As ever, the RA Summer show is an over-packed and variable mix, but there are good things to be found and the whole room presentation of Carey Young’s film ‘The Vision Machine’ is particularly welcome (see my related interview). With over 1,700 works, pretty much any theme could probably be explored, but I found myself drawn to a certain ghostliness…
Works 176-7 and part of 375 Oona Grimes, RA Elect – ‘Etruscan Ghosts: Medea’s Children’
These faces are put together playfully enough with -stencils, Letraset signage and map symbols – to suggest a children’s game, but their mouths are down and the title points to darkness. In Greek myth, Medea murdered her children as a means of revenge against their father – Jason, who left her for another woman. Here such children are drawn and collaged onto drafting paper to represent the ghostly traces of lost lives. They stand in, says Oona Grimes, ‘for all the stolen, abused, violated and disappeared children throughout time’.
28: Lee Maelzer: ‘Considerate Construction’
A building ghosted in the familiar way by a construction protection, translated into orange latex for the purposes of an impressively scaled oil, as if a fire threatens to precede completion. That makes for a striking colourfield, consistent with Maelzer’s wider ability to find something painterly, even lyrical, in the cruddiest aspects of the urban scene.
192: Margarita Gluzberg: ‘Vinyl Lake’
Plenty of works plunge into the past as if it were water, but Margarita Gluzberg’s giclée print finds a novel way to do that by presenting the grooves in vinyl as the lake’s ripples. That said, vinyl has circled back from nostalgia to the present again in recent years, so time is forward-looking as well as ghostly here…
1696: Elsie Owusu, RA Elect: ‘African Phoenix: Coffin for Qm Nana Yaa Asantewaa’
Curating the Wohl Central Hall, Assembly RA have gone with unconventional plinths. This one is a work in itself: ‘Slab & Hardcore’ by Local Works Studio is ‘deconstruction waste from Phoenix Industrial Estate, Lewes’, which closed in 1986 and is now being redeveloped for housing. That fits well with what it displays: a coffin sculpture in the Ghanaian tradition most often brought to art galleries by Paa Joe, this one being made in the style by Elsie Owusu OBE, founding chair of the Society of Black Architects.
487: Güler Ates: ‘Castello di Govone and She’
A mysterious figure inhabits a castle in Italy in one of the Güler Ates’s typical explorations of displacement between space and identity in the context of ‘East’ meets ‘West’, past meets present and – in this case – rescue blanket meets burka. The Turkish-born artist’s colourfully sculptural figures can also be seen as empowering female privacy as opposed to any male authoritarian expectation of veiling.
399: Tracey Emin RA – ‘Did It Ever Get Any Better’
This won Dame Tracey Karima Emin DBE RA the £35,000 Charles Wollaston Award for the ‘most distinguished work’ in the exhibition. Could it have got any better? The multiplicity of lines might be taken in two ways: as pentimenti, suggesting that it was hard to get to that good place; or as more artful hesitations, a deliberate means to dynamise the pose, rather than the unintended ghostly presences of previous versions.
198 Eric Butcher: ‘T/R. 971’
Eric Butcher made this by destroying his own previous work. Taking the skins of paint peeled from their original support he reconfigures them sandwiched between sheets of glass like specimens. They provide a record, or index of his past creative endeavours, a ‘natural history’ of his creative self. When he has used all available materials in the studio, he will stop making art. For now, he stretches out the afterlife of his detritus.
128 David Tindle RA: ‘Woman on the Phone No. 1’
The reduced view of this woman, elegantly captured in egg tempera, might bring to mind the diminished importance of physical presence given the primacy of the digital. I was also reminded somehow of the cowardly business of ‘ghosting’ – ending a relationship by not using the phone… Is she listening to her voicemails in the hope of one that will never come?
694: Annie Kevans: ‘Angelica Kauffman’
Ghosts of the Royal Academy’s past are invoked by Annie Kevans’ only-just-there style of oil on paper portraiture. Kevans typically groups her subjects by feminist themes (‘Boys’ depicted tyrants as children, ‘Vamps and Innocents’ were ’20’s female movie stars forced to play the role of the virgin or the whore). And it’s hard not to remember, in this context, that Mary Moser and Angelica Kauffman (whose own shown has just concluded) were founding RA’s in 1768, but it was 154 years before another woman was admitted. Now some 40% are female.
107 The late Mick Moon RA: ‘Tree’
Each year is likely to see the transition of a couple of the 100 RA’s into the ghostly realm – they are on average fairly old. Mick Moon is celebrated in this year’s show, following his recent death at 86. Here, moreover, he renders a lattice-screened tree in somewhat ghostly manner in one of his last paintings.
