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Art review: In Attendance: Paying Attention in a Fragile World (Fitzrovia Chapel, London W1)

by
24 January 2025

Jonathan Evens views an exhibition inspired by Simone Weil

Tom Carter

An installation view, from the east end of Fitzrovia Chapel, of the exhibition, conceived and curated by the Roberts Institute of Art

An installation view, from the east end of Fitzrovia Chapel, of the exhibition, conceived and curated by the Roberts Institute of Art

THE Fitzrovia Chapel is the former chapel of the Middlesex Hospital, now hidden in the heart of the Fitzrovia community. Built in 1891, it has been a place of sanctuary, prayer, and reflection for patients, their families, and doctors and nurses.

An enchanting gem of a building, full of Byzantine-inspired mosaics and architecture, it was used recently for the King’s Christmas Broadcast, as it is a place of meaning, memory, and sanctuary for many, and also an enriching cultural space for creative health and well-being.

The charity that maintains the chapel and organises activities there offers a distinctive artistic programme, supporting emerging and established artists and learning opportunities. Their latest venture is a collaborative exhibition with the Roberts Institute of Art which explores themes of attention, compassion, and curiosity through a selection of paintings, sculptures, and video by UK and international contemporary artists found in the David and Indre Roberts Collection.

The exhibition includes work by 11 artists — Etel Adnan, Emmanuel Awuni, Phyllida Barlow, Berlinde De Bruyckere, Gabriella Boyd, Miriam Cahn, Eve Sussman, Rachel Kneebone, Anj Smith, Paula Rego, and Cathy Wilkes — and asks us to reimagine the idea of attention as an open-ended practice tied to compassion, curiosity, and care. It draws on the chapel’s heritage as a place of sanctuary and reflection by encouraging visitors to explore attention not as rigid focus, but as a receptive and dynamic engagement with the world, inspired by the philosophy of Simone Weil.

Weil wrote: “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love.” Ellen McGrath Smith has noted that invoking “the spiritual writing of Simone Weil”, including that assertion, broadens the possibility for poetry, as it also does for art, as prayer, regardless of content, since all such acts are acts of “acute mindfulness”. David Miller finds an earlier source for such ideas in Nicolas Malebranche, who said that attention “is the natural prayer of the soul”.

Weil, he suggests, echoed this, consciously or not, in her similar assertion. As a result, as is essentially explored in this exhibition, to pray is “to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself”, whether “a landscape, a poem, a geometrical problem, an idol, or the True God”.

Through these diverse works and their setting, the exhibition celebrates how attention can help us to remain open and receptive rather than always seek solutions and answers. As Weil suggests, complete understanding of anyone or anything will remain elusive, but the practice of attention can allow for a journey of ongoing discovery and connection with the world and others around us.

The exhibition begins with sculptures set in recesses near the chapel’s entrance, moves through framed works displayed on simple stands in the nave, before culminating with an installation in the sanctuary which forms a new altar before the chapel’s own altar.

A key work is Paula Rego’s drawing St Mary of Egypt, in which the saint is shown in a state of rapt attention and openness to the divine. Weil called this receptivity an “inner supplication” where thought is “ready to receive in its naked truth the object that is to penetrate it”. This is the attitude with which Kneebone and Barlow approach their sculptures. Barlow’s work invites us to pay attention to overlooked materials and recognise that they hold “endless possibilities”. Kneebone observes that “the making process has more authority” than fixed outcomes. Her interlaced porcelain forms show organic and human forms in transformation, as metamorphoses and in-between states underpin her work.

Awuni speaks of letting go to pay attention to the materials with which he is working, which then “feels like you are flying”. His sculptural piece Red embeds a glazed clay head within a large expanse of sky-blue memory foam. Remembering his sense of flying when paying attention, this piece could be a positive visualisation of the usually critical phrase “having your head in the clouds”.

Etel Adnan’s work is the reverse, in that it involves paying attention to one particular aspect of the material world — Mount Tamalpais in Northern California — over many years. Through vibrant colour fields and simplified forms, she attends to the ever-changing mystery of light as it plays over this particular mountain revealing the spirit of the mountain itself.

Cahn’s emotionally charged image mit kind flüchten, of a spectral refugee mother with her child, resonates with Weil’s notion that attention to suffering is a moral concern, rooted in the recognition that we all share the capacity to suffer. For De Bruyckere, too, attending to the vulnerability of another is an act of both witnessing and staying with them. De Bruyckere’s sculpture sits at the altar and depicts a limp, dead, horse, graphically showing to us the fragility of life.

Of all the pieces shown, Sussman’s video piece, which reimagines Diego Velázquez’s painting Las Meninas, invites its viewers most fully into a slow, contemplative experience that captures the quiet, mysterious moments of attending to others. Her video encourages viewers to spend time attending to the details and atmospheres of this well-known painting, particularly the spaces between the characters.

The Fitzrovia Chapel director, Madeleine Boomgaarden, says: “The themes of personal reflection and marvel embedded in this show fit perfectly with the chapel’s history as a place of sanctuary, prayer and contemplation while it was part of the Middlesex Hospital — and to this day.” Kate Davies, RIA director, reflects: “The setting of the chapel could not be more fitting and . . . offers visitors an opportunity for contemplation, wonder and a fresh perspective.”

“In Attendance: Paying Attention in a Fragile World” is in Fitzrovia Chapel, Pearson Square, Fitzrovia Place, London W1, until 9 February. Phone 020 3409 9895. www.fitzroviachapel.org

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