I had a busy day of gallery visiting yesterday, crossing London from South Kensington to Shoreditch (in a relentless drizzle that made a mockery of my vision of strolling around town and kicking up leaves under a beautiful autumnal sky).
Time At The Lake by Deborah Tarr
First stop, Cadogan Contemporary and the solo Deborah Tarr show. Her paintings are incredible – abstracted landscapes with beautiful colours. Such simple compositions, just a few strokes of the palette knife, but such depth in each one. Very inspiring stuff. She uses weighty antique frames which add a certain museum-y quality, the paintings look like heirlooms and yet have a modernity in the fresh, vibrant tones.
Then on to Pace Gallery, round the back of the Royal Academy. I though there was a Nathalie du Pasquier exhibition on there, but turns out I’d missed it by 2 months. Ah well, it’s a nice big space, still worth knowing about.
Next the Mall Galleries, where the ING Discerning Eye competition is being shown. I’d like to enter it next year, so it was great to see what kind of thing is accepted. Although, there was such a huge range that it wasn’t really possible to gauge. The idea is that all the paintings are an accessible size that anyone could hang on their wall. The paintings are numbered and only named in the pricey catalogue, so I picked my favourite anonymously and sneaked a look in the catalogue to find it was Mark Entwisle, whose work I’ve looked up online in the past. He won the National Portrait award in 2002, but he paints all sorts of subjects, this is the one that caught my eye but he had a few displayed together and they’re all great – muted & thoughtful but with some sort of complexity in the compositions…
Small Painting by Mark Entwisle
Then along the South Bank to the OxoBargehouse – a really confusing entrance to the National Open Art exhibition, but once you’re in the building it’s really clever, you’re guided up and through three storeys, with only one way through the various galleries, so you know you’re not missing anything by accident. The building itself is great, lots of old brick and crumbling plaster. This is another art competition, the first one I entered earlier in the year (to no avail), and there’s another real range. As well as the juried prizes, visitors get to vote for their favourite (the winner getting £1,000) and I found it really hard to choose. One of my favourites had already been awarded the overall winner, so it seemed silly to vote for them. Here are the ones in the running for me (excuse the wonky photos)…
Ralph and Arnold by Jane Cattlin
Untitled by Lil Wilkinson O’Dwyer (the overall winner)
The Open Gate by Elaine Turnbull
The Homework Club by Robert Edward Wells
And finally, Ally McIntyre at Jealous Gallery. Six or seven big raw canvases with hot, fluorescent scrawly abstracts with a Miami-style palm tree motif running through them. They’re really bold and full of life, I was surprised more hadn’t sold as the exhibition is coming to an end.
Coyote by Ally McIntyre
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