Liverpool Exhibition Visit

On Thursday we went to Liverpool to visit some exhibitions, it was really good to see some of the recent contemporary art that has been exhibited.

We first went to the Walker art gallery and as we went into the exhibition space we saw a wall with loads of sticky notes on:

I thought this piece was really good because it allowed the viewers to participate even before entering the exhibition itself. We all had a go at putting one on each of the questions, it was pretty hard to think of an answer in some cases because I found out that there is more than one answer for each one of them. 

This sticky note was below the question 'Who inspires you?' and I found it pretty amusing:

American Pie is one of my favorite films so I thought that was funny! Except from the odd silly answers, it looked like it got a really good outcome. 

This is a picture of Phil Simpson having a go on the post-it note wall:

Phil Simpson writing on a post-it note.

As we walked into the exhibition we walked past John Moore's painting prize that was made by 'Sarah Pickstone'. It was really nice to see this piece of art for the second time. As we have recently produced an artist statement last week for the 'Dispatches' project, I wanted to have a read of what Sarah Pickstone said about her work. It was really interesting because it said that the painting that she had created was a representation of the poet 'Steve Smith' in a deranged landscape. One of the interesting things about this is that its a painting from one artist reflected through another!

After reading the artist statement it said that the poem that was written by 'Steve Smith' was a very dark poem, Pickstone changed this in a way wanting to make something more joyous out of the poem.

This is the John Moore's painting prize:

As you can see she has used colour to bring this joyous feeling to the poem even though it is of a dark nature. 

I saw a couple of pieces opposite the painting prize winner that caught my eye. One of them was a previous painting prize winner called 'Kieth Coventry' who created a piece of art named 'Spectrum Jesus'. When I first looked at it, it looked a bit weird, but in a good way! This piece of art was an oil painting but also used wood and glass. Coventry's work displays a dark flip-side to idealism: Urban decay, Social failure etc. The artwork displayed was a blue monochrome depicting the face of Christ.

This is the artwork from Kieth Coventry called 'Spectrum Jesus':

 

The other piece of artwork that was opposite the John Moore's painting prize I didn't manage to jot the name of he artist down. But, it was a strange piece which I might research more into. This is what it looked like:

  

I saw a piece of art while I was walking out of the Walker art gallery which caught my eye. The main thing that drew me to this piece was the different textures and how the paint has been allowed to fall/slide down the canvas. It was like gravity was taking the paint!

This is what this piece looked like:

I really liked this piece as it didn't just use paint but also used other materials. I had to take a closer picture to see the finer details:

This piece displays layers really nicely, I think ill take a book out from Uni to do with painting and see if I could incorporate these elements into my work!

After we came out of the Walker art gallery, we went over to the Bluecoat. Unfortunately it was closed as I think they were setting up for another exhibition. So, we decided to make our way down to the Liverpool Tate. Again, there was an exhibition called 'Glam' that I would have liked to see but didn't start till the following day so we have decided to go back and view it at another date. As we were there anyway, we had a walk around the other exhibitions that were taking place in the Liverpool Tate. Some of the pieces were really interesting and involved its audiences really well, for example, there were a couple of dark rooms where one you had to take a camera in and use the flash to see, and the others had video's playing.

I saw 2 posters that had language/text written on them which I thought was pretty interesting: