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Wednesday 8 October 2008

Take your pick

Robert Dukes (born 1965) is one of our finest younger artists.

For a complete change of pace and subject, proceed to Bernard Jacobson Gallery (6 Cork Street, W1), where new sculpture by Phillip King (born 1934) is on view until 3 May. One of our most distinguished sculptors, King has been out of circulation recently, having devoted himself instead to the presidency of the Royal Academy, and putting his own art on hold. He retired from the RA in 2004 and this exhibition features all new work made in the past couple of years. It’s excellent to see King back on form and prepared as ever to try out new things. No bronze here, nor ceramic pots. Instead a new material has seized his imagination: foam PVC which can be cut or cast according to what is required. It’s very light, takes paint well, and is highly adaptable. King has used it with the same kind of free-wheeling invention (and colour) that characterised the work that first made his name in the 1960s.

The show is entitled Living with Colour for good reason: the sculpture, though some pieces are quite sizeable, is domestic in intention and made for home or garden rather than museum. Walking into the gallery you might be forgiven for thinking you were in an adventure playground, with sculptures like a paddling pool (with propeller) or climbing frames. The largest piece is made of steel, but all the others are foam PVC. Here sculpture meets furniture. Downstairs is a hatstand and umbrella bin in red and black which is fully functional as well as being a homage to Malevich. There’s a ‘Little Miss Muffet Table’ (with spider-web patterns) and a ‘Red Apple Chair’. These funky objects surprise and intrigue as King readdresses the debate between form and function.

Quite a different artist is showing at the Fine Art Society (148 New Bond Street, W1, until 18 April) — John Linnell (1792–1882). This is the first show of Linnell’s work for 25 years, and yet he was enormously successful in his own lifetime and quite a figure in the Victorian art world. He was William Blake’s greatest supporter but his good name has suffered from his intemperate treatment of his son-in-law Samuel Palmer. It’s high time he was looked at again, and this small but select show inspires re-assessment. Particularly fine are a group of watercolours he made on a month’s tour of Wales in 1813 — pale, delicate, minimal notations that appeal to contemporary sensibility. The exhibition’s centrepiece is a large oil ‘The Storm in Harvest Time’ (1856), a grand and dramatic subject, superbly handled. But perhaps even more desirable is a smaller study of it in oil, more subtle and not so overbearing, the creamy grey cloud showing up the varied yellows, pinks, browns and greens of the landscape. Another oil study, this time for ‘The Rest on the Flight into Egypt’, has a rare luminosity which can only be called brilliant.

More articles from: Andrew Lambirth | this section

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