Yesterday I finally went to see the Irving Penn exhibition at the National Portrait and boy was it worth the wait! Penn's portraits are absolutely stunning and he has always been a great inspiration to me. With each portrait one could easily tell who the sitter was and learn a little about what they did. Penn manages to get such honesty from the sitter and I felt such an intimacy with the person which I feel many other portrait photographers fail to achieve. I had such a fantastic time and really did not want to leave and definitely bought the catalogue!
However, the catalogue was a little disappointing compared to how great the exhibition was. It didn't contain the whole exhibition and some of my favourite images weren't included. Although Irving Penn's other books are definitely a lot more successful in my opinion, this one was still worth buying just as a momentum of the exhibition as unfortunately there were no postcards of it for a sale, which I was a little annoyed about as I like to collect a few postcards of my favourite images from any exhibitions I go to. The exhibition is only on for another few weeks and so I encourage anyone and everyone who gets a chance to go see it!
I also visited the Tate Modern as I hadn't been there for a while and always love the variety of exhibitions they have on as well as their permanent exhibition, which is always worth going back to! There wasn't anything in particular I went to see but two exhibitions were really enjoyable. The first was "Van Doesburg and the International Avant-Garde - Constructing a New World"
which I knew nothing of and suprised me at how much I liked it! It was a unique and exciting chance for van Doesburg's work to be seen for the first time in the UK and his follows in the footsteps of a series of exhibitions looking at different aspects of Modernism, conceived by Vicente Todolí, Director of Tate Modern. "Van Doesburg, who worked in disciplines within art, design and text, founded the far-reaching movement and magazine De Stijl. This artistic movement of painters, architects and designers sought to build a new society in the aftermath of World War I, advocating an international style of art and design based on a strict geometry of horizontals and verticals.
Van Doesburg travelled extensively in Europe in the 1920s making connections and collaborating with avant-garde contemporaries of the time. This exhibition explores Doesburg's role as promoter of Dutch Neoplasticism, his Dada personality, his efforts to influence the Bauhaus, his links with international Constructivists, and his creation of the group Art Concret. Including over 350 works (many unseen in the UK before) by key artists as Jean Arp, Constantin Brancusi, László Moholy-Nagy, Piet Mondrian, Francis Picabia, Gerrit Rietveld, Kurt Schwitters and Sophie Taeuber, the exhibition features van Doesburg's rarely-seen Counter-Composition paintings and designs for the Café Aubette in Strasbourg, furniture such as Rietveld's iconic Red-Blue chair, as well as typography, magazines, stained glass, film, music, sculpture and more."
The exhibition was colourful, experimental and exciting and I ended up buying the catalogue as I wanted to learn more about this 'Avant-Garde' art movement that I knew nothing of. Although I was not familiar with his work I had seen some exhibitions from others also showcased like Piet Mondrian and Francias Picabia, but otherwise was clueless about the movement and the other artists. Again this was an exhibition worth seeing, full of sculptures, films, paintings and a whole mix of different art media. I throughly enjoyed it and recommend it to others but hurry it ends on the 16th May!
The other artist was Simryn Gill who had a room containing her current project "Dalam" which situated within the exhibition entitled "Photographic Typologies". The five-room display gathers a range of artists who use photography to approach a topic or theme systematically, creating multiple images of similar subjects.
Gill's display "Dalam" was a room filled with many pictures of various rooms. The rooms were all photographed in the same medium format, from the same height and the same lighting. The 258 photographs that form Dalam, (Malay for deep; inside; interior), are the outcome of Simryn Gill’s travel across the Malaysian Peninsula over an 8 week period. Gill knocked on the doors of strangers and asked if she could enter their houses to photograph their living rooms. Perhaps surprisingly, most said yes, and the resulting works are a fascinating index of how people live as well as conveying why the artist undertook this project.
The project was a fascinating documentation of people's homes and I loved the whole concept and technicalities behind the body of work. However I thought the way the photographs were displayed in the Tate Modern was a little... well sloppy. Each images top corners were nailed to the wall and whilst I liked the simplicity of the display, I felt that all four corners should have been secured down as the bottom was flapping away from the wall which slightly ruined the impact from the mass of images. Yet still a fantastic project with a great idea and wonderfully colourful images. Another exhibitions worth seeing and I will definitely be looking up more of Gill's work.
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