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RUSSIA, ROYALTY & THE ROMANOVS The story of how two royal houses became entwined ●●●●● BRIDGET RILEY Major retrospective exhibition of iconic British painter ●●●●●
Two full-length portraits flank the stairway to the Queen’s Gallery: on one side Peter the Great, the first Russian ruler to set foot on British soil, and on the other Tsar Nicholas II, the last. They bookend more than 200 years of diplomatic and familial connections between the British and Russian royal families. Ultimately, this exhibition tells the story of how
two royal houses, initially suspicious of one another, became intimately entwined, mainly thanks to Queen Victoria’s determination to marry her offspring into Europe’s most important families. Rare cine footage survives of the visit paid to her at Balmoral in 1896 by Nicholas II and his wife, her granddaughter Princes Alix of Hesse (‘little Alicky’).
Even if you spend much of your time trying to disentangle the dynastic connections and work out who was first cousin to whom (answer: most people are), there is something incredibly poignant about the family photographs of Nicholas and Alix enjoying the regatta at Cowes in 1909, and the tiny Cossack general’s uniform made for Prince Alexei, knowing that tragedy loomed just around the corner. (Susan Mansfield) n The Queen’s Gallery, until 3 Nov, £7.20 (£3.80– £6.80).
Ways of seeing are everything in this major overview of one of the UK’s greatest living painters. With work from seven decades shown across ten rooms, Bridget Riley’s vast back catalogue at first appears to move back and forth in straight lines. But as she goes from black and white to colour and back again, sensory responses are bent out of shape to a dizzying degree. If there is an umbilical link running throughout, it is an increasing expansiveness as the decades roll on. This makes for a thrilling dynamic, as the different coloured shapes seem to dance with each other.
Beyond kaleidoscopic exhilaration, there is a
painstaking meticulousness to Riley’s work. The roots of this can be found in the first and last rooms, which bookend the exhibition, first with a look at the influence of 19th-century French artist Georges Seurat, then with a revelatory display of early, pre- abstract works. A room full of preparatory drawings, too, shows off Riley’s painstaking attention to detail and the sheer graft involved in what she does. This is proof positive, if it were needed, that in Riley’s world, nothing’s ever really black and white. (Neil Cooper) n Scottish National Gallery, until 22 Sep, £15 (£8.50–£13).
CUT AND PASTE: 400 YEARS OF COLLAGE The world’s first survey exhibition of collage ●●●●●
Everything connects in this major overview of the ultimate DIY artform, which brings together more than 180 works dating as far back as the 16th century. Back then, anatomical woodcuts with flaps to reveal bodily interiors were used as educational novelties, predating the sort of paper dolls appropriated by the ultimate dressing-up-box mistress of reinvention Cindy Sherman for her short film, Doll Clothes (1975). Sherman was one of a wave of women artists using collage in a way that opened the door for the feminist photomontages of Linder or Penny Slinger. Along the way, an array of dadaists, cubists, futurists and punk provocateurs mix and match words and pictures to disrupt, satirise and explode old ideas out of existence.
While we never quite get to the aural collages of
sampling, Eduardo Paolozzi’s 13-minute film, History of Nothing, uses sound as well as vision to both illustrate and subvert the busy rush of a multi-tasking world. As it is, we finish with the likes of Christian Marclay, Jim Lambie and Jake and Dinos Chapman, who, in radically different ways, are still ripping it up and starting again. (Neil Cooper) n Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern Two), until 27 Oct, £11.
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CINDY SHERMAN: EARLY WORKS, 1975–80 Seminal early works by the influential American artist ●●●●●
Cindy Sherman is one of the most celebrated self-portrait photographers ever, and for good reason. Starting out her career in New York, she became immersed in the ‘Pictures’ generation of the late 1970s – a movement which recognised the photographic medium as a tool to criticise both high art and media culture – and Sherman’s output epitomises those aims. The small, well-curated selection of work on
show at Stills gives a strong sense of her affinity for adopting different personas from art history, film and mass culture. The series Untitled (Murder Mystery People) is a perfect example of this: she embodies stereotypical old-Hollywood film characters, using the humour found in dressing up to critique the overuse of such regurgitated images (‘The Dashing Leading Man’, ‘The Detective’, ‘The Drunken Wife’, to name a few). Doll Clothes, a 16mm film she made in 1975, sees Sherman as a paper doll, being dressed up in various outfits by anonymous hands; emphasising society’s power to project the image they want onto the female body. Similarly, the four prints from her series Untitled Film Stills (1977–80) see her mocking the stereotypical presentation of female Hollywood stars in the media. (Arabella Bradley) n Stills, until 6 Oct, free.
31 Jul–7 Aug 2019 THE LIST FESTIVAL 127