Huguette Caland exhibition at Tate St.Ives, May 25 to 1st September 2019
This artist is now aged 88, a Lebanese artist whose daughter came to introduce the show.
It's always of interest when another show opens and the director, Anne Barlow, has selected another
woman for the new big gallery space.
At the preview the director spoke but the acoustics are so bad that it was like an announcement at
a station and I couldn't hear the destination, not one word was audible. Can't a solution to this
problem be acheived?
I obtained a bit of information from a helpful attendant and read the wall notices. The artist's having
a husband and simultaneously a lover and then leaving both to go to Paris to study art is described
as ‘an uncompromising perspective’ and I wondered if a man behaving like this would be seen so
sympathetically.
The paintings and drawings show a variety of influences. There's a drawing
recalling Roger Hilton's 'Oy Oi Oi' of an exuberant naked woman, and the Hilton was done several
years earlier in 1963. There are line drawings
surely after John Lennon's 'In his own write' which
came out in 1964 well before these Caland drawings.There are lines approaching one another or
shapes barely touching
that remind me of what seemed to be in the air when I was at art college in
the 60's when sex was invented and embraced and I too was using abstract metaphors to express
my explorations of bohemian liberated attitudes.
We are all a product of our times but I would like to have seen these influences acknowledged.
There are boiled sweet acid diluted colours and cartoonish heads. There is an unflattering
green picture of her parents and a fellow onlooker said to me maybe they weren't very nice parents?
There are blown up bottom shapes accommodating themselves to the rectangle of the canvas.
There are a couple of capacious decorated kaftans one of which has a striking design.
It's ok.
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