Review: Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2010, A Foundation Liverpool

By Kenn Taylor

Bloomberg New Contemporaries is an open-submission showcase for art students and recent graduates, which takes emerging artists and their works out of the educational realm and places them within the framework of the “real” art world. The exhibition has a long-established pedigree, having been in existence in various forms since 1949, and it provides a rare opportunity for early career artists to get their work shown in a professional gallery context.

In 1996 the exhibition premiered in Liverpool, before touring to London and other venues across the country. Part of this year’s Liverpool Biennial, the show is once again airing at A Foundation, consistently one of Liverpool’s most satisfying contemporary art spaces.

Inevitably, with such a variety of work and artists on display, the exhibition feels like a graduate show, albeit a high quality one. This is however, not necessarily a bad thing, and it’s a refreshing exhibition. A Foundation’s huge Coach Shed Gallery is large enough to give generous space to each of the 49 artists featured.

A highlight is Sam Knowles’ series of works, which utilise the aesthetics of space. In Field (2009) star systems are painted over dozens of pages from books: novels, works of anthropology, philosophy and science. Elsewhere A Sectional View of the Endless Immensity (2009) is a complex map laying out an outline of both the mind and the universe. Reflecting on how we attempt to reduce the enormity of existence to technical diagrams and descriptions, it’s a complex, understated and arresting series of works.

Kiwoun Shin’s Dis_illusion_Coin_Faces (2010) features close-ups of various international coins being ground down. It is a particularly memorable piece, because it is simultaneously straightforward and yet uncompromisingly epic. Dis_illusion_Coin_Faces is continuously fascinating to watch, as symbols of power and wealth are repeatedly and relentlessly reduced to dust.

Another stalwart is the time-based work of Greta Alfaro. In Ictu Oculi (2009) unfolds as a static camera documents a flock of vultures descending upon and devouring a lavish banquet laid out on a table in barren countryside. The film is both engrossing and disturbing to watch, as domestic subtly is subjected to brutal animal reality.

Nick Mobb’s large photographs of sofas stuffed in doorways make the ordinary and industrial seem organic and uncanny. Elsewhere, Joe Clark’s mixed media piece Somewhere in West Virginia (2009) requires time in order to understand exactly how the “Mousetrap-like” set-up produces the image on view. Technical quality aside, the vision is atmospheric, but might have benefited from a darker, more isolated location.

Chris Shaw Hughes’ carbon drawings of aerial scenes, from petrochemical plants to housing estates are technical marvels, creating a shift in perception that makes the mundane monumental. At the opposite end of the drawing scale, Naomi Uchida’s Doodles on National Treasure Project (2010) is a surreal and finely drawn amalgam of fiction, fantasy and folklore, with the look of an ancient scroll created by an oddly contemporary hand.

New Contemporaries is a timely survey of upcoming talent, and it is encouraging to see the work of new artists given a decent platform, demonstrating that there are plenty of raw, talented artists to watch out for in the future.

New Contemporaries continues in Liverpool until 13 November www.afoundation.org.uk and then continues to the ICA in London (26th November 2010 - 16 January 2011)

Image:
(c)Greta Alfaro
In Ictu Oculi (2009)
Medium: Single channel video (HDV, 16:9, colour, sound)
Duration: 10'53''

Gallery Update: TOM WESSELMANN at Haunch of Venison, London

TOM WESSELMANN: Works 1958–2004 opened earlier this month in London at Haunch of Venison, marking the most extensive exhibition of his work to date in the UK

Tom Wesselmann (1931-2004), the American painter, sculptor and print maker, is widely regarded as one of the leading figures of American Pop Art. Bringing together a selection of major paintings and drawings from across his career, the exhibition spans four decades, and examines the evolution of Wesselmann’s style, revealing his openness to a range of subject matter, scale and media.

Tom Wesselmann had planned to become a cartoonist, but while a student at the Cooper Union, the powerful work of Willem de Kooning provided both inspiration and inhibition as he attempted to find a new direction centred on a tangible subject. He rejected abstract expressionism in favour of the classical representations of the nude, still life, and land?scape. He created collages and assemblages incorporating everyday objects and advertising ephemera in an effort to make images as powerful as the abstract expressionism he admired. Among the works in the exhibition are several of Wesselmann’s iconic paintings, from the Great American Nude series which he began in 1961, including Great American Nude #53 (1964) an accentuated and sensual nude study against the background of a typical American interior.

In the 1970s, Wesselmann continued to explore the ideas and media which had preoccupied him during the 1960s. Most significantly, his large Standing Still Life series, composed of free standing shaped canvases, showing small intimate objects on a grand scale. He made Still Life #59 (1972), a canvas of five panels that form a large, complex dimensional, freestanding painting: here too the elements are enlarged, and part of a telephone can be seen. A nail-polish bottle is tipped up on one side, and there is a vase of roses with a crumpled handkerchief next to it, and the framed portrait of a woman, actress Mary Tyler Moore whom Wesselmann considered as the ideal prototype girlfriend.

In 1980 he embarked on the Bedroom Painting series, in which elements of the Great American Nude and Still Lifes were juxtaposed. With these works Wesselmann began to concentrate on a few details of the figure such as hands, feet, and breasts, surrounded by flowers and objects. He continued exploring shaped canvases (first exhibited in the 1960s) and began creating his first works in metal. In Bedroom Face with Lichtenstein (1988/9) he instigated the development of a laser-cutting application, which would allow him to make a faithful translation of his drawings in cut-out metal at a larger scale. For Wesselmann: “It was like a miracle, to be able to hold this unit of spidery lines, as though it were a drawing that had just been picked up by the lines and removed, intact, from the paper”. The exhibition will also feature works from the 1990s and early 2000s which saw Wesselmann creating abstract three-dimensional images that he described as “going back to what I had desperately been aiming for in 1959.” He had indeed come full circle. In his final years he returned to the female form in his ‘Sunset Nudes’ series of oil paintings on canvas, whose bold compositions, abstract imagery, and sanguine moods often recall the odalisques of Henri Matisse.

This fantastic show continues until 4 November. www.hofv.com

Image:
Tom Wesselmann
Great American Nude #53(1964)
Oil and collage on canvas
259.1 x 243.8 cm
© Tom Wesselmann
Courtesy Haunch of Venison

Art & the Owner

In the early 20th century, Duchamp posed the question of ownership in art and yet despite all the ensuing discussions surrounding postmodernism, authorship and everything else in between, something has been lost; just because the work of art has become part of a Baudrillardian network of signs and significations, that is not to say that the potential for an autonomous or original form is a thing of the past.

Tenderpixel Gallery’s current exhibition What’s Yours Is Mine by Roisin Byrne & Duncan Wooldridge addresses this point as it focuses on questions relating to access, possession and ownership in an altered context. Depicting the shift in art practice where ideas become common property that can be invoked, adapted and absorbed, both artists are interested in seeking out what lies beyond the dominant theorizations of appropriation.

In What’s Yours is Mine, both Byrne and Wooldridge focus on the secondary sources that have become a dominant source for obtaining information about the world. This intertextual material, mediated through web-sites and search engines, as well as books and other printed matter, creates fragmented, often unreliable or contestable narratives that the reader is obliged to piece together. Through different methods and using different tools, the artists pose important questions relating to access, possession and ownership.

What’s Yours is Mine features two new commissions that bring together the artists’ interests in the historical and conceptual consequences of artistic gestures- what an artwork makes possible, whether planned or unforeseen.



For Wooldridge, the contingency of the creative act and the potential of repetition are core concerns. For Tenderpixel, Wooldridge will present a new work from his ongoing series DIY IKB in which he attempts to match Yves Klein’s infamous International Klein Blue using commercially available paint-mixing machines. Colours, for Wooldridge, become a tool for the representation of the intangible and whilst Dulux colour charts standardise, DIY IKB challenges not only our chromatic experience but explores the gesture behind the work; gestures which can be radical in their intent, and playful in their rupturing of our relationship with the photographic image.

In Goldenie Brown, Byrne presents us with a holiday snap with hidden meaning. Throughout the months of April, May and June 2010, Byrne became preoccupied with the idea of becoming a piece of work. Presenting herself to the highly acclaimed Santiago Sierra enquiring after a work of his from 2000 in which he paid 4 women to take part in one of his installation pieces; tattooing a straight line horizontally across each of their backs, Byrne travelled immediately to Spain (is Byrne sponsored by Ryanair one might ask?) and a work of art was transferred from one body to another.

Controversial, challenging and well-documented, this exhibition disrupts the relationship between audience and performer and whilst the ideas are complex, they are truly engaging, oddly moving and beautiful.

What’s Yours is Mine runs from 7-30th October 2010, Tenderpixel Gallery, 10 Cecil Court, London. For more information please visit www.tenderpixel.com.

By Bethany Rex

Image:
Rosin Byrne, Goldenie Brown
Duncan Wooldridge, DIY IKB
Images Courtesy of Tenderpixel Gallery