Vera Lutter & Nancy Rubins at the Gagosian Gallery. Recommended.

How to sum up this winter? We had one of the darkest winters in years, snow in February and now snow again in the middle of March. I am happy though that the days are longer, it makes such a difference. I can't remember a year when it snowed this late, anyhow it looks beautiful, I love it! 

In the news also is the attempted assassination of Russians on British soil and the use of a chemical agent for the first time since WWII in Europe, and the fact that whoever used the chemical agent is most worryingly still out there.. Also I found the lack of information from the Government surprising, what to do if you come into contact with a nerve agent or other chemical, I mean like any other mere mortal I just googled it up on what to do in case it happens. With all of this happening & lack of sleep I was still able to meet my deadlines, with great results. I decided to take an afternoon off and go to the Gogasian Gallery near King's Cross station to view the works by Vera Lutter & Nancy Rubins. It was an oasis of peace in there.

Photo by Vera Lutter courtesy of the Gagosian Gallery.

The exhibition by Vera Lutter is titled Turning Time; she uses a large pinhole camera, she revived the camera obscura (light enters into a dark camera space thorough the pinhole and it projects an image inside the box onto the photgraphic paper) by using a large shipping container instead of using a small box. She then left the exposure for several hours, even days and months which then gave the work a ghostly appearance. All the photographs are large and are positioned in one room on the walls; some are put together as they are so large and you have to get close to notice this. She took photographs of ancient temples in Paestum, Italy, positioning the container at different angles, so has sometimes to get close ups of the subject or sometimes to get distant images. This ancient site includes three temples built around 550BCE, for the gods Neptune and Athena. Basically she turns a shipping container into a large camera obscura see pics above and below.

Photo by Vera Lutter courtesy of Pinterest.

Next to the above pictures are photographs of the Effelsberg Radio telescope at the Max Planck Insitut fur Radioastronomiey in Germany, where she went in 2013, that records cosmic acitvity in space see pic. below. They are all inverted black and white images, each image is unique, it is a slow process where she observes the changes that happened outside of the pinhole, like catching shadows; the long exposure gives a sense of emptiness, of the blackness of the photos observing the mystery of darkness, of time passing.  It actually reminded me of Andy Warhol's film Empire with the long observation of an object, registering the changes see link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMCeDBn1Zu0.
The pinhole camera is not well suited to capture fast movements such as cars, they would look like fragments, and it is an imaginative use of the camera obscura which was big in Victorian times. There are no people in the photographs; she would have spent a long time observing, recording the changes of the building over time.

Photo by Vera Lutter courtesy of Pinterest.

Her work is very different in nature from that of Nancy Rubins as evidenced in her exhibition titled Diversifolia which dominates the main room in a playful way. You can't really avoid it, not that you would want to as it is fun see pic below.

Nancy Rubin's sculptures photo courtesy of the Guardian.

It included found over-the-top garden ornamental objects/animals which are turned upside down, connected together through wires, going in different directions. She uses a structural property in her work called 'tensegrity': here the individual animals/objects are secured with tensile wires in a compact way. They made me think of bouquets of flowers scattered in all directions, that give you the illusion of floating in the air. They are monochrome, cast in iron, bronze, brass, aluminium, I went close up to them and I saw an upside down turtle at the bottom, a duck, a zebra, a crocodile tail, there is a lot to look at in the sculptures! While the wires zig zag through them, the sculptures invite you to walk around them to discover them as a whole. They have an organic feel to them, despite their being made of metal, as though they have grown rather then being designed, and they still retain a feeling of randomness & untidiness see pic below.

Photo courtesy of the Londonist.com.

In the exhibition room there are also two large drawings see pic below. At first I thought it was a wavy sculpture made out of aluminium (this is how good it is) fluidly moving across the wall, again in an organic way  and then when I went close up to it I realised it was made out of paper covered in graphite. It made me think of the heavy dense drawings by Richard Serra.

Photo courtesy of Pinterest.

It went really well with the other sculptures in the room, the balance between an organic fluid piece and the tension and the controlled caos and absurdity of the other works. I thought it was funny, the fact that she is recycling expensive garden ornaments that you would find in wealthy houses in California where she is based and she turns them into sculptures/installations which are surreal and which defy gravity. Brilliant exhibition.