Melaneia Warwick Nest

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Melaneia Warwick, Nest

Melaneia Warwick, Nest iv, (2011) 39 x 30 inches (framed) charcoal, chalk, household varnish on paper

Drawing is a good way of thinking about Melaneia Warwick’s Nest works, not just because they are in themselves very skillfully drawn but because they also draw you in. The Nest series combines two unlikely elements – a redundant bird’s nest of pegs and hessian and a discarded, plastic doll – and immediately they create narratives.

In Nest i the headless doll appears to be clutching and falling. It has tumbled from its nest in front of your very eyes, its little hand slips from the grip of a frayed root end just out of reach. The black hole where its head should be is like a screaming mouth. In Nest iii, the same doll appears sturdier, more self-sufficient. The nest is gone and whilst the frayed and winding root – like an umbilical cord – remains, its a cord that’s been ripped free.

This violence is there in the paint, in the drips and scrapes of the surface, in the roughly smudged charcoal and in Nest ii. Here the empty nest is both visceral and wounded, animated in vibrant pinky-reds and bold greens. The mood is different again in Nest iv where the whited-out outline of a peg in the foreground is like a memory that hasn’t quite faded.

Nest is still life that refuses to stay still.

See Nest at Hotel Alphabet here

The Guest Room: Artist in Virtual Residence – Melaneia Warwick

Melaneia Warwick, Nest i (2011) :  64 x 46 inches (framed) – varnish, ink, paper, charcoal, oil on arches velum

Hotel Alphabet is delighted to have Melaneia Warwick in virtual residence! The idea of having an artist in virtual residence is to encourage debate between an artist and viewers. I will be posting my own thoughts on Melaneia’s Nest series later in the week but for the moment I’d like to invite you to look and respond. Let’s create a conversation! Go to http://www.hotelalphabet.com/melaneia-warwick.html to see more of her work.

Joan Mitchell The Last Paintings at Hauser and Wirth, Piccadilly, London

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Hauser and Wirth, Joan Mitchell

Joan Mitchell Sunflowers 1990-1, o/c, Diptych 280 x 400.1 cm, courtesy Hauser and Wirth

There seem to be a lot of “male” shows in London at the moment. From the ten men of the London School  (Bacon, Auerbach, Hockney, Kossoff, Freud, etc.) who feature in the Mystery of Appearance at Haunch of Venison to Freud at the National Portrait Gallery to Hockney at the Royal Academy to Picasso in Britain at Tate Britain, modernism feels like a very male affair.

So it is especially refreshing to see Joan Mitchell’s paintings at Hauser and Wirth on Piccadilly. Mitchell (like Lee Krasner, Grace Hartigan, and Helen Frankenthaler) was one of the few women to be taken seriously on the Abstract Expressionist scene. Her huge canvases with their wonderful, exuberant and complicated surfaces are every bit as expressive as Jackson Pollock’s. Look at Sunflowers, a diptych 280 x 400.1 cm, painted when she was 65 years old. She died a year later.

Chicago raised, classically trained, Joan Mitchell met the Mexican muralists like Rivera and  Siqueros. Like Kandinsky – they have parallel energies and rhythms – she had synaesthesia, hearing in colours. (The smaller tondos upstairs at Hauser and Wirth are equally effective. They sing; paint held densely in discernible patterns.)

Unlike Pollock who was allegedly proud of not owning a passport, she found her inspiration in France’s landscapes and in painters like Monet and van Gogh. She was clear that paintings weren’t about art issues, they were about feelings but it’s also pleasing to read in this 1986 interview with art historian Linda Nochlin http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-joan-mitchell-12183 that she wasn’t a sheep:

“to do modern art then, seemed to me, when you were going “modern” (both chuckle), it was Picasso. I mean, everybody. But I avoided that like the plague. I thought. . . . I loved Picasso, but it just wasn’t for me.”

You have till April 28th to catch these paintings here: http://www.hauserwirth.com/exhibitions/1223/joan-mitchell-the-last-paintings/view/

For guided gallery visits see:www.hotelalphabet.com

Museum of Non Visible Art

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Museum of Non Visible Art, Praxis

 

 

See my conceptual sculpture at Praxis’ Museum of Non Visible Art

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/739922847/museum-of-non-visible-art-praxis-and-james-franco

www.socialhistoryofart.com

www.socialhistoryofart.com

Lots of excellent essays here on art