Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and her enigmatic portraits

Until September 13 the Serpentine Gallery in London is hosting the enigmatic work of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye with the exhibit “Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Verses After Dusk,”

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye paints, almost exclusively, portraits of black figures. More often than not, the person is juxtaposed against a black background, or at least one mired in darkness, allowing the features of the foreground to camouflage with their surroundings, creeping towards invisibility.

“Where painters including Barkley L. Hendricks, Kehinde Wiley and Mickalene Thomas have taken a celebratory, triumphant and sometimes showy approach to the black subject, Yiadom-Boakye makes it nearly invisible,” Karen Rosenberg wrote in 2010. “She favors a dark, near-monochromatic palette and loose, even sloppy brushwork. Faces are inchoate, bodies phantomlike. Her figures don’t really inhabit their clothes, or the spaces around them.”

Yiadom-Boakye was born in London in 1977, the daughter of two nurses born in Ghana. She attended Falmouth College of Art and received her MA at the Royal Academy Schools. She began working full time as an artist in 2006, after winning an Arts Foundation award, and in 2013, received a new rush of widespread attention after being shortlisted for the Turner prize.

The artist’s portraits, in a strange way, communicate they’re not to be trusted. And for good reason. The images, rather than highlighting specific individuals in time and space, conjure fictitious presences, people that never were, outside of the realm of canvas and paint. The artist uses no photographs or preliminary sketches to create her startlingly realistic portraits. The detailed depictions are concocted entirely in the imagination, and executed in paint during the course of a single day.

The longer you look into the eyes of Yiadom-Boakye’s mythical subjects, the more their impossibilities float to the surface. Particularities place each subject in multiple eras, locations, even genders. As Jennifer Higgie wrote in Frieze: “Despite the fact that there is something determinedly average about these people – who, apart from the children, tend to be neither very young nor very old, seemingly neither rich nor poor – they exist in atmospheres touched by a compellingly faint frisson of something not quite explained.”

As the artist explained to New York Times Magazine in 2010, she does not paint her subjects. Rather, the subject is paint itself. “Painting for me is the subject. The figures exist only through paint, through color, line, tone and mark-making.”

Although her characters defy any singular origin, Yiadom-Boakye’s style has clear roots in the trajectory of Western art history. Her works contain the darkness of Francisco de Goya, the flurrying movement of Edgar Degas, the slow leisure of John Singer Sargent, the rough handling of Édouard Manet. Of her influences, Yiadom-Boakye told The Guardian: “I wasn’t intimidated by those painters. It made it easier: there was so much I could look at and learn from.” Through channeling these historical giants, Yiadom-Boakye raises awareness of the lack of black representation throughout the history of art.

“Historically, portraits have conveyed the wealth and authority of their subjects through poses projecting confidence and strength and through clothing, accoutrements and surroundings used strategically to indicate social hierarchy,” Amira Gad writes in an essay accompanying the exhibition. “Commissioning portraiture was a symbol of status, and only the elite were entitled to be immortalized within the ranks of historical painting. With Yiadom-Boakye’s layering of references, her paintings draw attention to the flawed perception of race in historical paintings. In depicting black subjects doing everyday things, she advocates both the normalcy and intricacy of blackness.”

Her political commitment is therefore in an indirect way, as she says, “Clearly, to represent only black subjects has a political sense. But for me it is natural, I don’t like to paint victims. The political commitment is rather in the way I make my paintings.” In fact, Yiadom-Boakye completes her paintings – often of major sizes – in a day, so the color doesn’t dry, as a style choice that gives her models both the intensity of the immediacy and the studied spontaneity.

Jeff Koons and the metaphors of his objects

The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao presents until September 27 Jeff Koons: Retrospective, a complete path of the work of the American artist Jeff Koons (York, Pensilvania, 1955) one of the most outstanding figures in the art of our time. Understanding the importance of the artist in contemporary art is not easy; in front of one of his works we can think, “But how! This is not art! I could also do it! “. Francesco Bonami, one of the most bold and intelligent worldwide curators, wrote in 2007 a very interesting book which I recommend to everyone who wants to understand more about the importance of contemporary artists. The title is “I could also do it – because contemporary art is really art.” In this book Bonami presents different artists speaking, in an ironic and understandable way, about the role that these artists have in the history of contemporary art. Including Jeff Koons of course, one of the most famous and highly thought of artists; vulgar for some and acute for others. I wanted to use some of Francesco Bonami’s ideas about Jeff Koons hoping that this post can be a guide for all art lovers who will visit the exhibition in Bilbao or simply want more understanding his work. I have also included some parts of an interview of Jeff Koon to El Cultural explaining the ideas that are the basis of his Works.

Bonami says in his book: “Jeff Koons celebrates the happiness and the love of the person through the wide universe of objects, transforming the banality in a kind of ecstasy of the consumption. Great art works are like those people of whom we recognize the face but we cannot remember or maybe we never knew the name.   “My idea is to work with things that everyone can relate to. My biggest goal is to dismantle the prejudices that there is only one way of looking.“

Koons is important in the history of art because he realized how the familiarity with an image or object is important for the success of an art work. Aware of how difficult, if not impossible, it is to nowadays create a masterpiece from nothing, Koons has thought it might be possible to convert common and insignificant things into masterpieces. A bit like Duchamp had done in the early 900s. “It has always fascinated me his idea of ready made, the consumer product that may not be included in the hierarchy of conventional aesthetics. With him, I realized that the objects are metaphors of people, which have the extraordinary power to create communities of people around them.”

For this project, however, it was necessary to transform the banality of ordinary objects into something precious and unique. How? Replacing valuable and sophisticated materials for poor and common ones, such as plastic. A successful example of this is Rabbit, an inflatable rabbit reproduced with a fusion of stainless steel, making it the Nike of our epoch. If you see it in a museum you immediately understand that it is a rabbit, but it’s sparkling surface like a big mirror will make it similar to the fantastic appearance or the illusion of a rabbit.

So is it enough to cast in gold for any old piece of scrap and to turn it in a masterpiece? Certainly not. Koons is not a crook but a great artist, as was Andy Warhol and how, in some ways, are Damien Hirst and Maurizio Cattelan. The wise choice of images and objects testify to his talent. In the inflatable rabbit the artist sees a classic shape that is hidden from the view of the ordinary consumer, who only sees colorful and inflated plastic under the guise of a cartoon rabbit. Instead Koons brings out the essence of this ordinary object.

“I bought the inflatables in the bazaars I found in the city. At that time, newly arrived in New York, I admired the work of Donald Judd and Robert Smithson. In fact, these works are closely resembled those that he made: inflatable flowers on mirrors. I liked the idea of the density and the emptiness, the terms associated to the physics.”

Anyone can look at a mountain or a basket of fruit but few, like hico Cézanne, know how to paint the mountain or apples in such a universal way. Koons does the same: he converts the reality that surrounds it in art, a reality that is no longer its simple nature, but the complicated world of consumer inundated with thousands of pictures and objects. If the body is also fully commercialized, then we can understand the meaning of the marriage of Jeff Koons with Ilona Staller. This artist’s problem, or wealth, is his inability to live his life normally: for him everything, including himself, is an artistic creation. Even marriage, especially marriage with a porn star, was for Koons just another way of thinking about the commodification of the world. “Cicciolina”’s body and his become instruments to create living sculptures.

“Made in Heaven speaks of the sense of security that each one has with his own body and what it means to be in relationship with nature. Also, how we preserve the species through procreation. It is related to the eternal and the sexual, and deals with these two poles of life: the biological and the spiritual. In fact it is inspired by Courbet’s painting The Origin of the World.”

Jeff Koons confirms that the great artists, though living entirely in his epoch, can lead to the objects and the art works out of time. Their powers do not extend equally to people. Ilona Staller and the Monna Lisa are individuals who reflect and always will reflect its link with the society of its time and the course of history. Nike and the rabbit Koons, however, imagined, even in their diversity, next to each other, share the same aura, the same ability to enter in the uninterrupted flow of imagination and of human emotions, and of belonging to “timeless” of the artistic eternity.

“I always thought that one is a star artist when he is able to connect with people. Since the beginning of my career, I have been clear that the way toward art is self-confidence, to bet again and again for your interests. It is insisting. That’s the secret to reach a completely metaphysical state.”

Nan Goldin: emotions and relations

Last week I visited at the gallery H2O in Barcelona Gloria Gimenez photo exhibition. In her black and white series Actor’s made in 1992 she expressed interest in the rituals that characterize the different social groups in contemporary society. In these photographs I found some connections with the work of Nan Goldin (Washington DC 1953) I personally esteem as one of the most important contemporary artists. When looking in my library I found the catalogue of the exhibition dedicated to the “Five from Boston” which was organized in 1998 at the Hamburger Kunsthalle. This presentation, made by Dorte Zbikowski, speaks about Nan Goldin, one of the five photographers. I have translated passages that transmits all the value and relevance of the work of this artist.

Nan Goldin think of the camera as a part of her body, as a veritable eye that stores impressions and experiences. For her, photographs have become “a voice that would not be censored, silenced or lost, that would not disappear”.

She began to take photographs when the memory of her older sister, who had committed suicide, began to fade.

At the age of fourteen, Goldin turned from her parents and siblings and sought a new community among her friends. She accompanied this steadily growing “family” with her camera in all circumstances of their lives and occasionally called her work her “visual diary” – “My life is my work”.

In her self-portrait she uses the camera “to get under my skin again, to get to know my face and my environment anew”. She saw herself in a serious battered state, her face swollen and eyes bloodshot, but in her positively defiant bright-red, shiny lipstick there is a power of resistance that admits no trace of self-pity in spite of the clear demonstration of outward and inward injury.

Many of Goldin’s pictures are photographs from the life of fringe groups. Nan Goldin says she not only belongs to them but admires them too. She has known violence, taken drugs, lived in the homosexual and transvestite scene and lost friends of AIDS: a life in the midst of glamour, self-destruction and death.

Goldin photographs only those friends who have given their consent: “At the time when I make the pictures there is a complicity, a collaboration … So it’s later that the person may feel vulnerable and exposed. And in some cases I take the pictures out of circulation.” This shows how Goldin respects her models’ privacy, even though she invades it pretty thoroughly too with the pictures’ titles, in which names, place and date are recorded.

She encouraged her friends to be themselves. Or she gave them the opportunity to discover their identity in role-play in front of the camera. But Goldin never imposes her own ideas on her models.

In her photographs Goldin does not just tell the private story of how she and her friends developed from minors to self-confident adults or found their identity. She tells of the dreams to becoming someone different, such as a star of the world of cinema and fashion magazines which compete for attention through scenes of sex and violence.

Goldin’s friend imitate the behavior of stars and models in front of the camera so as to borrow something of their aura. That means that not only the photographs but also the players are inspired by the media. At the same time, the photographs are a declaration of their escape from a life of social conventions and of their sexual masquerade.

In the early seventies Goldin made friends with the transvestites. She later collected the pictures from this milieu in the book The other side. It shows a glittery world of extravagant dresses and poses. But Goldin photographed the transvestites not only in their weekly beauty competitions but also privately in their everyday clothes and “dressing-up”. Goldin accepts them as they see themselves and want be seen by the others. “I had enormous respect for the courage my friends had in recreating themselves according to their fantasies”.

In her main work from the eighties, the Ballad of Sexual dependency, Goldin depicts in a show of hundreds of slides the development of women and men who in their struggle for self-determination have abandoned bourgeois ways. Euphoria and depression, hunger for life and the fear of death are expressed in the insatiable quest for the body of the other. With unremitted directness Goldin continually shows nudes washing, bathing or making love. But they display no weakness. Artist and viewer openly confront each other. Sexuality and emotions are revealed by the photographer, but equally are surrendered by the models.

Time and again Goldin enhances the power of her pictures by linking individual photographs to form complex series, such as the shots of her friend Cookie Muller that were taken over several years. For the book A double life she, together with David Armstrong, assembling a selection as a testament of friendship. The slides shows are especially forceful, and she has enlarged and re-arranged these for each presentation so as to keep up with changes in mood, feeling, impressions and memories. Goldin says, “I don’t believe in the single portrait. I believe only in the accumulation of portraits as a representation of a person. Because I think people are really complex”.

The same is true for reality.

Cy Twombly a bridge between continents and artists

The Gagosian New York Gallery presents an exhibition starting from April 23rd till June 20^th of a group of the last paintings and sculptures by the late Cy Twombly, before his death in Rome in 2011, many of which have never been seen publicly. Throughout his sixty-year career, Twombly infused the physical and emotional aspects of Abstract Expressionism with a wealth of historic and mythic allusion.

The Bacchus series (2004-08) is charged with visceral energies. In huge arcs and drips of sanguine paint, sensation courses-through the annals of myth and history. In later untitled works, cursive white lines against dark blue fields similarly describe the gestural force that first appeared in the “blackboard” paintings of the 1960s and early 1970s. Blooming (2001-08) is an efflorescent ten-panel painting spanning more than sixteen feet in width. Twombly captures and memorializes in patches of lush crayon and paint, and drips and flows of startling color, the fragile, heady nature of the peony flowers so revered in Japanese aesthetic contemplation.

From 1946 until his death in 2011, Twombly created sculptural assemblages from found materials and objects-kitchen utensils, cardboard, leaves, and other debris -unifying the ultimate form with a coat of white paint. In 1979 he began to cast some sculptures in bronze, thus preserving and transforming the disparate elements. The surface and patina of weathered evoke in original cast bronzes artifacts exhumed from the earth; contain some allusions to Egyptian and Mesopotamian sculpture.

Cy Twombly’s infatuation for Europe began in the 50s when he won a scholarship and used it to travel around the Mediterranean together with his friend, the Texan artist Robert Rauschenberg. The two artists spent long periods in Rome, exploring museums and antiquities and in Morocco, where he participated in an archaeological excavation of Roman ruins. Twombly enrolled as an artist in the American abstract expressionism, cultivating an inimitable script that ended up being the essence of his painting next to the use of the word, reminiscent of mythical figures and facts and gradually incorporating the color.

However, that calligraphy, representationism and use of color caused him the criticism from his compatriots not only due to nationalist and commercial reasons. The American artists never seen favorably his residence in Europe and his dedicated calligraphic art as well as the sophisticated cultural fundamentals of his works.

He was passionate about poetry and thought of Greece and Rome and about painters like Raphael and Poussin. So, periodically, he expressed in his work a most baroque and wilder side that estranged him from the austerity of abstract art. According to Edelbert Koeb, Director of the Museum of Modern Art in Vienna, Twombly represented the link between the formal radicalization of post-war American art and the complexity of European painting.

Reflecting on the role of a link Twombly had between Europe and America, I remembered that in 2014, Dieter Buchart, one of my favorites curators noted for his courage in seeking correlations between works of artists of different periods, organized the exhibition Poetics of the gesture in New York, which combined the work of three artists that no one would expect to find hanging next to each other: Egon Schiele, Cy Twombly and Jean Michel Basquiat. In an interview, talking about that project, Buchart said: “Twombly was the bridge between Schiele and Basquiat. Twombly was taking up Schiele a few generations before Basquiat, the great unifying element is, of course, that both are making drawings; even if they made paintings, both always used techniques from drawing. So the question was how to connect these two artists in the sense of generations on the one hand, and, on the other, what artist had been especially influential for Basquiat and how he developed his inimitable line. And that’s Twombly. Twombly was very influential for Basquiat early on, in the transition from his poetic conceptual graffiti to his early collage works, drawings, and paintings. You see that in the way Basquiat works, with a type of line derived from handwriting, and the representation of handwriting. He also frequently used actual words, a very important part of his art. And Schiele, on the other hand, though he has so many similarities to Basquiat, seems less obvious at first in this trio. But the bridge between Twombly and Schiele is Basquiat-it’s not about making the comparison between Schiele and Twombly, but really, Basquiat is in the middle.”

Talking of Cy Twombly we meet again this binding function, to connect different cultures, art can develop art. An important role in a historical moment where totalitarianism, fascism and fundamentalism are taking advantage of the fear and incertitude amongst humans, and are trying to assert themselves to achieve the same goal. To deny the complexity, diversity and individuality of people and create a single, violent ideology with an attempt to destroy anyone or anything which may oppose to its monolithic logic.

“Each line is now the actual experience with iIts own innate history. It does not illustrate-it is the sensation of its own realization.” Cy Twombly

Sonia Delaunay and Marlene Dumas: two queens at theTate Gallery

Yesterday I received the following tweet from the Tate Gallery in London for the inauguration of the exhibition of Sonia Delaunay that runs from April 15th till August 9th:

As #SoniaDelaunay comes to Tate we want to know: are women artists taking center stage?

 Until May 10 the Tate Gallery is also hosting a major exhibition of Marlene Dumas, another artist who is enjoying impressive success in the world of contemporary art.

Both the Tate’s tweet and these two exhibitions seem to contradict my previous posting on this blog that, starting with the provocative question of the Guerrilla Girls “Do women have to strip to enter museums?” analyzes the difficulties of female artists to assert themselves in the art world.  I think to understand the changes that are occurring in the role that female artists play and can play in future in art, it’s interesting to consider the artistic and personal paths of these two artists in whose lives it is already possible to find significant developments.

Sonia Delaunay-Terk was born into a Jewish family in Odessa (Ukraine) 1885. She soon moved to St. Petersburg, under the tutelage of her uncle Henri Terk, an event which would change her not only her name, but her destiny.  She was hosted by a family of good social position, which offered her the possibility of a good education and particularly a strong background in several foreign languages, since it was deemed  prestigious to speak French or German, even at home, among the Russian upper classes . That linguistic proficiency opened many doors to Sonia over her life and contributed to her role as a cultural agitator. From her incursions as a translator of Kandinsky’s strategic books to her relationship with the Berlin gallery Der Sturm, with which, thanks to her mediation, exhibited first her husband’s and then her own work in the years before the war.

In 1904 she went to Germany. There she studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe, training she would continue two years later in Paris, a city which opened her eyes to the color through the Fauves, especially Matisse. Through the homosexual dealer Wilhelm Uhde, whom she married in 1908 for convenience to avoid returning to Russia, she came into contact with painters living in Paris.

The direction of Sonia’s life completely transformed when she met the painter Robert Delaunay, whom she married in 1911. Together they embarked on an artistic adventure that simply was a research leading the Cubism one step further through the use of colors. Throughout their life together they created, in fact, a symbiosis in which the roles are well spaced and at the same time formed a solid whole. The pictorial art of Robert is the other side of the applied arts of Sonia, although in many cases it is she who takes the initiative, who rushes research a step further, as occurs with other famous and coetaneous couples, Hans Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp for example, with whom the Delaunay shared ferments and friendship at various times in their lives.

In 1913 Sonia begun to create “simultaneous dresses” which proposed the other side of her husband’s color pursuit. That challenge for the so-called “applied art” has its roots in the English Arts and Crafts movement, where a painting is not superior to the design of a dress or a vase. It is the idea of ​​coexistence of art and craftsmanship that other artists of the time, for example Taeuber-Arp, performed with their designs of textiles, toys and tapestries. And it’s also something very Russian: the fascination with popular culture became fashionable among contemporary artists like Kandinsky.

The year 1913 of the first “simultaneous dresses” is the same as that of a fascinating publication, a kind of book of that Sonia created with Blaise. Cendrars Siberian Prose and Little Jeanne of France appeared in Paris and was the place where the free verse of the Swiss writer met this colorful game Sonia proposes, in the style of a harlequin costume. They are the same colors of her original creations in canvas, leather, shoes, bags, dresses, coats, capes, cars … Designs that over the years Delaunay perfected qualified produced. Designs that the twenties manufactured with the Dutch stores of high range object Mertz & Co.  After the owner discovered Sonia Delaunay’s work in the great International Exhibition of Decorative Arts in 1925, where the supremacy of art deco was established, the fascination, then, moved to the sophisticated mass-produced object.

In those years when she started creating her games of simultaneísmos, the home of the Delaunay in Paris became a central focus point for the avant-garde movement at which poets, writers, artists came together. Also in Madrid, where the war surprised the couple and where Sonia opened Sonia House in 1918, a design shop that dressed the aristocracy of the city, the society was fascinated by the energy of this woman.

When the war finished they returned to Paris in 1921 and Sonia and Robert Delaunay returned to being the center of attention, and their house was again a magnet for new vanguards. At that time the applied arts were as essential as the painting itself, and Sonia Delaunay was included in the exhibition of Cercle et Carré, the group formed in the in the late twenties with the aim to gather non-figurative artists. After art history would become conservative and begin to prioritize painting compared to the applied arts, fame would turn to her husband, a painter.  During this period of conservative art history, Sonia was little more than a designer, a couturier and a creator of objects. Despite this the artist managed to search for the meaning of things in building the world that had some resemblance to global theater, pursuing the adventure of the colors until her death in Paris in 1979.

The Tate Gallery exhibition is the first retrospective in the UK to assess the magnitude of her vibrant artistic practice through a wide range of media. It will be exhibit her innovative paintings, textiles and clothing made through a sixty-year career, and also the results of her innovative collaborations with poets, choreographers and producers, from Diaghilev to Liberty.

Marlene Dumas is a South African artist, born in Cape Town in 1953. During her childhood she lived in Kuilsrivier, South Africa where she spoke Afrikaans, her mother language. She grew up in the world of apartheid, closed to the outside world, with some pictures in books or magazines as a small window to the outside world. She graduated in Visual Arts at the University of Cape Town in 1975 and, thanks to a scholarship, she moved to live in the Netherlands to become a free artist but never completely breaking the umbilical cord with her homeland. “South Africa is my content” she says.

From 1976 to 1978, she worked imparting education in Ateliers ’63, Haarlem and in other Dutch institutes. She devoted herself to represent scenes or figures from files of own photographs, newspapers and magazines. The starting point of her work is almost always a picture, sometimes taken by her, sometimes clipped from a magazine, which then transforms into a painting. Along with painting, often subtle and watery, like rain which allows to glimpse the canvas, Marlene Dumas adds to the simple initial image a strong charge interpretive and emotional. Her paintings are not decorative: they are strong works which affect the eyes and capture the mind and the imagination. The news is elevated to emblems of a condition or situation. The role of women in history has always fascinated Marlene Dumas. An Algerian patriot captured by police during the war of independence in 1961, the German terrorist Ulrike Meinhof dead in prison, a victim of Chechen terrorism, a Palestinian terrorist, the wife of the killed African leader Patrice Lumumba, including Charlotte Corday, the assassin Marat, who before being guillotined said she had “killed a man to save one hundred thousand”: each merits a painting.

Marlene Dumas is a figurative artist, almost all her paintings are portraits of people or anyway focused on the human figure. There is no background, no scenery, no point of view, everything is focused on the expression of the faces or on the importance of gestures. However the expressive power of her art doesn’t require human features, as evidenced by the extraordinary picture Mindblocks: stone blocks that give an immediate feeling of anguish, but a glimpse of escape. There is hope, as long as we let go our “mental blocks” and liberate the imagination.

The exhibition at the Tate Modern condenses the integrity of a trajectory that began in the seventies, owing to her now becoming one of the most respected names in art today as well as one of the most quoted. In 2008 she became the most expensive living woman artist when someone paid 4 million euros for a canvas entitled The Visitor. Five years before, her works were sold for 20,000 euros. There was something in her dark expressionism which began to resonate in her time. It Marlene Dumas bothers to remember this fact, perhaps because this debate diverts attention from the contents of a complex and fascinating work, like an enigma that one faces a thousand times without finding a solution, which she talks of as her most prized possession.

In the end the artistic and personal paths of these two great artists show us the way that artists, not only female, have to establish themselves is by leaving their small environment and measure themselves against the world at large without forgetting their roots, which always will influence the form of their artistic expressions. For women it has always been more complicated but Sonia Delaunay and Marlene Dumas, at different times, have attained this result and their exhibitions in London confirm it.