Douglas Gordon: K.364 Douglas Gordon's first foray into feature film-making, Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, was an arthouse hit. Even critics loved his multi-camera tribute to the French footballer. Shot during a single game it was a vision of fleeting human achievement. His second feature, K.364, is something darker and more complex: a portrait that explores the great trauma of the 20th century. Its fragmented narrative follows two young Israeli musicians with Polish ancestors as they travel from Berlin to Warsaw through a landscape marked by the Holocaust, including a synagogue still used as a swimming pool in Poznan. As they perform Mozart's titular composition or muse on qualities of music, the present is weighed against the intractable burden of cultural memory.
Gagosian Britannia Street, WC1, Sat to 26 Mar
Skye Sherwin
Well, if Gauguin was right in stating that "nothing so resembles a daub as a masterpiece", then David Hockney's Bigger Trees Near Warter (Warter is in fact a place in the Yorkshire Wolds) could well be either. Certainly it's a glorious monstrosity, hanging at 15 feet high and 40 feet long, a composite of 50 canvases painted on site. There's something of an elderly artist's daring about the monumental image. So, old-timer Hockney returns to rediscover his Yorkshire home county after all his trendsetting adventures with some kind of second-childhood innocence.
York Art Gallery, to 12 Jun
Robert Clark
The notion that leaving something to the imagination gets our desire ticking has long obsessed Portuguese artist Julião Sarmento. The woman who has appeared in little black dresses in his black-and-white paintings for 25 years is particularly unattainable: she's missing her head. Painted and drawn, the outline of her limbs often smudges or even vanishes too. This blurring of boundaries is all about transgression, a chief concern of philosopher George Bataille, whose writings on eroticism are often referenced in Sarmento's work. His latest show is something of a departure: canvasses are shaken up with vivid drips of red, yellow and blue, while modernist buildings seem to float in psychological limbo and wispy body parts all but evaporate into the paint.
Pilar Corias Gallery,W1, Wed to 19 Mar
SS
About time too that the internationally renowned French artist Jean-Marc Bustamante gets a look-in in the UK with this extensive show and an overlapping one at the Leeds Henry Moore Institute in April. Bustamante's art is a highly subtle affair in which the ordinary is afforded an extraordinary significance by the hypnotic insistence of his camera. Architectural images are transferred to silkscreen and printed on Plexiglass to achieve a misty and moody ambiguity. Then there are the architectural sculptures and abstract paintings. Bustamante cleverly sidesteps easy definition, but what he is up to is mesmerising.
Fruitmarket Gallery, to 3 Apr
RC
Michael Craig Martin's Alphabet Series is a game of words and pictures. The Pantone-bright screenprints, ripe with oranges, blues and pinks, make an irregular A-Z. Letters are paired with 26 of the linear drawings of everyday stuff. But the visuals don't match up in the way you'd expect. Instead of A for apple, the initial letter is overlaid with a picture of an umbrella. A for accessory, then. B gets a wineglass for beverage or booze. C is a knife for cut, carve-up or carnage. It goes on, every bit as fun, fast and flat as you'd expect from this artist who has made the shifting surfaces of banal consumer culture his playground.
The Burton Art Gallery & Museum, to 14 Mar
SS
Johanna Domke infiltrates the collection of Derby Musem And Art Gallery and the Pickford's House museum with a series of touching tableaux. The most fitting nooks and crannies are sought out for her little sculptural figures to attain maximum tearful affect. There is an air of Victorian sentimentality and retro-dressed nostalgia about her scenarios as clay children play hide and seek amid the quaint 18th-century domesticity of Pickford's House and a lone female figure draped in dated clothing sits gazing wistfully amid the proud selection of brooding Joseph Wright of Derbys in the Art Gallery. Here's another forlorn child perched on the stairs next to a pile of sculpted school books. Domke's earthly grey protagonists seem like perfectly appropriate hauntings to momentarily re-enliven the predictable mustiness of a typical provincial and far from modernistic permanent collection.
Derby Museum And Art Gallery and Pickford's House, to 30 Jun
RC
Watercolour has a reputation for being a bit of a soft touch: oil is for proper painting, while poor old watercolour gets sidelined as the quaint preserve of Sunday painters. This show aims to rescue the wishy-washy medium from such unjust slander, exploring its history from medieval illuminated manuscripts through to creations by the likes of Peter Doig or Howard Hodgkin. Rare gems on show include William Blake's visions of angels and alternative creation myths, where pale wash is held by inky lines; Aubrey Beardsley's subtly saucy woman equestrian dominating her careening ride with crop in hand, and maritime scenes made in Bedlam by schizophrenic Victorian painter Richard Dadd, best known for his hallucinogenic fairy painting.
Tate Britain, SW1, Wed to 21 Aug
SS
A beautiful enigma of an installation. After years of experimentally using her body as a camera, Seers has made work of rare narrative charm. Cryptically titled It Has To Be This Way2, the film kicks off with the alarming sentence, "I was her mother but she was never my daughter and now she has gone missing, I can honestly say I never loved her." The setting itself is peculiar as the film is projected onto a circular screen inside a structure apparently based on a Swedish fort on the West African Gold Coast. Tales of diamond smuggling accompany the central theme of the disappearance of the artist's stepsister, as the air of poetic reverie leaves one with a distinct uncertainty as what is fact and what is not.
BALTIC, to 12 Jun
RC
No comments:
Post a Comment