A Couple of Hours at Whitechapel Gallery

I was over in Whitechapel yesterday, too embarrassed to turn up more than an hour late for the Climate Camp meeting at the Rag Factory off of Brick Lane and too frazzled by the novelty of a hot August afternoon to cycle any further east towards home. So I popped into the recently expanded Whitechapel Gallery, which I used to visit regularly many years ago, back when the London Metropolitan University up the road was still the City Polytechnic. And what a surprise its cool, calming galleries turned out to be: no pretentious conceptual art, just paintings, some abstract but mainly figurative, from the long-running East End Academy exhibition and from the American artist Elizabeth Peyton.

Walking into the ground floor gallery, the first painting you see is Andy Harper’s ‘Feast of Skulls’ (above), a mass of black, pink and red that looks like fractal from a distance but is a mass of intricate detail of hundred of flowers. My other favourites included Guy Allott’s landscapes framed by a hole seemingly blasted through a tree, and Emily Wolfe’s almost photo-quality paintings of everyday household objects.

Upstairs, the collection of mainly small, intimate portraits by Elizabeth Peyton was fascinating for her choice of subjects, some historical and others artists and musicians, including David Hockney, Mick Jagger and Liam Gallagher. Peyton certainly has a way of capturing the angular, feminine male faces of people like Jarvis Cocker, turning them into whey-faced Pre-Raphaelite figures that are rather more interesting than the more simian features of Gallagher.

It has been a long time since I’ve spent an enjoyable hour in just one exhibition and clearly, I need to make more random decision like this in the future...