Venice biennale 2015
I was lucky enough to spend a few days in Venice last week and visited as well as museums like the Peggy Guggenheim museum – this year’s Venice biennale.
I’ve not been to the biennale before even though I’ve visited Venice a number of times, the area that is dedicated to the biennale is in the Giardini area of Venice and the exhibition is divided in to a number of small buildings dedicated to a nations work, or at least the artists they choose to represent them. The area reminds me of a Californian zoo only the occupants of the buildings are works of art!
Enjoyable to see the wide variety of art, though I have to say if I see another arrangement of sticks on a white floor ever again I’m going to personally use them as fire wood. Much of the work I felt I’d seen before, the ‘Swiss’ building for example had a tank of pink fluid in a fluorescent green building, rather too close in feel to the huge black oil filled tank in the Saatchi and Saatchi gallery on London’s Kings Road for my liking…..there’s nothing new under the sun….
Not surprIsingly the paintings in the Guggenheim earlier in the visit were of greater quality and included works by Klee, Pollack and Rothko all ‘old modern’ art but all felt more relevant and fresh than what was in the biennale.
The only nation and artist work I actually liked was the Romanian one with paintings by Adrian Ghenie … which reminded me of Ron Kitajs work and had real quality.
That of course is just my opinion and who am I with my roots and influence in post impressions and Euston road school to judge others!
I did a number small watercolour sketches during the visit to Venice and I’ll post those after this one.
Back to the Liverpool cathedral paintings this week, looking forward to it!
My Liverpool based exhibition will be on for two months and due to open on 14th August in Liverpool’s Matthew Street.
