Visits over the summer

In July, I visited the Tate Modern in London, I've been once before on a trip at the beginning of first year so I wanted to go back. I was visiting London anyway to made a point of going again.

The first piece that stood out to me was a mixed media piece, by Mark Bradford, who was born and worked in the USA. The piece itself is called Los Moscos (2004).

The scale of this piece is what initially caught my attention, it covers the whole wall and apprears very striking. Colourwise, the use of a black background allows the individual layers of different objects and papers to really stand out, and the shapes are all angular and defined, mimicing the structure of a grid. Some of the materials used Bradford found outside in studio in LA, adding an extra layer of context and a sence of home and belonging in this piece.

The plaque next to this piece read: 

"This large-scale collage included materials found by the artist on the streets around his studio in Los Angeles, USA. Visually suggestive of aerial maps of sprawling, urban areas, the collage is constructed entierly from paper fragments which, the artist believes, 'acts as memory of things pasted and things past. You can peel away the layers of papers and its like reading the streets through the signs'. This work takes its title from a derogatory slang term for migrant day labourers in the San Francisco Bay Area, reflecing the artist's long-standing interest in the sub-cultures of the inner city."

In August, during a family holiday in Dubai, UAE, I visited the Pro Art Gallery in the Palmstirp Mall in Dubai. 

The location of the gallery itself was stunning, opposite Jumeirah Mosque, on a busy city road, in a mall which was mainly outdoors, and in the gallery itself, large windows lit the room, and added to the display of some pieces, including this one by Salvador Dali called cosmic rhinoceros, which is a bronze sculpture, which had the Mosque looking over it.

Once inside, it was a very intimate atmosphere, where only we were there, and someone who worked there, and none of the pieces were behind glass or restricted off, so I could get rather close to the piece of work. The gallery itself is someone’s private collection, some of which is on display. Whilst I was there, there was an exhibition of art from Asian artists. The first piece that stood out to me was this one: 

This piece shows how the bloodline flows through one’s family. The cool tones used give the piece a sense its lacking love, or seems rather cold-hearted. The baby is red, showing love and affection and the parents have faint portions of this of each of their portraits, and these patches of red link to the baby. The fine lines of red connect the family, only faint, but they’re still there. The piece following on from that had a portrait (below) is of two girls, one on the left smaller and in red, in my interpretation I see this as the child from the previous painting, and I see the child on the right as the mother from the previous when she was younger. The facial similarities show this, in my opinion. It shows how the child looks similar to the mother, but has a part of her father with her, in this case its shown physically and metaphorically with the patches of red on the faces.

Another piece I found quite interesting and inspiring was these resin casts.

They stood reasonable large, about A3 size, and had difference objects encased in them, the first was used paint tubes, acrylic I think. From the side, you can see the layers of resin and how it’s been layered up to ensure all the tubes didn’t sink to the bottom when it was setting, this created a lot more depth within the piece. The clear resin allows light to pass through easily, and reflect off the metallic paint tubes.

The mixture of paint which is on the outside of the tubes shows how well used the paints were by the artist. My tubes of acrylic paint look in a similar state to those in this piece, reminding me of how used and dirty they look, yet still functional. The fact of encasing objects in resin makes them seem eternal, and timeless, the fact those tubes of paint would have been used endless times to create lots of art, and now they’re encased on show forever. 

There were 2 pieces in this series, the one with the paint tubes, and this one:

with the old mobile phones. I found this one particularly inspiring, as it’s taken something old and unwanted, and turned it into in which people are interested in and find beautiful. I find the idea of using resin to encapsulate objects quite interesting, a technique I’d like to try myself when I’m back in England. I think it would lead quite nicely into my idea of being influenced by the chemistry of addiction, and using resin to almost encase ‘snapshots’ of the stages and how chemical dependency can evolve and take over a person’s life.

Those were the two pieces I saw which really caught my attention, and the resin pieces have really inspired me to create some experiments in response to this, which is my next step.