Showing posts with label paintings. Show all posts
Showing posts with label paintings. Show all posts

12/08/2014

Sandro Chia at Hillsboro Fine Art



On Thursday 1st May 2014, Carol and I went into town to an opening at Hillsboro Fine Art of new oil paintings and watercolours by Sandro Chia. Although I had been waiting with baited breath for this exhibition for many months - I had doubted if I would actually go to the opening - since I had come to hate the posturing and desperate networking of openings. However, two weeks before the exhibition, Sandro Chia (who I had friended on Facebook the year before) messaged me. I was so shocked and surprised by his gesture and I told him he had been a teenage hero of mine and I said I would attend the opening where he said he would like to shake my hand. Since the age of nineteen Sandro Chia had been one of my minor heroes though sadly I had never actually seen any of his work in the flesh. A key member of the Italian Transavanguardia that emerged in the early 1980’s, Chia was one of the seminal figures in the revival of figurative Post-Modern art. However, after a meteoric rise he quickly fell out of critical favour, collector interest - and most devastatingly fashion - as did most of the Neo-Expressionists of the period with the arrival of Neo-Geo and Neo-Conceptualism. Chia continued to exhibit all over the world - however his work was given scant attention by the in-crowd who almost unanimously dismissed 80s art as an embarrassing chapter in the history of taste. That Chia had continued doggedly to pursue his own vision despite almost two decades of neglect and lack of favour by the art world taste makers impressed me and I was very fond of the new works I saw him post on Facebook. So I was excited to go to the opening despite my chronic social phobia and self-loathing depression.                                                                                                      
  

Before going to the Hillsboro, Carol and I decided to have a drink in the rock bar Fibber McGees to take the edge off. I had three Southern Comforts and Red Bull and Carol had two pints of Strawberry Kopparberg. I remarked to Carol that I still felt more comfortable in places like Fibbers than posh stuck up places. After an hour, we headed down to the Chia exhibition in great form. We were fashionably late, though Chia had still not arrived.    Apparently he had only arrived in Dublin from Miami the night before.  I was very fond of Chia’s new oil paintings and watercolours - though Carol was far less impressed by them comparing them to Clip Art and only liked his use of kindergarten colours and rough-cut frames. I liked Chia’s faux-primitive style of painting which made his oil paintings look like clotted poster-paint works by a talented, but lonely and solipsistic child. I noted how in the early 1980’s Chia had produced vast oil paintings but now his work was greatly reduced in size and ambition since his fall from grace in the mid 1980’s - though his themes and characters had not changed in over thirty-four years. Although, I found Chia’s repetitive painting of single male artist figures for over thirty years bizarre - I did enjoy the small differences in treatment he created. His figures did not fly around like they had in the early eighties when he was at the height of his fame - and they looked more worn down by life. Another theme his new work repeated, was the male artist showing his work to teddy bears – an ironic comment by Chia on his audience in the art world – though the number of teddy bears looking at his work had diminished and they seemed less interested than before. I wondered why there were hardly any female figures in his work and if his whole oeuvre was a comment on male loss of purpose and identity in a post-feminized world. I also liked the handmade frames Chia had made from pieces of roughly cut wood painted chalk white. The oil paintings were priced at €26,000 and the watercolours at €3,000 – very expensive in real world terms, but very cheap for an artist who had once been at the top of the art world pantheon. Only one had sold, though if I had been a collector with money I would have bought one, perhaps Cool Artist an artist figure in a snow storm with a snowman with a grin looking on.                                                                                       


Chia finally arrived at exhibition about an hour late and he was soon surrounded by well-wishers chatting with him about his last showing of work in Ireland at the Rosc group show in 1984, querying his Irish connections and talking about the weather. Meanwhile I bought the catalogue which cost €10. Finally, Sandro Chia sat down on the same bench where we were sitting on the opposite side. So I took my chance to say hello and wish him well. “Hi Sandro!” I said at which he jumped up and started chatting with someone else. I thought he had not heard me or maybe someone else had caught his eye first. A few minutes later he sat back down. “Hi Sandro, I am David Murphy, I am friends with you on Facebook!” I said excitedly. “Oh I had to delete one of my Facebook accounts, too many maniacs, stalkers and lonely people.” He replied contemptuously, not even bothering to look at me. I was absolutely gobsmacked. No one had ever been so rude and disrespectful to me for no reason in all my life. For five minutes I sat in silence with Carol - trying to take in what Chia had just said to me. Had I upset him by mentioning Facebook, or after chatting with me online had he looked at my art and decided I was to be avoided? Either way, I decided not to let him get away with it. “But Sandro you are the one who emailed me the other day!” I angry challenged him. “Maybe I was lonely.” He mumbled. “You know, I always wondered why your career had got nowhere. I mean from 1980 to 1983 you were up there and then suddenly your career went over a cliff. I read people thought you were arrogant! And now I know it’s true!” I shouted at him. “I am afraid I am going to have to ask you to leave the premises.” John Daly the owner of the Hillsboro interrupted. “What about your career? You’re frustrated!” He replied calmly. “Well you know what, I am a maniac, but at least I am honest and you are nothing but a spiv.” I shouted. “I am afraid I am going to have to ask you to leave the premises.” John Daly interrupted again. “No problem!” I replied and peacefully left the gallery. It was the first time in twenty years of gallery going and heated debates that I had been asked to leave a gallery.                         


Later we met up with a friend and had a pint in Jurys Inn before heading home. I was left feeling totally disgusted with the art world. Virtually every single hero I had met in the art world had been a disappointment – though for sheer two-faced rudeness Chia topped them all. I still liked Chia’s work - but then my taste for early 1980s art was ‘manic’ and out of step with fashion. Worse still, I could never return to the Hillsboro - the one gallery in Dublin I genuinely loved because of their attempted revival of Neo-Expressionist painters.

14/03/2014

Eoin McHugh At The Douglas Hyde Gallery


On Monday 19th August 2013, Carol and I went into town so I could get some art supplies. Having not had much new to read for a while - I felt the need to buy some new art books. So I had a look around the National Gallery bookshop and then Hodges Figgis and bought books on Modigliani and Egon Schiele’s landscapes. Then we walked through St. Stephens Green and up to Kennedy’s art shop where I bought 12 sticks of Schmincke soft pastels (my favourite chalk pastels) and a six tube box of Winsor & Newton Alkyd paints. On our way back we had Mochas, sandwiches and cakes in Starbucks.                 

Before heading home we dropped into the Douglas Hyde gallery. I stomach clenched as we approached the entrance, expecting yet another pretentious exhibition appealing only to those with PHD’s in philosophy or conceptual art. So often exhibitions in the Douglas Hyde were like cynical brain teasers designed to make you look like an idiot and the artist an unfathomable genius, and I had grown sick and tired of such dances of the seven veils. However, I was delighted to discover the work of Eoin McHugh (who I had never heard of) was masterful, bewitching and engagingly conceptual. The first work on the first floor was a pond lined with branches and populated by a beakless duck, another with a motorboat for a body and a clutch of chicks. It was superbly made and very convincing and its craftsmanship and surreal play reminded me of the Chapman brothers. I could not remember the last time I had seen work of this quality and broad appeal in the Douglas Hyde. Born in 1977, McHugh was an ex pupil of NCAD and exhibited with the Kerlin gallery - the premier commercial Dublin art gallery. McHugh was a skilled painter in oils and watercolour, a surreal sculptor of real talent and a conceptual collector of objects that he really made speak to the viewer. There were obviously many layers to McHugh’s work and the overall technical quality of the work made me want to unravel some of them. McHugh’s images at first glance appeared normal even illustrative, however one was quickly made uneasy by the sight of birds without eyes or frightening melanges of bird’s wings than reminded me of things I had seen during bad acid trips. His sculptures took this biomorphic distortion further, so that parts of his sculptures reminded me of human torsos, other parts bones, animal limbs and yet others branches and yet others insect legs. Yet the overall execution was so seamless that all these elements flowed freely between each other. Also interspersed in the exhibition were found objects; a wooden model destroyer covered in barnacles, a wooden tall ship with its sail burnt, a book with parts of it cut out to hold bones, a headless hedgehog and many other evocative things that actually did rhyme with the forms and ideas in the paintings, watercolours and sculptures in a genuinely interesting way. Carol said McHugh was depressingly brilliant, and I knew she meant it as a compliment. However, though he was six years younger than me, I did not find McHugh’s talent depressing or anger inducing like mediocre art so often was – I found his work inspiring. It was clear from the number of visitors to the exhibition, the time they spent looking at the art works and their giddy buzz that we were not alone in rating McHugh’s work.              

Also in the Douglas Hyde was a small exhibition of oil on paper and cardboard paintings by the folk artist Frank Walter whose work could hardly be more different from McHugh’s but was just as good in its own way. Walter’s work had a naïve simplicity, directness and unintentional humour that was refreshing. Walter’s drawing was naïve and he seemed to have a simple technique for different visual phenomena - like sponging for the effect of leaves on a tree or use of a scrapper for the effect of waves. Some of his work - like an image of a man being swallowed by a whale - made me laugh in a good hearted way with its childlike conception. When I read that Walter had written a 25,000 page autobiography, I joked to Carol that I had better get writing! I thanked Carol for suggesting we visit the Douglas Hyde!  


In the days, and months that passed, I thought again and again about Eoin McHugh and Frank Walter’s exhibitions. While I could still vividly recall many of Walter’s paintings on paper, McHugh’s work left only a vague impression. I recalled something similar had happened when I had seen many of the nineteenth century academic Salon painters in the Met in New York. While I had marvelled at the labour and skill that had gone into the likes of Jean-Léon Gérôme’s paintings – they had left no lasting impression on me. With Salon painting like Gérôme’s you spend more time being impressed by the technical skill and labour put into the work - than actually feeling anything about what is being conveyed. It’s the kind of skill that never lets you forget it is skilful - to such an extent you feel nothing. This left me musing about that certain something which we call soul or spirit or character in art that is essential to a true masterpiece - no matter how much work and dazzling skill was deployed. Conversely, often works of little apparent skill or labour like Frank Walter’s can sweep us off our feet through their intensity, soulfulness or visual catchiness.