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Artist Curated: Ten Artworks in Ten Minutes
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Miles aldridge curates - Ten artworks in ten minutes
We are pleased to present the second in a series of artist-curated viewing rooms, where a gallery artist selects ten works from our inventory. All we have asked is that they choose pieces that they find engaging, inspiring or thought-provoking.
Our aim is that this distillation will encourage us to look more closely and to see familiar pictures in a new way - helping us to better understand both the works that have been chosen and the artist who has chosen them. -
Kiki Smith
Carrier, 2001'Kiki Smith's gigantic etching of rats scurrying through the water, entitled Carrier from 2001 is a beautiful object. I love the format, it’s long like a Chinese scroll. The story of these rats, trying to survive seems to be an image of a kind of hope, but also desperation.' - Aldridge
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Ed Ruscha
Raw, 1971'Ed Ruscha is an artist who has many different aspects to his work. There’s the photography, the cataloguing of Sunset Boulevard, all the swimming pools, parking lots; a brilliant, postmodern idea and an incredible use of the camera in a kind of cold, dispassionate way without any kind of emotion - I like that coldness. This piece a screenprint from 1971 called Raw is one of many of Ruscha’s word prints, where word and image come together to create something fresh and new. I love the palette. It's really sort of strange and disturbing, like something from a David Lynch film, and the strange quality of the word reclining, feels like it might be something from a title sequence of a 1930s film' - Aldridge
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David Hockney
The Marriage, 1962'The story goes that David Hockney was with his boyfriend of the time at a museum of Egyptian art and apparently Hockney, being slower than the boyfriend to view the artefacts, had lagged behind. And when he looked up, he saw his boyfriend down the corridor staring at a piece of art and next to him was a sculpture of an Egyptian Queen. The young gay man and the Egyptian Queen fused in Hockney's imagination, and he saw them as a kind of weird marriage. I love how the palm tree echoes the standing boyfriend and the form of the Egyptian Queen runs down the page, and how he's tried to understand by drawing the transparency of the veil, how it reveals the body underneath.' - Aldridge
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Gary Hume
Here's Flowers, 2006'I love Gary's work. It's endlessly inventive in its use of printmaking. I spent hours just studying his prints and how he builds up layers of ink, the surface of the paper is played with lacquer and varnish. And this print has all of those elements, which I find so sort of beguiling in his work. I also love how this flower is drawn, almost with a Tipp-Ex by a secretary during her lunch break, taking a break from correcting the typing.' - Aldridge
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Roy Lichtenstein
Ten Landscapes, 1967'I love this surprising portfolio and its contrast of printmaking techniques, a tremendous achievement of mixed media. It is unusual for Lichtenstein as it does not have a figure or a still life, the subjects that we most often associate with his work. In this series, Lichtenstein instead asks himself what is a Pop Art landscape and the result is almost like a series of gigantic post cards from Pop Art land, where sun, sea, and sand are all represented by various materials and printing processes, including Lichtenstein’s own colour photography, which is fascinating to me.
Interestingly, Lichtenstein also designed the box where the cover was a window that could interchangeably reveal images from the portfolio.' - Aldridge -
Michael Canning
Untitled I , 2013'I chose this little drawing by Michael Canning in graphite of a little bird because it reminds me of a few things that I really love. It reminds me of going to the Natural History Museum as an art student and drawing the stuffed birds there myself. But, it's like a line from a Ted Hughes poem, Thrushes, in which Ted Hughes talks about how the thrushes have this incredible sort of mechanical action with their sort of pecking and pecking and pecking of the worms in the ground.' - Aldridge
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Sarah Graham
Salvazana Imperialis (Colour), 2012'Sarah’s work is so impressive, it sort of opens up the world of insects - this cinematic moth hovering in front of the screen.' - Aldridge
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Harland Miller
In Shadows I Boogie, 2019'Harland Miller's In Shadows I Boogie is an extraordinary piece of printmaking. The print itself has its own kind of palette separate from the painting, equally as beautiful, but in a way richer. I actually did my own project based on Harland’s painting In Shadows I Boogie where I included a miniature version of his painting as a book cover in the hand of one of my actresses.' - Aldridge
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Tom Hammick
The Bay Coming In (Homage to Harald Sohlberg), 2016'This woodcut is a tremendous combination of things that I love. There's a bit of Edvard Munch in there, there's a bit of Ingmar Bergman. It has this Nordic strangeness to it - the stillness, the quietness, the murderousness of it, the black trees, and the single lighted house. .' - Aldridge
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Gerald Laing
Jean Harlow, 2011'I love this portrait of Jean Harlow. It's so sort of painterly and sumptuous with its choice of colours. And inspiring to me and my own work is this very brutal halftone dot that he's used in black and white to contrast against the areas of flat pink and tangerine and emerald green.' - Aldridge
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List of Works
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Works Available By Miles Aldridge
