Time & Tempo: Outside, Inside, Still Lifes

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Time & Tempo

Outside, Inside, Still Lifes

London | 26 September – 4 October

Christie’s South Kensington presents Time & Tempo: Outside, Inside, Still Lifes, an exhibition of original paintings by the acclaimed artist Helen Berggruen. Beginning with direct observations from life, her work metamorphoses in the studio, allowing the materials of her practice to evolve at their own pace, with the music of Mozart interceding between the brush and surface. Taking her cue from the Post-Impressionists, Cézanne, Van Gogh and Bonnard, as well as the influence of the German Expressionism, Berggruen’s work retains these masters’ lyricism and musicality while her colours and brushwork boldly proclaim themselves.

The parallels between musical and visual forms have recently come to be the focus of Berggruen’s explorations. In Time & Tempo, she explores three different environments and themes, named Outside, Inside and Still Lifes. She describes her landscapes as the product of her ‘being drawn again and again to the polyphonic textures of the farmlands-silos punctuating the sky in a kind of staccato sequence, deep furrows cutting rhythmically through rows of drying corn’. Though human figures rarely appear in her interiors, the objective in those paintings is to charge the air, even the walls and floors, with a sense of movement. In the same tableau, on the mantel, a faded portrait might offer a glimpse into the distant past. These two approaches are united in her still lifes, where her goal as ‘composer’ is to establish a contrapuntal relationship between the objects on the table, inside the room, while they each carry on a melodic exchange with the world outside the window.

The act of looking, for Berggruen, is a process akin to listening to music, and she believes painting should reflect and encourage this. As she has said: ‘Music occurs in time. Dissonances, cadences, and resolution become a memory for the listener. The painting is a fixed object brought into the present by the viewer’s eye. The attention can roam the surface, crossing diagonal lines, circling back around; eventually it seeks a point of resolution or tonal repose. Having found that repose, the gaze is again free to roam.’