Birthday Treats

So to treat myself, I went to the Tate to see the Rothko exhibition. Mark Rothko is one my favourite painters. I love the pulsating vibrant colours that seem to sing with joy.

This exhibition focuses on his work in series. Honestly, I was a bit disappointed. I wanted to immerse myself in saturated colour, but a lot of the works exhibited, like Black-Form paintings, his Brown and Grey works on paper, and his last series of Black on Grey paintings were so sombre. But then again, Rothko meant them to be contemplative. If you kept looking at what appeared to be a solid black canvas, you would begin to discern a difference in the way light reflected. I enjoyed the textural/reflective subtleties that emerged slowly. But this experience was so far removed from the vibrant works that I had gone to experience. Maybe I wanted the immediate rush of colour, while the works dictated a gentler, more sedate experience.

I was just reading the words I had scribbled in my little notepad while viewing the paintings-
layering, glowing edges, reds, sombre, purple-orange, iron-rust.

The gallery

Black On Maroon: currently on display

On a whim, I went into the Weston Gallery, which is a floor down from Rothko. A selection of contemporary paintings i.e. 1990 onwards were on display. I really enjoyed the works. In particular, Chris Ollifi's No Woman no Cry and Sergej Jensen and Michael Raedecker work both of who work with textile materials and/or techniques. Currently on display are Raedecker's Overnight and Jensen's The World.

I ended the day with Anish Kapoor's Ishi's Light.

The Tate catalogue describes it as: An egg-like structure opens to reveal a dark red interior. Kapoor has related this work to Barnett Newman’s paintings, in which a vertical stripe represents the creation of the universe. In Kapoor’s sculpture, a column of light appears at the centre, produced by reflections from the curved interior. ‘The column of light is like a virtual object’ he has said. ‘It isn’t simply on the surface’. The work is named after Kapoor’s young son Ishan.

Really cool.