Alex Katz

"Anna Wintour" 2009

An american artist primary associated with the pop art movement, Alex Katz is a figural american artist with a recent installation at the National Portrait gallery. Described as "fresh and flat", Katz obsesses over surface details such as hats, sunglasses and hair. stylized, superficial, painting the high end bohemian whirl of society- I'm not convinced. His work was dull and conveyed nothing. A work in the National Portrait Gallery show, called One Flight Up (1968) consists of 31 portraits on aluminium, cut out and mounted together. The effect of looking at it is of stepping into a New York party. When Katz was painting it he felt, he says, “like a casting director” trying to work out who would fit into the scene. Influenced by Ukiyo-e japanese prints aiming to show the present world, he succeeds in portraying the latter half of the 20th century as baseless and frivolous with no substance. Maybe this is a nod to the social circle he was a part of. Commenting on a portrait of Anna Wintour created for the exhibit, he claims he had been friends with her a long time - 20 or so years - yet was only compelled to paint her after her rise to fame and fortune - this kind of disgusts me.

"One Flight Up" 1968

The Serpentine: Nairy Baghramian and Phyllida Barlow

Phyllida Barlow 2010


Nairy Braghramian - "Klassentreffen" (Class Reunion), 2008

Last week or so I visited the Serpentine in hopes to see the work of two female contemporary Sculptors. I find the Serpentine can have pretty hit or miss exhibitions- this one I am still on the fence about. FirsT, i found it pretty difficult to distinguish the two Artists' work. The gallery claimed the work was set up to "interact" with the other artist's pieces, which was total bullshit - each artist had a couple of rooms in the gallery, with only the entrance area combining their work. The serpentine gave vague descriptions and aims of the artists. "The exhibition will offer a new perspective on these two artists, who, though strikingly different in their approach, each examine questions related to the context in which their works are shown, while addressing the art-historical debate on the politics of form." Admittedly they both created abstract forms on varying scale addressing space and form, yet what sculpture doesn't in this age?
Nairy Baghramian is a Berlin-based artist known for her sculptural installations and photographs. Her work encompasses questions of context, institutional framing and the production and reception of contemporary art. Key to Baghramian’s work is how theoretical concepts, drawn from art historical debates around Minimalism, literature and design history, are translated into specific decisions about materiality, manufacture and display. - I found her work pretty dull and overdone. Plastic mold forms that often went unnoticed due to their small scale and positioning in corners, while her other featherweight spindle forms failed to impress.
Phyllida Barlow is an English artist practicing since the 1960s. Her sculptural installations are characterised by their large scale, often made quickly in the same place that they are to be shown and with materials that are subsequently recycled for future use. Their rough appearance conveys the urgency with which they are produced. Her work felt raw, worked and emotive, with effort put into them unlike Nairy's work. scale, texture, malleability, variety of materials with their original form still clear, protruding into the viewers space - all these things turned me on. Although after investigating her further online, I was a little disappointed in the selection of work she constructed, considering some of her previous works which looked fanatastic, and I also failed to find pictures of the work I liked the best in the exhibit. Fail.. Guess which artist I preferred.