Peter Doig at Michael Werner London, 22 Upper Brook Street, September 27 to December 22, 2012
Luc Tuymans at David Zwirner Gallery, 24 Grafton Street, October 5 to November 17, 2012

Installation shot of works by Peter Doig at Michael Werner Gallery, Mayfair, London

A confluence of events made London the place to see art this October, with the opening of three New York galleries in Mayfair at the same time as Frieze Art Fair. News headlines like “The Americans are coming” and “US art dealers invade London with massive new galleries” sounded almost nervous.

Why it makes market sense for international art dealers to come to London now, and why elegant properties in prime areas are suddenly affordable is easily explained by things like the world economy and where new rich buyers want to live. More interesting is the ascendancy of painting at all these venues.

David Zwirner opened in a five–storey Georgian townhouse with a show of paintings by Luc Tuymans; Michael Werner opened around the corner from the Dorchester with paintings by Peter Doig; and Pace has taken over what was once the Museum of Mankind – behind the Royal Academy – and opened with the late black and grey paintings of Mark Rothko juxtaposed with stark, dark photographs of water by Hiroshi Sugimoto. The juxtaposition took the edge off both artists, and the general mood was altogether too black.

Peter Doig’s exhibition, on the other hand, was filled with strong, perhaps Caribbean, color (the Scottish-Canadian artist left London for Trinidad ten years ago.) As a longtime admirer of Doig, I have to report that the show was a disappointment. Whether the huge price tags on his work have become an inhibition – White Canoe, a fabulous painting from 1990, was sold at auction in 2007 for an extraordinary $11.3 million – or whether Trinidad is not stimulating him, something is missing.

Peter Doig, Figure by a Pool, 2008-2012. Oil and distemper on linen, 98-1/2 x 78-3/4 inches. Courtesy Michael Werner Gallery, New York and London

In place of the old vigor, with the visceral use of paint and hint of menace in the subject matter, the work now seems passionless and thin. Poolscapes, colonial cricket pitches, a naked, long-haired figure riding through the sea on horseback, a boat floating past a cave – these may be a real part of Doig’s daily life on the island, but within his paintings these are still in the realm of romantic ideas that don’t seem visually or culturally digested. If– as they seem to be – the figures are self-portraits, there is something too comfortable and too easy about them. In the past, Doig’s palette has been awkward in a good way, as if referring to artificially created color, but the liberal areas of bright orange and yellow in the new paintings just feel fake and noisy.

A delightful, quirky exception is the small canvas, Lion in the Sand (2012). It could be a tricolor flag with aquamarine sea above the humanized, prancing lion and burning red below. Although I was later told that the drawings in the upstairs gallery were not supposed to be part of the exhibition, I was happy to find small, untamed works on paper, some of them sketches for the canvases below, which suggest the old vitality is not entirely lost. (The horseback rider in the sea, however, should have been scotched in both forms.)

There is an odd interaction between the exhibitions of Doig and Luc Tuymans, whose new series of paintings, Allo!, casts an ironic eye on colonialism and the much romanticized story of the painter who went to live on an island. Doig, who has been accused of doing a Gauguin, says he remains an outsider on the island and that his work would be much more romantic and myth-based if he were Trinidadian.

Luc Tuymans arrived late, bleary-eyed and grumpy for his press preview at Zwirmer, and used the occasion to slag off the “fucking Brits” for being “half-hearted Europeans”. He seemed reluctant to talk about his art that day: the quotes that follow were taken from his interview at Frieze Art Fair a week later. But the Belgian painter is viewed with such respect that he can get away with crass behaviour – and he certainly knows how to silence an audience. When questions were invited at the end of the Frieze talk he interjected: “Only intelligent questions please.”

The paintings in the first gallery are a preface to Allo! (a quote from the parrot which inhabited Tuymans’ local bar): washed out and distanced from the viewer as if seen through a fuzz of talcum powder or on a dim TV screen. Quiet as they are, they grab the attention. Peaches (all works 2012), for instance – a pyramid of bleached, sickly green spheres, which look a bit like cabbages and a bit like scoops of ice cream caught under a fluorescent light. Or Technicolor – a bouquet of flowers seen from above, aglow in a murky haze.

The Allo! paintings are based on stills from a 1942 Hollywood film – which is based on Somerset Maugham’s book, “The Moon and Sixpence.” The story of a middle-aged English stockbroker who abandons his wife and children to become an artist in Tahiti, it is in turn a romanticized version of Gauguin’s life. In the closing sequence, the film moves into Technicolor, showing fake, kitschy “Gauguins”, and this becomes the source of Tuymans’ paintings.

With thin washes of scarlet and blue, hints of yellow, smeared edges and areas of canvas left bare as if overexposed, there are a lot more luminous grays in these paintings than color. They are more about the crude technology of early Technicolor, broken down further by being screened on television, photographed and enlarged. The result is paintings that are complex and subtle.

Luc Tuymans, Peaches, 2012. Oil on canvas, 68-1/2 x 46-1/2 inches. Courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London

Tuymans photographed the film stills from the screen with his iPhone, catching reflected images of himself at the same time – which add a lurking element of autobiography. A lot, indeed, lurks in these strange, sinister paintings. The nostalgic beauty of floating female figures and Tahitian fabrics; the lonely prowling figure of a man in a hat who watches, cut off from the action; suggestions of a violent interface between primitive and colonial, and the violence in each.

Transparent as these works are – the pencil drawing is left visible and there is no feeling of change or cover up, just loose, light, searching brushstrokes – Tuymans says that for him the first few hours of a painting are an agonizing struggle. He also says that painting is all about time and precision, that a good painting is never finished and that it remains a one-to-one experience. He is a hard act to follow.

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The New High School at Shoshana Persits Street, Tel Aviv, site of the 2012 Fresh Paint 5 Contemporary Art Fair

As the crowds converge on Fresh Paint 5 the eagerness is almost palpable. The venue of Tel Aviv’s annual art fair is always a surprise and part of the fun.  It was the Botanic Gardens last year and Jaffa Port the year before. This time the setting is a large new municipal high school near the sea in North Tel Aviv, due to open in a few months. There are plans for a pleasant residential development around the school – one day. At the moment there is little more than dust and stones behind the sand dunes, with the lone school building presenting itself as an odd, slightly surreal venue for an art party. The first question has to be, why here?

The organisers of Fresh Paint find locations that have never been used to show art before, and never exposed to the wider public. Each venue is a recently constructed complex where the art fair can take place before the official opening.  With 30,000 visitors over five days, this also puts the limelight on the new venue and gives it a good launch. For an event focused on young artists, many of whom are recent art school graduates, the current location is apt. Headmaster of the new school is Ram Cohen, whose outspoken liberal views as head of Tel Aviv’s Municipal High School Aleph for the Arts landed him in trouble at the Knesset two years ago, but made him into a kind of superstar in the eyes of many students and parents.

Like the rough landscape and school building, the art on the show projects a feeling of raw potential and future promise – especially in the section called the Greenhouse, which is the nub of the exhibition and showcases the work of young, unknown and unrepresented artists. The art viewing community of Israel – coming mostly, of course, from Tel Aviv – brings with it the enthusiasm of a stereotypical Jewish mother, looking at its new offspring with pride and pleasure.

Ran Barlev, Untitled. Further details to follow. Courtesy of Niva Navon Public Relations and Productions

The idea of a contemporary art fair for Tel Aviv originated with Sharon Tillinger, an entrepreneur, and Yifat Gurion, a graphic designer, who had worked together in the past. It was a vision to bring young artists into the public eye and to expand the art market, and has succeeded beyond expectation. The first fair was held in 2008 in a building in Florentin, a shabby but interesting South Tel Aviv neighborhood that has since taken off as an art centre. The Greenhouse is limited to Israeli artists, and the independent commercial galleries that rent space at the fair are all – so far – local, but there is an international presence. Artists like Douglas Gordon, Adel Abdesamed, Rineke Dijkstra, Muntean Rosenblum and others are shown by the Israeli galleries that represent them, and there are projects with foreign artists that this year included a show of Spencer Tunick’s Dead Sea “human installation” – photographs of 1,200 naked Israelis in the rugged landscape.

This year 46 artists were selected for exposure in the Greenhouse out of over 1,000 applicants, by a jury of gallerists, collectors and educators, who made their choices only on the basis of the work, and without knowing anything about the artists. This inspiration is also picked up by the Secret Postcard project, a yearly event in which postcards by hundreds of different artists are sold for the same price of 180 NIS ($50). Only after buying one can you discover whether it was made by a famous artist like Ya’ir Garbuz or Menashe Kadishman, or by someone as yet unknown.

A sense of play and experimentation ran through much of the work in the Greenhouse, with objects taken out of context, quirky perspectives, and use of non-art materials.  In Shay Arik’s installation, an upturned bottle of bleach drips slowly on to a neat pile of black T-shirts, creating patterns as it turns them white. Broken umbrellas are recycled by Avinoam Sternheim to make sculpture with wit and a free spirit – his luscious paintings have the same character. Matan Oren etches his drawings through a layer of dry whitewash on the inside of plastic buckets. Matan Mittwoch focuses on tackiness and banality in his photographs of office interiors but presents them as abstracts. And Ran Barlav’s splashy romantic paintings are of domestic interiors that are cheap and nasty. Much of what you see is great fun without being great art, and the show seems perhaps less substantial than in previous years. But for diversity and exuberance it gets 100%.

Once artists have made it to the Greenhouse, they are protected and nurtured like tender exotic plants. Each is assigned a curator who becomes an expert on his or her work and can represent the artist. These reps are present and available at the exhibition and are fluent protagonists for the artists, with a professional ability to explain and promote the work to viewers. Massive exposure to the most powerful and influential members of Israel’s compact art world in a short time is likely to create dramatic changes in an artist’s career. The metaphysical paintings of Igor Skaletsky, Russian-born and with an academic art training in Moscow, were sold out by the third day. And Nevet Yitzhak’s video installation “Alashan Malish Gheirak”, that projects the Arab singer Farid al-Atrash singing his popular song “Because I have no one but you” above a floor projection of a swaying oriental carpet, sold out too.

Igal Ahouvi, a collector, gives the Most Promising Artist award annually to someone from the Greenhouse, which includes the sum of 40,000 NIS ($10K) and a solo exhibition at the following year’s fair.  Nivi Alroy, a sculptor who works with wood and paper, was the 2010 winner. Asked how winning the prize had affected her art career, she said that the solo show was a signature show for her. Alroy was helped and supported throughout, allowed to work with the curator of her choice, even though she was living in Miami, and to rebuild the exhibition space in order to accommodate her work. Because of the exhibition, her work was reviewed in an international magazine, which in turn led to an invitation to be part of an important art event in Philadelphia. The amount of exposure her work received, she said, was “incredible”.

Fresh Paint has opened up the Israeli art scene in two important ways. On the financial side it boosts the art market, brings in new artists and buyers – many of whom are selling or buying for the first time –and allows them to bypass the museums, galleries and curators who act as gatekeepers. In the five years since the fair’s inception, the Greenhouse alone has generated sales adding up to NIS 9,000,000. On the side of culture and awareness, the fair gives Israelis the opportunity to see what is happening in the local art scene, all under one roof.

Israeli art is growing fast. It started with photography and video, and now has spread to painting. Having its own art fair is the next natural step.

Fresh Paint Contemporary Art Fair took place in Tel Aviv from May 15 to 19, 2012

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David Goldblatt, At Kevin Kwanele’s Takwaito Barber, Lansdowne Road. Khayelitsha, Cape Town in the time of AIDS.16 May 2007. Digital print in pigment inks on 100% cotton rag paper, 90 x 111 cm. Courtesy of Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg

David Goldblatt, boyishly youthful in all but age, chose to celebrate his eightieth birthday by holding an exhibition of his own work at the Market Photo Workshop – the school he founded in Johannesburg in 1989, with the primary aim of introducing photographic skills to young blacks disadvantaged by apartheid. The school, which has been non-racial from the start, is flourishing: a lively centre of information and debate about the visual arts, offering courses in photojournalism and documentary photography, with 150 to 200 graduates each year – and Goldblatt is flourishing wonderfully too.

In the last twenty years he has become internationally renowned: recipient of the Hasselblad, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Lucie awards, his reputation has been further established by exhibitions at MoMA and Documenta, and a retrospective exhibition that toured galleries and museums around the world, as well as the publication of many books of his work.

But Goldblatt remains true to his dictum that “the arts should always be iconoclastic,” describing himself as “an unlicensed, self-appointed critic of South African society which I continue to explore with a camera.” The critical, critiquing aspect of his work is offset by its visual poetry and – most importantly for this most respectful of photographers – by his own dignifying, humanistic approach: a Goldblatt image typically achieves a balance between scorn, compassion and an artist’s delight in discovery. The weight of narrative is important in a reading of Goldblatt’s work, and the explanation is often in the titles (see the captions to images in this article). He acknowledges the influence of literary friends such as Nadine Gordimer, Barney Simon and Ivan Vladislavic, with whom he has shared projects. His own body of work is as close to literature as pictures can be.

Entitled Fale le Fale, a Sesotho phrase that translates as ‘Here and Here,’ the Workshop exhibition is modest in size but profound and far-reaching in content. It shows Goldblatt’s independence from the contemporary art world that embraces him, and from stereotypical political thinking in South Africa, past and present.

The photographs are printed small and cover a diverse range of themes, stretching from recent work back to the 1960s, with black and white hanging next to digitalised colour. Included are pictures of motorists, photographed by the young Goldblatt in his rear view mirror: a scathing depiction of white South Africans at the time, they all look grim and bad-tempered. Menu (1971) is a reflection of colonial aspirations for “English” respectability – taped onto a brick wall outside a downmarket hotel, the bill of fare offers Potage or Consommé and Baked Rice Pudding.

Among his recent work are portraits of ex-offenders, each with a detailed history of the crime – they are also at the current Venice Biennale – and triptychs, which show different aspects of a subject, extending the narrative or, as Goldblatt says, “showing what is around the corner”. Willem Vorster with friends, family, house and garden, 2009 shows the mud brick house and garden carefully created by a man who is disabled and unemployed, and as the camera takes in the harsh environment it also reveals a row of modest prefab houses in the background that are the embodiment of Vorster’s dream.

David Goldblatt, While in traffic, homage to Federico Fellini, Johannesburg. 1967. Silver gelatin print on fibre based paper, 30 x 40 cm. Courtesy of Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg

What made Goldblatt choose these particular images, I asked him.  “I thought I would like a ‘conversation’ with the students of the Workshop and that it might be an idea to show work from different areas of interest rather than something strongly thematic,” he replied. “Then, as well, the spaces seemed to lend themselves to that idea. So I said to the curators, John Fleetwood and Molemo Moiloa of the Workshop, that I would like to bring together ‘bits and pieces’, things that I have never shown or printed before, together with other work. They had a strong sense of what might interest and provoke students and so, together, we chose the work.”

Asked whether he kept the format small for practical reasons, he said, “I didn’t want to overwhelm. The work needed to be not only accessible but within the grasp of students’ own printmaking possibilities. Smaller rather than larger seemed right in those spaces.”

Goldblatt’s work is usually exhibited large-scale these days. Stepping up for a close scrutiny – rather than stepping back for a long view – is a reminder of his early exhibitions, and the rather private experience of entering into a different, uncomfortable and very intense world. At Kevin Kwanele’s Takwaito Barber, Lansdowne Road, Khayelitsha, Cape Town, in the time of AIDS, 2007 is simultaneously on display at the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, but in large format. The big print is a more impressive image and shows the detail better; the small version is less like an artwork, more like a human document and perhaps more poignant.

Unexpectedly this photograph makes me think of Piero della Francesca’s Nativity. Both show disparate characters in a bleached and dusty landscape under a limpid sky; each of them is differently occupied, and looking in a different direction. Both have a strange sense of stillness. And both have a common narrative that links the characters and makes sense of the composition – in Khayelitsha, the repeated AIDS symbols create the narrative. But mostly it is the clarity of light in Goldblatt’s photograph that reminds me of Piero, whose paintings are always bathed in light. In both artists, light imparts an atmosphere of reason and serenity.

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Full title of Here, in 2007, Ellen Pakkies strangled her son Abie. Lavender Hill, Cape Town. 12 September 2010:
Ellen was sentenced to three years in prison suspended and 62 hours of community service. There were extenuating circumstances. Her son Abie, the youngest of three, started using tik when he was 13. He robbed Ellen and her husband of everything: money, clothes, bed linen, dishes, appliances, copper pipes and taps in their house. He smashed their home to pieces and terrorised them. Through it all, she cared for him. She wanted him to feel that he belonged somewhere. She couldn’t throw him out onto the streets, because she had come from the streets herself.

Her mother was homeless when Ellen was an infant. They moved into a backyard room in Kensington when Ellen was two and her mother got married. Ellen was four when the boys next door began molesting her, six when another neighbour, a known murderer, first raped her. Her parents drank heavily. Ellen cared for the children born to the marriage, but had no friends. By the time she was 11 she had been abducted twice by sexual predators. She was 13 when her parents allowed a known rapist to share her bed because he brought liquor into the house. She ran away. She’d had four years of primary school.

Ellen lived on the streets, eating garbage and selling her body. Her first child, conceived in rape, was born when she was 17. She married at 18. The union lasted 6 months. Her second marriage lasted 2 years, and she had two sons, Abie and his brother. She married Ontil, her husband today, when she was 28. At the time of the murder she worked at an orphanage where she was happy; the children taught her new things, like how to swim and to play, and she could help them, because she knew where they came from. Today, she helps other women with addicted children.

Exhibition continues at 2 President Street, Newtown, Johannesburg 2001 until 29 July, 2011

William Kentridge Interviews Himself: two stills from William Kentridge, Drawing Lesson 47 (Interview for New York Studio School), 2010. Video, 4'48". Courtesy of Marian Goodman Gallery

Two famous artists with nothing in common spoke about their work to invited audiences in Jerusalem in recent weeks, and both were happy with their audiences. “You couldn’t get 200 people like that in New York,” Philip Pearlstein told a friend after his talk at the Jerusalem Studio School, where he found himself surrounded by fans. Packed audiences are a regular occurrence for William Kentridge, who spoke at the preview of ‘Five Themes’, his exhibition that opened at MoMA a year ago and is now at the Israel Museum – but he said he really enjoyed the responsiveness of this audience.

As a fellow South African, I am familiar with Kentridge’s Johannesburg, but I have an outsider’s view of Pearlstein’s New York. Listening to Pearlstein, and later talking with his wife Dorothy, also a painter, threw light on a few mysteries – which could all be covered by one question: What makes Pearlstein closer as an artist to his old friend Andy Warhol than to the painter with whom he is usually compared – Lucien Freud? In other words, what is so different about painting in New York and London?

Asked how he relates to Freud, Pearlstein said: “I don’t know anything about him but when we went to London in the 1970s, someone said ‘Why do we need Pearlstein when we’ve got Freud?’ “ Then he said with a smile: ” All I know is, since MoMA bought Freud, my work is in storage.”

Dorothy Pearlstein used the word ‘pragmatic’ about the American approach to art. And she said that for Pearlstein it is very important not to “leave a bit of himself on the canvas” – brush marks, fingerprints, or lumps of paint, in the way of European expressionism.

Philip Pearlstein, Two Models With Air Mattress and Sailboat, 2006. Oil on canvas, 60 x 84 inches. Courtesy of Betty Cuningham Gallery

Pearlstein’s decision to make huge paintings was pragmatic from the start – he had to, he said, or they wouldn’t be noticed. His interest in the gleaming nudes that he paints, with the translucent light and shadow moving over them, is unashamedly skin deep. And yet Pearlstein speaks about the people he paints with pride and admiration for their achievements – off the canvas.

He creates a smooth, impeccable, impenetrable surface that removes all evidence of the artist from the work and keeps the viewer at a distance. Elizabeth Taylor’s projected image comes to mind: seamless glamour devoid of irony, simplistic to the point of hick. But it’s New York hick, that moves easily from hick to cool to very sophisticated, and seems so enviable and unattainable to non-New Yorkers

For Kentridge, art is not about making an object to be treasured. His theatricality and love of trickery give a feeling of circus entertainment to his show. He made his audience rock with laughter at a split screen film interview between himself as two competing personae of the artist: the fumbling creative side and the scornful self-critic – while also expressing some of the most pertinent comments about the making and viewing of art.

Self-portraiture is at the heart of Kentridge’s work – a dramatised, evolving self-portrait that he uses in rather the same manner as an author like Philip Roth, where the main protagonist is not exactly him but reflects him; and where real life intertwines with fiction. In his early videos, based on charcoal drawings, Kentridge depicts himself in a pinstriped suit, or vulnerably naked, taking the part of two characters whose names, he says, came to him in a dream. Felix is a romantic lover and Soho is a heartless tycoon, but both are lonely figures in an unreliable world. The charcoal itself is vulnerable, smudgy and ephemeral, adding its own sense of romance and nostalgia.

At the preview, Kentridge repeated the remarkable speech he gave when he received the Kyoto Prize for Arts and Philosophy in November 2010, in which he expressed his strong feelings for Johannesburg, the city where he was born, and where he still lives and works. He has made his home and main studio in the graceful colonial family house where he grew up, on the crest of a hill overlooking the leafy suburbs. There is a buzz of creativity in Johannesburg, embattled though it has always been by politics or crime – but free, gutsy and self-ironical in terms of its people and its culture. Kentridge plugs into this creativity, working with local artists and musicians, and capturing and expressing the fun as well as the toughness of it in his work.

What does link Pearlstein and Kentridge – apart from being hard working, ambitious and impeccably professional – is that both communicate their enjoyment of making art.

How does a modern-day artist go to work in the city dominated by the Parthenon?

‘We live with it,’ says Stefanos Daskalakis, an established Greek painter living in Athens, ‘but it’s no longer an obstacle.’

Stefanos Daskalakis, Myrto in blue velour, 2005-6. Oil on canvas, 210 x 180 cm.

The heroic spirit of Ancient Greece, nevertheless, is still evident – whether in the subject matter of the art itself or in the way it is viewed and presented. The figurative paintings of Stefanos Daskalakis seem haunted by heroism. It’s heroism down on its luck – perhaps just a yearning memory of heroism – which gives gravitas and emotion to work based on close observation of the figure. He can be seen at Sismanoglio Megaro (the Sotiris Felios collection) in Istanbul until 12 December, an exhibition which will travel to Venice in June, and at the Kouvoutsakis Art Institute in Athens – Felios and Kouvoutsakis being two private collectors with a passion for promoting Greek art.

A weightiness pervades Daskalakis’ paintings – and it is not just that his subjects are often voluminous women painted on large canvases. It’s like the weightiness of Greek urban folk music: “You don’t need a voice,” someone tells the singer in a Greek film, “you’ve got sorrow inside you, and pain.”  Daskalakis is highly trained as a painter, in Athens and Paris, but is not afraid to address the same raw feelings in his work. Ioanna, Despina, Myrto – the models he works from again and again – look as if they are going through hell, but this only emphasises their human dignity, and a kind of enduring heroism that makes life’s degradations seem more monumental.

Viewed for a moment simply as genre painting, these portraits say something about Greek society that is interestingly different from, for example, Lucian Freud’s bleak view of contemporary London. Discovering that Daskalakis prefers to paint actors because, he says, they understand what he is after, puts another light on the work. Theatricality is in the emotional poses that his models strike, in their facial expressions, and in Daskalakis’ dramatic method of lighting, where heavy pools of shadow lie behind the characters.

The women are presented like broken champions. The flesh is tired – so tired your feet feel sore just looking at the bulky older woman wearing the pointed shoes of a young fashionista. In another painting she appears perched on a stool in an uncomfortably short skirt, a tiny handbag held in plump fingers with red polished nails, but the intelligence in her level gaze challenges the artist/viewer to pity or ridicule her.

Yannis Tsarouchis, Study for the month of May, 1973. Oil on cloth, 80 x 55 cm. Yannis Tsarouchis Foundation

Daskalakis was assistant and sometimes model to the famous Yannis Tsarouchis  for nine years until his death in 1989. Tsarouchis’ painting, he says, “synthesized the Greek tradition – Ancient, Byzantine and Primitive – along with the search for modernism”. In early 2010, Benaki – a privately funded museum in Athens – hosted the first large Tsarouchis retrospective to celebrate 100 years since his birth, and it sells a giant catalogue of his work.

Tsarouchis had a pivotal influence on the art community of Greece and on wider Greek society, both as a painter and through his charismatic ability with words. His work expresses the heroic ideal of ancient Greece and the Renaissance and Baroque movements in the form of young men, while emphasising their weaknesses. Elegant composition, vigorous lines, fresh colour, lush paint: these make the first impression on seeing a work by Tsarouchis. But it only paves the way to a little frisson, if not shock at the realisation that these muscular boys with handsome faces and gleaming chests, lounging on beds, half-naked or wearing cute sailor outfits, have vulnerable, uncertain faces, broken limbs or bandaged hand. Some are adorned with ridiculous fairy wings. Like boys in a gay body-building magazine or from a poem by Constantine Cavafy, they resemble mythical heroes. His work is on permanent exhibition at the Yannis Tsarouchis Foundation in Athens.

Another kind of heroic aspiration is felt when you enter the Deste Foundation for Contemporary Art created by collector Dakis Joannou. Housed in a former sock factory in an affluent suburb of Athens, Deste is a kind of Saatchi, in that it is based on one person’s taste in art and his ability to buy it. Like Saatchi, it brings local and international art to the public eye and has a generally enabling influence on contemporary art. It offers a prize biannually to an emerging Greek artist, funds lavish art projects, and opens its art library and archive of Greek artists to the public.

Mainly though, it creates themed exhibitions drawn from Joannou’s collection, like the current Alpha Omega (open until December 29). But here – at least in the case of this exhibition – the enterprise trips itself up, perhaps by taking itself too seriously (as heroes sometimes do). Despite helpful curators, a hefty catalogue and a quantity of exhibited texts, the connection between the blown up philosophy on the wall and the playful character of most of the work is mystifying, and doesn’t do either any good. For instance, Jeff Koons’ painterlyTree, Paul McCarthy’s cynical installation White Snow, Maurizio Cattelan’s floating donkey and disembodied saluting arms, and Triple Candie’s witty ingroup Maurice Cattelan is Dead may or may not relate to multiplicity and the cyclical nature of the universe. Either way, the texts are too sonorous for the art, and end up undermining it.

A room devoted to three beautiful paintings by Chris Ofili is an exception. You can pin a lot onto Ofili without risking pretentiousness because big mystical issues really do seem to be at the heart of his work, and he has the rare ability to turn them into good art. Christiana Soulou is showcased as a new Greek artist, but her light pencil drawings based on the Tarot are subtle almost to the point of invisibility.

Continuing the heroic theme, this past summer the Benaki Museum staged an exhibition of the naïve painter Theophilos (1867-1934). A total eccentric, he saw himself as Alexander the Great. He walked around dressed up like him, complete with helmet and spear, and painted himself in the role.

With the massive support of private funders like Deste and Benaki – and there are several others, including the Contemporary Greek Art Institute (Nees Morfes), the Frissiras Museum and the stunning Onassis Cultural Center that opened on Dec.7 – Greek art itself is likely to become increasingly visible in the wider world.

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installation view of the exhibition under review, with, foreground, Mary Sibande, Conversation with Madam CJ Walker, 2009. Mixed media, life size synthetic hair on canvas. Courtesy of Gallery MOMO, Johannesburg

Riason Naidoo has hit it right. Young, smart and very individual, Naidoo is the first Black director of the Iziko South African National Gallery, appointed just a year ago. His first exhibition, 1910-2010: From Pierneef to Gugulective ( April 16 to October 3, 2010), seizes the moment and leaps into the spirit of World Cup celebration, matching the excitement that is running like an electric current through this country. It is an excitement generated not only by football, or the novelty of hosting hundreds of thousands of foreign visitors – it is the exhilaration of seeing ourselves with new eyes, as part of the larger world, and of standing together as one nation behind one team, the experience of national pride legitimated.

With something like this in mind perhaps, Naidoo chose to mount an exhibition that would “turn the focus in on ourselves” and give visitors to the National Gallery, both foreign and local, “a reflection of our own art stories”. To explain the title, Hendrik Pierneef was an Afrikaner landscape painter of 100 years ago, much admired by the establishment: seven murals by him are in South Africa House, Trafalgar Square, London (which became a focus for anti-apartheid activism). Gugulective is a concept as much as a group. It was started in 2006 by a collective of young Black artists, actors and dancers living in Gugulethu – a disadvantaged township outside Cape Town – in the hope of stimulating social interaction and political change. Now it includes artists from other townships. In spite of the chronological order of its title, the hanging of this exhibition takes us in the opposite direction, moving from the current works of the Gugulective back to the beginning of the White Afrikaner narrative, when the British and the Boers achieved Union, solidifying White rule.

But far from being a studious plod through history, Pierneef to Gugulective is more like being at the coolest party in town. With over 700 works by that many artists, all crammed together and jostling for attention in a not very large space, there is no point in trying to give proper attention to everybody. You can either skim the surface and enjoy the general atmosphere or get into a huddle with a few pieces. I was grabbed by Mary Sibande’s In Conversation with Madam CJ Walker (2008) – a sculptural installation of a woman being unravelled by her maid, and by Steven Cohen’s video Chandelier (2001), which shows him near naked and teetering on fetish high heels in a Johannesburg squatter camp, and by Deborah Bell’s luscious oil painting, Lover’s in the Cinema (1985). The exhibition occupies the entire gallery, with most works taken from its own rich collection. With a modest budget and limited time, all five of the museum’s curators collaborated – Naidoo says he told them to play – resulting in an intoxicating get together of artists and ideas that looks light and spontaneous even though a lot of heavy issues are included.

There is color, wit and gravitas, not only within the works themselves but in the unpredictable relationships set up between them. Even for those who know little about South African art, there is the fun of spotting celebrities on the crowded walls, with artists like William Kentridge and Marlene Dumas given no special treatment. There is plenty of emerging young talent at this party, the heady excitement of South African artists who are beginning to be noticed by the rest of the world. Seeing them under one roof is like picking the cream off the best recent exhibitions – but these are the artists who are always seen. Their appearance on biennials and international shows adding to the great feeling of being a respected part of the international art world, just as the general population loves being part of international football. Like the vuvuzela – the ubiquitous plastic trumpet that gives every holder the power of expression at football matches – individually these artists may have a lot to say, but all at once they can be taxing.

A happy surprise is the inclusion in Naidoo’s wide embrace of older generations, of familiar works long out of circulation, and of little known works. Black artists and photographers who were denied access to art schools during the apartheid years, and mostly ignored by galleries, are treasured guests at this party. Naidoo says he is especially preoccupied with ‘bringing together neglected history’. Some works, like Ronald Harrison’s Black Christ (1962), which the apartheid regime banned, are heard about but seldom seen. And there are seminal works, like Willie Bester’s 1913 Land Act (1995), a bench assembled out of found materials with the words “Europeans Only” carved into it; or Jane Alexander’s The Butcher Boys (1985), three lifesize half-human figures that expresses the bestiality of the times.  At the other extreme, you want to say Wow! to VladamirTretchikoff, the wildly popular realist painter previously considered too kitsch for the National Gallery – How did you get invited!?

Lionel Davis, a Cape Town artist, says that he has never seen anything that appealed to him as much as this show. “Every moment that I spent in that place was a joy to me,” he said. After seven years on Robben Island, Davis was kept under house arrest for a further five years, living in a tiny flat with his mother within the Coloured community of Cape Town – which is when he started painting. He enjoyed this rare opportunity to see works of artists he knew from the past, and said that although Tretchikoff was scorned by academics and intellectuals, reproductions of his work hung in every Coloured home. He loves the way the walls at this exhibition are packed with art, he says, because they remind him of an ordinary home, and show “how a museum can be an extension of oneself”.

installation view of the exhibition under review, including Ronald Harrison, The Black Christ, 1962. Iziko South African National Gallery Permanent Collection

Naidoo, who says that the first time his parents went into a museum was when he was working in it, wants the National Gallery to belong to the wider public, and to attract communities who do not normally visit. He started as a painter, but was driven to curating by a passion to rediscover forgotten artists like, for instance, the 1950s photographer Ranjith Kally, whose work he unearthed from old files and has exhibited around the world. He says his aim is “to open up our gallery to beyond our borders, especially to the African continent”.

But Naidoo has received some harsh criticism. In an attack which became personal, one prominent local critic accused him of trashing the reputation of the National Gallery, of having no curatorial experience and of being out of his depth. Others have equally strenuously defended him, praising the exhibition’s feeling of freshness and air of vitality. But in general, the Cape Town art establishment seems to be hedging its bets – for the moment – about an exhibition which in so many ways goes against the accepted international approach to art presentation.

TATE TRIENNIAL 2006: NEW BRITISH ART
Tate Britain
Millbank, London
March 1 to May 14, 2006

Mark di Suvero and Rirkrit Tiravanija (and invited artists), Peace Tower, installation at Whitney Museum

It may not be a fair comparison but you can’t help wondering: How can the Whitney Biennial be so exciting and the Tate Triennial so tedious when both are showcasing the same kind of contemporary art on either side of a well-traversed pond?

The Biennial is a long established event – it has history, a character of its own, and it is big. Whereas the Triennial is young (this is the third), hasn’t yet created a place for itself, and is a fraction of the size. But the art is as good in London as it is in New York. The difference is in the curating of the exhibitions.

The vitality of the Biennial spills out into the street with interventions on the sidewalk. Its character is established by the Peace Tower at the entrance. Made out of small, raw paintings by 200 invited artists, and remarkable for its non-artiness, it was conceived and built by sculptor Mark di Suvero in 1966 as a united statement against the Vietnam War. Recreating the Peace Tower in the present political and emotional climate generates connections between the protest era of the sixties and our current feelings about Iraq, to the doubts, fears and changed perspectives of post 9/11 America.

Good exhibitions quickly spread feelings of excitement and pleasure. I walked into the Whitney with a friend who kept saying: “This is like what I love!” I agreed. There was a lot to like and love in the Biennial. Videos which really touch you, pieces (like the fake obituaries of famous people) that really make you laugh, a sense of adventure as you move around the galleries, a lot of new and old artists to discover. In my view, it’s the painting – when there is any – that gives a multimedia blockbuster exhibition its gravitas. This one has a bunch of strong painters who were new to me.

Spencer Sweeney is a fabulous painter. I don’t care what the work means or what the artist or anyone else says about it. It is alive, sophisticated, original, and it stands on its own without relying on explanation. I love the luscious color, the ice-cream pinks and bloodstain reds, the layers of visual language, the passages of drawing and painting that combine with ease.

Dawolu Jabari Anderson’s drawings of iconic figures from black American history, battered and stained, and seen through a wrinkled surface, are childish yet seem as authentic as an old document. Kelley Walker uses Photoshop to create abstract expressionist images with an impersonal surface, using toothpaste and cereal boxes. Mark Bradford’s large, multilayered collages recall the scraped and repainted wall surfaces created over time in urban environments.

But the artist who represents the spirit of the show for me is the octogenarian poet, performer and painter, Taylor Mead, not so much with his painting (which is hardly known) but his exuberant life. He is a Zelig in American art history. A character among the Beats, he worked with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Andy Warhol. He marched with the Village Gays, was filmed by Jim Jarmusch and Rebecca Horn, and performed at the Bowery. Mead epitomizes that unique New York combination of caring and cool.

Bad exhibitions, however, are annoying. I stomped around the Tate Triennial irritably, expressing my disgust loudly to a friend, an English one this time, who encouraged me by laughing. Stuffy, predictable, conservative. The large, bland installations, the words made into sculpture or mystifying messages, the torn photographs, the inevitable room with a warning about sexually explicit material – this time it is the 1970s photo collection of a porn star turned artist – everything is somehow awfully familiar. This is art that makes you feel manipulated, makes your heart sink.

What little painting there is knows its place, minds its Ps and Qs, and won’t embarrass critics or curators by being difficult to talk about. Take Michael Fullerton, who says he is inspired by Gainsborough. But it’s not really Gainsborough’s painting, more his socio-political attitude or “aesthetic” that interests Fullerton, whose own paintings are messy, illustrative and slight. Clumsy patches of stippling are the only evidence that he’s ever looked at a Gainsborough. The large painting of a naked woman masturbating above a life-size self-portrait of the artist looking uncomfortable was particularly bad. What really makes these paintings bad is that they don’t go anywhere or open any doors for the viewer. They are closed, finite, and remain safely within the bounds of what they say they are.

“Nothing has changed all over again” says an exhibit by Liam Gillick, in mirror writing – it could be a dry comment on the way Beatrix Ruf, Director of the Kunsthalle, Zurich, curated the Triennial. The Tate claims that the exhibition “reflects the future of British Art” but instead the feeling that you have seen it all before lingers. The curating of the Triennial resembles a Procrustean bed, where the art has to fit an established and accepted format.

Rebecca Warren, The Hostess 2006 re-inforced clay and plinth, 98-1/2 x 33-3/4 x 37-1/2 inches Courtesy the artist and Maureen Paley

There is one important exception. Rebecca Warren’s figurative sculptures (which I saw last instead of first, because I came in through a side entrance) are like a breath of fresh air. Made of unbaked clay, with the look of plasticine which has been pinched and pulled by the fingers of a giant child, they are unfinished and partly formed but completely human, lively, and vulnerable. A large rock cube on wagon wheels is like an outsized toy, but manages to be worrying as well as playful.

Would I have felt differently about the exhibition if I had started where I was meant to? Another wagon near Warren’s made me think that I wouldn’t. It was filled with art materials (rather good ones), as if to satisfy creative urges generated by the Triennial. It only served to underline the negative feelings that the exhibition generated. It was like being offered a party favor after a particularly joyless occasion, and it didn’t make up for the loss.

The attitude of the Biennial curators, Chrissie Iles of the Whitney and Philippe Vergne, Director of Francois Pinault Foundation for Contemporary Art in Paris, was the opposite of Ruf’s. They say they took their cue from the artists, exploring work “where not everything is understood but everything is questioned.” This courage and openness has resulted in an exhibition including a wide spectrum of work that has depth and breadth and makes for a fascinating portrait of contemporary America.

London-based artist David Ben White has created an installation of family portraits in the flat, which seem to inhabit another layer of experience without causing interruption or disrespect to the flat’s original narrative. Using a blend of dripped ink and collaged cutouts to offset his descriptive style, White has based his portraits on closeup photographs of the extended family, simplifying them on the computer, and coming up with a series of strong, painterly images which themselves manage to work on different levels at the same time. These strong, deconstructed faces, glossy black and garish colours on crisp white board, are pasted above, below and in front of the Sarah/Bandi experience, most of them pegged on to lines strung across the balcony where they bob in the breeze like laundry. Because White is a liked and trusted family friend, the faces tend to smile amiably, but the smiles and personalities of White’s subjects are subsumed by his own celebrative and investigative energy. The work of artists as disparate as Boltanski, Calder and Bacon come to mind; intended as a homage to a family, more than that it is a homage to painting.

The exhibition includes a video loop which shows the work as seen at different times of the day and night.