Birmingham Art Gallery Visit

As my London gallery visit was not as successful as I had hoped, I decide to got to the Birmingham Art gallery as I had done some research and found that there was quite a lot of work there to do with my theme of figures. These were the photographs of the artwork that I felt were best. There was a lot more artwork in Birmingham that linked really well with my Component 1, from figurative sculptures, to photographs of people much like how I have been using my own photographs of people. This was especially important as my theme for Component 1 is figures, so it meant that there was a lot of different pieces of artwork that were very helpful and inspiring. The colour blue was really emphasised in the exhibition 'Night in the Museum' I went to see in the gallery and it really inspired me to strongly stick to this as a colour theme for my own work. I personally felt that there was a lot more to see in the Birmingham Gallery than the London National Gallery, I think perhaps this is because the exhibition was on at the time I went to the Birmingham Gallery.

I fell in love with this photograph because it is so simple, looking like a family portrait, however the composition with the placing of the people and the lack of colour really makes you focus on the people themselves. How they are standing, the expressions on their faces, I feel like you connect more to the people in the photograph because you just focus on them, and not the colours of their clothes or any other coloured things that can distract you from what you are really looking at.

I really liked these two pieces together, I loved the different tones created by the different shades of blue to create the people in the piece and the contrast between the lighter shades of blue and the darker shades. It links quite well to what I have been doing as I have used a lot of photographs in my work that are made up majority of blue colours, blue had predominantly been the colour I have been using for my photographs as they all contain water. t also links to the exhibition that I also saw in the Birmingham gallery where the primary colour focus was blue.

Exhibition:

There was an exhibition on called 'Night in the Museum' which was created by the artist Ryan Gander. The exhibition was made up of lots of modern and contemporary art. In the film where he was talking about the exhibition he said that people go to galleries and do a lot of viewing of sculptures, sculptures are always viewed and never do the viewing. So the idea behind the exhibition was to take sculptures of people and place them so that they are the ones viewing the artwork, meaning that we are the viewers of the sculptures viewing the artwork. Gander said that there had to be blue in all of the artwork that the sculptures are viewing, he described blue as the colour of infinity. The sky is always blue, day and night, no matter how light or dark it is, screens on standby go blue and will remain blue until turned on again. Gander talked about the colour blue so passionately and thoughtfully that I found it really inspiring and it made me look at my own work differently as I had also been using the colour blue a lot.

This is a sculpture of a woman who is lying on the floor.
Behind the sculpture is a giant blue cube.

I thought this sculpture was quite interesting, it was an engine type thing that was completely covered in these blue crystals. I felt that the blue was very hypnotising, it was so deep and sparkly that I fell in love with the colour. Being surrounded by so much blue in the exhibition changed my perspective of the colour and I noticed that as I walked around I was automatically looking for the slightest thing coloured blue, even after I left the exhibition my eyes were drawn to anything that specifically had the colour blue in it.

This is a figurative sculpture facing a blue cube that has a white light inside.
Hanging above the cube is blue glass orb.

This is a sculpture of a woman sitting down. The
sculpture has been placed so that it is looking at a blue TV
screen which links back to what the Ryan Gander was saying
about a blue screen being infinity.

This was my favourite sculpture in the whole exhibition. I loved how creepy and unusual it looked even though you could still tell that it was clearly a person. The lighting had been placed above and in front of the artwork that the figure was looking at to create the shadow behind on the floor. I loved the layout of the exhibition because the shadows made it feel more real, I felt like the sculptures were real people and that I was actually standing there with them observing the artwork. I spent more time in this exhibition than I did looking at the rest of the gallery because I loved it so much.

I was actually more fascinated by the blue patterned background on the wall than the sculptures in from of it in this section of the exhibition. The BLUE pattern on the wall reminded me of the styles I had been doing when paper cutting, with the geometric shapes. I loved the simplicity of the background because when you think about it, the painting is a really simple thing, however when you look at it, it appears a lot more complex - just like my paper cutting experiments.

This sculpture was one of my favourites in the exhibition. It was interesting as the sculpture itself was blue unlike all of the other sculptures in the exhibition. I also though that sculpture reminded me of cubism as it was made up of these tiny coloured plastic cubes and it also is a bit distorted. I find it quite interesting as well that one half of an arm is missing, it makes it seem like a 3D pixelated character that hasn't been finished yet as it stopped before it had finished being created.