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Francis Bacon and Henry Moore: Terror and Beauty at the Art Gallery of Ontario

Elizabeth Parke — Thu, 10 Jul 2014 07:00:30 +0000

Francis Bacon and Henry Moore are known for producing curvilinear compositions and contorted human forms that often double back upon and swoop around themselves. In contrast, the Art Gallery of Ontario’s dual retrospective of the artists, titled Terror and Beauty, takes a distinctly linear approach. Passing over divergent biographical information about the artists (such as that Henry Moore was the son of a coal miner from northern England, while Francis Bacon was born to prosperous English parents living in Ireland), the exhibition aims above all to illuminate how a shared historical and cultural context, which included the World Wars and the milieu of economic austerity that followed, proved formative to the development of the artists’ signature styles. In doing so, the show highlights similarities in Moore’s and Bacon’s works that are often overlooked by accounts that dwell on the fact that Moore worked in sculpture and Bacon in painting.

Francis Bacon. Lying Figure in a Mirror, 1971;  oil on canvas;  198.5 x 147.5 cm . Museo de Bellas Artes Bilbao  © Estate of Francis Bacon / SODRAC (2013).

Many of the works in Terror and Beauty were on view earlier this year at the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology at the University of Oxford as part of an exhibition titled Francis Bacon/Henry Moore: Flesh and Bone. While the collaboration between the British institution and the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) indicates a shared interest in underscoring the links between these two artists, the two museums seem to project slightly different narratives. Whereas the Ashmolean exhibition begins with the characterization “…these two great figurative artists whose careers have rarely been linked until now,” positioning the exhibition as a novel curatorial statement, the AGO forthrightly undercuts such an assertion with a large-scale timeline on the wall of the first gallery that maps when and where the artists were born, trained, exhibited, and died. At a glance, this timeline may seem to chart more divergence than overlap between the artists. Yet, as a viewer wades through the copious information on display, points of convergence and interlock emerge—some in the form of major global events like the Blitz in London, which both artists endured, and others more intimate, like group exhibitions that happened to include works by both artists. Indeed, the number of times that Bacon’s and Moore’s works have been exhibited together reinforces the notion that the two were in fact involved in a longstanding artistic conversation, of which this exhibition is only the latest and most explicit chapter.

From there, the AGO divides the work on display among four large rooms, each of which corresponds to one of four headings: Bodies, Blitz, Vulnerability, and Resilience. These terms effectively function as signposts declaring the curators’ vision of how these two artists might be seen as engaging in conversation—or at least how the seemingly parallel lines of their respective practices in fact bend toward certain areas of intersection. For example, the “Bodies” room sets up a particularly powerful juxtaposition of Bacon’s 1971 Lying Figure in Mirror and Moore’s 1956–7 Falling Warrior. The two figures, both of which possess pronounced knees and elbows, writhe in compositional dialogue, despite one being in paint and the other in bronze.

The show is thick with such works that call out to and echo each other. All around, a viewer encounters voids bounded by the crooks of elbows, mouths agape in sleep or screams, bone structures that modulate and form outer skins, whether molded in bronze or paint. One of the more unexpectedly complementary pairings to emerge is Moore’s Helmut Head and Shoulders and Bacon’s Study for Portrait VI. In each, the artist bilaterally splits the face and leaves a void where one would expect a mouth, resulting in a highly unnerving and disconcerting figure. While the subjects are dissimilar—one depicts a warrior, the other a pope—the horror of the World Wars is plainly reflected in both.

Home to the Henry Moore Sculpture Centre, the AGO holds over 900 works by the artist (and is also flanked on its northeast corner by Moore’s outdoor public sculpture, Two Large Forms). After viewing Terror and Beauty, the nearby Sculpture Centre suddenly seems comparably dormant, lacking the buzz and excitement created by the pairing with Bacon—testimony to the success of Terror and Beauty’s curatorial project.

Francis Bacon and Henry Moore: Terror and Beauty runs through July 20 at the Art Gallery of Ontario

The Hat, That Never Existed: Christoph Roßner at Romer Young

Danielle Sommer — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 00:28:33 +0000

The paintings of Dresden-based Christoph Roßner have the power of a waking dream. As opposed to our regular, logically- and visually-tangled dreams, the visions we have right before we fall asleep – or even in the middle of the day – tend to focus on single objects: things recognizable but out of reach, comforting but not quite tangible. Slow and atmospheric, they demand time and attention – almost like a good wine in need of lots of time and oxygen to breathe. Like any good vintner, Roßner lets his work sit for long periods, sampling it until he feels its done. And like the best vintners, he only releases a limited number of works at a time, which – thankfully – we’re able to see this month at the Romer Young Gallery, in a large part due to support from San Francisco’s Goethe Institute and the Southern Exposure Alternative Exposure Grant.

Man With Hat (2009), Christoph Roßner, oil on canvas, 23.5" x 17.75", image courtesy of Romer Young

Full of everyday objects – like people, a flag, a chunk of wood, a small prism or stone – the paintings seem familiar, but obscured. Sometimes this obfuscation results from composition and scale: the painting Small Wooden Piece (2010), for example, zooms in so tightly that it shows virtually nothing but end grain. At other times, it’s due to technique: faces, like that belonging to Man With Hat (2009), are blurred or smeared and then given the barest of human attributes (eyes, nose, mouth). All background information has disappeared, replaced by thick sheets of color.

Stone (2009), Christoph Roßner, oil on canvas, 10.25" x 13.75", image courtesy of Romer Young

Roßner mainly paints in oil, placing layers on top of layers. In Stone (2009), for example, a creamy yellow, prism-like object seems to glow in the center of a thick, gray background. The different sides of the prism have been thickly coated with paint, as has the background itself – so much so that what could be seen as empty space appears to have real mass.

Ghost (2008), Christoph Roßner, oil and acrylic on canvas, 19.5" x 25.5", image courtesy of Romer Young

More than adding density, however, Roßner’s overpainting suits his subject matter in a different way: each layer elides the one before, disguising details and preventing us from accessing specific narratives for any of the objects. Looking again at the work on display, the pieces seem hauntingly personal. The subject matter for works like Ghost (2008) and Flag (2010) – a doll or toy with a smeared face and a sheet of cloth or paper attached to a piece of wood – are decipherable and yet ultimately confusing. We see their form, and through the weight of Roßner’s brush, the fact that they are significant, and yet we fail to see what the significance is.

Johannes Kahrs

Julie Henson — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 07:00:10 +0000

I have to admit, there is nothing more impressive to me than a well executed painting, and spending some time with the work of Johannes Kahrs has done nothing but revive this fascination. Living somewhere between film, modern news media and history painting, Kahrs’ work seamlessly merges the beauty and tradition of painting and portraiture with banal yet grotesque objectivity, seducing the viewer into a reductive, saturated palate only to confront them with an aggressive yet all too familiar imagery. Choosing images generally experienced through second hand sources of information, Kahrs infuses his paintings and drawings with the drama of film, creating a sense of constant motion and closeness within a still and fragmented plane. Claiming imagery typically referenced through our daily interaction with media sources, Kahrs builds on the diversity of photographic images infused with the seductive palette of artists such as Richter and Tuymans, but invests them with a grotesque, bodily relationship to the viewer seen in the work of Jenny Saville. Kahr’s dark and alluring palette creates an ominous sensation surrounding his shrouded, anonymous figures that instantly builds a narrative within his intentionally extracted context. Kahrs’ film-like color references the emotive palette seen in work such as Luc Tuymans’ Gaskamer, but builds another narrative context that remains familiar but unidentifiable.

Nevertheless, it is his hybridization of media that keeps me coming back to his work. The sensation of moving film, rather than a captured photograph, comes not just from rendering from video stills, but showing sequences of images with a subtle shift in time. Kahrs employs a blurring and shifting of images, but also blurs the identity of his subjects, contributing to his seamless combination of the banal and the grotesque. This obscuring of subjects to a point of abstraction, allowing faces to melt off the subjects like those of Francis Bacon’s portraits, elevates while disguising the identity of the mundane, drawing on our cultural over saturation and disconnection from the physicality of violence. Further complicating his role in creating the image, Kahrs paintings and drawings are often shown behind glass, emphasizing the viewer’s separation from the work and further masking the artist’s hand. This masking and obscuring of time combined with the multiple references to media builds more questions than answers, giving someone a place to investigate and question both the history of painting and its relationship to modern life.

Kahrs recent exhibitions have included solo shows with Luhring Augustine in New York and GAMeC in Bergamo, Italy, in addition to several group shows at the Phoenix Art Museum, the SFMOMA and Museu Serralves in Porto, Portugal. Kahrs currently lives and works in Berlin.