English Still Lives – Pallant House: Striations – Close: Morena di Luna – Maureen Paley Hove
This summer, a lot of exciting art can be seen in country towns and houses within commuting reach of London. For reasons ranging from high-speed broadband connectivity to Covid lockdown escape to the soaring cost of metropolitan real estate, a growing number of top-tier commercial gallerists have opened out-of-town spaces. Meanwhile, local museums curate ambitious shows with national and international heft. Though public funding is in short supply, private patronage fills the gaps.
Some examples from the current season:
The Shape of Things, the summer show at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, West Sussex, is billed as the first major exhibition dedicated to British still life painting, a genre mostly considered peripheral to a national canon dominated by landscapes and portraiture. In almost 150 works by about 100 artists, it traces the evolution of still life in Britain from early paintings by 17thcentury Dutch émigrés through to the present day, ending with a site-specific raw clay installation, I Hear Myself with My Throat by the contemporary ceramicist Phoebe Cummings.
Interesting early examples include works by the 18thcentury Smith brothers of Chichester, two of the earliest British-born imitators of the Dutch school, and a 1768 floral composition by Mary Moser, one of only two women founders of the Royal Academy and its youngest founder member.
Pallant House prides itself on an ambitious mission to stimulate new ways of thinking about modern British art. In keeping with that mission, the core of the show explores developments from the early 20th century onwards when avant-garde artists, grappling with the traumas of two world wars and the nuclear age, reimagined traditional memento mori and vanitas tropes through the subversive lenses of expressionism, surrealism and abstraction.
The comprehensive sweep is extraordinary for a relatively small museum, from the Camden Town and Bloomsbury groups to the Scottish colourists, the St Ives School and their 21st-century successors. Well-known names include Walter Sickert and Sylvia Gosse, Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell, William and Ben Nicholson, Christopher Wood, Paul Nash, Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, and Lucian Freud—many less famous people, too, who, on this evidence, deserve to be known better.
After the Arts Council withdrew support last year, only 13% of the gallery’s budget is now covered by public funding. Private donors and commercial sponsors have made the show possible, including the Scottish fashion brand Brora and a local Sussex-based furniture company, Sofas & Stuff.
The Shape of Things, Pallant House Gallery, East Pallant, Chichester, running until October 20
Tucked into the outbuildings of a country house in Somerset, Close Gallery is a contemporary art space created by the formerly London-based curator and art advisor Freeny Yianni. This summer, the gallery is presenting Striations, a group show by four young kinetic artists whose work in different media conjures strikingly complementary effects. Taking its title from the geological structures of sedimentary rock, the show explores the unpredictable visual formations resulting from a slow, methodical build-up of line upon line, gradually merging into complex and fantastical wholes.
When entering the gallery grounds, the first thing to catch the eye—or maybe not—now you see it, now you don’t—is Robert Currie’s nylon fishing line installation. Myriad filaments stretch from tree to tree, building to building, merging and diverging like a three-dimensional cat’s cradle conceived by a playful phone lineman, weaving evanescent patterns in the air.
Currie’s wall works use the same transparent filament, stretched taut over rectangular frameworks in close-set sequences defined by specific mathematical ratios. They reflect, refract, diffract and absorb light, creating shifting interference patterns and spatial perception toys.
Ben Gooding achieves similar effects by engraving sequential parabolic curves into plates of copper, brass, or steel. Each curve is micro-millimetrically separated from the next, like the grooves of a vinyl disc. Often pivoting around predetermined focal points, the grooves sweep out and spin, reflecting light in shimmering waves that shift with the viewer’s movements.
Tony Blackmore also plays with reflection, scoring sheets of translucent drafting film with overlaid patterns based on number sequences. Cross-folded along the score lines and sewn with regimental precision onto a backing of photographic lighting gel, the sheets form a crumpled topography of inter-related planes that colour-shift with changes of viewpoint and evolve sequentially like the tessellated trompe l’oeil drawings of Dutch artist Maurits Escher.
Familiarity with these artists is controlled and predictable repetition, producing unpredictable effects. It’s the law of unforeseen consequences that reaches aesthetic heights in the work of Caracs-born, Leipzig-based graphic artist Maribel Mas. Repetitively penning finely inked lines around a gradually rotated cardboard template, she produces exquisitely fluid structures that bring to mind the frills of a flamenco dancer’s dress or ruffles of sheer black silk organza. Magical.
Striations, at Close Gallery, Hatch Beauchamp, Somerset, until August 3
Morena di Luna, London gallerist Maureen Paley’s sea-side outpost in Hove, East Sussex, has just opened a group exhibition, Voyage, drawing inspiration from the French magician and cinematographic pioneer Georges Méliès 1902 silent movie Le Voyage dans la Lune.
The film follows a group of eccentric astronomers who travel to the moon, where they fend off an attack by its quasi-anthropomorphic inhabitants, capture one, and bring him back to Earth. Considered the first sci-fi film in cinematic history, it’s a surreal satire lampooning 19th-century industrial and imperial society.
Responding to the film’s exuberant fantasy, the show’s eight artists create imaginary worlds exploring ideas of self, identity, gender and transcendence in often hallucinatory and dreamlike works. An intergenerational and multicultural group, they include Jake Grewal, born and working in London; Savannah Marie Harris, London-born and riffing on her Caribbean and Cuban heritage; Caspar Heinemann, lives in London; Merlin James, born and living in Glasgow; Sanya Kantarovsky, born in Moscow and living in New York; Alistair MacKinven, born in Liverpool, living in London; Mike Silva born in Sweden, living in London; and the Antiguan artist and writer Frank Walter, who died in 2009, aged 82.
It is set in a gorgeous Regency townhouse overlooking the sea, and it is well worth a visit.
Voyage, at Morena di Luna, Maureen Paley Hove, weekend afternoons until 15 September
Words: Claudia Barbieri Childs Top Photo: ‘Still Life Variations 2’ by William Scott (1969) Pallant House