Ed Clark, Without a Doubt, Hauser & Wirth, London

Ed Clark, Untitled (Paris), 1998

Before going to see the Ed Clark exhibition at Hauser & Wirth's Saville Row space, I was convinced I would find something familiar. Even though I didn't know Clark's work, I thought "how different can it be?" New York School emerging in the 1950s, working in the 1970s and 1980s, pushing painting. beyond abstraction ... it all sounded like something I knew well. 

Ed Clark, Without a Doubt
Installation View, Hauser & Wirth

However, the work turned out to be different from what I was expecting.The surprise in the painting comes in the frequently hard lines of the stroke and the rainbow of colours inside those lines. The colours and composition were familiar —blues, pinks, some spectacular reds moving across the horizontal line of the canvas. In some paintings the movement was on the vertical, or in curvature, always stopping short of connection with other colours and other movements.The innovation of the movement's direction was curious and gave pause for reflection. But what makes Clark's brushstroke special is its application. 

Ed Clark, Untitled, 1996

Clark pours multi-coloured paint and then uses a household broom to sweep swathes of thick oil paint across, up and down and around the canvas What the art world knows as Clark's "big sweep" results in wide multi-coloured strokes in which purples, greens, yellows, greys appear out of opposite and unrelated colours to surprise us. Though, at first sighting, it seems as though the unexpected colours emerge from the crevices of the main colour, when we realize that Clark has swept the paints with a broom, the painting starts to makes sense. This is how he has produced the distinct line that cuts through many of the images.

Ed Clark, Paris Gothic, 1993

As I walked around Hauser and Wirth's gallery, I couldn't help thinking of Mondrian's sea compositions. While Mondrian's canvases were muted and limited in palette, the shape and composition seems like the obvious precursor to Clark's. The oval composed on the vertical, that strange, in between shape that is neither circle nor oblong is the shape that Mondrian used a century ago to challenge the conventions of composition. As early as 1911, he painted within an oval matte, and then by 1914, the edges of the oval themselves had become blurred. Clark similarly pushes at the limits and boundaries of the expectations of painting. He becomes one of the first artists to paint on shaped canvases. Assuming that Clark had his supports custom made, I was reminded also of his distance from the gestural marks of painting so beloved by his fellow Abstract Expressionists.  

Ed Clark, Untitled, 1976

Brooms and buckets, together with custom made frames should produce an aesthetic of coldness and remove. Yet, they are warm and sensuous, reminding us of sun rises and sunsets over the ocean. Thus, what makes the paintings unexpected and unique is that the application of paint, and the sometimes aggressive changes he makes to the canvas add up to something quite different again: these paintings are nuanced and lush, reminding of nature, where their technique would logically suggest the very opposite. 

Lubaina Himid @ Tate Modern

Lubaina Himid, Between the Two My Heart is Balanced, 1991

It was a real treat to see this superb exhibition of Lubaina Humid's work on my first visit back at Tate Modern since BC. It was also my first visit to the new wing, and happily, I didn't need to spend much time in the access spaces. While I understand their architectural innovation, they were too far on the dark brick and concrete side to make them anything more than transitional.

Lubaina Himid, Le Rodeur, The Exchange, 2016

The critics have not been kind to Himid or Tate Modern for the exhibition's apparent acquiescence to the institutional demands of art, but I couldn't help thinking these detractors had missed the point of the work. This is not angry, volatile art designed to stir up a revolution. Of course, this lack of attention to racial and colonial politics is what disappoints the gatekeepers of who says what in art today. Himid's are paintings in which people have conversations, in which the interactions between multiple figures are more important than the public impact of their conversations. The paintings are peopled with black people discussing, rather than black and white people arguing or raising fists. Indeed, the absence of white people from the paintings in direct contrast to the near-absence of black people from the exhibition could hardly be missed. Although Himid's work is easier to access, more narrative and efflorescent, I kept sensing that these paintings would juxtapose for their contrast to those of Marlene Dumas or Kerry James Marshall. In Himid's work, there is none of the pain and sorrow of the South African painters. 

Lubaina Himid, Ball on Shipboard, 2018

The exhibition is, like much of Himid's body of work, in many ways, about space. it is about the spaces we occupy, the things with which we fill spaces. The creation and building of space, the conventions and colours of construction, and how we are living in spaces that are given us, rather than spaces we create. The paintings are about how often those spaces don't suit us, don't work for us. Moreover how we are constantly trying to fit into these spaces nevertheless, to change ourselves to fit. Similarly, Himid's painted spaces are about colour. The colours are magnificent, they are very much those of Africa, used to distinguish unfinished spaces, infinite spaces, as well as those that are limiting and falling in on us. The spaces are typically the spaces in which we (especially women) live, but they are also spaces opening up onto public and political life. In The Operating Table, for example, three women discuss a map, the ownership and use of land.

Lubaina Himid, The Operating Table, 2019

One room of the exhibition is given over to blue and the language we use to describe, evoke and recall blue. In a connection to the discourse on space, Himid's reflections on colour are about how blue creates perspective (how we see it/ how we describe it/how we occupy it) depending on our culture and language. The installation shines a light on what we are told of space, what we learn through reading, culture, tradition, and of course, advertising. And then, in the blue room, questions of memory and history are everywhere as they are sequestered in blue furniture, blue objects, fabric from the past. 

Lubaina Himid, Three Architects, 2019

I found the exhibition to be delightful. The brilliant colours are enchanting and uplifting, themselves creating complexity within the image. One of the things that I loved about the groups of people in each painting was that they were never in power struggles and neither were they buying into gender stereotypes. Women discuss what it would be to have had women discover the world, build houses and lead countries. Men meet each other in bars and turn up at the bottom of drawers. Somehow Himid manages to communicate the result of the power and manipulation that is now invisible. Just as it is in the world that we live in.

Lubaina Himid, Tide Change, 1998

In many of Himid's paintings, the sea is the central element. Even when the image depicts people in conversation, at parties, and at work, they are often surrounded by the sea. For Himid, in the presence of the sea, her paintings reveal what is a pivotal concept in her art. The exhibition reveals double-entendres, inviting the visitor to see differently, see things from multiple different perspectives. And we see the ocean from every angle. We see it through windows, as a backdrop to conversations, surrounding a lookout, and even in abstract composition. 

Himid's work may be "old school" as one reviewer for The Guardian put it, or as others have insisted, lacking the cutting edge so key to a growing recognition of racial and cultural identity. But that makes me a fan of the old school. As narratives these paintings take time to digest, to read, to incorporate into our understanding of the way things are. I would rather look at art that makes me think, than art that gives predictable answers to complex contemporary concerns.