The focal point of Matthew Barney’s Hayward exhibition is Redoubt, a two-and-a-quarter-hour film projected on a giant screen that invites you to immerse yourself in the rugged terrain of the Sawtooth Mountains in Idaho, where he grew up.
Paradise, according to German artist Thomas Struth, is to be found in the tropical rain forests of Yunnan Province, China. His gorgeous photograph Paradise 11 is the first thing I saw on entering the Hayward Gallery and, immediately it had a soothing effect on my frazzled urban psyche.
Kiss My Genders may not claim to be a survey, yet it seems perverse to mount an exhibition of work by LGBTQ artists who address issues of gender identity without including some of the best known names.
There are some wonderful things in Space Shifters, the Hayward Gallery’s autumn exhibition. The selection of work plays with one’s perceptions of space and everything in it. You look through, round or over these sculptures and installations rather than at them, since they direct attention more to the act of seeing than to the work itself.
“Let the light in” has been the fundraising slogan for the two-year project to revamp and modernise the Southbank Centre’s Hayward Gallery, and adjacent Queen Elizabeth Hall and Purcell Room. And that is just what has happened, with two triumphs at the Hayward.
James Scott’s filmography is wide-ranging, including the 1982 short film A Shocking Accident, based on the Graham Greene story, which won an Academy Award the following year, and other works on social questions.
Metal figures on the foreshore of Crosby Beach, Liverpool, set against a sunset, signify the preoccupations of Antony Gormley. The sculptor has been concerned consistently with the human figure, manifested in metal – lead or iron – casts of his own body.
A steel corridor stretches as far into the distance as you can see (pictured below right); the gleaming sides and gently sloping floor invite you to step inside but, as you venture further in, it gets darker and darker until you are groping your way in pitch blackness. This unnerving experience reminded me of when, as a child, I followed my parents deep into the cliffs of north Cornwall as they gingerly crept along disused mine shafts, lighting the way with matches that quickly fizzled out.
A Bloodhound Mark 2 surface-to-air missile points to the sky from the terrace outside the Hayward Gallery. From 1963–1990, the missiles were stationed along the east coast, from Humberside to the Thames, to intercept Soviet planes coming to drop atom bombs on Britain.
It's a chilling reminder of the Cold War and the nagging undertow of fear it engendered; it is also a timely reminder that, in recent weeks, Russian fighter jets have been intruding on our air space to give us the jitters and ratchet up tensions.
When a large and ambitious group exhibition is mounted on a particular theme or subject, in this case the human figure in contemporary sculpture, it’s always interesting to note what gets left out as well as what goes in. It’s reasonable to ask what story is being promoted under the heading of a general survey. Here are 25 sculptors, all but one from Europe and America, spanning the past 25 years. You might ask, “But where is our own Antony Gormley?” After all, Gormley has been the “go-to” British sculptor whose subject for the past quarter of a century has been the human figure.