A Trip To Liverpool: Tate Liverpool and The Walker Gallery

Image taken from here

Image taken from here

Image taken from here

I recently went on a trip to visit Tate Liverpool and The Walker Gallery which I thoroughly enjoyed. Tate Liverpool is currently holding a great exhibition of Jackson Pollock's artistic journey (shortly closing October 18th) called Blind Spots, which I was super glad to see. Having never seen a Pollock piece in the flesh before I had an image of the exhibition being a room full of his iconic 'drippy' paintings but it was so much more than that, I never realised or fully appreciated the extent of Pollock's work and life until I saw this exhibition. There was a huge spectrum of work ranging from gouache and graphite pieces to screen prints and ink drawings on Japanese paper - It caught me off guard. I loved his work before but I love it even more now, it's something you have to see in real life to really appreciate it; the light glistening off the paint, the texture of the layers and the scale of each piece. That is something you just can't reproduce.

There was also a lot of art from other major names in the main gallery including Franz Klein, Grayson Perry, Richard Hamilton, Andy Warhol, Bruce Nauman and Rachel Whiteread. Unfortunately I didn't get any photos of the work because I didn't take my camera into the gallery but I guess there is more to life than looking at art through a camera lens.

Image taken from here

I then went to The Walker Gallery to see an exhibition called Reality which brings together major 20th century and influential contemporary painters (Francis Bacon, Lucien Freud and Chantal Joffe to name a few) to produce a fantastic show full of colour. 

My favourite artist from the exhibition was Caroline Walker with her paintings of women completely unaware that they are being observed by us as the viewer. I loved the style and concept of the viewer becoming the voyeur - something we have discussed before in our critical studies.

I also had a little peak at the John Moores Painting Prize Winners (1957-2006) exhibition while I was there. I picked out two of my favourite pieces below - Slump/Fear by Alexis Harding and Untitled (yellow Ochre) by Fiona Rae.

Alexis Harding won the John Moores Painting Prize in 2004 with his paintings based on the process of painting. Harding came to Leeds College of Art last year to talk about his work so it was great to see one of his pieces up close, I really like how he uses oil and gloss paint to make paintings of the controlled vs the uncontrolled. He uses guttering with holes in as a tool to create grid-like formations on the paint surface which I think is a really unique, clever process.

Alexis Harding - Slump/Fear

Fiona Rae's painting really caught my eye because of the superimposed marks and gestures on a flat background of yellow ochre. I really admire her use of abstract shapes painted onto a canvas as if the canvas is a object itself. These raw shapes, flat tones and colourful marks are something I really want to try and incorporate into my own still life paintings in the future.

Fiona Rae - Untitled (Yellow Ochre)