Joy, Dance, Magic – Three Artist Films. Art & Critique Art Crawl #14 from Mayfair to Fitzrovia

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Art & Critique Art Crawl #14: Joy, Dance, Magic – Three Artist Films

Saturday, 30 March 2019, 13:45 -17:00
Meet at Lévy Gorvy Gallery, London W1S 4PY
Curated by Eva Ruschkowski
All welcome, booking required

Join us for a stroll from Mayfair to Fitzrovia to visit three galleries showing video works by Agnes Martin, Geta Brătescu and Rachel Rose. The Art & Critique Art Crawls are excursions that offer the opportunity to explore, articulate thoughts and critically discuss exhibitions in a group.

We will meet at 13:45 at Lévy Gorvy Gallery to begin our journey with Martin’s film ‘Gabriel’ (1976). We follow a fourteen-year-old boy, the protagonist of the film, on his leisurely meander through a rural landscape to take part in his innocent exploration of natural beauty. “[The movie] turned out to be about joy – the same thing my paintings are about” the artist states. By contrasting Martin’s film with her serene geometric experimentation on canvas which she mainly is known for, Lévy Gorvy allow a deeper insight into the artist’s work and, as the gallery proposes, to “linger in the pensive calm that Martin’s art, regardless of its medium, so exquisitely conveys.”

A similar juxtaposition of still and moving images will greet us at Hauser and Wirth, our second stop, which is showing a group of works Geta Brătescu made over the last decade. Richly informed by literature and mythology, Brătescu untiringly explores her fascination for drawing, composition and line. ‘When I draw, I can say that my hand dances’. Hauser and Wirth put her drawings and collages in conversation with two films ‘Linia (The Line)’ (2014) and ‘The Gesture, The Drawing’ (2018), which were created in collaboration with Ștefan Sava and give an intimate insight into Brătescu’s studio practice and creative thinking process.

We will round out our walk at Pilar Corrias with Rachel Rose’s atmospheric film set in 1500s rural England. ‘Wil-o-Wisp’ (2018) tells the story of Elspeth Blake, which was inspired by the fate of healers who practised in the time of the Enclosure Movement. Rose draws us in the realm of magic at the same time examining the drastic historical shift and its consequences caused by the privatisation of communal land.

Schedule:

13.45 - Lévy Gorvy, 22 Old Bond St, London W1S 4PY

15.00 - Hauser and Wirth, 23 Savile Row, London W1S 2ET

16.00 - Pilar Corrias, 54 Eastcastle St, London W1W 8EF