawings in pencil and graphite, recording changes to the landscape in Columbia  with the impact of industrialisation 

 

 Upstairs  in a separate exhibition on death, the 'stars' of  Pangaea I, the ant forms of Rafael Gómezbarros, have been rehoused  in a small room. Very creepy (not referring to Ian)

 On Tuesday, I finally got round to another museum  sketching session in the company of Margaret Cooter and co , back at the Wellcome Collection. We were based in the reading Room, home of the amulets.  Many of the displays  were quite high up  in cases but  I found a good position at a table in the section on alchemy,  attempting to capture in graphite the differences in surface between the glass flasks  ( above) and wooden pestle and mortars ( below)   without getting a crick in my neck!

 Since then it's been dental appointments, a funeral, house hunting in Faversham  and keeping the house tidy for viewings.

Proms and Paper

Yesterday  we went to out first Prom of the season - a Saturday Matinee at the Cadogan Hall near Sloane Square . Sarah Connolly has an amazing mezzo voice,  singing in 'Pheadra's Frock' borrowed from the production at Glyndebourne.  Afterwards, as in previous years we went to the nearby  Saatchi Gallery, where Ian bought me a colourful pair of artists brush earrings to wear on my painting holiday next week! The exhibition on 'paper' was thought provoking: used in so many ways from large scale drawings of overlapping pieces;  collage; paintings  to puppets, papercuts and diverse sculptures

Trees featured heavily from 'branches' made of layers of newsprint to delicate paper-cuts from paper bags(  I'll never look at a McDonalds bag in quite the same way again)

The structure made of kites had the wow factor.

I would have liked to have had more time to look at the suspended city made of tracing paper but the gallery was closing  and we were racing round to have a glimpse of everything  before they chucked us out ( we have a bit of a track record in that regard!)

Strangest and most intriguing was this papier mache boulder attached to the wall suspending belief.