Isa Genzken: Open, Sesame!
Whitechapel Gallery, until 21 June
Passports: Great Early Buys from the British Council Collection
Whitechapel Gallery, until 14 June
The Whitechapel has just re-opened after a major renovation and expansion, increasing gallery space by 78 per cent, incorporating and transforming the old library next door as part of a Heritage Lottery Fund assisted project. The results are spectacular: the original exhibition spaces which have beguiled generations of gallery-goers are still there, looking better than ever, with the addition of several new areas to discover. As a result, the Whitechapel can offer a range of exhibitions at any one time and will no longer need to be shut for lengthy periods to rehang. In fact, there’s so much to choose from it’s easy to miss one of the displays until you become familiar with the building’s layout. It’s worth spending time getting to know the various spaces, and there’s a stylish new restaurant in addition to the existing café if you need refreshment.
The main exhibition is devoted to Isa Genzken (born 1948), a German sculptor little-known in this country but considered to be highly influential. The rather better-known Wolfgang Tillmans affirms that she is ‘hugely admired by fellow artists’ and that her work ‘has an incredible formal clarity whilst delving deep into society’s underbelly and the struggles of our time’. It’s refreshing to hear such sentiments from an artist rather than a historian or curator, but I still don’t really know what they mean. I can recognise and appreciate the formal clarity of many of the objects in the interesting installation on the ground floor of the Whitechapel, a number of which look like furniture hybrids or even giant bodkins, but apart from a slight satiric edge to the works upstairs, I find it difficult to identify any ‘deep delving’. In fact, in notes made going round the show I described the work as private nightmares and the acme of the synthetic.
I did like the series of structures on plinths under orange awnings called ‘Beachhuts’ (Genzken seems to have a bit of a thing about orange and mirrors), but the majority of the upstairs exhibits left me unmoved and rather irritated. The downstairs works are much better, made from polished wood, lumps of cast concrete or epoxy resin, and emulating windows, radio sets or loudspeakers, screens, columns or a lamp, they have a presence and dignity, even a touch of poetry. I know this is the first proper showing of Genzken’s work in England, but I felt there was rather too much of it. Perhaps the selection and installation simply don’t do justice to her particular achievement. Will it make more sense when it opens at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne in August?
Also on the ground floor, in one of the new galleries, is a display (until 18 April 2010) about the 1939 London showing of Picasso’s ‘Guernica’, devised by the Polish artist Goshka Macuga (born 1967), one of last year’s Turner Prize nominees. The centrepiece is a lifesize tapestry of ‘Guernica’ dating from 1955, which is certainly impressive.
Upstairs is the other major display, though confined to one room — Great Early Buys from the British Council Collection, chosen by Michael Craig-Martin. This is the first of four separate selections from a rarely seen collection, shown here with their purchase prices and exhibition history. There are some very fine things, ranging from an early Henry Moore carving, ‘Girl with Clasped Hands’ (1930), to Frank Auerbach’s ‘The Camden Theatre’ — a lovely combination of thick and more thinly worked paint — to Peter Doig’s snow-specked ‘Hill Houses’. Craig-Martin gracefully acknowledges his own stylistic debt to Patrick Caulfield by including Caulfield’s superbly economic ‘View inside a Cave’, which we can then compare to a Craig-Martin wall drawing perched near the ceiling. Other treats include Paul Nash’s beautiful and disquieting ‘Landscape of the Megaliths’, a fabulous early Hockney ‘Man in a Museum’, all different weights of paint and graphic energy, and a crisp Vorticist composition by Frederick Etchells which clearly points to his later career as an architect.
Back in the 1980s when I lived in the East End and the Whitechapel was my local art gallery, I used to frequent the public library then situated next door. It had rather a good art section and I remember borrowing books on all manner of subjects from Marcellus Laroon to David Bomberg. I thought I might lament its passing, but the extension of the Whitechapel Gallery into its space has been so sensitively managed that I have only praise for the result. There’s an interesting small exhibition of the so-called ‘Whitechapel Boys’ (until 20 September), those radical Jewish artists such as Bomberg, Epstein and Gertler, shown with three flat cabinets of fascinating archive material. (I particularly liked the drawings on old journals by Bernard Meninsky.) Next door is an elegant reading room. The layout is spacious and uncrowded and a pleasure to visit. The Whitechapel Gallery has become a place to linger.
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