Our next stop was the Serpentine Gallery for the Barbara Kruger show, Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You, which I had previously seen at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2021 (and here, and here). While this exhibit was necessarily much smaller than in Chicago it had also been greatly updated and made more use of video and LEDs (see a few shots below, click them to enlarge).
The Goodman Gallery provided an opportunity to continue my collection of big, open, white gallery spaces. See more below (click pictures to enlarge).
Our next stop was the Goodman Gallery to see Zineb Sedira’s Let’s go on singing! It captured a sense of the Franco-Algerian music/cultural scene. This included Algerian disk versions of musicians I was listening to when I lived in the mid-East in the early 1970s. See some more images below.
Our school trip to London galleries followed the Photographer’s Gallery with a visit to Gagosian to see the exhibition of Douglas Gordon: All I need is a little bit of everything. See additional images below (and click on them to enlarge).
Next stop on our gallery tour was the Royal Institute of British Architects in Portland Place. We’d been hoping to see the photography exhibit, Wide Angle View but it was closed and we contented ourselves with an exhibition of student projects and a library project on the difficulties faced by women architects in the largely male world of architecture.
Several weeks ago, we did a crawl of London galleries, starting at the Camden Art Centre and the Bloomberg New Contemporaries, a student show that contained surprisingly mature work. Once again, I was struck by gallery spaces and the installation below (‘Twinkling finale’: 4.3.2‽_-⨅⨼, 2022 by Zayd Menk). Click either image below to see them larger.
This mysterious life-size statue of a man contemplating the water held in his cupped hands is the work of the celebrated British sculptor Antony Gormley. Sound II, fashioned from lead out of a plaster cast of the artist’s own body, is in the Cathedral Crypt.
A few more images to give a sense of the magnificent scale of the place. Click on any of the images below to see them full size.
Near the end of December we visited Winchester Cathedral on a rainy day. Click any of the images to see them full-size.
During the break our daughter was visiting from the States and we took her to visit Chawton House, erstwhile home of Jane Austen’s brother (the Jane Austen House itself, which we visited last May was closed for the holiday). The house has a fascinating history, which you can read about at the link above, and I took some pictures out the windows which provided framing of the view.
Whilst waiting to meet my wife for the train home, I was taken by the wavy reflections of the many passersby on the floor of the station whenever the sun shone in brightly through the skylight. Thus end the series of photographs from my London excursion 3 weeks ago in mid-October.
One more little joke before we leave Sugimoto and the Hayward. When you left the exhibit, you could go up the stairs to the cafeteria where a small theatre had been set up, screening a short video about his work on the Enoura Observatory in Japan. There was no one there when I entered, nor when I left. I couldn’t resist the opportunity to make my own homage to his theatre pictures by brightening the screen and adding a small glow and darkening the side windows.
And, as always when I’m visiting a museum or gallery, I’m as interested in the space and the geometry as in the art exhibited (and finding some place for my reflection). Click any of the images below to see them full-size.
I never knew about these metallic constructions of his. In the first image below I’ve centered and isolated the structure in black and white on its mirrored plinth, in the next I show a little more, including the reflection of a passerby and, in the final image I show the whole room with the object centred so as to cover the structure shown above (click on any of the smaller images to see them enlarged – clicking through to the web site first if you’re seeing this in an email).
It would be hard to overstate the scale and impressiveness of the Hiroshi Sugimoto survey now at the Hayward. My pictures of both the exhibit and the gallery will occupy these pages for the next few days. Click on any image below to enlarge them all (you may have to click the post-title above to get to the website first if you’re seeing this in email).
After the Tate Modern I made my way over to the Barbican Centre, expecting to see an exhibit of Simryn Gill photos adverted to me by the Saltoun Gallery. As it turned out, Gill was just a small part of a much larger exhibit on ecofeminism and its illustrious (photographic) history with works by Gauri Gill, Francesca Woodman, Simryn Gill, Fay Godwin and many others.
Continuing with the theme of museums’ use of geometry, here’s a look at (and through) windows at the Tate Modern. Click any of the images below to see them larger.
I continue to be struck by museums and galleries’ use of space. All the whiteness, openness, vastness and what this says about wealth in the hegemonic metropolises. This is particularly seen in empty space, and the use of geometry in defining spaces like staircases. The Tate Modern is a little bit of a special case, situated as it is in a former power station but the vastness of the space continues to echo the theme. Click on any of the images below to see them full sized.
