A day in London: The British Art Fair and Tracey Emin
British Art Fair:
Saatchi Gallery, Chelsea
Big art fairs can be too much, there is so much to try and see and so many people that, to be honest, one can go bit art-blind. However, it is a great opportunity to scratch that art itch if you just want to see a lot of stuff in a short amount of time. I had one day in London, so I went for it.
The BAF is held at the Saatchi Gallery, with three floors of dealers, galleries, projects…mostly Modern with some Contemporary artists thrown in for good measure. There was even a digital concept space which looked interesting, but I just didn’t have the time to stop and explore.
I was really focused on seeing what Modern offerings the galleries and dealers were showing…In short, there was a lot of Terry Frost and Mary Fedden which was great, but they were of variable quality. I found a few Gwen John works on paper and even a tiny Joan Eardley sketch tucked away which was a joy to see.
I was really taken by a small Clough oil painting which, though unapologetically brown, reminded me of something I might have painted. I also noted several Alan Davie paintings and prints - mainly works on paper - of which my favourite was a bonkers dancing cow and snake composition. In short, keep hydrated and eat before you go.
Prunella Clough - Dark Flower, 1997 - a favourite find at the British Art Fair - I love the sculptural zig zag form and ugly brown paint.
Alan Davie - a gouache on paper, one of several Davie's at the fair, but this one has a cow.
I followed you to the end:
Tracey Emin at the White Cube
The White Cube is huge. It is an unforgiving space and one that is hard to fill. It also takes minimalist curation to the extreme, with a small QR code at the entrance your only guide to what awaits inside.
Tracey Emin’s work fills it well. It fills it with thin watery paint, drips and scribbles and handwriting and rawness. This series of recent paintings (plus two sculptures and a video) show us life and near-death in all it’s messy and painful reality. Emin’s reality anyway.
It is all failed love affair, death of a mother, life-saving and life-altering surgery - she has a lot to paint about and to say, and using acrylic paint offers a super-speedy direct method of making visible her thoughts.
As a painter I find myself wishing she’d worked into some of her paintings more. I like to see the rubbings out, the scars of buried layers where she has gone over with a second and third attack of the paint. There are a lot of drips too, I mean a lot. Yep, there’s the obvious link to blood (do watch the video of the bleeding stoma if you need context).
In the work of others, I can be averse to self-conscious carefully dripped paint but here it works, mainly I think because it is done so much and it’s just the straight forward result of using such thin paint. I like the way it makes stripes and becomes and object in itself.
Gallery View - Another Place to Live (l) I followed You to the End (r)
The sculpture doesn’t translate well into photography. It is huge, of course, and has the mark of the artist’s hand where she’s squeezed and moulded the clay to create the maquette. What is it? It’s legs and torso. Burying itself into the ground. An act of abject desperation, collapse and exhaustion. It’s huge and there’s an edition of three apparently…and yes, it makes compete sense it the exhibition. It’s just there in the middle of the room trying to burrow its way through the highly polished concrete floor. Part alien.
I Kept Crying, Acrylic on canvas
One of my favourite pieces from the show was I Kept Crying. A figure squashed into a bath tub, in water and blood…It reminded me a little of Guston. It's one of the smaller pieces at approximately 122cm square.
The larger Take Me To Heaven has the worked surfaces of creamy white paint, that I feel really help give some weight to the work. The patterned wall paper and little wonky lampshade have the domestic feel of your grandmas house. And again, the bed.
Take me to Heaven, Acrylic on Canvas
I think i’m right in thinking all these paintings are dated 2024, which is pretty astonishing. That’s a huge amount of work to produce In less than a year, and the urgency and speed of painting shows and becomes part of the experience of looking.
The paintings do look rushed, un-done, sketchy…but that’s the point. Emin shouldn’t still be here, this is a true lived experience - in all its messy, sad, painful, exhausted and finite chaos. It’s the honesty and fire that make this work quite remarkable.
