This September Cristea Roberts Gallery presents, A Primer of Birds, which brings together a collection of over 25 works by artists who weave images of birds into their visual narratives.
Each artist in the exhibition (which takes its title from an elusive late twentieth-century poetry book of the same name, by poet Ted Hughes and artist Leonard Baskin), explores the complexities of human character and the raptures found in life, through the lens of avian imagery.
As Ali Kazim has spotlighted the Hudhud or Hoopoe in his work, a bird which encompasses cultural significance in Islamic texts and folklore, the artists in this exhibition have intertwined images of crows, ravens, magpies and other ornithological creatures into their visual lexicon to stir a visual communiqué which gestures towards thoughts concerned with the environment, the physiological, poetic and spiritual.
In the etchings of Georg Baselitz we see a convocation of eagles, a subject which became a steadfast feature of his graphic work from 1970 onward. For Baselitz, the eagle was an autobiographical motif, a realisation of the self, interrogating both personal and political histories while resolutely committed to a disruptive process of orienting and disorienting, challenging what defines traditional, symbolic or subversive picture-making.
So too, in the works of Paula Rego, animals and birds enduringly feature as essential players in the cast of characters Rego called on to manifest her images acting out unsettling scenarios, nudging the senses into awkward spots that leave the viewer slightly off guard and disconcerted. Rego expressed that she often depicted people she knew as animals “because you can do things to animals which you cannot do to people because it is too shocking”. We observe the ‘shape shifting’ females of Bird Women Playing, 1995, dancing around the tiny image of a man, and the menacing presence of a ‘crow’ which features through all three works by the artist. Through literature and art crows have symbolised death and despair as well as being symbols of mischievousness, power and good luck. The Crow and His Cat and The Crow’s House were made in 1994, six years following the death of her husband Victor Willing. Here one could imagine that the crow was a vessel through which to channel deep despair but also a motif to conjure luck and hope.
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