How to follow Banksy? It’s a question Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery has been ruminating on ever since last summer’s unprecedented success.
The answer? Bring in those brash Americans. This show is a real coup for Bristol; in collaboration with the Corey Helford Gallery in Los Angeles, 49 noted contemporary artists present new works, many specifically produced for this exhibition.
Entering the gallery is like suddenly appearing in LA without the jet-lag. Vibrant, garish colours shout out from the walls, competing with a glitzy diamond-encrusted sculpture and a giant inflatable ice-cream cone for your attention: ‘Hey, how are YOU today? How you doin’?’ screams the art, desperate to draw you in. But rather than just quick-fix visual food, much of the work is surprisingly subtle, juxtaposing glamour and chastity, beauty with bathos.
Some artists yearn for childhood innocence. Emmy award-winning artist Gary Baseman (pictured left) shows ‘Bubble Girl,’ a wide-eyed cartoon nymph with orange hair and a pink dress covered with eyeballs; Korin Faught’s beautifully painted ‘Bonnet’ (pictured above) shows two tattooed socialites in baby-ish nightwear, blissfully asleep and removed from California’s harsh adult world; and the young face in Josh Petker’s ‘Headwound,’ with one eye brutally covered, can hardly bear to look out at us.
More overt criticism of America is common. Cold-hearted prostitutes in ‘Wet Tea Party’ sip tea in the pool whilst greedily eyeing up clients, while the central totemic figure in Chris Anthony’s ‘SKAM’ stares at us blindly, gagged by a star from the U.S. flag.
Will ‘Art From The New World’ have people queuing for hours to get in? Perhaps not, but it’s a laudable attempt to keep Bristol firmly on the map of contemporary culture.
Jonathan Camp
Bristol City Museum & Art Gallery
10am to 5pm daily, free. Tel: 0117 922 3571.
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I’m fairly sure I read an interview with the woman who painted ‘Wet Tea Party’ and she said she invited her friends over for a tea party, which she had coriographed for the composition of the painting, and they ignored her and jumped in the pool… but then enjoying art is all about your own interpretation I suppose
Great exhibition for the summer…
Questionable having an exhibition curated by a gallery and including most of their stable of artists. Kind of like Sensation and Saatchi except worse because Saatchi, while commercial and trading works, didn’t actually represent particular artists and drew his artists from a wide variety of places. This exhibition isn’t young art from LA (no Mark Bradford, no Elliott Hundley etc.); and taking Mark Ryden as the grandaddy of an LA art scene (while most of the art in the show looks, from a long way down, at people like Lari Pitman and Jim Shaw) is skewed and awkward. If you don’t know any of the names I’m writing it’s because this is a contextless and cynical show.