witty stuff: Laing Art Gallery/ Baltic39

We had a course walk about Newcastle and visited The Laing Gallery art gllery and Baltic39.

The Laing is home to an impressive collection of art and sculpture and its exhibition programme is renowned for bringing the biggest names in historic, modern and contemporary art to the North East.

Here are some of the 20th century abstract paintings on display in the upstairs gallery that we visited;

Paul Feiler

The artist Paul Feiler was a prominent member of the St Ives School of art, has pictures hanging in major art galleries of the world. Paul Feiler was born in 1918 in Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany. He also studied at the Slade School of Art in London 1936-1939.

Anthony Benjamin (1931-2002)

Anthony Benjamin moved to cornwall in 1955 where he lived in a cottage at Crippelsease near St Ives, then a centre for abstract Art, and painted landscape based abstracts. In 1958 he won a scholarship to study printmaking at SWHayter's Paris studio 'Atelier17'. Much of his workafter this time shows the influence of American Abstract Expressionaisn, as he became more interested in form and colour rather than representing physical objects.

Below is an example of one of his abstract screenprints on paper 1965.

Also upstairs we viewed 'Timecasting', an installation by Nick Kennedy; Timecasting incorporated rows of clocks each with a lead attached to one of the hands each of differing lengths. Over time the lead creates a spiral drawing, each one being slightly different. It reminds me of Spirograph an eighties toy that created lots of spiral patterns from various sized circular cogs with holes in for putting the pencil lead ! obviously this was a rather more sophisticated version as the point of the installation was to record the passing of time. I thought it was a well thought out and well executed installation.

Downstairs we viewed some of Paul Noble's work:

Paul Noble's work represented the gallery at last year’s Venice Biennale which was an initiative led by The National Glass Centre at the University of Sunderland, which brought together the Laing Art Gallery, Locus+ and mima, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, with Caterina Tognon Arte Contemporanea in Venice to present Interloqui, an exhibition coinciding with the 54th Venice Biennale of Art. A selection of his ceramics are also on display

.I really like the organic structure and detail in this piece of Nobles work, this image is just a small section of a huge piece of his work exhibited on one of the walls. It appears to be woven into the cloth like a huge tapestry/ wall hanging.

After visiting the Laing we walked to BALTIC39.

BALTIC 39 is a cultural hub for contemporary art located in the heart of Newcastle with a gallery programmed by BALTIC. It is also home to thirty-two artist studios, Northumbria University Fine Art students and the BALTIC Professor. BALTIC 39 is a collaboration between Newcastle City Council, Arts Council England, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art and Northumbria University.

Managed and programmed by BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, the top floor gallery, BALTIC project space offers artists and guest curators creative freedom to experiment and innovate, enabling them to stretch the boundaries of contemporary art practice. Managed and programmed by BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, the top floor gallery, BALTIC project space offers artists and guest curators creative freedom to experiment and innovate, enabling them to stretch the boundaries of contemporary art practice. The building has an urban feel to it but the area to the rear has been extended so what were external walls are now incorporated within the internal space of the building. There is a huge staircase that gives access to all of the levels with studios on and at the top is the large gallery space. The staircase is open and you can see the structure of the building and what was the outside prior to the construction of the gallery.

Currently exhibiting in the gallery space is Matt Calderwood, Paper Over the cracks.

Matt Calderwood (born in 1975 in Northern Ireland) is known for his often perilous performances, sculpture and film works. Calderwood's carefully controlled sculptures rely on counterbalance and friction to keep them steady, transforming everyday household items such as buckets, wine glasses, basketballs, shovels, into something extraordinary and seemingly close to collapse.

For his solo exhibition at BALTIC 39, his first in a public gallery in the UK, Calderwood ll created a series of sculptures which explore decaying and collapsing systems and the impact of environment and process on simple everyday materials. Made of fragile, degradable materials and interlocking elements, the works will be installed on the gallery’s roof terrace where they will weather and decompose, their delicate surfaces recording their exposure and deterioration. They will then be dismantled and reassembled over the course of the exhibition. Calderwood will also presents a site-specific sculptural video installation showing new and recent films, each documenting a performance in which the artist experiments with balance, tension, instability and risk.

The sculptural geometric shaped blocks displayed on the floor were used to create the prints exhibited on the walls, effectively like potato prints!