I am enjoying looking all the way down the train, watching the carriages move from side to side, as though the train were a long snake, curving through the city. There were snakes in Teaching snakes to be snakes (2008), a painting by Ryan Mosley. (Image at top.) They were accompanied by foot-women, women whose bodies seemed to be all foot, and achilles. Reminded me of the story of Eve. He describes this as a “broken anatomy”. A man smokes a pipe, another male genitalia reference. The snakes seemed to have been painted smoothly, they cut across the canvas. A pattern of curlicues.
There were also snakes in Michael Armitage’s Peace Coma (2012), their tails knotted together. An enforced peace? A peace of fundamentally untrustworthy elements? A peace of things artificially tied together? Quite of the artists showing few had a fluid, flowing style that reminded me of Peter Doig, especially Armitage, and Sanya Kantarovsky. Daniel Richter’s pieces I felt had echoes of Lucien Freud, as well as Dana Schutz and Tala Madani.
I had seen some of Daniel Richter’s work before, I enjoyed his style, the things he had to say. Michael Armitage’s work is fluid and painterly, trees and limbs curl like sinews, or snakes.
Cecily Brown’s Lucky Beach (2017) makes me feel the heat, chiaroscuro and exposure of the sun-baked, sandy, rocky shore line of a warm country. The Last Shipwreck (2018) (also by Brown) felt like a sea storm, noisy and chaotic. Maid’s Day Off (2005) left me confused. What did it mean?
It was a large exhibition. Some of my favourite paintings were: Teaching Snakes to be Snakes, I have written about that above, also Kampala Suburb (2014), by Michael Armitage, because of the colours and the theme – all deep blues with a flash of white and yellow, showing two men kissing, topped by a frieze of figures shooting at each other with guns. I really enjoyed #mydressmychoice (2015) by Armitage as well, it still feels topical and new 5 years later, but also borrows from another of my faves, Velazquez’s Rockeby Venus (1647-51). He really captures the delicacy and curves of the figure of Venus, and the idea of voyeurism with the little monkeys with big eyes in the foreground, and all the men’s feet in the background.
I liked Deprivation (2018) by Sanya Kantarovsky because it made me feel uncomfortable, the way the man is gripping the woman’s wrists seems sinister to me. Tarifa (2001) by Daniel Richter shows the refugees fear and desperation in the composition – they are surrounded by an almost black sea, cramped in the corner of the painting, huddled together against the vast inky darkness. The flashes of orange seem to heighten the emotion of the piece making it a higher key. I enjoyed the cheeky humour of Das erstaunliche Comeback des Dr Freud (2004) – The Amazing Comeback of Dr Freud – by Daniel Richter with its references to and inversion of trashy porn images, Spaghetti Westerns, and lush, painterly fluidity. Another piece that made me smile was Koco at the Bodega (2017) by Tschabalala Self. Self makes work which incorporates painting, textile collage and sewing as mark-making to play with themes of identity, gender and race, as well as geography and the human figure.
An exhibition of sensuality, sexuality, gender, race, including social and political and high- and low- brow cultural references that was an exploration also of colour and the human figure.
Zoe Michell 