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Work of the Week

Yayoi Kusama

The Wick - Yayoi Kusama Narcissus Garden, 1966

Discover Narcissus Garden, 1966, by Yayoi Kusama

Narcissus Garden,
1966, by Yayoi Kusama

Reflecting on the most controversial and memorable works of sixty Venice Biennales, one work stands out: Yayoi Kusama’s Narcissus Garden. In 1966, Kusama installed 1500 plastic reflective spheres – a “kinetic carpet”, as the artist referred to it – on the grass outside the Italian Pavilion during the 33rd Venice Biennale. Kusama had not been invited to participate in the Biennale – but she showed up in a gold kimono fastened with a silver obi, and handed out printed praise for her work, attempting to sell her scintillating balls at 1200 lire a piece (equivalent to about 50p in today’s currency, the buy of the century for those who purchased).

In 1966, Kusama wasn’t very well known in Europe, though in New York her first mirrored installation, Infinity Mirror Room – Phalli’s Field (1965) had attracted a lot of attention in the US. According to Kusama, Lucio Fontana supported Narcissus Garden, and they had secured permission from the Chairman of the Biennale – but the installation caused an uproar nonetheless. Kusama said: “They made me stop, telling me it was inappropriate to sell my artworks as if they were ‘hot dogs or ice cream cones’. But the installation remained.”

A comment on the commercialisation of art, Narcissus Garden had all the hallmarks of Kusama’s now world-famous works: hallucinatory, expansive installations that immerse the viewer and invite self-reflection and even self-obliteration. In the years that followed, Kusama continued to restage Narcissus Garden all over the world in different ways. Thirty years later it all came full circle when, in 1993, Kusama was selected to represent Japan at the Venice Biennale – becoming both the first individual artist and the first woman to represent her country. But it’s Narcissus Garden – one of the works that kickstarted Kusama’s international career – that remains one of the icon moments in the history of the Biennale.

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The Wick - Discover Gateway, 2019, by Joana Vasconcelos

Discover Gateway, 2019, by Joana Vasconcelos

As the chill in the air ebbs away and is replaced with the scent of spring blossom, the idea of swimming outdoors seems reasonable once again. Surely on every swimmer’s bucket list is Joana Vasconcelos’ spectacular Gateway, an artwork to bathe in: a fully functioning, nine-metre diameter pool made with 13,000 scintillating hand-painted, hand-glazed Viúva Lamego tiles, made exclusively for the Portuguese artist. Vasconcelos is renowned for her collaborative works with artisans and craftspeople, incorporating a variety of craft techniques into her practice in her Lisbon studio. The Gateway pool is surrounded by a lush, landscaped garden at Jupiter Artland, Scotland. The pool is open daily and public swim sessions are available to book for £15.

Gateway was created to coincide with the artist’s 2019 exhibition at Jupiter Artland, which also marked the tenth anniversary of the contemporary sculpture garden located just outside Edinburgh. Fully embracing the spiritual potential of communing and immersing in water, the pool was deliberately constructed along Ley lines, said to intersect across the site of Jupiter Artland, believed to channel earthly energy. The design of the pool was also based on the artist’s astrological charts.

Vasconcelos said of the work: “Gateway is a big splash that invites the public to immerse in a joyful and spirited dimension, leading to a connection with the energy of the Earth. It’s like a threshold to another universe that we’re not conscious of but through which we can flow.”
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The Wick - Skyspace I by James Turrell

Discover Skyspace I, 1974, by James Turrell

American artist James Turrell has long made light his primary medium to encourage us to sharpen our senses to the world around us. He is best known for his series of Skyspaces, minimalist experiences centred around apertures that frame the ever-changing sky. The first – produced in 1974 and on permanent loan to Fondo per l'Ambiente Italiano from the Guggenheim Museum – is a square room with a large square opening in the ceiling, in which the sky is framed by a small slither of white ceiling. The low, concealed fluorescent lights and white floor reflect and intensify the experience.

“With no object, no image and no focus, what are you looking at?” Turrell once asked. “You are looking at you looking. What is important to me is to create an experience of wordless thought.”

Over the years, Turrell has created nearly 90 Skyspaces around the world, with one set to be unveiled in Kansas City in 2024. They recall ancient building techniques that used natural light—and the cycles of the cosmos—to create symbolic architecture. As the clocks change and the days get longer, it feels fitting to channel the Arizona-based artist this week and look at the sky anew.
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The Wick - Oeuvre (Verdigris), 2018, by Gavin Turk Photograph: Courtesy of Gavin Turk’s studio and Ben Brown Fine Arts

Discover Oeuvre (Verdigris), 2018, by Gavin Turk

Gavin Turk has created over 600 odes to the egg over his lifetime, following in the footsteps of artists such as Dali, Magritte and Brancusi. These fragile symbols of life and creation appear in the YBA artist's work in all manner of guises: as surreal faces, broken shells depicting his signature and in liquid form as mayonnaise and egg tempera paint.

“Oeuvre (Verdigris),” 2018, at Yorkshire Sculpture Park is made from patinated bronze and resembles a giant duck egg. In the leafy surrounds of the Lower Lake, it could almost be real, though comic in scale. The work’s title toys with the similarity between the word for an artist’s life’s work – ‘oeuvre’ – and the French word for egg – ‘oeuf’. It will be a fitting sculpture to stumble across as you take a spring stroll around the park this Easter.
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The Wick - No. 299, 29th April 2020 by David Hockney

Discover No. 299, 29th April 2020 by David Hockney

We’re welcoming the onset of spring this week with a little help from David Hockney. In the midst of the pandemic, the British artist captured the season unfolding at his home in Normandy in a series of works ‘painted’ with app brushes on his iPad. You can literally sense his delight in the burgeoning blossom, vivid greenery and bright skies in the pieces, which were exhibited at the Royal Academy in the exhibition, David Hockney: The Arrival of Spring, Normandy, 2020, staged a year later. They feel loaded with optimism despite the strange times we were living through.

Hockney has been using the iPad to create works since the Noughties. Throughout his life, he has embraced technology – including cameras, photocopiers and fax machines – so it is no surprise that he should regard the tablet as just another tool for drawing and painting. His Normandy works capture the wild intensity of Spring, while giving it with a thrilling new electricity.
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The Wick - Sheila Hicks (American, b. 1934 in Hastings, Nebraska) The Principal Wife, 1968 Bundled and wrapped linen, rayon and acrylic yarns; Lucite bar Length: 254 cm (100 inches) Gift of in memory of Mary Josephine Cutting Blair 2005.42

Discover The Principal Wife

“Textile is a universal language. In all of the cultures of the world, textile is a crucial and essential component. Therefore, if you’re beginning with thread, you’re halfway home. There’s a level of familiarity that immediately breaks down any prejudice.” So said American artist Sheila Hicks in 2014 of a material that has been a mainstay of her career, woven, sculpted and teased into all manner of giant installations.

The Principal Wife is part of a series of works of the same name by the pioneering fibre artist. To make them, she wraps bundles of undyed linen thread with brightly dyed thread at random intervals to form sculptures that appear to cascade down the wall. The title recalls the varied roles of women that Hicks has observed and the ways in which they can split and combine into new forms.

Hicks’ work is currently on show in Weaving Abstraction in Modern and Ancient Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, until 16 June 2024.
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The Wick - 'The Three Ages of Woman' by Gustav Klimt, 1905.

Discover The Three Ages of Woman by Gustav Klimt, 1905

A mother cradles her child in her arms in Austrian artist Gustav Klimt’s The Three Ages of Woman, swathed in a blue aura with a pattern that recalls Byzantine mosaics. The pair appear to sleep, unaware of our gaze. Beside them is an older woman, in a warmer aura of earthy tones, who hides her face between her hand and long, flowing hair.

The work represents the cycle of life in unflinching detail – including the folds of skin and sinewed arms of the older woman. Some say that, in separating the mother and child, Klimt is idealising youth and suggesting that life stops when a woman’s reproductive years pass, but others suggest that the work evokes the beauty and vulnerability of womanhood – a vision of femininity that eschews idealisation. To us, Klimt shows the beauty in all three states, offering a beguiling celebration of what it is to be a woman at any age.
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The Wick - When Forms Come Alive, Hayward Gallery February 2024 Ruth Asawa

Dream The wire sculptures of Ruth Asawa

Ruth Asawa’s undulating organic forms are instantly recognisable – and unfailingly alluring. Woven in wire and plunging from the ceiling, her sculptures broke down the binaries between creative disciplines. “It doesn’t bother me. Whether it’s a craft or whether it’s art. That is a definition that people put on things,” she once said.

Born in California in 1926, Asawa began taking classes in art and painting at an internment camp in the US, where she and her family were among thousands of people of Japanese descent who were forcibly detained by the government during World War II. After her release, she enrolled at the legendary experimental art school Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where she was taught by the likes of Josef Albers and Buckminster Fuller. During those years, she travelled to Mexico with Albers and his wife, the fibre artist Anni Albers, and learned to weave in wire while visiting a village outside Mexico City. The technique – involving looping the material with a dowel – became a mainstay of her career. She compared the process to drawing in the air, saying “I was interested in the economy of a line, enclosing three-dimensional space.” In this trio of sculptures, on view at the Hayward Gallery exhibition, When Form Comes Alive (7 February — 6 May 2024), the interior of each piece is as important as its profile. As the show's title suggests, they have a life of their own.
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The Wick - Landscape near Malabata, Tangier, by Francis Bacon, 1963

Dream Landscape near Malabata, Tangier by Francis Bacon, 1963

Francis Bacon’s tribute to “the only man I ever loved” radiates with the unsettling emotional intensity that came to typify his work. With a nod to the landscapes of Vincent Van Gogh, it shows a small figure on the edge of woodland, darting across grass scorched by the searing African sun. It pulses with passion, ecstasy and pain – the highs and lows of his tumultuous relationship with his partner Peter Lacy, and his subsequent death in Tangier, Morocco.

Landscape Near Malabata, Tangier has resurfaced on the market for the first time in nearly 40 years and will go under the hammer at Christie’s in London on 7 March, with a pre-sale estimate of £15-20 million – more than 35 times its sale price when it was last auctioned in 1985 ($517,000, a world record for Bacon at the time).

The artist’s relationship with Lacy began after they met at the Colony Room in Soho in 1952. The former fighter pilot was a troubled man, who battled with alcoholism and reportedly had a violent streak. He once threw Bacon through a glass window, according to an account by art critic John Richardson, writing in the New York Review of Books. But that didn’t dim Bacon’s passion. He honoured Lacy in several other paintings, including the triptych, “Study for Three Heads” (1962), in the collection of MoMA, New York. Spinning with a “near centrifugal force”, as Katharine Arnold – the head of post-war and contemporary art at Christie’s Europe – puts it, Landscape Near Malabata, Tangier is a highly charged portrait of love and loss, in all its rich complexity.
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The Wick - Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901), Au lit: Le baiser, 1892. Oil on board, 17⅞ x 23 in (45.5 x 58.5 cm). Private Collection.

Dream Au lit: Le baiser by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Two young female lovers are locked in a passionate clinch, their limbs tangled together amid swirling, sea-blue bed sheets. This 1892 painting is one of four by Henri de Toulouse Lautrec depicting intimacy between two women in a maison close (brothel) – stolen moments of tenderness captured with deep sensitivity. They are part of the French painter, printmaker and illustrator’s long exploration of Paris’ demi-monde, which saw him paint as many as 70 pictures of prostitutes. There’s an empathy and sensuality to the way he captures this couple, as if he is using the ocean-like bedsheets to protect their forbidden love from the outside world.
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