In recent months, two new museums have opened to much acclaim: The Hepworth in Wakefield and Turner Contemporary in Margate. Now Colchester is receiving the dubious benison of a new building. What is this assertive new generation of museums in England supposed to be about? Leisure, business or art? There’s precious little of the last in the much delayed Firstsite gallery in Colchester, a long pavilion by Rafael Viñoly Architects clad in gold-coloured metal which looks wonderfully out of place in the Roman city of Camulodunum (the name also chosen for its inaugural exhibition). Don’t get me wrong: I live in East Anglia and would welcome a great new museum in Colchester, as a centre for excellence and a potentially worldwide audience. Sadly, I find it difficult to imagine Firstsite attracting such interest.
The first exhibition is so thin as to be almost invisible. Revealingly, there’s not a single painting in this installation, and only one or two exhibits worth prolonged attention. The pile of junk in the foyer is called ‘We the People’, and is actually an installation by Danh Vo (born 1975, Vietnam) of fragments from his copy of the Statue of Liberty plus tools and moulds. Somewhat classier is the Berryfield mosaic, Firstsite’s only permanent work of art. Of Roman origin, it has been relocated under the floor beneath glass panels over which visitors can vertiginously walk. Nearby there’s a rather small dedicated gallery for changing displays of the University of Essex’s renowned collection of Latin American prints.
Spread out across the rest of the building, the exhibits are a mixture of the expected (Warhol and Ai Weiwei), the slight (an almost invisible Turner drawing of Colchester, and a cabinet of bits and bobs that inspired Henry Moore) and the downright dreadful (a twee relief by Karin Ruggaber and some kitschy resin pieces by Michaela Eichwald). Thankfully, there are a couple of things which redeem the show slightly: Bill Woodrow’s ‘Car Door, Boot and Wing with Roman Helmet’ (1982) is reliably witty, and Robert Smithson’s ‘Chalk-Mirror Displacement’ (1969), though remade for a gallery environment, has an authentic magic. In a separate room, the so-called Foundation for Sports & Arts Gallery, a couple of Henry Moore ‘Helmet Heads’ deserve attention with a Barbara Hepworth white marble ‘Pierced Form’ (1963–4). But Firstsite’s initial display is very disappointing.
More care seems to have been lavished on the dramatic new auditorium than on the galleries. The building itself is quite spacious, but long and drawn-out, like a series of corridors, interspersed with smallish gallery spaces. There are lots of glass walls (no good for hanging paintings), which encourage visitors to look out, rather than focusing their attention within the building. And there’s a long sloping wall, of limited exhibition use, currently stuck with photocopied images. There are plenty of indeterminate areas where crowds can linger, culminating in a nice restaurant (with balcony) at the far end of the building. At once it becomes clear that the design and layout favour functions and corporate entertaining rather than exhibitions. Is this the new Town Hall masquerading as an art gallery? A palace of business given a veneer of art to make it more palatable and to add a cool edge to its receptions? It certainly seems so.
More than likely it will end up like mima, the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, opened in 2007 in a swanky new glass and steel building, tricked out in Turkish limestone and Italian slate, but which no one visits. The most activity I’ve seen there has been in the café, and the building is being heavily promoted as a hire venue. Now look up Firstsite’s website. After the expected blather about this ‘iconic, golden-clad crescent in the heart of historic Colchester’, we get down to the nitty-gritty. ‘You can hire Firstsite’s 190-seat tiered auditorium, hi-spec meeting rooms and vast foyer space for a host of business purposes, including conferences, presentations and product launches. Firstsite is also available for club and society meetings, and makes a spectacular backdrop to private parties and celebrations.’ That’s its true purpose, not a museum or a cultural centre.
The Minories, Colchester’s long-serving public gallery just across the garden, though a little shabby now and forgotten, has far better cultural qualifications. An unassuming exhibition of work by Joseph Robinson (1910–86), painter and theatre designer, runs until 15 October and is worth a look for its wartime drawings. The best of these combine an interest in modern forms of expression with a need to record the events Robinson experienced serving in the RAF.
Back in London, what a pleasure to be able to recommend an exhibition of real, full-blooded painting after the insufficiencies of Firstsite. Tricia Gillman (born 1951) is an artist who clearly loves paint and the games, both visual and philosophical, she can play with it. In the beautiful high-ceilinged white spaces of the APT Gallery in Deptford (open Thursdays to Sundays, 12 noon to 5 p.m.), Gillman’s paintings shine out joyfully and seductively. She is showing a survey of 30 years’ work, from the bold gestures and saturated colours of the 1980s pieces ‘Como’ and ‘Carambola’, which owe something to the inspiration of Picasso and Matisse, to the richly inflected recent work, which brilliantly combines schematised outline drawing with fields of broken, mottled, subtle colour and complex texture.
Gillman uses the language of husbandry to describe her current working practice, referring to the canvas as a place where she can plant things and then dig them up and move them. She also refers to the process of filling up the canvas and emptying it out, as imagery grows dense and then spare, which sounds a little like breathing, or the cycle of seasons in a garden. This organic referencing is appropriate for an artist who likes to use leaves and trees, insects, birds and animals as motifs.
Although she is an abstract painter, Gillman will not hesitate to employ figurative imagery in her paintings, principally because she finds the resulting discomfort between the two languages immensely stimulating. Aside from references to the natural world, Gillman has also been raiding the imagery of ancient Egypt (an enthusiasm sparked by visiting the country), and her new canvases are staffed with ideographs, hierophants and details from Assyrian reliefs.
These fragments rub shoulders with part of a pattern from a William Morris wallpaper or an improvised stencil, and are then orchestrated with great skill, together with the blots, pours, spatters and various other abstract skirmishes which for her make up a typical painting. Daring to be decorative, through the process of consolidation Tricia Gillman translates her work to an altogether higher plane of aesthetic achievement. Recommended.
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