The Lade: 2012

Thursday, 20 September 2012

Friday, 27 April 2012

Humble Pie - I Don't Need No Doctor - 1971

Adrian Wisniewski at Glasgow Print Studio:"TRANSCENDENTAL POOL PARTY".

One of the most enjoyable exhibitions that I've seen recently.A show retailing some of Wisniewski's signature motifs from his career,but in a bolder & more muscular form than I had expected.I remember some years back,being impressed by the scale,audacity & stripped-down technique of his painting,"Two.Men.Doing.Absolutely.Nothing.".The subject matter was pretty much as the title implied,but "doing it" on an extravagantly large scale,& this ethos is celebrated throughout this beguiling collection:fey youth-frozen-forever busy doing very little, within their fractured day-glo worlds.Playing with snakes in "Omega Man",reading,drinking tea,playing with oysters.A disconcertingly docile revolutionary whittles on a twig while in the cheerfully insane,"Two Superheroes Waiting" the Wonderwoman lazilly sips on a glass of absinthe , in colours as acidly bright as the Gallery's adjacent jar of complimentary Smarties.All this against a backdrop of Arcadian meadows or nestled in darkly sylvan glades fringed by weirdly fecund blooms & creeping vines. I particularly enjoyed,"Unicorn".Differing from the others,this is painted in a linear monochrome over a muted ,tea-stain like wash & features the horniest Unicorn you are likely to see outside a Hentai Porno-Flick.Technically,it has some of the most attractive qualities of a giant steel-plate etching,but without all that troublesome heaving about & printing.Keep it to yourself,but I have mentally filed this one away in the section of my brain labelled,"Borrow/Steal at some point in the Future".