Category: Uncategorized

200 words #31 / Gonzalo Chillida

Gonzalo Chillida – Untitled, c. 1955 – 1959, ink on paper, 35.3cm x 41.4cm. Image courtesy of Galería José de la Mano, Madrid.

Painting is rarely a team sport and maintaining the right balance between solitude and contact around which a career can be built is a perennial challenge. In the period from January 1951 to June of 1953 Gonzalo Chillida was striking this balance in two periods of residence at the Colegio de España in Paris. What came out of this experience over the next few years was a body of work which took his previously figurative tendencies down an accelerated path of abstraction which stands in bold relief against previous work and the muted abstract landscapes of the later periods.

Minimal yet densely rich brushwork floats against the white surface with effortless confidence. Surprisingly small in the flesh, in reproduction they can be imagined on a large scale. Yet this was Paris at the start of the 50s and the super-sized ambition of American painting hadn’t yet started to disrupt the fiddly aesthetic of European easel painting. This modest series is an object lesson in less is more.

We can only imagine where Chillida might have brought this development in his work had he kept dipping into the cauldron of Paris, but instead he settled back into the bosom of solitude.

http://www.josedelamano.com/

*In the text above I make passing reference to Gonzalo Chillida’s later work and, given the restrictions of the 200 words format, I couldn’t expand on the beauty of the later landscape inspired paintings. To get an overview of the many fascinating aspects of Chillida’s oeuvre, I can recommend the following website, which is maintained by the artist’s estate.

https://www.gonzalochillida.com/en/

Shozo Michikawa – SASAMA @ Erskine, Hall & Coe, London / 1 – 24 September 2020

Shozo Michikawa – Natural Ash Sculptural Form, 2020, stoneware, 43 x 16 cm. Image Courtesy Erskine, Hall & Coe, photography by Stuart Burford.

If they look a little like domestic props in a cubist interior, then the fleeting similarity between a vase form in a painting by Georges Braque or Juan Gris and the ceramic sculptural forms of Shozo Michikawa is no more than that, an immediate visual impression. As with all ‘It looks a bit like…’ statements, to labour any comparison in this case would be a fruitless indulgence.

The thought does however point to an interesting divergence between painting and ceramics; that is the central importance of technique in the discipline of ceramics. When I talk about Shozo Michikawa’s work I feel more comfortable using the term ceramics rather than pottery. I guess this is a subconscious bias away from functional studio pottery and towards something which might be vainly reaching for the exalted, the rarefied – art basically. Under the slightest scrutiny this bias falls apart because of the fact that in order to produce anything of quality in pottery, whether it is slip-decorated table ware or non-functional gallery ceramics, the amount of practice, failure, recovery, and knowledge required is staggering. When it comes to pottery, you can’t fake it.

Shozo Michikawa, Shino Sculptural Form, 2019, stoneware, 19 x 15 cm. Image Courtesy Erskine, Hall & Coe, photography by Stuart Burford.

Shozo Michikawa was born in 1953 in Hokkaido, Japan. At a certain stage during his initial career in business he took up evening classes in art. It was here that he discovered his passion and talent for pottery. A few years later, Michikawa quit business to devote himself to ceramics. Over the years he learned the skills involved in pottery and some more conventional examples of traditional tea bowls (chawan) are included in the current exhibition at Erskine, Hall & Coe.

Stoneware tea bowls by Shozo Michikawa. 9 cm high to 9.5 cm high. Image Courtesy Erskine, Hall & Coe, photography by Stuart Burford.

Michikawa is an artist who has always shunned a studio pottery affiliation, a system which forms the core of the Japanese pottery scene. He prefers to have the freedom to produce exactly what he wants without having to consider the demands of the client. Free of the limitations of studio pottery, Michikawa has developed a range of unique sculptural series in which he experiments freely and playfully, riffing on traditional Japanese pottery shapes and using classic glazes such as shino and kohiki. The pieces in this show were made during the bi-annual Sasama International Ceramics Festival during a three-day firing in an anagama kiln. Michikawa founded the Sasama International Ceramics Festival in 2011 and the exhibition includes photography of the Sasama region by Yoshinori Seguchi.

Shozo Michikawa, Kohiki Sculptural Form, 2020, stoneware, 38.5 x 13.5 cm. Image courtesy Erskine, Hall & Coe, photography by Stuart Burford.

Another point of divergence between painting and ceramics is that it is fascinating to watch a talented potter at work – something which is not always the case in painting with its ponderous interludes. This is true for example in the case of Ken Matsuzaki throwing tea bowls off the hump. But where the pleasure of watching tea bowls form, each one masterfully imperfect, may be mesmerising, watching Michikawa turn a dull, dumb block of clay into a dynamic exploding/imploding sculptural form is seat-of-your-pants stuff. (See the link below for a 2018 recording of Michikawa throwing at Leksands folkhögskola Art College in Sweden.)

Shozo Michikawa, Kohiki with Handle, 2020, stoneware, 61 x 27 x 14.5 cm. Image Courtesy Erskine, Hall & Coe, photography by Stuart Burford.

If the forms at times seem to be frozen in a state of collapse or explosion, then it is because in the process of creating them they come close to doing both. One essential skill to develop as a potter is to do as much as possible of the final shaping of the piece on the wheel to minimise the amount of trimming and altering required later. Michikawa takes this dictum to another level as he slices and gouges the form to create the basis for what will shortly emerge as the final piece, or as he transplants bits of clay from one part of the form to another where they will perhaps be more useful. The artist’s thinking is laid bare and it is a thrilling pleasure to observe him reassess the shape as it develops and to recover from near failure with brutish and excruciating-to-watch interventions. The throwing of the lacerated form is executed by hand, using traditional Japanese forming tools, and by using lengths of timber wedged unceremoniously into the centre of the piece. With the form of the clay prepped in this way, the final shape comes together with a few delicately controlled spins of the wheel. From start to finish there is an economy of process and mastery of technique which are the very same as those which have been employed in Japanese ceramics for centuries.

Watch a fascinating demonstration given by Shozo Michikawa at Leksands folkhögskola (Art College), recorded on July 15, 2018.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxJrIoEn__o&t=1441s

200 words #30 / Francis Kéré

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Gando residents carrying ceramic pots to be used in the roof of the Gando School Library – Image courtesy Francis Kéré Architecture

So much architecture in Burkina Faso looks cobbled together and unfinished. Rebar pokes through the tops of walls on the off chance of a new layer of cement. Brick walls are dotted with cavities to allow air to circulate, and corrugated metal roofs sit lightly on lattices of thin girders. Dust covers everything, and neighbourhoods, as much as they may be rising from that dust, look as though they are returning to it.

Francis Kéré has built an international architectural practice by distilling the essence of this dusty yet elegant functionality of design and articulating it through traditional Burkinabe building methods. Although Kéré’s portfolio now includes diverse and celebrated projects such as the 2017 Serpentine Pavilion, it is in earlier projects such as the Gando School Library where the use of local materials can be appreciated to fullest effect. In the buildings Kéré produced for his home village of Gando – a primary school, a later school extension, and the school library – he honed some of the key features of his style: exploiting the straightforward beauty of raw materials, and making the manipulation of light and the effective circulation of air fundamental principles from the very beginning of the design process.   

Gando School Library under construction, Interior reception space – Image courtesy Francis Kéré Architecture
Installing pots on the roof of the Gando School Library – Image courtesy Francis Kéré Architecture
Gando School Library in March 2013 – Image courtesy Francis Kéré Architecture

200 words #29 / Erika Verzutti

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Erika Verzutti – Man Ray com Peixe / Man Ray with Fish, 2019, Bronze, cast aluminium and oil, 70 x 57 x 10 cm, Unique work in a series of 3, © Erika Verzutti. Photo: Eduardo Ortega. Courtesy Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, São Paulo/Rio de Janeiro.

The short-lived publication Documents (1929 – 1930) – edited by Georges Bataille – exemplified a shift in much visual art in the early 20th century towards drawing from and combining influences from wildly differing sources both within and far beyond the arts. It is a tendency towards a heterogeneous aesthetic which has become so ubiquitous that nowadays it informs first principles in most art schools from foundation level on. And whilst it lends an air of research facility to the average artist’s studio, it can also, through the collision of dissonant sources, muddy the task of judging the quality of the artwork produced.

In such an open field as the visual arts have become, one difficulty is to consolidate disparate elements skilfully. Erika Verzutti produces painted bronze and papier-mâché wall-mounted reliefs which stretch the territory between painting and sculpture. The surfaces might be pummelled and gouged playfully, then cast in bronze, then painted irreverently in common acrylic. The artist’s process spins 360 degrees from kitchen table craft through industrial fabrication and back without pitting the base and the exalted medium against one another. In Verzutti’s work there is humour but not the ham-fisted variety, allusion without explication, and beauty both superficial and profound.

Carne Sintética @ Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel

Two previous articles on Erika Verzutti on theglazelondon:

Erika Verzutti @ Andrew Krepps

Erika Verzutti @ Alison Jacques

200 words #28 / Robert Ryman

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Robert Ryman, Untitled, 1965 oil on canvas, 11-1/4″ x 11-1/4″ x 1-1/4″ (28.6 cm x 28.6 cm x 3.2 cm) © 2019 Robert Ryman /Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

When asked about free jazz saxophonist Ornette Coleman, Miles Davis said ‘…the man is all screwed up inside.’ This wasn’t his definitive appraisal of Coleman, but it does capture the sense of bewilderment his tunes were, and sometimes still are, met with.

Robert Ryman, coincidentally born the same year as Coleman, moved to New York in the early 1950s to be a jazz saxophonist. For a while he worked as a guard at MoMA, where he was exposed to Abstract Expressionism at its brash and innovative best. The cumulative effect of hanging around so much painting – delivered from the disorder of the studio and hung to museum standards – got the better of him and he bought some paints and set to work.

Ryman’s paintings regularly suffer a similar fate of miscomprehension to that of Ornette Coleman’s tunes. Lazily tagged as monochrome because of the predominance of white, they are, more often than not, busy surfaces of carefully placed impasto on dense weave, often raw, canvas – the metal brackets on which they are hung sometimes left starkly, intentionally visible. Ryman’s attention to detail should be no surprise given the time he spent observing the painted world before ever dipping a brush.

Robert Ryman at The Phillips Collection

200 words #27 / Anni Albers

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Anni Albers / Wall Hanging 1926, Mercerized cotton, silk, 2032 x 1207 mm
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Everfast Fabrics Inc. and Edward C. Moore Jr. Gift, 1969 , © 2018 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/DACS, London

In the critical rehabilitation of weaving as a serious artform, much is made of the analogy between the figurative ‘weave’ of painting – the modernist grid being a heavy-handed example – and the literal weave of fabric on a loom. It is a comparison from which the art of weaving invariably comes out on the bottom. It is a comparison also which would have us see the weave as a starting point for something supposedly greater, and not the result of an accretion of experimentation, symbolism and knowledge, and an end in itself.

Shortly after moving to Black Mountain College in 1934, having trained at the Bauhaus, Anni Albers began taking frequent trips to South and Central America. She collected textiles, and her eye discriminated as much based on aesthetic interest and her own feel for quality as a producer of textiles as on the historical importance of the sample. For Albers, Peruvian weaving was the ‘highest point weaving could aspire to’ (1.). Her respect for the accumulated wealth of weaving knowledge from different cultures was evident in her own unhurried and sophisticated oeuvre. In the artist’s own words – ‘let threads be articulate again…to no other end than their own orchestration’ (2).

Anni Albers at Tate Modern

(1.) Briony Fer on Anni Albers in Tate exhibition catalogue

(2.) Anni Albers, ‘Pictorial Weaves’ in Anni Albers: Pictorial Weavings, exh cat, Cambridge, MA 1959

200 words #26 / Shoji Hamada

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Shoji Hamada – Bowl / 13 x 21.5cm / private collection UK / image – Michael Harvey, Oxford Ceramics

I have long enjoyed the variously attributed quote that observes – ‘Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.’ Its pithy truth about the perpetual failure of the intellect to come up with anything meaningful to say about an artwork occurs to me when I hear many artists try to speak about their work. Potters though, seem in general to suffer from no such trauma of expression. A potter will mention specifics – clay bodies, glaze recipes, firing ranges and multiple failures leading to modest successes. I like to think that this concentration on the medium and the skills involved in pottery allows for slow and meaningful innovation.

In 1953 ceramic artists Shoji Hamada and Bernard Leach delivered a lecture tour across the US. The tour contributed to the shift in American pottery from being a staid and functional craft to an artform. At the same time in the States, Anni Albers, through textile weaving, was showing a healthy disregard for any debate around functionality and art. For Albers, coming from the Bauhaus, and for Hamada, one of the leading potters of the Mingei movement in Japan, there had never been any question of a distinction between craft and art – enough said.

Shoji Hamada at work – YouTube video

The Mingei Film Archive Project – watch

Shoji Hamada current exhibition at Leach Pottery

Shoji Hamada at Oxford Ceramics

Toshiko Takaezu

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Toshiko Takaezu / #8 Closed Form, 1970-1979, Salt-glazed stoneware, 9 x 8 1/2 inches (22.9 x 21.6 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift of the artist, 2007-68-8, © Toshiko Takaezu

When potters are learning essential skills on the wheel, they will often use a gauge – perhaps no more than a chopstick held in place with a lump of clay – to ensure that a series of pieces reach the same height and diameter. And to develop an awareness of the vessel as a 3-dimensional object, and to ensure uniformity of shape, they might use a mirror held in place to reflect the side which is out of view as the piece is being formed. In short, everything the potter does reminds her of the form and volume of the object she is making.

For several decades the American artist Toshiko Takaezu (b. Hawaii 1922, d. Hawaii 2011) taught the skills involved in forming pottery on the wheel, teaching first at the Ceramics Department at the Cleveland Institute of Art in Ohio, and then at Princeton, where she helped to develop the visual art program. She herself had studied at the Cranbrook Academy of Arts in Michigan under the influential Finnish ceramist Maija Grotell – a training which would give her a solid yet experimental approach to the unique challenges and problems of ceramics.

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Toshiko Takaezu throwing a ceramic pot / Toshiko Takaezu papers, 1937-2010. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Wheel formed pottery’s unique challenges are tied to the demands of the medium and the skills involved in handling and forming it. This is a factor which often leads to more subtle shifts and developments over time than might be registered in another artform, such as painting. Another factor which influences the way the potter thinks about her medium is the serial mode of producing vessels on the wheel. In Japanese pottery this repetition, and the natural impulse to try to produce identical objects, was harnessed and made central to the creation of such objects as Chawan – tea bowls thrown off the hump – a method of repeat throwing in which the potter forms a series of vessels one after another from a single large hump of clay on the wheel. In Japanese pottery the subtle inconsistencies and imperfections which necessarily result from any attempt at identical repeat throwing are embraced rather than rejected.

Toshiko Takaezu was maturing as a potter and artist in the 1950s – a period when artists such as Peter Voulkos were exploding the very form of the vessel itself. Voulkos, like Takaezu, was an immensely skilled potter. He took his experiments to a large scale and chopped up and reassembled his colossal pots so that they relinquished all functionality and now looked more like modernist sculptures. To me they recall the wobbly urns and jugs that Braque painted in his patient 1940s reworkings of Cubist still life. Voukos’ rupture with the integrity of the vessel looked dramatic on the scale at which he carried it out and was in tune with concurrent developments in painting. On deeper reflection however, Voulkos’ innovations might equally appear as radical reworkings of the kind of openwork ceramics being produced in Korea in the 5th century AD which often featured ventilated bases and angular protrusions. So, the idea of a complete rupture with tradition in ceramics is one which disregards the knowledge and skill which the serious artist will have acquired in order to be able to make even the slightest shift in what he produces and how it looks.

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Toshiko Takaezu / Enclosed Form, 1980; ceramic wheelthrown white clay vessel form with small hole at apex. Gift of MaryAnne Normandin. Credits: Photo by Hannah Finegold. Rights: All Rights Reserved. Image: https://mimi.pnca.edu/

Takaezu’s rupture with the idea of functionality in ceramics was, on the face of it, subtler than that of Peter Voulkos. At the end of years of wheel forming open ended vessels, manipulating subtle shifts in elegant necks, and experimenting with glazes, Takaezu’s revolutionary break came in the moment she decided to close the form completely, sealing it at the top with a steady and patient hand. It is the kind of shift which one can imagine happening in a single unplanned moment following thousands of near repetitions of thrown pots on the wheel, like waves lapping the shore until one finally covers the last visible rock. It was a radical shift very much in keeping with the artist’s personality. In the same way that there is no distinction made in Japanese culture between the status of a painter and a potter, Takaezu saw no distinction in her life between the activities of pottery, cooking and gardening. To her the attention and patience required by each were essential to ensuring any degree of mastery.

From this tidy gesture of sealing the top of her vessels, the artist proceeded to elaborate on the forms which could be produced now that the functionality of the object had been reduced to a memory. As she became further drawn into the formal properties of the sealed form, she produced objects of larger scale and more ambitious technical challenge. Like Braque’s pots which seem to emerge from the camouflage of the densely patterned canvas, and with a steady, humming energy like that of Giorgio Morandi’s painted arrangements, Toshiko Takaezu’s vessels from this point on were objects pure and simple, with all the mystery and beauty that this implies.

Toshiko Takaezu documentary on YouTube

 

 

 

Josep Grau-Garriga @ Michel Soskine Inc. Madrid / 13 Sept -24 Nov, 2018

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Josep Grau-Garriga / Cada Día, 1992, Tapestry, 300 x 180cm, Image courtesy of Michel Soskine Inc.

An odd fact at the heart of painting is that it retains such a widely unquestioned status above so many other forms of visual art despite its debt to, and sometimes yearning for, certain qualities of those other media. In commentary, the infinite contortions of the painted surface are routinely spoken about in the borrowed vocabulary of other media. A painting’s presence as object might become so determinant to the way it is interpreted that it is spoken of as being sculptural. And in describing the interaction of motifs on a painting’s surface, such as Piet Mondrian’s experiments with lattices of coloured adhesive tape in his late New York paintings, we might understandably think of tapestry and opt for the word weave. Of course, the term painterly is equally applied across other media when describing a certain trace of fluidity in motif, surface texture, or colour. I would argue however, that what is painterly in painting is that which is evocative to us of the physicality of many other media.

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Josep Grau-Garriga / Textures Fan Mar, 1977, Tapestry, 220 x 225cm, Image courtesy of Michel Soskine Inc.

Tapestry, by virtue of its relative flatness and the range of pictorial possibility available to it, is perhaps more prone than many other art forms to direct comparison with painting. Whilst there is nothing odd today about tapestry occupying the gallery wall, as a stand-alone art form in Europe it has not always been viewed as a medium independent of and equal to painting. The Catalan artist Josep Grau-Garriga (1929, Catalonia – 2011, Angers) speculated that the very practicality of tapestry, in that it is relatively light and easy to roll for transportation, inspired the shift in painting studios around the 14th century from painting on wooden panels to painting directly onto prepared fabric. Whether or not this transition in painting was as straightforward in origin as the artist describes, painting did go on to experience many other transformations across the centuries, whilst the art of tapestry largely remained the remit of artisans until as late as the early 20th century – a factor which served to insulate it from harsh, transformative creative forces.

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Josep Grau-Garriga / Personatge Blau, 1992, Tapestry, 200 x 80cm, Image courtesy of Michel Soskine Inc.

Whilst artists such as Joan Miró and Antoni Tàpies – also Catalan incidentally – used fabric and rope with great inventiveness, they did not go down the same route as Grau-Garriga of allowing the material to speak for the entire piece. In their work, fabric typically remained either a support for paint or simply another component within a sort of assemblage involving the two as distinct elements. Grau-Garriga made the transition from painting to tapestry during the late 1950s, during which period he met the artist Jean Lurçat – a key figure in the resurgence of interest in the art form in Europe amongst artists. By the time of their meeting in 1957 Grau-Garriga had already started an involvement with the Casa Aymat – a former carpet manufacturer in Catalonia and now a creative space. In France, the artist would consolidate his skills and make artistic connections.

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Josep Grau-Garriga / De L’Afrique També, 1998, Tapestry, 200 x 113 x 35cm, Image courtesy of Michel Soskine Inc.

Artists who come to a new medium with an established practice in another tend to see that second medium as a means towards expanding on the possibilities of the first. Grau-Garriga’s stated aim however, was to address the tradition of tapestry as a craft in the service of painting – a medium to be manipulated to order by an artisan rather than being worked on directly by the artist. To really address this, and to begin to push the medium in new directions, there could be no half measures. In approaching the art of tapestry from the premise of equal status to painting in its articulation of texture, motif, colour and meaning, Josep Grau-Garriga contributed towards an important and continuing realignment of many art forms traditionally thought of as craft within the shadow of painting.

Josep Grau-Garriga on tapestry (French)

Josep Grau-Garriga at Michel Soskine Inc, Madrid

200 words #25 / Yann Gerstberger

DSC_8776.jpgYann Gerstberger / Sex Messenger, 2018, 280 cm x 250 cm, 110,2 inches x 98,4 inches, Coton, linoleum, colle néoprène, pigments naturels (grana cochenille) photo Hugard & Vanoverschelde. Courtesy Sorry we’re Closed Gallery

The word painterly often gets thrown around without thought for the scope of its significance. When applied to the weave of a tapestry or an area of glaze on a ceramic pot, its very use implies the primacy of painting above crafts. One irony however, is that the thing which is considered painterly in painting is that moment when its very nature as a material – pigment suspended in a medium – is most evident. In that moment, I feel we are in fact appreciating painting as craft. So, it should seem strange for an observer to lend the term to other art forms when in truth, a painting is sometimes most painterly when it reminds us of other media.

In Yann Gerstberger’s large scale tapestries, the heft of the weave and the complexity of fantastical, crude, exotic motifs as they seem about to bleed into each other, may well bring to mind a heavily-worked painted surface. The exaggerated flatness of tapestry weave – in Gerstberger’s case market sourced fabrics and hand-dyed mop-head strands glued to a vinyl surface – is enhanced by the tightly-packed and carefully balanced imagery, the arrangement of which leaves not a single area of visual slackness.

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Studio view – Image courtesy Sorry we’re Closed Gallery

Yann Gerstberger at Sorry We’re Closed Gallery

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