ARTS
Exhibitions
Ana Corbero (Albemarle, till 28 April) Luke Elwes (Rebecca Hossack, till 12 May) John Hoyland: Prints 1968-1989 (Austin/Desmond, till 26 April) William Roberts (Gillian Jason, till 27 April)
A colourful Easter parade
Giles Auty
Arespected commercial gallery owner complained the other day that the impor- tant art critics in Britain seem to spend their whole time reviewing big museum shows, frequently those happening in other countries. Because the remark was ad- dressed to me, in an agreeable-seeming way, I understood that I did not belong to this hierarchy of significant writers. I didn't know whether to be pleased or sorry. Nevertheless, I was prompted by these comments to look back over my own record in such matters over the past two years. From these I discovered that almost exactly half of my reviews featured exhibi- tions at private commercial galleries and that the proportion had increased in 1989 as against the year before: 27 out of 50, compared with just 22. I have no idea whether these figures would strike my gallery-owning friend as fair or reasonable. I make no secret of the fact that I support the private gallery system, but on the other hand I remember a more politically radical colleague of recent times who could hardly bear to set foot in establishments where capitalist transactions might conceivably take place. This critic's sensitive soul pre- ferred the purity of publicly funded galler- ies, especially those where art of an anti- government nature was regularly on view.
Mercifully, commercial galleries have generally got more important things to do than encourage young artists to make trite and uninformed political comments. They are thus able to offer genuine variety to their viewing public. In an average week there is a great deal to choose from in London alone but there are also scores of excellent commercial outlets up and down the country.
The four examples I have chosen this week are fairly typical fare. Two of the galleries are taking a chance with young and little-known artists, while the others deal with an established artist and one who died ten years ago. Being the daughter of a Catalan sculptor of renown, 30-year-old Ana Corbero arrives with interesting credentials. From her not-so-distant child- hood the artist remembers Dali and Miro dropping in to the family house for supper; whether the former visitor was a source of pleasure or penance she does not say. Miss Corbero studied art in Texas and Pennsyl- vania yet remains rooted identifiably in her surreal Spanish past. Real time and place cannot claim a spirit which prefers to inhabit a hinterland of twilight happenings: dreaming, drowning or clambering for safety into trees. Many of the artist's titles are as mysterious as she is. Would you expect a painting entitled 'Hypostasis' to deal with (a) excess of blood in organs of the body, (b) essential substance or (c) the person of the Godhead? The young woman in the crimson painting of this name appears to be sitting at the bottom of a pond, tugging gently on a brace of fishing lines. As I confessed recently, I am notor- iously poor at interpreting feminine sym- bolism. I wondered also whether the young woman with blue legs in 'The Second Tower' had climbed a tree simply in order to avoid a fox which is rooting about rather suspiciously in some Nolanesque swamp- land. The tower of the title, meanwhile, is fading away quietly behind these super- imposed images. Send for Sigmund.
While Miss Corbero's charming show at the Albemarle Gallery (18 Albemarle Street, W1) comprises such appealing land- scapes of the mind, that of Luke Elwes at Rebecca Hossack Gallery (35 Windmill Street, W1) treats real landscape of a most unlikely nature, filtered through a young artist's poetic sensibility. Elwes follows the four-wheel drive trail-blazed by the Au- stralian artist Fred Williams in seeking pictorial metaphors for the mysteries of Australia's desert heartland. The artist's renderings of desert flowers, boab trees and the contorted, mollusc-like rocks known as bungle-bungles have a haunting and colourful strangeness. This is aborigin- al landscape through Western eyes and infinitely more interesting than anything to be found in the recent British Art Show in Glasgow where the selectors chose from 1,000 artists in Mr Elwes's age group. I can only presume he was not among them.
John Hoyland is a famous war-horse of British abstract art and noted especially for his circular images based, so an unkind colleague once suggested to me, on British Rail breakfasts. If one can avoid conjuring up bacon, eggs, tomatoes and sausages, Hoyland's prints at Austin/Desmond (15A Bloomsbury Square, Pied Bull Yard, WC1) seem colourful and full of sizzle. Finally, if you would invest for a future 'Marking the Pose' by William Roberts, c.I960 Easter nest-egg, I advise that there is a fine selection of 60 drawings and watercolours by the late William Roberts (1895-1880) at Gillian Jason (40 Inverness Street NW1). Many of these are witty expositions of London gallery life. All of us are there: artists, auctioneers, models, poseurs and even those critics who only emerge for a foreign freebie.
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