To the Royal Academy to catch Hide and Seek by Eileen Cooper. Until 23rd August the John Madejski Fine Rooms are filled with drawings spanning the artist’s forty year career. They’re rooms worth visiting anyway – there’s a Sebastian Ricci ceiling painting from 1712 and one of the rooms is where Charles Darwin’s paper on the origin of species was first delivered. (Note the careful structure of that statement – Darwin himself wasn’t actually there and others read from his notebooks).
Cooper works from her imagination to create bulbous, disproportioned figures, the drawings reflecting the primitive that Darwin would have experienced on his five year voyage on the Beagle. There’s a raw, crude quality to the charcoal marks and a narrative that changes and darkens as the visual diary of her life and thinking continues through the exhibition.
Onward to ContiniArt on Bond Street where photographer Gianfranco Gorgoni’s Icons of Contemporary Art shows the lives of leading US artists of the late-Sixties and Seventies.
Jasper Johns stares at the camera suspiciously, Julian Schnabel carries surf boards back from the beach. Andy Warhol reclines on a luxurious bed whilst elsewhere Roy Lichtenstein rides a horse by the sea. Coinciding with her new exhibition at Tate Modern, there is also a wall of images of Agnes Martin from New Mexico, 1974. Mainly black and white they come from a commission by L’Espresso to create a photo story about the vibrant New York art scene. Candid and spontaneous they capture the fun and camaraderie of the period.
Finally to Fold Gallery in Fitzrovia for Corporeality, Objects and other Stuff. A group show that brings together paintings and sculptures from six contemporary artists. They investigate (amongst other Stuff) how the viewer responds to the physicality of a work that intrudes into their space. Works are deconstructed, their innards on display, others are the results of process and performance. You can check out Paul Emmanuel’s fleece paintings and the other works in the show until 11th July.
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