14 December 2013

Two exhibitions

To deepest Mayfair, to Hamiltons, to see "Silkscreens" by Daido Moriyama. The gallery has a strange facade, this vaulted niche enclosing the door, and no windows to the street -
Inside are many skylights and a wonderfully polished cement floor.
The work on view was 16 photos chosen by the gallery director to be made up into silkscreens and printed on canvas - very suitable for Moriyama's grainy style, with the solid sections of ink gleaming wildly -
Next door, Timothy Taylor also had a polished cement floor and was showing four "European" artists - Hartung, Hantai, Soulages, and Tapies -
Thick black paint (Pierre Soulages)
Earthy colours (Antoni Tapies)
It's about the process? (Simon Hantai)
It was Hantai's "pliage" technique that interested me. I have a little book about his work (somewhere) that shows him working on huge folded swathes of fabric, laid on the floor; presumably they were stretched afterwards. You might just about see the folds in the close-up -
Hartung's titles look enigmatic but there is a system - this, painted in 1970, is T1970-H40 -

No comments: