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The Gallery
This lovely gallery was always, and remains, characterised by a quality of precision, with crisp modernist works on pale grey walls.
I enjoyed visiting the collection and seeing the permanent collection, temporary shows of Joan Eardley, contemporary painting and a Barbara Hepworth retrospective.
Eardley
The exhibition of Eardley related to her time in Catterline is accompanied by cases with photographs and letters.
The work on display are major work. In these she incorporates some of the rough textural effects seen in American Abstract Expressionism. My feeling is that the variety of surface effects masks an underlying sentimentality- that there is a glossiness given to the scenes which is a projection from Eardley.
But it`s hard to define exactly what this sentimentality really consists of, unlike in her street urchin paintings where it is in plain sight. All I can say is that I feel it is there.
Hepworth
This is major survey. By 1935 Hepworth`s work as settles into an exposition of the idea of significant form, and from then on her work consists of repetitions of these ideas on a larger and larger scale. The sculptures continue with consequently decreased intimacy, and take on the characteristics of typical corporate or institutional art- i.e. coldness of temperament, bigness, inoffensiveness, suitabililty as a means to offset or complement architecture without outshining it.
Sculpture thus becomes the opposite of what it should be- it becomes a meaningless thing, a spacefiller, a thing you pass without realising it`s there.
Appropriately, the show ends with a screening of Hepworth`s address to the United nations. As earlier work by Hepworth has a curious and emotionally rich quality, especially in such torsos as that in my photo.
This is sad. I fear that the ideas she pursued in her art, these formalist ideas, especially taken to a institutional environment, rapidly lead to a creative cul-de-sac. I remember feeling the same pfff on seeing a giant, insipid Miro in a Chicago plaza.
Carol Rhodes
There is a little show of contemporary British painting, an from it the two Carol Rhodes works are the most interesting, tackling as they do contemporary built landscapes.
I do, alas, feel that Rhodes` work is better in photo than in the flesh, where they appear rather like academic exercises, the paint handling having a mechanical quality.
I have done a little work on similar themes- I intend to do more. But they are not enjoyable places to visit. They`re inhuman, unkind, and making work in them requires definite fortitude.
Some paintings in the permanent collection
There is a joyful quality in these three above that I find very pleasing, and necessary. I love the golden colours. The Peploes are such tempting sweets that I`ve included too.
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