Cherries, Light bulbs and Der Kreig.

Cherries, Lightbulbs and Der Kreig.

The Gazelli Gallery on Dover street is one of my favourite commercial art galleries in London. The Gazelli founder and director Mila Askarova is from Azerbaijan and thus a lot of the artists who show at the gallery are from the emerging art markets of the Commonwealth of Independent States. Their private views are always worth going along to all you have to do is RSVP to their mailing list. The majority of the exhibitions at Gazelli have been group shows but I’m always most impressed with the artists they select for solo shows. In the past Saad Qureshi blew my mind with his psycho-architectural sculptures and this month I went to see Nyaz Najafov’s expressive oil paintings.

For a set of great photographs of the show, which are better then anything I could show you, go to Gazelli's Flickr here: Gazelli Flickr


Although their private views are always packed, if you go to see an exhibition at Gazelli on a week day it’s always quiet and the people who work there are incredibly friendly. As an art student, I’m used to being given looks that could kill from gallery invigilators as I pick up their press releases. It is so lovely to receive a smile and a pleasant greeting and then to be left to wander about the works quietly. There are very few commercial spaces that are so welcoming, usually once they’ve judged you won’t be buying anything they won’t be bothering with you.

The digital press release didn’t do Najafov’s work any justice, but isn’t that always the case. Expressive is the name of the game here, the paintings had real presence. The artists palette of volatile reds and saturnine blues and purples meant each piece demanded the eyes attention upon entering. The mark making and treatment of the paint are aggressive, like the figures are bursting forth from his imagination through his hands. Figures, mostly male, are strewn across canvases and I can imagine the physicality of painting humans like this. It would be simplistic to note the parallels of latent violence and Najafov’s history as a solider. What I found more interesting were the enigmatic motifs that reappeared amongst the dismembered and contorted figures. Cherries, bones, light bulbs, rabbits, eggs, udders and nipples appear over and over linking a strange chain of narrative between the paintings. But the visual language these works are speaking is primeval and distorted, but in a good way. They are kind of running wild inside the space, existing beyond their purpose as objects of art.

The figures act out scenes of torture and bestiality in scenes of comical lunacy. 

Amongst these poor unfortunates, one female nude stands strong in an alcove by herself on the 1st floor in “Dancing on Bones” the title work of the show. Whilst most of the other figures hang like meat she appears to be dancing like a viking goddess. She wears nothing but a pair of Pippi Longstocking-esque pigtails which make also an appearance elsewhere in the show in “Pigtails”. In which a bellowing girl is pulled tug-of-war style between two men. Najafov’s treatment of different genders might interest some but I don’t feel like a gender-rant today so I’m going to just consider his general interaction with humans on his canvases. Dismembered, injured, dying or dead... Each figure is pitiable and unique. 



The first artists that popped into my head as I walked around the exhibition were Otto Dix and Francis Bacon. Aware that the Wellcome collection’s exhibition “Death : A Self Portrait” had a collection of Otto Dix’s Der Kreig etchings I headed over to have a look with all that contemporary painting weighing on my mind. The Death show is really interesting and well worth a detailed look. It’s so diverse that I have to focus on one aspect, these etchings. Done in 1924 after World War 1 they are referential of Goya’s Los Desastres de la Guerra which they were displayed alongside. But without a doubt my attention was drawn to Der Kreig. Scenes of war, torture and broken soldiers are synonymous with the German Expressionist painter. Displayed in a grid, the viewer is systematically exposed to scenes of grim terrors of war. In contrast to Najafov's vibrant paintings, these etchings are uniform in the monochromatic medium. 


In summary, synchronicity is a beautiful thing. Experiences of art and life feed into and inform on each other. I try to see each experience in relation to everything else that exists in this life.

Jonas Mekas and Carboot Photographs

"... To renew the old world, that is a collector's deepest desire when he is driven to acquire new things."

- Walter Benjamin

On Saturday I journeyed to the Serpentine Gallery in Hyde park to see the Jonas Mekas exhibition before it closed and I was delighted I caught it. The exhibition coincided with the Lithuanian artist filmaker's 90th birthday. His website is a plethora of biographical information, films, poems, interviews and images. I really recommend taking a look for just a glimpse into the life of this wonderful man and you can find it here: http://jonasmekasfilms.com/

Mekas is a magpie for images, this exhibition displayed a fraction of his collection that he has been gathering since moving to New York in 1949 and buying his first camera. Mekas is best known as an avant-garde film maker and poet. There is a distinct thread of conversation between the two practices in his work, his films reference poetic structures and his visual poetry flows like film. As the Serpentine Gallery identifies itself as a "contemporary fine art gallery" there was a definite attempt to display Mekas' oeuvre in the manner of a fine artist's practice. Those more familiar with Mekas would perhaps be critical of this, but as a student of Fine Art myself I found this made the work a lot more accessible as it was displayed in a language I'm familiar with. The sheer volume of a life time's work could never be contained within a small gallery like the Serpentine, instead the exhibition succeeded in introducing the viewer to a fascinating man. 

In order to mix things up a bit, Mekas' various films were displayed in a number of ways. Some, like The First 40 were projected onto a wall, others played on small, old-fashioned TVs stacked together throughout the exhibition (one of my favourite ways to see video artworks is on clunky old televisions, the more cube-like the better) and others were only referenced by the multitude of film stills displayed on the walls. The film stills all depicted three images mostly portraits of Mekas' friends and loved ones. These odd images, sometimes blurred and out of focus created very tentative intimate portraits that depicted the movement of these fleeting moments. With three successive pictures we learn a lot about that flicker in time, in some we can tell the subject was moving quickly in others the focus darts about the still. To my delight one of the films in The First 40 references my favourite Artist's Manifesto : "I am for an art." by Claes Oldenberg. I can understand why Oldenberg's exalting "call to arms" for artists to create appealed to Mekas. Throughout his films familiar faces appear and fade out again, his films are full of the living and the dead. His daily life was the richest source material he found. 

In the middle of the show, under the gallery's central dome Mekas' latest film was debuted "Outtakes from the life of a Happy Man". Mekas narrates as a series of flickering images dance across the wall. His voice is incredible, rich and inter weaved with years of experience as he speaks with the wisdom of someone who has been misunderstood more often then not. With the natural lyrical quality of a poet, Mekas' voice has been stuck in my head for days and it's saying: "Just images.... Passing by.... Just images... Some fragments of this world of, my world, which is not so different from any other, anybody else's world". His voice is like crushed velvet, textured and deep. I could (and have been) listen to it all day. I wonder if all the stories and anecdotes are true such as tales of one clawed lobsters. 

"These are not memories" Mekas insists, "they are real, the images are real." 

Lavender Piece (2012), 16 screen installation

An interesting text by Czelaw Milosz is displayed on the wall of the gallery containing Lavender Piece and a series of Mekas' poems. It discusses the relationship between duration and distance in the artist's work: "Distance engendered by the passing of time." Considering duration is important for  locating many contemporary art practices and the resulting work created.

Before I went tot he exhibition I ventured to the enormous car boot in Wimbledon stadium. I haven't been so one since I was a child, to my dismay I've gotten a little bit snobbish as I've gotten older and come to regard them as just huge collections of junk. I had totally forgotten the absolute wonder they awoke in me as a child. The Wimbledon one is great, it's muddy and very rough around the edges, just as I remember all car boots being. On every other stall there was something wonderful I had to talk myself out of buying. Until I stumbled upon a stack of strange black and white photographs of old wooden furniture that look like they were taken for a catalog. 

They were so wonderful! For 12 quid I got the lot, over 100 of them! Pricey for a car boot but I love them. I have no idea what I'll do with them but I smell a big body of work coming from these humble photographs. Perhaps they will be the beginning of an expansive collection. Who knows, I mention them because that's what Mekas is, at heart, a collector of images and in thinking about it, aren't we all?