Skip to main content

Herstory review – a surprising, alarming odyssey through art by women

Touchstone, Rochdale
From sand-filled tights to a BDSM portrait, this Lancashire gallery gets a major lift with a provocative show

For a long time, a painting by Jessica Etchells hung in Rochdale Art Gallery was presumed to have been painted by her brother, artist and architect Frederick Etchells. Jessica, born in Stockport in 1892, had studied at art school, moved to London and worked both for Roger Fry’s Omega Workshop and, later, Wyndham Lewis’s Rebel Art Centre. It was only in 1980 that the painting was identified as being her work. Now, this lowering still life hangs next to two works by the American artist Sherrie Levine – one is a photograph titled Untitled (After Walker Evans), the other a drawing “After” Henri Matisse. The Matisse is a direct, watercolour copy of a Matisse drawing, while Levine’s photograph reproduces a famous Walker Evans, rephotographed by Levine from a catalogue of the late photographer’s work.

Levine’s appropriations of Matisse and Evans are plays on authorship and originality, and on the supposed singular vision of the male artist. There is something poignant about the juxtaposition of Levine and Etchells. There’s a lesson here, retold and expanded in Herstory, an exhibition of work, all by women artists, combining loans to Rochdale by the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo collection in Turin, and works from the museum’s own collection.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2vmrCF7
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Knives Out review – Daniel Craig goes Columbo in Cluedo whodunnit

Craig grills an all-star lineup of suspects when a wealthy novelist is found dead in Rian Johnson’s sharp, country-house murder mystery R ian Johnson unsheathes an entertainingly nasty, if insubstantial detective mystery with his new film, Knives Out. Back in 2005, his debut movie Brick (a high-school thriller) paid tribute to the hardboiled noir genre. Now he does the same thing for cosy crime, although there is nothing that cosy about it. Knives Out has a country house full of frowning suspects, deadpan servants and smirking ne’er-do-wells and an amusing performance from Daniel Craig as Benoît Blanc, the brilliant amateur sleuth from Louisiana who annoys the hell out of one and all by smiling enigmatically, occasionally plinking a jarring high note on the piano during the drawing-room interrogation and pronouncing in his southern burr: “Ah suh-spect far-wuhl play!” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2L0NKO4
Post a Comment
Read more

Thirty Years of Adonis film review: sexually explicit gay drama mixes porn and pomposity

1/5 stars The line between soft-core porn and pompous art-house cinema grows ever finer in the seventh feature by writer, director and producer Danny Cheng Wan-cheung, also known as Scud. Intended as a philosophical statement about the meaninglessness of life, Thirty Years of Adonis instead comes across as a badly misjudged piece of sensationalist filmmaking. God’s Own Country review: gay love story set in the Yorkshire countryside The film revolves around aspiring gay actor Adonis Yang... from South China Morning Post - Culture feed https://ift.tt/2qgQkop
Post a Comment
Read more

Tracey Emin decorates Regent's Park and a celebration of Islamic creativity – the week in art

Emin and others survey the state of sculpture, Glenn Brown takes his decadent imagination to Newcastle and artists offer northern exposure – all in your weekly dispatch Frieze Sculpture Park Tracey Emin, Barry Flanagan and John Baldessari are among the artists decorating Regent’s Park with a free survey of the state of sculpture. • Regent’s Park, London , 4 July until 7 October. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2IDCpPV
Post a Comment
Read more