FEBRUARY UNCENTRAL

The highest concentration of galleries may be in Mayfair, Fitzrovia and the West End, but art is well-dispersed in London with good shows to be found in all directions… so it is that the following ten recommendation don’t include any galleries with a W1 postcode. I start in Ealing and traverse Bermondsey, Hoxton, Hackney, Wimbledon, Cambridge Heath, Finsbury, Kensington, Whitechapel and Shoreditch in the following - and I was also tempted by Camden, Islington, Lambeth and Peckham…

Edgar Martins - 'Untitled (Atlanta, Georgia)' from the series 'This is not a House'

The Near and the Elsewhere / Marguerite Horner @ PM Gallery, Walpole Park, Mattock Lane – Ealing Broadway

To 17 March: www.ealing.gov.uk/pmgalleryandhouse

Sir John Soane’s Pitzhanger Manor-House hosts an impressively curated photo-centred survey of urban development, displacement and desertion round the world. Highlights include Francis Alys’ slide show of street sleepers in Mexico; Sara Ramo’s menacing irruption into a Brazilian interior; Peter Pillar’s documentation of the German equivalent of the M25, Edgar Martins’s shots of abandoned houses in America; and Thomas Demand’s photos of his recreation of a Hong Kong bar moved twice to accommodate redevelopments. Plus, in a neatly complementary painting show, Marguerite Horner’s grisaille evocations of townscape anomie.

Il mistero delle cattedrali

Anselm Kiefer: Il Mistero delle Cattedrali @ White Cube, 144 – 152 Bermondsey Street - Bermondsey

To 26 Feb: http://www.whitecube.com/

The word ‘portentous’ may never be far away with Anselm Kiefer, but his literally heavy symbolism proves well-suited to White Cube’s monumental new Bermondsey space: alchemy and history weave through twenty works including paintings weighing more than a ton due to the boulders, lead wings, metal sunflowers etc hanging off them. Their dark and salty silveriness is resonantly aged by exposure to the elements; and the recently closed Tempelhof Airport in Berlin, which Speer envisaged as Hitler’s gateway to Europe, proves a fertile source of apocalyptic mysticism. True, Kiefer seems doomed to re-enact the same obsessions, but isn’t that part of his point? And has he ever done so this powerfully in Britain?

Three Trees

David Hepher: Lace, Concrete and Glass, an Elegy for the Aylesbury Estate @ Flowers, 82 Kingsland Rd – Hoxton

To 25 Feb: http://www.flowersgalleries.com/ (talk 2 Feb 6.30pm)

Want an English artist with some of Kiefer’s majesty, albeit to quite different ends? I suggest the latest of David Hepher’s long-running landscapes of blocks of flats, here the huge Aylesbury Estate in Walworth. Aside from a rhyming name and similar scale (like Kiefer, he has a painting more than 10 metres wide) Hepher also skewers romanticism and mixes the pictorial and the real - here are not just paintings of buildings, some on photographs of buildings, but irruptive paintings of other scenes, images in grafitti on the buildings, and building materials forming part of the pictures. ‘Three Trees’, for example, plays a game reminiscent of Joseph Kosuth’s famous comparison of a chair with its representations.





Jarek Piotrowski: Soft Machine @ GALERIE8, 203 Richmond Rd – Hackney Central

To 11 March: http://www.galerie8.co.uk/

The newly-expanded London Overground makes Hackney easy to reach, and Jarek Piotrowski’s impressively-scaled (actually on the site of the old Flowers East) is a good reason to go there. The German-based Polish-born Canadian isn’t one to get stuck in a style any more than in a country. Ink drawings, pastels overworked to considerable effect, and atmospherically sylvan watercolours complement the dominant work here: Piotrowski uses a surgeon’s scalpel to excise intricate patterns, many of them found in medical textbooks, from large PVC mats of a type common in hospitals and playgrounds. The bodily, then, is cut into the industrial - and hung so that the shadows, which make intimately ghostly positives of the negative removals, are integral.


Phillip Allen: Shop-soiled Nude

 The Perfect Nude @ Wimbledon Space, Merton Hall Rd – Wimbledon

To 10 Feb (weekdays only): wimbledonspace@wimbledon.arts.ac.uk

A healthy, if preferably clothed, ten minute walk from Wimbledon station you’ll find a hundred nudes – made by fellow artists at the request of Dan Coombs and Philip Allen. That’s some way from the day job for most, and a contrast develops between those who make characteristic-looking work at something of a kilter from the tradition (Danny Rolph, Alexis Harding…) while others are less recognisably their usual selves (Mali Morris, Allen himself). Lee Maeltzer, Andy Harper and Sam Windett land rather effectively on the middle of that continuum, and Damien Meade stood out among those new to me. The diversity makes it hard to draw conclusions about nude today, but my impression was that the artists enjoyed the freedom enforced by this constraint.




Brian Griffiths: The Invisible Show @ Vilma Gold,

To 19 Feb: www.vilmagold

In the kind of show you’ll remember even if you don’t like it, Brian Griffiths riffs on the empty gallery as exhibit and the possibility that the show isn’t yet ready to open by seeming to cloak large sculptural works in beige tarpaulin. Of course, this ‘cosmic latte’, as Griffiths terms it, becomes the work it purports to cover, the more so as its shades of would-be-camouflage are lovingly hand-painted. That brought to mind Richard Tuttle, which also fits with how the minimalist cube is made provisional. But you could equally see the installation as frustrating the urge to see inside – to the action in tents at a fair, perhaps, or into the artist’s own process…


Panto

 Caroline Achaintre: Trip-Dip @ Arcade, 87 Lever St – Finsbury

To 18 Feb: http://www.arcadefinearts.com/

The London-based French artist Caroline Achaintre is perhaps best-known for her mask-like wall rugs which combine ancient and modern as they ‘paint in wool’. Here, though, ceramics predominate with three neat twists: first, they too exploit our natural tendency to find faces in what at first seems abstract; second, several appear to be melting, as if the soft-to-hard process of the clay has gone into reverse; and third, some make punchy use of other materials, such as black leather as in the fetishitic carnivality of ‘Panto’, (which ties a bulbous ceramic nose onto a leather ball) and ‘Tie Man’ (in which the leather neckwear seems to double as an anti-gravitational noose).

'Book of Time' (detail)

Lygia Pape: Magnetised Space @ the Serpentine Gallery - Kensington

To 19 Feb: http://www.serpentinegallery.org/

Of the three biggest names in Brazilian neo-concretism, Hélio Oiticica has had a Tate retrospective; and Lygia Clark has been well-shown here by Alison Jacques – yet this is London’s first broad view of Lygia Pape (1927-2004: say ‘Par-pay’), whose multi-media work often focuses on aesthetic experiences which are available for relationships in collective terms. Two works stand out: the 365 tempera-on-wood contractions of the ‘Book of Time’ (1961-63), which activate a year’s-worth of geometries through the implied movement in a process of cutting out shapes which are re-presented on a different plane; and the golden threads of the late ‘Web’, cloistered in their own dark, which shimmer tremulously as you circle round them.

Mary Hurrell: Call @ Carlos / Ishikawa, Unit 4, 88 Mile End Rd – Whitechapel / Stepney Green

To 3 March: http://www.carlosishikawa.com/

South African Mary Hurrell is a recent RCA graduate who grabbed headlines with naked figures on a shelf in her degree show. She’s installed a beautifully measured dance of space, sound and light in the gallery recently opened by Vanessa Carlos (formerly at The Approach) and fellow-Brazilian Nara Ishikawa. The viewer is lured onto a floor painted to resemble a white dance mat, and into movement around ambiguously-volumed constructions of jesmonite, Perspex and steel to a soundtrack made by a genuine dancer, elegantly filmed manipulating a metal sheet as wobble-board. The whole coheres to form a curious combination of antiseptic, industrial and poetic.

Daniel Rapley: 'Sic' (2010-12)

Daniel Rapley: Covenant @ PayneShurvell, 16 Hewett St & Olek: ‘I do not expect to be a mother, but I do expect to die alone’ @ Tony’s Gallery, 68 Sclater St – Shoreditch

To 3 March (Rapley) & 23 March (Olek): http://www.payneshurvell.com/ & http://www.tonysgallery.com/

These two convincingly obsessive artists can be found within a couple of hundred Shoreditch yards. Daniel Rapley has transcribed the Bible by hand – though you have to take that on faith from the first of the 750-or-so double-covered sheets of neat writing. He muses entertainingly on his activities in astonishingly print-like pencil drawings, and is literally with us his own blood text ‘Praesentia’. New York-based Pole Olek spent two months living and crocheting in Tony Taglianetti’s gallery, covering people, furniture and any objects within her ambit - with added self-revelatory sexual twists which fit in with her Emin-quote title. How to shape the world to your own ends, or just cover the cracks?


Images courtesy relevant galleries and artists + Charles Duprat (Kiefer)

2011 IN REVIEW

Obvious highlights of 2011 included Miro and Richter at the Tate, Leonardo at the National Gallery, Toulouse-Lautrec at the Courtald, Degas at the Royal Academy, Twombly/Poussin at Dulwich, Pistoletto at the Serpentine, Struth and Sasnal at the Whitechapel, New Sculpture at the Saatchi Gallery and the British Art Show at the Hayward. Good stuff too, all of which I’m ignoring in plumping for a lower profile selection:

* 10 London shows, 5 which featured in my recommendations and 5 which might have but for one reason or another (eg the timing of the show or of my visit) did not

* 10 from the ‘rest of the world’ – fairly narrowly defined, in this case as ‘the other places I happened to visit’ or, in Southampton’s case, be in.

5 favourites from my 10 recommended London shows per month:

Phyllida Barlow: RIG @ Hauser & Wirth

Phllyida Barlow was something of an artists’ artist until she retired from her influential teaching practice at the Slade – Rachel Whiteread, Tacita Dean and Douglas Gordon are among her former students - revved up her exhibition schedule and got signed by Hauser & Wirth, for whom this was her first solo outing. The distinctive wood-panelled former bank proved an ideal host building for infestation by her trademark brand of pseudo-slipshod anti-monumental constructions. The scale of infestation was impressive over four floors of very physical sculptural experience – it got in your way – with political overtones: barricades with the feel of the street in a place with a capitalist history. What’s more, Christoph Buchel’s Piccadilly Community Centre was pretty much as effective in a different register in the same building…

Emma Hart: To Do @ Matt’s Gallery, 42-44 Copperfield Rd – Mile End

Feel-good show of the year was Emma Hart’s chirpily hypnotic cacophony of 27 ‘assistants’ - which is to say tripod-based sculptures with avian features, each showing a short film on a pocket camera in which Hart herself makes jokes and calls out instructions. Hart explains that the bird-cameras sprung from their visual similarities as small things with beady eyes, and their shared ability to influence our behaviour, eg we try to spot both. Fun aside, this also picks up on her ongoing concern for the camera as an active creator of events, and sneaks in surveillance as a darker theme by way of twitching. Hart is currently in residence at the University of Kingston, by the way, and you can catch her performing there on 25 January.

Pino Pascali’s Final Works, 1967 – 1968 @ Camden Arts Centre

The way in which the Italian arte povera artists used everyday materials remains highly influential in current practice, but Pino Pascali (1936-68) had hardly been seen in Britain before this show, despite his prominent role at the start of the movement, and despite – or is it because of? – his glamorous lifestyle and potentially myth-making early death in a motorcycle crash. It proved a startlingly fresh show, conceptually and materially (even though it used lots of steel wool, which should by rights have disintegrated by now). There was something right, for example, about the wrongness of a six-legged spider...

Clockwise Stoppage (8.30pm-5am)

What If It's All True, What Then? @ Mummery & Schnelle

This two part 12 artist show surveyed that fertile strand of abstraction which tweaks the distinction between painting and object. It had the incidental merit of invoking some excellent recent shows elsewhere (Angela de la Cruz and Peter Joseph at Lisson; Simon Callery at Fold; Rebecca Salter at the Beardsmore Gallery) and prefiguring (pre-abstracting!?) a couple to come (Jon Thompson at Anthony Reynolds, Paul Caffell at Mummery & Schnelle itself). Alexis Harding’s performances of paint, in which the canvas is turned as the paint congeals, were one highlight…

Jodie Carey: Somewhere, Nowhere @ The Pump House Gallery, Battersea Park

June was the perfect time of year to stroll through Battersea Park to the unique four floor gallery which – happily – survived a well-publicised grant reduction. Here Jodie Carey used a pared-back aesthetic to tease a fragile beauty from base materials, affirming life at the same time as evoking its vulnerability and potential addictions. Cumulatively, her installations - wallpaper patterns of cigarette ash; a marbled and surprisingly sparkly carpet of ground blood and dust; cast plaster slabs which incorporate the chance effects of coffee and lace - also brought a bodily presence to the architecture.

5  shows from London not previously featured:

Blue 25.05.11

David Batchelor: 2D3D @ Karsten Schubert

David Batchelor is known mainly as a sculptural bricoleur (eg of found light boxes) and colour theorist (eg his book ‘Cromophobia’). Novel as it was to see his paintings for the first time, their focus was, then, thematically unsurprising: pools of colour which provide the titles; a sculptural emphasis on how those pools wrinkle into intricate patterns when left to dry on sheet aluminium over several months; and a resemblance to forms on a plinth - whether they be abstract shapes, exhibited heads or, more cheerfully, liquorice allsorts.

Simon Periton & Alan Kane: The Asbo Mystery Play and Other Public Works @ Sadie Coles HQ

Sadie Coles might well be my gallery of the year, with an exceptional programme in both spaces. In cases such as William N Copley, Jonathan Horowitz, Andreas Slominski and Georg Herold that was no surprise, but I hadn’t know what to expect from Periton & Kane, though this was in fact the second collaboration between these artist-friends after an 18 year gap. An inventive and witty installation took as its theme the generation of absurd proposals for public works: how about giant cigarette lighters instead of streetlamps? Repainting the drains in disco colours? A tramp’s sculpture table? A pavilion based on a baseball cap? And so on, with many transparently affectionate ways to mock and yet pay obeisance to the possibilities of the monumental.

Untitled, 2011

Simon Liddiment @ the Standpoint Gallery

The Standpoint Gallery awards artist residencies which conclude with a quickfire show over a single weekend. I caught Simon Liddiment’s, which included a set of ‘male’ and ‘female’ anthropomorphic / phallic / mammary coat hooks, which Liddiment he’s painting daily until the ‘closure’ of touching is achieved: he expects that to take three years. Add an ingenious frieze of beer labels and a shelving bracket holding up a panda poster (deconstructing the frame’s role and setting up a half-rhyme between brackets and bamboo) and you had a satisfyingly focused and witty whole.

Floor Piece

Leah Capaldi @ The Hole

There’s a tradition of intense performance art in which the performer tests the endurance of themselves and the audience. Not so Leah Capaldi’s recent performances, as other people carry them out and they form part of the ambient scene. Her ‘Floor Piece’ at Simon Bedwell’s adventurous venue The Hole exposed just the crown of the head of an actor secreted beneath the floorboards in a memorable coup de theatre of exposure and vulnerability, offset by its humorous resemblance to a rodent. Capaldi also infiltrated both the Catlin Art Prize and New Contemporaries with overwhelming perfume, distracting viewers from the other works and pointing up those shows’ competitive edges.

Lovebird

Michiel Ceulers: MCHL CLRS DRNK TRBL @ Rod Barton

I happened to see three very different shows by the imaginative Belgian painter Michiel Ceulers. First, at Juliette Jongma in De Pijp, Amsterdam’s equivalent of the East End,were his included ‘matings’ of pairs of paintings found in the art college skip. Second, at Rod Barton in London, where what looked like crosswords-come-space invaders–come-abstract-geometries proved to be paint and vodka depictions of the QR codes which linked to an instructional video of how to make cocktails. So the paintings refer beyond themselves – to spirits in two senses, perhaps – and might even prove useful to the thirsty collector. Finally, at Maes & Matthys in Antwerp, he took an unexpected figurative turn.

Ten from Elsewhere

From 'I Modi'

RH Quaytman: Spine, Chapter 20 (Basel) Cherchez Holopherne, Chapter 21 (Cologne) and I Modi, Chapter 22 (Venice)

It was something of a year of triples, as I also saw three chapter’s of RH Quaytman’s increasingly well-regarded site-specific sets of paintings: in Basel (in dialogue with the exhibition history of the Kunsthalle, and also making up a retrospective through self-reference), Cologne (linked to an antiquarian bookshop) and Venice (inflected with nautical themes). All convinced in their context – and Spine, her own illustrated account of Chapters 1-20 – bid fair to be declared monograph of the year for and its nuanced self-exploration and the way it formed part of what it recorded (the strength of her following was shown when the launch run of 2,000 sold out on her opening night in Basle at $100 a pop).

Installation view with the levitating hoop 'Sunrise'

Eva Rothschild: Hot Touch @ The Hepworth, Wakefield

Wakefield’s new Hepworth Museum opened to general acclaim in May, and it certainly does its principal subject proud across six of the galleries. But there was plenty to be said, too, for the big solo show of Eva Rothschild’s ‘magic minimalism’, which took several cues from Hepworth whilst still infusing their materialism with a sense of looking for some mystery beyond. They seemed equally at home in Wakefield, whether laid on the floor, suspended from the ceiling by Buddhist hands, or constituted in large part by parodies of more orthodox plinths.

Lighthouse (East)

Catherine Yass @ the De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill

Catherine Yass’s retrospective at the iconically modernist and recently restored de la Warr Pavilion included new work featuring a striking lighthouse platform a couple of miles out to sea in Bexhill. That was given added power by its being just about visible from the pavilion roof, and for me personally from the fact that, though formerly local, I’d never noticed it before! I was also struck by Yass’s innovative use of blues and browns: blue, she say, is the one colour which floats behind and in front of the plane… And a London version of this show opens soon (13 Jan – 11 Feb at Alison Jacques).



The Fugue

Neo Rauch @ Museum Frieder Burda, Baden Baden

There was no shortage of outstanding painting restrospectives in London in 2011: Leonardo, Poussin/Twombly, Richter and Sasnal spring to mind. However, the highly influential Leipzig painter Neo Rauch remains little-seen in Britain, so it’s a shame these 40 works didn’t tour. True, Richard Meier’s new museum provided an ideal setting for the meeting of surreal individuality with collective memory which drives Rauch’s brand of enigmatic post-pop incongruities with one ghostly foot in the communist past… but I still reckon it was a Hayward-sized show. Better news here is that Rauch's underrated wife, Rosa Loy, has a solo show opening on 24 Feb at Pippy Houldsworth.

Still from 'Squeeze'

Mika Rottenberg: Cheese, Squeeze and Tropical Breeze: Video Work 2003-2010 @ Museum Leuven

The newly-extended museum Leuven, a university town twenty minutes from Brussels, has an interesting permanent collection and as many as six wide-ranging temporary shows on at any one time. This autumn those covered Gregorian chant and Dirk Braeckman’s photography as well as impressively sculptural installations of seven films by New York-based Argentinian Mika Rottenberg. Cue blissfully mad systems of manufacture which satirise capitalism and the roles it ascribes to women, such as the use of ultra-long hair in cheese making or recycling a bodybuilder’s sweat. Rottenberg’s most elaborate set-up yet – Squeeze – also features documentary shots of lettuce and rubber production made to seem almost as absurd as the invented elements.

Dress Vehicle

Haegue Yang: Teacher of Dance @ the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford

The Berlin-based Korean brought a charged domesticity and an implied sculptural dance of folding and unfolding to Oxford’s airy space. Her ‘Non-Unfoldables’ are similar clothes racks transformed by covering and hanging items, while the ‘Dress Vehicles’ are boxlike groupings of venetian blinds on wheels, allowing the visitor to enter and move around the gallery. Was it too much to see the eponymous teacher as meditating on how much of our existence takes place in our relations with such commonplace objects?

Thomas Hirschhorn: Crystal of Resistance @ the Venice Bienalle

Thomas Hirschhorn’s almost absurdly ambitious Swiss Pavilion was a standout work at the Venice Bienalle. He provided plenty to read about how love, philosophy, politics and aesthetics operated through his rigorously excessive and illogically beautiful installation, inspired by a rock crystal museum, sci-fi B-movie sets, crystal-meth labs and a cheaply-decorated provincial disco. It was hard to know where – or, sometimes, whether – to look as the large space was overrun by broken glass, cotton buds, mannequins, disturbing war images, chairs, Barbies, mobile phones, beer cans and the crystals themselves ‘resisting visibility’ – with plenty of Hirschhorn’s signature tape to mummify things / bind them all together



Series E, 1967-68

 Charlotte Posenenske @ the Hansard Gallery, Southampton

The gallery linked to Southampton University presented the fullest account yet seen in Britain of Charlotte Posenenske (1930 -85), a German artist who has become widely known only since she featured in Documenta four years ago. The show concentrated on the influential work she made in 1967 before giving up art for a career in sociology – Judd-like scultures with a manufactured aesthetic but also an anti-market stance (unlimited editions at cost price) and a participative dimension, most obvious in those which can be rearranged by the viewer. Cerebral, cool and challenging.



Bear Creek




Boo Ritson: D is for Donut @ Southampton City Art Gallery

Two shows from Southampton may seem unbalanced but naturally enough I see everything in my home city, and it does have two excellent spaces. Body painting has become increasingly popular since Boo Ritson introduced her witty sculpture-painting-performance-photo narrative portraits of American characters five years ago. That may make them seem more mainstream than they are, so this, her first British retrospective, was a good chance to be reminded of their art credentials and punch – and of Ritson’s broader range from still lives to masks. It’s followed by a full show of new work at Poppy Sebire in the spring - to include landscapes on canvasses through which she puts people’s heads – such as ‘Bear Creek’ above.

Marcel Dzama: Untitled, 2000

My Winnipeg @ La Maison Rouge, Paris

Who’d have thought that the Canadian city of Winnipeg (pop 700,000), best-known for isolation, cold and having once housed Marshall McCluhan and Neil Young, had more than 70 recent artists worth exploring? Perhaps it hasn’t, but it has enough to make this big party of a show thoroughly enjoyable, mostly in a quirky way which casts the Royal Art Lodge (Dzama, Pylychuk, Farber etc) rather than the edgier General Idea (claimed for Winnipeg through college attendance, though more associated with Toronto) as the defining collective. Nor had I realised that Erica Eyres, Karel Funk and Kent Monkman were all born in Winnipeg. Highlights included the Guy Maddin docu-fantasia which provides the show’s name, and ‘Winter Kept Us Warm’, a basement full of work showcasing the potential for erotic action during the snow-bound months.

Comet

Vija Celmins: Desert, Sea and Stars @ the Museum Ludwig, Cologne

This was a severe, sublime, black-and-white-only retrospective of skies, oceans, deserts and webs from the American who has found a way to unite the conceptual with the traditional. It showed, said Celmins, her attempts to represent what interests her in the totally different – because small and flat – world of the image, and to make that world more real than the memory in your head. The beauty is an incidental bi-product of her meditation on how much she can see – of her drawing as evidence of thinking - but that beauty certainly helps draw viewers into their own intense looking.

JANUARY COLLECTIVE

It's in the nature of surveys and group shows that you won’t like everything, but a good one will have a high enough percentage to make a show within a show which particularly appeals, and the rest will provide valuable context. That’s a fair description of my first half dozen choices… 


Douglas Gordon: Self Portrait of You + Me (David Bowie)

 In Your Face @ SHOWstudio, 1-9 Bruton Place – Mayfair

To 4 Feb: http://www.showstudio.com/

Nick Knight, photographer-founder of the art of SHOWstudio, has packed forty artists into an energetic and confrontational mixture of art and fashion which focuses on the corporeal. It’s worth checking out just to remind yourself of the power of Abramović and Ulay’s ten minute shouting match projected up large. But the show also contains some original Viennese actionism, a blood-heavy mini-show of Franko B, Nancy Burson’s pre-Photoshop (ie pre-1990) blendings of faces across race and gender, Douglas Gordon’s burn-out of David Bowie, Nancy Fouts’ mummified boxing gloves, a near life-sized patterned nude by Orange County skateboarder-artist Ed Templeton… and more of like ilk, which is to say the best kind of worst kind of taste.



Leon Kossoff: Willesden Junction No 1, 1966

 The Mystery of Appearance @ Haunch of Venison, 103 New Bond St – Central
To 18 Feb: http://www.haunchofvenison.com/

When Haunch of Venison returned to its eponymous space after a three year refit it was hard to spot the difference. Only now has the point been revealed: that the gallery has been extended to run right through to a new main entrance on New Bond Street. The blockbuster chosen to inaugurate the expansion takes a subject-based approach to trace the mutual influences of ten major post-war British painters. It’s a bit of a mixed bag (are those really the best Caulfields they could find?) but full of interest. The room of nudes, and all of the Auerbach and Kossoff are especially good (I've been known to distinguish their similar styles thus: if I like it, it must be Auerbach – but these are really top Kossoffs).

Jonathan Delafield Cook: Belanus Crenatus

Radical Drawing @ Purdy Hicks, 65 Hopton St - Southwark
To 28 Jan: http://www.purdyhicks.com/

London has been blessed with some fine drawing-based shows recently: ‘Polemically Small’ at Charlie Smith was excellent in December, and ‘A Piece of Paper’ is at Madder 139 (to 28 Jan). I’m not sure the selection at Purdy Hicks is any more radical than those, but it has some great stuff in it: Keith Tyson’s huge and amazing 1,193-room plan of a university from 1993; five brand new, typically kooky, Marcel Dzarma drawings; Gavin Turk’s tea ring stains arranged like dirty takes on Bridget Riley’s circle drawings; Jonathan Delafield Cook’s detailing of a barnacle, made mountainous by scale; a beautiful Wangechi Mutu watercolour collage, and a suite of lively drawings in matching register by the new-to-me Australian Sally Smart.

Georg Herold: Untitled

Gesamtkunstwerk: New Art from Germany @ The Saatchi Gallery - Chelsea

This very broadly premised survey (art made in Germany by anyone or by Germans anywhere) is well worth seeing, especially for Georg Herold's canvas-covered painting-sculptures - as above - plus Thomas Helbig, André Butzer and Max Frisinger. But it’s part of the point of such shows to provoke, and even accepting the exclusion of moving images and the decision not to revisit Richter and his generation or those (Rauch and Skreber in particular) previously shown to good effect by Saatchi, I could happily have lost several of the artists featured. Perhaps Magnus Plessen, Susanne Kühn, Michael Sailstorfer, Sofia Hultén, Rosa Loy, Sabine Hornig, Daniel Sinsel, Florian Slotawa, Haegue Yang and Cyprien Gaillard could have filled in the gaps...



Leo Fitzmaurice: Misarray

 Chain Chain Chain @ Bischoff/Weiss, 14a Hay Hill – Mayfair

To 28 Jan: http://www.bischoffweiss.com/

This is something of a coming of age for Raphaëlle Bischoff and Paola Weiss as west end girls, for ‘Chain Chain Chain’ plays off the surrounding jewelry shops in considering art and value. The interlinking angles explored are well set out in an accompanying leaflet by curator Glenn Adamson, half the team behind the V&A’s big show ‘Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990’ (itself open to 15 Jan). There is, though, a nod to the gallery’s East End origins: Sue Collis, who’s represented by Hoxton’s Seventeen, formerly near to Bischoff/Weiss, has exchanged a section of wall between the two spaces. Oh yes, and the other works - from Leo Fitzmaurice’s re-modernising edit of packaging, to Nicole Cherubini’s clay that never leaves its box, via several rather blingier works – are themselves rather interesting.

 

Ditty Ketting: Untitled (346)

 Ongoing minimalism @ Rocket, Tea Building, 56 Shoreditch High St – Shoreditch

To 5 Feb: http://www.rocketgallery.com/

Is there no end (qv Newman, Stella, Cruz Diez , Riley, Buren, Rondinone, Davenport, Lambie, Phelps…) to the lure of the stripe? Well, I didn’t feel its pull pall in Dutch painter Ditty Ketting’s complex constructions. She uses a traditional colour wheel system, spiced by random spinning, to lay her colours over and under cage-like structures of black, white and grey. That imprisonment of sorts palpably fails to prevent the bursting forth of her 16 colours. She’s the most maximal of the minimalists in this bright survey, but all five (Ketting, Michelle Grabner, Will Taylar, Lars Wolter, Stefan Eberstadt) have their complexities – would ‘Intricate Minimalism’ have caught the vibe more accurately? But that’s enough stripes…

Damien Hirst: The Complete Spot Paintings @ Gagosian London x 2 (and New York x 3, Beverly Hills, Paris, Rome, Geneva, Athens, Hong Kong)

12 Jan - 18 Feb (London): http://www.gagosian.com/

In what must be the logical antithesis of a group show, here’s a chance to join the dots internationally as all 11 Gagosian galleries are turned over to some 300 of Damien Hirst’s estimated 1,400 spot paintings (including, he says, five he made himself). Along with the spins, they make up a persuasive - if overblown - reducio ad absurdum of abstract painting as a means of expression. They’re also Hirst’s most Warholian play on the market, and one he hasn't given up despite declaring several streams finished at his 2008 Sothebys auction (come to that, what has he actually stopped doing?). As usual this millennium, it’s the performance not the work which takes centre stage with Hirst – a pity in a way, but he is good at that.

Mille Fiori

Dale Chihuly @ the Halcyon Gallery, 144-146 New Bond St – Central

To 29 Feb: http://www.halcyongallery.com/

It's not easy to take a gallery seriously when (as on the top floor here) it hangs Picasso next to Lorenzo Quinn without apparent irony; and, supreme glass-blower though he may be, I’d put Dale Chihuly's paintings on the Quinn side of that equation. Get past those reservations, though, and there's some spectacular and luminous Chihuly spread around the lower floors of Halcyon's new, fourth (!) and biggest London gallery. The forty-odd glassworks – such as fantasy shell forms, cascading chandeliers, multi-horned vases and a garden of people-sized plants complete with pool - reveal the force of a medium pushed to its limits.



Offshore - installation shot

 Magali Reus: ON @ The approach, 1st floor, 47 Approach Rd – Cambridge Heath

To 22 Jan: http://www.theapproach.co.uk/

It’s not quite a Halcyon expansion, but The approach has started to use a second room above its host pub. Young Anglo-Dutch artist Magali Reus uses it to screen fit young men straining to shift big blue bobbing barrels in a colour-matched sea. That acts as a literal and macho counterpoint to the main space’s pared-back installation of sculptural surrogates which suggest transport and displacement: sleek riffs on airport security trays, luggage racks, camping mats, cameras and emergency ladders for train tunnels – the last two hauntingly combined to suggest a cinematic tracking device. What would its film show? Perhaps, for all our huffing and puffing, that we’re getting nowhere…

Unknown (I/H4) 

David Walker: Brides on Fire @ Rook & Raven, 7-8 Rathbone Place - Fitzrovia

To 19 Jan: http://www.rookandraven.co.uk/

And now for something somewhat different… I’m not sure I’ve previously featured an artist normally classified as ‘urban’ or ‘street’ in my choices, but David Walker’s surprisingly brush-free spray paintings at the new Rook & Raven Gallery have a distinctive panache which takes them beyond their impressive spray technique and the graffiti origins referenced in the many scrawled and decayed marks which irritate the details. It’s obsessive work: Walker only does female portraits, which he sees as ‘’the historic measure of painting and beauty’; and you can still see the effects of the three years in which he used only black, white and pink.


Images courtesy of the relevant galleries and artists

HOW LONG DOES YOUR PROJECT LAST?

London is painting central at the moment (Leonardo, Degas, Richter, Sasnal, Condo, Saatchi’s Germans, Dulwich’s Canadians…) but that’s not my theme. Rembrandt’s self-portraits in stimulating interaction with Bacon’s (at Ordovas to 16 Dec) could be seen as a lifelong project. After seven years, Charles Avery is halfway through creating his own world through ‘The Islanders’ (at Pilar Corrias to 16 Dec). That makes its eventual timespan likely to rival Nobson Newtown, for which Paul Noble has reached his 26th and penultimate main drawing after 15 years (at Gagosian to 17 Dec). In which context I start with three shows spanning 7, 15 and 35 years respectively. And my other choices feature artists whose individual works feel very much as if they are part of one long undeclared project: no strategies of inconsistency from Georg Karl Pfahler, Daniel Buren, Anne Craven, Neil Farber, Nathalie Djurberg, Tomma Abts or Alastair Mackie. A prize, though, to Bruce McLean, whose contribution to the fascinating show ‘Your Garden is Looking a mess Could You Please Tidy it up’ (at Payne Shurvell to 17 Dec) has been 40 years in the making...

Train, Mechanical, 2003-09

Paul McCarthy: The King, The Island, The Train, The House, The Ship @ Hauser & Wirth Piccadilly, Savile Row & St James’ Square – Central

To 14 Jan (outdoor sculpture ‘Ship Adrift, Ship of Fools’ to 15 Feb at St James’s Square):  http://www.hauserwirth.com/

It’s not for the squeamish, but Paul McCarthy’s sprawling three-site takeover of Hauser & Wirth has the swagger of a show which must be seen. The seven year ‘Pig Island’ project grew so big in the veteran provocateur’s LA studio that ladders are provided to aid viewing of the orchestrated version. It contains as many deviants, butt plugs, body parts and KFC buckets as one would expect – but seems mild alongside ‘Train, Mechanical’: two animatronic George Bush caricatures sodomise two big pigs, the ears of which are fucked by smaller pigs. The mechanism whinnies and whines, the Bush heads spin, eyes popping, and follow you round the room. And there’s much, much more … enough to set McCarthy up as the romantic artist hero he’s debunking at Piccadilly in ‘The King’?



Sarakiniko Meltemi

 Massimo Vitali: New Work @ Brancolini Grimaldi, 43-44 Albemarle Street - Central

To 28 Jan: http://www.brancolinigrimaldi.com/

The Italian photographer Massimo Vitali is known for the washed out effect he achieves through slight under-exposure, and his concentration over the last fifteen years on large colour prints of Mediterranean beach panoramas as a means of exploring the human interface with nature. This handsome show sees landscape features increasingly dominate the tourists who formerly took centre stage. These – far from being casual snaps – require detailed research and route planning ahead of a team of four with a truckload of equipment in what has become Vitali’s summer routine ever since Berlusconi first came to power. Perhaps, he hinted at the opening, a more radical change of tack may come now Berlusconi’s gone.



John Smith: Unusual Red Cardigan at Peer, 97-99 Hoxton St – Hoxton
To 10 Dec: http://www.peeruk.org/ 

The increasingly acclaimed but anonymously named John Smith wryly acknowledges his 1976 student film ‘The Girl Chewing Gum’ (in which a director’s voice seems to control the action in a street scene) remains his best-known – indeed, you can see the original at Tate Britain now. He has repeated this film shoot at the same street corner 35 years on and superimposed this over the earlier version,making for a commentary on social transformation. He also presents nine internet plagiarisms / homages of the film, and tracks the identity of an online advertiser of its VHS edition: Smith has bought and now exhibits some of the seller’s eBay offering, including the eponymous ‘Unusual Red Cardigan’. A typically eccentric tale of identity, value, change and the vagaries of fame…



Georg Karl Pfahler: Paintings @ Maria Stenfors, Unit 4, 21 Wren St – Kings Cross

To 17 Dec: http://www.mariastenfors.com/

This is a rare but welcome British showing from the estate of Georg Karl Pfahler (1926-2002), a versatile Nuremberg-born ceramicist, painter, sculptor and architect. He arrived at a hard-edged style of abstraction in the early sixties, which was closer to emerging American models than to any other German work at the time - though he reminds me most of the Swiss Max Bill and his Danish contemporane, Ib Geertsen. Here six large, crisply unfussy canvases suit the gallery perfectly. Several feature a rounded framing device which implies they are extracted from a wider circle, and that contributes to a satisfying interplay between the paintings and also an overall sense of openness.

Daniel Buren: One Thing To Another, Situated Works @ Lisson Gallery,
29 Bell Street – Edgware Rd

To 14 Jan: http://www.lissongallery.com/

Since 1965 the influential French artist Daniel Buren has always worked with the tool of 8.7cm wide stripes – he says for him to turn to something else would be like a similarly established pianist switching to the trumpet. If that sounds narrow, the point of the stripes is to make you see not themselves but other things – here the gallery space, of course, but also perhaps a spiritual dimension: there’s a room of woven fibre optics which come and go with the current, and another of coloured shadows. Add an outdoor installation and Buren’s upcoming commission for the remodelled Tottenham Court Road tube station, and the idea that stripes can keep you busy for nigh on fifty years seems plausible enough.

Ann Craven: Summer @ Southard Reid, 2nd floor, 67 Dean St – Soho

To 28 Jan: http://www.southardreid.com/

Southard Reid, above Black’s club, has something of a coup with the first British solo show from American painter Ann Craven. For two decades she’s spoken to the sense in which you can’t capture the present before it becomes the past, by obsessively repainting similar scenes with a rapidity which sets out to challenge that logic. Here she tries to arrest flowers, portraits and the archetypal always-changing-yet-always-the-same moon. What’s more, the moments are sealed in triplicate: through the image itself, stripe paintings made with the left-over paint, and the palette which held the paint, itself completed with the ‘tag’ of a bird, Craven’s best-known motif. The whole amounts to a vibrant anamnesis of the fleeting nature of summer 2011.



Untitled (Criminals)

  Neil Farber: Ursa Major @ Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, 1st Floor, 6 Heddon St – Central

To 14 Jan: http://www.houldsworth.co.uk/

The second show in Pippy Houldsworth’s welcome return to a central location focuses on the phantasmal crowdscapes of Neil Farber, a mordantly witty painter who came to attention as part of the Winnipeg collective The Royal Art Lodge. Hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people emerge from acrylic and poured media, often with pools of gel for heads. They range from criminals to pigheads to the Fraternal Order of Peasants. I particularly like ‘Untitled (Better Than)’, which exploits the ghostliness of white gel to set up a dialogue between living people below and an ethereal cloud-crowd above, all of whom are murmuring words in which their heads are the ‘O’s, like vOices frOm beyOnd.



Nathalie Djurberg with music by Hans Berg: A World of Glass at Camden Arts Centre, Arkwright Rd – Finchley & Frognal

To 8 Jan: http://www.camdenartscentre.org/

This is a substantial first UK solo exhibition for Nathalie Djurberg, the Swedish ‘claymation’ animator who explores taboos with charmingly crude and macabre relish: five older films in a 35 minute sequence (including the wonderfully direct birth reversal ‘it’s the Mother’) plus four new five minute tales running in convenient parallel to the same music. Berg’s score chimes with the striking glass-like sculptures which stand before the screens. They also act as props in the films, in which Djurberg’s archetypes show their own fragilities: all find that desire is stronger than sense, as when a woman made of butter incites a bull to lick her out of shape.

Hepe

Tomma Abts @ Greengrassi, 1a Kempsford Rd – Kennington

To 22 Dec: http://www.greengrassi.com/

The 2006 Tuner Prize winner isn’t one to hurry: this, her first subsequent London solo, features eight new drawings and eight smaller (Abts’ standard 48 x 38cm) new paintings quietly at one with their objecthood. The drawings share a linear red and yellow language which hints at architectural structures. The paintings emerge from the application of successive layers which generate ambiguities between painted shadows, built-up elements, apparent perspectives and the way colours advance or recede. It would be good to see these anyway, but there’s also an innovation in the form of channels cut fully through the canvas to divide them in two: the same, perhaps, but rather more so.



 Alistair Mackie: Copse @ All Visual Arts, Omega Place – King’s Cross

To 16 Dec: http://www.allvisualarts.org/

Alistair Mackie characteristically uses natural materials to conceptual ends. Here he shows just one large installation, of severely pruned trees the bases of which have been carved into table legs. This witty conjunction of actuality and potential neatly reverses Giuseppe Penone’s well-known series revealing the tree within a block of timber: Mackie show the furniture ‘hidden’ in a tree, mixing inside and outside, nature and culture, not without a dark side in the copse’s violent combination of lopped limbs and wooden legs. Ask, and you can also see quite a cache of Mackie’s other work in the back room, made from wasp nests, mosquitoes, mouse skulls, rhea eggs…


 Images courtesy the relevant artists and galleries + Alex Delfanne (Hauser & Wirth)