What
to choose in such a busy month? Most major spaces have a smaller gallery nearby. And so I start with a few small shows close to rather bigger venues with which they might well be combined. Only in passing, then, do I mention that the Tates, Hayward, Camden, Serpentine, Sadie Coles, Hauser & Wirth, Victoria Miro, David Zwirner etc have new shows well worth seeing. Let's start near - not to mention in, the Royal Academy...
Mark Tobey @ Thomas Williams Fine Art – near the Royal Academy
2 Oct – 2 Nov: www.thomaswilliamsfineart.com
Untitled, 1970 |
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Art of the Curious @ Colnaghi Old Masters, 15 Old Bond St – near the Royal Academy
To 25 Oct: www.colnaghi.co.uk
It’s
the current fashion to theme shows around the Wunderkammer: the last Documenta, the current Venice
Biennale, Rosemary Trockel’s recent Serpentine show, the Arts Council touring shows now at Margate and Bexhill… Colnaghi’s take is two rooms as big cabinets
with actual cabinets inside them. It’s a happy combination of ancient
discoveries and current riffs on the: Jonathan Delafield Cook’s lifesize charcoal
detailing of a narwhal tusk next to the real thing; Steffen Dam’s technically
amazing specimens in jars, all out of glass, by vintage pickled animals; Natasha
Daintry’s use of blue underglazing to make tattooed vases alongside their Ming
and Delft inspirations. And pretty close to White Cube’s Ham Steimbach show, in
which he presents objects, not on his usual shelves, but in cabinets…
Li Songsong: We Have Betrayed the Revolution @ Pace, 6 Burlington Gardens – same building as Royal Academy
Sara MacKillop: 45 wpm @ The Mews Project Space, 15 c Osborn Street, Aldgate East – back of the Whitechapel Gallery
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Li Songsong: We Have Betrayed the Revolution @ Pace, 6 Burlington Gardens – same building as Royal Academy
To 9 Nov: www.pacegallery.com
It’s not easy to achieve a wow factor in straight painting, but the vast, multi-panelled constructions of leading Chinese Li Songsong do just that in his first major London showing – and with a conceptual purpose. Appropriated images are divided up into units which Li Songsong tackles separately, painting them so thickly they tend towards abstraction. Recombined, the balance of fragmentation and unity suggests the complexities and ambiguities involved in China’s political history and rapidly changing society.
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Ciara
Phillips: Workshop (2010-ongoing) @ The Showroom, 63 Penfold St – near the
Lisson Gallery
Ciara
Phillips, a Glasgow-based printmaker who turns her skills to context-specific
and collaborative ends, will be resident at The Showroom for two months,
engaging in its programme’s characteristic community engagement. All that’s
built on a very smart show already in situ: a twelve metre abstract swathe
bearing months of printing acts as stage curtain, while multiple silkscreenings
of letters and shapes are set against a wallpaper of wrists wearing sellotape
as bangles: the artist dressed in her tools.
And all a handy couple of streets from Tatsuo Miyajima counting down
life at the Lisson Gallery.
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Sara MacKillop: 45 wpm @ The Mews Project Space, 15 c Osborn Street, Aldgate East – back of the Whitechapel Gallery
Saturdays / by appointment to 26 Oct: www.the-mews.org
Calendar, 2010
Suppose you plan to go to Sarah Lucas’ retrospective at the Whitechapel. Good idea – but why not go on a Saturday, and pop round the back to a succinct retrospective from Sara MacKillop, retro-minimalist of office life? The main theme is the typewriter, ,manuals on for which get into sculptural modes, ribbons from which fall down the walls, books on which include one on Oldenburg’s soft version. But there’s also a chance to browse twenty of MacKillop’s own booklets, elegantly re-purposing envelopes, coloured pencils, faded paper, photocopied instructions and strips of lottery tickets as quietly insistent art.
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Jo Addison: Not Trees and People @ Tintype, 107 Essex Rd, Islington – near the Estorick Collection
To 26 Oct: www.tintypegallery.com
Tintype
opens its new space with Jo Addison’s gently satisfying sculptural tweaks in
pursuit of the essence of things. A jesmonite cloud seems to carry the memory
of being rained on by a rainbow; the conundrum of ‘Knotty’, in which thread
life pokes through cracks, is enlivened by what sounds like the interesting
new material ‘ply, wool’; ‘Borl’ could
be its homophone, but cut to pieces and mis-reconstructed as geometry. Look
out, too, for Addison next up 5-6 Oct –see housemcdonaldwatson.wordpress.com ) in Alex McDonald and Anne-Marie Watson’s innovative weekend-long shows located in
artists’ houses.
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Maria Marshall: Voluntarie Service @ 102 Gifford St, N1 - near Large Glass
8 - 31 Oct (call first 07462342174): www.mariamarshall.com
If
you think there’s a God, how do you solve the problem of the evil He allows? You
must, I think, believe in free will and the existence of a comparably powerful Devil.
One virtue of Milton’s epic Paradise Lost is how powerfully it dramatises those
necessities. I don’t believe in God, but Maria Marshall does, and it’s that sense
of what underlies apparent innocence which gives her films, which often feature her children, their edge. Here Marshall follows a museum retrospective in Brussels
with a concentrated selection of painting, film and photography in a temporary
space at the end of the road where she lives. True, Charlotte Schepke's Large Glass is no behomoth, but it's very close and also interesting.
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Rachel Reupke: Wine & Spirits @ Cell Project Space, 258 Cambridge Heath Road – near Wilkinson
To 27 Oct: www.cellprojects.org
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Martin John Callanan: Departure of All @ noshowspace, 13 Gibralter Walk - HoxtonTo 26 Oct: www.noshowspace.com
At
any one time some 400,000 people are flying: Martin John Callanan’s first solo
show at noshow gives us the environmentally troubling details via a worldwide
live departures board on which 20-50 planes per minute (depending
on the time of day) trump memories of long waits for one particular flight to
come up. The elegantly futile representation of data skimmed off the top of
complex underlying systems or events is also seen in Callanan’s newspaper
listing all the wars, conflicts, rebellions, insurgencies during his lifetime –
as classified, in case you wonder at the differences, by the UN.
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Michael Ajerman: Squash @ Transition, Unit 25a Regent Studios, 8 Andrews Road - Cambridge Heath
To 27 October 2013: www.transitiongallery.co.uk
London-based New Yorker Michael Ajerman
has said he aims at ‘aggressive
surface control’ in his paintings, which are typically psychologically dark with a twist of wit. Half
this show consists of half of the ten results
to date of an annual ritual he has adopted: painting a pumpkin. A breathing
space which acknowledges his home country, they’re fluid and variable. My
favourite, titled for being rotten, had a power drill taken to its meaty slump.
Ten notes from time’s passing in exile?
Images courtesy the relevant artists and galleries.
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