PABLO VALBUENA TRANSFORMS EMPTY PARIS RAILWAY STATION INTO A HYPNOTIC LIGHT INSTALLATION

With Kinematope, Pablo Valbuena invests lanes still closed to the public of the new Gare d'Austerlitz. For his first visual and sound installation in Paris, designed specifically to enhance the qualities and the internal structure of this unusual location, he invites the viewer on a journey; giving life to this vacuous underground space of almost 500 meters long.  As a spectator this instillation makes for  a mesmeric almost hypnotic experience; Light games are appearing and disappearing forms , redefining and inventing new limits by a fleeting game of full and empty, abolishing the perception of space-time ... A cinematic experience directly related to the function of the station : movement , transit and transportation.

Created by Spanish artist Pablo Valbuena, "Kinematope"is a site-specific installation developed for Nuit Blanche at the Gare d’Austerlitz in Paris. It takes place at a railway station that is currently being refurbished,transforming the large empty space into a massive light canvas.                                     Via the website, "Kinematope uses ephemeral and intangible materials, projected light and sound, to setthe space in motion. It makes use of elements from the cinema apparatus to generate a spatial film. It is a direct filmic experience that omits the mediation of the camera, transporting the observer into a virtual space-time and maintaining at the same time the real,physical bonds of the body with its environment." 

JEFF KOONS LA RÉTROSPECTIVE @ CENTRE POMPIDOU, PARIS

During a recent trip to Paris in December, I attended this year's blockbuster exhibition- Jeff Koons: A Retrospective, at the Centre Georges-Pompidou (Musée National d'Art Moderne).

 The Pompidou presents the first major retrospective in Europe devoted to the work of the iconic American artist Jeff Koons: the gallery is the first to show the full extent of the artist’s oeuvre from 1979 to the present day.

But is it art? Is it Pompidou Centre worthy? Always good for a controversy, the American has divided the art world ever since he rose to prominence in the 1980s. Derided by many as frivolous, crass and banal, he’s nonetheless one of the most iconic artists of his generation. 

All of his most iconic pieces were on show. There’s the Michael Jackson porcelain statue. There’s the balloon dogs. And there’s Cicciolina, in all of her – very graphic – splendour. It’s kitsch, it’s controversial and it all makes for a great Instagram selfie backdrop. Once you've got all those Likes coming, who cares whether it’s art.

The retrospective curated by Scott Rothkopf is comprised of almost 150 sculptures and paintings arranged in a loosely chronological circuit  that highlights the various cycles in the artist's work, from early pieces conceived in a vein inherited from Pop Art to present-day works. Together with a preview presentation of new works by the artist, the exhibition also features his best known works – now some of the most celebrated "icons" of modern art, including Rabbit (1986),Michael Jackson and Bubbles (1988), Balloon Dog (1994-2000)and the series of aquariums in Equilibrium (1985). For 35 years, Koons has been exploring new approaches to the "readymade", with his distinctly kitsch and colourful sculptures, his work explores themes of mass culture, our reliance on the ready-made, and the cult of celebrity .By reconstituting all of his most iconic works and significant series, the exhibition allows visitors to appreciate Koons’s remarkably diverse and 'multifaceted oeuvre' in its entirety.

As with all shows at the Pompidou, the Koons retrospective is essentially open-plan. A few party walls have been erected to impose a basic chronology to the room, but most of the display is visible all at once on entering the exhibition. The result of which, makes for a rather chaotic atmosphere, more evocative of a circus ring than a contemporary art space. The exhibition design certainly sets the tone for this retrospective. Visitors are immediately bombarded by paintings of Play-Doh and Popeye, porn sculptures in purple glass, a polychrome wooden “Poodle” and a porcelain Pietà, “Michael Jackson and Bubbles”.

Before I was fortunate enough to experience Koons’ work first hand, I was curious as to what made his the most recognisable and expensive art  in the world today. However, after having attended the pompidou’s retrospective, I felt my curiosity somewhat satiated- Koons’s defiantly vacuous works of monumental mirrored artifice from the past two decades scream out questions to the viewer about consumerism, class roles, and distinctions between popular taste and high art, in this judiciously curated exhibition by Scott Rothkopf.

Dutch still life painter: Arnout van Albada

I recently encountereed the work of the Dutch still life painter, Arnout Van Albada. His  mesmerising artworks in egg tempera and oil paint, are reminiscent of the sumptuous, beautifully arranged still lifes, of the 17th century Dutch masters, who  reign supreme; their delicately rendered offerings defined by intricate texturing, breathtaking details and a naturalistic use of light.

Taart voor mokum, Arnout van Albada

Parmigiano, Arnout van Albada

                Regout pudding mould,  Arnout van Albada

 Beurre salé , Arnout van Albada

His paintings are simultaneously stark in their monumentality and warm in palette and tone, while their attention to detail rivals that of van Albada's revered predecessors. “My paintings need not to be interpreted too much,” the artist explains. “I see the simplicity and monumental nature of my compositions as their main quality.” His subjects range from distinctly modern fare, such as plastic wrapped bagels and chocolate coins, to timeless delicacies like Parma ham, artichokes and delicately hued rhubarb stalks; while personally I was  particularly partial to his depictions of pastel-coloured jellies, so realistic you can almost see them wobble. “The choice of my subjects is entirely determined by what I find beautiful and attractive – I look for subtle contrasts in textures, colours or shapes,” van Albada says. And what does he hope to achieve in his work? “In the end, I try to catch the elusiveness of an object when isolated from its context to create a timeless and magical image,”                                                    

 Gerookt spek , Arnout van Albada

Pandoro , Arnout van Albada

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TRANSMITTING ANDY WARHOL @ TATE LIVERPOOL

If ever there was an artist for the globalized age of mass media, technology and excess, it would be Andy Warhol.  With a new exhibition at Tate Liverpool of his work (the first of its kind in the north of England), it becomes clear that the artist was so unprecedentedly ahead of the times and the fashions, that his work seems born of ironic pathos.  Such was Warhol’s obsession with populism, the William Morris-like experiments with mass producing technology, and the overdoses of celebrity obsessed glitterati and phenomena, Transmitting Andy Warhol  as an exhibition actually has a surprising amount to say about today’s fashions and trends; a surprising feat for work that often encapsulates other late 20th century eras so succinctly.

The first thing to note about Transmitting Andy Warhol as an entire exhibition is the sheer range of different work.  This isn’t a bland point to raise but an important element in the Warhol mentality; that anything shot through the prism and the whole being of the artist would eventually become part of their work.  Because of this, the exhibition ranges from paintings, drawings, prints, films and video, magazines, books and just about every other imaginable form of expression.  Warhol pioneered the modern interpretation of the factory element of art (quite literally in naming his working collective The Factory) but is important in moving the process of art into this public sphere.  Though a blue-print of far earlier artists (quashing our romantic notions of the great genius painter working alone) Warhol defined the role of the ideas man with a team of creators, almost in the sense of a film producer.  It’s a blue-print familiar today with the likes of Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, and others all working from the same “factory” model.

This sense of a factory line perhaps gives the impression that the work is distanced, empty, maybe even emotionally devoid, but such readings undervalue the sense of irony and satire within Warhol’s sardonic collection of weird things.  His most famous imagery of Marilyn Monroe (shown here in 1962’s Marilyn Diptych and 1967’s Marilyn Screenprint), seems almost morbidly ironic in almost removing any identity of the person and showing her to become a mere product of the factory line.  It seems an even more poignant point considering Monroe’s own fate in the same year Warhol actually produced the diptych on show here.

Warhol’s complete embracement of the commercial and the garish lent his work a fair share of criticism over the years.  Some of it seems almost justified but other examples appear to have missed the point.  In Transmitting, the two polar ends  of this argument are present in the form of Three Brillo Soap Pad Boxes (1964) and the advert, Underground Sundae (1968).  The former is a ridiculous though amusing play on objects within the context of a gallery space, increasing the size of normality as if to effectively laugh at the art world’s own absurdity.  The latter, which is a genuine advert for Schrafft’s Ice Cream Parlour in New York, is more complex in that the line of parody is now blurred; Warhol is clearly doing something different with the form of the advert but the sheer context of such form begs for it to be undermined.  Far from people, objects and material items would have their fifteen minutes of fame in Warhol’s world.

Warhol’s video and film work in general is often his most interesting line of art, in spite of it being almost diametrically opposed to his more easily digestible celebrity prints.  His film experiment Empire (1964) is on show though perhaps the space isn’t quite right for such a work.  Coming in at just over eight hours long, the video is meant to be viewed in relaxed spaces and communally, with visitors coming and going; the strange static nature of the film subtly building communities around it just like the building within it.  The potential for such a reception to be recreated here is entirely impossible in the cold, behaved world of modern-day gallery spaces.

The themes of excess and celebrity obsession invade Transmitting but it manages to curate it in a way that seems prescient, especially as Warhol’s work is itself so reproduced for even the most disinterested of buyers.  Yet Warhol seems to be well ahead of the media game in his work on just about every front.  His celebrity prints, his adverts, his links with musicians and bands, all points to someone who predicted the oncoming interdisciplinary nature that the arts would have to take in the post World War Two west.  Alongside posters for concerts he designed (advertising his Plastic Fantastic nonetheless) are LPs, magazines and even sheet music from the likes of Lou Reed and The Velvet Underground; Warhol conquered forms in the way that modern technology of today insists on each of us doing even if, like Warhol himself famously predicted, we would become a generation of narcissists in the process.

ROBERT HEINECKEN: LESSONS IN POSING SUBJECTS @ OPEN EYE GALLERY, LIVERPOOL

US artist Robert Heinecken rose to prominence in the late 60s, creating photo collages that explored questions of sexuality and consumerism. His work often proved controversial during his lifetime but is being reappraised now in a series of exhibitions, including a show at the Open Eye Gallery in Liverpool. We talk to curator Devrim Bayar about Heinecken's work, and whether it will could still prove objectionable to feminists...

Heinecken described himself as a 'paraphotographer', because while photography was always central to his work, he was interested in exploring the medium as a subject in itself, and created works in a number of forms, including sculpture, video and collage. Earlier this year, a major retrospective at MoMA in New York looked at work from throughout Heinecken's career, yet the show at Open Eye (which originally appeared at Weils contemporary art centre in Brussels) hones in on a particular period, when he was creating artworks using a Polaroid SX-70 camera. Titled 'Lessons In Posing Subjects', the series repurposes images from popular culture to explore the way that female sexuality is used to fuel consumerism. This is the first time this body of work has been shown in its entirety in the UK.

Lessons In Posing Subjects: Standard Pose #1 (Hands/Neck/Head), 1982

"The exhibition concentrates on a technique," explains Bayar, curator of the show at Weils and Open Eye, "the use of the Polaroid SX-70 and how Heinecken subverted this widely popular technology. In 1972, when the SX-70 was launched, it enjoyed immediate success in the general public as well as in artist circles. It was the first easy-to-use camera that instantly produced colour prints. As a first step, Heinecken used the SX-70 like everybody else: to make snapshots of his wife, their intimacy etc. Very quickly though, he started re-photographing existing images, and more specifically, photos of mannequins in mail-order magazines and pornographic magazines.

"By photographing them with his Polaroid camera, Heinecken gives them a natural appearance, spontaneous, whereas these images are completely artificial. With this new tool, Heinecken explored important notions such as biography vs. fiction, true vs. false, and reality vs. representation, which is what the show hopes to emphasise."

Conversations about art and artists from He/She series (#9), 1980

While in his earlier work, Heinecken tended to work with photography as a subject, rather than taking shots himself, with the arrival of the Polaroid SX-70, this changed. "During his entire artistic career, Heinecken challenged the idea that photographic images are transparent windows onto the world," continues Bayar. "Instead he tackled their materiality in order to make apparent the latent content of the mass media: war, violence, pornography, sexuality, consumerism, etc. To paraphrase Heinecken’s own words “the photograph is not a picture of something, but an object about something”. Heinecken experimented with a large variety of techniques to tackle the materiality of photographic images, such as collage, lithography, photograms etc. The use of the Polaroid SX-70 camera is thus only one of the steps in his ever experimental approach. However it is quite a surprising one, as Heinecken was known for working with photographic images without ever using a camera.... It thus corresponded to quite a radical change in his method."

Lessons In Posing Subjects: Standard Pose #9 (Both Hands/Hips), 1982. All images © The Robert Heinecken Trust

Objectification of women was a central subject in Heinecken's work, though his preoccupation with it raised the ire of feminists when it first appeared, who denounced the artist as a misogynist. For Bayar, this is a complex issue. "I think that this view has changed but there are still people who feel his work is complacent with the objectification of women in mass media," she says. "Having researched his work extensively and been in contact with several people who were close to the artist, I am convinced that Heinecken's images, as seducing as they are, are strongly critical and engaged. As the artist himself replied, with his deadpan sense of humour, to a journalist who called him a 'misogynist photographer', he said he wasn't sure 'whether to be more insulted at being called a misogynist or a photographer'. I think this sums up quite well his way of thinking."

Bayar sees Heinecken's exploration of the blurred lines between reality and fiction in photography as being especially pertinent to today, when we live in a world of constant self-documentation. But whereas Heinecken was keen to point out the codes hidden in imagery, and thus the falsehoods, today we are inclined to disguise ourselves in a fiction more than ever. "Today, everyone can photograph their life with a click of an iPhone and give their images any filter thanks to special applications on smartphones and computers," she explains. "In a certain way, it’s the inverse phenomenon which produces itself: we give our life an artificial look. These images can then instantly circulate around the internet and be shared with the entire world. Thanks to new technologies the phenomenon of recontextualisation of images, be they private or public, is exponential. Heinecken’s work announced this phenomenon of decontextualisation, the growing ambiguity between reality and fiction in photographic images and the culture of selfies in which we live in."

ART SHEDS @ VICTORIA GALLERY & MUSEUM, LIVERPOOL

This week I attended the Art Sheds exhibition at the Victoria Gallery and museum as part of a group show for the Liverpool Biennial. We were fortunate enough to meet the participatory artist behind the Art Sheds, Susan Forsyth and curator, Moira Lindsey.

In her talk to the group,Forsyth contextualised her work, by explaing how she found inspiration in the history of the building (VG&M) itself; From 1894 – 1905, makeshift Art Sheds in the Quadrangle behind the VG&M were used by the University’s School of Architecture and Applied Art.

More than 100 years later,  Susan Forsyth, re-imagined the iconic sheds in the VG&M gallery space and invites visitors  to draw and paint inside these quiet spaces and exhibit their work for others to enjoy.

`Art Sheds’ features three unique sheds designed by the artist and constructed in Liverpool. In creating these individual studio spaces Forsyth applied 2,500 leaves of 22-carat gold leaf to the roofs using the traditional Renaissance technique she explains. Within each Art Shed, traditional Victorian subjects of portraiture, still life and the nude have been carefully chosen by Forsyth to inspire visitors.

The second space in the exhibition houses Forsyth’s personal selection of early paintings, drawings, prints, textiles and sculpture from the VG&M collection including works by artists who taught in the original Art Sheds

Susan Forsyth Portrait shed , 2014.

Susan Forsyth, Still Life shed, 2014.

Susan Forsyth, Nude Shed, 2014.

.VG&M Curator, Moira Lindsay, said: “This exhibition celebrates the site’s creative history but it is very much a contemporary installation and we hope that visitors will spend some time within the sculptures.

“It was a delight to work with Susan and we are pleased she chose to use our collections. Looking at historic collections with an artist brings a fresh perspective and hearing what inspires artists is insightful and often unexpected.”

Susan Forsyth added: “I was inspired to create this participatory exhibition by the history and collection of the Victoria Gallery & Museum. My public art work contains a strong sense of place and a link to history and `Art Sheds’ combines elements of the wonderful collection with the architectural and social history of the institution. It is also important that this work is site-specific and has open-ended participatory outcomes for anyone to come and enjoy.”

‘HYDROZOAN’ @ THE ROYAL STANDARD

Joey Holder – ‘HYDROZOAN.’ The Royal Standard – Liverpool Biennial 2014 Programme.

For the Liverpool Biennial 2014 The Royal Standard presents three consecutive solo exhibitions of new work by Rob Chavasse (UK), Sam Smith (AU) and Joey Holder (UK) over a 16 week period. 

Joey Holder's latest show, HYDROZOAN,  comes as the final instalment in this three part series.

Holder’s work extends across a range of contrasting media; she paints and sculpts, but also creates videos and builds installations and manages multiple image streams, exploring the “structures and hierarchies of the technological and natural world” through the various forms and their abstractions.

Joey Holder – ‘HYDROZOAN.’ The Royal Standard – Liverpool Biennial 2014 Programme.

This exhibition comes as the result a six-month residency that Holder completed with 'Near Now' in Nottingham, working with genome scientists and biochemists to research future urban farming methods and commercial fish farming. Holder’s answer is a gallery simulation of an ‘Aquaponics’ system: “a food production method that combines conventional aquaculture with hydroponics”.

After viewing the main exhibition space, visitors are  given the opportunity to view the artists various studios in the building – I felt that being able to explore their personal workspaces and view many works in the process of production brought to life the creative process, allowing a better understanding of the exhibition and its context.

A selection of the more  chaotic studios and workspaces of the artists, we had access to view at the Royal Standard.

                                              

NOT ALL DOCUMENTS ARE RECORDS: PHOTOGRAPHING EXHIBITIONS AS AN ART FORM @OPEN EYE GALLERY, LIVERPOOL

The current exhibition at Open Eye Gallery states in its hand-out literature that ‘a document is … amendable and changeable whereas a record is not.’ While this claim can most certainly be disputed, this self-reflexive display explores interesting and complex territories. In particular, the exhibition reconsiders the role of photography in documenting the official story, impact and legacy of large-scale exhibitions. Assembled works from four artists investigate the role that photography has played in the documentation of three significant platforms, documenta, the Venice Biennale and the Liverpool Biennial, over a period of over fifty years. These question too whether images of exhibitions can and should stand as artworks in their own right.

‘Not all Documents are Records: Photographing Exhibitions as an Art Form’ is a partner exhibition of the 2014 Liverpool Biennial. Cristina De Middel’s commissioned work responds to this specific context, using archival materials from the media in a new installation that imagines this year’s Biennial presentation. Covering three walls are a series of blown-up images of exhibitions and performances, and quotes from newspapers that criticise and sensationalise previous festivals: ‘£300,000 FOR THAT!’ and ‘Inflatable liver, a giant stain and a map of dogs,’ for instance. Such media interactions are an integral part of the history of art’s display, even if they might be typically expunged from official records by the exhibition organisers. De Middel has placed over these a series of framed photographs that have sections of other artist’s works censored by blocks of pink colour. Her work here questions copyright regulations pertaining to image reproduction and the prevalence of appropriation: just how far can one alter an existing artwork before it becomes a new piece altogether? No longer official records of previous Liverpool Biennials, De Middel has made new works which now exist as malleable and highly ambiguous documents that will form part of its future archive.Works by Ugo Mulas push this political bent further. They comprise a series of photographs that respond to two years of the Venice Biennale in the 1950s and 1960s. Some of these depict exhibition installation photographs, behind the scenes images and glamorous opening events, while others document protests by students and other artists against the Biennale. These protests resulted in many included artists removing or closing their displays. Evocative public demonstrations in the Piazza San Marco are contrasted with VIPs sipping coffee at Caffé Florian: the anti-establishment politics of the disenfranchised versus the privilege of the few. These are images which remain familiar even today.

Ira Lombardia exploits the truth that is so often presumed is manifest in records. Her works, displayed in vitrines in the upstairs gallery, are fictional accounts of documenta 2012 featuring an artist that doesn’t exist inserted into the programme. Lombardia’s books, appropriating the official catalogue of the fair, show how easily records can be manipulated and falsified entirely, and how a legacy shaped by such publications onlyseems to be more reliable than memory.

Pollock Bench Child.

Mondrian Pair.

The star of the exhibition is undoubtedly Hans Haacke. His black and white photographs made at documenta in 1959 are wry and humorous portraits of gallery visitors. Images such as ‘Pollock Bench Child’ and ‘Mondrian Pair’ give an indication that the artworks depicted are less significant than the visitors themselves and their interactions or non-interactions with the exhibition. A far cry from typical installation photographs, instead these show children playing, men reading and taking photographs, people in conversation and generally not looking at art. These images don’t fit into the official canon of images for documenta: this isn’t how visitors are supposed to behave either now or then. There are no clichéd wistful, contemplative images here. Instead, Haacke reveals something a little closer to the truth of the exhibition experience for many people, producing documents which are more mutable and perhaps more authentic than the kind of press images one is used to encountering. Capturing small narratives within the exhibition galleries brings together new experiences for the viewer of his work. A photograph of a Kandinsky painting hung behind a child in a push-chair who is turned toward the artist (and the viewer) with a puzzled expression on his face is no longer just a Kandinsky painting, but a new work entirely.

LIVERPOOL BIENNIAL 2014 - A NEEDLE WALKS INTO A HAYSTACK @ THE OLD BLIND SCHOOL

My visit to the Liverpool Biennial Group Show at the Old Blind School was accompanied by a guided tour of the exhibition ‘A Needle Walks into a Haystack,’by the Biennial Curator, Rosie Cooper. The exhibition hosted works of such artists as; Christina Ramberg, William Leavitt, Marc Bauer, Nicola L as well as Rana Hamadeh and Amelie Von Wulffen.

“A Needle Walks into a Haystack is an exhibition about our habits, our habitats, and the objects, images, relationships and activities that constitute our immediate surroundings. The artists in this exhibition disrupt many of the conventions and assumptions that usually prescribe the way we live our lives. They attack the metaphors, symbols and representations that make up their own environment, replacing them with new meanings and protocols.” – 8th Liverpool Biennial Exhibition.

Christina Ramberg.

Hand, Handkerchief,

1971.

Christina Ramberg

Untitled (five shoes)

c.1969

Christina Ramberg c.1982

Christina Ramberg

It was clear that this was a scrupulously  curated exhibition, not only for the apt location  choice of the Old Blind school, but also in terms of the interior layout of the exhibition space. The works appeared to be arranged in terms of there contextual likeness and relevance, in what appeared to be a thematic rather than a chronological curatorial approach; For instance, one room of the ground floor exhibition space, was dedicated to Feminist artwork. One such artist who featured here, was the work of Christina Ramberg, her work demonstrates  a representation of memories of her  mother who the artist witnessed 'transforming' herself in order to conform to male perceptions of idealised female beauty, or the so-called ‘perfect vision’ of the female form.

The artist was part of a movement in the nineteen nineties that focused  on drawing the female body in unrealistic or distorted proportions. A theme in Ramberg’s works displayed here seems to be the idea that women are taught to believe that they should suffer for the sake of their physicality , with  'beauty is pain’ being a repetitive motif. This convention is emphasised within the ‘Untitled (five shoes)’ c.1969, reminiscent of  the constraints imposed upon Japanese women who had their feet bound.

MONDRIAN AND HIS STUDIOS @ TATE LIVERPOOL

“To study Mondrian is to shine a light on the relationship between popular culture and the canonisation of art”

Certain works of art embed themselves in the public’s consciousness, in such a way that surpasses their creators -the artist’s life, and the circumstances in which they were produced. In  Mondrian’s case, it isn’t so much a single  painting that acts as the pièce de résistance to eclipse the artist himself or outshine his other works, but rather the  ‘look’ of his iconic neoplastic oeuvre.  

Tate’s blockbuster summer exhibition- Mondrian and his Studios – marks the 70^th anniversary of the artist’s death and offers a window into his life; through an insight into his itinerant studios, mapping his journey from his homeland in the Netherlands, as a figurative painter, to   his rise to international significance, moving towards geometric abstraction as a proponent for the ‘De Stijl’ movement. Offering a new insight into his restless pursuit to reduce, refine and re-assert the essence of line and space, colour and form.

The weight of this exhibition is devoted to his signature panelled pieces – the ‘Neoplastic’ – an examination of primary colour, geometric space and line, void of any attempt at natural form. But Mondrian, not content with the confines of canvas, evolved ‘The Style’ to include three dimensional maquettes, furniture and most notably this manifests itself in the ‘atelier as artwork’ of his studios.

 Taking visitors through the artist’s ateliers in Paris, London and New York, the exhibition trails Mondrian’s personal and aesthetic journey, and exposes links between the two: a key highlight of this retrospective is the immersive full-scale reconstruction of his Parisian studio, at 26 Rue du Depart, which allows viewers to momentarily occupy not only Mondrian’s creative domain but also step inside what appears to be a three-dimensional version of one of his paintings.

The retrospective begins with a display of earlier works such as trees and seascapes; the latitude and freedom of these paintings of organic forms is refreshing to see in contrast with the rigorous geometry characteristic of his later compositions. The exhibition path quickly navigates us towards the artist’s move to Paris, which sees Mondrian’s iconic compositional bravura really take off.

On first exposure to the main exhibition space (comprising the ‘neoplastic’ collection), Mondrian’s primary coloured pieces appear, perhaps, lost in a giant lattice of tedious homogeneousness. But when forced to scrutinise each painting individually, the more discerning viewer notices the composure, the balance and a sense of equilibrium in these impeccably calibrated and nuanced compositions.

His artwork has been paid homage to repeatedly, perhaps more than any other modern artist, Piet Mondrian has turned into a global brand, with his trademark yellow, blue, and red geometric compositions appropriated by pop culture. However this scholarly and judiciously curated retrospective is due much credit for its success in casting a new light on the old lines.

Mondrian and his Studios is juxtaposed with a comparative exhibition of Nasreen Mohamedi. A relatively unknown pioneering Indian artist, whose work comprises collage, paint and pen to create stark graphic compositions. This perfect pairing between Mondrian and Mohamedi, allows for a better insight into both artists’ journeys toward abstraction. Though working in different times and in different places, Mohamedi and Mondrian had similar motivations in their practices and in what they aimed to discover and achieve through art; both were able to extract the maximum out of the minimum.