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From: margaret
Category: Exhibitions
Date: 18 March 2004
I always want to meet harry pye and never get to say anything to him. next time I will approach him. He seems a nice guy.
this exhibition has his usual mix of humor/seriousness of the subject, and this has called lots of different people, heavily testing their humor/seriousness qualities, and the distance they can take to a subject that is actually supposed to be so close the each one's heart, all this leading somehow to irony, (we hope, as some images are really badly, innocently, skillfully painted)
since it was very big the group of people called -100- it is easy to check who and how has fallen on which category. and nonetheless there is NOT a hughe amount of differences in the approach to the subject or premise "Paint your own mother".
in fact, since some people made their work keeping their trademark pencil line/ photo image/vagina brushstroke/ figureinlandscape /etc... it could be possible to think that harry, with the aide of a few skilled friends, actually faked the whole group show, making all the images himself -this would have implied a year or so of image research and collection by the artist with the 100 artists in a borgesian way- only a few artists surprise you with what they did with the stretched canvas provided by the organiser. These are the artists who actually don't usually paint, or have changed the way they paint because, ie, mums are hard to represent with stripes or grids or drips or monochromes. I highlight the vagina mum by jj, the bob abd roberta repeating a 30 years ago drawing, the shrigley blub, the eva bensacon skilled, and amongst all, the john strutton, explaining details of the life of the child and mum together in a simple interesting way, details of the memory of the mother which probalbly we all share similarly, but few artists presented here. there is a website to this show, it is a very inteesting shoe in an unusual place with an unusual close subject. the link to which you can see in one of the reviews below.
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