Art to soothe my troubled brow

I'm a bit jaded this morning, which is entirely my own fault

Flora Yukhnovich’s Folies Bergère, 2024, in situ at the Wallace Collection

I’m knackered today. This working week has been very live-event focused (another newish thing that has become a surprising staple since I went freelance) - on Tuesday I moderated a panel at the Barbican for City of London businesses, designed to remind them just how much you get out of supporting the arts, and yesterday I compèred the annual conference for the Association of Women in the Arts (AWITA), which was an all-day event and involved me endlessly running about and switching microphones and introducing people and chairing panels and then finally drinking several cocktails in a very short space of time, which is probably the main reason why I’m feeling so jaded this morning. 

AWITA, by the way, is a brilliant non-profit organisation, set up to support professional and personal development for the huge number of women in the art world who are not artists - so the curators, directors, entrepreneurs, gallerists, auctioneers, historians, marketers and so on who keep the business of art going. If that’s you, do take a look - they’re developing a programme of ‘sister supporters’ who pay the annual fee for members who otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford it, or maybe wouldn’t think it’s for them.

Anyway, all that is why I’m feeling a bit crispy today and this is several hours late. But here we are. Onward.

This week

There’s some exciting art going on at the moment. Sin Centre at Hannah Barry Gallery in Peckham is an ambitious group exhibition - designed, they say, “for pleasure; a place and programme made by artists, writers, designers and friends working together”.

There’s a bar, the ‘Doors of Hell’, made by artists Melloney Harvey and Jesse Pollock (open on Saturdays from 5pm to midnight and catered by the team behind Frank’s, with mirrored walls that make for a very flattering soft focus for Instagram), a well-appointed ‘Love Library’ with furniture by George Rouy (usually a painter, but apparently a dab hand with cowhide), books chosen by artists and friends and a TV showing a range of films, from Shame to All About My Mother.

There’s also a ‘room of curtains’, the purpose of which I’m not entirely clear on, but I suspect it is activated with performance and other less formal shenanigans at various moments. Artists include Stevie Dix, Marie Jacotey, Ebun Sodipo, Nikolaj Schultz, Miranda Keyes, Simon Whybray, Paloma Proudfoot, Danny Fox and more. Don’t forget to visit the loo. Sin Centre is on until September 14 and you could combine it with a visit to Bold Tendencies, of which more in a future edition.

Casino Sign, 2024 by Simon Whybray in the stairwell of the Sin Centre

The Wallace Collection in Manchester Square has just revealed a two-part show bringing together the work of a young contemporary painter and an 18th century French master. Flora Yukhnovich & François Boucher: The Language of the Rococo features two of Yukhnovich’s paintings, inspired by the opulent scenes of that earlier era, hung in hand-made gilt frames at the top of the museum’s sweeping staircase (which was shipped over by Sir Richard Wallace in 1871 after being removed from the Royal Bank of France in Paris). 

Yukhnovich’s large canvases, in their ebullient Rococo colours, look fantastic next to smaller Boucher works and the many trills and noodles of the house’s exuberant decor. 

Downstairs, through the shop, the second part of the display finds the two paintings which have been temporarily displaced by Yukhnovich, Boucher’s cheeky rural idylls Pastoral with a Bagpipe Player and Pastoral with a Couple near a Fountain (both 1749). They’ve been transposed onto stark white walls, without their lavish frames, like works of contemporary art.