Galleries - July 2015

Rembrandt, Durer, Munch, Goya, and Warhol prints, Mapplethorpe, Struth and Helmut Newman photographs, major Joseph Beuys, Cattelan sculptures, and drawings and paintings from practically everyone you can think of from Cézanne and Matisse up to Gerhard Richter and Cindy Sherman. Museum quality indeed and well curated too. Reeling out of that I found myself going round the corner to Hanina Fine Arts , a gallery which, in perhaps rather less spectacular but equally important fashion, opens one’s eyes to a still surprisingly forgotten area of recent art history, the Ecole de Paris. Their current show, entitled ‘Cubism 2.0’ (to 8July) is typical of their scholarly and open-eyed view of this often somewhat puzzlingly disparaged field. With works as powerful as André Lhote’s Cubist influenced landscape ‘Sur La Terrasse 1945’ , exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1954, and Hungarian Modernist Róbert Berény’s subtle Cubistic ‘Nature Morte’, these are the kind of discoveries that really change received wisdoms. Going west of New Bond Street to Davies Street the picturesque way, via Avery Row and Brooks Mews with their cafés and smart restaurants, there are now also numerous galleries – among them Sarah Myerscough’s superb craft/- design space pioneering a new direction in this field. JULY 2015 GALLERIES 9 adventurous, this was to become his preferred medium, allowing him to give his work an often painterly and intensely atmospheric quality. Meanwhile right next door is Timothy Taylor whose big Philip Guston show – seriously museum quality late work – is on to 11 July. If you still have the stamina, head back now across Berkeley Square and into Bruton Street – several galleries here fighting it out with fashion, the best of which, in my view at least, is Osborne Samuel . Sadly their stunning recent Henry Moore show has now closed though I imagine a fair number of works from it will still be included in their summer exhibition which, with their quality of Modern British stock, will always be worth checking out. Finally back into the lower end of New Bond Street is Opera Gallery , best known perhaps for their European 20th Century art. They will be celebrating their 10th anniversary with a wide-ranging show entitled ‘Raw Footage’ in which some 12 leading European and American fashion photographers, MarioTestino, Vincent Peters,Gerard Rancinan and Douglas Kirkland among them, strut their remarkable stuff. Nicholas Usherwood In Davies Street itself there is another gallery with serious claims to be considered as one of London’s leading pioneers of avant-garde art in the immediate post-war period – Gimpel Fils . Long before Hanover or Marlborough, Charles and Peter Gimpel gave countless early stars of post-war British art their first show. It still does so today with their current show of young Dutch artist Edwin Zwakman’s quietly claustrophobic take on office architecture ‘Step into My Office.’ With its lowered, harshly- lit ceiling and just slightly smaller than human floor space, you go out into the world with, as the artist himself puts it, “more active and critical eyes.” From here cut across to Chandos Place where the long- established and highly-regarded photography gallery Hamiltons Gallery is mounting a show of the Polaroid prints the great Italian fashion photographer Paolo Roversi started taking in the 1980s. Always technically from left: V incent Peters ‘Laetitia Hotel Apollo Paris 3’ archival print, at Opera Gallery. Paolo Roversi ‘Tanga and Jenny, Paris’ © the artist, at Hamiltons Gallery. David Hockney ‘The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011’ iPad drawing, at Annely Juda. André Lhote (1885-1962) ‘Sur la Terrasse’ oil on canvas, signed, at Hanina Fine Arts. Edwin Zwakman ‘Step into my Office’ at Gimpel Fils Andy Warhol ‘Self-Portrait in Fright Wig’ 1986, Andy Warhol Foundation, at Christie’s Mayfair Going west of New Bond Street to Davies Street the picturesque way

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