London's National Gallery - Durer's Journey and Kehinde Wiley

 On Monday (7th February) I got the chance to visit the current exhibition that looks at Durer and his
Journey's in Europe.

Albrecht Durer was A Hungarian/German artist in the renaissance  (1471 -1528) who is known chiefly for his engraving, he was also a painter.

The exhibition sought to show how during his travels and through his work he had influenced other artists.

Merchandise 

 Much of the Durer work   was monochrome and   fairly small - Durer was a follower of Luther particularly at the start of his  career.

One of the things that I shall recall from the exhibition is how he portrayed animals he had not yet seen (like the lion) - one of the stories he frequently referred to in his engravings  was St Jerome and the Lion (Jerome having removed a thorn from the lion's paw) so there are frequent occurrences of the image of a lion.

one of many drawings


   As well as seeing the exhibition we went on to hear a talk with a perhaps rather tenuous link between the New World discoveries and Durer.


The present of this was a Professor Jago Cooper who has a big interest in  archaeology being a   British archaeologist and a former Curator of the Americas at the British Museum - he is now involved a s Director of the Sainsbury Centre at the  University of East Anglia . 

|Kehinde Book



After the Durer talk we had a look at a temporary exhibition showcasing some of the work of African American artist Kehinde Wiley who often revisits 'Classic' works adding African Americans .

Kehinde is famed for his portrait of President Obama.

As well as a work that referenced Caspar David Friedrich’s most famous painting, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818) there was a film on show  - The Prelude .


The Prelude was shown across 6 screens and was set mainly within a snowy landscape. 

Across multiple screens

As with so many Art moving image pieces  this seemed to run without a  published time that it started ore finished.

The image and audio were both (to me) exceptionally good quality.




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