We went to the Schirn Gallery in Frankfurt on Sunday to visit 2 exhibitions. One was of the so-called période vache of René Magritte. It shows a series if paintings from 1948 for an exhibition conceived as a provocation of and an assault on the Parisian public. I can’t say that I really found anything much to interest me in it. Magritte considered it a success at the time because he didn’t sell a single painting.
The second exhibition of 50 works from the last twenty years by Peter Doig was much more to my taste. The works were mostly pretty huge, being roughly between about 4 and 6 square metres of canvas each. What was also interesting was that the studies for some of the works were also presented as this one:
I particularly liked the painting Young Bean Farmer because of the prominence of the foreground, the branches of the trees and the almost central to the picture fence pole. An interesting change of perspective to the study above.
This painting was the first one you saw as you entered the exhibition. I could just imagine it as a fabric painting:
Reflections in water seemed to figure quite a bit in the works. This one reminded me of one of Escher’s woodcuts called Three Worlds. It’s called Window Pane:
In November I was in Den Haag for the EuroSTAR 2008 conference (on software testing). I took part of the Wednesday afternoon off to visit the Escher museum as I have always been fascinated by his work. Maybe that’s why his work sprang to mind as it was not so long ago that I saw it.
This was another painting showing reflection. Called Reflection (What does your soul look like) which is a title to get you thinking. Notice the feet are pointing away from the reflection. But you almost feel that the reflection is looking out at you.
The canvases were so huge that it was difficult to imagine painting them. When you got up close to painting distance you were completely lost in the details. How do you keep the whole painting in focus too?
Some of the later works were quite interesting too, because the paint was much thinner and you could almost imagine that the canvas had been dyed and not painted. The colours ran into one another and changed subtly like a masterful piece of dyeing.
There is a video of Peter Doig talking about his paintings at the Schirn Gallery in Frankfurt on YouTube.
