VICTORIA MIRO
YAYOI KUSAMA-MY ETERNAL SOUL
https://www.victoria-miro.com/exhibitions/528/
THE MOVING MOMENT WHEN I WENT TO THE UNIVERSE, a major exhibition of new works by Yayoi Kusama, takes place across the Wharf Road galleries and waterside garden.
The exhibition features new paintings, including works from the iconic My Eternal Soul series, painted bronze pumpkin and flower sculptures, and a large-scale Infinity Mirrored Room, created for this presentation, Kusama’s twelfth exhibition at the gallery.
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BARBICAN CENTRE
Francis Upritchard- WETWANG SLACK
https://www.barbican.org.uk/our-story/press-room/francis-upritchard-wetwang-slack
New Zealand born and London-based artist Francis Upritchard has created a new, site-specific installation.
Drawing from figurative sculpture, craft traditions and design, blended with references from literature and history, Upritchard pushes these practices into new directions, bringing them together to create a striking and original visual language of her own.
Playing with scale, colour and texture, Upritchard is populating The Curve with a spectrum of different materials, vibrant figures and eclectic objects.
The exhibition begins with brightly coloured polymer clay sculptures in various poses, bedecked in hand-made garments supported by plinths, leading to a series of bespoke metal and glass shelves suspended from the ceiling, displaying smaller-scale felt hats.
As the exhibition unfolds the colour slowly weakens from the sculptures concluding with large figures made from balata, a wild rubber harvested in Brazil.
These are inspired by the Parthenon Reliefs; creatures from science fiction novels; and the Japanese folklore characters of Ashinaga-tenaga (Long Legs and Long Arms), who extol the virtues of harmonious working relationships, coalescing into a melting pot of traditions where no dominant culture persists.
Francis Upritchard said:
“I'm envisaging an exhibition which works with the brutalist Barbican architecture with stone, wood, glass and metal – brutal but rational with my delicate, strange and sometimes colourful works atop. I've been thinking about The Curve as offering a kind of rainbow-light spectrum that plays with distortion and scale.”
Upritchard’s works are characterised by a sense of curiosity and exploration of the human form, from medieval knights to meditating futuristic hippies, these tantalising figures are hand-modelled in polymer clay, their skins painted in a range of monochromatic colours or distinct gridded patterns.
Traversing cultures and time periods, her figures resist easy categorisation, allowing for multiple readings. Hand-woven blankets, tie-dyed silks and bespoke garments often decorate these deftly made sculptures which are frequently combined with found objects.
Upritchard also regularly creates sculptural installations of utilitarian objects from vases, plates, lamps or urns often imbued with anthropomorphic forms and carefully arranged into mysterious domestic environments.
More recently, she has experimented with both form and material, creating a group of dinosaurs out of papier-mâchéand extracts from wild rubber trees in Brazil.
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This was my first time visiting barbican, and I had no idea that the gallery was there. Went inside without not knowing the artist.
When I went inside this gallery, first thing I was surprised with was the wall. Usually, walls at gallery are all white but this place had green/grey-ish colour.
If I had to exhibit my work here, I would be terrified because I have to make the audience feel like the wall is supposed to be this colour. I am not sure if the artist chose the colour of the wall, but it was refreshing to see a wall with colour after seeing white wall gallery for lot of times.
The colour green and sculptures really matches well and it felt more familiar and felt the connection with them. When I went closer to the sculpture it does not look that realistic but it felt very real which was quite creepy and interesting at the same time. I felt like the sculptures are actually real people, waiting for us to get close to them.
Although the content itself is serious, I felt like her work is made quite comically and brings out a bit of laugh from the audience. The facial expressions, the bright colours and the posture is very unique sometimes dramatic that it looks like they came out from cartoon.
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I did not realise but my friend told me that these sculptures smelled quite bad, so I am curious what its made out of....
And they remind me of Centaur.
When I first saw this sculpture I thought these two were man%woman. Man in the front and the woman hugging him. However, after looking back again, I felt weird how the woman is much taller than men and it looks more like she is trying to hold him, and making him have no control.
After reading that this sculpture was inspired by ashinagatenaga, it made completely sense but I wonder why she used that as an inspiration as it is not commonly known outside Japan.
When I looked at this work, I actually laughed a little because of the face expression. I realised that the pots are made in asian style and I thought that the fact that she gave them a face relates to the culture of how people believed that there is a god in every object, and how nowadays many like to create some character out of objects.