CURATORIAL
Harland Miller | Wayne White | Laurie Lipton | David Shrigley |
Magda Archer | Wilfred Wood | Stella Vine | Tracey Moffatt | Art by Villain
Paul Bommer | Sarah Maple | Roxana Halls | Jemima Brown
Maddox Gallery is delighted to host FUNNY HA HA, a thought-provoking group exhibition curated by the painter Roxana Halls. It features a selection of images which Halls finds humorous – and which she invites the viewer to enjoy and consider. In the process she addresses the subjectivity of humour, as well as the longstanding critical snobbery towards imagery that makes people laugh. Can't work which is funny also be serious, she asks?
Halls is best known for her wrily – sometimes darkly – amusing paintings of women who defy society’s expectations. FUNNY HA HA includes five of her own canvases, alongside work by artists such as Tracey Moffatt, Harland Miller, Stella Vine, David Shrigley, Laurie Lipton, Wayne White and Sarah Maple.
‘I’ve always questioned the idea that humour makes an art work in some way fleeting or frivolous,’ Halls says. ‘There’s a belief that the best art is the result of an sombre and unrelenting gaze. But as the likes of Hogarth and countless Dutch Golden Age painters proved, there is more than one way of getting to the truth – and humour is firmly among them’.
Halls’s five paintings all feature a female subject (or pair of female subjects) laughing as they engage in a subversive activity. Laughing While Boating, for example, depicts the actress Katherine Parkinson aboard a swan pedalo on a Butlin’s holiday camp boating lake. She sees the funny side as the outrageously long Jacobean costume she’s wearing billows over the side of the vessel and its hemline hits the water, its surface suggestively punctured with air bubbles.
Other imagery ranges from Paul Bommer’s Delftware-like tiles with ribald subject matter, to Tracey Moffatt’s tragicomic photography of Australian suburbia, via Stella Vine’s faux-naïve portraits of Princess Diana, and Wayne White’s kitsch landscapes with pithy phrases superimposed on them.
FUNNY HA HA is doubly timely. First, because, in such challenging geopolitical times, the human race needs humour now as much as ever; and second, because in an age of cancel culture, what constitutes humour is a much-disputed issue.
‘I wish to take a long look at laughter’, Halls says – ‘be it subversive, inappropriate, hysterical, satirical, covert, broad, bawdy or biting. What interests me is to explore humour and its functions, as muti-faceted as the artists who take it as their theme’.
Halls – who cites the writer Hélène Cixous’ essays including The Laugh of the Medusa, as among her key inspirations – has always liked to investigate cultural trends. In her popular ‘Appetite’ series, of 2013-14, she explored the acceptable limits in contemporary society for women to satisfy their desires.
‘Humour is more than a laughing matter,’ says Maeve Doyle, Artistic Director at Maddox Gallery. ‘Often it is testing the boundaries of what’s edgy and what’s insulting, to give us an alternative perspective on the way we see. As FUNNY HA HA makes clear, humour isn’t just funny, it’s brave”.