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Thursday 4 December 2008

Curiosity unsatisfied

Mari Lassnig
Serpentine Gallery, until 8 June

Alison Watt: Phantom
National Gallery, until 29 June

At the National Gallery is something very different. The use of drapery as a means of expression in art has been common since the advent of Greek sculpture. Then, as portrait painting became popular, there were more and more acres of drapery to paint. For some it became a specialism, like carpentry or needlework. Fashionable portraitists in the 18th century, such as the great Allan Ramsay, employed a drapery painter to fill in the less important areas of clothing. Traditionally, drapery painting was something of a lowly calling, specialised but subsidiary. In the more puritan modern period, drapery became an accepted site for ornament and pattern, where the artist could be frankly decorative without encountering too much criticism. In recent years, one or two artists have specialised in painting fabric (think of the richly worked stuffs of Thérèse Oulton), but few have attempted drapery as such. I remember visiting Euan Uglow in his studio just after he’d finished a modern drapery painting, ‘Dehydrated Pear with Drapery’ (1992–3), in which the lower portion of the canvas laid on panel was peppered with the punctures from dividers as Uglow strove to depict the different planes of the cloth. It’s an unusual painting, an experiment that was not repeated.

Alison Watt (born 1965) has been painting drapery since the 1990s. She first made her name as a figure painter but apparently it worried her to be painting people in a traditional way, so she purged her work of the human presence. Her paintings now suggest body parts and apertures (nostril, gape, cleft, rima) in a distinct and often deliberately sexualised way, but there is no figure beneath the expanse of cloth. The cloth itself has become skin. For the past two years, she has had a studio in the National Gallery, making work from the collection and has been the NG’s seventh Associate Artist. The practice of having an artist in residence is a fruitful one, and allows all sorts of links and references and interpretations of the past by the present. Watt has developed a strong relationship with Zurbarán’s remarkable painting ‘Saint Francis in Meditation’ (1635–9), and this is currently hung at the opening to her show. Her exhibition consists of five large paintings in the main Sunley Room, with another large canvas and a small one, hung near the Zurbarán in the corridor area.

More articles from: Andrew Lambirth | this section

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