In the multi-tiered hierarchy of academic painting, Still Life has traditionally ranked on the bottom rung, its everyday meat-and-veg celebrations considered lowly compared to massacres, mythologies, martyrdoms, landscapes and portraits of the great and good. Still, artists have always been drawn to the subtle messaging that can be concealed in a half-peeled lemon set beside a jugged hare, a bottle or a boot.
The gallery aims to boost the genre up the critical ladder, exploring its rich and complex evolution over the past century. In more than 50 works it mingles contemporary mixed media pieces and installations by emerging artists with paintings and sculptures by some of modern art’s top names, including the likes of Henry Moore, Ben Nicholson, Elisabeth Frink, Anthony Caro or Louise Bourgeois.
Modernism’s subjective expression and abstraction levelled the old hierarchies and the show’s title is a nod to two foundational British modernists, appropriating Virginia Woolf’s wry description of her friend Roger Fry’s studio: “Frying pans were mixed with palettes; some plates held salad, others scrapings of congealed paint…on the table…those tokens of a spiritual reality immune from destruction, the immortal apples, the eternal eggs.”
Two philanthropic private collections have collaborated with Hastings Contemporary to create and curate the show. The Ingram Collection of media entrepreneur Chris Ingram focuses on British 20th century painters and sculptors. The Roberts Institute of property developer David Roberts and his Lithuanian-born artist wife Indre Serpytyte focuses on young and emerging contemporary artists (one of her works, a sombre digital print of her deceased father’s Soviet-era military cap, is in the show).
The combination makes for an eye-grabbing spectrum of creativity ranging from the sublime to the sinister, the canonical to the quirky. In one room an exquisite Frink 1968 watercolour Sleeping Fox dialogues with Matt Collishaw’s 2010 c-print Last Meal on Death Row; in another Cathie Pilkington’s surreal mixed-media monkey’s supper party, (Top Photo) Singerie, confronts Rachel Kneebone’s delicate porcelain garland of metamorphosing human and vegetal forms But For Now I Am Alive, and Ori Gersht’s recurrently exploding floral video Time After Time:The Big Bang.
Nicholson’s classic oil on canvas 1926 Still Life and Moore’s 1949 lithograph Sculptural Objects rub metaphorical shoulders with Bertozzi and Cassoni’s 2005 impeccably crafted ceramic garbage dump, Scatola Brillo. Abigail Norris’s 2023 Faellen Aeppel, a composition of latex, wadding, tights, copper wire and vintage silk gloves, riffs with an untitled 1985 Bourgeois oil painting of two lemony ovals on a beige background. On the outer fringes of the genre, Hew Locke’s 2006 Golden Horde is a sci-fi warplane apparently built of deconstructed plastic anime toys, piloted by a crew of baby-doll princesses dressed to kill.
It’s an exuberant jumble of styles, subjects, media and materials, which raises a question: what actually is a “still life”? And for that matter, what isn’t?
It’s a question that the Roberts Institute of Art curator Yates Norton answers by shaping the show with a thematic structure tracing the semiotic and symbolic underpinnings of the genre – its appropriation of the commonplace to express messages of the human condition; its focus on consumption as a memento mori; its presentation of objects – Man Ray’s Lost Glove, for example – to evoke absence; the intrinsic ambiguities and double entendres of an art that in English is Still Life and in French, Nature Morte.
And what isn’t a “still life”? On a recent day the show offered a gnomic answer. In one room a broom leaned against a wall. This was a Susan Collis still life installation, Waltzer. In another room a tool box stood on a trolley beside a bucket and a plastic sack filled with offcuts and rubbish. This was left by a workman installing the show and was not a still-life installation. Go figure.