list.co.uk/festival Festival Visual Art
REVIEW JULIE ROBERTS: CHILD Honest and compelling exploration of childhood ●●●●●
Julie Roberts’ new body of work takes the subject of childhood and explores the displacement of children in the mid 20th century. Her paintings do not make use of universal images; instead they are the result of in-depth research and working through stacks of resource material in the archives of Barnardo’s Homes, including the photos taken of the children upon arrival. Her figures are dressed in 1950s attire and placed in domestic settings: the classroom, around the table, the bathroom. Painted in a colour scheme of green and brown shades, the application has developed into a stylised rendering. On the surface everything appears fine, but beneath lurks a deeply unsettling reality.
The imagery is polite and well behaved, but it has been painted with a strange set of coloured circles, forming patterns like the ring marks of soap bubbles burst all over the skin. It is as if Roberts brings the uncomfortable, unspoken friction, the anxiety and quarrels, the hardship, emotional strain, and aggressive uncertainty to the surface of these bodies as conduits, until it bubbles with eruptive disease of the skin, like pimpled adolescents unable to express themselves, thus bottling it all up and causing mild acne or severe eczema.
Without needing to spell it out, she is remarkably able to convey the psychological truths through the application of paint. The doll- like figures stand in for real people and they appear like clowns, almost fantastical and this makes it easier to look at children presented in an adult way. Roberts gives us those moments when you look into someone’s eyes and the truth is undeniably present.
The usual nostalgic notions of childhood are not present here. One of the works deals with that uneasy voyeurism into the privacy of a child. A little boy sits small in a bath, busy and concentrating on washing his back. No mother is present to wrap him in a towel afterwards. The viewer is aesthetically drawn into the painting to then uncover the stories and the relationships between the different works on show. (Talitha Kotzé) ■ Talbot Rice Gallery, 650 2210, until 25 Sep, free.
REVIEW JOAN MITCHELL Arresting display of abstract paintings by a singular artist ●●●●●
Inverleith House really is a special place. An 18th century mansion reserved entirely for the display of art, its beautifully proportioned light-filled rooms enjoy unmatched views of rolling lawns and botanicals. The works exhibited within its walls benefit from the sense of pause and distance that the space produces. The work of one of the most singular American painters of the postwar period, Joan Mitchell, finds great synthesis here.
Large, thick impasto strokes colour Mitchell’s canvases with vibrancy. Animated by varying gradations in weight and light, her soaring greens and broad pools of yellow are mixed with urgent drips and strokes – insistent marks of each painterly passage. These landscapes mark a relationship with nature without attempting to reproduce it, a tenet made all the more explicit by this sympathetic hang.
Comprising works made from 1958-1992, this spare yet considered selection of paintings and pastels evince the artist’s European influence as well as the support of abstract expressionists de Kooning and Kline. A figure annexed from the canon, Mitchell’s works are enjoying a late resurgence of interest and her unrivalled continuation of the abstract expressionist idiom is represented here with two late pastels from 1992. Provoking neither a reading nor even a wonder at what they may be, these works on paper simply imprint a presence and stand sentry for Mitchell’s fine and significant practice. (Rosalie Doubal) ■ Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Garden, 248 2849, until 3 Oct (not Mon), free.
19–26 Aug 2010 THE LIST 77
REVIEW GEMMA HOLT & RICHARD HEALY: SHAPES AND THINGS Making provocative art from the everyday ●●●●●
A partnership instigated by Edinburgh gallery Sierra Metro, ‘Shapes and Things’ is the first collaboration between London-based artists Richard Healy and Gemma Holt. Both work to manipulate and divert the language of design, injecting ‘newness’ into commonly accepted systems and codes and exploring the untapped, creative potential in the ordinary. Three screen-printed, fabric partitions divide the exhibition, forming tent-like
enclosures that alter the cubed space of the gallery and shelter the smaller pairs of individual works from immediate sight. The close proximity of the works set up a dialogue stressing the theme of doubling, an idea derived from EH Gombrich’s The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art, which the artists used as a nexus to explore their collaboration. Holt approaches this idea by presenting pairs of familiar objects that lose their
shared identity through slight manipulation. A bulb sits atop a pink post, its double projected at 90 degrees from the wall in ‘Pink Angle’, while square mirrors become disparate shapes when hung at different angles in ‘Reflect, Reflect’. Healy takes an architectural, rather than fine art, format, exploring the doubling concept through juxtaposition. The film ‘An Era’ presents a montage of classical ruins and modernist blocks, simultaneously presenting the old and the new. Another work is a blown-glass lamp, which constantly changes colour and, thus, the mood of the space.
The show demands a radical re-evaluation of the everyday, creating art from
the most mundane objects. (Rachael Cloughton) ■ Sierra Metro, 0797 151 0877, until 12 Sep (not Mon–Wed), free.