Independents Biennial Show

Curve Gallery, Victoria Street
22nd October – 6th November 2010

Reviewed by Tom Bottle

A painter, a photographer, and a printmaker all the way up the wind-ee and windy stairs. All the way to the top of the Victorian gem that is the Jerome Building, and the small and spacey Curve Gallery. Thomas Williams marble paint effects are covered in architectural angles and a sheet of Perspex. Trying to figure out what’s what I recruit the thoughts of a fellow art fiend but, though all his words, on their own, I love, the lot strung together don’t stack. This is a solo job. I have to loosen up, toss off the shoes, drop the imaginative inhibitions, let it flow. OK, the angles are a grid of the city. Behind, the marble paint city as it really is, the dynamic everyday, the kind and the mean, noir in the daylight; and in the light, Norris Green! Thank God, some of us are going to be saved.

Printmaker Lisa Who’s wall installation of black figures and symbols on white squares are based on a picture diary travelling through Northern Spain, taking in San Sebastian, Bilbao, and floor prints of the Guggenheim. There is some influence from the Basque sculptor Eduardo Chillida, who kept goal for Real Sociedad before going on the tools. How come all the great artists who played football (Camus and George Formby spring to mind) are always goalies? Surely one of them must have flew up and down the wing? Lisa’s prints include another sport, the blood red of the bullring, the only colour in a set of intriguing figures which become really interesting when you hear the stories behind them.

Finally, if there’s anyone out there still says photography’s not art throw them in a taxi to Curve NOW. Two rotten pears at the end of a long white linen table cloth could be Vermeer all over again. The odds and ends of life, things forgotten and left behind are the stuff photographer Dave Penny picks up on in his still life show, Pair of Pears (2009). Not much to say after that.

Printer friendly page

Sorry Comments Closed