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Study Visit: Phyllida Barlow - Set - The Open College of the Arts

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Study Visit: Phyllida Barlow – Set thumb

Study Visit: Phyllida Barlow – Set

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIspzhb1v8U]

Last night I attended the opening of the Phyllida Barlow exhibition ‘Set’ at the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh.
Barlow began her art education at Chelsea as an undergraduate in 1963 and had her first solo show in a major public space in 2010. She has been an influential educator to generations of sculptors but at 70 is focussing on her own work. This exhibition is breathtaking in its maturity and assuredness.
The show actually brought tears to my eyes and I think they were largely tears of relief. I hadn’t noticed what thin soup I’d been getting accustomed to in recent gallery visits. The sheer power of the visual and spatial sensibility displayed was enveloping (literally as well as cognitively).
Coming back today to experience the show in a quieter moment I can spend more time marvelling at the poise and flair of this huge construction.
The upper storey sees an already strangely shaped room obliterated by a massive construction which scarcely leaves room for the audience to squeeze around the perimeter. It’s walls are slabs of wood and polystyrene daubed with cement, paint and plaster. One feels Barlow might have enjoyed the possibility of piercing the gallery walls and roof and pushing the effects of the inhabitant to John Hurt / Alien proportions.
The lower gallery has several discrete compositions resembling flytipping. Part building site, part yard sale the whole coheres within a rich fug of sensory precision.I am reminded of a conversation between Eric Morecambe and Andre Previn about piano playing from a Christmas TV special of my youth. Morecambe memorably responds to criticism by saying “I am playing all the right notes, just not necessarily in the right order” – Barlow’s dance with anarchy is imbued with her deep learned confidence in manipulating structures.
It is no coincidence as far as I am concerned that this enormous two storey installation seems to be channelling the palette of De Kooning – surely one of the most masterful colourists of the twentieth century.
I don’t know whether my extreme appreciation of the shapes and colours of this exhibition dates me – but thinking about some of Barlow’s past students (Martin Creed for example) I think, or hope, not. This is a show for people whose eyeballs are joined to their brain in a certain way – and thank heavens, or thank Phyllida, for that.
The OCA have luckily agreed for me to run a study day to this exhibition on Saturday 26 September.
Please email enquiries@oca.ac.uk to reserve your place.
The show runs until the 18 October so there is plenty of time to get to it.
 
Featured Image: Phyllida Barlow, Fruitmarket Gallery
Emma Drye. OCA tutor and assessor.


Posted by author: Emma Drye

4 thoughts on “Study Visit: Phyllida Barlow – Set

  • This looks amazing, She’s a really interesting speaker and you get a wonderful sense of enquiry when listening to her. I like that the work isn’t ‘about’ anything. There’s no definable meaning or message – her work is not a crossword puzzle to be solved – but rather it pushes and tests space and form and colour and material. There’s a really interesting interview with her in an old copy of FRIEZE magazine in which she’s asked about ‘purity’ in her work and she quickly shuts down any idea that what she does is ‘pure’. She says that one of here students (who I know as he taught me on my MA) criticized her use of the word as it’s a right-wing, even fascist, idea. Her work isn’t pure. It’s negotiated and questing. Each bit is rubbing along with the other bits. I’ll try and find the reference.

  • Here you go:
    “I once made the mistake of referring to Bruce Nauman’s work as pure sculpture and a student, Jasper Joseph Lester, went ballistic and said that you must never use the word ‘pure’ in relationship to the visual arts – it has fascistic connotations. I attempted to justify what I had said: in Nauman’s sculptures of the 1980s, there is no single, ultimate viewing position; they prompt you to keep on moving around, under and across them. But Jasper was right to challenge my use of the word and he made me think more clearly.”
    http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/learning_experience/

  • Emma, I saw her show in TATE Britain last year, and having walked through all the bolted, contrived, laboured and posturing pieces of Richard Deacon getting more and more irritated, (apologies to admirers of Deacon), I felt relieved walking into the Duveen Gallery and meeting Barlow’s work. The enormous scale of her vision, the abandonment of anything tending towards the precious, (take note Richard Deacon), the rawness of the materials, you are immersed in something you can’t quite put your finger on – all those connections between the eye, the body and the brain get buzzing. I had to go again to see if was a one off experience; the second time was different but equally satisfying.

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