Patrick Caulfield: Dining Recess, 1972 |
Lie down, take it easy in the August heat... and contemplate some generally quiet stuff, even in the case of sound art. Plenty of grey, starting with the Caulfield above (from the outstanding show at Tate Britain to 1 Sept), in which the moon of light seems to have paradoxically little wider influence. If you want noisy, by the way, I commend Emma Hart at Camden Arts Centre.
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Susan Hefuna: Rasm – of Wood, Silver and Gold @ Rose Issa Projects, 82 Great Portland St – Fitzrovia
To Aug 9: www.roseissa.com
Life and Nothing Else |
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Iain
Baxter& / Adam Chodzko @ Raven Row, 56 Artillery Lane –
Liverpool St
To
Aug 11: www.ravenrow.org
Ian Baxter&: 'Rebecca's Flat' (detail) |
Ian
Baxter& (& yes, you pronounce the 'and', indicative of a collaborative
bent) is such a veteran (born 1936) of the Canadian art scene that he taught
Ian Wallace, who taught Jeff Wall. He's still full of life, though, sporting
his own 'Masturbating Life Makes Art' shirt slogan at the opening of his first
UK solo show. Baxter&'s use of vacuum-formed plastic (40 years before Seth
Price) and conceptual japes from the 60's onwards are certainly worth seeing,
but the main reason to visit Raven Row is for his third major bagging installation.
That puts the whole contents of the flat above the gallery behind plastic,
preserving how it was before the death of Rebecca Levy, who lived there from 1918-2009!
The effect is mournful yet curiously clean – and quite different, as
Baxter& points out, from the more European practice of wrapping.
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At the Moment of
Being Heard @ South London Gallery, 65-67 Peckham Rd –
Camberwell
To 8 Sept:
www.southlondongallery.org
Rolf Julius: Stones |
This
is the quietest,
Zenniest survey of sound art l've (just about) heard, due mainly to
Baudouin Oosterlynck's 'Variations of Silence' and the rare intimacy
which the influential German pioneer
Rolf Julius (1939-2011) brings to the genre through his
expanded notion of music (whereby it can be found everywhere - 'under
the stones/where there is damp/music is cracks in the wall'). In
'Singing' (2000), seven
low-humming speakers are suspended so that the sound causes pigments
on their surfaces to subtly shift; a video installation creates a
volcano of sorts in a parallel manner; and a grouping of pebble-small
yet formally weighty stones bear a gently chirruping speaker aloft. True, the intermittent Eli Keszler gets effectively louder, but in general it's good to get close.
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Somewhat
unusually, the Japanese artist Yoshihiro Suda combines hallucinatory,
labour-intensive realism with a site-specificity: his beautifully
rendered wooden plants essentially take classical Chinese flower
painting and dramatise it for a modern age through interaction with
both gallery spaces and other works of art. Here two are placed in fleshy dialogue with paintings by Francis Bacon; two more
take centre stage as they feed off the space; and a further group of
leaves cluster with such apparent modestly around a radiator they're
easily overlooked. Art, Suda seems to suggest, can bloom anywhere:
you should live on the alert.
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Yoshihiro
Suda
@ Faggionato Fine Art, 49 Albemarle St – Central
To
Aug 30: www.faggionato.com
Installation view with 'Weeds' |
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Here Peter Marlow presents full-sized photographs of all 42 of our Anglican cathedrals, and they prove fascinating. He operated under suitably ritualised Becher-style conditions,
rising by night to set up looking east towards the altar as dawn broke, with
all artificial lighting turned off. Architectural patterns and contrasts emerge,
with the roofs, for example, varying from clean white Portsmouth to celestial
Carlisle to funereal Bradford. Pop in the office, incidentally, for Mistress Astrid
from Susan Mieselas’ striking dominatrix series ‘Pandora’s Box’ - activity such as has
often occurred in the shadow of the cathedral..
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Ironically,
one of the most permanent ceramics in the Pangolin's 10 week
part-rotating, part-fixed showcase for ceramics is my favourite:
Clare Twomey's 'Temporary', in which over 500 ceramic elements
ordered from light to dark according to how the chance ways the glaze
has floated down each porcelain element to make up a window of
windows with an impression of falling and maybe a cathedral echo. August looks a good time
to visit, as it will be the elemental oscillations of Blackburn-based
Pakistani Halima Cassell's will be on show 1-17th (she's
at Canary Wharf too – August is very much Cassell's month).
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Peter Marlow: The English Cathedral @ the Wapping Project
Bankside, 65a Hopton St - Southwark
To 24 Aug: www.thewappingprojectbankside.com
Durham and Birmingham |
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Sculptural
Ceramics
@ Pangolin, Kings Place, 90 York Way – Kings Cross
To
7 Sept: www.pangolinlondon.com
Clare Twomey: 'Temporary' (detail) |
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In-between @ Skarstedt Gallery, 23 Old Bond St – Central
To 31 Aug: www.skarstedt.com
Adam McEwan: Simeon Stylites |
Sign of a good thematic group show: I didn't wonder who (Brice Marden?) was missing, but appreciated what here: painting processes made visible in Richter, Oehlen and Wool, and excitingly close to eclipsed in Agnes Martin; a sarcophagally horizontal Richard Prince car hood; David Hammons' drawing (made by bouncing a basketball) spectacularly poised on a 300 kg boulder; a rarely seen 1965 Vija Celmins sculpture of her childhood house aflame. And they all provide a chance to muse on the in-between non-colour, grey. Adam McEwen is probably the least-shown this side of the Atlantic (even though he's British), but his gleaming graphite basement doors are another stand-out.
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Marguerite Horner: Through each Today @ The Crypt, St Marylebone Church, Marylebone Rd – Baker Street
To 30 Aug: www.contemporarybritishpainting.com/wordpress
Forward |
Marguerite
Horner’s photo-based near-grisaille landscapes – the latest in a two
year festival of 24 painters being shown in this most creative of crypts
– have several points of interest: a varied and often radical
employment of barriers – trees, grills, telegraph wires, a bus’s
interior (as in 'Forward') - to disrupt the composition; a 50’s / 60’s atmosphere
(emphasised serendipitously by cars squished out of modernity by the computer process of squaring the format); cunning use of colour intrusions, sometimes as minimal as
brakelights; and a subtly implied sense of movement, more often of the
viewer than of what is seen. The result is a distinctive world,
suggestive of psychological unease generated by a constricted past.
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Late Nights & Early Mornings: with Jacob Dahlgren and Edward Clydesdale Thomson @ Kunstraum 15a Cremer St
To 22 Aug: www.kunstraum.org.uk
Edward Clydesdale Thomson: The Distracted Gardener |
The ‘Art Room’ (Kunstraum) delivers its stated mission of bringing European-based artists to London with this small but richly connected pairing of Stockholm’s Jacob Dahlgren and Rotterdam-based Scot Edward Clydesdale Thomson. The former treats his collection of over 1,000 T-shirts as found abstracts in a video sequence, and has ‘Unit of Measurements’ map out its own installation and dimensions: it consists of horizontal tape measures, variously unwound. Both the horizontality and the cloth are picked up by Thomson, who uses Finnish textiles with garden patterns to form a self-defining clothes line. The posts are part of his avowed intent of ‘taking over’ the topiary designs of nineteenth century architect Robert Lorimer.
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The
Instability of the Image @ Paradise Row, 74a Newman St – Fitzrovia
To 12 Sept: www.paradiserow.com
To 12 Sept: www.paradiserow.com
The Zabludowitz Collection’s two part
survey ‘Painting in the ‘2.5th dimension’ (to 11 Aug) shows how much
energy there is among young American painters pushing at the boundaries of
sculpture and representation. This eight strong selection from this side of the
pond could have been Part 3 – or at least Part 2.5. Here Gabriel Hartley, who’s made an
impact here and in the US through highly textured oils which he spacially disrupts
with a concluding layer of spraypaint, extends into fully sculptural foam and resin paintings:
standing like a corner remnant of wall, or horizontal with found offcuts from
the studio turned laid on top, they call to mind John Chamberlain or Fabian
Marcaccio as much
as, say, Joan Mitchell or Varda Caivano.
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Something
old, something new, something borrowed, something blue, and a silver sixpence
in her shoe @ Fred, 17 Riding House St - Fitzrovia
To 31 Aug: www.fred-london.com
Franz West: Untitled, from the series, Transfigured Past, 2009 |
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