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| Two Chairs with People, photographic drawing, 2014 |
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| Experiments with perspective |
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| Card Players #1, 2014 |
Hockney's comment: "“Painters have always known there is something wrong with perspective.
The problem is the foreground and the vanishing point. The reason we have perspective with a vanishing point, is that it came from optics. I am sure that that’s what Brunelleschi did. He used a five inch diameter concave mirror to project the Baptistry onto his panel. This gives automatically a perspective picture, just like a camera would. This is why there is always a void between you and the photograph. I am taking this void away, to put you in the picture.
I made the paintings of the card players first. That helped me work out how to photograph them. Everything in the photographs is taken very close. The heads the jackets and shirt and shoes are all photographed up close. Each photograph has a vanishing point, so instead of just one I get many vanishing points. It is this that I think gives them an almost 3D effect without the glasses. I think this opens up photography into something new.
If you really think about it, I know the single photograph cannot be seen as the ultimate realist picture. Well not now. Digital photography can free us from a chemically imposed perspective that has lasted for 180 years.”"
Idris Khan, Conflicting Lines, at Victoria Miro (till 6 June).
Gallery says: "Khan is well known for his large-scale works, which use techniques of layering to arrive at what might be considered the essence of an image, and to create something entirely new through repetition and superimposition. For his exhibition at Victoria Miro Mayfair, Khan has produced large-scale composite photographs made from a series of oil stick paintings. These have gone through an intensive process of overlaying lines of writing repeatedly painted onto a minimal ground, until the language becomes obscured."
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| A corner of the gallery |
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| Colour woodcuts using 21 and 22 colours |
Gillian Ayres, New Paintings and Prints, at Alan Cristea (till 30 May)
From a review: " As Titian and Turner devotees often stress, an old artist can actually reach sublime peaks, the combination of experience and looming death yielding new-found profundity. Where, then, does Gillian Ayres stand, as a show of new paintings and prints opens to mark her 85th birthday?
On a practical level, she’s not as mobile or as forceful with her paint as she once was. She used to lay it on thick, building up the impasto into rich, often encrusted, textures. Now her surfaces are smoother, her forms simpler and cleaner."
Definitely a feel-good show - the colours, the colours....
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| One of Rovner's multi-screen LCD video installations |
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| The figures keep moving.... |
Michal Rovner, Panorama, at Pace (till 16 June)
Gallery says: "These large-scale, multi-screen works combine her signature human figures with the landscape elements which she has been exploring for the last two years. The brooding soulful expression of the human and natural worlds is intertwined through the use of increasingly bold abstraction. Panorama evokes Rovner’s themes of human interaction, dislocation and the persistence of history, while creating a new level of immediacy by further removing the narrative to its barest and most urgent elements.
Adding painting qualities and gestural “brushstrokes” to video recordings of real-life situations, the new work respond to Rovner’s sense of disjointed reality."
Also seen: Isa Genzken, Geldbilder, at Hauser & Wirth; Diane Thater, Life is a Time-Based Medium, at Hauser & Wirth. And talks by Rebecca Salter on Japanese wood block prints (a skill that is being lost as its practitioners die off); Jack Zipes on his new translation of the first edition of Grimm's Kinder- und Hausmaerchen. It's been a busy week.
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