Look back with pleasure
Andrew Lambirth
1979
Bloomberg SPACE, 50 Finsbury Square, EC2, until 17 September
The Bloomberg Space on the edge of Finsbury Square is a fine ground-floor gallery with rocketing ceilings that exudes wealth and sophistication. It’s a rare and pleasantly civilised experience to walk in off the street and not only be welcomed but also handed a complimentary catalogue of the exhibition. The catalogue is a modest illustrated pamphlet containing ample information about both artists and exhibits — sufficient even for the knowledgeable spectator. Here are none of the door-stopper tomes beloved of academic curators, just a neat, stapled brochure, and a handlist of the exhibits if you require more specific information. The surroundings are spacious and elegant. Museums should be like this. Since they aren’t, perhaps the burden of more exhibitions should be shouldered by the likes of Bloomberg — eminently capable City firms with a strong interest in the arts who have the space to mount temporary displays.
The current Bloomberg loan exhibition is focused on the year 1979, apparently in honour of the first British Art Show, which was curated in that year by the redoubtable critic William Packer. (The sixth British Art Show opens this autumn in Gateshead and tours the country. It’s a ‘state-of-the-art’ survey of varying interest, largely dependent on the intelligence of the selectors. Few have had the humane eclecticism of Packer.) Three Bloomberg curators (Stephen Hepworth, Graham Gussin and Sacha Craddock) have each selected five artists who showed either in that first British Art Show or in the Hayward Annual (that’s another group show which would bear reviving) of the same year. To these a single mutually agreed addition was made, constituting a total of 16 exhibiting artists, all now show ing at least one work made in the late 70s.
A couple of white sculptures by Carole Hodgson, which apparently refer to the landscape of west Wales, are the first objects you encounter. Plaster uprights on plinths, they look like blanched slices of shale or slate, and echo the small henge of paired lumps of chalk by Nick Pope, set some way off on the floor. But the big impact in this large space is made by the two Bert Irvin paintings: dynamic with diagonals, vibrant or opaque. In comparison, James Faure Walker’s messy abstract ‘Lazy Afternoons’, with its Monet waterlily references, looks clumsy — like a pattern of handprints to ward off the evil eye gone mad. The other picture here is an optical field painting by Barrie Cook, consisting of repeated vertical forms like burnt matches or cotton buds, exploring white/black and blue/red. Amiable, but without the mental shiver you get from Bridget Riley. Also in this room are John Cobb’s disassembled wooden construction ‘Easy Chair’, and Garth Evans’s flat plywood spiral, like a coir floormat, rippling outwards from a circular centre in waves of distortion.
That feeling of sculpture taking itself to pieces and pondering the remains continues into what is called the ‘Back Space’. Occupying much of the floor is Jeff Lowe’s surrealist assembly of forms in zinc-plated steel, stone and slate. On the walls are a couple of typical Stephen Buckley oils, all low-relief geometry and fabric pattern. Michael Mason is represented by a collage of ‘Vac Forms’, four envelopes of photos, diagrams and lists, and the maquette for a far larger sculpture called ‘Agincourt’. This seems to have been a playful architectural interpretation of the mediaeval battle. Thankfully, the tone of this room is boosted by the inclusion of Prunella Clough.
Clough is one of those refreshingly diffident painters the English produce from time to time, whose originality is unmistakable and more far-reaching than many a noisier and more celebrated talent. No one could particularise a painting’s surface in quite such an exquisitely varied way. Clough was a supreme manipulator of textures, a tonal painter who painted the organic and natural world besieged by man-made detail, the latter often depicted in rainbow hues. So here, in this typically poetic image (‘Untitled with four elements’), she juxtaposes the geometric and the organic, the linear and volumetric, in quiet buff and grey. Colour is reserved for an elbow of tubing which obtrudes into the bottom-left corner, in green, pink, yellow and white. Like most of Clough’s paintings, its reticence is deceptive: it withstands a lot of looking.
The other exhibits are arranged around a balcony, which looks down on to the floor below. (The architecture of the Bloomberg building is dramatic, but does not compete unfairly with the exhibits.) Four collages by John Stezaker are the cut-out silhouettes of film stars (is that Orson Welles, by any chance?), only the surrounds remaining from the original magazine photos, their features excised and dark. These make a wild contrast with the meticulously observed realism of Euan Uglow’s portrait, ‘Head of Pat’, painted over five years of rigorous and unrelenting scrutiny. The radical nature of Uglow’s painting is still underestimated. Perhaps the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of his work will help to draw attention to its originality and inventiveness.
A complex film installation by Tony Sinden consists of a pair of black screens, each with a grey plastic chair set off to one side, with framed photographic accoutrements. Film plays continually on each screen, of a figure interacting with a similar chair. It’s all about the relationship between still and moving, real and projected objects, I suppose — fine if you enjoy that sort of thing. There are three albums of images by the maverick performance artist Genesis P-Orridge, which are obscure and of little obvious interest; hardly worthy of the instigator of ‘Throbbing Gristle’ and ‘Industrial Music’. A video loop of Charlie Hooker’s 1979 performance, ‘Stroll On’, re-enacted in early August, is playing on a monitor. I recall the late Ken Kiff singing Hooker’s praises and suggesting he would make a provocative artist in residence at the National Gallery.
As is usual in these mixed exhibitions, it’s the paintings which stand out: Uglow, Clough, Irvin. For these alone the show is worth a look. The gallery is open Tuesday– Saturday, 11 a.m.–6 p.m. Another performance of Charlie Hooker’s ‘Stroll On’ will take place at 7 p.m. on Friday, 16 September to mark the end of the exhibition. Email: gallery@bloomberg.net to reserve a space.
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