Gallery visits – Edinburgh & Athens

In April 2017 I visited ‘Mark Wallinger Mark‘ at The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, UK and in May 2017 The Deste Prize at The Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens, Greece.

Mark Wallinger Mark

The exhibition of Mark Wallinger’s work at the Fuitmarket is a joint exhibition with the other work being shown at the Dundee Centre for Contemporary Art.  I’ve alway had an interest in Wallinger’s work, but have not had the opportunity to view much of it in the flesh. There was an area with monograph’s and exhibition catalogues laid out and this was very useful as it filled in the gaps of my knowledge of his work.

His subject matter and themes can be quite diverse and to be honest I find his previous projects more interesting, than the work I viewed at The Fruitmarket. I hope to use the research gained from the visit in the next year of the MA.

Snapshots of work from the research room that I was interested in:

Above: Zone (2017)
A 5km white thread that creates a border in Munster, Germany a work about borders and communities.

Above: Painting the divide (2005)
Jerusalem, Famagusta, Berlin – reflects the fallout of Empire, from the experiences of re-unified Germany and the raw divisions in the middle East.  Shown at ‘The Russian Linesman’ exhibition in 2009. ‘You enter to the soundtrack of James Joyce reading Finnegans Wake – “awake in the nightmare of history” – and a series of documentary photographs, by Wallinger and others, of disputed territories: Berlin, Nicosia, Jerusalem’ (FT.com review)

Above: The Nightmare of History (2009)
14 stereoscopic photographs examined through Viewmaster eye pieces. Among them were images of Hitler, Queen Elizabeth II visiting a leper colony in Nigeria in  1956 AND Wallinger’s own stereoscopic images including UN Post on the Green Line, Nicosia.

Deste Art Prize

A Bi-Annual art prize in Greece for contemporary artists of Greek birth. I saw an announcement online by Loukia Alavanou, that she had work in this show. I was visiting Athens and was also visiting the Museum of Cycladic art where the show was being held.

It was an interesting enough show, but I didn’t have too much time to spend looking at it. I did watch ‘My my my’ by Loukia Alavanou.  I understood from watching this that most of the footage and images were ‘found’  with sound effects, music, audio samples and speech added.

There were two other works that I found interesting and relevant. This work titled ‘Fauna Magica III’ by Angelo Plessas is made in neon. It is a simple design, but fascinating and mesmerising to look at, especially the flickering.

The final work that I found interesting was titled ‘The Very Rigid’ by Kostas Sahpazis and the materials listed were leather, resin and iron. I had talked about possibly using leather and resin as a material and it was interesting to see a work that used these materials.

Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens 

An amazing collection of art from the Cycladic islands that came from the B.C. period. I have seen Cycladic Art in both The National Museum of Cyprus and the British Museum in London, but this collection is the largest and best in the world. This was the art that heavily inspired both Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, borrowing the simplified minimal suggestion of a face. The museum also contains other floors that show ceramic ware and describe the process of mouldy making and casting.

It was interesting to learn that tbe sculptures would have been painted with eyes and a mouth. In the picture above it is just possible to make out an eye on the left hand side. Like most of us, I had always assumed the sculptures were absent of paint and colour.

Ceramic vases that tell legends, myths and stories of Ancient Greece.