Upfest 2013

 

No prizes for guessing what this post is about. It has been an exceptionally busy week for the arts with three posts in the last few days instead of the normal one a week. You're in for a treat with this post as its going to be less words and more images!

 

On a gloriously sunny Sunday I attended Bristol's Upfest (Urban Painting Festival) for the first time. Had only heard about Upfest this year, as happened to know someone in it (name drop alert!), Martin Joiner, whose work I have snapped and included here, thanks to him for the info. Camera in hand I left Temple Meads toward North Street arriving firstly at Dean Lane Skate Park where there was street art going on as far as the eye could see. This was to only be the start of what was the biggest graffiti festival I have ever seen (turns out, that apparently Upfest is the biggest of its kind in Europe?). Running since 2008 this year's Upfest ran for three days over the bank holiday in May 25th -27th and featured over 300 artists painting in venues the length of North Street from the Tobacco Factory, Bar BS3, Spotted Cow and North Street Green. Sponsored by those, 'oh so smooth, beautiful' but expensive POSCA pens (any one who has ever wielded one will know what I mean). The event is free but with money from brochures going towards children's charity NACOA (National Association of Children of Alcoholics).

 

The festival had a really busy but a brilliant atmosphere, especially around the market at the Tobacco Factory which was packed. There's a constant thrum of music from live DJ sets and haze of paint fumes (part of me does wonder on the environmental impact on the fumes...cannot be a good thing) or possibly the 'coolness' that seems to literally linger in the atmosphere; combined with the opportunity to watch paintings in progress in the gardens/buildings and outdoor spaces along the street; all making for a lively experience. Work wise, it seemed to me that there was a lot of text based New York subway style art which I feel is a bit 'old hat' now in the sense it is what graffiti 'used to be expected', but there was also plenty of illustrative and imaginative stuff going on; some representational, some not. Techniques from the more drawing-based and painterly to collage and stencil work varying on ambition and scale. Also encouraging to see mix of ages as well as male and female artists. Overall a really exciting day, not so good that I got pretty sun burnt and possibly intoxicated by the paint spray fumes (which always helps forget the sunburn, I feel!) but still all worth it for a day of seeing some excellent art work. Below are a few out of what could have been many more highlights...

   

 

The large, slightly diseased looking cat is a definite improvement from the sneering green-eyed lady that was there previous.

Some photo-realist work at North Street Green

Up yours, or perhaps down....(Martin Joiner) 



Whilst some of the work is done directly onto buildings or shutters, most is temporary and on boards, like the above. Hence the opportunity to see many artists at work at once.

 

The Upfest gallery

Is this the work of Agent Provocateur? At Bar BS3.



Some more of Martin's handiwork on the shutter of Rare Butchers of Southville.

Graffiti that responds to the place. Same colours-nice!

 

Whilst you may have missed Upfest this year some of the work can still be seen gracing the walls of buildings throughout North Street. And for more info on all of the above please check out:

http://www.upfest.co.uk/



'Passing Through' - The Musgrove Gallery

I'm currently exhibiting a painting made especially for the exhibition, 'Passing Through' at The Musgrove Gallery. All work is for sale. Please check it out!

'Passing Through'

21st May - 15th July

"As you pass through the Musgrove Gallery does something catch your eye or draw your attention? Do you stop and investigate; look and explore? Are you in a hurry and just 'passing through'?"

"The artists have created works which reflect and express ideas of movement, journeys and transportation to echo the movement through the gallery. Many of the works are long and thin, so you can enjoy them as they form part of your journey as you pass through -they almost travel with you!" 

The Musgrove Gallery, First Floor Queens Building, Musgrove Park Hospital, Taunton. TA15DA

www.artforlife.nhs.uk

 

(above) Natalie Parsley 'A Bicycle for Fernand Leger'

 

"In response to the theme of ‘Passing Through’  I wanted to create a new piece of work that explored creating a static image out of parts of bicycles, wheels and gears/cogs from watches as signifiers for time and movement. The resulting painting is a semi-abstract composition influenced in style by the work of Fernand Leger and inspired by shapes derived from the mechanisms of bicycles and clocks."

 

 

 (above) Louise Baker 'Wagon 4'

 

 (above) Linda Mattock 'Spirit Dance Drawing' (Close up)

 

"Drawing on her previous experiences Linda's work is inspired by observations of people, particularly in movement. Using complex layering of marks to capture the illusive and fleeting moment in time, her work produces semi-abstract images that express the energy, atmosphere, drama or stillness of the experience. Works exhibited include studies of broad choreographed movement, as in the drawings and paintings based on concepts and expression of spiritual dance undertaken in St Paul's Cathedral in collaboration with Ballet Rambert."

(above) John Brooks 'Swing Bridge S2'

"My work as an artist/photographer features the world around us viewed in an alternative way, one that seeks out the extraordinary that lies within the ordinary. Parts of the environment by which we are surrounded are often overlooked despite being plainly within our view."

 (above) Lydia Halcrow 'Living map of the city'

"As we walk through a place we leave behind traces of the paths we have taken, spills of food and drinks on the pavement, traces that erode other marks and leave new ones behind as they overlay with other people's journeys on foot. They hint at how we navigate the city, who was here before us, what route they took. My paintings and drawings use layers and erasure to link to the processes at play in the city, developing over time to create an alternative map of a place based on my experience of walking through it, day after day, collecting traces of what people leave behind."

Fixating!

"And now after some thinking, I'd say I'd rather be, A functioning cog in some great machinery serving something beyond me," - Fleet Foxes 'Helplessness Blues'

Discovered this book in Tate St Ives this week, Todd McLellan 'Things come apart'. I'm always on the look out for things that inform my practice and offer new ways into thinking about how I make decisions in my work. Essentially this book is a collection of various everyday objects that have been painstakingly taken apart, piece by piece with every component laid out individually in a grid-like formation whereby it is then photographed. In another series of photos the same components are then dropped and photographed mid-fall, resulting in a fragmented image that looks like a distorted almost Cubist version of the original thing.

Need I elaborate more as to why I am particularly interested in this book? I will anyway. The images in this book are visually beautiful in their crispness and forensic-like accuracy in how they've been executed as a result they are also mesmerisingly captivating; just seeing the number of pieces alone that make up what seem to be fairly simple objects such as a mechanical pencil, a torch and padlock makes one realise the intricacy, attention to detail and engineering that goes into the most everyday of things. I ponder if that is the 'art' of good design and engineering; that things appear simple in their design but are in fact complicated in their simplicity through either many parts that make up the whole or the engineering that has been undertaken to get to that 'essential' form.

Pah! But less about design and more about the art.

It also unravels some of the mystery of, 'how things work', each bit having to work with another in order for any function to happen at all and without going into it too deeply here, the metaphorical associations that it implies around ideas of how people/society/governments etc function is also very interesting (if not rather more deep, and problematic when I only intended on keeping this brief!). This is a book for anyone that has ever found a screw, washer, pin, cog and said, "I wonder where this goes?" Its for those who like to stare in awe at hundreds of bits and pieces, not knowing how they come together and think, 'Wow, that's an IPad?!' Its for devourers of shape and form, like me (I am beginning to realise that it is 'shape' that makes me tick, in the same way that some artists are entranced by colour, surface, line, pattern or texture. I am drawn in by the shape of things, their form and the negative space they create against another shape. Don't get me wrong, I'm still interested in colour, line and surface as well, but I really think that its shape that is the first thing that I look for when choosing something to draw or that I find aesthetically pleasing). I am in luck as there are shapes in abundance here, this book offers up a cornucopia of shapes. Similarly, the way in which the pieces have been displayed (as I already mentioned) gridded and in an order of sorts. Each piece gains an importance/status of its own like a fragmented relic to which the presentation looks like one of archaeology or archiving. How do we interpret these objects? Do we see them in formalistic terms as a series shapes of colour and surface? (I'm reminded of the flat pack style paintings of Frank Stella) Or if you didn't know the original form that these components made then how would you read each piece, what new possibilities and functions could be created from those same bits? See also artists, Mark Dion, Lisa Milroy and Sophie Calle if this sort of thing appeals.

Perhaps the other important thing this book highlights is our desire/need to understand, make and fix things and sets a challenge of, 'if it can be taken apart -then so it can be reassembled together' as a way of addressing 'throw-away' culture. In short, if you could see all the bits that went into making that toaster would you be so quick to throw it away when it stops working? Similarly, if offers an appreciation for the objects it depicts that extends the idea of 'only noticing an object when it stops working' when in fact should we notice/appreciate them more when they are working? See Richard Sennett, 'The Craftsman' and Matthew Crawford, 'The Case for working with your hands'.

I'll never look at flat-pack furniture with the same degree of annoyance ever again!  

Check out the artist's website at: http://www.toddmclellan.com/thingscomeapart

Spike Island -Jessica Warboys

Sunday 5th May - Jessica Warboys' 'Ab Ovo'

 

 Jessica Warboys’ paintings (although she doesn’t consider herself a painter and some of the work is film/sculptural) are on display in the Spike gallery space until June 16^th. Featuring three large ‘Sea Paintings’ of unstretched/unframed canvas that were made whilst the artist lived in Cornwall using the sea to soak the canvas and scattering pigment over them before returning them to the sea to be ‘set’ by the salt water. The description that they [the sea paintings] become, ‘records of their own making’ affected by the saltiness of the water and topography of the beach as it picks up folds and creases on its surface is interesting and can be seen in the staining and incidental-looking mark making in the work. Monumental in scale, like Rothko’s that had been taken for a walk, I can only imagine what it must have been like to physically haul these out of a wavey Cornish sea. The canvases are grounded in how they are hung in the gallery space, touching the floor as though re-connecting them with the earth and I particularly I enjoyed the way they were hung on the wall, no stretchers, frames or mount board –they were simply tacked to the wall with staples and it was this kind of low-tech approach that made them all the more earnest and appealing in my view.  I didn’t dwell so long on the films and sculptural works in this exhibition, preferring to immerse myself in the pigmented, sculptural surfaces of the canvases.

Get Connected!

Wonderful! Its that time of year again, for end of year shows -please go and check it out!

 

Connected
Fine Art Foundation Degree Show
Discover emerging artists from Somerset College

 

 

The Market House (side entrance)
Fore Street, Taunton, Somerset TA11JD
Viewing Hours:
4th -11th May 2013
Monday-Saturday 10am - 6pm (Closed Sunday)

Kurt Schwitters - What a load of rubbish!

A couple of weeks ago I visited the exhibition, ‘Schwitters in Britain’ at the Tate Britain [catch it if you can, it’s on until the 12^th of May]. Previously I’ve been lucky enough to view one or two of Schwitters’ collages and mixed-media works in collections in modern art galleries throughout Europe; every time seeing one of his ‘jewel-like’, multi-layered, aged, delicate and weathered creations and thinking, ‘I’d love to see a collection of his work someday.’   Then on Tuesday 9^th April, that day finally came!

 

Here are a few of my thoughts...

 

 Initially I was surprised by the scale of most of his work, a lot smaller than I had thought, but soon got distracted into the intensity of colours, painterly compositions and shapes, structures and forms. After keeping my ‘drawing a day’ diary for four months now, I am beginning to realise just what sort of things, specifically, that I find aesthetically appealing. Objects with a strong sense of form, shape, design particularly being favoured over those with more ephemeral, less tangible outlines and structure. For example, I think if I was asked to draw ‘light’ I would want to depict it as quite solid shafts and lines as to depicting its softness or affects of light hitting the edges/surfaces of other objects. I digress from Schwitters, but the point here being, that the structure and content of his work is what appeals to me most; the shapes created from his overlapping scrapes of paper as to the actual colour and textures of the paper itself. Schwitters described the use of objects/found-materials in his work as, ‘having equal rights with paint’, which I think echoes a little bit of what I said previously that the structure and content of the work is made from the objects within it acting in a similar way to how paint is normally used to create structure and content.

 

 ‘Anything with a stone’ - This reminds me of Kandinsky’s painting ‘Red, yellow, blue’.

 

It would be easy to make comparisons of Schwitters’ work to Picasso’s early collages so I’m simply going to mention it and then move swiftly on because it is the influence that Schwitters had on his predecessors that is actually a lot more interesting. With Schwitters’ deployment of the theory of Merz as, ‘essentially the combination of all conceivable materials for artistic purposes’ in his art; another crucial stepping stone was laid on the path towards ‘the everyday’ in an ‘as’ art. Influences of which can be seen in Pop Art particularly Richard Hamilton, Rauschenberg and Daniel Spoerri. Consequently, the more I think work I see by artists who were part of Dada (Schwitters, Duchamp, Man Ray etc) the more clearly I can see how much of what they did fed into what later became Pop Art. Pop Art being the more commercial, glossy mass produced younger sibling of Dada but still with its same values of the everyday, play and experimentation with ‘what is art?’ at its core.

 

 There’s a feeling of nostalgia with Schwitters’ work, apart from literally looking worn, stained and aged the colours, textures and patterns in the work feel old-fashioned. They remind me of wooden toys, fairground games or pub signs whose paint is beginning to chip, fade and peel off. The piece titled, ‘Merz Picture 46 A. The Skittle Picture’ does actually comprise itself of wooden playing pieces in a box frame composition and look like the leftovers from some battered old pub game. Play, of course being a factor in the making of Schwitters’ work as, to some extent, must have been an element of chance; after all most of the materials used in his collages were scrapes and throw-away objects. Part of me wonders if this is simply because the content within the collages is itself now old (sweet wrappers, bus tickets, newspapers, metal, feathers etc) and I wonder if they felt as ‘aged’ at the time they were created? A modern-day Schwitters collage would be drastically more intense in its colour palette, textures and surfaces due to the wide selection of materials, glossy papers and printing inks that are commonplace today. Or, perhaps more than likely, he wouldn’t be doing collage from paper scrapes but taking on digital mediums and left overs/waste? Collage from the content not of our bins but our computers recycle bins?! Modern-day Merz.

 

There were elements to this exhibition that felt a little bit empty, that it was all a little bit ‘nice’ and I wanted to be challenged a bit more, made to think, which the installation of the ‘Merz Barn’ (large scale plaster sculptural works comprising of found objects that filled rooms and created immersive environments for the viewer) did go some way in challenging my expectations as did a surreal performance piece called ‘Ursonate’ but perhaps I was looking for something more, but not really knowing what that was. Neither was I particularly a fond of his free standing sculptures made from stone, wood or bone and plaster. That’s of course completely subjective and it is good to see the other sides to Schwitters’ practice, but they only acted as additions to the painted and collage work which were really the stars of the show and completely captivated my attention. 

 

'En Morn'

 

Equally I was so busy looking at work didn’t pay too much heed to context that the work was made in, for example Schwitters’ time during the war exiled from Germany to be interned on the Isle of Man to his involvement in London art scene and influences that the Lake District had on his work up until his death in 1948. It seems that despite the amount of art I subject myself to seeing that I never really take as much attention and enthusiasm to understanding the context surrounding the work. Retrospectively, I did find something interesting in the way in which Schwitters’ collages made during his time living in the Lake District used more organic and natural found materials in his collages than when he was living in London where the work took on a more urban feel, but I think maybe I would have noticed these differences eventually anyway without having known when/where they were made. I feel the same way about music and that really I am only interested greatly in the music itself and very rarely if at all know anything about the band/artist that produce it. Does it change how I feel about the music if I know the lead singer’s favourite colour is blue? Or that they used to be a furniture maker?  Would Schwitters’ have minded if I sort-of ignorantly, if unintentionally, paid no attention to his life and situation he found himself in during his time in Britain? Or maybe that would have been just what he intended, he himself stating, ‘The picture is a self-sufficient work of art. It is not connected to anything outside.’ With that in mind I’ll leave it for you to decide whether I made the right decision upon seeing, ‘Schwitters in Britain’ in noticing less of the ‘Britain’ part and instead  focusing more on the ‘Schwitters’.

Images from:

http://www.tate.org.uk
http://www.southwillard.com/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/

Barcelona! Top 10

Hola from, er, sunny England! Back from my four day Barcelona art, architecture, museum, alternative transport, sangria, cheese and ham, ham and cheese extravaganza! So much to take in at the time so what better way to reflect and muse on my adventures than with a rather self-indulgent post featuring my top, uh 10 (or-so) highlights....and you never know it could also be useful. In no particular order!

1. La Pedrera aka Casa Mila

The first of a few Gaudi buildings to mention in this post. To go to Barcelona and not visit or see any of the Spanish architect, Gaudi's buildings would be a bit like going to Paris and not seeing the Eiffel Tower. In tourism terms they are the same, but when it comes to originality and imagination then in my opinion Gaudi wins hands-down. This building with its cave-like curving form and seaweed-like metal work is amazing on the outside, equally impressive inside and takes a whole new definition of the word incredible once you reach the roof [pictured here]. Never before have I wanted to draw a building so much, 'The shapes, the shapes, the shapes!' A cross between the organic and the mechanical, the forms are hard-edged yet soft, curving and undulating. Ha ha, it sounds kind-of ridiculous in words, but how best to describe the wacky-ness and strangeness of it all? So much of my views on architecture comes from the 'function dictating form' this place is so completely different, whilst it is still 'functional' the function has been designed to fit the form and not the other way round-hence you get chimney stacks that look like seashells or helmeted-soldiers and windows that curve and bend to fit the shape of the wall. Exploring this place with its many steps, ups and downs, doorways and arches felt like being in some sort of stage-set  or play park where you weren't really sure where you were going only that it was going to be fun to get there.

2. Casa Batllo

Yet another Gaudi building situated on the same street as La Pedrera [Passeig de Gracia]. With Casa Batllo, however its beauty is in its attention to detail. On a street built up around art nouveau buildings and features (which can be seen in the street lights, paving stones etc.) Casa Batllo seems as though it has sprouted and taken root like an alien-hybrid that both fits in and stands-out at in the area it finds itself in. Art nouveau and the natural forms that inspire it, again, being the order-of-the-day and windows framed by branch/bone-like pillars, shell-like balconies, reptilian-like mosaic make up the outside and inside, mushrooms, light, fish, gills sunbursts, flowers, spines, ribs, seed pods and more is just a few analogies to natural forms that can be seen in the buildings design. The attention to detail that I referred to earlier manifesting itself in the form of door handles shaped to the form of a human hand and plaster door surrounds that have been sculpted with human hand marks to look like waves/seaweed. I can remember studying ergonomics briefly during my Graphics GCSE, and how boring it was, but in relation to this work it would be fantastic. Regardless of whether you are a painter, a sculptor, an architect or a designer, I think there is so much that buildings have to offer in the way of how we understand shape, light, colour, textures as well as the more philosophical debates on how bodies habituate spaces and social/political dynamics of occupying/using these buildings and how they make us think, feel and behave.    

3. Sagrada Familia
The last Gaudi building on the list and certainly the most popular. The Sagrada Familia is the iconic Barcelona church and was worked on by the 31 year old Gaudi up until his untimely death. As a result of many of Gaudi's plans being lost during the Spanish Civil War the building remains unfinished and still causes controversy as to whether it should be finished in his honour or not. The cranes that permanently surround the building seem to also make up the architecture....the world's most famous unfinished building?! Although it does not take away from the outstanding achievement of the parts, I presume are finished and for me personally, I don't need to say a lot here other than, 'would you take a look at that ceiling!' Really, it is spectacular and the mind boggles as to what Gaudi may have continued to do had he been allowed to finish it. This is a building of two completely different sides; the back of the church looks like the famous Hokusai, 'Great Wave of Kanagawa' painting where Gaudi has made stone look fluid, wave-like and as though its melting down the building in between images of saints and lizards whereas on the other side it actually looks quite 'normal' and what you would expect a very grand church entrance to look like. I enjoyed the contrast.

4. Parc Guell

Is it a cave? Is it a palm tree? Wood or stone? Feeling pretty intrepid on the first day in Barcelona after visiting all the Gaudi buildings it made sense to complete the set and visit the park Gaudi designed, Parc Guell. Again, you might be able to see from the image above that it is equally imaginative in terms of design. The park also features the famous serpent bench, lizard fountain and buildings and gateways that look like gingerbread houses, sandcastles or something out of a dream. 



5. Arts Santa Monica

Right at the end of Las Ramblas [Barcelona's main shopping street] lies Arts Santa Monica. This isn't on the list of the main art galleries listed to visit in Barcelona but in my opinion was actually one of the best [and its free]. Much bigger inside than it looks in this photo, it actually spanned three massive floors and on my visit here featured an exhibition of photography titled, 'From here on'. I'm not a huge fan of photography but found the selection  in the way that they chose work that was challenging the realms of 'what photography could be' and diversity of how it was presented to be really refreshing. The theme of the exhibition was around new media IE the Internet, mobile phones, streaming, blogging etc and reflected on the very satirical and witty and also disturbing consequences of living in a digital, image entrenched age. Pretty much every gallery I visited in Barcelona featured or was currently showing a special exhibition on photography, which was also pretty intriguing and has made me wonder if this was endemic of photography becoming increasingly prominent medium in contemporary art at the moment? Either way, this was a really good exhibition.

The image above was a view taken from up top Castell de Montjuic [a former fortress used for military operations] and was a short cable car ride [coincidentally also my first ever time in a cable car] away from the Joan Miro museum.  The view overlooking Barcelona's harbour and [pictured here] shipping containers was impressive and could almost be a separate number in the top ten on its own, but I wanted to include it here in relation to the exhibition on at Arts Santa Monica.

 

So....Below is an image from the exhibition, by artist Jenny Odell, titled '195 Cargo Ships, Barges, Motorboats, Yachts, Tankers, Cruise Ships, Riverboats, Sailboats and Hospital Ships'. I think the connection between this and my own tourist photo above should be pretty obvious but I found something interesting visually about the grid formation, organising and collating of 'stuff' [in this case boats or dock containers]. Maybe this comes from my own research into collections of tools and tool catalogues nonetheless it is a visual theme that I kept getting drawn to. Maybe I like the organisation of things but also I think I like the way objects/things are interpreted once they become part of a big collection. For example the boats below in Odell's photo don't necessarily stand out as being recogniseable as boats at first glance, it almost becomes an abstract image of lines and colour or the boats become spear-heads or fragmented archaelogical reminants until you inspect them further. I'm really interested in these kinds of images, Odell's other work explores other arial shots of collections of swimming pools, basketball courts and grain silos. Presenting them in this way they end up looking like maps where they join together and seeing the arial view of quite familiar sites highlights their differences and creates, literally and metaphorically a new perspective on how we see them.

 

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Briefly, before I move on to the next point the photography of Penelope Umbrico also was also pretty interesting. Again, the 'collection' and griding is present (which I don't really think about or notice at the time) but this piece is a trompe l'oeil and what appear to look like a series of mirrors are actaully photos of mirrors. How do you take a photo or a mirror? Surely you can only ever take a photo of what is refelected in a mirror and can only define the mirror itself by its edges/frame? I love the games and thinking that this work plays, similarly I also think using the mirror as a frame to take images of the inside of a room/an interior is also very interesting. What does a mirror 'see' when there's no one there? The illusion of being confronted with a wall of mirrors that aren't really mirrors not being able to see one's reflection is also amusing and raises questions into the realms of who is the viewer/who is the viewed etc. Roy Lichtenstein did a whole series of paintings of mirrors that were more about creating a stylised representation of the shiney/reflective surface of mirrors where as these images are more about the image seen in the mirror...I suppose what I'm getting at here is that there is so much play that can be made creating images of/using mirrors because of the many layers and surfaces of seeing/reflection that they incapsulate. There's a whole project there...waiting to be started. Mirrors.

6. Antoni Tapies 'Foot'/The roof of The Tapies Museum
Of course no trip to Barcelona would be complete without a visit to the Tapies museum aka Fundacio Antoni Tapies. I'm a fan of his painting, but for the purposes of my top ten I want to highlight things that held particular and specific interest for me personally. Tapies' sculpture 'Foot' is disturbingly skewered with tools, I haven't found out exactly why -it wasn't unusual for Tapies to include/embed everyday objects in the surface of his paitings or in his sculptures but I am curious to know if there was any significance to tools being placed into an effigy of a foot. Looks painful! Maybe the tools are the tools that were used to make the sculpture/carving of the foot and refer to its own making? Still, there are tools involved so I'm interested and in relation to the body [or part-of] so I'm doubly interested.
The roof to the Tapies museum has this huge wire sculpture above it where it sits like a cloud or birds nest. Later I find out it was created as an intervention to the building by Tapies and is actually called, 'Cloud and Chair'. Funny, I couldn't see the chair [an emblem frequently used by Tapies] at the time but having looked at some photos of the building online since I think I can now pick it out. Anyway, I took much joy in seeing the lines, textures and different densities of blackness [it reminded me of a drawing/the process of drawing] where they crossed and intersected and thought it was an exciting contrast to have this wild, loose, fluid form sitting on top the weighty, hard-edged, grand mansion that is the museum.
 

7. Caxia Forum

Another gallery that maybe gets easily missed by tourists as its right next door to the National Gallery which steals the show in terms of grand entrances (its vast!) but the Caxia Forum is definitely worth a visit and makes my top ten! Hosting two exhibitions [free entry] when I visited, 'What to think, What to desire, What to do' [a small exhibition of sculpture, film and painting from national and international artists]and 'Seduced by Art' which was another photography exhibition that was brilliant as it focused on artists making transcriptions from old paintings. Fantastic! Straight away I am reminded of the exhibition, 'Encounters' that Britain's National Gallery curated in 2000 where they had 24 contemporary artists make work in response to paintings in the National Gallery's collection. I never got to see that exhibition, but as a young art student we did a project on transcriptions whose influence no doubt came from the Encounters exhibition. It was one of the best projects we ever did and so I was very excited to see something similar in Barcelona. One of my favourite images being, 'Blow Up: Untitled 5' by Ori Gersht as a transcription of a painting called 'The Rosy wealth of June' by Ignace-Henri-Theodore Fantin-Latour. Gersht's photographic image looks like a painting, perhaps more of a Jackson Pollock, but nonetheless it looks painterly. There's a whole post that needs to be written just on this exhibition, but for me if I had to articulate what is so exciting about these kinds of exhibtions is that the present work creates an imediacy of being able to relate to the image and how its read that as a viewer I can then transfer to how I read/relate to the older work. In other words it makes it makes the past work more accessable and in-turn makes one notice and then in some cases appreciate the work more.

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8. Museo de Frederic Mares

My goodness, just when I didn't think there could be anything exciting left to talk about and I have quite honestly saved one of the best til last. The Museo de Frederic Mares is a gem of a museum and is on a par in my estimation with Pitt Rivers in Oxford. For anyone that loves stuff, things, tat, objects and collections then this place is for you. Initially the museum appears to be a collection of the sculptors carvings of saints, christ, the madona etc. but explore further up to the first floor and find rooms dedicated to the artists many colletions. Rooms of keys, cigarette cards, pipes, lead soldiers, dolls, watches, canes, seashells, opera glasses, glasses, bicycles and more and more.....!!! So wonderful, so much to see and seeing it all arranged in cases, framed and rows one cannot help but see it all as art. Which it invariably is.



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9. Joan Miro 'Figure with Umbrella' and 'Sobretexium with eight umbrellas'

And now another colourful insight into some of my many obsessions, two works by the Catalan artist and sculptor, Joan Miro featuring umbrellas. All the time I spent in the first year on my degree disecting umbrellas, covering them in paint, drawing them and suspending them when all it may have taken was something so elegantly simple as hanging one open of the side of a wooden, er, figure. And don't get me started on the painting below, who knew that Miro used umbrellas!? This piece looks like a Rauschenberg or a surreal piece of sheet music where the notes are replaced by umbrellas and staves by inky bursts of paint. What would it sound like?...I'm getting carried away, but only in the excitment of the variety of mark-making, shapes, textures and elements within the work that make this piece such a wonderful find.  

 

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10. Exploring the city streets -Random finds

This last point in my top ten is a bit of a cheat, but is in all honesty something that I enjoy doing in any city. Finding the higgle-piggle allyways, labyrinthian paths and courtyards in Barcelona's Barri Gothic [Gothic Quarter] are both beautiful architecturally and in atmosphere [pictured above]. Somewhere near this area [near La Seu] we also found an amazing market [pictured below] which I suppose was like the food version of the Frederic Mares Museum just a whole lot busier. Finally, along the Rambla de Raval discovering this weird fat cat statue by Fernando Botero that reminded me a bit of the cat bus in 'My neighbour Totoro' for those of you who are into you Japanses animation. It was one of those pleasant surprises that you get when you're a tourist in a city for the first time.   



Hopefully There'll be another top ten from another city or location soon! Thanks for reading.

 

**** Images from: http://www.fundaciomiro-bcn.org/?idioma=2

*** Image from: http://obrasocial.lacaixa.es/nuestroscentros/english/caixaforumbarcelona/caixaforumbarcelona_en.html

**Image from: http://www.penelopeumbrico.net/

*Image from: http://www.jennyodell.com/