Louise Nevelson at Louise T Blouin Institute

Louise Nevelson at Louise T Blouin Institute

01 May, 2009
by: SUSIE

Some years ago, Time Out ran a comprehensive feature listing The Worst Things About Living In London. Amid this list, cruelly succinct: 'West London'. But if anything can induce green-eyed envy in an otherwise smug east-ender, it's the Louise T Blouin Institute; opened in October 2006, it is surely one of the strongest defenses of the W-postcode area.

A grand old coach house, beautifully renovated at great expense, the institution aims to combine its role as gallery with acting as a centre for the Foundation's work, which concerns itself with using creativity as a force for cultural exchange. Lofty and commendable ideals, but this stunning space – filled, for this exhibition opening at least, with a chauffeur-driven, champagne quaffing crowd – does not sit easily within the surrounding Latimer Road housing estates and it would be interesting to find out how effectively the gallery has managed to integrate with its local community.
 
But tonight we remember Louise Nevelson, and it certainly seems like our memories, at least in this country, need a jog. Nevelson was a New York-based artist, closely associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement. Despite coming to art later in life, she presented nearly 260 solo exhibitions worldwide, and various large-scale public commissions in the US bear testament to her success. But fickle fame was not to last. Nevelson's work fell out of favour after her death in 1988. It's tempting to compare this tale to contemporaries such as Mark Rothko (who was both a friend and a fan); an artist of such vacuity, with his Tate retrospective and record-breaking auction results… and my feminist spidey-sense is tingling.


Louise Nevelson, 'Untitled', 1964. Wood painted black 8’ 7 ¾” x 10’ 10-3/4” x 1’ 8-1/2”
Photo: Courtesy PaceWildenstein, New York © Estate of Louise Nevelson/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

Dawns and Dusks - the artist's first major London exhibition in nearly four decades - brings together work from the 1950s to 1980s. A compulsive scavenger, Nevelson's materials were sourced from any-which-where: factory refuse, discarded furniture, odd scraps of wood. This work sits comfortably alongside our (hopefully) increasing culture of recycling and reuse; a joyous celebration of the secondhand as if in retort to the monstrous new mega-mall just over the road at Shepherd's Bush. Combined in what came to be known as 'assemblages', these pieces were painted in monochrome – white, gold or, in the case of most of the works on show here, black. The paint unites the scraps so that they evolve into a new thing, a work of art; but that is not to say they deny their past life as chair seat, wine crate, balustrade, letterpress, bedknob, broomstick. Nevelson is known for her belief 'that art is everywhere, except it has to pass through a creative mind'.

In this perfectly lit gallery, these large-scale assemblages are given the space they need and yet still manage to fill the room. They are drawings, with lines forged from wood and shadow; sculptures that – like a Cubist painting – refuse to commit to a single form, that emerge forth into the room and towards the viewer. You cannot help but engage with this art.

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SUSIE