John Patrick Byrne: A Big Adventure ‘Above all, Cosmic Dancer reveals Clark as a collaborator and a catalyst’
Greg Thomas
1 John Byrne, Guitar with painted portrait of Gerry Rafferty Private Collection © John Byrne. All rights reserved. DACS 2022
photographers, composers and pop groups on show are effectively duetting with Clark as part of his extended ensemble. MC by initials, and master of ceremonies in everything that follows, Clark remains at its inspirational centre. Cosmic Dancer isn’t so much a retrospective, then, as a (self) portrait writ large; part living sculpture, part design for life, part choreographed chorus line of Total Art, formed from the explosion of ideas bursting forth from Clark’s personal and artistic evolution. This is what happens if you dance yourself right out of the womb. Check out the guy’s track record. Neil Cooper is a writer and critic based in Edinburgh
2 John Byrne, Hands Up. Image courtesy of Andrew and Fiona Paterson © John Byrne. All rights reserved. DACS 2022.
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Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow Until 18 September
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Michael Clark: Cosmic Dancer V&A Dundee 1 Riverside Esplanade, Dundee, DD1 4EZ T: (0)1382 411 611 | vam.ac.uk Open: Wednesday to Monday 10am–5pm
1 Michael Clark Company in Duncan Campbell, It For Others, 2013. Image courtesy of the artist and Rodeo, London/Piraeus 2 Michael Clark & Company with The Fall in I Am Curious, Orange, 1988. Sadler’s Wells Theatre, London. © Richard Haughton 3 Michael Clark in a publicity photography, 1986, © Richard Haughton 4 Michael Clark, Silke Otto Knapp, Group (Formation) 2020, courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/ New York and greengrassi, London 4
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This new exhibition of painting, drawing and sculpture by John Patrick Byrne (b.1940) displays in prominent position a 1968 quote from GW Lennox Paterson, deputy director of Glasgow School Art: ‘Byrne is unquestionably one of the most able painters we have seen in the past 20 years. He is something of a “chameleon”. We have had paintings by him ranging from Bonnard to Picasso which the masters themselves could not have failed to admire.’ The chameleon tag perhaps predicts a critical opinion that would grow up around Byrne’s work, and which curator Martin Craig wants to acknowledge and move past early on: that there may be an absence of depth behind Byrne’s impish and prodigious play of visual styles. An early vitrine of works produced at Glasgow School of Art from
artist’ moniker ‘Patrick’ have something of the huge fleshiness of Stanley Spencer, while strange interior scenes such as ‘Jock and the Tiger Cat’ (1968) riff on surrealist iconography. There are animal studies set in dark dreamlike forests, like ‘Owl’ (c.1968), which bring to mind Henri Rousseau, while in various self-portraits and landscapes the Fauves and Impressionists are emulated with equal glee and dexterity; so too, here and there, is the dapper fin-de-siecle atmospherics of Whistler. ‘Billy Connolly and Banjo’ (1974), indicative of Byrne’s artist-to-the-stars status, sits comfortably in the pop-realist zeitgeist of the Hockney era, but sketches of family members show a tender naturalism, such as ‘Celie’ (2010). Byrne’s status as an accomplished writer for stage and TV makes sense here. Ultimately, he is a masterful inhabitant
and his portraits of comedians and film stars, Byrne is an acolyte of pop culture and especially pop music. He came of age in the post-modernist paradigm of the 1960s–70s, when this was a new and laudatory subject matter for fine art; and when a chameleon-like feint across formal approaches was perhaps the whole point. Certainly, the viewer won’t leave bereft of a sense of warmth, humour or playful adventure.
1958–63 confirms the technical ability: nudes and seated groups are endowed with a living sinuousness that many artists who remain in a sombre, naturalistic approach would envy. But from there on in the show flits enjoyably between reference points. Early works signed off in Byrne’s ‘outsider
of character. The point applies both to his depiction of subject matter and his intuitive-seeming grasp of myriad compositional styles. Indeed, it’s perhaps in his thematic choices that a kind of unity emerges. With his commissions for album covers, painted banjos and guitars,
10am–5pm, Friday and Sunday 11am–5pm
Greg Thomas is a critic and editor based in Glasgow John Patrick Byrne: A Big Adventure Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum Argyle Street, Glasgow, G3 8AG T: (0)141 276 9599 | glasgowlife.org.uk Open: Monday to Thursday and Saturday
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