Jost Münster: Spring |
Paul Housley: ‘They Bloom at Night’ at Belmacz, 45 Davies St - Mayfair
To 13 Dec: www.belmacz.com/gallery
This, described as ‘an idiosyncratic overview of the artist’s work from
the past 18 years’, is indeed a curious but stimulating mix - even before you get to the
jewellery shop setting of Belmacz: mid-nineties cartoonish additions to
pre-existing images and a thoroughly nailed teddy bear (what would Grayson
Perry say?) are followed by a long gap to Housley’s recent plays on the art of
painting (Is it like building a house of cards? Are the results always
self-portraits? Even if they take off from Picasso?). And something faintly seasonal about these
brushes as flowers as candles rather appealed to me…
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Opening the Shutters: An Exhibition of Contemporary Photography in the Bishop’s Palace @ Mallett, Ely House, 37 Dover St - central
To 21 Dec: www.mallettantiques.com
Installation shot with Jacqueline Hassink |
And now for something completely different… Not the Monty
Python reunion, but a chance to see contemporary photography in the super-plush
setting of the palace built as the London residence of the Bishop of Ely in
1772 and unaltered since. It’s resplendent with Mallett’s antiques and high end
modern design, installed as if in a dwelling, and now with the bonus of a
substantial room-each showing from seven of the Jules Wright / Wapping Bankside’s photographers.
Three suit the 18th century setting especially well: Peter Marlow’s full
set of 42 Anglican cathedrals by echo; Edgar Martins’ Cosmonaut Training shots by
counterpoint; and Dutch photographer Jacqueline Hassink’s measured views out of
windows into Japanese gardens by parallel escape from the modern world.
Meekyoung Shin: Unfixed @ Korean Cultural Centre,
Grand Buildings, 1
- 3 The Strand - Trafalgar Square
Bodily functions are all over contemporary art, but how many shows do you go to at which visiting the loo is a major part of the art experience? All three toilets in Meekyoung Shin’s all-soap retrospective contain Buddhas made of soap on which you're invited to wash your hands. The main space has examples which have been exposed to such treatment in various museums for a few months each, to varying age-evocative effects, the most severe citizens being the Brummies who rubbed away the whole head. Interesting, and part of a large and impressive - though rather shoddily-installed - retrospective.
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Bodily functions are all over contemporary art, but how many shows do you go to at which visiting the loo is a major part of the art experience? All three toilets in Meekyoung Shin’s all-soap retrospective contain Buddhas made of soap on which you're invited to wash your hands. The main space has examples which have been exposed to such treatment in various museums for a few months each, to varying age-evocative effects, the most severe citizens being the Brummies who rubbed away the whole head. Interesting, and part of a large and impressive - though rather shoddily-installed - retrospective.
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Katy Moran @ Modern Art, 6 Fitzroy Square - Warren Street
To 20 Dec: www.modernart.net
Katy Moran’s third solo with Modern Art sees her use an
impressive variety of collage modes out of and into which her distinctive painterly
language goes back and forth with something of cubism’s alternation between
thought and play. Different works feature thick accretions of cultural scraps,
like an art history notice board put
through a shredder; painting over found paintings, one with its frame framed
anew; multiple layers piled into sculptural effect; and cut-ups of canvas used
as spatially complex sites for mark-making. Add titles which teasingly hint at
what we might see, and you have fascinating set of proposals to explore.
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Urs Fischer @ Sadie Coles HW, 62 Kingly Street - near Carnaby St
To 18 Jan: www.sadiecoles.com
Urs Fischer? At the level of individual works, I’m not so
sure. But he’s a master of the total show installation, and sure enough he
makes the most of the wide open opportunity to bring fairytale surrealism at scale to Sadie Coles’ newly-acquired
former dancehall space. There are really only two works: several versions of the same
reclining clay figure, in various states of decay as if they’re stages of his
self-melting candle sculptures; and a veritable rainbow 'Melodrama' of 3,000 big fat ceramic water
drops / icing drips / pears / commas in colour-coded sectors of blue, green, purple and pink.
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Marcel Broodthaers: Décor: A Conquest and Bricks: 1966-1975 @ Michael Werner Gallery, 22 Upper Brook Street - Mayfair
To 18 Jan: www.michaelwerner.com
Installation shot of Bricks: 1966-1975 |
Two crisply baffling strands of Marcel Broodthaers’ (say BROT-hairs) influential
practice when it’s decades since London had even one? This combination of
brickworks downstairs (seriality in multiple registers of fake, real and both)
with a two room guns ‘n’ leisure environment upstairs has to be seen. File the
latter, a version of Broodthaers’ exhibition at the ICA in 1975, alongside the
recreation of 1969’s ‘When Attitudes Become Form’ under the growing business of
revisiting shows past. Curious fact: Broodthaers and Shakespeare both died on their 52nd birthday.
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Jerzy ‘Jurry’ Zieliński : Paintings 1968-77 @ Luxembourg
& Dayan, 2 Savile Row – central
To 14 Dec: www/luxembourgdayan.com
The Smile, or Thirty Years, Ha, Ha, Ha -1974 |
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Universal Fragments: Conversations with Trevor Shearer @
Large Glass, 392 Caledonian Rd – Caledonian Rd & Barnsbury
To 14 Jan 2014: www.largeglass.co.ukInstallation view: Jean-Luc Moulène ‘Model for Diving’ (2007), TREVOR SHEARER ‘Mental Exercises’ (2002) Plaster casts, and ‘Yellow Painting’ (2011). |
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Anna Barriball @ Frith Street, 17-18 Golden Square – Soho
To 21 Dec: www.frithstreetgallery.com
To 21 Dec: www.frithstreetgallery.com
Night Window 1, 2013 |
Anna Barriball (stress the first syllable) keeps finding direct
ways to capture doors, windows and walls with a direct literalness which somehow
effects a paradoxical denial of their essential functions. Here frottage
drawings are floated on fluorescent backings; images taken looking out at night
make for a colourful shadowplay of video windows; silence turns to image as a pencil
is poked through acoustic tiles; and, best of all, inked glass is floated in
water and pressed against paper to yield a photogram-like impression of a
rain-swept series of 'Night Windows'.
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Comrades of Time | Comrades of Time @ Cell Project Space,
258 Cambridge Heath Road
To 22 Dec: www.cellprojects.org
Boris Groys’ eponymous essay claims the video loop as prime exemplar of how the only
contemporary infinity, after God, lies in the
repetition through which art can be ‘with time’ – its comrade – rather
than ‘in time’. I couldn’t readily connect that to this film-free show, but there
does seem to be an interesting double deconstruction of the media of art (made
abject) and of the self (made elusive) in such works as Nikolas Gambaroff’s
latex casts of his own paintings; Wade Guyton’s cross (the self as voter in a
digital print pushed so hard it breaks into the painterly); and Magali Reus’ use of three ceramic bus seats, one flesh
coloured, the other two newly wrapped in plastic, to say something about the
self and something about colourfield abstraction.
The Piper Gallery’s refreshing USP has been that it features only artists who’ve had a 40+ year career and are still active, which makes them all at least twice as old as Megan Piper herself. Here curator Tess Jaray qualifies, but her inventive choice of work which relates to painting without fitting its traditional definitions includes such whippersnappers as Martin Creed and Rana Begum as well as rule-compliant John Stezaker and Tim Head. I like Support, in which young Onya McCausland polishes away the wall to make a fake shadow which, as I read her title, could be holding up an off-kilter chalk-covered McCrackenesque plank just as that form could be holding up the wall.
Nostalgic for the Future @ the Lisson Gallery, 27 Bell St - Edgware Rd
To 11 Jan: www.lissongallery.com
The Lisson Gallery is already looking back from the vantage
point of its 50th anniversary in 2017. Some high quality (notably Cragg,
Floyer, Wentworth) and the pairing of early and late works from each artist
lift ‘Nostalgic For the Future’ well above a routine group show of gallery
artists, but the main reason to visit is the basement, turned over in full to Haroon
Mirza’s composition ‘Preoccupied Waveforms’: electro-percussion; TV as
instrument; acoustic barriers as sculpture; and an abstract light-work,
fan-blown through a smashed-through wall. These merge to make a mesmerising
cyclic environment suggesting how, just as systems are broken down, they can
come together afresh.
Francisco Nicolas @ LAMB arts, 27 Cork St – Central
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The Edge of Painting @ The Piper Gallery, 18 Newman St –
Fitzrovia
To 30 Dec: www.thepipergallery.com
The Piper Gallery’s refreshing USP has been that it features only artists who’ve had a 40+ year career and are still active, which makes them all at least twice as old as Megan Piper herself. Here curator Tess Jaray qualifies, but her inventive choice of work which relates to painting without fitting its traditional definitions includes such whippersnappers as Martin Creed and Rana Begum as well as rule-compliant John Stezaker and Tim Head. I like Support, in which young Onya McCausland polishes away the wall to make a fake shadow which, as I read her title, could be holding up an off-kilter chalk-covered McCrackenesque plank just as that form could be holding up the wall.
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To 11 Jan: www.lissongallery.com
Haroon Mirza: Preoccupied Waveforms, 2012 |
To 22 Dec: www.lamb-arts.com
Sobre El Filtro de le Realidad, 2010 |
Images courtesy of the relevant galleries + artists + + Alex Delfanne (Shearer)
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