Inspired by ....the Saatchi Gallery, London.... 'Paper'

 

Saatchi Gallery

 

'Paper'

 

Had a day trip to London on Saturday for some artistic & cultural inspiration. Visited the Saatchi Gallery on the Kings Road, a beautiful gallery in a great area and its free to get in! The exhibition on at the min is 'Paper' - 10 gallery spaces filled with really good mix of work created with...paper!

 

 'In a digital world where books are replaced by kindles, email is the death of traditional letter writing and the internet overtakes printed newspapers, it would seem plausible that the art world would follow suit. Not quite.

A new Saatchi exhibition is a surprising regression to an artistic climate dominated by one traditional material. It demands a reinterpretation of the modest medium of paper. In an exhibition called Paper the Saatchi Gallery reinvigorates this forgotten material through collage, sculpture, painting, and installation.'

 

There was some really interesting work and (and some not so interesting work), but definitely worth a visit &  overall was really inspiring... some thought provoking work...even my little six year old was inspired!...did some sketching (him not me - shameful) and he was very discerning in his selection process...the teacher in me approved...the mum in me thought he was so cute!'

 

 

Jessica Jackson Hutchins - 'Couch for a long time'.

 

 

T'his international group show features 44 artists who all work, though in very different ways, with paper – the humble but once ubiquitous medium that’s becoming increasingly sidelined in an era of Kindles, emails, computer-based graphic design and digital art prints.

It certainly may, as has been suggested by the curators, form part of a wider backwards trend towards the expression of traditional artistic skills after years in which shock tactics and conceptual art reigned supreme. But the way paper is used here is massively varied, ranging from collage and sculpture to illustration and installation.

José Lerma and Héctor Madera, for example, practically reach the ceiling of the room with their colossal paper bust of US boxer Emanuel Augustus, his face abstracted pretty much to a point beyond recognition'.

 

Jose Lerma and Hector Madera - 'Bust of Emanuel Augustus'

 

 

Odires Mlaszho - 'Caesar 17'

 

 

 

Yuken Teruya's discarded shopping bags – themselves heavily imbued with meaning and a constant reminder of a modern consumerism which borders on hysteria – become miniature stage sets, in which he casts trees as the players. He painstakingly carves templates of trees from the sides of each bag, bending the results inwards to recreate a lone example of the material from which this paper tree is derived. The tree is viewable from the opening of the packaging on its side. Apart from the work's humourous likeness to a peep show, Teruya's approach starkly recalls an important role often embraced by the artist: that of an individual dedicated to extracting meaning from the detritus of contemporary society.

 

Tom Thayer - 'Nature Scene'

 

 

 

 

The diverse range of works in the exhibition all have one thing in common: paper. As the cultural sector seems to be dictated by a desire to feed a modern appetite with what is considered commercially viable, paper has become in recent years a marginalised choice for curators everywhere. Blockbuster exhibitions such as David Hockney: A Bigger Picture (2012) have been very popular with the public and dominate the scene with ‘new technology’ works such as iPad/ iPhone drawings and video installations. However compared to the hand-made works in Paper, the process of works likes these in David Hockney: A Bigger Picture call into question the authorship of the art. As opposed to those produced on paper, drawings produced on an iPad have the potential to be copied and reproduced endlessly.

Marcelo Jalcome’s Pianos-pipas n17 (2013) stands as the exhibition’s popular signature piece. Photographs don’t do it justice. In a dream-like way this piece dramatically floats alone in a spacious white room and appears free standing. Coloured tissue paper is transformed into what the gallery describes as “a flock of disturbed parrots” and is shaped with fibre glass, bamboo frames and cotton threads. The simple medium of paper is carefully orchestrated and sculpted with striking colours. It is in pieces like Pianos-pipas n17 that Saatchi expresses the new potential of paper.

 

Marcelo Jalcome’s Pianos-pipas n17 (2013)

 

 

 

 

Han Feng Floating City
2008
Tracing paper (laser print) and fish tackle thread

 

 

 

 

Daniel Kelly - ' i see it all now...some of it'

 

 

 

Dawn Clements - Untitled

 

 

 

 

 

Paper is, arguably, the first material with which artists develop a working relationship, providing a malleable conduit for the physical realisation of often unfathomably divergent follies of imagination. The disconnect between the object and the complex processes applied to it is amplified by the near-comic simplicity of its fabrication: wood, cloth or grass fibre, pulped with water, pressed flat. A recipe replete with close to 2000 years of history, yet one that's hardly aged a day. Quite apart from the variety of work on display in this show (much of it strong and engaging, all of it very different), the realisation gradually dawns that all contained therein is the result of sophisticated and rather beautiful manipulations of an uncomplicated and solitary source material.