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Laura Knight and Thomas Bayrle Visit - WeAreOCA

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Laura Knight and Thomas Bayrle Visit thumb

Laura Knight and Thomas Bayrle Visit

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The photograph above of some of the OCA students who attended the recent study day in Newcastle proves that not even the slightly dodgy weather prevented us from having a really enjoyable day. Not that it was without some healthy exchanges of opinions. On our visit to the Laing there was some lively debate about the merits of the Laura Knight exhibition. The group agreed that as the first woman member of the Royal Academy since Angelica Kauffmann and Mary Moser, she must have been under a lot of pressure. Hence some thought that this might explain why she seemed so keen to demonstrate that she could outdo the men when it came to demonstrating her skills. Certainly, some of the best works in the exhibition seemed to be about ‘putting on a show’. Not only was this true of her well-known themes of ballet and circus performers but also of her interest in the way in which both they and the debutantes and fashionable ladies that she portrayed transformed themselves with the help of make-up and costume.
Some of the group’s favourite works turned out to be her sketches in which, as one student pointed out, the artist was able to capture the different surfaces of a costume and the tension of an actor about to go on stage. However, not everyone in the group was equally impressed by her war-time commissions. As a woman artist, it is easy to believe that she might have identified with the Stakhanovite munitions’ worker who in eight weeks picked up the skills that her male equivalents had acquired over an apprenticeship of several years. Nevertheless, her rather flashy hyper-realist portrayal of this UK equivalent of the US Rosy the Riveter revealed an attention to detail and a kind of Soviet sloganizing that to some seemed rather over-the-top.
Bayrle-milk-image
More unanimous was the group’s appreciation of the Thomas Bayrle exhibition at the Baltic. Like Warhol or his fellow-German artist, Sigmar Polke, Bayrle uses repeated images of consumerist logos and brands in ways that express the uniformity and banality of everyday life. Much of his work appears to make conscious reference to Walter Benajmin’s ‘Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’. For example, he re-presents Durer’s tender portrayal of Adam and Eve as a collage created out of dozens copies of the same centre-fold image of pornographic actors making love. In the same way he represents one of Utamaro’s prints of a Japanese Kabuki actor through a repetition of cunningly distorted images of a Japanese brand of camera. Like many of the works, these dated from before the digital revolution and hence anticipated by several years the now common practice of making a single image from a composite of many others.
Bayrle’s training as a textile artist gave him an interest in the weaving process as a metaphor for the social fabric. For example, one of his paper sculptures used three types of weaving pattern known respectively as S, A, and R to create an interlocking abstract image that evokes the structure of the SARS virus. He was also greatly influenced by images of vast military parades in China in which the individual becomes nothing more than a dot in a constantly moving image. This led him to make works in which consumer society, political propaganda, new technology, sexuality, religion and architecture and urban development become as interchangeable as the communist, capitalist and fascist societies, which he decries.
His creation of images in a programmatic way refers both to the tedium of factory work and to the tendency of modern societies to turn individuals into passive clones. One of the most effective exhibits was a circle of tiny cans of milk powder arranged in a way that recalled both childish building blocks and Constructivist aesthetics. His juxtaposition of endlessly rotating motors with speakers playing repetitions of medieval Gregorian chants was equally playful and accessible.
As a bonus, the show was beautifully complemented by an exhibition of Sarah Barker’s mock-heroic monument to modernist public sculpture and Salla Tikka’s films of Viennese horses and Romanian gymnasts. The rigorous training of young adolescent girls in ways that seemed to distort their natural movements was a disturbing echo of Bayrle’s wry depiction of the constraints and uniformity of modern life.


Posted by author: Gerald

6 thoughts on “Laura Knight and Thomas Bayrle Visit

  • Geoffrey.
    19/2/14
    Thanks to both Lucille for organising the day and Gerald for leading the discussion. As well as the obvious thing about seeing original work, it was good to meet up with fellow students and to discuss and exchange ideas.
    OCA STUDY DAY NEWCASTLE 8/2/14.
    Laura Knight Portraits: Laing Gallery.
    The most interesting and informative pieces in the exhibition were the drawings and sketchbooks which displayed fine draughtsmanship and qualities of spontaneity that the paintings lacked; this is particularly evident in the working drawing for the ‘Nuremberg Trials’ 1946.
    The paintings are laboured and formulaic: ‘Take Off’ 1943, shows the crew of a Halifax Bomber going through the pre take off checks, all are wearing heavy leather flying suits yet the painted leather surface is identical in treatment to the cotton overalls worn by the engineer in the painting ‘Stitch Works’1945. The compositions seem to exist purely as a backdrop/device for the more carefully observed and executed portraits of the characters concerned. They are more illustration than painting bringing to mind the work of the Russian Social Realists – all that was lacking was a suitable war time slogan. See Gerasimov’s ‘Stalin at the 18th National Congress’ 1939.
    Her work seems out of time, almost a looking back, whereas her contemporaries such as Paul Nash and Henry Moore where breaking new ground in their depictions of life and war both in terms of their vision and use of materials. See: Paul Nash ‘Dead Sea’ 1941 and Henry Moore Study for ‘Tube Shelter Perspective: The Liverpool Street Extension’ 1940 – 41.
    The portrait of Ethel Bartlett (1926) has solidity and a mass that recalls the sculpture of Maillol, the form built up with small dabs of paint, the hair simplified and tightly contained. Contrast that with the ‘Post–Impressionist’ style painting of 1914 ‘Rose and Gold’ which might have indicated a move forward into modernism. The exhibition organised by Roger Fry in London of Post-Impressionism had been held in 1910.
    OCA STUDY DAY NEWCASTLE 8/2/14.
    Thomas Bayrle All-in-One: The Baltic.
    It came as no surprise to read in the exhibition notes that Thomas Bayrle worked for two years as an apprentice weaver in a textiles factory. Central to the main gallery is a piece titled ‘SARS Formation’, 2008 – a large suspended construction made from card and wood; its interwoven link like forms reflect the warp and weft process of fabric construction.
    The use of the repeated motif features throughout the exhibition, whether in the form of something as simple as the gravure dot, or constructions built from cans of condensed milk. He makes use of the mass production and consumerism of the Capitalist West and the repetitive propaganda of Mao tse-Tungs’ China, seeing similarities of monotony and uniformity in both. See, also Sun Yat-sen ‘Sign of the Moon’2005; made from woven cardboard strips – with silkscreened black and white photographs taken from Chinese propaganda material.
    His use of ordinary materials: card, paper, tracing paper, acetate, wood and paint, combined with quite traditional ways of working, make his work very accessible. Most of the pieces are handmade, employing hand cut stencils, photocopies, collage and silk screen. Only in the 1980’s did he begin using computers in the production of his films.

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