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Thursday January 23, 2020
Tate Modern
Limbering up for a busy week ahead for me (I think I am busy when I do more than one outing a week.... there seems to be so much planning involved these days: packed lunches, flasks, tartan blanket....) we went to the Tate Modern. Given my supposed new-found interest black and white photography, I wanted particularly to see their exhibition of Dora Maar's work. She is well-known for her surreal photo montage work, (which coincidentally struck a chord with some of the current fiction books I have been reading). I found it interesting that she was a commercial artist creating arty photos for the fashion world and advertising. I think (I have read) that quite a lot of women artists in this period (which, post WW1, was an emancipation of sorts) took up photography to make a living, as it was a newer art form without the "rules" encompassing traditional art - rules which generally excluded women. I found her camera-less photographs she made in the darkroom in the 1980s very interesting - looking back, Rob had a phase of this kind of experimentation, probably in much the same time period.
Side-stepping emancipation - she is also the subject of in a number of her lover Picasso's paintings with whom she was notably involved for a number of years.
We then drifted into the Dóra Maurer exhibtion. She trained as a graphic artist in the fifties, and in her career of over 50 years, she has worked in almost every medium, from film and photography, to painting, performance, and sculpture. The exhibition has 5 rooms following her career, focusing on the themes of movement, displacement, perception and transformation. The breadth of her work - in colour geometry, and trempe l'oeuil - is fascinating.
Based on her idea to use vacant rooms in the Schloss Buchberg for permanent art installations, in 1982, Dóra Maurer provided a geometric colour installation as the first site-specific art work. Gertraud and Dieter Bogner now house a unique collection of such conceptual artworks.
Finally, we viewed exhibits by Yin Xiuzhen, a (female) Chinese experimental artist who explores issues of globalisation and cultural identity. This is called "weapons" - but at the time we viewed them we did not know what they were and interestingly Rob saw only "some kind of musical instrument perhaps". The "missiles" are made using fabric from second-hand clothing; the worn textiles are stretched over a frame of extendable curtain rods and metal hoops.
The exhibit in the Turbine Hall was the rather spectacular (and large) Kara Walker's Fons Americanus, inspired (in a negative context) by the Victoria Memorial in front of Buckingham Palace.
Posted by Christina at 9:37 AM. Category: Days Out
