Galleries - October 2010

THUMB nails 14. GALLERIES OCTOBER 10 One of Italy’s most celebrated fashion and celebrity photographers over the last 40 years, with a dramatic, intensely informal style, Bob Krieger has found himself, through the 1990s, turning away from commercial photography to pursue a growing fascination with ways of rendering the human body. Two published volumes, Metamorfosi (1990) and Anima Nudi (1998) followed and now, with this new show ( Imago ) entitled KRGR, he takes the idea a whole step further, making painterly intrusions on the photographic image – to strikingly powerful sensual effect. Bob Krieger ‘Evoluzione’ (detail) Volcanoes have always occupied a powerful place in our collective imag- ination, whether, as in 18th C. Europe, with artists like Wright of Derby, they stand as examples of a cataclysmic natural power that man was trying to understand scientifically, or in Japanese prints, by Hokusai and others, of latent symbolic force, or today, in film and video, as part of our morbid fascination with the immanent sense of mortality they embody. This marvellous show, at Compton Verney, entitled simply ‘Volcano: Turner to Warhol’, covers all these bases to striking visual effect. S ir William Hamilton ‘Observations on the Volcanoes of the two Sicilies’ (detail) Coinciding with his massive retrospective currently at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, this exhibition of David Nash’s recent work at Annely Juda contains, alongside some recent sculptures – a comparatively new innovation, his 2-D Colour Works series. Though works on paper Nash doesn’t see them as drawings, being more interested in the quality of the raw pigment than their form as crayon or pencil and, as with the 3-D work, the mutability of the medium. Indeed it is just this quality that, 40 years on, keeps all of Nash’s work so astonishingly fresh and relevant. D avid Nash installation shot Whitford is showing acrylic abstracts by celebrated Aboriginal artist Kudditji Kngwarreye. Born in 1928, it was not until the early 90s that he began to produce bold lyrical paintings such as My Country . Kudditji’s ‘Dream Paintings’ are in fact evocations of the dreams, myths and cere- monial rituals of the Aboriginal peoples of the Central Desert region and form part of an ancient tradition that is also linked to modernity, as Mark Rothko, a painter to whom Kudditji has been compared, also used fields of colour to evoke dreams from the collective unconscious. Clive Joinson Kudditji Kngwarreye ‘My Country 03’ 2007 Nicholas Usherwood