Gerhard Richter: Drawings @ Hayward Gallery

Gerhard Richter, 22. Juli 2020, 2020

This small exhibition in the HENI Project Space at the Hayward Gallery offers a peaceful respite from the crowds milling around the Southbank Centre. Surrounded by this series of drawings and watercolours, it felt like I was seeing Richter, the old man still thinking about issues that have preoccupied him for over six decades. The works are, in the vein of pencil drawing as a medium, very delicate. Nevertheless, they are filled with familiar scratchings and scrapings, erasure and redrawing that we know from Richter's paintings. Similarly, the rubbing of the pencil sketches so that the definition of the line is smudged remind of the characteristic obfuscations of his paintings. 

Gerhard Richter, 24 juli 2020, 2020

In some of the scrawls and scratches we see faces beginning to emerge, reminding of those faces and figures studied in the drawings of Leonardo. Pensive faces, gaping mouthed cherubs and hands, eyes, noses, in the same way that artists have practiced these forms in their drawings over centuries. This debt  to the renaissance masters and their use of the drawing as a medium to explore the possibilities of expressing emotion has to be a conscious exploration. It is as though Richter asks this question (like he does in his paintings): what is this medium I am using? What is drawing? In many ways, Richter explores the medium what drawing is, as if it were a painting. Line is not a simple, one dimensional phenomenon in Richter's drawings. Line is heavy and straight, it is gentle and flowing, dark and airy, shown through multiple different intensities of the pencil. In addition, there are multiple forms of line, multiple meanings of line: scraggy, confident, rethought, playful.

Gerhard Richter, 27.4.99 (1), 1999

He also includes interesting explorations of time and space. Space in the drawings is fragmented, reflected, refracted, made multi-dimensional and superficial, it is created and destroyed, but space is always multiplied, though not necessarily in a geometry and dimension that we can compute. In this play with space on the paper, we see Richter push his art into abstraction. 

Gerhard Richter, 31.08.2008, 2008

Included in the exhibition are a handful overpainted photographs. If I didn't know how involved Richter was in his exhibitions, I might have assumed that the gallery's curator had added these works out of some unexplained desire to confuse. But Richter has surely included the overpainted photographs to push still more insistently at the definition of what a drawing is. By placing them in an exhibition of drawings, they question the definition of a photograph. Is a photograph a form of drawing, preparation for a larger, more ambitious (and colourful) work to come? Is photography the way to engage with the history of painting and representation? Again, we find the process of erasing, smearing, obscuring through the use of grey paint over a photograph that he uses in the drawings. For Richter, the photograph as support for painting or drawing as an idea for painting puts the emphasis on the process, the application of the medium. This enquiry is as important as the questions that surface about definition of the medium itself. 

Gerhard Richter,  21.11.2017, 2017

If Anish Kapoor spent his lockdown reflecting on the violence and rage of the world in which we are living, as well as the need to bring animals and humans inside out and drag them through their undoing in the abattoir, Richter spent his in a very different way. The old man approaching the end of his life was deep in thought about his medium, about representation, about the impossibility and unfinishedness of all expression. 

Alex Katz, Mondes Flottants, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Pantin

 

Alex Katz, Floating Worlds, Installation

Thaddaeus Ropac, Pantin

I have never been a big Alex Katz fan. I know that he's an important 20th century painter, and that the high society women in sometimes gaudy colours are sophisticated critiques of capitalism and the art market. But, there's something about the hyperrealism that I find off putting. The works in current exhibition at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac's Pantin space are, however, a different story. The paintings of water of different types, in different states are mesmerizing, even when they are painted in glaring blues and greens.

Alex Katz, Hommage to Monet, 5, 2009

A few of the works in the exhibition include people. I couldn't help notice how the human figures interrupt the cool, flow of the water. The human disturbs the expanse of blue that is nature's existence. Even though Katz painted these reflective works a decade ago, I was struck by their resonance with today's alerts for our devastation of the environment. In works such as People (2012) featuring people, the bathers horizontally dissect the water, interrupting, the figures seemingly conversing, playing, bathing, create a wave around them. The peaceful aqua blue of the sea is forced to change direction, lap around them.

Alex Katz, Reflection with Lilies, 2010

The paintings are also about reflection, about light as it dances across the surface of the water, and in this, the water, comes together with paint. The sea and painting have been partners in exploration of the limits of what we see and know. For centuries, artists have used the sea as a way to move beyond the human world, and in Katz's works that push is found at the limits of abstraction. Abstraction enabled through the marriage of paint, blue, water and light is brought to the fore of the paintings. Without depth and sometimes without any articulation of orientation or definition of space, we are left looking at the flow of paint that is the flow of the water.

Alex Katz, People, 2012

Another thing that is striking about these works is that we often don't know whether we are looking down at the water, across it. We lose orientation, in space as well as time: is that the moon shining on a night sky reflected in the water? Is it a grey day and raining? Is that a sea covered in mist? Is it a reflection, upside down in a lake? The intrigue and ambiguity of what we see in the image contributes to its oscillation between abstract and figurative. Again, the ambiguity like the abstraction comes in their bringing together of water, paint, perspective and light bounding around the canvas, reflecting and refracting off the water.

Alex katz, Wave 4, 2000

Ultimately, these works are more personal, more intimate, more reflective than anything else I have seen by Katz. And in the oasis that is Thaddaeus Ropac's Pantin gallery, housed in a renovated 19th century red-brick boiler house - its xenethal lighting makes the experience one of a calm, cool summer afternoon, far away from the noise and pollution of the city

Anish Kapoor @ Lisson Gallery

Anish Kapoor
Installation @ 27 Bell Street, London

I opened my London season of gallery visits with Anish Kapoor's latest creations at Lisson Gallery. I can't remember the last time I was so inspired by an exhibition. I realize many people reading this will not get to London to see this exhibition, but hopefully, there will be other opportunities to experience the works. As we walk into Lisson's main gallery space, we are met by Anish Kapoor's Sacrifice (2019). A steel structure draped in red resin that immediately brings associations of the innards of a slaughtered being. Whether that being is animal or human is not so important as we are overwhelmed by the mess of blood still dripping out the gutters that have been installed for this very purpose. The bloody entrails of what we imagine to have been a ritualistic killing—whether of the industrial or mythical kind—globbing and bubbling into their disintegration is gut wrenching. Sacrifice is filled with trauma and the slow painful death that we sense viscerally, even if we do not see the murder taking place. The rest of the exhibition offers no escape from the gaping wounds of a world filled with death, destruction and no promise of rebirth.

Anish Kapoor, Inhuman, 2020

The shapes and forms in sculptural and painted works remind us of things as variant as vaginas, bleeding wombs, monsters running rampant through volcanic landscapes, fire and rage of mythical proportions. The body and the natural landscape join forces in agony, screaming for help, watching their own disintegration at the hands of an unrelenting force. It's mindboggling to think that this is what Kapoor produced in lockdown, while we were all on Zoom meetings, avoiding people in the supermarket and getting depressed on our sofas. 

Anish Kapoor, All There Under my Skin III, 2020

The Lisson gallery flyer mentions Kapoor's engagement with the history of art, reminding us that artists from Leonardo all the way to Francis Bacon have been obsessed with raw flesh and meat. Halfway through the exhibition, it becomes clear that Kapoor is not making vague references to his predecessor's concerns, but rather, that he draws specifically on the work of Francis Bacon, if not others. Kapoor followers will remember the Rijksmuseum's coupling of Kapoor's Internal Object in Three Parts (2013-2015) and Rembrandt's Carcass of an Ox. The artist's debt to Rembrandt is well known. And in the works on view at Lisson Gallery, the debt to Bacon is unmistakeable. Even before seeing the three-dimensional frame in the corners of the untitled works on paper, Bacon's gaping mouths, bleeding wounds, distorted and deformed flesh, screaming with pain are so clearly haunting Kapoor's intense and angry abstract compositions. As much as the triptych Diana Blackened Reddened (2021) might be about fertility and hunting, it is also about Francis Bacon's Second Version Triptych 1944. As Tate's website blurb quotes, Bacon's is a work that reflects "the atrocious world into which we have survived." One gets the feeling that Kapoor's triptych is saying something similar. 

Anish Kapoor
Installation @ 27 Bell Street, London

Francis Bacon, Second Version Triptych, 1944 1988

And then, we must not forget that these works are also about painting. Where the raw flesh of a body slaughtered body hangs limp over an unrelenting steel frame, so paint is filled with emotion and rendered alive in the accompanying paintings. But, by extension, paint is as connected to death in these works as Damien Hirst's Cherry Blossoms are to life. It is as though Kapoor were saying something to the effect of painting cannot be separated from flayed bodies, oozing entrails and violently desecrated souls. Painting is about the destruction of our humanness. In turn, if Kapoor is so intent on seeing our bodies slashed and slammed in the abattoir of existence, then he must also be saying something about the modern condition. Certainly, there is not much to look forward to—unless of course, the pleasures of the flesh are also captured in these visceral distortions. Certainly, the proliferation of bleeding orifices and spewing volcanoes would strongly suggest that death and sex are never far apart.

This exhibition is breathtaking from beginning to end.