Rachel Campbell-Johnston’s London choice
HUMPHREY OCEAN: HOW’S MY DRIVING
Dulwich Picture Gallery, SE21, until Sep 14
(020-8693 5254)
TWO YEARS ago Ocean was invited to become the new artist in residence at the Dulwich Picture Gallery. He found himself, to his great delight, communing intimately with some of the greatest painters in the world. So perhaps it might at first seem unusual that he should have chosen the quintessentially understated Flemish painter David Teniers the Younger as his principal influence. Ocean’s show is inspired by such pictures as Teniers’s Christmas card-style Winter Scene and his sepia-toned The Brickmakers near Hemiksem.
“The great advantage of residences from the host’s point of view,” writes Desmond Shawe-Taylor, the director of the Dulwich, “is that the artist looks with so much more attention than the rest of us and chooses such different things to look at.” Ocean is aware that The Brickmakers is one of the most “walk past-able” pictures in the gallery, but its appeal, he explains, lay in the artist “doing exactly what was necessary and nothing more”.
This economy and precision is what characterises Ocean’s work. How’s My Driving presents an ostensibly drab urban scene, a pair of Sixties office blocks and a white van amid the traffic. Its muted tones are alleviated only by the tiny orange spot of a Belisha beacon and the reddish flare of a brake light. And yet, for all its minimalism, this picture does much to capture the essence of the contemporary urban mood. The simplicity of Ocean’s paintings is striking. His work rinses out the eye. But perhaps his pictures are not quite so unassuming as they seem.
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Rachel Campbell-Johnston’s best London exhibitions
DAVID MUSGRAVE: ART NOW
Tate Britain, SW1, until Sep 7 (020-7887 8000)
YOU WILL recognise all the materials from primary school: paper and Plasticine, pencils and paint. And in a sense, too, as in primary school, it is artistic potential that Musgrave is out to explore. He looks for little people amid the mess that he makes. Thus Paper Golem began life as lots of torn pieces of paper shuffled into a faint semblance of a human figure. This moment was then frozen by translating the shape into painted aluminium. Musgrave’s work (see Anthroposomething) is about the processes of making and the viewer’s reactions to what is made.
SARAH RAPHAEL
Marlborough Fine Art, W1, until Aug 8
(020-7629 5161)
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SARAH RAPHAEL was always moving on as an artist. Even though this survey includes only pieces completed in the last seven years of her short life — she died in 2001 aged 40 — a quick glimpse could suggest that it was a show of the work of two artists. On the one hand there are her abstracts of the Australian Outback (see Time Travel for Beginner’s): They contrast and yet resonate with the subsequent Strip Page pictures which, painted in strong bright colours, look a bit like a television with its back removed.
VIDEO ACTS
ICA, SW1, until Oct 19 (020-7930 3647)
“INDISPENSABLE VIEWING,” declared The New York Times. Now the show of Pamela and Richard Kramlich’s world- renowned collection of video art comes to the ICA. If you have not kept up with developments in this field, here is the ideal opportunity for a spot of revision. Including more than 100 works (including Man Ray Man Ray by William Wegman), this show goes back to the earliest performance art. It includes landmark pieces by Bruce Nauman and looks at current artists such as Pipilotti Rist and Steve McQueen who are helping to redefine the genre.
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THE STATE ROOMS
Buckingham Palace, SW1, until Sep 28
(020-7766 7300)
ART LOVERS should relish the opportunity to wander through the State Rooms of Buckingham Palace this summer. The Royal Collection contains some lovely works, including Feliks Topolski’s Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. A frowsty amalgamation of Elizabethan portraits and Tudor clutter was jazzed up by the acquisitions of Charles I to make a treasure trove akin to those of the great art-loving European monarchs. And though many of the works were sold under Cromwell, several prize paintings remain in a collection that has been added to by subsequent monachs.
STRANGE AND BEAUTIFUL
Sketch, W1, until Aug 30 (0870-777 4488)
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IN BRINGING together the work of two German-born artists, Strange and Beautiful evokes the underlying Romantic mindset that connects them. Mariele Neudecker films the rising and the setting of the sun on opposite sides of the globe in her video film Another Day (2000). Meanwhile, in Sala de Espersa (Waiting Room), Janaina Tschäpe explores the shadowy inner world of some indefinable metamorphosing creature; half woman, half bird. The natural and the supernatural, representation and perception, are paired in these pieces.