Haunch of Venison surveys British post-war figurative painting. Tom Jeffreys is intrigued, for a number of reasons.
The nature of the commercial gallery is changing: slowly but decisively, and with increasing significance. I’m not going to get into it here – I’m in the process of writing a much more extensive discussion of the issue – but, to put it succinctly, the distinction between the commercial gallery and the public museum is collapsing apace. Haunch of Venison’s new exhibition, The Mystery of Appearance, which opens to the public this week, is but the latest example.
The exhibition seeks to take a fresh look at a group of ten artists and the influential works they produced in the second half of the twentieth century. At a time when abstraction and conceptualism were the contemporary buzzwords, these artists – among them, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, David Hockney and Frank Auerbach – sought to breathe new life into the old genres of the portrait and the landscape. In so doing, they established the framework for the continuation of figurative painting to this day.
The show is curated by Catherine Lampert, former director of the Whitechapel Gallery, and friend to many of the artists on show (she sat for Auerbach). Through her, the exhibition goes beyond classifications of movement or genre, and takes a rare look at the relationships between these different artists. “It’s important,” Lampert says at the media view, “to look at conversations, rivalries and shared interests,” rather than simply organising things according to theme or era, as, she implies, museums are wont to do these days.
This biographical angle is mostly confined, for better or for worse, to the exhibition’s accompanying catalogue: as you’d expect in a commercial space, wall text is kept to a minimum. But the relationships that Lampert does draw out are between the works themselves, which are hung with knowledge and insight. The upstairs gallery is a particular triumph in terms of form and colour, whilst the reflection of Hockney’s Man in a Museum (Or You Are in the Wrong Movie) in the dark-backed glass of the adjacent Bacon is a witty curatorial touch.
The title of the exhibition comes from a Bacon quotation (emblazoned above the stairs) about the various attempts by artists to capture the “mystery of appearance”. “One knows,” he says, “that, by some accidental brushmarks, suddenly appearance comes in with a vividness that no accepted way of doing it would have brought about." And certainly this idea of figuration emerging from arrangements of (abstract) marks is at the heart of the exhibition. It’s explored in Auerbach and Leon Kossoff’s heavy impasto, Patrick Caulfield’s pop minimalism and, most clearly, in Richard Hamilton’s overpainted photograph, Whitley Bay, where Bacon’s notion is shown to apply not just to painting but to all attempts to fix reality.
But this idea is perhaps not as accidental as Bacon liked to suggest. We know from Tate Britain’s exhibition in 2008 that Bacon did produce preparatory sketches, and such importance of a considered approach to ‘arrangement' is shown here too. We see this in the compositional marks of William Coldstream’s Seated Nude and portrait of Lord Ifor Evans, as well as Caulfield’s incredibly detailed architectural drawings and his study for The Mysterious Suspicion: After Magritte, complete with numbered and lettered gridlines in bright yellow. Process here is to the fore – the work (and therefore perhaps appearance itself) always in progress.
With works on loan from public institutions and private collections as well as some, like Bacon’s Study after Pope Innocent X by Velasquez, that haven’t been seen in public for 60 years, this is an impressive exhibition, with many highlights: among them two complex and virtuoso works by Michael Andrews’ – Thames at Low Tide and The Lord Mayor’s Reception; Lucien Freud’s drawing of Bacon with his trousers undone; Auerbach’s uncharacteristically bright Reclining Nude; and two calmly contemplative, beautiful little paintings by the relatively underrated Euan Uglow – Polygons and Obelisk.
By largely eschewing over-exposed works in favour of the lesser known, Lampert has put together an intriguing and unusual exhibition. Mystery of Appearance doesn’t so much explain or introduce or make an argument; rather, this is an exhibition that suggest new lines of thought and areas for further consideration. Despite (or perhaps because of) its fundamentally commercial nature, this is an exhibition that, in examining the ways in which we attempt to picture reality, frames this very question in a new and productive light.
The Mystery of Appearance is at Haunch of Venison until 18th February 2012.
Click here to see all London exhibitions.
Click here for things to do in London.
Return to Spoonfed's London Art homepage.
Image credits: Francis Bacon, Pope I - Study after Pope Innocent X by Velasquez ©The Estate of Francis Bacon; Richard Hamilton, Study for Re-Nude © The Estate of Richard Hamilton
Pallant House Gallery, Chicester (Wilson loan, 2006.)
Add an event
Frieze Art Fair to launch new section for young galleries in 2012
Frieze have today announced details for the 2012 edition, their tenth art fair in London. Taking place...