Highlights 2014 – Amy Sherlock

By Amy Sherlock

Henri Matisse, 'The Parakeet and the Mermaid', 1952. © 2015 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

On the twelfth day of Christmas, a look back at some of the gifts that 2014 gave us:

A partridge in a pear tree
It’s not quite the same as a partridge, but how about a parakeet – accompanied by a mermaid – floating amongst the sinuous, coloured-paper fronds of what could be either tropical foliage or an octopus’s garden of kelp. Henri Matisse created his monumental wall piece The Parakeet and the Mermaid, which occupied one glorious room of ‘The Cut-Outs’ at Tate Modern, London (the MoMA iteration of the show runs until 10 Feb), in 1952, while convalescing after a major operation that kept him out of his studio. He spoke about the work as ‘a little garden all around me where I can walk’ – an apt description of the show itself which, in spite of hoardes of visitors, was an oasis of childlike wonder.

Two turtle doves
The pairs of trademark voluptuous ladies that filled the large canvases in ‘How to Work Together’, Ella Kruglyanskaya’s solo show at Studio Voltaire, London, in spring, were not so much cohabiting peacefully as eyeing each other up, like hawks. Supportive and antagonistic in equal measure, they might be saying something about the way that relationships between women are habitually caricatured, or the particular kind of competition that is bred by always being the object of the gaze, or the point at which watching a person should become watching out for them. They might equally be a straightforward celebration, or appreciation, of the female form – its curves, its contours and its claddings. Either way, Kruglyanskaya is a painter who knows birds.

Ella Kruglyanskaya, Zip It, 2014, oil and oil stick on linen
214 × 167 cm. Courtesy: the artist, Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York, and Studio Voltaire, London

Three French hens
My 2014 started with a trip to Paris to catch the retrospectives of Pierre Huyghe at the Centre Pompidou and Philippe Parreno at the Palais de Tokyo in early January. Huyghe’s presentation was as dense and teeming with sounds and lifeforms (performers; fish tanks; Human the dog) as Parreno’s felt uninhabited, almost ghostly. Occupying the entirety of the vast Palais de Tokyo, the shows hidden doors, sudden bursts of Stravinsky’s ‘Petrushka’ (1947) and automata lent it something of the atmosphere of the Beast’s extravagantly lonely castle in Jean Cocteau’s ‘La Belle et la Bete’ (1946), with its corridors lined with animated candelabras. Both exhibitions were enchanting. A large-scale survey show of the work of Dominique Gonzales-Foerster, which will come to the Centre Pompidou in the autumn after opening at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro over the summer will complete a trio; I am looking forward to it greatly.

Four calling birds
Performed by a chorus of grey-clad women across all levels of Tate Britain’s beautiful new Caruso St John-designed rotunda, Cally Spooner’s a-cappella drama And You Were Wonderful, On Stage (2014) was a mediation on the ways in which the human voice, which we assume to be so natural, so true, can deceive, exaggerate or become robotically detached. Spooner’s smart, always inventive work is acutely attuned to the multiple and shifting structures of call and response in contemporary mediatized society.

And You Were Wonderful, On Stage, 2014, performance at, Tate Britain, London. Courtesy: Tate, London; photograph: Oliver Cowling

Five Gold Rings
The press image for ‘Rembrandt: The Late Works’ (on show at the National Gallery, London, until 18 Jan) is a detail of the painting known as The Jewish Bride (c. 1665) in which a man in a billowing tunic leans across to touch the bosom of his wife, who lays her hand gently over his. The glowing light (the characters seem to give off a radiance of their own) catches the gold ring on the woman’s little finger, outlining the central pearl in a twinkle of white. I couldn’t get over the hands in these paintings. It might be because so many of Rembrandt’s subjects, like the artist himself at this stage, were advanced in years, and there is something about hands and their inability to conceal their age that flaunts Rembrandt’s magisterial honesty in dealing with physical decrepitude, including his own. There is no one better able to capture the particular translucency of old skin, its spent elasticity. Two portraits hanging side by side, of Jacob Trip and his wife Margaretha de Geer (c. 1661; both part of the National Gallery’s permanent collection) are stunningly direct portrayals of old age: beautiful but brutal, entirely without tragedy or false ennoblement – a lesson to all of us who are afraid of ageing, in a world as transfixed by youth as it ever was.

Rembrandt, Portrait of a Couple as Isaac and Rebecca, known as The Jewish Bride, c. 1665. © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Six geese a-laying
A gaggle of geese waddles about the bottom right corner of Sigmar Polke’s Watchtower with Geese (1987–88) under a hulking lookout hut, the ominous presence of which is tempered only slightly by the bubblegum pink wash that colours it. The work is included in ‘Alibis’, Polke’s retrospective, which opened at MoMA, New York, where I saw it in May, and runs at Tate Modern, London, until 8 Feb. This was a show that made me feel dizzy, not just because of the chaotically compressed hang (which felt somehow appropriate) but because I find it hard to get my head around the breadth of thought and material, and the sometimes rampant contradictions – between tragedy and humour; sensitivity and glibness; spirituality and materialism; Pop; satire; romance; guilt; desire and disgust – contained within and elicited by this impossibly inventive artist.

Seven swans a-swimming
I read Ali Smith’s How To Be Both (2014) in two prose-drunk sessions over the Christmas holiday. The novel is in two parts: one set in present-day Cambridge, where a teenage girl struggles to get over the death of her mother; the other in early Renaissance Italy, which tells the story of a painter at the court of Ferrara. The two narratives are linked by the frescoed walls of the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara, painted in part by the artist-narrator and visited by the girl with her mother, who has become intrigued by an enigmatic, androgynous figure in one of the panels, in the year before her death. Divided into the twelve months of the year, the frescoes are part mythical-allegorical and part idealized depiction of life in the city under its magnanimous Duke, the works’ patron. Birds abound – one of the first details the girl notes is “a truly shocked duck with a hunter’s hand around its neck” – and a pair of white swans pull the chariot of Venus in the month of April. Smith’s tale has inspired me to make a pilgrimage to see the frescoes (which were also discussed by Jan Verwoert in a friezepicture piece in 2013) this spring. How To Be Both is a novel that is smart and deeply moving without seeming laboured; no sentence feels extraneous or overburdened. The revelation, when it comes, speaks eloquently of the gender inequalities that still plague the art world – as almost everything else – even in 2015.

Detail from Francesco del Cossa, Mese di Marzo (Month of March), Hall of the Months, Palazzo Schifanoia, Ferrara, c. 1469

Eight maids a-milking
A slightly tenuous link but bear with me: Phyllida Barlow’s inaugural show at Hauser & Wirth’s Somerset outpost, which overlapped with the artist’s pomp-puncturing explosion of an installation in Tate Britain’s grand Duveen Galleries, was the culmination of a crescendo that has been building since the long-time Slade professor retired from teaching to focus on her own work in 2009. Barlow’s responsiveness and dexterity in handling spaces is remarkable. In Somerset, her work managed to fully occupy the awkward concertina of converted farm buildings (including, you’ve got it, cow sheds) that constitutes the gallery space: pushing out against the walls or creating protected spaces within, mixing outside materials (timber; cement) with inside materials (fabric; ply) to bring some of the muddled-up chaos of the city to this rural idyll.

Nine ladies dancing
I loved Yvonne Rainer’s survey show at Raven Row, London, for the live performances, which reminded me that a dancer’s gesture, however much it feigns normality, is a fantastical, alien thing, and for the droll recorded lecture, Parts of the Body (from the late 1960s), which played on loop in a room upstairs, talking through the limbs’ almost limitless repertoire of movements and reminding me of what a wondrous thing a body – any body – really is.

Dancers performing Yvonne Rainer’s Diagonal (part of Terrain), 1963, at Raven Row, 2014. Courtesy: the artist and Raven Row; photograph: Eva Herzog

Ten lords a-leaping
It might be poor form to include something that I helped to organize, but ‘action-sculptor’ Bruce McLean’s performance, in which he interviewed himself, as part of Frieze London Talks in October, was one of the funniest things I saw all year. There was much theatrical leaping between seats and switching one pair of glasses for another but, behind the poking-fun-at-art-establishment-convention–with-a-very-straight face that has characterized McLean’s work since Nice Style, I think there may have been a gentle, and valid, warning here against the art world’s tendency to speak in a language that no-one but itself can understand. (For the regal bit: at the end of his performance, McLean exited the stage in front of a projected video of himself dancing underneath a crown.)
McLean’s survey show at firstsite, Colchester, curated by Michelle Cotton, and the accompanying catalogue were excellent documents of a witty, unique career.

Eleven pipers piping
London project space Piper Keys produces consistently intelligent, concise and exciting exhibitions in a live/work warehouse space on a shoestring budget. Their programme last year included solo exhibitions by Rachal Bradley, Chris Evans, Allison Katz and Lucy Stein, as well as a permanent installation in the form of a brick sculpture designed by Per Kirkeby. Roll on 2015!

In the capital, other notable mentions in this regard include: Rowing, whose recent exhibition of Rachel Maclean’s filmic brand of hallucinatory political critique, ‘Please Sir’, will be reviewed in the March issue of frieze; French Riviera, particularly for their solo show of work by South African artist Lisa Brice, whose dreamy, gauzy paintings drew on the space’s former life as a poodle parlour; and SPACE, whose extraordinary show of ultra lo-fi early black and white video works by Paul McCarthy in January (curated by frieze contributor Paul Pieroni) was something to hold onto later in the year in the face of the tired, spurious grotesquesness of the artist’s autumn blow out at Hauser & Wirth in Mayfair.

Twelve drummers drumming
Glasgow International 2014 felt like something of a fanfare, rallying commercial galleries, artist-run and non-profit spaces, established institutions, and artists and critics alike in a way that felt quite unique for a bi-annual event on this scale. A drum kit was involved – in the form of a performance by the thrashingly noisy Solar Lice as part of Tobias Madison, Emanuel Rossetti and Stefan Tcherepnin’s exhibition ‘Life & The Invitation& Vapour in Debri&’ at The Modern Institute – but my personal highlight was an altogether quieter pair of shows. With spaces on different floors of the same rambling old hotel building in the city centre, Kendall Koppe and Mary Mary put on a pair of exhibitions – Mary Mary of the clunking, twisted ceramics forms of young, London-based artist Jesse Wine; Kendall Koppe of the precise, Modernist vessel forms of ceramicist Lucy Rie and the elegantly risque homoerotic portraits of photographer George Platt Lynes – which showed how little contemporary clay practices owe to British ceramic tradition whilst simultaneously highlighting a shared, instinctive, and perhaps even inescapable tendency to connect the clay body to the lived body and it’s frailties.

Ceramics by Dame Lucy Rie. Courtesy: Kendall Koppe, Glasgow