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From: Mary Leiphardt
Category: Exhibitions
Date: 30 May 2001
2001 Jerwood Painting Prize Union Street SE1 London until June 17
I hate these kind of silly art competitions because I never get in to them. The process involves paying a fifteeen pounds entry fee to deliver a few paintings/ 10 slides to a warehouse where some critics/curators/fellow artists/celebrities will look at them for a few seconds or hours and choose from the million/two hundred entries somewhere between five and twenty artists to show. These artists will be the usual mix of ex-golsmiths/rca students and more “established”( boring) artists. One or two of them will be awarded big cash prizes. Those not chosen for the show/ the losers will be sent a form letter explaining the difficulties of the judges in choosing from the high standard of the entries. The high standard is usually invisible in the selected finalists.
This show was quite ugly. The horrendously poky Jerwood Space does not help. But neither did the work. Ian Davenport’s medium drips were destroyed by the messy space and comparison even with the other work. Marte Marce’s work is very difficult to judge, there is little there except quite nice colours and patterns, but you could imagine they might be good in some inexplicable way. Pratt’s work has too much texture as usual and I wonder what the point of it is . Still Marce, Pratt, and Davenport are better than the others: the truly dull decorative patterns of Tim Renshaw, the shockingly non-ironic figuratives of Peter Archer, and the tired foot and mouth paintings of Basil Beattie. As my friend said “this is really bad”. I told him to shut up, this is art and someone might hear.
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