“I shake you by the hand, comrade Bacon: British Art Abroad”

WHITECHAPEL GALLERY
77-82 Whitechapel High Street
December 19–March 14

Barbara Hepworth, Maquette for a Winged Figure, 1957, brass, 23 x 8”.

Taking its title from a visitor’s register at Francis Bacon’s landmark 1988 exhibition in Moscow (at the height of Glasnost), this small exhibition examines the rapports between British modernism and UK identity abroad. Through the poignant prism of a handful of case studies, the show explores the efforts of the British Council, over the past seventy-five years, to export the country’s culture––not always to entirely triumphant, or even measurable, ends. As the sun finally began to set on the seemingly eternal British Empire, artworks served, in some instances, as a new form of diplomacy, with strikingly varied results.

Barbara Hepworth’s Maquette for a Winged Figure, 1957, was exhibited in Tehran’s Museum of Contemporary Art in 2004. The proposed exhibition of David Hockney’s prints illustrating Constantin Cavafy’s notably homoerotic poetry not only stirred up anxiety on behalf of Mexican officials in 1968 but also led the British Council to reconsider its own plans. The cultural attaché wrote back to London, remarking that the works’ exhibition in the Mexican provinces might draw “queens and beatniks” and was thus perhaps best aborted. Francis Bacon’s exhibition at the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow seemed to confirm various perceptions of Western art, whether of dissolution or of emancipation. An adjoining room contains relevant archival documents, including the translated book of Russian visitors to Bacon’s show––which constitutes in its own right a compendium of cultural consciousness and culture shock. “Our civilization is a rotting corpse,” wrote one twenty-one-year-old student somewhat elusively, perhaps finding in Bacon’s images a reflection of Soviet decline, or else testament to a general decadence. A sixteen-year-old saw things differently: “[This] is not art. The only feeling is one of bewilderment.”

— Ara H. Merjian

Nicholas Byrne

VILMA GOLD
6 Minerva Street,
January 16–March 7

Nicholas Byrne, Sailor, 2009, oil on linen, 43 x 24".

The list of works for Nicholas Byrne’s first solo exhibition at this gallery resembles something from the script of a fin de siècle operetta. There are paintings with names such as Dresser, Hosier, Sailor, and Barber, and others titled Plume, Garland, and Fan after their rococo, curvilinear theme.

The artist’s compositions, drawn on linen, copper, and now Plexiglas, have previously adopted marbled patterns from Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–67) and the harlequin motif associated with commedia dell’arte in their layered assemblage. Byrne paints, scrapes away, overpaints, and scores at the pigment for a quick glance at the surface underneath; his work involves a multitude of styles that often refer to another age. Made as composite images, they become objects of historical narrative, relics by design.

His new works are less polymorphous in character, less concerned with symmetry and repeated ornament, and are more autonomous and fluid, each dominated by a single color different from the last. While traces of fleshy impasto and florid brushwork imply notions of artistic heritage, the loopy outlines, brilliant hue, and wickerwork texture of the paintings look beyond art to a more general and recent experience of fashion and style. These abstract hybrids are attuned to the details of passing cyclists, hairstyles, and earrings and seem less shaped by the chapters of painting sampled in previous work. Byrne’s subjects appear more integral and familiar; they have become jocund in character, a bit brassy, perhaps.

— Michelle Cotton

Ryan Mosley

ALISON JACQUES GALLERY
16 - 18 Berners Street
January 13–February 13

Ryan Mosley, Southern Banjo, 2009,
 oil on canvas, 96 1/8 x 120 1/8".

Ryan Mosley likes to borrow freely from art history. In his recent paintings, there are cartoonlike blobs of flesh that recall Guston, Gauguinesque landscapes filled with garish color, and even references to Bellini and Vermeer. But reducing his work to an ironic jumble of appropriations doesn’t do it justice: As his first exhibition with this gallery shows, his paintings are full of subtlety, strangeness, and potential. Many of the larger paintings are tied together with a southern-gothic or Americana thread. In Midnight Cabaret, 2009–2010, for example, a giant white moon frames the blackened face of an extremely flexible cowboy, while in Southern Banjo, 2009, a bearded banjo player plucks away as an Old Testament serpent slides toward him from an overhanging branch. The smaller paintings, by contrast, have the quiet delicacy of old-master portraits: Take In Bloom, 2009, for instance, in which a mustached face floats against a dark background, and A Concave Friar, 2009–2010, wherein a monk’s skull elegantly protrudes and caves in.

Despite all the stylistic leaps and changes in scale, the show offers a surprisingly tight group of paintings. This is largely due to some clever compositional links, such as the shape-shifting serpentine line that runs through several works: sometimes as a snake or a cactus, occasionally as a slithering form punctuated in a paisleylike furl. There are possibly a few too many paintings in the show, but for all his knowing winks to other artists, Mosley is definitely starting to stand on his own two feet.

— Anthony Byrt