Perhaps July belongs to the big boys: Lowry,
Hume and Caulfield at the Tate; Donald Judd at David Zwirner, Robert Irwin at
Pace, Per Kirkeby at Michael Werner and a pellucid survey of greyness at Skarstedt as the new American galleries get
into their stride. Ignoring all that, then,until we get to Jutta Koether at the end of a dozen, let's start with a fourfold exploration south of the river, and move on to the threatened Cork Street and its potential successor, Savile Row.
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The Opinion Makers @ Enclave 1, 50 Resolution Way – Deptford
The Enclave run of galleries – just 6 minutes from London Bridge - has a fine set of shows, notably Nadege Meriau’s attempt to save the world with mushrooms (Anarch); Stefan Hoerlein’s infra-red sex in a Dusseldorf park (news of the world) and Lubomirov-Easton’s pairing of artist-curators with an artist of their choice, which makes for a highly cohesive show with such as Gordon Cheung (campfire sticks out of the Financial Times) choosing his very estimable assistant Sayshun Jay (an exacting four screen video animation in a wooden structure); Richard Ducker with the late Charles Mason; a walk-through Frances Richardson; and a peer-into Matt Hale which ruptures the painting's surface in a new way while also seeming to set it in a functional context.
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Helen
Maurer:
The Rock Gardens @ Danielle Arnaud, 123
Kennington Rd – Kennington
Helen Maurer uses light, glass, mirror and shadow to transform mundanity into a beauty which persists beyond our solving its quotidian origins. For her latest show in Danielle Arnaud’s elegant domestic space, she pares back her language somewhat by restricting the colour in the downstairs projections, and by showing just filmed results upstairs. Either way, the flashy deceptions of much surrealism are replaced by the gentler washes of a meditative underwater calm.
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Notes on Neo-Camp @ Studio Voltaire, 1a Nelson's Row - Clapham Common
To 20 July: www.studiovoltaire.org
Ella Kruglyanskaya: Reading Bather |
I'm normally careful not to quote press releases, which is fairly pointless when they're bound to be biased, and you can read them anyway. But that on Chris Sharp's Notes on Neo-Camp captures this fascinating conjunction of 13 artists exactly: 'their work shares a highly sensual and plastic sensibility, which alternates between coy understatement, as in the paintings and sculptures of Daniel Sinsel, and erotic bombast, as seen in the paintings of Ella Kruglyanskaya' (she's said her egg tempera women are ready to burst, existentially). 'This work is aware of the impossibility of a return to Victorian sublimation, and as such, wilfully indulges in a kind of sublimated desublimation'.
On the
(im)possibility of the pure praise poem @ Man & Eve, 119-120 Lower Marsh
- Waterloo
Aliki Braine: Surface No. 2 |
This isn’t an easy sell: complex work with an
unfashionably religious aspect titled
from the uncompromisingly intellectual poet Geoffrey Hill. All the more reason
to point out that Man & Eve’s spacious new location is well worth a visit
for this lovingly curated conjunction of typewriter paeans by Benedictine monk
dsh (Dom Sylvester Houédard, 1924-92), votive video appropriations by
fellow-priest Mark Dean, poised sculptural enjambments by Anna Sikorska and Aliki Braine’s rigorously pure form of
praise for the photograph as object, made from negatives in which she’s punched
holes to personalised multi-moon effect. Good for the soul, even if - like me - you
haven’t got one…
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Wosene Worke Kosrof @ the Gallery of African Art, 9 Cork Street - Central
To 26 July: www.gafraart.com
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Wosene Worke Kosrof @ the Gallery of African Art, 9 Cork Street - Central
To 26 July: www.gafraart.com
WordPlay XIV, 2011 |
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Jon Henderson: Excerpts @ Carl Kostyál, 12a Savile Row - Mayfair
To 16 July: www.kostyal.com
Still from 'Cleanings', 2010 |
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Dolly Thompsett / Julie Heffernan / Haruko Maeda & Alastair
Mackie:
Multiplicity @ All Visual Arts,
2 Omega Place - Kings Cross
To 3 Aug: www,allvisualarts.com
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Kleiderbild |
There’s a frenetic melancholy to this
distinctive show, which captures – yet through its preservation transcends – a sense of
Dieter Roth’s 20+ active hours a day (he didn’t sleep much). There are orthodox
diaries, but also 700 files each holding 20-odd items from a day’s waste;
records of scribbles and notes made by
all-comers on his studio tabletop; and the 131 TV monitors of Solo Scenes
present Roth in his last year, reading, working, eating, shitting - a paean
to the unedited which Sean Ashton’s accompanying essay terms ‘rhopography’. The
closest we get to orthodox painting are the Kleiderbild - three self-portraits by means of Roth’s
clothes mired in glue.
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Hauser & Wirth goes Japanese
in this handsome survey, which fits the literal meaning of 'Gutai' ('embodiment ') and its 1956 Manifesto statement that: 'in Gutai art, the human spirit and the material
shake hands with each other, but keep their distance.' Matsutani's practice is tracked from early 60s explorations with the curious
material of vinyl glue (often with air blown into it so it acts as
sculpturally-charged paint),
through to recent intensely meditative graphite works, often made over the
shapes made by glue: since he moved to France
in 1977. Matsutani has worked exclusively with black. In all phases this is highly tactile work, the obsessive
repetition of which represents the flow material, time and the self.__________________
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This show highlights Cornelia Parker’s ‘Queen
of Hover’ mode, usually achieved by suspending objects in space - as in her
famous exploded shed and squashed silver pieces. ‘Unsettled’ is a beautifully
poised new work of this sort, in which planks which seems at first to be set on
the floor and leaning against the wall prove to be held just above the floor
and not quite touch the wall. But her hop-scotch-tempting bronze casts of the
cracks between paving stones are a tease: they’re raised on nail-like legs to
similar effect. And if you happen to be
at the RA;s Summer Show, Parker provides three of the wittiest pieces there: an
elephant-made sculpture, a drawn out tooth and a play on the red dots of sold
works
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Broughton & Birnie: BERLIN The Forger’s Tale; The Quest for Fame and Fortune @ WW Gallery, 34/35 Hatton Garden - Farringdon
To 13 July: www.wilsonwilliamsgallery.com
Installation view - Regenerate Art Room |
Kevin Broughton and Fiona Birnie take things to
the max and that persuasive bit beyond through scores of paintings, collages
and masks (plus cabaret performance 13July) on the theme of how the
present interferes when we revisit the past. A darkened ‘Collector’s Room’
picks up on the sale of forgeries to the Nazis by reworking classics
to incorporate the internet age: Delaunay’s windows with a Windows logo, an
Ensor figure browsing for porn… The next room is reserved for the notorious
Degenerate Art exhibition: as its contents are known only through black and white
photos, versions are painted that way on top of 1930’s German currency and
lottery tickets, giving the weirdest of spins to Klee, Beckmann and Kandinsky. A
feel good show, for sure, but with the dark suggestion that our electro-frentic
age bears comparison with the tailspin of Weimar
Germany.
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Jutta Koether: The Double Session @ Campoli Presti, 223 Cambridge Heath Road – Bethnal Green
To 26 July: www.campolipresti.com
Images courtesy the relevant artists and galleries + Andy Keate (Roth)
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Jutta Koether: The Double Session @ Campoli Presti, 223 Cambridge Heath Road – Bethnal Green
To 26 July: www.campolipresti.com
Isabelle |
Jutta Koether is - like Michael Krebber and Merlin Carpenter - a former assistant
to Martin Kippenberger who has taken forward his interest in how painting links to broader networks. The results are unruly, but include a
distinctive painting style seen here in a jocularly large phallus which might
be taken to mock the pretensions of the heroic male artist, especially as it’s
opposite a basin containing gift shop items including a rather vaginal
scallop shell, and streaks of colour on torn canvas strips suggestive of a
destroyed painting. Add
a group of plank
works rammed vertically into the stairwell, and a video showing a wider
range of Koether’s work and related performances, and this provides a
good
primer on the New York-based German’s complex practice, even if you
don't try to work out how it constitutes ‘an ongoing performative
reading’ of Derrida’s 1969
lecture ‘The Double Session’.
Luise |
Images courtesy the relevant artists and galleries + Andy Keate (Roth)
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