Immortal Apples, Eternal Eggs, Hastings Contemporary: Fun and quirky contemporary rethink of the still life genre
The first thing that will surprise anyone expecting a show about the art of still life – think opulent Dutch Master paintings of flowers in vases, or apples painted by Cézanne – is that the first gallery at Hasting Contemporary is full of sculptures, some of which just look like, well, things. A cleaner appears to have forgotten their broom, leant against the wall, its handle flecked with paint spatters.
Look closely though, and one discovers that these flecks are really insets fashioned in mother-of-pearl and precious stones. Is Susan Collis’s Waltzer (2007) a “still life”? It’s not an image of a domestic object, but it’s just an object either. Something ordinary, magicked into something more by the artist.
Immortal Apples, Eternal Eggs (it’s a line from Virginia Woolf’s biography of modernist art critic Roger Fry, a big Cézanne fan) takes from the painterly tradition of still life artists’ fascination with all things unremarkable and lowly; of how looking at the overlooked might celebrate the value of small things. Tara Donovan’s Bluffs (2006), a weird mass of crystalline stalagmites, its shadowy interiors refracting a brownish light, is made of nothing but thousands of humble transparent plastic buttons.
A standout work is Bertozzi & Casoni’s Scatola Brillo (2005), an astonishing feat of trompe-l’oeil, it presents a battered cardboard box, marked with the famous Brillo brand of scrubbing pads, but open to reveal a mess of broken eggshells, plastic cutlery and crumpled banknotes, a tipped-over espresso cup teetering on top.
That all this is made of glazed ceramic is hard to believe, but then the arty reference to Andy Warhol’s famous Brillo boxes reminds us of the long history of Pop artists merely borrowing in mass-made objects to knock high-art off its pedestal. Here, thankfully, artistic skill gets put to use celebrating the culinary delights of civilised existence. Nearby, Michael Craig-Martin, perhaps the most indefatigable cataloguer of consumer stuff, paints in acid-tones the outlines of a stovetop coffee maker, a wine glass and an empty jar.
Once past the sculptures, the show settles back to a more recognisable idea of still life, with mid-century paintings that stretch back to Ben Nicolson’s austerely cubist 1926 arrangement of vessels on a table, or the glowing conviviality of Mary Fedden’s 1957 Orange and Green Still Life, the jugs, vases and glasses arranged as if standing in for a lively night among friends.
Still life is invariably a way to reflect on the intimacy of normal life, as well as the pleasures and perils of excess – for which Cathie Pilkington’s comically depressive tea-party of glum-looking taxidermied monkeys, sat at a long table in their knitted jumpers, bunting and balloons sagging around them, might serve as a lesson. Not that the bizarrely sexy little figurines that writhe around Rachel Kneebone’s wall of porcelain reliefs seem to be taking the slightest heed.
Immortal Apples does a lively job of testing our assumptions about a familiar genre, and while not everything will be to everyone’s taste, it’s a reminder of how much comes out of paying attention to what, a first glance, seems like nothing at all.
From Sept 21-March 16; hastingscontemporary.org
