Art

Art is a weapon. I mean, not always. Sometimes it’s just something pretty for rich people’s walls. But in the hands of octogenarian American artist and activist Faith Ringgold, art is a weapon. Art is a way of fighting back. Ringgold is a black artist, born and raised in Harlem during a time of civil unrest and social upheaval. The early paintings here show rich white bankers next to kissing interracial couples, an educated black woman near a bunch of featureless white men in suits, all captured with thick lines and flat planes of cream and blue and black. But something about straight-up painting feels too close to established art tropes to be effective here. It’s when Ringgold ditches canvas for the power and history of quilts that things really start hitting home. Influenced by Tibetan fabric art as well as the American quilt tradition, Ringgold starts combining storytelling and painting to stitch together narratives about black American history and the fight for equal rights. Panels alternate between written words and painted images. There are stories about Harriet Tubman, Martin Luther King Jr and pancake-mix icon Aunt Jemima. The images show horrifying visions of drowning slaves, but also New York subway scenes daubed with graffiti, people dancing in jazz clubs. Some of it is painfully harrowing, some of it brilliant empowering. Using the power of folk tradition and her own fighting spirit, Ringgold condenses the black American experience down into little nuggets of

We’ve all got mummy issues and daddy issues. That’s the whole point of parents: they mess you up enough that you spend the rest of your life striving to prove them wrong. Hell, my parents said an art history degree would be a waste of time, now look at me! Sure, I’m poor and miserable, but I showed them. Grace Pailthorpe and Reuben Mednikoff wanted to do more than just prove their parents wrong, though, they wanted to use their work to explore childhood trauma and how it manifests throughout life. Pailthorpe was a surgeon and Mednikoff was an artist, together they embarked on a career of drawing, painting and mutual psychoanalysis. They fit perfectly into the surrealist scene of their time – dream-obsessed, sexual, scatological and totally Freudian – and created a fascinating, semi-scientific body of work. Mednikoff is the better technical artist. He paints and draws big tubes and vessels that leak and spill and lick and suck. He’s described as an ‘ex-baby’, a man filled with resentment towards his parents and sibling, longing for his mother’s love. His figures are constantly grasping for breasts, or contorted and dribbling, made of actual faeces or impossible bits of architecture. Pailthorpe is less accomplished but more interesting as a result. Her naïve figures are constricted and bundled up; she saw herself as a prisoner of the womb, a vicious pink blob kicking against restrictions from conception to death. There’s so much anger in her work. The duo also saw how the

Tate Britain is filled with the corpses of British industry, the long dead, rotting remains of this country itself. Strewn across the massive central Duveen Galleries are chunks of enormous abandoned machinery: presses, clamps, welders, cutters. Some have been left untouched, others have been piled on top of each other. Their wires are frayed, their oils have dried, their spindles have rusted. Nelson spent months collecting these objects from salvage yards and asset strippers. As our national industries waned, debt collectors waded in, seizing equipment and discarding the humans who used it. On the one hand, Nelson has repurposed these machines and turned them into sculptures, laying bare their aesthetic qualities, their twists and turns, shapes and shadows. But on the other, the narrative of these objects is inescapable. Even when he places a concrete ring on a bed of telephone poles, or an engine on a pile of sleeping bags, you’re still haunted by the pasts of the machines. Nelson makes it a claustrophobic experience. The works tower over you, threaten to crumple on your soft, fragile body. And it never ends, there are doors to push through, spaces that unfold, an unending trip through the misery of Britain. You can see it all as a metaphor for the death of Empire and British pride, for the impact of Brexit, for the dire sadness of modern life moving forward too quickly. Or you can see it as an ageing man who is finding a reflection of his own body and mind in the cru

If you’ve ever seen Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Mona Lisa’, then you know you’ve never really seen it. What you’ve really seen is a jostling crush of irritable tourists with their cameras obscuring your view of an enigmatically grumpy Renaissance woman somewhere in the distance. Leonardo is arguably the most important artist ever. He’s a superstar, a god, a legend who once walked among us. Only a handful of his paintings have survived the 500 years since his death – many in poor shape, like the crumbling ‘Last Supper’, and one of dubious provenance, ‘Salvator Mundi’. But forget those, because the Queen has 200 of his drawings in her collection, and they offer something far more intimate than his over-popular, unreachable paintings. Pulled from an album of drawings acquired by Charles II, the works here are as private as drawings get. There are figure studies, maps, engineering and weapon designs, anatomical explorations and architectural plans. It’s all of Leonardo, spread out and put on display. There are pages filled with the same repeated face, perfect drawings of hands cradling crudely sketched fingers, a sheet combining clouds, figure studies and engineering diagrams. Some moments are breathtaking. The head studies for ‘The Last Supper’, the shower of mortars landing on a fortress, the faceless bust of the Madonna, the series of botanical drawings, the staggering abstract deluges. Leonardo was obsessive, passionate, maniacal in his need to analyse and deconstruct, and her