Tate let-down is Chris Ofili. I’m sorry, this exhibition stinks. As an art critic it’s my job to honestly tell you this. Masquerading under the black African experience Ofili is still, hopelessly, lacking in skill as he tries, painfully, to express the wonderful primitive fetishism of African art. His doctrinaire formula of decorating his canvas with elephant dung and glow-in-the-dark dots of bright fluorescent colour are now nothing more than simply naïve. Much overworked and predictably garish.
"Go Figurative": Going back to Figurative Art via Barack Obama‘
Since the 1990s, the phrase Conceptual Art has been unfairly manipulated to become an all-encompassing term, generating derision, which some erroneously apply to the Turner Prize, and other anti-figurative art.
As change comes politically, so it follows artistically with art imitating politics, reflecting its time. And so it was, that under former-President George W. Bush art moved towards temporary sculpture, with artists remembering 9/11 as a ‘sculptural’ event based around two Giacometti-tall Judd-shiny minimal ‘sculptures’, razed to the ground. Demolished as a Happening art-from.
Now with President Obama in charge, figurative artist Shepard Fairey was selected to paint Barack’s official Presidential portrait. Deem it au courant for artists to investigate the ‘self’, promoting the figurative back into art, back into vogue.
Putting the ‘F’ word, figurative, into ‘Neo-Figurativism’, Go Figurative...(www.gofigurative.com)
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