Tai-Shan Schierenberg: ‘Loki’, 2014 Oil paint and polestyrene, 28 x 26 cm
Paint is expensive stuff, best make the most of it. For the first time Tai-Shan Schierenberg is showing his sculptures (Flowers Gallery to 25 March). They’re heads made of paint on polystyrene, rather in the manner of Glenn Brown’s neat reversals of his flat Auerbach-style paintings, but unlike Brown (so far as I know) Schierenberg uses the paint scraped daily from his palette, making them something of a diary of his practice. That’s a known way of generating a chance-heavy yet grounded colour result. Gerhard Richter is the famous practitioner: most days he scrapes his palette off across a photograph, thus imposing a personalised diaristic mark which echoes his two famous moves: of blurring an image, or of employing stick-scraped paint as the basis for abstraction. Jonathan Meese, somewhat mockingly I suspect, has imposed similar markings onto images of his rather more chaotic life. At a slight angle to those, some of Bernard Frize’s earliest abstract works were made peeled off the coloured skins from pots of paint left open in the studio, and applying them over the surface of the canvas. And Jonathan Horowitz made his Leftover Paint Abstractions (2014) by flinging whatever half-used cans of paint were in his studio against a canvas. “I see them as a repository’, he says, ‘for something that would have gone in a landfill’. Not just economical, but responsible…
Gerhard Richter: ‘ Fextal, Piz Chapütschin 1992’ 10 cm x 15 cm Oil on colour photograph
Jonathan Horowitz
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?
