London Eye: September 2009

Almost a year after his epochal £100 million one-man auction at Sotheby’s, the artist Damien Hirst returns to the London limelight in October with a new exhibition titled No Love Lost. Anyone expecting the familiar pickled livestock, pharmaceutical containers or dead butterflies mimicking stained glass windows will be disappointed, however. The 25 new works, to be displayed in the Belle Époque ambience of the Wallace Collection in Manchester Square, are all oil paintings on canvas. What is more – hold the front page! – Hirst painted them all himself.

Many of the familiar Hirst motifs are in evidence, including skulls and other vanitas symbols, but in a radical break with the “white cube” conventions of contemporary gallery spaces, the new works will be hung in the same interiors that house rococo masterpieces by Boucher and Fragonard and lavish gilded furniture by Riesener and Linke.

Few living artists have exhibited at the Wallace Collection. Often described as London’s equivalent to the Frick in New York, the Wallace is a “closed” collection, no part of which can be lent out and which cannot be added to. “I’ve chosen to show my new paintings here because I love the fact that it is a family collection,” said Hirst. “It’s like a world away from the world. My new works somehow feel like they belong here with other works and objects from other times.”

In their similarities to the paintings of the late Francis Bacon, who was an admirer of Hirst’s vitrine pieces, the new Hirst pictures may also represent a homage of sorts. This makes them more personal than the manufactured pieces for which Hirst is internationally renowned. A spokesman for the artist confirmed to London Eye that Hirst received no assistance in painting the pictures, and stressed that they were not for sale. No Love Lost will be at the Wallace Collection, London from Oct. 14 to Jan. 24.

One person who in the past might have looked somewhat askance at Hirst’s use of animals, albeit dead ones, is the former French film star Brigitte Bardot, for decades one of the most high-profile campaigners for animal welfare and animal rights.

This month Bardot can be seen in her original public guise as one of the most beautiful women in the world. James Hyman, a leading London-based dealer in Modern British art, is currently holding an exhibition at his Savile Row gallery of rare original photographs of the former French screen goddess.

The exhibition focuses on Bardot’s younger days and features a number of now iconic images of the star in her prime plus rare shots that have never been exhibited or published. The show also features original vintage prints by Tazio Secchiaroli (1925-1998) and Marcello Geppetti. Secchiaroli provided the inspiration for Fellini’s character Paparazzo in the famous 1960 film La Dolce Vita.

Hyman says the show is curated around a series of themes “which chart a range of photographic approaches to the subject from the complicit to the intrusive, the posed shot to the snatched moment, the public to the private, the studio to the street.” The exhibition is sure to have resonance for all those interested in contemporary celebrity culture since many of the images date from the moment when the concept of celebrity was solidifying into the bizarre phenomenon it is today.

The exhibition, which runs until the Oct. 3, is timed to coincide with London Fashion Week, Sept. 18-22, and with Bardot’s 75th birthday Sept. 28.

So preoccupied are we with sculpture and painting, we often overlook the extent to which many contemporary artists engage with craft-orientated materials and techniques. The Estorick Collection in Islington in north London has earned an international reputation for its prestigious collection of Italian Futurist works and also for its adventurous exhibition program, but later this month it ventures into craft.

Its new exhibition, entitled Terra Incognita: Italy’s Ceramic Revival, features work drawn from the Bernd and Eva Hockemeyer Collection of 20th-century Italian ceramics. The show comprises 50 key works dating from the late 1920s to the mid-1980s by a host of well-known artists, ceramicists and sculptors such as Marino Marini, Lucio Fontana, Robert Crippa and Carlo Zauli.

Scheduled to run from Sept. 30 through Dec. 20, the exhibition will offer a welcome distraction for the many international collectors and curators flying in for the Frieze contemporary art fair in October. It will also rather neatly pick up some of the Italian modernist themes established by the current Italian Futurism exhibition, which is packing crowds into Tate Modern.

Further evidence of the impact of the recession on London’s contemporary gallery scene comes from the prospective list of exhibitors at this year’s Zoo fair, which coincides with Frieze. In the past a labyrinthine warren of innumerable competing commercial galleries, this year the fair is vastly pruned down and looks more like a cerebrally curated museum show than a commercial jamboree for collectors. London Eye will be reporting on these events in more depth next month.

But some London contemporary galleries are still thriving beyond the perimeter fence of the sprawling art fairs. This week the energetic young London dealer Josh Lilley opened an exhibition of paintings by Irish-born, London-based abstract painter Sarah Dwyer entitled Hands Stuffing a Mattress. The show’s curious title comes from Franz Kline’s famous comment to Philip Guston: “You know, painting is like hands stuffing a mattress.”

Located in the chic Fitzrovia district just north of Oxford Street, Lilley’s gallery was humming with activity at this week’s private view as visitors sized up Dwyer’s imposing canvases. Whether painting on a large or small scale, Dwyer has no fear of loading on the paint in great airborne swirls which add a kind of baroque visual energy to the surface of the canvas. Some of them look like abstract versions of Old Master, Impressionist, or fin-de-siècle Symbolist works. Lilley has an eye for innovative painters and Dwyer looks likely to be another artist who will benefit from his canny patronage. The show runs through Oct. 8.

Finally, a brief mention of a handful of notable prices from a recent auction held by Dreweatts in Newbury on Sept. 9. Dreweatts have just announced a commercial alliance with London-based specialist book auctioneers Bloomsbury Auctions. This gives some much-needed momentum to the Dreweatt Fine Art Auction Group’s seemingly inexorable regional expansion, the commercial logic of which has never been entirely clear.

Quite what the implications of the “alliance” will be in the longer term remains to be seen, but in future Dreweatts will enjoy a foothold through Bloomsbury’s London location, while Bloomsbury’s general book sales will now take place at Dreweatts’ Godalming saleroom.

Meanwhile, prices at Dreweatts recent furniture and clock sales reinforced the truism that the rarest and most unusual things can still be relied upon to confound the gloomiest of recessionary predictions.

The most dramatic example was an oval glass coffee table mounted with a stuffed caiman crocodile. This bizarre colonialist trophy, which dates from the early part of the 20th century, having been part of the furnishings of a Paris apartment in the 1920s, changed hands for $6,900.

Rarity was also a key factor driving the bidding for a 17th-century Dutch gold oval Puritan watch with single fusee verge movement and calendar by Jan Jansse Boekels the Younger, The Hague, circa 1635. It was a somewhat primitive looking affair, but no less important for it, hence the $31,300 winning bid.

Another one for the serious horologists was a fine Queen Anne eight-day longcase clock. Ebonised cases were never the most marketable of things, but when the maker is none other than John Knibb, Oxford, it can be a different story. This early 18th century example beat an estimate of £10,000-15,000 to reach £23,000 ($38,000).