Taking full advantage of my Easter break I decided to visit to some current exhibitions and I had been meaning to go to for a while. Both the Saatchi Gallery & Tate Britain are places I do not visit often but the two exhibitions currently on show had received some really good feedback and numerous people I had spoken to really recommended going.
I have been an avid fan of Charles Saatchi through reading his books on his personal outlook on the world of art but very rarely have I visited the Saatchi, a beautiful gallery space set in the heart of Sloan Square. Saatchi was showcasing a new collection of artwork produced by various Russian artist and designers, creating pieces that showcased culture, history and elements of events that had taken place. The exhibition featured a mixture of sculpture, installation, photography and mixed media work, and expressed a cold and extremely dark twisted outlook on Russia. The way the gallery is laid out allows scope for scale and movement across all 15 spaces, however with that comes a coldness and isolation amongst the spaces and work (this may/may not be intentional). I must say it really showed me how an exhibition of various types of work can be so seamless and beautifully curated.
Within the Saatchi there was also an exhibition showcasing the glass paintings of Delphine Lucielle. Her work is based upon her personal findings and obsession with rocks, and her want and desire to see inside stones. the exhibition showcases various pieces form her collection where Delphine sliced through various stones and reprinted what she saw through a microscope onto glass to give the user a sense of how light is travelled through the object. Her work is stunning and if I had the money one would be in my living room.
Tate Britain is a school Trip must! and often people only visit to see the permanent collection of painting and sculpture (not my cuppa). However mixed media and collage work is and who else to go and be influenced by then the work of Kurt Schwitter. The story of Schwitter is one of sadness and the exhibition curates this with every room being a chapter of the artists life. He was a significant figure in the early 20th century with a majority of his early collage work based upon the event and outcomes of the world war. Kurt Schwitter was deemed 'Degenerate" by the Nazis and so in 1940 he broke away to Britain. The exhibition is remarkably powerful and you are drawn into imagining where Kurt was, what materials he had, and what he motivation was. The exhibition ends with some of his last work dating to the same year he past away in 1948. The exhibition then ends with two nominated contemporary artists paying tribute to Kurt Schwitter by creating a video and installation based upon his great work the "Merz Barn"
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