Summer Exhibition 2012, Royal Academy of Arts

Recently i have visited the Royal Academy of Arts in London to see the annual Summer Exhibition, which consists of a large collection of all types of art from hundreds of different artists. 'Held annually since the founding of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1768, the Summer Exhibition is the world's largest open- submission contemporary art exhibition. Now in its 244th year, it continues the tradition of inspiring debate and displaying work in all styles and media, including painting, printmaking, photography, sculpture, architectural models, artists' books and film. The Summer Exhibition attracts a high volume of entrants annually with over 11,000 entries received this year. The exhibition features over 1,400 works chosen by the Summer Exhibition commitee.
In this post, i will pick out some of the works i liked the most which will also give you an idea of how wide the variety of work was that was exhibited.




Sweetly The Air Flew Overhead: Battle With Unicorns No.9, By Cathy De Monchaux, Mixed Media

Personally one of the most spectacular time-consuming pieces of the entire show in my opinion, this work depicts a battle between fantasy creatures such as unicorns, made from elastoplast, copper wire, brass, beads, feathers, silk, paint and glass. The intricacy was extroadinary, and seemed to repeat patterns and lines of the creatures in a never-ending 3-dimensional 'painting'. In this sculpture, Cathy de Monchaux combines opposites, hard and rough contrast with smooth and soft. The forms also work in opposition, with spikes or jagged edges contrasting with curves and padded surfaces. Her imagery implies harshness and softness of nature which simultaneously attract and repel. The elegant form of a unicorn is changed into something blood-thirsty and heartless.






After Henry James, By Tom Phillips, Epson and Silkscreen

Tom Phillips is an artist who looks at ornamental forms of writing, taking inspiration from quotes, and phrases from books and poetry, to create colourful and thoughtful pieces. Paying so much attention to one set of words in a piece of work really emphasises what is being said and makes you wonder at the words instead of dismissing them as you might do if they were written normally in a book. It shows a lot about the artist's mind and messages he wants to convey to the people that look at his work. Elected to the Royal Academy in 1984, Phillips went on to chair the Academy's Library and its Exhibition Committee from 1995 to 2007. He also served as a trustee for the National Portrait Gallery and British Museum. His huge involvement in these art galleries and the experiences and memories from these years of his life reflect in his work, some of the phrases used have been written by himself from what he knows about various life occurances.




Pure To Another (Portrait Of Brian Kennedy), By Colin Davidson, Oil On Linen

Colin Davidson is a contemporary artist, living and working near Belfast, Northern Ireland. Since graduating with a first class honours degree from the Art and Design Faculty at the University of Ulster in 1991, Colin Davidson has exhibited extensively in London, New York, Milan and across Ireland. His latest body of work is a selection of portraits of writers and actors, a portrait of Brian Kennedy being displayed at the Summer Exhibition. I have picked this work to blog about because although it may look like any other ordinary realist portrait of a man, seeing the work in reality was a completely different experience. Parts of the painting were very detailed while others were left rather hazy and blurred as though the head in the portrait was actually moving. Something else i noticed that stood out from other portraits i have seen was the composition of the eyes. Although the composition of the head looks to be almost directly angled forward, the eyes are not looking directly at the viewer as a majority of portraits of this formation do. This gave the painting quite a sombre mood as though the subject being painted did not want to be there or was thinking of something else.

Stourhead 30th June 2003, By Adrian Berg, Oil

Adrian Berg's work celebrated nature in its most cultivated form, and throughout his life he was fascinated by England’s parks and gardens; among those he recorded were Windsor, Kew, Dartington, Nymans, Stourhead and Sheffield Park. 'However narrow the subject matter, Berg found new ways of recording it and of examining the effects of the seasons on the landscape. He experimented with different dilutions of paint, studied the ways in which water alters the forms of the trees it reflects, and intensified or reduced the richness of colour to extract the maximum expressive potential from the subject.' Much of his work shows the same subject matter, his most popular composition: lush green landscapes reflected in water. He was elected a Royal Academician in 1992 and appointed an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Art in 1994. Stourhead 30th June 2003 was shown in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition and i thought his work was very child-like and experimental, playing around with different paint dilutions and studying the way in which water alters the forms of the trees it reflects.






Feather Child 1, By Lucy Glendinning, Mixed Media

Perhaps one of the most unnerving peices i have seen in the exhibition this year is Lucy Glendinning's Feather Child 1 showing the lying, fetal positioned body of a child made entirely of white an brown feathers. Most of her work experiments with different types and colour of feathers covering the bodies of children and when looking at her work, some moments it made me feel unsettled because seeing it in reality it was just so different from anything i had ever seen before, the figure seemed to look vulnerable yet quite scary at the same time. It seemed to me that i didnt like looking at it because it made me feel unsettled but i loved looking at it at the same time, the brown feathers being concentrated on the face an ear made it feel very unhuman. Accompanying the work, Lucy Glendinning has twinned a poem:

Will we be able to resist it?
Of coursed not, I say.
The endless opportunity
to better our future,
to improve the human race,
and solve the endless
problems of more.

Will we be able to resist it?
Once we have cured the sick,
to improve the well,
what fun we’ll have
making useful modifications
improvements and special vocations.

Will we be able to resist it?
A decoration applied with
a gene, not a needle.
To breath under water
Wouldn't that be useful,
or to fly who could resist that.
To be special we all want it,
once we are no longer a child.

Will we be able to resist it?
Is evolution ours now?
Will it be like most,
money will buy the prize?
You will need to be
something like a Rothschild
to be able to fly.
Or to glow in the dark
a Geldof or a Spark.
Is it about to change,
are we to be in charge?

The Victoria Miro Gallery, London

'The Vanity of Small Differences' exhibition, Grayson Perry, 07 June- 11 August 2012

A few days ago i visited the Victoria Miro gallery in London, which was a gallery i hadnt been to before as its a little out of the centre of London and not so widely publicised as some others. The Vanity Of Small Differences by the artist Grayson Perry consisted of six tapestries of scenarios 'exploring his fascination with taste and the visual story it tells of our interior lives.' Looking at the work, it is clear there is a central focus on political themes, morals and class and what is right and what is wrong. I enjoyed the exhibition very much as the traditional medium of tapestry used was very unusual in contrast with the content of the work. The bright colours and composition of the pictures were very distorted so each vision seemed like a dream or a personal memory of the artist. There was so much happening in each picture and unbelievable attention to detail that coming away from a piece and then going back to looking at it again, there were new things to take in each time.



Here is the official description from the Victoria Miro Gallery about the exhibition:

'In The Vanity of Small Differences Grayson Perry explores his fascination with taste and the visual story it tells of our interior lives in a series of six tapestries at Victoria Miro and three programmes, All in the Best Possible Taste with Grayson Perry, for Channel 4. The artist goes on a safari amongst the taste tribes of Britain, to gather inspiration for his artworks, literally weaving the characters he meets into a narrative partly inspired by Hogarth's A Rake's Progress.

Grayson Perry comments: "The tapestries tell the story of class mobility, for I think nothing has as strong an influence on our aesthetic taste as the social class in which we grow up. I am interested in the politics of consumerism and the history of popular design but for this project I focus on the emotional investment we make in the things we choose to live with, wear, eat, read or drive. Class and taste run deep in our character - we care. This emotional charge is what draws me to a subject".

Perry has always worked with traditional media; ceramics, cast iron, bronze, printmaking and tapestry. He is interested in how each historic category of object accrues over time intellectual and emotional baggage. Tapestry is the art form of grand houses: depicting classical myths, historical and religious scenes and epic battles. In this series of works Perry plays with idea of using this ancient allegorical art to elevate the commonplace dramas of modern British life.

The artist's primary inspiration was A Rake's Progress (1732 -33) by William Hogarth, which in eight paintings tells the story of Tom Rakewell, a young man who inherits a fortune from his miserly father, spends it all on fashionable pursuits and gambling, marries for money, gambles away a second fortune, goes to debtors' prison and dies in a madhouse.

The Vanity of Small Differences tells the story of the rise and demise of Tim Rakewell and is composed of characters, incidents and objects Perry encountered on journeys through Sunderland, Tunbridge Wells and The Cotswolds. Hogarth has long been an influence on Perry's works, his Englishness, his robust humour and his depiction of, in his own words, 'modern moral subjects'. The secondary influence comes from Perry's favourite form of art, early Renaissance painting.

Each of the six images, to a greater or lesser extent, pays homage to a religious work. Including Masaccio's Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, Matthias Grünewald's Isenheim Altarpiece, Rogier Van de Weyden's Lamentation and three different paintings of The Annunciation by Carlo Crivelli, Grünewald and Robert Campin. The images also reference the pictorial display of wealth and status in The Arnolfini Portrait by Jan Van Eyck and Mr & Mrs Andrews by Thomas Gainsborough. Woven into each tapestry are snatches of text, each one in the voice of a participant in the scene illustrated. Each image also features a small dog, reminiscent of Hogarth's beloved pug, Trump.'

Below are the six tapestries that make up this exhibition:


The Agony in the Carpark, 2012


Expulsion from Number 8 Eden Close, 2012



The Adoration of the Cage Fighters, 2012



The Upper Class at Bay, 2012



The Annunciation of the Virgin Deal, 2012



Lamentation, 2012


'Press Release' exhibition, Sarah Sze, 20 June- 11 August 2012

Another exhibition which i loved was Press Release by the site-specific installation artist Sarah Sze who uses everyday objects and materials such as wool, string, match sticks, lamp lights, pegs, twigs, fruit, water bottles, paint tins etc to make different situations in a floor space which are composed in an intrigueing way, almost like seeing through the eyes of an inventor or being let into the exciting world of an inventor's work shop. They were so detailed and elaborate and cleverely imagined, you could definately tell they were created over a substantial amount of time.





Here is the description about the exhibition composed by the gallery:

'Victoria Miro is delighted to announce an exhibition of new work by Sarah Sze, her second solo show with the gallery. Characteristic of Sze's expansive practice, the exhibition will comprise
several interrelated installations - conceptual constellations of everyday objects.

Over both floors, Sze's latest body of work re-imagines the gallery as a kind of laboratory where processes of observation, examination, and exploration are in progress. In the lower gallery, a series of discrete works serve as accumulated evidence of a project - each sculpture it's own portable, temporary site, a complex system marking a location with an individual, precisely choreographed gesture. In the upper gallery, from across a darkened expanse a single, illuminated large-scale installation becomes an archaeology of its own: an elaborate concave assemblage seemingly captured in a moment of either construction or ruin.

Preoccupied with conceptions of how we continually locate ourselves within space, Sze's works unfold as investigations of the psychological, and even emotional, understandings of our environment. We are always finding ourselves in space, oscillating between orientation and disorientation, and with each location we experience accompanies an evolving history.

In the works, references to instruments of measure and mapping are drawn, as are the worlds they strive to ascertain. The act of looking prompted by Sze's intricately constructed sculptures and the detail of her materials is underscored here as a unique, yet shared, encounter with place: a moment of discovery, a remnant of an experience.

Biographical information: Sarah Sze will represent the United States of America at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013. Sze has exhibited internationally, with solo presentations at MUDAM, Luxembourg (2012); Asia Society, New York (2011-2012); Musée d'Art Moderne et d'Art Contemporain, Nice, France (2011); Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Newcastle, UK (2009); Maison Hermès Forum, Tokyo (2008); Malmö Konsthall, Sweden, (2006); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, (2003); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2002); Fondation Cartier in Paris (1999); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1999); and ICA London (1998). Recent permanent installations include Still Life with Landscape (Model for a Habitat), The High Line, New York and The Distances Where Magnets Pull, University of California, San Francisco, both (2011). Sarah Sze was born in Boston in 1969 and currently lives and works in New York.'


Narcissus Garden, By Yayoi Kusama, 2008

This installational work was something apart from the exhibitions by another artist called Yayoi Kusama consisting of giant metal spherical shapes floating on the pond water like massive ball bearings. The way they gathered together reminded me of multiplying bacteria or some kind of alien growth, though they were also very beautiful in the natural light and reflecting from the water beneath. There was a dazzling contrast between something that was very beautiful but something that felt dangerous and overwhelming at the same time.