CURLICUE MOUNTAINS | MARO GORKY, AT LONG & RYLE
If, as I did, you come out of Tate Britain’s The Rossettis feeling rather bloated with all that earnest medievalist symbolism, I can suggest a rather affective digestif. A colourful sorbet, if you like, after an over-filling main course.
Maro Gorky: My Father's Birthplace, 2022, oil on canvas, 160 x 120 x 3 cms, courtesy of Long & Ryle
A retrospective of the vibrant paintings of Maro Gorky, to celebrate her 80th birthday, has just opened at Long & Ryle, round the corner on John Islip Street. In the show’s catalogue, Cressida Connolly writes: ‘any room would sing with one of her paintings on the wall.’ Well here are 20 or so of her exuberant creations in a single – rather intimate – gallery space: make that a joyful chorus.
Maro Gorky, who for 55 years has lived with her husband Matthew Spender in a farmhouse in Tuscany, decorated with self-styled interiors, like a Mediterranean Charleston, is the daughter of the surrealist/abstract expressionist pioneer Arshile Gorky. She dates her artistic career back to the few years she shared in his company before his suicide in 1948, when she used to paint on the back of his canvases. Born in the USA, she was educated at the Slade, where her teachers included Frank Auerbach and Jeffrey Camp. She was more influenced, one might surmise, by the latter than the former.
Other influences, she has recently stated (in an excellent piece in the FT by Vanessa Nicolson) include Joan Miró, Jean Hugo, Yves Tangay and Kandinsky. There’s a very European feel to her art, which has become increasingly colourful as she has matured (bringing to mind Jenny Joseph’s famous ‘Purple’ poem). A layering of cultures, and influences. But all in her own unmistakable style.
I visited the gallery while they were still in the process of hanging the show, and will certainly revisit with more time to take it all in. Two paintings, in particular, will live long in the memory. My Father’s Birthplace (2022) is a landscape painted after a visit to Armenia (from where a young Arshile Gorky escaped the genocide in 1915). Curlicue mountains in shades of red and orange overlook a cerulean lake dotted with orangey-yellow stepping-stones, with an abstracted bather relaxing in the foreground. Joan Miró on a Caucasian vacation? I could have looked at that one for hours.
Just as striking is Liv Tyler 1995, showing the then-teenage American actress lounging rather louchely in a diaphanous summer dress on a royal blue cushion, which morphs into a mountain-peak background. Tyler starred in the 1996 Bertolucci film Stealing Beauty: the Italian director based the farmhouse setting of that movie on Gorky and Spender’s colourful home. Did the young actress pay a visit to their Tuscan paradise while researching the role? I’d like to know.
Landscapes, painted in oils, and gouache, and tempera, dominate the show, and wherever Gorky takes you – from Greece to Libya to China – she brings herself for company, with all her verve and joie-de-vivre. Maro Gorky: A Life Painting runs until May 5, and I would certainly recommend a visit. You might consider popping into Tate Britain, while you’re in the area.