Richard Billingham: ‘Horses’, 2011
Company mergers have long been routine in the private sector, and in the public sector scene I work in by day, collaboration is now very much the name of the game. Successive governments have made local authorities smaller, split off their functions, and then reduced their funding to the point at which they’re forced to work together to survive. Why shouldn’t some of the same logic apply during tough times in the art world? Just so, Anthony Reynolds’ has moved from having his own separate space to a strategy of sharing the space of other galleries. First up, his retrospective of Richard Billingham’s landscape photographs in the lower of Annely Juda’s two floors, which comes with the added advantage that the long, airy room suits them better than his own former space would have done. As for the work, one could complain that these quiet vistas (‘Panorama’, to 28th Aug) would never have made Billingham famous the way the documentation of his parents did when ‘Ray’s a Laugh’ emerged in 1996 – or one could be pleased that his previous success has generated a wider audience for these subtle pictures in unusual elongated formats. Exploiting such contingencies as ageing film stock and wind moving the trees to atmospheric effect, they feel like photographs taken as studies for paintings, only for the artist to find that they already achieved the painterly effects planned.
Richard Billingham: ‘Untitled’, 2014
Most days art Critic Paul Carey-Kent spends hours on the train, traveling between his home in Southampton and his day job in London. Could he, we asked, jot down whatever came into his head?
