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.
