Approaching the Grundy I’m struck by feelings of familiarity and return. The banners outside announcing Garth Gratrix’s largest solo show to date, Flamboyant Flamingos, are recognisably the shade of paint ‘Flamboyant Flamingo’. Back in 2021 the entire floor space of the Abingdon Studios show, Many Splendored Things, was painted in this bright, peachy pink. There, Gratrix’s characteristically cheeky behind-the-scenes linguistic punning manifested in pushing viewers to walk on eggshells (it was, of course, paint with an eggshell finish), leaving behind our dusty footprints. This combined with their enduring commitment to utilitarian and everyday materials – their colour choices are driven by the names the home décor market bestows on paints. It’s this opportunistic seizing of camp and subversive linguistic possibilities that marks Gratrix’s own brand of queer formalism. Their minimalist sculptural installation practice investigates and stages queer bodily and emotional experience through symbolism, reference and dialogue, offering multiple possible interpretations to the viewer.
It’s this abundant possibility that I love most about Gratrix’s work, and the one which makes writing about it so difficult. I could spend my whole word count describing the meticulously finished objects they manufacture, or I could delve into the backstories of their misleading minimalism, which conceals deep engagement with other artists, thinkers and writers. The iterative nature of Gratrix’s exhibitions over the past few years and the cumulative effect that their works have developed unfold in my memory. In some senses I am returning, having written about Gratrix’s work in 2020 and 2021, but this is also a new beginning, as the first out-and-out queer show in the prestigious summer slot at the Grundy, and the first by a Blackpool-born-and-bred artist.
Blackpool is also the locus of Gratrix’s wider praxis. Having founded Abingdon Studios just up the road in 2014, they have provided artists with space, opportunities, funding and more over the years. This commitment to nurturing interconnectivity and community is a core element to the work as a whole, one which Flamboyant Flamingos concretises through inclusion of works by other artists, notably Derek Jarman and Felix Gonzalez-Torres, two of our celebrated queer elders who died too young from AIDS-related illnesses.
Gratrix’s work has always been conversant with histories of oppression, tragedy and protest through gestures of memorialisation – through symbols like the stripe and pink triangle, for example. It’s also always been personal, examining our experiences as queers and as people, cruising in space, navigating other bodies flirtatiously or tentatively. But the depth of feeling in the tributes to familial and generational histories in this show feels like an augmentation.
Over the front door of the gallery where the neon red light of Martin Creed’s ‘Work No. 231: Things’ (2000) usually glows, are instead two flashing pink triangles. As the first Blackpool voice of queer identity to occupy this space, I understand Gratrix’s desire not to be objectified – not to be thinged – and I also suspect that with language contributing such vitality to their works, they know they can do much better than the word ‘things’. Indeed, the two flashing triangles of ‘Mummy’s Boy’ (2024) don’t wink at random but convey the work’s title in Morse code – a direct line to thinking about World War II whilst also drawing in childhood experiences of bullying and homophobia. It’s no surprise to learn that Gratrix’s grandfather was active in that war, like so many of his generation, but learning that he was a prisoner of war for four years in a Hamburg camp adds another layer of gravitas to the piece. The pink triangle, which originated then and now symbolises both LGBTQ+ histories of oppression and shaming along with resistance and pride, crops up in Gratrix’s work repeatedly, even becoming the protagonist in 2020’s exhibition Shy Girl. This coded instantiation, along with ‘GayDay GayDay’ (2024), vinyl panelling with cut-out dots and dashes, announce many of Gratrix’s ongoing concerns with communication and code making/breaking/switching, all bound up with other allusions and dichotomies: visibility and invisibility, obfuscation and revelation, history, redundancy, legacy, thresholds and passage, rights of passage, secrecy and safety and danger, voyeurism and peeping toms and glory holes…
‘GayDay GayDay’ (2024) also bears the classic beach stripe-cum-football stripe (their other grandfather was a celebrated local player)-cum-prisoner of war stripe that has become a signature of Gratrix’s. In this way, their practice is partly a product of its place. Blackpool – and British coastal resorts generally, with their weird open edges that can encourage outwardness, outness and openness – imbues a tonal quality in the work, especially in its negotiations of working class sensibilities and almost theatrical performances of queer identities. The first room of the exhibition is a confrontation with grief. ‘Smumpy (Benidorm with her baps out)’ (2024) is the actual lettered bouquet from the cremation service of the artist’s mother in March 2024. The violet and white floral letters, trimmed with purple ribbon, which spell out ‘Smumpy’ – the name Gratrix and their sibling affectionately called their mother – have been freeze dried, imbuing them with a hauntingly sweet scent which hints both at the unnaturalness of their preservation and how recently both they and Gratrix’s mother were alive. At first quite a shocking piece, its complexities unfurl as it becomes apparent that this tribute wasn’t conceived after the fact – Gratrix chose these flowers with their mother in the full knowledge of her approaching death. Each flower is, of course, suffused with meaning, such as the carnation which was a favourite of hers as well as an established symbol of queer love. I wonder if they always envisaged this other use for her bouquet, placed atop a white plinth here in an exhibition. I imagine that they did, in which case this piece is evidence that art, especially for Gratrix, is daily – a part of life and a tool for understanding it. It feels both revelatory and inevitable that the tenor of Gratrix’s work has opened up and become more easily relatable by turning inward and allowing autobiography in. But this tribute is not sombre; the work’s jokey subtitle looks back on joyful holidays and the brazen humour that must have filled their relationship. It also suggests hope, that the artist’s mother might indeed be resorting differently up in that glittering resort.
The inclusion of ‘Untitled (Last Light)’ (1993) by Feliz Gonzalez-Torres in this room, then, could suggest a possible discomfit with this amount of autobiographical sharing. It takes the lens off Gratrix, the person and artist, in a way that is simultaneously self-deprecating and generous. Because ‘Untitled (Last Light)’, a string of twenty-four glowing lightbulbs, is one of those pieces that speaks to all of us, about life and death generally, but specifically about the unjust deaths of so many during the AIDS crisis, of the 1980s and 90s and subsequently. The layers of memorialisation in this near-empty room are dense, and can also be felt in the history of minimalism and use of everyday materials as passed down from Gonzalez-Torres to Gratrix. We can see the inheritance, and the openness, of a rule-bound practice, looking from the specified number of lightbulbs to Gratrix’s ‘Humble’ (2024), the third piece in the space which consists of nine-inch stripes in a very muted, dusty pink, painted directly onto the gallery wall. Gonzalez-Torres left the specifics of installation open, and in this instance the string of lightbulbs is draped vertically up the wall, echoing the stripes and articulating the clear differential power dynamics between verticality and horizontality, agency and stillness.
This room offers the clearest manifestation I’ve seen of something always at play in Gratrix’s work; the dynamic between two opposing positions. The subtlety and humility of the painted stripes directly counters the flamboyance of the exhibition’s title, questioning and undermining potential assumptions about a queer, Blackpool exhibition. It says at once, yes, we’ll have some fun flirtation, but not without remembrance and acknowledgement of where we’ve come from. This is excellent minimalism – moving along this axis between emptiness and abundance.
After this commemorative encounter, the installation in the main gallery space is delightful. Four separate sculptural works create a holiday resort atmosphere of David Hockney-style late twentieth-century Miami glamour, or the glittering Benidorm pools we’d just been imagining. This room brings together many of Gratrix’s previous series and ongoing processes. There are elements from ‘Shy Girl’ (2020-present), an ongoing work currently comprising nine beach towels featuring the stripes and triangle, hung from nine wonky (angled at nine inches off horizontally straight) bronze coated steel bars. The artist’s nine-inch rule – garnered from the intimate and unabashed lines of interviewing pursued on gay dating apps – also find new iterations in this space, culminating in the eighty-one-inch height of the bronze poles in ‘Flamboyant Flamingo (Dip in the Pool)’ (2024). This is a huge, low (nine inches) rectangular plinth, the shape and colour of a tiled, chlorinated swimming pool, with nine bronze-cast spinning plates absurdly balanced atop those poles, looking like great sunflowers with their faces turned to the sky. This work also draws on the artist’s personal history. The plates are exact replicas of a spinning plate their father worked with when playing as Rainbow the clown – a persona he performed as for over a decade.
Slotted into niches cut out of the plinth are two curvy, colourful Henry Moore-like sculptures, ‘Fresh Squeezed, Innocent Peach’ and ‘Gobstopper, Comfy Jeans’ (both 2024). Inspired by tantric chaises, these smooth fibreglass seats conjure feelings of rest and comfort more readily than eroticism. But they also feel playful, from both their paint-derived names and the way they interact with other surfaces. Material joy is tangible in this room, in the visual interaction between the clean corners of the blue box plinth and the curved edges of the chaises and their opposing surface textures: the flatly sheeny blue of what I think is an eggshell finish paint covering the wooden plinth, and the mustard and peach fibreglass reflecting the light, while along the walls the soft absorbent fabric towels rest on the cold steel bars. Looking further up and noticing ‘Lone Splendour’ (2024), the holiday feeling really sets in, the layered references building up to a sort of celebratory nostalgia. Two powder coated steel balconies with, in the artist’s words, ‘a suggestive bulge’ in their bars, are fixed high up on the gallery walls, with ‘Shy Girl’ towels slung over them. It’s incredible how perfectly they conjure the feeling of walking down a Mediterranean holiday resort street, partly because of the way they suck the gaze upwards and make you feel the space differently – supported by the decision to unveil the galleries skylights and see the works illuminated by natural light only.
That’s what this room is all about – our performances as we move through and around this space, bodies interacting with other bodies, be they other viewers, the sculptures themselves or bodies of knowledge and research invoked by the spaciousness here. Because the spaces of Gratrix’s installation invite readings, I’m reminded of the deep blue lake in the ancient city of Disc in Jarman’s Through the Billboard Promised Land, where words and phrases come flying and sparking out of the water, casting light and shadows on the things around them.
The last two rooms of the show are largely given over to works by other artists, again evidencing the truth that none of us work in isolation – the importance of family, community, queer lineages and alternative canons is paid tribute to. The Collection Spotlight gallery includes works selected by Gratrix from the Grundy’s archives alongside their own, with ‘The Voile Curtains’ (2023), a rainbow curtain of loose sheaves of sheer colour cutting the space in two, hiding most of the old paintings. It’s here I feel the exhibition’s melancholy most sharply – perhaps because of the physical touch of the fabric as I pass through the curtain, a manifestation of the obfuscation and revelation that queer existence still requires in this heteronormative world. Perhaps it is the layers of history I’ve been navigating in this show, and the way that Gratrix’s new work welcomes in the viewer’s personal history as well – I feel all this and more, and it is perfectly overwhelming. There are two of the ‘Shy Girl’ beach towels neatly folded in front of ‘The Green Waterways’ (1926) by Henry Scott Tuke, a bright oil painting showing two men skinny dipping in a protected cove, and I’m almost moved to tears by the tenderness and banality of the assemblage.
In the final room, Jarman’s Blue (1993) offers the viewer pause, asking them to sit down and watch this feature length film and be still for a while. It operates as a sort of inversion of the whole show – verbal communication without the visual. It’s an opportunity for meditative rest, just following the speakers’ associative and meandering speech after the overstimulation prompted by the spaciousness in Gratrix’s installations. But it also explicitly states many themes of the show, including visuality, early death, HIV/AIDS, colour and more. Flamboyant Flamingos invites many more lines of enquiry: how the spaciousness of the exhibition and the slowness it promotes form part of the refuge from daily life that the holiday resort also represents, whilst simultaneously referencing the everyday from its material constitution. How, where negative affect in previous shows felt more like a shadow or an undertone, here feelings of sadness and loss are spoken at an equal volume to the joys the work expresses. How we therefore move between those two positions constantly. And how this reminds me of another queer working class creative also lost too soon, the poet Mark Hyatt, especially his happier pieces and the pleasure he takes from bathing, alone and with others. How Gratrix’s work emphasises the viewer’s active participation in the work, like how Deleuze and Guattari and Julia Kristeva outline it. How the insistence on absent bodies – of work, of knowledge, human bodies – create feelings of desire, loss, memory and narrativization. The press material dubs this show ‘a riot of colour and queer expression’, and while I think it is much gentler than the word ‘riot’ suggests, there is indeed defiance and an explosive, generative capacity sparking through Flamboyant Flamingos. It’s a joy to see the continuing accumulation of Gratrix’s works, and to return to the abundant possible readings which continue to flow from them.
Garth Gratrix: FLAMBOYANT FLAMINGOS Feat. Derek Jarman & Felix Gonzalez-Torres, The Grundy, Blackpool, 6 July – 7 September 2024.
Jazmine Linklater is a poet and writer based in Manchester.
This review is supported by The Grundy.
Published 01.08.2024 by Lauren Velvick in Reviews
2,496 words
