TEN TOP CURRENT PICKS - blog 2

Baldessari, Ruscha and Kapoor are still going strong, to which one could add the racy Wild Thing at the Royal Academy and the apparently surprising incursion of the Kienholzs’ Hoerengracht at the National Gallery – albeit the red lights of Amsterdam’s brothels give their replication ‘a sensuous, almost painterly feel’ according to the catalogue. And Hirst tries again with his critically-panned paintings across both White Cubes (or does he? Is the work actually the theatre of his switch to painting, rather than the paintings themselves?). Among the less well-publicised shows, those at Ancient & Modern, the Barbican and Swallow Street may not seem like art (discuss) but whether they are or not they are powerful in contrasting ways. And the first two make a neat little triangular walk along with Rokeby…


Wayne Thiebaud @ Faggionato Fine Art, 49 Albemarle St - Central

To 18 Dec: http://www.faggionato.com/

San Francisco’s master of painterly pop surely has a lower British profile than he should. This show may help rectify that with its good mix of still lives, signature cakes, landscapes and vertiginous cityscapes, but a large scale museum show would be welcome. Worth noting that Faggionato opens Mon-Fri only, and is fairly well-hidden on the first floor.

Tom Badley @ Rokeby, 5-9 Hatton Wall – Clerkenwell

To 18 Dec: http://www.rokebygallery.com/

It’s well worth seeking out the new Rokeby space near Farringdon rail/tube for young British artist Tom Badley’s first solo show, which combines what is becoming a very distinctive way of mediating between fragmentation and coherence (video using internet sourcing + repetition + speed variation + organization by sound + smashed monitors…) with a mesmerizing sculpture which gives magnetic permanence to the spin of a coin. Not that cash would ever crash…

Mustafa Hulusi: ‘The Worshippers’ @ Max Wigram, 99 New Bond St – Central

To 19 Dec: http://www.maxwigram.com/

A triple bill from the British-born Turkish Cypriot: characteristically hyper-real paintings (outsourced from Hulusi’s photographs) heighten our consciousness of oranges; black marble replicas of Roman statues from Salamis poke at the survivals of colonialism; and he combines with Mark Titchner to make ‘The Worshippers’, an animation which combines the Ayatollah Khomeini with psychedelia and the styling of corporate capitalism. And Hulusi has more work at Civic Rooms, the East End artists’ cooperative which he helps run…


William E Jones: ‘Tearoom’ @ Swallow Street, 3-5 Swallow St – Piccadilly

To 19 Dec: http://www.swallowstreet.com/

Never mind Hauser & Wirth’s main Piccadilly site – alright, I exaggerate, as ‘After Awkward Objects’ is a fine show, especially the Alina Szapocznikow – but while you’re there be sure to pop into their sponsored but independent project space just over the road. ‘Tearoom’ consists of police surveillance footage taken through a two-way mirror in a public toilet in Ohio in 1962. We see urination, washing, combing and sex, mostly half-hidden in the cubicles. This is poignant – the film was used to prosecute the men – and its flickering and grainy, refreshingly not-for-camera reality generates its own aesthetic resonance.

Stephen G Rhodes: ‘Reconstruction or Something’ @ Vilma Gold, 6 Minerva St – Cambridge Heath

To 20 Dec: http://www.vilmagold.com/

Rhodes is one of the most interesting inclusions in Saatchi’s current survey of new work from America, and this impressive sculptural installation with multi-screen video collage combines high visual impact with underlying complexity (ie best to ask for more explanation than the press release) in considering the USA’s relations with Iraq. And the simultaneous, as opposed to successive, collaging of film elements seems very much of the moment.

La peinture est presque abstraite @ Camberwell Space, 45-65 Peckham Rd - Peckham

To 23 Dec: www.camberwell.arts.ac.uk/camberwellspace

A very coherent group of paintings which use representational motifs to make abstraction, with four French and four British painters and curated by Claude Temin-Vergez, who though born in France counts as one of the Brits (he teaches at Camberwell). True, this is a far-flung off-tube space, but then again it’s right next to the South London Gallery and so can be combined with the videos of Omer Fast (to 6.12) or Susanne Burner (10-18.12).

Presque Rien III @ Laure Genillard, 2 Hanway Place – Tottenham Court

To 9 Jan: lauregenillard.com

What is this French title trend? The third (!) instalment of Laure’s group show of almost nothing amounts to quite something, largely through drawing you into objects which turn out to be something else: a kebab is a sculpture, books are wings, a ball of dust is a planet. Plus a chance to see David Batchelor's classic slide show of found white monochromes. Worth noting that the gallery doesn’t do mornings!

Robert Kusmirowski: Bunker @ The Curve, Barbican

To 10 Jan: www.barbican.org.uk/artgallery

Perhaps by being a deliberately rather than accidentally awkward space, The Curve often works better than the Barbican’s main gallery. Or maybe its just the quality of commissioning and installation: Richard Wilson and Peter Coffin have been particularly memorable there, as will be Kusmirowski and, I would bet, Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, the French artist who is next up but as yet absurdly little-known in England. Kusmirowski is a Pole who became famous for his recreation of a 1940s railway carriage in a former Jewish girls school at the 2006 Berlin Biennale. Here, inspired by how the Barbican rose out of the blitz, he takes us deep inside the inter-connected rooms of a second world war bunker, on several levels and complete with a railway track which runs round the whole 70m semi-circle of the space. It comes ready-aged in rust and grey tones and generates a powerful combination of amazement and historical resonance.

Hans-Peter Feldmann @ Ancient & Modern, 201 Whitecross Street – Barbican

To 16 Jan: http://www.ancientandmodern.org/

How often do you see 174 paintings of nudes in a contemporary gallery? Especially one with Ancient & Modern’s particularly modest scale? Well, it turns out to be an exact fit for Hans-Peter Feldmann’s installation of stamps, each showing just that. It’s a well-worn topic for thematic stamp collectors, but the gallery context alters their reception, just as it has that of the multifarious other selections the wide-ranging German has presented in the past in addition to his photographs.

The Body in Women’s Art Now @ Rollo Contemporary Art, 51 Cleveland St (Fitzrovia)

To 20 Jan: http://www.rolloart.com/

The first part of a three-part survey of work created by women artists this century in which the body is central, ‘Embodied’ combines Regina José Galindo and Sigalit Landau’s recent video classics with less well known but also interesting work by Jessica Lagunas (who, like Galindo, grew up in Guatemala) and young British photographer Lydia Maria Julien. And there is an excellent catalogue.I recommend you start downstairs, where Lagunas piles on the beauty to edgily comic excess by applying lipstick and mascara for an hour, and then drop back between the shorter works to see how she’s getting on…


http://www.newexhibitions.com/ gives full address and opening time details of most shows

TEN FOR THE FUTURE

I am looking forward to:

Drawing Form @ Green Cardamom 20.11 – 22.1

Benoit Maire @ Hollybush Gardens 20.11 – 24.1

Kendell Geers @ Stephen Friedman 27.11 – 16.1

Nathan Danilowicz @ Crisp 25.11 – 9.1

Tatsuo Miyajima @ Lisson Gallery 25.11 – 16.1

Alexis Harding @ Mummery & Schnelle 27.11 – 19.12

Andre Butzer @ Alison Jacques 27.11 – 9.1

Klaus Weber @ Herald Street 28.11 – 17.1

Neo-Concrete Experience @ Gallery 32 (the Brazilian Embassy) 9.12 – 13.1

Peter Campus @ BFI 11.12 – 14.2

TEN TOP CURRENT PICKS - Blog 1, 2009

Yes, Baldessari at the Tate, Ruscha at the Hayward, Kapoor at the RA are high impact shows. Then there’s Lucy Skaer and Roger Hiorns impressing in the Turner Prize and quirky group shows at Camden and 176… Here, though, are some less obvious selections of shows well worth seeing.

Boo Ritson: Back-Roads Journeys @ Alan Cristea (Part 1) & Poppy Sebire (Part 2)

To 21.11: 34 Cork St & 36 North Audley St - Mayfair

Ritson’s painting-sculpture-performance-photograph images of people literally painted gain extra narrative thrust in spreading across two galleries, with a new twist whereby the viewer has to fill in the gaps represented by white paint. And be sure to take the superbly produced diner ‘menu’.

Beat Zoderer: Sourceless Fields @ Bartha Contemporary

To 26.11:136b Lancaster Rd – Ladbroke Grove

A representative sample from the Swiss master of industrial, commercial and office materials, including works in the rarely-encountered Eternit, a highly versatile concrete based fibre-cement material, and some attractively impossible knots.

Bill Culbert: State of Light @ Peer

To 28.11: 99 Hoxton St - Hoxton

New Zealander Culbert has often worked with tubes of light to very different installational effects from Dan Flavin: here the gallery is turned half black, half white reflecting a display of window-come-picture frames which suggest a traditional RA hang.

Mariele Neudecker @ Room

To 29.11: 31 Waterson St - Hoxton

Business as usual for the Bristol-based German, in that she gives us atmospheric models of romantic landscapes, but fascinatingly undermined by such devices as a gritty urban foreground or being inverted and made to resemble eyeballs. Plus rather creepy sculptures of aeroplane black boxes.

Glenn Brown @ Gagosian

To 26.11: 2-24 Britannia St - King’s Cross

Brown continues to deconstruct the thick, expressionist painted surface by making it at one extreme flat and at the other a ‘sculpture of paint’ in distorted riffs on art history and pop culture. Also includes a new strand of shaped canvases.To quote Martin Herbert's rather brilliant summary of Brown's career in Art Forum: 'Man finds theme: painting's demise expressed through zombified remakes of works by Frank Auerbach, Salvador Dali and Karel Appel, and then through grandly geeky enlargements of sci-fi book covers. Man commences sideline in sculpture... Man shreds post-modernist primers; messes with Photoshop; discovers deep, hazy pictorial space that suggests the afterlife; evolves boggling vocabulary of melting forms, gaseous flesh and necromantic figures..'

David Raymond Conroy: It was part of it before. And now. @ Seventeen

To 28.11: 17 Kingsland Rd - Hoxton

Would be worth seeing merely for ‘Sometimes I wish I could just disappear’, a succession of photos from Ebay of mirrors for sale – in which the owners didn’t quite succeed in excluding their camera from the image… But beyond that, an impressively varied and witty set of reframings which go that now-necessary step beyond simple appropriation.

Wayne Thiebaud @ Faggionato

To 18.12: 49 Ablemarle St - Central

San Francisco’s master of painterly pop surely has a lower British profile than he should. This show may help rectify that with its good mix of still lives, signature cakes, landscapes and vertiginous cityscapes, but a large scale museum show would be welcome. Worth noting that Faggionato opens Mon-Fri only…

Time is a Sausage @ DomoBaal

To 19.12: 3 John St - Clerkenwell

Actually a ‘show of shows’ in that 60 works shown salon-style in the main gallery are combined with a succession of separate shows featuring one or two of the participants. For 12-21.11 the extras are sculptors who catch the urban landscape above and below ground in contrasting ways: Steve Johnson and Phyllida Barlow.

Stephen G Rhodes: Reconstruction or Something @ Vilma Gold

To 20.12: 6 Minerva St - Cambridge Heath

Rhodes is one of the most interesting inclusions in Saatchi’s current survey of new work from America, and this impressive sculptural installation with multi-screen video collage combines high visual impact with underlying complexity in considering the USA’s relations with Iraq .

Presque Rien III @ Laure Genillard

To 9.1.10: 2 Hanway Place - Tottenham Court

The third (!) instalment of Laure’s group show of almost nothing amounts to quite something, largely through drawing you into objects which turn out to be something else: a kebab is a sculpture, books are wings, a ball of dust is a planet. Worth noting that the gallery doesn’t do mornings!

www.newexhibitions.com gives full address and opening time details of most shows

TEN FOR THE FUTURE

I am looking forward to:

Mustafa Hulusi @ Civic Rooms (12.11 – 13.1) and with Mark Titchner @ Max Wigram (19.11 – 19.12)

Peter Davies @ The Approach 13.11 – 17.1

After Awkward Objects (Louise Bourgeois, Lynda Benglis & Alina Szapocznikow) @ Hauser & Wirth 17.11 – 19.12

Kendell Geers @ Stephen Friedman 17.11 – 16.1

La Peinture Est Presque Abstraite @ Camberwell Space 18.11 – 23.12

Tom Badley @ Rokeby 19.11 – 18.12

Drawing Form @ Green Cardamom 20.11 – 22.1

Benoit Maire @ Hollybush Gardens 20.11 – 24.1

Nathan Danilowicz @ Crisp 25.11 – 9.1

Tatsuo Miyajima @ Lisson Gallery 25.11 – 16.1