Predicting the careers of young artists is a perilous game, for outrageous fortune has a good many slings and arrows in her armoury. But the fourth edition of the Catlin Guide attempts to do just that, picking out 40 of the most intriguing recent graduates from British art schools from Bournemouth to Glasgow.
According to Justin Hammond, the curator who narrowed down the shortlist of 200-odd graduates "through a process of studio visits and stalking", the year's haul has seen a "particularly diverse" selection, with work ranging from oil painting, sculpture and installation to video to performance.
The recent calming of the art market in the face of the recession is taking its effect. "There's a good trend of artists who are not making market-ready art," said Hammond. "And that's really positive."
One manifestation of that trend is the prominence of performance work: artists making live art range from Lydia Brain, a recent graduate from Wimbledon College of Art, who creates video and performance about men from Hasidic Jewish communities; and Andrew Gannon from Edinburgh College of Art, whose work, he writes, may consist of "performing unrehearsed rope escapes and painting the faces of gallery invigilators".
The opening of the Tanks at Tate Modern last year – and the appearance for the first time of a performance artist, Spartacus Chetwynd, on the Turner prize shortlist – has confirmed the current interest in performance art among artists and curators.
There's also some refreshingly upfront feminism in the guide, which will be launched on 16 January at the London Art Fair. The work of Hannah Lyons, she writes, "is concerned with aspects of personal inadequacy and the undesirable and unwanted feelings associated with being a bloody woman". The work she shows in the guide is an armless, headless, classical-style sculpture of a skimpily draped woman, titled Ironic Piece of Work by a Female Artist.
According to the art historian Ben Street, who has contributed the guide's foreword, there is something else that draws many of the artists in the book together. If the work of recent Turner prize winners could be characterised, through its quietness and self-effacement, as a riposte to the bombast of the YBAs, young artists emerging from colleges now are, perhaps, post-post-YBAs. There is, writes Street, "a shrugging-off of the Oedipal battles of the modern past, towards an acquiescence, and engagement even, with aspects of art's history. They've decided … 'that the grandparents were cool'."
Nearly a quarter of the artists, for example, are painters. One, Steven Allan, paints "humanised objects such as bananas, teapots and paint tubes". So far, so peculiar, but his work We're All In This Together is a knowing reworking – with bananas – of Poussin's A Dance to the Music of Time. Another, Philip Booth, who recently gained a BA from Camberwell College of Arts, works in as unfashionable a genre as still life. Hyojun Hyun, from the fine art MFA at Glasgow School of Art, makes paintings that attempt to capture "the new shapes and textures of the neglected, disorderly urban landscape" – fleeting moments of beauty amid the rough-and-ready streets of his adopted city, so "different from Seoul", his hometown.
Nancy White is not a showy painter. Her abstract works at Steven Zevitas Gallery, no larger than 10? inches tall, sport a consistent color value, which means there’s little contrast of bright and dark — rather, this group of paintings is fervently dim.
That’s part of what captivates. White doesn’t romance the eye, but she draws the viewer into her small worlds of slicing shapes and tilting planes with compositions that suggest surprising space. Within the dusky tones, there may not be glamour, but there’s mystery.
These works verge toward monochromatic, with “#35” shuffling oranges, and “#40” built from wine reds with the occasional sliver of green. White’s color consistency evokes temperature, humidity, and the suggestion of stepping into a small, enclosed space with passages and obstructions that invite you to find your way by touch.
These are White’s largest paintings to date, and she introduces curves amid all her straight edges. In “#44,” which is all gray-blues and browns, the left side looks like a brown bracket, cupping a scoop of blue twilight — the deep space in this painting. The layered planes of gray and brown to the right might be a pyramid, opening at the front to spill an unlikely shadow.
The flat, opaque forms in these works build on one another to suggest volume, they scissor around each other like slotted pieces of construction paper, or they angle out as if crisply folded. The orange piece, “#35,” features that last trick, as triangles pivot one into the next, making a zigzag in which one angle nests into the next. These fractured, complex spaces confound, but, in their delicacy, they draw you in.
White’s powerfully understated paintings are effective because her formal rigor prompts the experience of night vision — groping through shadows, looking for edges — which makes you feel as if you can’t see at all. But of course you can. It’s just a different way of seeing.
The work comes across as varied and, on the whole, incisive and witty. Niho Kozuru’s “Nova,” a red rubber circle, serrated on the inside, blobby on the outside, combines the organic with the industrial. Nancy Milliken’s “Honey Wall” is fairly simple — a translucent square case filled with honey, mounted on the wall — but it deliciously conflates structure with light and taste. Roz Driscoll’s “Moult” features a ceiling-high ladder, and a strip of rawhide twines down it like the castoff skin of a snake. Dan Wills’s “Nervous Reaction,” a cartoon sculpture of a bolt shying from a voracious wrench, is a hoot.
I’m a sucker for sculptures that play against monumentality, such as Hannah Verlin’s “Extinct,” a cube of paper circles, each written over with the name of a species that has become extinct. Viewers are encouraged to take a circle with them. Then there’s Andy Moerlein’s “Hanging by a Thread,” suspended over the gallery’s front door: It looks like a boulder, but it hangs from a string; it’s likely made of something much lighter than the rock it purports to be.
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