True Colours
Helen Beard, Sadie Laska & Boo Saville
Newport Street Gallery, SE11 6AJ
6 JUNE - 9 SEPTEMBER
Free
Newport Street Gallery is easily one of my favourites. Set up and curated by artist Damien Hirst (who I'm not so keen on), it displays interesting and original collections of modern art, with an emphasis on colour and shape. The gallery's latest exhibition 'True Colours', explores the work of three artists - Helen Beard, Sadie Laska and Boo Saville. Despite the three artist's work being largely different, they all share a common interest in exploring colour and the possibilities a varied palette can bring.
Galleries 1 & 4 display Beard's work: by far the best of the exhibition. Beard uses vivid and contrasting colours to explore sexuality and eroticism - from bodies intertwined or kissing to full on intercourse. Using the medium of paint, Beard describes the brushstrokes mimicking 'strokes to the skin' and evoking the intimate and delicate connection two humans have when they engage in sexual contact. The colours within the paintings largely differ and body parts are thus physically separated, further accentuating the human form and also shapes we find ourselves in during sex - "the arching, all that pushing, that exaggeration" (Beard).
Through the amorphous forms contained within Beard's work, she aims to show the act of sex and pleasure in an indirect and and subtle manner. A number of her works titles, such as "Wet Wednesday" and "Big Night In" aim to mock the simplicity and narrow mindedness of the porn industry and play on the vulgar and cheap ways sex is so often expressed within it. Beard manages to divulge the sexual act as beautiful and intricate, reminding us that it still is and can still be a meaningful occurrence. Ultimately, Beard aims to and succeeds in saving sex from the modern day misconceptions of a male-focused, demeaning and, frankly, quite embarrassing engagement. Rating: *****
Galleries 2 & 6 contain works by Boo Saville, a stark contrast to Beard in both appearance and message. Saville's work contains a large board of mixed colour - something she describes as 'split atom parts' of a single project. If I'm completely honest, they did nothing for me at all and the commentary which came with them was simply a pretentious way of trying to make, well, a colour-board, sound artistic. Pretty to look at, for a second or two, but as a direct contrast to the previous room's of Beard's work, there is for me no comparison in terms of skill.
Saville does have the odd random work which differs from her colour boards in the exhibition. These works supposedly present "chance encounters thrown up by internet algorithms" and display subjects such as a man surveying his erection and an internet-famous 'Janus' cat. These I found much more skilful and interesting than her previous works, particularly the intricate detail of Janus the cat in 'Born with Two Faces'. However, despite these being infinitely better than her other works, it isn't quite enough to save her overall. Rating: **
Galleries 3 & 5 contain works by Laska and it is as if the exhibition is aiming to spiral downwards; wowing us at first and then slowly baffling us to oblivion. In favour of "punk riffs, kitsch subversions and patchworks" Laska's work did even less for me than Saville's. A lot of people often criticise modern art, claiming things like "a child could have done it". Whilst visually, this can be the case, often I find the meaning behind the works, and commentary given by the artist helps the work to escape from this accusation. For Laska, however, her work is merely explained as reflecting "a world of randomised encounters". I genuinely believe that a child could have come up with this description also, in fact their work often is a result of just this: a randomised perception of the world in an explosion of shape and colour. Whilst children's work can often be bloody fantastic, it rarely appears in art galleries such as this, and will never be given the same gratitude or standing as Laska might be: a fact I find frankly quite unfair. Rating: *
Overall, you should go and see True Colours merely to appreciate the stunning works by Helen Beard. It doesn't take long to view the other two and if you want to appreciate Beard's work even more than it is worth viewing Saville and Laska's work merely for comparison. If this exhibition was Beard's work alone, then it would have blown me out the park. Unfortunately, however, I must take the exhibition as a whole and that is why it's overall rating may seem decidedly low.
OVERALL RATING: ***
https://www.newportstreetgallery.com/exhibition/true-colours-helen-beard-sadie-laska-boo-saville/
