25/02/16
12 @ MENIER
Menier Gallery
22 – 27 February
2016
Artist Sarah Jane Moon describes her role in 12@Menier, an
exhibition featuring works by 12 contemporary women artists, as ‘organiser’,
not ‘curator’. In tandem with Elizabeth Shields, she selected a further 10
artists, whose work she likes, and invited them to take part in the show. What
works would be submitted was not known until the day of the hang. Somehow,
however, it has worked – and worked well. The walls of the basement gallery –
including some temporary partitions – are filled with familiar faces (if you
know any of the artists involved, you are bound to know some of the models
too!) and the odd landscape in between. No one work dominates and you can
therefore take your time conversing with each subject and exploring the
variously absorbing scenes.
Two of the artists are sculptors and so one aisle is
bisected by a series of metal legs, Uta Brouet’s ‘One and Three’ (2016), the identical shapes seeming to
kick rhythmically, dance, move, and create images in the imagination. On the
ground, two aluminium wire dogs vie for attention, while, in the far aisle, Laurence
Perratzi’s bronze ‘Circles’ hold dancers and acrobats, beautifully navigating
the challenges of a confined, yet infinite space – a metaphor, no doubt, for
life itself.
Moon’s own contributions include a detailed triple portrait,
‘In the Studio’ (2015), which she describes as “not just a self-portrait, but a
portrait of relationships both lateral and triangulated”. A meditation on
female sexuality, the body, nature, violence and nurturing, Moon represents herself
as the artist, with paintbrushes in hand. The wall behind is decorated with pictures
key to her identity, including Courbet’s ‘L’Origine du monde’ (1866) – an explicit painting of that
place between a woman’s legs – and Marlene Dumas’ ‘The Painter’ (1994), which
shows her young daughter, naked, hands covered in red paint, perhaps a reminder,
throughout our adult upheavals, of the inner artist child.
Roxana Halls’ quirky portraits include ‘Sushi’ (2014), taken
from her Appetite series of paintings of women eating, set on a sliding scale,
with some scarcely daring to indulge and others displaying a voracious
appetite: food, Halls explains, is a metaphor for life. Her reclining nude,
‘Liza’ (2011) appears simultaneously confronting, seductive and yet plaintive.
The rich drapery, the make-up and the choker convey a sense of theatricality,
inherent to all of Halls’ work.
Camilla Cannon, who appears as the subject in a couple
of Susanne du Toit’s portraits, is showing a vibrant, abstracted oil of a woman
in a yellow bathing suit, arms above head, unshaven pits bared to the world.
The artist also famously painted the writer Emer O’Toole, after she caused something
of an uproar by speaking out in favour of female body hair on ITV’s This
Morning in 2012.
“The whole thing’s been a really interesting
experience,” reflects Moon. “A mixture of west end and east end, straight and
gay, different classes, but all women. I felt like a kid in a sweet shop being
able to put together a list of the painters and sculptors I admired most – and,
happily, they all agreed.” Moon chose artists whose work she recognised as “very
good formally” and whose manner of conducting themselves in the world as
artists “suggested a kinship”. She sought artists who prioritise their practice
and treat it as a vocation rather than an occupation. Also important was that
they should be working within the figurative and representational genre with
traditional materials.
Coinciding with Saatchi’s Champagne Life exhibition,
showcasing the work of 14 women artists, Moon adds: “It’s a well-known fact
that women are hugely under-represented in the professional arts world and I
wanted, in a small way, to do something to address this fact. Women are
incredibly powerful when we work together. Together we hung the exhibition
with a brilliantly collaborative spirit – there was very little ego to
negotiate.” And that shows. If this were curated, one would say it had been
well done; since it was not, then even better! Well worth a visit.
Artists included: Sophie Bayntun, Alice Boggis-Rolfe,
Uta Brouet, Camilla Cannon, Susanne du Toit, Roxana Halls, Sarah Jane
Moon, Laurence Perratzi, Olha Pryymak, Ilaria Rosselli del Turco, Elizabeth
Shields, Adele Wagstaff.
http://www.meniergallery.co.uk/
Image:
Camilla Cannon
Mansplaining
oil on canvas
100x100cm