Kara Walker Tate Modern Turbine Hall

Despite the vast volume of the Turbine Hall, the Fons  Americana still feels spatially constricted.

As sculptor Kara Walker's spoof advert indicates, this is intended for a large British public space.  It's modelled on the Victoria memorial by Buckingham Palace,  or the Albert Memorial and needs a similar outdoor location.

Conceptually however it is magnificent

Artistic soulmates?

this post is very belated owing to intensive work at NPG 
and half-finished, but still i hope worth posting





As a result of visiting the exhibitions of work by Natalia Goncharova and Frank Bowling in the same week, i was struck by their comparability [if there is such a word, not meaning similarity]

Both used colour so dynamically, in the sense of colour being the dramatic driving force of the visual image, whether figurative or abstract or in-between.


Then each was personally displaced from their lands of origin, whose themes were consistent sources of memory, imagination and energy  with being nostalgic.

And both responded to the successive art movements of their time, so that contemporary influences are visible in their own works as in a graphic conversation that might otherwise seem derivative. 

Critics tend to valorise 'original' artists whose work is entirely sui generis, but those who reveal their encounters with others tend to offer an equally interesting narrative  for the viewers.   Film art loves to include references, homage, allusion, subversion.

Mary Sibande at Somerset House

Installation series "I Come Apart at the Seams"

by Mary Sibande

that carries on the trajectory of Sophie who worked as a maid in white households in apartheid South Africa [and probably still does, although now an emancipated citizen]

through the years of struggle that culminated in Mandela's presidency

 and now seem again endangered.

in the Terrace Rooms at Somerset House.  Open daily until 5 January

Elizabeth Siddal's hair

in some haste because of still being super-busy with Pre-Raphaelite Sisters, but here is a link to an interesting item



https://www.udel.edu/udaily/2019/october/lizzie-siddal-pre-raphaelite-muse-winterthur-lock-hair-art-histor

which is currently on view at NPG in Pre-Raphaelite Sisters  exhibition  alongside W H Deverell's etching of Siddal in costume as Cesario playing court to Olivia in Twelfth Night