Barbican’s Modern Couples explores art, intimacy and the avant-garde

‘Some women fight and others do not,’ observes Joan Didion in her The White Album. ‘Like so many guerrillas in the wars between sexes, Georgia O’Keeffe seems to have been equipped early with an immutable sense of who she was and a fairly clear understanding that she would be required to prove it,’ the American author writes of the great American painter. Much like the handful of female artists struggling within a very male modern art world, O’Keeffe refused to be considered a ‘woman painter’. She was brave and famously outspoken, writing of her flower series which she felt were sentimentalised by the male gaze, ‘I made you take time to look at what I saw, and when you took time to really notice my flowers you hung all your associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see – and I don’t.’

Georgia O’Keeffe’s romance with the photographer and gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz, who she met in 1918 and later married, is amongst the forty art couples featured in a rich and engaging exhibition opened at the Barbican in London. Modern Couples: Art, Intimacy and the Avant-garde is the story of modern art in the first half of the 20th century told through relationships. The Barbican refuses to portray the woman as victim here – purposely avoiding the tired artist-as-muse narrative. Instead Modern Couples highlights how the union of two – or in some cases three as friends and lovers, straight, bi and gay – can create exciting artistic dialogues.

‘Its new take on modern art history, focusing on collaboration and mutual influence in intimate relationships, could not be timelier,’ says Jane Alison, the Barbican’s head of visual arts. ‘The show offers visitors a deeply personal and revealing insight into the transformative impact artists’ had on each other. Ultimately it is an exhibition about modern art and modern love.’

Organised by Centre Pompidou-Metz in collaboration with Barbican, it forms part of the gallery’s  The Art of Change, a year-long series exploring the relationship between art, society and politics. Modern Couples offers an insight to the life and work of an incredibly rich collection of painters, sculptors, photographers, architects, designers, writers, musicians and performers, shown alongside personal photographs, love letters, gifts and rare archival material. This is not your usual crowd-pleasing, instagramable exhibition. There is so much to take in, and so much to learn in the brilliant béton brut Barbican.

Amongst the legendary duos here are Camille Claudel and Auguste Rodin, Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Dora Maar and Pablo Picasso, the brilliant Lee Miller and Man Ray, Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West. Then there are some surprising unions, for instance Federico García Lorca and Salvador Dalí, or Emilie Flöge and Gustav Klimt. Seen as a muse in the past, Flöge was a talented fashion designer who ran her own couture house in Vienna, and happened to be Klimt’s partner. Both shared a euphoric sense of a new world of art outside the confines of academic tradition and a love of textiles and ornamentation, which clearly fed into both their practices. The photographs they took of each other are fun and full of life.

Others such as Lucia Moholy and László Moholy-Nagy are a union as much about love as shared ideology that helped alter the creative landscape. One particular highlight is Leonora Carrington’s exceptional portrait of Max Ernst, taken in 1937, a coded double portrait (pictured here). At the intersection of design and art, we get to see the Omega workshop created by Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry and Duncan Grant in 1913; there are Aino Aalto and Alvar Aalto and their Artek design company in Helsinki opened in 1935; and Eileen Gray and Jean Badovici’s modernist villa, E1027, in the south of France – featured here with original furniture pieces.

Modern Couples includes intimate relationships in all their forms – obsessional, conventional, mythic, platonic, fleeting, life-long – to reveal the way in which creative individuals came together. They often transgressed the constraints of their time, reshaping art, redefining gender stereotypes and forging news ways of living and loving. Crucially, the exhibition challenges the idea that the history of art is a single line of solitary, predominantly masculine geniuses.

This is a fascinating portrait of creative relationships, an engaging study of connections and conversations, of the brave and brilliant, daring and dynamic female and male artists, designers, writers of the early part of the last century. To quote the curators, it is a tale of ‘modern art and modern love, the seductive power of art …’. On until January and not to be missed.

Nargess Banks

All images are for press publication only and are subject to copyright. See individual descriptions for detail. #moderncouples

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Hayward Gallery’s Space Shifters offers new perspectives

We live in peculiar times. Reality, fact, truth is under fire – replaced with a cocktail of fiction. Increasingly we are made to feel detached from the reality of others as news, war, death all become passing images. So, it feels apt to turn it all up-side-down – to see all around from different perspectives. This is the theme behind ‘Space Shifters’, the new exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London. The surrounding Southbank Centre and its sincere civic promise, then the Hayward’s brutalist solid structure yet soft, tactile concrete walls and rooms flooded with natural light, are perfectly fitting to experience reality on its head.

Here, our sense of space is completely disrupted through twenty installation pieces and sculptures by a powerhouse of international artists. Yayoi Kusamas, Anish Kapoor, Richard Wilson are exploring how – through shape and translucent materials – they can indulge in a little play on our perceptions. They also offer an alternative view of minimalism. Rather than the usual dry, geometric and serial minimalism, the collection here are altogether more alluring and playful.

Some of the artists featured have explored the double meaning of reflection – the physical mirroring of an object and the contemplative act. One of the highlights is at the top of the concrete ramp – an installation by Daniel Steegmann Mangrané inspired by the shape of pouring concrete stairwells. It asks us to form a new narrative with the architecture of the Hayward Gallery.

‘Space Shifters’ alters our focus. We see ourselves differently – perhaps as others may see us. The audience become participants, approaching the art, entering sculptures, becoming animated. The space is flooded with strange reflections of distorted faces and inverted bodies. And yes, it is a selfie paradise. This isn’t to say ‘Space Shifters’ is presenting art as a theme park. Rather, here there is room for contemplation to allow space for other realities.

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Enter the fascinating universe of Joan Jonas

Yesterday I found myself immersed in the work of Joan Jonas, lost in thought in the vast, subterranean Tate Modern Tanks and then in Herzog & de Meuron’s twisting, spiralling Switch House. Walking through her life’s work, I felt compelled to enter her imaginary, real, brilliant, often bizarre and always colourful worlds. Then downstairs in the Tanks, we were treated to a special preview of Mirror Piece II, a long-admired performance from 1970. Live art feels so intimate, and this was pure visceral joy.

Jonas is a pioneer in the world of performance and the visual arts, and this is the most comprehensive and captivating exhibition of her work ever shown in the UK. Unfolding over ten days and six nights, BMW Tate Live showcases Jonas’s performances and installations including ground-breaking works not staged for 40 years.

The artist produced a vast and complex body of work to include film stills, sketches, video installations and live performances, and it has been a challenge for the curators here to find new ways to share the way Jonas uses live theatre situations to explore storytelling, conveying her movement back and forth in time, how she constantly remakes and rearranges existing situations.

Jonas creates miniature performance theatres – at once a balance of the instance and preserving the past, keeping memories, re-imagining past textures, re-thinking ideologies. These are action sculpture and her work is always alive – the past and present in constant dialogue.

‘I always thought the activity of putting one object next to another was like making a visual poem,’ writes Jonas about the props she has displayed as a sculpture in the opening room. Her work draws from curious cultures and religions, from imagery, fairy tales. Jonas has long been fascinated by oral storytelling, and you sense this walking around and into her giant-size moving screens.

In the late 1960s and 70s, she shot stills in New York, capturing the textures and the colours of a city on the edge of bankruptcy. Later she began working more directly with narrative exploring women’s place in history, ‘as outsiders, witches, storytellers,’ she says. ‘I’ve always been interested in the poetics of how women are depicted, which is political, of course.’

Jonas’s work is presented at the Tate in dialogue with an intergenerational selection of artists – Jason Moran, Mark Leckey, Sylvia Palacios Whitman, Jumana Emil Abboud – demonstrating the powerful impact she has had on contemporary artists today. Throughout these ten days, visitors are invited to explore a series of installations in the Tanks to include her acclaimed Reanimation, a spellbinding environment made from projected footage of Arctic landscapes and light refracted through dozens of hanging crystals.

What makes the Tate Live series so special are the six-night live performance programmes. They will open with Jonas performing live with her long-time collaborator, the jazz pianist and composer Jason Moran. The third and fourth nights will be dedicated to three seminal performances from a formative period in Jonas’s career: Mirror Check, Mirror Piece II and Mirage, the latter performed by Jonas herself for the first time since 1980. The final weekend will focus on Chilean-American artist Sylvia Palacios Whitman, a peer of Jonas who also came to prominence in New York in the 1970s, performing for the first time in the UK and will debut a new collaboration with photographer Christopher Rauschenberg, son of artist Robert Rauschenberg which, in the spirit of the avant-garde, will be kept a surprise.

Nargess Banks

BMW Tate Live: Ten Days Six Nights (16 – 25 March 2018) is curated by Catherine Wood, senior curator of international art (performance), Isabella Maidment, assistant curator of performance and Andrea Lissoni, senior curator of international art (film).

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Lee Ufan’s Relatum – Stage opens at Serpentine Galleries

Once-upon-a-time ‘Rock on Top of Another Rock’ lived in Kensington Gardens Hyde Park outside the Serpentine Galleries. The public sculpture by Swiss artist Fischli & Weiss stayed here until a few years ago, its public life prolonged for its popularity, and it made me smile every time I walked, jogged, or ran past it. It was so simple and so perfect for this magical little corner of London. As seasons changed so did these seemingly hovering Rocks – their mood, their light, their character. One day as I ran past, the two rocks has gone leaving a sad empty space. I changed my running route.

Today I was so excited to see South Korean artist Lee Ufan’s ‘Relatum – Stage’ which went live this morning and will be here until July. It recalls Fischli & Weiss’s work and is a nod to the neolithic monuments in the British countryside – Stonehenge etc. Ufan’s minimalist work uses only two materials – steel and stone – as is characteristic of the Japanese avant-garde Mono-ha group of which he was one of the main proponents in the 1960s. Meaning ‘object school’, the group rejected Western notions of representation, instead focusing on the relationships between materials and perceptions.

Here in Hyde Park the two cold, angled, mirrored, steel sheets and tactile Welsh stones together reflect and blend in with the surroundings. In focusing on the precise conceptual and spatial juxtaposition of the natural and industrial materials, Ufan seeks to find a balance that heightens the moment of encounter, allowing us to see ‘the world as it is,’ he says. ‘The highest level of expression is not to create something from nothing, but rather to nudge something that already exists so that the world shows up more vividly.’

Relatum – Stage will be at the Serpentine Galleries, Kensington Gardens until 29 July.
Photographs © Lee Ufan, Photograph © Ian Gavan/Getty Images.

Nargess Banks

Read my interview with the Serpentine Galleries chief executive Yana Peel here.

Design Talks | The Textile Building | 29a Chatham Place | London | E9 6FJ | UK
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Design exhibition: The Future Starts Here

‘The future is up for grabs,’ according to Rory Hyde, co-curator of The Future Starts Here, an upcoming exhibition at London’s V&A which sets out to explore the power of design to shape the world of tomorrow. ‘This is not a speculative show,’ he warns me at the preview this morning. Rather this exhibition, which has taken two years to research – working with architects, designers, scientists, inventors around the world – is more about gathering evidence of the future to see what social and cultural impact objects can have on our lives. ‘These objects point to where we are going.’

On show this morning were only a few examples of the sort of objects and ideas to expect when the exhibition opens here in May 2018. All the 100 or so selected pieces are currently in development in studios and laboratories around the world. From smart appliances to satellites, artificial intelligence to internet culture, this will be the first opportunity to not only see projects by the likes of Google and Apple, but in the context of alternative futures presented by smaller institutions and independent thinkers.

For instance, Bento Biowork’s Bento Lab is a portable DNA lab that makes it relatively easy to take biological samples and conduct simple genetic analysis. As the name suggests it is compact and designed to be portable and affordable to appeal to universities but also ‘hobbyists’ – bee keepers, brewers, say the inventors. Radical Love is Heather Dewey Hagborg’s DNA portraits of Chelsea Manning – the life size, three-dimensional printed portraits were generated using her DNA, which was extracted while in prison from cheek swabs and hair clippings and posted to the artist.

Netherlands-based artist Jalila Essaidi’s Living Network project imagines a future of the internet as a worldwide web of trees, allowing communication over great distances.While, Luchtsingel is a 400-meter pedestrian bridge connecting Rotterdam’s declining Central District to north of the city with its own park and rooftop garden. A community initiative crowdfunded by citizens, each of the bridge’s timber panels is inscribed with the name of every donor. Elsewhere, Facebook’s Aquila aircraft is part of a solar-powered high-altitude platform station system which is in early development as part of the company’s efforts to bring affordable connectivity to unconnected regions around the world.

The Future Starts Here will explore not just these objects and ideas, but crucially what impact they may have on us, our daily lives, our work, cities, larger politics and the planet. Hyde likens it to the smartphone, an object that has merged our work, home, personal and leisure lives, unknowingly completely altered how we live. The exhibition highlights the reality that the future isn’t some abstract concept that we don’t have control of – we can monitor, direct, select the objects and ideas that define our future in a positive way.

The Future Starts Here is supported by Volkswagen Group
The exhibition will be on from 12 May to 4 November 2018 in The Sainsbury Gallery, V&A, London

#TheFutureStartsHere

Design Talks | The Textile Building | 29a Chatham Place | London | E9 6FJ | UK
Design Talks is published by Spinach Design
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