The run-up to Christmas is the perfect season for an exhibition of Andrew Logan’s joyful and extravagant art.
The run-up to Christmas is the perfect season for an exhibition of Andrew Logan’s joyful and extravagant art. At Flowers (82 Kingsland Road, E2, until 31 December) is an installation of glittering sculptures which lightens the spirit and brings a song to the lips. Fashion meets fantasy in Logan’s signature mirror sculptures, his unique blend of resin, glass, fibreglass, paint and glitter. For the past 40 years, Logan (born 1945) has brought colour and light into people’s lives. He was a pioneer of the sensational long before the YBAs toddled into view; revealingly, Sir Norman Rosenthal, chief enabler of the YBAs, is a long-time admirer of Logan. Now, in a show appropriately called Rejoice, Logan salutes the tinsel season in his own inimitable way.
The visitor steps into a wonderland of freestanding sculptures — three variants of Pegasus, Logan’s trademark winged horse, in black, red and white, and mirrors cut into portraits and intensively decorated. Here is Derek Jarman with a stack of driftwood for hair, a witty allusion to his home on the beach at Dungeness. Over there are Fenella Fielding, Zandra Rhodes in the manner of Klimt, the late Freddy Gore with a vibrant great dangling canvas tie, and a vast but splendid portrait of the flaxen-haired Angela Flowers. The classical collides with the surreal, and some of Logan’s objects resemble the props in the Twenties photographs by Angus McBean.
In a back room, a film of the 2009 version of Logan’s celebrated Alternative Miss World competition is running, in which his playful but determinedly anarchic spirit can be seen in action. The whole show represents the triumph of kitsch, an extreme position that commands respect.
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