list.co.uk/visualart Reviews | VISUAL ART
REVIEW PAINTINGS & COLLAGES ANDY HOPE 1930: WHEN DINOSAURS BECOME MODERNISTS Inverleith House, Edinburgh, until Sun 13 Jan ●●●●●
Scary monsters and super-creeps abound in the Berlin-based artist formerly known as Andreas Hofer’s first UK museum exhibition, which features five new works among an epic 41 on show. Seen side by side, there are moments when they resemble an outsize pulp fiction collage of pop culture ephemera swirling around Hofer’s brain, overlapping each other as they burst through the frame. Drawing a line between Roy Lichtenstein and Daniel Johnston,
Andy Hope 1930 takes the trash aesthetic of golden age comic book iconography and invests it with a subverted mythology born of the more questioning, me-generation years. So, against a Zabriskie Point-style landscape in ‘Impressions d’Amerique’, Batman and Robin are dressed as the Lone Ranger and Tonto, making the umbilical link between existentialist outlaw (super) heroes of old and new America as he goes. The nod to French proto-surrealist Raymond Roussel, who so
influenced a generation of New York poets, is as knowing as the wonkified charity-shop Kurt Schwitters homage, the portrait of John Baldessari as Marvel Comics super-villain Galactus, which comes complete with extra added Jesus, and the strip cartoon take of Linda Lee as Supergirl. Because, among the desolate landscapes Andy Hope 1930 needs heroes to call his own. Of course, there are dinosaurs, be they larger than life and
hidden behind wallpapered candy-stripes, or pocket-sized and contained, as they are in ‘The Education Dinosaur Movie Hall’. This earth’s core installation is a cardboard box peepshow into a Ray Harryhausen-style parallel universe where dinosaurs watch science fiction B-movies at the local drive-in. As evolution goes, it’s a spaced oddity, for sure. (Neil Cooper)
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REVIEW PAINTING REMBRANDT AND THE PASSION Hunterian Gallery, Glasgow, until Sun 2 Dec ●●●●●
REVIEW PHOTOGRAPHY JITKA HANZLOVÁ: ROKYTNIK Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh, until Sun 3 Feb ●●●●● REVIEW PAINTINGS & SCULPTURE CATHY WILKES The Modern Institute, Glasgow, until Sat 24 Nov ●●●●●
Rembrandt might be a household name but whenever there is an opportunity to stand in front of his work it brings a renewed understanding of what a master he was in portraying the human condition. This prolific Dutch artist had a disciplined printmaking practice and his etchings no doubt informed his painting style of creating dramatic contrasts between light and shadow. The exhibition has at its centre a painting owned
by the Hunterian: Rembrandt’s ‘Entombment Sketch’ – a preparatory monochrome oil sketch that he made for a series of paintings of the Passion of Christ commissioned by the Prince of Orange. It fleshes out his modus operandi, influences, studio practice and provides scientifically accurate information about the works that are about 400 years old.
Some works by other artists that informed Rembrandt’s own are also on show and gives an impression of his ‘kunst caemer’ – a cabinet of curiosities which housed books, rare objects and a vast collection of prints and drawings by earlier masters such as Mantegna, Raphael, Dirck Barendsz and Rubens. (Talitha Kotzé)
Whether or not Jitka Hanzlová’s 1982 defection from her home in communist Czechoslovakia to West Germany has any direct bearing on her resulting artistic practice, the very earliest series in this broad-reaching photographic retrospective elicits the strong sense of a disconnect between halcyon childhood memories and the reality of the present moment. The earliest series here is striking, and the fact she could only start it in 1990, the year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, has helped position her as a post-Cold War European artist.
Named after her hometown, it’s a series of photographs taken on her first visit home post- reunification, which depicts an almost uncannily contented world of odd-looking children at play and women in fashions, which predate the time, an uncomfortable dialogue between past and present amidst the shockwaves of 1989. Since then it’s as if her work has been reaching for but never quite grasped the thrusting new Europe, through a series of portraits and studies taken around the cities of the continent, her street shots of women in the poorest parts of Brixton, and a return to portraiture which concentrates on features over emotion in the Renaissance style. (David Pollock)
Viewers to the Northern Irish artist’s latest exhibition are met with a fairly minimal installation in the Modern Institute, of roughly made dolls, old cross- stitch patterns strewn across the gallery floor and naive little paintings around the walls. The proportion of the objects and their arrangement in the space is child-like and seemingly careless, but the stained and mildew-covered surfaces are at odds, immediately repellent. Wilkes describes her work as an intuitive process
of assembling and positioning objects, in order to create dialogues between them and show a frailty of materials. Through this she tries to draw out a poetic meaning beyond the physical objects. But this takes a long time to acclimatise oneself to seeing – at first, it’s just a grouping of dirty cloth and dolls, and many people could struggle to get anything more from it. Given time, however, there is something
mysterious in Wilkes’ arrangements, which keeps you thinking about them. Eventually, and quite disconcertingly, you do find yourself inventing little narratives, back-stories and worlds, if only to justify spending so long looking. (Michael Davis)
15 Nov–13 Dec 2012 THE LIST 113