Also visited up in Sydney last weekend.
Bacon's never really caught my imagination, but as often happens with these career survey-type exhibitions, seeing work from across most of his working life (1940s-80s) has given me a better understanding of what he's about, and more of an appreciation for his work - this was the first time that any of his paintings have really spoken to me, or that I've really recognised his skill.
It's also given me more context for the works/style that I generally associate with him - the distorted, twisted human figures and faces - and it's striking how much continuity there is in his paintings of those subjects, often nude, over time, even though certain aspects, notably his use of colour, clearly did evolve. Actually, the piece that most struck me, "Study of a nude" (1952-3) is, in many respects, uncharacteristic - smaller scale and more overtly metaphorical and symbolic; it was hung with three or four others with a similar air of ghostly, unknowable loneliness.
* * *
"We used to talk about love" - a contemporary photomedia exhibition, similar in style to much of what ACCA tends to put on (including many similar artists - all Australian, I think, or at least the names I recognised were). Interested to see another video work by Grant Stevens - having first come across him just a week or so ago at, indeed, ACCA and then seen another in a similar vein in the foyer at MCA the day before.
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Also worth noting, in the NSWAG's always impressive contemporary section (the large, white-walled rooms a perfect setting for their well-selected pieces - walking through never fails to leave me feeling as if my mind, or perhaps spirit, is being expanded, trite though that sounds), an installation called "Basement Keller Haus u r (Basement cellar house)" (1985-2012). A steel door in the wall, which opens into a series of built rooms - a partial reconstruction of a residential apartment block in Germany, but this one is the cellar, so very dark, narrow passages, low ceilings, blind corners, partitions, mirrors and refuse.
I almost didn't make it past the first chamber and a bit, inching my way around - using my mobile phone for light in exploring what was close to a pitch black short passage - and not realising that there was another passage in the opposite direction behind the door that I'd opened from the first room; I had a dream a while ago in which I was in some kind of contemporary art gallery or installation or somesuch and for some reason it was very threatening - an apt pre-metaphor for the experience created by this one. (I certainly understood why the piece description outside contained so many warnings, including a requirement to tell a member of the gallery staff before going in.) It was genuinely uncanny - a term I use a bit when describing how art operates on me, but accurate.
Bacon's never really caught my imagination, but as often happens with these career survey-type exhibitions, seeing work from across most of his working life (1940s-80s) has given me a better understanding of what he's about, and more of an appreciation for his work - this was the first time that any of his paintings have really spoken to me, or that I've really recognised his skill.
It's also given me more context for the works/style that I generally associate with him - the distorted, twisted human figures and faces - and it's striking how much continuity there is in his paintings of those subjects, often nude, over time, even though certain aspects, notably his use of colour, clearly did evolve. Actually, the piece that most struck me, "Study of a nude" (1952-3) is, in many respects, uncharacteristic - smaller scale and more overtly metaphorical and symbolic; it was hung with three or four others with a similar air of ghostly, unknowable loneliness.
* * *
"We used to talk about love" - a contemporary photomedia exhibition, similar in style to much of what ACCA tends to put on (including many similar artists - all Australian, I think, or at least the names I recognised were). Interested to see another video work by Grant Stevens - having first come across him just a week or so ago at, indeed, ACCA and then seen another in a similar vein in the foyer at MCA the day before.
* * *
Also worth noting, in the NSWAG's always impressive contemporary section (the large, white-walled rooms a perfect setting for their well-selected pieces - walking through never fails to leave me feeling as if my mind, or perhaps spirit, is being expanded, trite though that sounds), an installation called "Basement Keller Haus u r (Basement cellar house)" (1985-2012). A steel door in the wall, which opens into a series of built rooms - a partial reconstruction of a residential apartment block in Germany, but this one is the cellar, so very dark, narrow passages, low ceilings, blind corners, partitions, mirrors and refuse.
I almost didn't make it past the first chamber and a bit, inching my way around - using my mobile phone for light in exploring what was close to a pitch black short passage - and not realising that there was another passage in the opposite direction behind the door that I'd opened from the first room; I had a dream a while ago in which I was in some kind of contemporary art gallery or installation or somesuch and for some reason it was very threatening - an apt pre-metaphor for the experience created by this one. (I certainly understood why the piece description outside contained so many warnings, including a requirement to tell a member of the gallery staff before going in.) It was genuinely uncanny - a term I use a bit when describing how art operates on me, but accurate.
