Start the day off at Marylebone station and then a walk down to the Lisson Gallery to take a look at some new large paintings by Carmen Herrera. Now, the work here is fairly obviously abstract but when it comes to finding the appropriate words for a more precise taxonomic labelling then I have to admit I’m on slightly dodgy ground. As a youngster I used to have a well-thumbed copy of the I-Spy book of Modern Art but my classificatory comfort zone has always been more in the European, first half of the 20th century rather than in the subsequent post-war transatlantic decades. So, whereas I can spot a piece of Pointillism at fifty paces and recognise some real Synthetic Cubism when I see it, my knowledge of Minimalism is more minimal, I’m unsure of the KPI’s required to calibrate Performance Art performances and I sometimes question my conceptual conceptualisation of Conceptualism. As for the nomenclature used to define all the multiplicity of different strands of non-figurative Abstract Expressionist works that started to come out of America from the 1950s onwards, well, I think I got the idea of action painting, colour fields and hard edges but subsequently got a bit lost in the post-painterly painting terminology. Having said all that, if forced then I reckon I’d pigeon-hole Herrera’s paintings as the artwork of an artist working in a sort of Pre-Neo-Geo-ish tradition – and then wait for someone to call my bluff. Suffice it to say that her latest works are simple, bold, geometric and colourful and presented with the kind of confidence that is a characteristic of the very young and naive or the very wise and experienced. And, since the Gallery notes advice that artist was born in Havana in 1915, I guess she falls into the latter category.
Either way, I quite liked her paintings, though I can’t help wondering that had the Gallery notes said that the artist was aged 22 rather than 102, my view of them might have been less positive. As it is, I suppose it’s hard not to see the paintings as the near culmination of a lifetime’s dedicated experimentation and engagement with a particular field of monochromatic colouring and patterning. And this then inevitably imbues them all with a sort of inherent nobility or grandeur or some other kind of impressive subjective patina above that of the actuality of their intrinsic retinal impact. Then again, I suppose that looking at art is more than just an exercise in trying to make gradations of objective quality and, anyway, I retain the retrospective right to decide that – should it turn out that a typo has crept into the Gallery notes and Herrera is, in fact, in the spring, rather than the autumn of her career – the paintings are, frankly, a little too simplistic to require further consideration.
At which point it seems a good time to move on. And so, after a tube ride to Oxford Circus, I find myself walking down New Bond Street where I can’t resist calling into the Halcyon Gallery. This is one of those rather slick, silky sleek commercial spaces that tends to have shiny displays of Warhol prints surrounded by paintings by the likes of Buffet, Botero and displays of other middle-of-the-road, easy-on-the-eye artists that are presumably specially selected to attract the attention and titillate the optical taste buds of the less sophisticated of the ultra-high net worth, nouveau riche, arriviste parvenus that can sometimes be seen parading about this part of town. Normally I stride past the Gallery with eyes averted but today I happen to notice that they’ve put on a one-man show by Dale Chihuly (pronounced, so I’m told, chee-hooly), the glass blower extraordinaire who is perhaps best known in this country for having produced the centerpiece in the entrance hall of the Victoria & Albert Museum. This squirming morass of vitreous extrusions hung high above the information desk undoubtedly looks really rather impressive. And, similarly, the smaller, more restrained works in the Halcyon are also not unattractive but I think the artist reveals his true colours – gaudy, garish and glowing – in the larger installations where his dazzle designs tip into a form of over-the-top, kitsch absurdism that could surely only be truly appreciated by someone with a truly Trumpian vulgarity of taste. Then again, however one judges the aesthetic values of Chihuly’s incredible constructions, they are certainly an undeniable phenomenon and worth a visit just to gawp at the sheer nonsensicality of their shimmering translucent bizarreness.
A few doors further down the street is the Fine Art Gallery within which a mini-retrospective of works by Alan Davie has been gathered. He was another long-lived abstractionist who seems to have retained that extraordinary creative flare required to keep bashing out the characteristic compositions of hieroglyphic and otherwise idiogrammatic variations of signs, symbols and shapes that formed such an important part of his trademark style. A smattering of early works shows Davie experimenting with less well-defined miasmatic blurs and clouds of colouration before a sort of natural centripetal force seems to come into play that slowly coalesces and crystallises these forms into the much more familiar bright and sharply structured vignettes of bouncy, playful poster art that he then spent a long career promulgating. They strike me as examples of a kind of unfettered optimistic expressivity that is likely to put a smile on the face and a spring in the step of all but the most jaded of viewers.
Alas, these kinds of unserious outward reflections of an inner joie de vivre seem entirely inappropriate when I enter Spruth Magers, the next gallery on today’s itinerary, for they are showing works situated at the decidedly minimalistic, po-faced end of the abstractionist rainbow and these items demand that the viewer adopts a more determinedly straight face – and definitely no step springing. A slight wrinkling of the brow and furrowing of the forehead is allowed, but nothing should otherwise disturb the overall atmosphere of reverent obeisance demanded when one is stood before a stack of Donald Judd aluminium boxes or Craig Kauffman’s pair of pouting pink plastic labial lips. Fortunately, I’m still just about flexible enough to be able to reprogramme my body language and adopt the requisite stance to confirm that I’ve achieved a sufficiently sophisticated level of aesthetic appreciation such that I don’t just like the more obvious attractions of Davie’s effervescent, whizz bang, style of paintings but can also enjoy the cooler stuff, too. In fact, I like to think of myself as being pretty liberal minded when it comes to showing an interest in just about all the various artworld fads and fashions, with an art agenda fluid enough to embrace the full multiplicity of different forms of creative expression. And that definitely extends to including the more subtle and nuanced tones and forms of this kind of abstract art development that arose in the late 1960s and shifted ideas of sculpture away from an investigation of the illustrative and descriptive and along into the realms of the more meditative and contemplative.
Which, rather neatly, leads on to the next show over at the David Zwirner gallery. For here is the latest series of works by the grande dame of British painting, the Op Art octogenarian Bridget Riley CH CBE (though, I was surprised to note when scanning through my copy of Burkes, not quite an actual, full-on Dame yet – but don’t worry Bridget, if you last as long as Carmen I’m sure you’ll get one in the end). Honours aside, Riley has been playing around with her particular brand of illusionistic patterned designs since the first of her black and white teasers emerged to dimensionally discombobulate the groovy generation of gallery-goers that helped make London such a swinging place to visit back in the 1960s. Of course, it wasn’t long before these early, more clinical monochromatic works metamorphosed into the brighter, brasher full colour versions that assured Riley’s permanent position in the artistic firmament. Although, occasionally these involved such extreme chromatic clashes that audiences were advised to wear protective goggles in order to prevent overstimulation of the optical neuronal networks. Fortunately for all concerned over the years Riley has managed to fine tune her works to find that happy medium firmly situated within the Goldilocks region of Op Art abstraction where viewers can enjoy her exhibitions without risk of exiting a show followed by a huge head-pounding headache. And such is the Zwirner show, which mixes some very large, wall-sized b&w’s with selections of smaller, beiger grids of spots and dots – a combination that creates an overall ambience of comfortable elegance that seems a rather pleasant way to end another day or artworld rambling.
Except, I thought I’d take a quick look into the grand galleries of the nearby Phillips auction house to take a look at the selection of prints and multiples that they’ve collated together for their Editions sale. As expected, it’s a bit of a mixed bag but here are some neat Warhols and Lichtensteins, a nice stash of Picasso ceramics and, best of all, a couple of really hefty Howard Hodgkin abstracts that, in light of my earlier comments, deserve to be commemorated by a neologistic addition to the inventory of abstract terminology and are, as such, fine examples of what I would choose to christen Splodgkinism.
