The Sky was Blue the Sea was Blue and the Boy was Blue

In this series of unique photo-collage works, Isaac Julien revisits and expands upon his influential 2004 work Encore II (Radioactive), a short film inspired in part by a character called Lilith Iyapo from the writings of Octavia E. Butler (1947–2006), an acclaimed African American science fiction writer best known for her recurring exploration of genetic manipulation, contamination and hybridity. To make Encore II (Radioactive), Julien re-digitised footage shot in Iceland and northern Sweden from his work True North, which takes as a starting point the story of Matthew Henson, the African American explorer now considered to be among the first to set foot on the North Pole. In his re-digitised footage, Julien manipulates the landscape and imbues it with an aura that dislocates the setting from a specific time and place. The Radioactive collages stage a solitary heroine, the cyborg Lilith Iyapo, who is performed in Encore II (Radioactive) by Vanessa Myrie. Following her through a solarised landscape, the works explore Lilith’s ‘avatar’ nature and human and mechanical origins. In these new works, feelings of dislocation are heightened by the dramatic use of collage, where enigmatic figurative and abstract elements are brought together on metallic foils. Julien has employed a number of materials and techniques, including the use of hand-cut digitally printed foils, which are more frequently use in advertising, on cars and in robotics. These elements – in colours such as silver, gold, copper and blue – create an unreal, dream-like effect and shift the work beyond the photographic into a compelling territory of hybrid materiality. Each work from this series presents a different combination of colours, cut-outs, and compositions, resulting in a distinctive exploration of materiality. Each work from this series is unique.

This work is from Sarah Sze’s ongoing project, Afterimage, which explores how images function as tools to make sense of the world. Comprised of multiple layers of paint, ink, paper, pencil, prints, objects, and wood, this body of work both re-frames and refracts the collision of images we are confronted with daily. The title, referring to the effect where an image continues to appear in our vision after exposure to the original image has ceased, also alludes to the filmic idea of the persistence of vision, where the afterimage fills in the gaps between film frames, setting still images into motion in our perception and memory. Traces of multiple image-making mediums are layered in the works, such as the ghost images of etching, the skidding surface of silkscreen printing, the layering cuts of collage, the dripping and brushing of paint, the exposure by light of photographs, the digital disturbance of computer processing, and the flickering movement of film. While the painting stands on its own, when installed within its archive, the constellations of images shift in scale, fade, disappear, re-emerge, creating a storyboard of how an image is burned into memory and persists over time.

Flora Yukhnovich is acclaimed for paintings in which she adopts the language of Rococo, reimagining the dynamism of works by eighteenth-century artists such as Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, François Boucher, Nicolas Lancret and Jean-Antoine Watteau through a filter of contemporary cultural references including film, food and consumerism. New paintings created especially for this exhibition take their initial inspiration from Boucher’s Triumph of Venus, 1740 (in the collection of the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm), which depicts Venus, seated in a seashell, surround by sea creatures and representations of love, such as dolphins, tritons, naiads and cupids. Speaking about her work and its relationship to Boucher, the artist says, ‘In mythology, Cronus throws Uranus’s testicles into the sea and Venus emerges, fully formed in the froth of the waves and is carried in a shell to land. I was immediately drawn to the idea of her body being made of the water. The idea of fluidity of form feels like a very painterly concept to me, a bit like creating seemingly solid figures out of wet paint… There is a tendency for water and the sea to be spoken about as female – fluid and soft but also capricious and destructive. I like the potential for strength or force in that association and it’s something I wanted to try and bring to these paintings.’

In this new work on paper, Chris Ofili’s imagery represents the myth of the satyr. Crowning of a Satyr (Blue), 2021, depicts a satyr with curved silvery horns being crowned by a female figure, the selkie. In Scottish mythology the selkie is a mythological creature who is able to transform from seal into human form by shedding its sealskin. Here, the selkie is visible in her female form, after the moment of metamorphosis; she is one with the water. With his sensitive representations, Ofili repositions the satyr away from the conventional depictions of wild, Dionysian conduct.

Chantal Joffe brings a combination of insight and integrity, as well as psychological and emotional force, to the genre of figurative art. Defined by its clarity, honesty and empathetic warmth it is attuned to our awareness as both observers and observed beings, apparently simple yet always questioning, complex and emotionally rich. Joffe has often talked about her paintings in terms of transitions, those associated with growing and ageing, as well as her attempt to mark a life’s milestones. Esme in a Blue Skirt, 2014, depicts the artist’s daughter, eyes averted, one arm protectively covering her front, wearing a new blue skirt with appliqué animals. It touches on this key theme of Joffe’s art, one explored in her recent institutional exhibition For Esme – with Love and Squalor, held at Arnolfini, Bristol, which focused on the shifting relationship between mother and daughter over time, navigating spaces, dynamics and roles.

One of the most dynamic painters of his generation, Secundino Hernández is celebrated for a spirited enquiry into the language, history and enduring potential of abstraction. New works made especially for this exhibition continue his investigation into the vocabulary of painting – line, form, gesture and colour – and historical classifications of the medium – action and colourfield painting – to create images that, radiating a sense of urgency, explore not only their own process of creation but our responses to a painted surface. For Hernández, painting is both a physical and cerebral activity, a conduit for intellectual and philosophical enquiry. Whether employing strong linear elements, by turns painterly or calligraphic, or rich bursts of colour, his work corrals diverse influences within a signature abstract language, often collapsing traditional distinctions and hierarchies. In Hernández’s hands, a monochrome might also be an action painting, while an action painting might, on closer inspection, reveal itself to be an almost archaeological excavation of the picture plane’s sedimentary layers. This painting is derived in part from a process of removing paint with a pressure washer. Almost archaeological in nature, this method involves the artist erasing pigment, in this instance a series of marks and gestures in tones of blue, to expose the canvas beneath. The resulting ‘wash’ painting has a dramatic, exploratory quality and openly displays the challenges and triumphs of the artist’s practice. Writing about Hernández’s work, Oliver Basciano notes that ‘Within the parameters of his unique process, there is a mad freedom to Hernández’s paintings, one that operates beyond the restraints of authorial control… For the viewer, the artist’s surfaces feel kinship with the turbulent mark-making of a JMW Turner seascape… Hernández’s work evokes the same loss of control as one is submerged into the painted surface, a sublime overwhelming, a surrender to the elements and all the scarring that brings forth.’ Speaking about his use of blue, the artist comments, ‘My approach to blue recognises the amazing heritage of painting and its paradoxes. In a sense, I’ve tried to create contemplative works in which a variety of ethereal blues seem to dissolve into a compassionate void. The series refers to the application of the colour blue in elevated, or so-called ‘high’, abstraction. But also, I wanted to create washed paintings that refer to the blue found in nature, or even the blue that encompasses our inner lives – complete with beauty but also distress or violence. In the end, these paintings ask one of my favourite questions of a work of art: how in our lives should we harmonise contradictions while preserving the very aspects of life that elevate us as humans?’

‘In Lapis, we see an anthropomorphic polar land under a frigid blue sun, the figures reduced to glimpses of hands, eyes, beaks, fish scales.’

— Charlotte Mullins

Do Ho Suh has long ruminated on the idea of home as both a physical structure and a lived experience. Main Entrance, 348 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011, USA, 2016, is a large gelatin drawing based on the entrance of the artist’s former home and studio in New York City. This work was created using a process in which the artist’s signature architectural pieces are compressed into large-scale two-dimensional drawings. Using gelatin tissue, the works are sewn in the same way as Suh’s architectural fabric pieces. Once immersed in water, however, the gelatin dissolves, fusing with the paper to leave an image in which the threads appear like a skeletal framework against the coloured form of the object. Residual yet highly visceral, these works draw parallels between architectural space, clothing and the body, making explicit Suh’s fascination with the interconnected spaces we inhabit while continuing his career-long investigation into the porous boundaries of identity.

‘People are very wedded to the idea of a neat ending: our rational brains would love us to tidy up the mess of the world and to have either Armageddon or Heaven at the end of our existence. But life doesn’t work like that – it’s a continuum.’— Grayson Perry. Grayson Perry is a great chronicler of contemporary life, drawing us in with wit, affecting sentiment and nostalgia as well as, at times, fear and anger. In his work, Perry tackles subjects that are universally human: identity, gender, social status, sexuality, religion. Writing about Map of Nowhere around the time of its making, the artist commented, ‘The starting point of this print was Thomas More’s Utopia. Utopia is a pun on the Greek ou topos meaning ‘no place’. I was playing with the idea of there being no Heaven. People are very wedded to the idea of a neat ending: our rational brains would love us to tidy up the mess of the world and to have either Armageddon or Heaven at the end of our existence. But life doesn’t work like that – it’s a continuum… The basic formal design came from a German mappa mundi called the Ebstorf Map, which was destroyed in the Second World War. It showed Jesus as the body of the world. My daughter often accuses me of setting myself up as God, so I made the lakes and rivers into my body. The whole idea of alchemy and a spiritual body fascinates me. I wrote place names on the map with references to modern-day things like ‘Internet dating’ and ‘Binge-drinking’. There are lots of jokey references to ecology and green politics. In the middle of the map is ‘Doubt’, because a philosopher once said: ‘Doubt is the essence of civilisation.’ The image of a skeletal child is like an early anatomical drawing but here the child is covered in bigotries: he has ‘Racism’ on one hand and ‘Sexism’ on the other. ‘Fear’ is in his guts, because all bigotry starts with fear. A light shines out of my bottom hole, down onto a monastic building on the mountainside. The landscape around it shows a pilgrimage scene with people in religious garb carrying funny dolls and backpacks. The map is very flat but the drawing at the bottom has a 3-D quality: it’s like the difference between the realms of the spiritual and the human, or the split between mind and body.’

One of the most acclaimed artists of his generation, NS Harsha draws on a broad spectrum of Indian painting traditions and popular arts, as well as the Western canon, to create quietly philosophical works that reflect on structures, borders and barriers as a series of ever-shifting concepts. Central to his work is a gentle questioning of our place within the known and unknown worlds, the strength of our grip on the tangible and, conversely, the force with which the intangible exerts a hold over us. Storytelling endures at the heart of Harsha’s practice, yet linear narrative remains elusive in exquisitely rendered new paintings such as May, 2020, which was painted over one month last year and features one of the most enduring images of the current Covid pandemic – a blue surgical glove. The blue gloved hand reaches into a blue space, in search of something that remains tantalisingly out of reach and out of view.

A painter of erudite, questioning canvases in which topical content is tackled with various degrees of abstraction and metaphor, John Kørner has developed a wide-ranging practice that speaks beyond the boundaries of the painted image to include installations that transform the viewer’s experience of three-dimensional space. Kørner has made a number of works that refer to solar, lunar and geologic time, and how we are transported metaphorically through time and space by an image. In paintings that, notionally at least, correspond with the idea of the rise and fall of the sun or, as here, the phases of the moon, he also comments upon the idea of the picturesque and sublime. Shadows of the Moon proposes the almost sci-fi idea of there being more than one moon, perhaps moving in different directions (the artist cites as a source of inspiration Haruki Murakami’s alternate reality novel 1Q84) and how life, as a measure of time and movement, might change. The simple, graphic language of the work belies the complex nature of its ideas, while the shade of blue and insistent horizontals creates a sense of optimism and calm.

On display in the upper gallery is an enveloping installation of large-scale blue paintings. Khan has often drawn inspiration from key philosophical and theological texts in his work, yet increasingly his own writings have become a conduit for investigating memory, creativity and the layering of experience. Unified by the use of the colour blue, using the artist’s own mix of gesso, rabbit skin glue, slate dust, marble dust and Prussian blue and Ultramarine blue pigments, the paintings on view feature passages of texts in which Khan expresses thoughts, feelings and responses to the past year. Diaristic in nature, these texts, once repeated and layered in sonorous blue oil, are distilled, a number of fragmentary experiences and disparate ideas becoming a single image. In this manner, while Khan ultimately eradicates the meaning of the original text, he constructs an abstract and universal language.

Celia Paul’s art is founded on deep connections – familial, creative, looping back and forth across time – to people and places, and is self-assuredly quiet, contemplative and ultimately moving in its attention to detail and intensely felt spirituality. This painting depicts the artist’s husband, the writer, philosopher and poet Steven Kupfer, alone in a rowing boat in Lake Altaussee in Austria, a place the couple have visited for many years, renting a hut on the shore. Rising up before him is the Trisselwand mountain, the upwards movement as the eye is drawn through the blues of water, earth and air enhanced by the vertical format of this jewel-like small painting. Seascapes and paintings of water are an enduring motif in Paul’s art. During the 1970s, her father was head of the Lee Abbey religious community in north Devon, where she became familiar with a stretch of coastline that influenced a number of works. While the artist has spoken of her waterscapes in terms of feeling in flux, for Paul solace can be found in the consoling beauty of nature and the flow of time that connects us all. In relation to this painting, the artist speaks of resonances with Robert Creeley’s poem The Mountains in the Desert. 'The mountains blue now at the back of my head, such geography of self and soul brought to such limit of sight, I cannot relieve it nor leave it, my mind locked in seeing it as the light fades. Tonight let me go at last out of whatever mind I thought to have, and all the habits of it'.

‘The boy, lying naked and blue on the sand like a broken doll, the sea licking his feet… Our attention is completely focused on this strange figure, who, in death, has become frozen like a wooden saint…’ — Emily Spicer, Studio International. The Sky is Blue the Sea is Blue and the Boy is Blue, 2017, is one of four works by Paula Rego inspired by Bastardia, a 2005 story by the celebrated Portuguese novelist, playwright and poet Hélia Correia. It was created for Rego’s 2017–2018 Jerwood Gallery Hastings exhibition The Boy Who Loved the Sea and Other Stories, the first major exhibition of new work by the artist in a UK public art gallery for ten years. In Correia’s fateful tale, a boy who believes his father is the sea makes a journey to the ocean, which he has never seen before, experiencing a number of encounters and hardships along the way. This work depicts the story’s denouement, in which on reaching his destination the boy immediately dies: sky, sea and the boy’s lifeless body assume shades of blue. Writing about this work in a review of the Hastings show published in Studio International, Emily Spicer, commented ‘Rego’s illustrations for this tragic tale are vibrant and busy, packed with animals and characters, but the last image, that of the boy, lying naked and blue on the sand like a broken doll, the sea licking his feet, is comparatively sparse. Our attention is completely focused on this strange figure, who, in death, has become frozen like a wooden saint. Tilt your head to the side and he becomes Jesus on the cross, a martyr to neglect.’

Working across figuration, abstraction and conceptualism, Howardena Pindell has since the 1970s examined a wide range of subject matter, from the personal and diaristic to the social and political. In 1979, by this point known for her ravishing pointillist abstract spray paintings, Pindell was involved as a passenger in a car accident that left her with short-term memory loss. She has spoken of the impact of this event on her subsequent work as an attempt to ‘mend the rupture’ brought about by concussion. More overtly autobiographical work followed, where elements of abstraction and figuration were stitched together almost as an act of remembering. The Wave, 2011, forms part of this extended body of work, which places centre stage the importance of travel in the artist’s practice, as both mind-broadening experience and, here, as a reconstitution of memory and self. To create these works, Pindell drew upon her extensive collection of photographs taken while travelling, postcards she purchased, as well as other ephemera from her trips. Gravitated to what she describes as ‘more natural shapes’, she arranged these asymmetrically, often fanning multiple images of the same location in patterns to create a sense of compression or expansion that, allied to her own embodied experience, shifts the viewer’s perspective.

Milton Avery’s late portraits are a reflection of his accumulated skills in depicting the figure with great economy. By the early 1960s he was working almost exclusively from his in-home studio with a bird’s-eye view of Central Park. This city dwelling was an ideal setting for frequent gatherings and he continued to be an active observer of visitors, distilling characteristics with refined simplicity. While the two figures in this painting have not been identified, events such as the one depicted here were a common occurrence in the Averys’ home. As early as the 1930s, the couple’s apartment became a meeting place for young artists, writers, musicians and poets. In interviews, Avery’s wife, Sally Michel Avery, mentions Avery’s love of poetry, in particular that of T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams, and that he used to like to read aloud to her and their daughter, March. Two Poets is one of the last large-scale paintings completed by the artist and is masterful in its simplicity, by turns modest and monumental.

In her short life, Ilse D’Hollander (1968–1997) created an intelligent, sensual and highly resonant body of work, drawing upon her impressions and experience of place, particularly the Flemish countryside where she spent the last, highly productive years of her life, to produce paintings and works on paper that reveal a masterful command of graphic and painterly touch. D’Hollander’s works on cardboard, such as Untitled, 1990–1991, possess a markedly different character to her canvases. The writer, critic and Senior Consulting Curator at the Clyfford Still Museum, Denver, David Anfam, writes: ‘The extraordinary mixed media studies on cardboard project an almost manic energy. Greens, blues, deep red and other vivid tints clash and commingle in lapidary facets, by turns glinting and sombre, that bear a resemblance to landscapes by Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele.’

One of the most dynamic painters of his generation, Secundino Hernández is celebrated for a spirited enquiry into the language, history and enduring potential of abstraction. New works made especially for this exhibition continue his investigation into the vocabulary of painting – line, form, gesture and colour – and historical classifications of the medium – action and colourfield painting – to create images that, radiating a sense of urgency, explore not only their own process of creation but our responses to a painted surface. For Hernández, painting is both a physical and cerebral activity, a conduit for intellectual and philosophical enquiry. Whether employing strong linear elements, by turns painterly or calligraphic, or rich bursts of colour, his work corrals diverse influences within a signature abstract language, often collapsing traditional distinctions and hierarchies. In Hernández’s hands, a monochrome might also be an action painting, while an action painting might, on closer inspection, reveal itself to be an almost archaeological excavation of the picture plane’s sedimentary layers. A recent development in Secundino Hernández’s practice, stitching adds a further dimension to the linear and structural concerns that underpin his work and feeds into an ongoing dialogue around processes of construction and deconstruction. These works are created using sections of linen, which are machine sewn then stretched taut across a frame. Joined together in broadly, though not exclusively, vertical bands, sometimes traversed by shorter diagonals, they set up a lively conversation between spontaneity and control. Here, the structural line – embedded in the very fabric of the work – intermingles with larger, more freeform areas of pigment (or linen). One might think of art historical forebears – Barnett Newman’s exalted ‘zips’, for example, spring to mind. However, for Hernández a detailed and informed knowledge of art history always gives rise to a stylistic multiplicity. Transcending any one moment, these works attest to restless, exploratory character of Hernández’s practice and the urgency of his abstraction.

Jules de Balincourt’s Uphill and Downhill, 2020, continues an intuitive approach to image-making, where the world we inhabit is filtered through the artist’s own psychological landscape. Always rich in colour and technique, de Balincourt’s work is a bountiful confluence of reality and fantasy, where references to society, politics, or popular culture are never less than equalled by free association and painterly invention. Often, as in the work on display, de Balincourt’s paintings hinge on utopian/dystopian narratives, structures of power or opposing forces. At the same time, they carve a space of reflection and contemplation against a tide of contemporary media. Speaking about the work, the artist says, ‘Uphill and Downhill is about trying to freeze or pause these ubiquitous moments in history, in a time in which images and information are processed through a scroll of technology. I want this painting to operate as a marker or commemoration for those oppressed fighting for social justice and equality in a world with a collective global anxiety.’

Tal R’s eventually all museums will be ships, 2018, is from a suite of works on paper united by nautical imagery and shades of blue. Completed in the run-up to the artist’s important solo exhibition at Hastings Contemporary in 2019, these works respond to a coastal location and the imagery of the ship. Speaking at the time, the artist said, ‘The first thing I thought was that the ideal museum would actually be a ship. When we looked into my stores, I found that I have lots of paintings that fantasise about the sea and ships, which are going into the show. It’s a metaphor, though, about getting lost and found – I don’t actually like to be out at sea.’ The artist has often worked within sets of self-imposed limitations, in terms of composition and colour palette. His use of blue, which also united the works in his major 2018 exhibition at Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, is both a simplification of his visual language and an invitation to contemplate the colour’s expansive associations.

Tal R’s small boat leaving, 2018, is from a suite of works on paper united by nautical imagery and shades of blue. Completed in the run-up to the artist’s important solo exhibition at Hastings Contemporary in 2019, these works respond to a coastal location and the imagery of the ship. Speaking at the time, the artist said, ‘The first thing I thought was that the ideal museum would actually be a ship. When we looked into my stores, I found that I have lots of paintings that fantasise about the sea and ships, which are going into the show. It’s a metaphor, though, about getting lost and found – I don’t actually like to be out at sea.’ His use of blue, which also united the works in his major 2018 exhibition at Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, is both a simplification of his visual language and an invitation to contemplate the colour’s expansive associations.