Albert Irvin: Painting the Human Spirit @ Gimpel Fils, 30 Davies St – Bond Street
To 12 Sept: www.gimpelfils.com
Bert Irvin died recently at 92, having worked exuberantly to the end on his passionately colourful abstractions. A selection of them make for a suitably upbeat summer show. Most are from his 80’s, when he settled into an attractive, if slightly predictable, language of smallish canvases full of noughts and crosses, quatrefoils and dashes. But he left a lot in his studio, some of it apparently too big to display at Gimpel Fils, large as their space is – and so the show is spiced by such as the more monumental close tones of 1960’s Moving Through; a stain-based Untitled (above) from a 1970’s series, shown alongside Irvin’s favourite sunflowers; the larger gestures of Pegasus, 1982; and the sonorously dark Endymion, 1991 . Though Irvin was very much a London artist, a retrospective at the light-filled Tate St Ives would make sense, I reckon.
 Endymion, 1991 - acrylic on canvas, 84 x 122 cm ___________________ |
Imi Knoebel @ White Cube, Bermondsey and Lars Wolter: Framed @ Rocket, 4-6 Sheep Lane - Cambridge Heath
To 13 Sept (White Cube) / 3 Oct (Rocket)
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| Imi Knoebel: Installation view with 'Molani', 2001 |
Oddly, White Cube has the first solo London by the seminal German abstractionist Imi Knoebel, who has had any number of such shows elsewhere, and it's well worth seeing. There's also a table by Knoebel at the beautifully appointed new premises of Jonathan Stephens' Rocket gallery, together with new work by another German minimalist with a wider crossover with furniture. Lars Wolter makes all his own superbly crafted painting-objects. Here he has four separate streams of work, much of it - like Knoebel's - exploring colour, but I also like the more chromatically restrained series which can be read as a sleep-scape punctuated by dream events.
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Lars Wolter: 'Dream A', 2014, veneer & paint on wood, 196 x 139 cm
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Justin Hibbs: Alias_Re_Covered @ Carroll / Fletcher, 56 - 57 Eastcastle St - Fitzrovia
To 12 Sep: www.carrollfletcher.com
To 12 Sep: www.carrollfletcher.com
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| Installation view |
Justin Hibbs’ first solo show at Carroll / Fletcher is something of a multi-dimensional juggling act. It’s simplest to start with his version of Joseph Albers’ album cover for Mussorgsky's 'Pictures at an Exhibition'. That connects with music and design, and is made with a pin-striping machine on linen, causing glitches which link to the humanising acceptance of errors in even the most computerised of future imaginings. The music cues the show’s ambient soundpiece, and the glitches anticipate the crashed computer screen as a generator of sleek abstractions which set off a dance of two and three dimensions as paintings fold out into sculptures. It’s too complex to describe quickly, but preliminary ideas form a sort of brain in the central room, and some domestically coloured walls offset the industrial aspect of what proves a seamlessly holistic show. Given that Hibbs embraces the fault, I’m tempted to complain, does his show itself have enough?
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| Alias Re_Versioned, 2015 |
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To 12 Sept : www.lglondon.org
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| Impingement no. 63 (installation detail) |
Gary Woodley has developed a site specific practice which consists of the ‘impingement’ of an imagined three dimensional form in and around a space such as a gallery’s. They might almost be better left imagined than realised, but then there would be nothing to see: rather, Woodley delineates the imagined object’s points of intersection with wall, floor or ceiling. This results in lines on their surfaces - originally inspired by how a bubble breakks on a wall - which aren’t so much the work in the form of a drawing as an indication of the imagined object’s shape and volume. Here we have not just the second time Woodley has impinged on Laure Genillard’s space, and with increased computer-aided precision, but also 2D and 3D editions showing how it works, and a free publication with an informative and well-illustrated overview of Woodley's practice since 1982.
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| Impingement no. 63 - Ink on perspex model __________________ |
To 31 Aug: www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk
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| The Greenhouse, cyclamen and tomatoes, 1935 |
| It isn't hard to work out why Ravilious's paintings appeal: his quirky eye for the objects and landscapes of the decade to his death in 1942 plays in to nostalgia tinged by the war to come or in progress; his apparently straightforward depictions are seeded with an almost vertiginous sense of underlying strangeness; he has a remarkable sense of how to build up a persuasive whole from detailed patterning of grass, sea, wallpaper or repeated flower pots, largely achieved by importing experience of making woodcuts into his watercolour production; and he has the most amazing watercolour technique, lighting clarity from within through the blazing white of the paper. Art history has taken little notice, but these 80-odd paintings are your best-ever chance to enjoy a ravishing achievement. |
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Thomas Eggerer: Ozone @ Maureen Paley, 21 Herald St - Bethnal Green
To 23 Aug: www.maureenpaley.com |
| Untitled, 2013 - collage, 63 x 50 cm |
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| Mint Ozone, 2015 - oil on canvas, 130 x 112 cm |
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Emily Young: Call and Response: London @ The Fine Art Society, 148 New Bond St
To 29 Aug: www.faslondon.com/fine_art_society_contemporary/exhibitions
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Caramel Dark Face, 2015 Caramel Onyx - 23 x 16 x 19 cm
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Emily Young, though born in London was partly raised in Rome and recently returned to live in Italy, where she works with the most traditional of means– free carving in the manner of Michelangelo. Yet there's a 60s counterculture feel to how she sees her conversation with stone as being 'small part of mankind's most serious, most elemental conversation, that with Earth'. So it makes some sense that in her youthful days experimenting with drugs she was the Emily in Pink Floyd's 'See Emily Play'. Here, in the London half of a show shared with Venice, she shows an ability to release faces from a huge variety of minerals - typically discards from defunct quarries, which she prefers for their characterful imperfections.
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| Verdite Forest Head, 2015Verdite 23 x 23 x 20 cm |
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To 5 Sept: www.piartworks.com
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| Rae Hicks: Lux, 2015 |
This is the second of three shows refreshingly programmed over the summer in which the Turkish Gallery take the chance to show British artists. This atmospheric installation curated by Isabel Dexter features two with a knack for disrupting the domestic. Rae Hicks' paintings stage the mundane with a seriousness which elevates its significance, and in combinations which take the such quotidian items as cookers and rooftops beyond themselves to generate ambiguously unsettling atmospheres. Charles Sandford is more direct, as when parking a hearse outside the opening and having it meticulously polished, or giving a kinetically billowed curtain the title Rape Scene. The two join forces to tie the show together with a carpet piece in which Carl Andre meets wolf grey and dog red which the show suggests are hard to distinguish at dusk.
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| Front: Rae Hicks & Charles Sandford: Ties the Room Together, 2015. Back: Charles Sandford: Rape Scene, 2015 |
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Connect2Colour Summer Arts Prize @ Lacey Contemporary Gallery | 8 Clarendon Cross- Holland Park
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| Still from Claire Macdonald: Launderette |
I was one of the judges for the inaugural year of this open submission prize. The
winner, Claire Macdonald’s Launderette,
is a simple film in which ten men talk for a couple of minutes each as their
washing is done – yet it draws you in with considerable art as they cover
birth, childhood, love, money, class, race, disability, mental illness, war… And, although what the men say is pretty much clichés,
the cumulative effect is to remind us why such statements became clichés in the
first place – their repeated relevance to human concerns. Something of life’s essential
cycles enters the commonplace of the spin cycle. Andrew Hladky’s sculptural
painting on cocktail sticks, Kiran Tasneem’s neatly ambiguous photos of identity
behind the burka and Olivia Kemp’s drawing of buildings returning to
nature are worthy runners up, though I would have liked a place for Alice
Robinson’s cycle of drawings, in which her astonishing technique serves to
meditate on speed and time by casting a cartwheeler as a sundial.
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| Alice Robinson: Cartwheel - graphite on paper, 95 x 42cm |
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Alex Cecchetti: the printing house of hell @ Kunstraum, 15a Cremer St – Hoxton
To
22 Aug: www.kunstraum.org.uk
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| Dancing with a teapot, 2015 - oil on paper |
It says something for Alex Cecchetti’s charisma that the audience stuck with him during the two hour tour of the building which kicked off this show, and which you can now sample on video. The Franco-Italian artist runs the gamut of performative approaches: he draws clouds (without looking, so as to surprise himself) then has the viewer fly among them by following his lines while playing a birdcaller; dances round teapots, outlining their phallus and womb spouts and interiors as he goes; pays homage to the movement required for female masturbation in a wall drawing made with blackberries; and requires that the gallerist leaf through fifty drawings of lovers entwined just once for each visitor, so that they become unrepeatable actions. Then there’s a Blakean backstory, and sculptures…. quite a quantity of diversions for a small space.
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| Alex Cecchetti showing his erotic Memoires, 2014 at the opening |
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Object Painting – Painting Object @ Jonathan Viner,
To
29 Aug: www.jonathanvinergallery.com
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| Charles Harlan's Tree, 2014 and Michael Rey's Fromes, 2015 either side of Elias Hansen's strikingly titled glass on self work If fucking would’ve fixed this, I’d have fucked the shit out of you a long fucking time ago, 2015 |
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| Aaron Bobrow: Untitled, 2015 |
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Michaël Borremans: Black Mould @ David Zwirner, 24 Grafton St - Mayfair
To 14 Aug: www.davidzwirner.com
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| Black Mould / Juggling with Fiery Limbs II, 2015 - oil on wood, 34 x 28 cm |
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| Black Mould / The Badger's Song, 2015 - oil on wood, 22 x 31 cm |
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PREVIOUS CHOICES STILL ON
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St Ives Connections and Dolly Thompsett: The Secret Life & Other Stories @ Art First, 32 Eastcastle St - Fitzrovia
To 14 Aug: www.artfirst.co.uk
To 14 Aug: www.artfirst.co.uk
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| Bryan Wynter: Meander III, 1971-4 - oil on canvas, 111.7 x 141.1 cm |
Art First quite often conjures an interesting mix
of classic British modernism above more current work in the project space
below, and so it is here. A selection by Wilhelmina Barns-Graham and her circle
includes large and darkly glowing geometry
from her own Outside Inside – Meditation Series, some lively Roger Hilton and a
lyrical, indeed summery Bryan Wynter from the very winter
of his life (1915-75). Downstairs you’ll find Dolly Thompsett’s latest
layerings – material and art historical – of nature charged with desire, often disguising
secrets in amongst the intricacy. The surprises for me were small works which allow
her characteristic ground of patterned fabric to take over much of the
painting; the new still life motif of the pictorially decorated oval serving tray;
and her having found a dress so appealingly in tune with her paintings...
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| Dolly Thompsett with Huddle, 2014 - oil and mixed media on printed fabric and canvas 131.5 x 95.5cm |
Matthew Higgs and Clive Hodgson & ‘Figuratively’ @ Wilkinson, 50-58 Vyner St – Cambridge Heath
To 16 Aug: www.wilkinsongallery.com
This
is quite the smorgasbord: New York mutli-tasker Matthew Higgs pairs his
droll found text works, extended here from isolated phrases to the
attachment of favourite books to the canvas, with the plangently
diaristic abstract drollery of Clive Hodgson His nine paintings
demonstrate, largely on a bigger scale than previously typical, that
he’s far from running out of new ways to relish and subvert the
combination of simple gesture, obtrusive signature and date. Higgs then
mixes things up nicely by pairing that show, across both floors, with
five figurative artists born in 1977-80. Of those I warmed most to Texan
Daniel Rios Rodriguez’s small paintings encrusted with objects and wit,
and Canadian Jane Corrigan’s slippery scenarios fluidly realised
wet-into-wet: here her character seems to be preparing carrots for a
rabbit she has killed with some sort of pastoral castration sub-plot
going on.
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e-studio Luanda: African Industrial Revolution @ Tiwani Contemporary, 16 Little Portland Street
To 15 Aug: www.tiwani.co.uk
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| The show's curator, Rita GT, has designed her clothes from Francisco Vidal's paintings |
We're getting some African weather, so why not check out this
feelgood slice of Angola, actually a version of the national pavilion
currently at Venice. That in itself reflects transportable nature of the
concept: it's an open studio set up by artists collective e-studio Luanda. The
means of production are unpacked from the U.topia Machine, aka a
plywood box on the floor. Painter Fancisco Vidal is holding the
most prominent court, covering the walls with intensely colourful
abstractly-patterned faces on handmade paper and rapidly sketching
all-comers: my wall portrait was number 552. The idea, in a neat
reversal, is to produce, distribute and share by traditional means a
version of online experience.
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| Francisco Vidal with one of his portrait drawings. I should add that they're not meant to be realistic... |
Henry Wessel: Incidents @ Tate
Modern
Tate
has a recent penchant
for arguably underappreciated American photographers: I can't say I
wasn't
bowled over by Harry Callahan but Henry Wessel is more impressive. He
moved
from New Jersey to California in 1971 to chase the year round light, and
his
pictorially acute affirmations of interest in the world feed into the 27
photographs selected and ordered to make his summary work 'Incidents'.
These
work persuasively individual images of strangers, replete with shadow
play,
unexpected tilting and internal rhymes such as between grass and hair,
crutch and railing, thoughts and branches; and as a group they emphasise
vantage points as they move
between youth and age, men and women, singles and couples to build a
putative
narrative.
Tomoko Yoneda: Beyond Memory @ Grimaldi Gavin, 27 Albemarle Street - MayfairTo 7 August: www.grimaldigavin.com
* Zarina Bhimji does something related in film, and I'd also commend her newest, Jangbar, at Nottingham New Art Exchange, 16 July - 27 Sept
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To 1 Aug: www.berlonigallery.com
Here Ben Woodeson kicks rather refreshingly through health and safety concerns: panes of glass are left to bend where you can walk into them; rat traps look set to snap shut and shatter an intricate network of neon; 99 billiard balls are held up just by a glass rod which could easily be kicked away; and shiny floor plates in tribute to Carl Andre prove 'hot' in that they are electrified - you can and should generate a satisfying crackle by spreading your fingers across two plates. Nor is this mere shock art: Woodeson's explorations of how to make materials behave dangerously also carry an aesthetic charge.
To 31 July (Philbrick) / 1 Aug (Gagosian)
Arguably the two most influential American artists of the 'baby boomer' generation have shows either side of Davies Street. Inigo Philbrick’s new space aptly pairs Sterling Ruby’s rethinking of abstract traditions as spray from the streets with ‘memory ware flats’ by Mike Kelley (1954-2012) – encrusted archeological accumulations of everyday objects which act give our collective pasts a decidedly Freudian twist in the context of Kelley's work as a whole. Opposite, Gagosian shows ‘New Portraits’ by Richard Prince (born 1949): screen captures on canvas lifted from Instagram. They generate something of the bracingly radical ‘can that be art?’ impact of his first rephotographs 40 years ago, and Prince’s account of their genesis is fascinating – make sure ask to see that or pre-read on the gallery site.
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Emma Hart & Jonathan Baldock: ‘Suckerz’ @ l’étrangère, 44a Charlotte Rd – Shoreditch
To 1 Aug: wwwletrangere.net
Joanna Mackiewicz-Gemes is doing a good job of maintaining the standards of a space formerly occupied by Carl Freedman and Andrew Mummery, here with an unusual collaboration in which Emma Hart and Jonathan Baldock produce separate work which they combine into a joint installation, at the centre of which is a riotously sensual dinner table replete with tongue napkins, breast plates, drunkenly wonky ceramic wineglasses and cutlery with fingernails. Hart’s spaghetti turned into hair by strategic use of the scrunchy, and Baldock’s animated way with holes in paintings are equally lively. The artists reveal enough empathy of form and approach – both use clay to provide a social context for bodily anxieties - to leave you unsure who’s done what. Like it? Then you’ll want to see Hart II at the Austrian Cultural Forum…
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To 31 July: thedotproject.com
Selma Parlour: Curtain (2013) oil on linen, 60 x 50 cm
You might think, a hundred years on from Malevich, that all the possibilities for geometric abstraction would have been played out. Sure, you can batter it, stick on odd surfaces, play it off against sculpture; complicate the space with mirroring, emphasise the sides of the surface; use surprising shapes of canvas, explore sequences, subtly undermine apparent regularity; or adopt a meta-painting strategy as if you’re depicting geometric paintings, not geometry straight. But those are all moves I’ve seen before. And yet, I haven’t seen them made in the same ways as by this well-chosen quartet of Tim Ellis, Jane , Kritina and Selma Parlour. Turns out you might as well say you’ve seen paintings of people before. True, the hang could be more sympathetic to the subtlety of the work, especially Parlour’s, but it’s good to see this second adventurous show from a new gallery off the usual track.
Anna Barham: Fig-2 30/50 @ ICA, The Mall
To 2 Aug: www.ica.org.uk/whats-on/seasons/fig-2
As previously indicated, the Fig-2 programme of 50 x 1 week shows at the ICA has a high hit rate. This week Anna Barham explores the translation of meaning from one state to another, which is after all fundamental to art, through a process akin to Chinese Whispers. Her room contains two computer screens and a silvered panel which reflects the ambient light appealingly as its dots of ellipsis indicate that things will go on. They do, as the first screen flashes, just too fast for comfortable reading, successive fragments of a text which the artist read in advance to voice recognition software*. The second screen is set up to allow visitors to record themselves reading from a pint-out of the same text. Of course, they or the recognition software, will get the occasional wood wrong, feeding into a fresh version which is printed out to form the basis of the next reading. How far will the original shift in a week?
* see Barham's works at soundcloud.com/banana_harm/penetrating-squid-chapter-3-seemingly-fleshed-inside and www.annabarham.net/video/thesquidthathidv.html for a fuller understanding
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Bruce Conner: Crossroads @ Thomas Dane Gallery, 11 Duke Street - St James's
To 1 Aug: www.thomasdanegallery.com
This may sound trite if not outright dull: a long film made in 1976 of atomic explosion tests from 1946, largely in slow motion, with some music. Yes, a terrible beauty... In practice. though, it's compulsive viewing, partly due to the presentation on a 4 metre screen; partly due to the quality of the images taken from 328 high-tech cameras carried by drones and 64 aircraft, making the Bikini Atoll test the most photographed moment in history; partly due to the edit and pacing; and especially due to how that fits with 12 minutes of Patrick Gleeson's re-creation on Moog of the sound of the explosion, followed by 25 minutes of Terry Riley's organ improvisations, which take the troubled transcendental to a whole other level. Set aside 37 minutes now!
 Isa Genzken: Basic Research Paintings & fig-2 26/50: Anne Hardy @ the ICA
To 6 Sept (Genzken) / 5 July (Hardy)
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| Isa Genzken, Basic Research, 1989, oil on canvas, 90 x 75 cm. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne |
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| Anne Hardy at fig-2
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Et Mon Droit @ Copperfield Gallery, 6 Copperfield Street - Borough / Southwark
to 11 July: www.copperfieldgallery.com
to 11 July: www.copperfieldgallery.com
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| David Birkin, Cyclura Nubila (2014), Comissioned Sketches by courtroom artist Janet Hamlin, 19x25" legal paper |
I
guess you won’t be surprised to learn that a show about art and the law
is full of paradox: Marco Godoy reminds us that we cannot own currency,
we merely borrow it, hence his effacement of coins is
illegal; on the other hand, Jason File photocopies a Dan Flavin
certificate then remakes it by hand to yield a fake of a fake which –
unlike Flavin’s original certificate – he designates as art; and David
Birkin hires a court artist to put Guantánamo Bay's iguanas in the dock,
so pointing up their seeming to have more rights than people. Add the
more familiar conceptual twists of Etienne Chambaud, Jill Magid and
Carey Young (whose Obsidian Contract may be best viewed while naked) and you have an exhibition which – if there’s any justice – should be a success.
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| Marco Godoy, Who Makes Europe (2013), altered coins and armature |
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Herbert Golser: A Quivering Solidity @ rosenfeld porcini, 37 Rathbone Street - Fitzrovia
To 11 July: www.rosenfeldporcini.com
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| Untitled, 2014 / 15 - pear wood |
Ignore that over-insistent show title: Austrian sculptor Herbert Golser has a remarkable repertoire
of cuts, changing the form of wood through the virtuosic use of a various
saws. Choosing mostly pear, which allies an attractive golden tinge to
a twisting upthrust, he works iteratively to interpret the tree’s inner energy
rather than impose himself on it. Golser's interventions take months to stabilise, and often leave the wood looking
fragile - but you can still sense the strength of the trees,
and I love how some forms seem to echo the natural arboreal processes of forming rings, or
hosting fungi or hives.
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Ann Craven: Untitled (Palettes: Naked, Tagged), 2013-14 @ Southard Reid,
7 Royalty Mews - Soho
7 Royalty Mews - Soho
To 25 July: www.southardreid.com
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| Installation view with the tagged palette Untitled (Palette, Cushing, Meadowlark Singing, 10.1.14), 2014 |
The spirit of On Kawara lives on in Ann Craven’s paintings: she
repeats stock images as much to record
time passing as to assert her love of oil paint, wet on wet; and documents the
process not just through the painting but by saving her palettes – themselves on
canvas – as a means of enabling her to recapture her colours choices. Sometimes she
leaves those palettes as is (‘naked’), sometimes she sketches the subject into the paint to‘tag’ them.
This show is the first to show only the
palettes, itself a naked exposure of her process without the support of
the
conventional end product. The 50 examples, though, are a riotous
triumph
of colour and variety. It strikes me that the Serpentine could do worse,
now it has two galleries, than to dedicate one each to Craven and her
husband, Peter Halley.
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| Untitled (Palette, NYC, Moon Halo, Last Night, 11-04-13), 2013 incorporates both knife and plastic applied to keep the paint from drying |
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Kaari Upson: HOLE @ Massimo De Carlo, 55 South Audley St - Mayfair
To 18 July: www.massimodecarlo.com
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| Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue, 2014 - Urethane, pigment and aluminium, 217 x 198 x 78 cm |
Kaari
Upson has made her name through the long-running psychological intensity
of attempting to inhabit another in 'The Larry Project' (2007-14). Facing the challenge
of moving on, she’s conjured sculptures which operate very independently yet
retain a psychological charge. Upson's own cut-and-paste thesaurus-style list
of 'hole' terms sets the mood. On the ground floor, sofas are cast
repeatedly, and hard, onto the walls. They’re like interior organs, and also
fleshy lips – a resemblance reinforced when you descend to find Angelina
Jolie's mouth as paintings and wallpaper, and urethane forms partially cast
from wood which stand at Jolie's height. Each has three holes one takes to be
hers, and somehow merges body, tree and mattress.
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| Lower Floor Room III Installation view |
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Günther Förg: ‘To London! A Selection of Paintings’ at Almine
Rech, 12 Savile Row; and ‘Lead Paintings’ at White Cube, Mason’s Yard – Central
To 11 July (White Cube) / 25 July (Rech)
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| Untitled, 1996 - acrylic on lead laid down on panel 90 x 50 x 3.2 cm |
By curious coincidence, given the rarity of his appearances in London, these
shows each provide a good introduction to one of the several long-running
streams of work produced by the German artist Günther Förg (1952
-2013). Both contain echoes of the architecture – especially windows –
which Förg also photographed. White Cube has acrylic paintings on
lead sheets wrapped around wooden panels (Förg’s favoured surface in 1984-92).
These attain a severe resonance through the scratches, scrapes, and occlusions
of their heavy base both in exposed patches and in how glimpses show through and
the grounds mutes the colour of the painted sections. Almine Rech presents freely
drawn grids, a series which ran from 1992 onwards. In this set from 20o6, the colours
are energised by the luminously white grounds, and Förg made a small pendant
watercolour version of each afterwards, as if memorialising – by deliberating
on – his instinctual actions.
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| Installation at Almine Rech |
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Emma Bennett: Several Small Fires @ Charlie Smith, 336 Old Street, 2nd Floor - Shoreditch
To 25 July: charliesmithlondon.com
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| Haunts, 2015 - oil on oak, 25 x 20 cm |
It was interesting, at Emma Bennett’s private,
view, to hear the wide range of preferred favourites among eleven superficially similar
paintings on small oak panels, all showing themes extracted from 18th
century paintings on a void-like black ground. Was it all about the
painting, especially in the lead motif of fires? Were they meditations
on mortality, pushing
the vanitas in a contemporary direction flagged by the show’s title
(which comes
from the late Stuart Croft’s adaptation of Ed Ruscha’s phrase)? Were past and present being played off? Was there a
religious dimension? Or was the essence in sex – burning passion, ripe
fruit, ruffled bed linen? Just the sort of ambiguity you want.
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| Painter Marguerite Horner (left),
who's on a campaign to be photographed with artists, looks pleased to
have added Emma Bennett to her recent co-starring appearances with
Tuymans, Hockney, and Borremans
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Sergio Camargo: Mármore @ Lisson Gallery, 52-54 Bell St – Edgware Rd
To 4 July: www.lissongallery.com
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| Three Untitled works from 1988 in Belgian Black marble |
If
you’re after poised cadence, head for the Lisson. The European
reputation of Brazilian sculptor Sergio Camargo (1930-90) has risen
steadily this century, but this still represents an unusually full
British showing. He’s best known for white-painted wood works using
serial curved geometries originally inspired – as he explains in an
evocative accompanying film in which he claims Bachelard, Borges and
pineapple ice-cream as influences – by cutting across an apple. Here,
though, we have a wide range of scale and form, and more works using
marble - and not just white Carrara, but also a pitch-black Belgian
stone which seems almost artificial in its purity. Need more? Shirazeh
Houshiary is in top form with her immersive paintings derived from
abstracted Arabic writing in the other space, and the viewing rooms
behind Camargo feature some spectacular - though much more visceral -
Latham and Kapoor.
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| Untitled, 1978 - Carrara Marble |
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Lucy in the Sky @
Transition Gallery, Unit 25a Regent Studios, 8 Andrews Road - Cambridge Heath
To 5 July: www.transitiongallery.co.uk
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| Emma Cousin with They texted to tell me my smear test was overdue, 2014 and Teaching grandma to swim, 2015 |
Transition, a space run by female painters, tends towards
intimate shows of painting with a healthy sexual balance, here a conversation
between five personal visions of the world. Emma Cousin's sideways thinking makes
for a quirky colloquial surrealism with abstract tendencies: here, for
example, are the tales of how a smear test reminder text arrived intrusively just as she
was painting mountains, and of discovering that her grandmother had never been
able to swim. I also like the processed meat garden of Kevin Broughton and
Fiona Birnie (here curiously elided as 'Brobirn'), wittily underlining how unnatural
the suburban can be; and Aly Helyer's extension, inspired by Florentine
alterpieces, of her alchemical face-hybrids into the potential narrative of New Believer.
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| Broughton & Birnie: Meat Garden, 2015 |
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To 27 June: www.modernart.net
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Richard Tuttle makes his point with Pollution and Toxicity (White for Albright-Knox), 1972, 2011
|
This has been the year of the assertively unassertive Richard Tuttle: following
his Tate and Whitechapel shows comes this presentation of recent work,
concentrating on the series ‘Separation', in which the different elements of a
painting - frame, canvas, image - are taken apart. Tuttle, who
describes himself as a mystic and individualist, is more worried that his
current window of success might throw him out of balance than that it might
end. The photo shows him indicating a dot which he added this year to a work
produced in 2011, which was itself made it as replacement for a piece which
was vandalised in 1972 in the notoriously polluted city of Buffalo, where the
Albright-Knox Gallery is located: it's his version of pump used to bleed away toxics, hence the unusual title.
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Jeanette Ehlers: Whip It Good: Spinning From History’s Filthy Mind @ Rivington Place – Shoreditch
To 20 June: http://autograph-abp.co.uk/events/whip-it-good
|
There
can be a fine line between the simplistic and the elemental, and I
these three projects by Danish Trinidadian Jeanette Ehlers may fall the
wrong side for some: a hypnotic film of the sea, distorted into redness
in post-production to suggest the bloody business of the slave trade; a
performance in which Ehlers – and audience members, so made complicit –
use a whip to apply charcoal to canvas (the resulting charged
abstractions are shown alongside); and the harrowing film The Invisible Empire,
2010*, which recounts a modern version of slavery through the words of a
girl cast into abuse and prostitution. She speaks in the voice and to
the agonised image of an old man we take to be her father (but is
actually the artist’s father) lending a distance which increases the
poignancy. That carries a question into the whole show: how much of this
truly in the past?
* runs 20 minutes on the half hour
 |
| From Whip It Good (2015) 8 minute video + 7 canvases of 100x200cm |
____________________
Can Altay @ Arcade, 87 Lever St – Old Street
 |
| Light, 2015 (I'd never, incidentally noticed the blotchy ceiling before!) |
Turkish
artist Can Altay also generates a stark resonance from three elements:
the swollen silver globular door handle which has long been a feature of
Arcade, but now provides a prequel for the same shape as a bulb – Light 2015 - swinging across the ceiling. Both are made less functional but not quite useless, as is the other work , Window,
2015, which just covers the gallery’s frontage with political comics,
which are rendered semi-legible by their new role of keeping out half
the natural light. It’s an atmospheric way of shining a light on dubious
practices, only to find – should we be surprised? – that little is
revealed.
 |
| Window, 2015 (with the earlier door handle from Distributed, 2012) |
Mical Rovner: Panorama @ Pace Gallery, 6 Burlington Gardens - Central
To 15 June: www.pacegallery.com includes video
Untitled 9 (Panorama), 2015 – LCD Screen, 108 x 190cm
For
sheer wow factor, it’s hard at the moment to beat the first substantial
London showing of Israeli / New York farmer / artist Michal Rovner’s
large scale projection and LCD monitors in which her signature rows of
people made generic by smallness tramp across abstracted landscapes in
never-ending loops. If that sounds a bit like Beckett hammed up to the
max, maybe it is in theory. In practice, though, the conjunction just
works at the technical, visual and evocative levels. Video has never
been more painterly, and the new-to-me development whereby dark figures
have white shadows in Untitled 3 (Panorama) increases the ghostly
sense of inhabited pasts as well as migratory presents. Look out
for Rovner when the Canary Wharf crossrail station opens…
Untitled 11 (Panorama), 2015 – LCD Screen, 108 x 190cm
Stirring the Pot of Story: Food, History, Memory @ Delfina Foundation,
29/31 Catherine Place – Victoria
To 13 June: www.delfinafoundation.com
 |
| Leone Contini: Uncanned Histories, 2015 (detail) - food tins from the WWI Austro-Hungarian front, now in Slovenia |
No-one could consume the whole of the
recently-expanded Delfina Foundation’s four year, multi-disciplinary, residence, research
and event-rich programme ‘The Politics of Food’ - but this six artist exploration of power
relations through food is an independently relishable morsel. Three new
works commissioned by curator Nat Muller are the highlights: Mexican Raul Ayala
Ortega has built the tower of babel out of fat, which will melt in the lights
over the show’s run to expose a superstructure of bones; duo Cooking Sections
propose to ferry bananas in glasshouse-like carry-on luggage; and Italian Leone Contini
has spent three years obtaining tins dug up from World War I trenches in order
to show them and their iconography in three forms – line drawings, filmed close-up,
and the rusting metal itself as arranged to echo the skyline of Tripoli and
trigger various takes on Italian history.
 |
| Cooking Sections (Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe): Cases of Confusion, 2015 (detail) - (50-20-20) and (55-40-20), the Ryanair and Easyjet carry-on trolley maxima - photo Sylvain Deleu |
Patricia Treib: Mobile Sleeve @ Kate MacGarry, 27 Old Nichol Street - Shoreditch
To 6 June: www.katemacgarry.com
 |
| Patricia Treib at the opening, dressed in one of her paintings’ most characteristic colours, with Hem, 2015 |
This
is the London solo debut for the Brooklyn painter whose stand for
Wallspace at Frieze 2013 made a big impression on me. Her loose-wristed
single-take apparent abstractions draw you into the spatial ambiguities
and muted
chromatic interplay of what feel like 1950’s colours. The real pleasure,
though,
lies in how they’re arrived at – via several rehearsals – from the
negative spaces
in between the objects in her source images, and retain that sense of
making something
out of nothing. In what will I guess get called Treibal Art, painting
becomes positively peripheral.
 |
| Delft Icon, 2015 ____________________ |
To 6 June: www.kristinhjellegjerde.com
 | ||||
Sheree Hovsepian: Reveries of a Solitary Walker, 2015 Archival dye transfer print, graphite, acrylic, silver gelatin prints, wood, ink drawing on paper, brass nails and string,101.6 x 127 cm |
This neat two-hander brings together Iranian-born American Sheree Hovsepian and London-based Pole Konrad Wyrebek, both of whom imply figuration through apparently abstract meets. Hovsepian has found a way to combine the various strands of her practice – the photograms for which she's best known, geometric string drawings, sculptural forms and photographs - into vitrine-like wallworks hinting at personal references which, their background in Gestalt theory suggests, might cohere into an narrative. Wyrebek takes on the modern fact of life that a world reliant on electronic data is also subject to its errors. He uses an elaborate process to mimic the corruption of communications so that his images are fragmented almost to abstraction, painting which generates a large scale beauty which may never have been there in the first place. Again, what is broken down emerges surprisingly whole.
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| Installation view, with Konrad Wyrebek front ____________________ |
To 30 May: www.simonleegallery.com
Installation view, image courtesy of the artist and Simon Lee Gallery London / Hong Kong Photo: Peter Mallet
Berlin-based
Canadian Angela
Bulloch is known for the building the social context of instructions and
coding into abstract structures which echo the screen. Here its the
online gaming screen as she turns the gallery into an archetypal and
anthropomorphic cartoon desertscape. Bulloch generates a
surprisingly intense atmosphere from stacked
polyhedra through the spatial ambiguity of colours
and planes
contradicting each other; the mix of
regular and irregular shapes; the counterpointing of grey MDF in bare,
painted, or evocatively rose-oiled states; the internal light of some sections (versions of her characteristic pixel
boxes); and the superb installation, lit in subtly varied tones against a
backdrop of horizontal and vertical motifs painted on the walls. If her
subject, via cybernetics, is the
integration of the human with the technological, then my warming to the
show may
have proved something…
 |
| There' also an offsite Heavy Metal Stack of Six in nearby Mount Street, playing quite differently off its historic context |
____________________
Karin Lehmann:Wiedergänger @ Seventeen, 270-276 Kingsland Rd –
Haggerston
To 30 May: www.seventeengallery.com
 |
| Karen watches Nino, her boyfriend and designated water-servant, fill some vessels |
I don’t recall anyone before Kari Lehman being given all of Seventeen’s space in its eight year
history, and it enables the upcoming Swiss artist so honoured to explore the
properties if her materials at generous scale. First, by using casts of the floor
to make rudimentary textured columns in what might be a reductio ad absurdum of the dream gallery space, which might be endless floor with no columnar
interruptions. Second, by covering the floor itself with unfired pots in a wide range of
clay tones. Tranches of these will be filled with water over the month of the
show: I was surprised by how soon – about 45 minutes – they then collapse. The
results of this sculptural performance are rather painterly pooling of water
spill-out, vari-coloured by the clay it came from.
 |
| Sediment Sampling, 2014-15 |
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| Jason File: An Ornament and a Safegaurd @ The Ryder, 19a Herald Street
To 6
June: www.theryderprojects.com
Three
shows in, it’s worth heralding this latest addition to the East End’s most
interesting street. Anglo-American lawyer-turned-artist Jason File is spending
his £5,000 Mead Fellowship on mounting ‘Decus et Tutamen’, to give the Latin
version of its title, more often found on the side of a £1 coin. Given the 50%
gallerist’s price share, it will cost you £10,000 to buy the only work in the
show – that £1 coin itself, on which File has lavished the other £4,999 in
order to lay bare the art world mechanisms designed to confer legitimacy and
add value. Documents set it out: the cost of the display unit in which the
money is housed; six weeks of the gallery’s rental; an advert in Art Review;
having the show photographed; publishing a catalogue; holding a dinner
etc… Fascinating and somewhat troubling – even though, as an accountant,
I ought to like the clear costing…
____________________
|
Robert Therrien @ Gagosian Gallery, 17-19 Davies Street
To May 30: www.gagosian.com
 |
| No title (Pots and pans II), 2008 Metal and plastic 274.3 x 167.6 x 203.2 cm |
LA-based
Robert
Therrien is known for bringing a little surrealism, pop and minimalism
to works which are big on scale, often recreating the charged
perspective of a cild over whom furtiture looms. So it suits him to
make plenty of the Gagosian’s
smaller space: not just
a teetering ceiling-high stack of 25 specially-made and dramatically
enlarged saucepans, but a
shelf-top version found from dollhouses, and a Dutch Barn door which,
being
black and in his gallery, inevitably invokes Richard Serra. If those
spookify by scale, a cart of coloured discs presented as Buddhist
meditational kasiṇa
does so by origin:
they’re made from over-painted trays from
the Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles – the one in which Robert F Kennedy
was assassinated. Does this explain why Therrien has fixed on the
motif of a devil – which I haven’t seen from him before - in the work
on paper in the viewing room?
 |
| No title (Mini stacked pots and pans VI, two CorningWare), 2006 - Metal and plastic 35.5 x 19 x 19 cm |
____________________
Taus Makhacheva: Vababai
Vadadai! @ Narrative Projects, 110 New Cavendish St – Fitzrovia
One interesting space (New Narrative Projects) has become
two (Christine Park at the original location and Narrative Projects in a new
one). This second show at the new space takes us to the Caucasus, as the
widely-shown Dagestan artist Taus Makhacheva brings a sharp insider’s eye to
the enactment of masculine and feminine roles. A collection of vintage postcards
sets up the stereotypes. A range of carved noses makes up the region’s characteristic
mountain landscape. There are three films: male street posturing is recast as
performative gesture; whereas a woman (the artist demonstrating her powers) unfussily clears a road of what looks like a
massively heavy boulder; the post-Soviet inflation of marriage ceremonies with
little authentic basis in tradition is mocked via the adoption of even more
inflated dress. ‘Holy Moly!’ – or, as they say in Dagestan and in the show’s eponymous
soundpiece, ‘Vababai Vadadai!’
____________________
 |
| Still from A Space of Celebration, 2009 |
____________________
Martin Wilner: Making History: The Case Histories 2014 @ Hales,Tea Building, 7 Bethnal Green Rd - Shoreditch
To 16 May : www.halesgallery.com
Five
years ago Martin Wilner showed some of a fascinating and somewhat Opalka-like ten year project
(2002-12) based on monthly accumulations of a daily drawing of what
caught his eye in the newspapers. Now Wilner has embarked on a
collaborative version, in which the items are taken from daily
correspondence with a different person each month: Wilner transcribes
the letter (often rather imaginatively) on one side of the paper, and
draws what it triggers on the other. The results form calenders with
Monday always top left so that slightly irregular shapes result - as
months don't tend to start on Monday and finish on Sunday. The new
project not only forces Wilner out of a decade’s way of working, it also
plays more directly into his USP: a half-time job as Associate Clinical
Professor of Psychiatry at Cornell Medical College. The new work is
more layered, and parallels his other professional practice of asking
questions and interpreting answers to understand his subjects.
 |
Images are Recto and Verso of Making History: Case Histories, February 2014: Dr Jorn Gunther, 2014 pen and ink on Bristol board, 41.9 x 43.5 cm copyright Martin Wilner, courtesy of Hales Gallery
|
______________________
Organic Sculpture
@ Alison Jacques, 16-17 Berners St – Fitzrovia
To 23 May: www.alisonjacquesgallery.com
 |
Installation view with Janine Antoni's Polyurethane resin to twine, 2014 and behind it
Pier Paolo Calzolari Untitled, 1988 - Salt, lead, refrigeration unit, refrigerator motor
|
This
isn’t sculpture made from organic materials, but 38 works
by 15 artists, all of which arrives at broadly organic forms,
resembling plants, eggs, bodies and their underlying geometries: the
predominant media are ceramics and metals. It’s full of highlights,
really, but hard not to mention Pier Paolo
Calzolari’s refrigeration piece; Alina Szapocznikow’s
polished bronze stones fitted cancerously into a tablet; the plaster
works of the Slovak Maria Bartusova (1936-96), who only came to
prominence in the last Documenta; and Janine Antoni’s twining of two
cast spines in
a transcendental connection which puts Marc Quin’s mating skeletons
firmly in
their place.
 |
| At the opening, visitors Sissy (left) and Marta made quite a
contrast with the aesthetics of Paolo Icaro’s white plaster Window Show, 1974 (and
with the rest of the show come to that)
_______________________
|
To 17 May: www.ica.org.uk
 |
Ydessa Hendeles, From her wooden sleep…, 2013 (detail) photo by Robert Keziere
|
Draw
a Venn diagram of two
fascinating recent exhibitions - the
Fitzwilliam’s history of the artist’s dummy, ‘Silent Partners’; and the
Barbican’s ‘Magnificent Obsessions’ cornucopia of artists as collectors
- and the intersection would contain
this dramatic whole room tableau. Canadian Ydessa Helendes might best be
described as a collector-curator who presents her finds with a precision
which
is art. Previous shows, mostly in her own Toronoto Foundation, have
included a
trove of 3000 photographs featuring teddy bears; here the central
feature is
some 180 very variously sized articulated artists’ manikins (used to
supplement life models), complete with extensive seating, five mountain
banjos
and 18 fairground distortion mirrors contributing to an atmosphere made
childishly
menacing by Chopin’s ‘Golliwog’s Cakewalk’. On trend, for sure, but a
trend which Helendes initiated…
 |
Ydessa Hendeles, From her wooden sleep…, 2013 (detail) photo by Robert Keziere
_______________________ |
To 23
May: www.modernart.net
 |
| Installation view with Back of my mind (washcloths) and Treelike (bath towels) |
As if to
amplify what Jason File expounds, Modern Art presents eight works by New York
based Briton Paul Lee at around about the same price point – but instead of a
coin, you’d get the cut fabric edges of ink-blackened towels and wash cloths,
the value is added more orthodoxly by thought, removal and intelligent
arrangement. The result is what might be termed wall drawings in a material
which, in spite of its prior function, yields a line more warm than dry, more
shaggy than clean. Some sort of rules appear to operate such that towels make
architecture or landscapes; wash cloths describe internal states; and the one
to mix both is bodily.
 |
| Detail of Wall (bath towels), 2015, pigment based ink, washcloth, cotton thread, stainless steel rods, 298 x 163 cm |
____________________
I'm here but you've gone @ Fiorucci Art Trust, 10 Sloane Avenue - Kensington
Weight for the Showing @ Maddox Arts, 52 Brook's Mews - Bond St
To 10 May (smell) / 13 June (weight): www.fiorucciartrust.com / www.maddoxarts.com
 |
| Still from Levi van Veluw: The Collapse of Cohesion, Archive, 2014 |
It's good to see less commonly appreciated elements come to the fore,
and these two shows foreground smell and weight respectively. The
Fiorucci Fioundation dedicates its whole impressive house to
installations focusing on scents created by an impressive range of
upcoming young artists including Adham Faramawy, Ed Fornieles, Celia
Hempton, Magali Reus and Prem Sahib. It's a bit hit or miss, but
fascinating. Maddox Arts combines such heavyweights as Richard Serra and
Phyllida Barlow with names for the future like Levi van Veluw and
David Rickard in an exploration of the literal and metaphorical aspects
of another easily overlooked quality. I'd say this is all hits - but
then, I did curate it myself...
 |
| Prem Sahib's breathing action neon Relapse and scent Vault
are placed an an alley outside and aim to simulate the crowded, sweaty
and sexually charged environment of gay cruising club The Vault ________________ |
To 5 May: www.vigogallery.com
 |
| Installation view with 'Sky Lights' |
If you
want your art elegant yet rough, simple yet reverberant – and why wouldn’t you?
– look at the two main bodies of work here: one we might expect to tread on,
one we might expect to lie beneath. Glasgow-based Toby Christian draws
hesitantly evocative lines on tablets of concrete which read as the plans for
rooms, but with aspects of their shapes proving more painterly than plausibly
architectural. Then he introduces personalised real life by gouging the surface
with his car keys. The much larger ‘Sky Lights’ mount a back-reflecting
bulb on a surface of marbled paint, particles of chalk and the odd
nail, all on beaten-up boards. That sets us ricocheting between on and off,
lighter and lit, substance and shadow, sea and cloud, crucifixion and ascent,
dream and reality...
%2B2015.jpg) |
| Plan (Cover), 2015 - coloured pencil on scratched concrete, 29.7 x 21 cm |
____________________
Roger Ackling: Simple Gifts @ Annely Juda Fine Art, 23 Dering Street - Central
To 7 May: www.annelyjudafineart.co.uk
 |
Voewood (2013)
- sunlight on wood with metal.15.4 x 6.5 x 15.6 cm
|
For 40 years before his death last year, Roger Ackling created small sculptures by directing sunlight through magnifying glass to burn images of the sun to make up parallel lines to track their forms dot by dot. Sort of small-scale Daniel Buren of more poetry than concept. These 80 pieces from Ackling's last active year show lots of appealing variety of shape, size, contour effects, additional elements such as rings or an elastic band, and several variants pieces which enact a much freer line on the back of photo frames - as if to guess at an outline image the other side. If Ackling reduces the sun to an intimate scale, then it makes some sense that June Green, in the paired show, presents argangement of 'pebble shapes' big enough to count as serious rocks.
 |
Voewood (2013) - sunlight on board with hinge support, 20.2 x 15.3 x 8.5 cm
|
____________________
Group show @ Ibid, 27 Margaret Street - FitzroviaTo 2 May: ibidprojects.com/marchgroupshow/
 |
Robert Gober Untitled, 1993-94 photolithography on archival paper
|
What do you want in a group show? An interesting theme, links
between works, some favourite artists and an interesting new one seem like a
plausible requirements – which Ibid delivers. The easy familiarity of
capitalist consumption at home is disrupted by a comedic trip in Francis Alys'
sensitive little encaustic, and the macabre aspect of roasting a whole pig in
Robert Gober's editions of newspaper adverts. That triggers our questioning of
the apparent calm in Paul Theck's painting on newspaper and leads thematically
and onomastically to the new-to-me Romanian Razvan Boar, who - aside from his
great name - abstracts from rote commercially sourced figuration by casually
painterly blobs, scuffs and dirt somewhere in the space between Warhol and
Oscar Murillo (David Spiller also comes to mind). Ross Chisholm provides two suitably weird portraits of parents
to overlook the scene. All that's missing is a porcine title - well, any title - for the show...
 |
Razvan Boar
Juice Tree, 2014 - oil, charcoal and spray paint on canvas
____________________ |
To 26 April: www.janehayesgreenwood.co.uk
 |
| Jane Hayes Greenwood with Old Town, 2015 |
True, this is a four days
only show (worth combining with
Vitrine’s Time Etchells show downstairs) but you can also see Jane Hayes
Greenwood’s
innovative combination of archaeology with painting in the excellent 12
woman
group show at Collyer Bristow to 17 June). Hayes Greenwood will often
inhabit the past by
remaking it before digging into its cultural histories and art legacy /
baggage by painting from the result - most notably, here, in the tour
de force Old Town, in which
she remakes an excavated settlement in Mali in the creamy paper which
gives her painting
its delicate colour. Archeologists’ indicative arrows for the location
of
finds - which included a mask also pictured - add to the hint of Paul
Klee, and some other artifacts are seen through archeologists’
measuring screens.
 |
| Eyedol, 2015 |
____________________
Santiago Taccetti: ISO 9001 @ Hus Gallery, 10 Hanover St & Nasan Tur @ Blain|Southern, 4 Hanover Square
To 25 April: http://husgalleries.com 15 April info@blainsouthern.com
 |
| Santiago Taccetti: Untitled 15 (Einsatzbereich Innen - Außen), 2015 Household acrylic on canvas 200x145 cm - I think that would translate as 'Application Indoor - Outdoor' |
Two
interesting shows from Berlin-based artists either side of
Hanover Street show contrasting approaches to presenting conceptual
work. At Hus (say 'Hoos') Argentinian Santiago Taccetti pursues two
lines of enquiry into material properties: seven towers of aluminium
ashtrays
covered in speckly stone plaster become mysterious ash sculptures; and
the cheapest
possible household acrylic is spread roughly onto what proves to be the
back of
eight pre-primed white canvases. The point isn’t economy, but the
chemical crudity
of cheap paint, which makes it the best at crinkling the canvas into
intricate patterns
as it dries onto it. All that remains is to constrain that sculptural
effect in
a metal frame engraved with the chemical formula which controlled the
unseen paint.
Compared with that, Blain Southern’s feels like a group
show. Is that a Bill Viola slow motion human reaction film of people firing
guns for the first time, a Walead Beshty pulping of what proves to be Das
Kapital, a Martin Creed neon displaced to the floor, where it blazes a yellow CRISIS?
And has that rather creepy collection of marble body fragments come from
ancient statuary? But no, Turkish German
artist Nasan Tur is adept at repurposing a wide variety of languages to his own
ends, wittily pointing up the slippages between the political and personal and
their conversion to art. A wall painting reproduces the results of police covering
over graffiti; loss of bladder control is similarly presented as if it were a mere
mark-making process; and what do we read into the post-discharge expressions of
those gun virgins?
 |
| Nathan Tur: Crisis, 2014 |
______________________
Eric Gadsby: Works 1966-1976 @ Austin / Desmond Fine Art, Pied Bull Yard, Great Russell Street
To 24 April: www.austindesmond.com
 |
| Untitled, 1971 - oil on canvas, 137 x 91 cm |
Last year, a 70 year visitor to the Kinetica Artfair mentioned to Emily
Austin that he had a stack of old paintings he was thinking of throwing away,
as he needed to clear his living room. You
can see why: most of the 13 shaped and layered canvasses from 1966 – 76 are
over 2m across. The represent the bulk of Eric Gadsby’s production: he gave
up in favour of teaching as, despite his involvement in the New Generation
exhibitions, there wasn’t much of a British market for such work. Think Ellsworth
Kelly with a curvy and slightly mysterious dash of the US west coast aesthetic,
and you’re not far off: Gadsby’s painting-objects have genuine presence 'in the flesh', and
are neatly complemented by contemporaneous Bridget Riley studies downstairs. Good call, Emily!
 |
| Rubescence,1976 - Oil on canvas, 198cm diameter |
________________________
Petr Davydtchenko: Hard Bass & Jodie Carey @ Edel Assanti, 74a Newman St – Fitzrovia
To 25 April: www.edelassanti.com
 |
| Installation view: Jodie Carey |
 |
| Installation view: Petr Davydtchenko |
Matt Stokes: Cantata Profana @
Dilston Grove, Southwark Park
To 26 April: www.cgplondon.org
 |
| Cantata Profana |
The refurbished concrete shell and adjacent parish hall of an ex-mission church prove ideal to show the most compelling
of Matt Stokes’ investigations of sub-cultures. In Cantata Profana
(2010) six extreme metal singers from such directly named bands as Norway’s She Said Destroy, USA’s Hatred Surge and Germany’s Paroxysm are given a screen each as they
combine a capella in a dated GDR
radio studio to sing a six minute composition by Orlando Gough, who exploits
their extreme vocals to link them into modern choral styles. If you like
beatboxing, grindcore or Ligeti – and surely most people go for one of that
unlikely triad – you’ll be drawn in. Logically,
you might link this with a visit to Stokes’ parallel show at Matt’s Gallery in
Mile End, but his ponderous satire on the sit com form is hard to recommend; as
is the less than user-friendly group show in Southwark Park’s nearby Café Gallery.
 |
| Dilston Grove's gallery entrance doors are a feature in themselves... |
____________________
George Rippon: Now Panic & Lena Henke and Marie Karlberg: One step away from further Hell @ Vilma Gold, 6 Minerva St - Cambridge Heath
To 25 April: www.vilmagold.com
To 25 April: www.vilmagold.com
 |
| George Rippon: Forever Summerhouse, 2015 Limonium, lentils, coins, paper, photograph, allergy tablets, bottle caps, egg shell, chestnut, models, plaster 58.5 x 115 cm |
This pair of shows operate just out of the range of
direct meaning, yet in a way I found fascinating rather than frustrating. Young
Frankfurt-based American George Rippon’s
sculptures and sculptural paintings make surprising use of the organic.
They revel in such combinations as Allergy Allegory’s
‘dandelion, models, black rice, allergy
tablets, epoxy, plaster’, which seems to embed a personal
narrative-by-association
of elements into its containing block. And New York based German and
Swedish friends
Lena Henke and Marie Karlberg, who've organised exhibitions together,
present a two-hander in which it feels as if each
artists’ work could be the other’s, though their backgrounds in
sculpture and performance / fashion respectively are very different.
 |
| Lena Henke and Marie Karlberg: Installation view |
| ________________________ |
John Skoog: Shadowland @ Pilar Corrias, 54 Eastcastle Street - Fitzrovia
To 17 April: www.pilarcorrias.com
 |
| Still from Shadowlands, 2014 |
Swedish artist John Skoog has created a highly effective two-part show which pivots around the transformational ambitions of American cinema. Downstairs is a 15 minute 16mm black-and-white film of 44 locations in the topographical a diverse state of California, each chosen because they were used in films from the black-and-white era to represent other parts of the world. A list enables you to follow what stood in for where. Upstairs are 21 photographs of US 'movie palaces' from the 20s and 30s which themselves looks to evoke other places architecturally. You could, then, be watching Big Bear Lake as Japan in St Paul as a Spanish Castle...
 |
| Still from Shadowlands, 2014 |
________________________
Simon Mullan: Popularis @ Belmacz, 45 Davies Street - Bond St
This show of facing triples contrasts two
streams of work at the art–non-art interface. Simon Mullan’s tile collages
exploit the skills he learned as a teenager in the building industry. They may
look like bathroom décor, but the relationships of cut tile shapes, the three
shades of grout and slightly differing whites à la Flavin (caused by using
different tile manufacturers) and the way some tiles sneak around the back to
emphasise these ‘paintings’ as objects, reveal that these are art. As are the
Berliner’s collaged paintings made from the front of bomber jackets… but not the
other triple on show here: the ‘naked’
jackets which remain after his collaging activities. They’re mere
collateral, and as such are not for sale, but worn for free by people judged
deserving.
 |
| 'Roger.Samir and Kilian', 2015 - Tiles and wood, 89×116 ×4cm |
________________________
Thomas Joshua Cooper: Scattered Waters: Sources Streams Rivers @ The Fleming Collection, 13 Berkeley Street - Mayfair
To 11 April: www.flemingcollection.com
 |
Twilight - Rapids on the River Ness,The Weir, Dochgarroch,Inverness, Inverness-shire, Scotland, 2002-2014 - silver gelatin print, hand toned and printed by the artist
|
Thomas
Joshua Cooper has restricted himself to a narrow process for the past
45 years, 30 of them in Scotland after moving there from his native
California: he walks miles with a 30kg kit to makes pictures of the
outdoors, one shot
per site. He uses an 1898 5 x 7 inch plate camera which he bought from
the
70-year-old son of its original owner plus tripod. Cooper
prints, avoiding any modern process, onto the world’s last substantial
supply
of silver-rich paper, which he bought up when Agfa went bust in 2006.
Why so? He finds slowness suits him, he
explained at the opening of this welcome selection of his Scottish river
works,
as a way of paying respectful attention to the spirit of things - grass,
trees, water, air - and saying thank you for place, time and light – often capturing the
dark of dawn or dusk with long exposures. The 15 images here are certainly
quick with the sense of water as life force for the land.
 |
Early evening - Near the mouth of the River North Esk St Cyrus Beach, Kincardineshire, Scotland, 2000-2014 - Silver gelatin print, hand toned and printed by the artist
____________________ |
To 11 April: spaceinbetween.co.uk
 |
| Gallery co-director Laura McFarlane demonstrates the give in Perpetual Instability, 2015 |
We’re used to neo-concrete Brazilian artists, but this cracking litle show features a concrete one. Inspired
by a stay at the iconically brutalist Belfron Tower in Poplar, Lucas Simões has
installed a concrete floor over a base of foam, so that over the exhibition’s run
it breaks up and becomes a shifting platform under foot: soft social issues
impacted by modernism, perhaps, but outlasting it? The concrete is more
assertive in the accompanying shelf of sculptures: now the softness is concertinas
of paper, and there’s a tension: are they trapped by the structures, or insinuating
their lax values into the hard world?
 |
| Empty 03, 2014 |
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Flore Nové-Josserand & The Still House Group @ the Zabludowicz Collection, 176 Prince of Wales Rd – Chalk Farm
To 19 April: www.zabludowiczcollection.com
To 19 April: www.zabludowiczcollection.com
 |
| Flore Nové-Josserand looking suitably colourful with Flatland 5 |
The central presentation
of New York’s Still House Group of young artists is interesting without being
particularly persuasive. But Flore Nové-Josserand’s 'Zabludovicz Invites' multi-disciplinary tableaus are a joy: origins
in colourful rhythmic abstraction have led her to paintings of stage-like
‘sets’ which she photographs and then presents in sculptural-come-architectural
settings. The photographic flatness is framed and countered, and it becomes a
challenge to sort out which medium is which as the viewer encounters a politely
unruly streetscape merging private and public, twee and derelict. I also like
the walk-through installation by three artists chosen by the Still House Group,
in which Joe-Graham-Felsen’s Church,
Mosque, Synangogue is the dominant element, merging potentially conflicting
houses of worship (and in the Methodist Chapel, to boot) out of the stud walls
which would normally support, rather than be, an exhibition.
 |
| Installation shot with Joe-Graham-Felsen’s Church, Mosque, Synangogue |
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Maaike Schoorel: Sub-Lo @ Maureen Paley, 21 Herald St - Cambridge Heath
To 12 April: www.maureenpaley.com
 |
| Shez with disco lights, 2014-15 - oil on linen, 165 x 135 cm |
 |
Lisa in the bath, 2014-15 - oil on canvas, 135 x 175 cm
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Roman Opałka: The End Is Defined @ Christie's Mayfair, 103 New Bond Street
Polish-French artist Roman Opalka’s amazing 46 year project ‘OPALKA 1965 / 1 – ∞’ used counting as a means to ‘paint irreversible time passing ad infinitum’.
He reached 5,607,249 on the 233rd such canvas by the time of his death
in 2011, so the typical canvas contains some 24,000 seven digit numbers.
After a few years he started adding 1% of white to his initially black
paint to move each canvas towards the deathly white on white he’d
reached by 2008. Was this hermetic process just measuring time for its
own sake, or moving beyond the proto-modern urge to use time to
advantage? Either way, this chance to take in a dozen paintnigs – the
most I’ve ever seen gathered in London, and niftily paired with Darren
Almond’s clock works – is well worth taking.
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Agostino Bonalumi - Sculptures @ Mazzoleni, 27 Albemarle St - Central To April 4: www.mazzoleniart.com
 |
| Rapporti, 1978 - glass, resin and marble |
Two years ago Francesca Pola curated a magisterial survey of Agostino Bonalumi’s earlier decades at Robilant + Voena. Now she’s back at a new Italian gallery with a chronologically fuller sample from the estate, concentrating on Bonalumi (1935-2013) as a sculptor - which is after all only one step out from his constructed paintings. The later years contain such underappreciated experiments as enamelled metal sheets; relational pieces (here one in which a resin formation takes flight over marble); and extravagantly shaped self-standing canvases along with bronze, ceramic and fibreglass variants.
 |
| Francesca Pola explains Giallo, 1969 - vinyl tempera and shaped canvas |
CLASSICICITY @ Breese Little (in conjunction with Rupert Wace Ancient Art), 30b Great Sutton Street - Clerkenwell
To 2 April: www.breeselittle.com/past-classicicity
 |
| Alexandre Singh: Number Eight, 2014 |
What do you do with a PhD in the ancient art? James Cahill and Ruth Allen have found a good answer by curating this beautifully pitched combination of classical artifacts and recent work . The latter combines established and less-known artists to good effect from the new looking old (Edward Allington’s Unsupported Support and one of Ged Quinn’s abstract paintings of craquelure) to riffs on myth (Maggi Hambling and Mary Reid Kelley’s versions of the minotaur) and Rachel Kneebone, Sarah Lucas, Nell Allen and Pfeiffer & Walz's reminders that there was plenty of sex and kitsch in those once-painted statues we take so seriously.
 |
| Ged Quinn, Nekyia Modern, 2014 |
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Nicole Wermers: Infrastruktur @ Herald St, 2 Herald
St - Bethnal Green
To 2 April: www.heraldst.com
 |
| Untitled Chairs CR-O and FXR-1 vintage fur, steel tubing, upholstery, silk and velvet |
Nicole Wermers’ new show presents two radical ideas.
First, she makes sculptures by merging a vintage fur with the back of chairs
from a design by Marcel Breur. having relined the coats to match the browns and
greys of the seating. The ten sculptures are named through a code for the type of fur,
from Cream Rabbit to a Afghan. The effect as a group was like a high-end
version of towels reserving sun loungers. Second, she makes ceramic versions of
those tear-off flyers through which to obtain phone number of a potential
flatshare, or whatever. Luxury is contrasted with crude utility, but both
represent the system of social organisation and an infrastructure of sorts.
 |
| Sequences 1-3, painted ceramics |
William Cobbing: The
Duddo Field Club Audit @ Tintype, 107 Essex Rd - Islington
To 4 April: www.tintypegallery.com
 |
| Sestriere, 2014 - glazed ceramic |
William Cobbing’s
previous work has seen him find memorable forms to imply the subconscious: the
skeleton of Palindrome, 2003, exchanges
pelvis for skull, The Kiss, 2004,
sees a couple struggle to smooch through clay… No surprise here, then, that inaccessible knowledge
is memorialised through the books pressed into a version of a monolithic
standing stone; that the burden of metaphor is reinforced in ceramic recreations of various rock-heavy
covers from editions of Camus’ The Myth
of Sisyphus; or that a psychological distance builds up between a woman (collaborator
Beth Collar) writing and erasing her fugitive thoughts on one screen while Cobbing
seems to pour out his own inner emotions on another (‘You can never give me an
unqualified answer’…)
 |
| Beth Collar & William Cobbing: Palimpsest, 2014 - 16.30 mins videos
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|
Gideon Rubin has such a penchant for blank faces we’ll probably never
know if he can paint them in full. The effect is to anonymise, ambiguate
and universalise the place and time of his sources. Here he dances around modes
of representing people culled from 1950’s magazines hunted down during his recent
residencies in Israel and China. Sometimes he paints over the page, sometimes
relocates a figure to an independent canvas or transfers it to a different news
context. Enough clues remain for us to puzzle out what comes from where, but
without the potentially lazy short cut which facial features can provide.
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Renata De Bonis & Ruben Brulat: Mapping Continents @ Lamb Arts, 10 White Horse St – Green Park
To 28 March: www.lamb-arts.com
..
 |
| The artists with the top of Renata's floor-ceiling piece and some of Ruben's photos (look hard to see him naked on the rock) |
It’s good to see that Lucinda Bellm now has a permanent
space, after London various pop-ups, to add to her Sao Paulo links. Its three
rooms are well-used for this globe-spanning match of romantic existentialists. Young
French photographer Ruben Brulat tweaks his nude-in-wilderness theme with self-portraits
from a geologically unstable zone of Ethiopia, including just his sulphured
hands from a pool too acidic for full immersion. Brazilian Renata De Bonis
exchanges soil between Brazil and England (and heartbeats between her and her
boyfriend), paints selected Icelandic rocks and shows kerbstones neither up nor
down as they pierce the floor / ceiling. What are we but human clay,
elementally connected?
Here's a better chance to see Ruben Brulat in Sous les murmures (Under the whispers), 2014
Here's a better chance to see Ruben Brulat in Sous les murmures (Under the whispers), 2014
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Meekyoung Shin: Painting Series @ Hada Contemporary, 21 Vyner St – Cambridge Heath
To 29 March: www.hadacontemporary.com
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| Painting Series - installation view |
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Analia Saban: Interiors @ Spruth Magers, 7A Grafton Street - Central
To 28 March: www.spruethmagers.com
 |
| Claim (from Chesterfield Sofa), 2014 |
Analia Saban’s
latest London solo sees her upsize - indeed, she gets all three floors!
- with her move from Josh Lilley to Spruth Magers, but without reducing
the
commendably perverse conceptual wit with which she collapses the
distinctions
between types of work and pushes her materials further than they can be
expected to go. Marble folds like a towel. A sofa becomes a painting –
no, hang
on, a painting becomes a sofa. Photographs of paint are mined for colour
which is
then used as if it really is paint. A sequence of flower pictures
paradoxically
‘fades’ towards abstraction by getting
darker as the brush used gets broader….. A painting swells, pregnant
with a
sculpture made of paint…
 |
| Draped Marble (Fior di Pesco Apuano), 2015 |
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Sunday in the Park with Ed @ Display Gallery, 28 Holborn Viaduct –
Farringdon
To 28
March: www.displaygallery.co.uk
 |
Rebecca
Meanley: Untitled (Dark place), 2015
|
Energetic
artists Cedric Christie and Pascal Rousson have asked 84 (! – count ‘em… I didn’t)
artists to choose a work which represents what is transgressive in their own
practice, loosely starting from Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’Herbe. There's plenty of good stuff, but it could easily have been a messy confusion had
the gallery not done a fantastic job in setting out what’s what and providing quotes
from each artist and some idea of their aims. Not everyone is meaningfully on
theme, but of those who are Alex Hudson, Jeff McMillan, John Smith, Helen Maurer
and Nathan Taylor impressed me along with the illustrated pair who pick up on
the lawn aspect of Manet. Rebecca Meanley says she is immersed in her own past’s ‘sordid
encounters’, making her abstracted undergrowth a portal to matters ‘too dark
to articulate in words’; Ackroyd & Harvey – whose material of choice
is grass - exhibit seeding turf as a flayed animal fur which I take to compare hunting
and land use practices.
 |
| Ackroyd & Harvey Pelt (After Living Skin), 2014-15 |
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Hair: Object of Desire and Culture @ Daniel Blau, 51 Hoxton Square
To 20 March: www.danielblau.com
 |
| Anonymous: Fontainebleau, 23 August 1944 from a collection of photographs of 'Femmes Tondues' at the Liberation of France |
 |
Eugène Brussaux: Mission Henri Moll, Eré village, Moundan Woman, 1906. Silver gelatin print |
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To 21 March: www.tjboulting.com
 |
| Rise up you are free, 2014 led light panel & arduino led strip, duratran, 102 × 76 cm |
The sponsor gallery of the International Photography Award presents 2015 series winner
Dominic Hawgood's photographs of people engaged in faith-based activities, the
veracity of which we have ourselves to take on faith. His previous series
(shown by South Kiosk gallery) depicted – if that’s possible visually – speaking in tongues. This installation,
requiring shoe-covers for entry and set atop a chancel-like platform, explores
the intersection between voodoo and Christianity in London churches. We see people
in the throes of exorcism, or casting away their no-longer-necessary crutches, knee
supports or drugs. Or do we? Are they acting for the camera? Are they always
acting? Or are they for real?
 |
| This is where the darkness lies, 2014 self adhesive vinyl, 203 × 152 cm |
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Ross Hansen & Julian Wakelin: Studio Brain @ Artworks Project Space, 114 Blackhorse Lane - Walthamstow
To 22 March: www.barbicanartsgrouptrust.co.uk/exhibitions---artworks-project-space-at-blackhorse-lane1.html
 |
| Two half walls from Hansen (left) and Wakelin (right) |
Move
fast for this one week show, 250 yards from the Blackhorse Road
under/overground station, gives two walls each to painters engaged in
the dance between originality and repetition. On the gentler right side,
Julian Wakelin’s hesitantly lyrical abstract motifs jostle and lean
against each other in a lively hang as if ranged experimentally around
the studio. On the tough left side is Ross Hansen. In 2012 he decided
to give up the search for originality, and merely find ways to remake
his own earlier work. Wouldn’t you know it, though? He does that with
paradoxically original wit and no little technical flair: we get his
midlife crisis painting, in Ferrari Red; dense build-ups of pigment
almost entirely sanded away; splashy-looking edges which are actually
made by cutting out the paint; and dazzling photorealist drawing used to
depict the studio mundanities of a stack of unprogressed paintings and
couple of maquettes swaddled in bubblewrap.
 |
| Ross Hansen: Models for Unrealised Ideas, 2014-15 - colour pencil on paper |
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Sebastian Helling & Richard Schur: Verve @ Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, 533 Old York Road - WandsworthTo 21 March: kristinhjellegjerde.com
 |
Richard Schur, Bridges, from the Manhattan Series, 2015
|
This pairing of painters seems at first like order and
chaos: a welcome return to London for Munich-based Richard
Schur’s layered refractions of geometry and place versus Norwegian
Sebastian Helling’s mash-ups of Ab Ex and streetishly sprayed marks inspired, he
says, by his musical icons of the 70's, notably Led Zeppelin. Look more closely,
though, and you’ll see dynamising little accidentals in Schur and a fair amount
of structure behind Helling: a seducively colour-filled combination, but also
a meditation on how much of its apparent opposite so many conditions
actually contain.
 |
| Rare self-appearance with Richard Schur! |
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Mimmo Rotella @ Robilant + Voena, 38 Dover St – Central
To 24 March: www.robilantvoena.com
 | |
|
This revelatory show is the first London survey of the breadth of Mimmo
Rotella’s practice. The Italian artist (1918-2006) is known for his often
cinematic torn poster décollages, but
actually worked in several other ways linked to advertising posters. Here are his retros, the backs of posters with look of peeling walls; the blanks in which he shows posters almost
wholly obliterated by a monochrome cover prior to the next layer being applied;
the artypos, taken from found poster
proofs used to test out colours, often with superimposed images; and the sovrapittura, in which torn posters are
overpainted.
,+1963-5,+89+x+123+cm.jpg) | |
|
Margo Trushina: Borderlines @ Erarta Galleries, 8 Berkeley St – Central
To 14 March: www.erartagalleries.com
 |
| Margo Trushina with her heatbeat in Waves, 2014 |
London-based
Russian
Margo Trushina explores a plethora of borders in the elegant flow
between works here, all rooted in the landscape, even – unusually – when
they
use neon. The boundaries range from the political to the personal. An
irregularly descending line of red light, which could be
the falling oil price or rouble, turns out to be the border which the
Russians authorities
draw within the Ukraine as their claim on its land. That's in dialogue
with a Trushina’s own heartbeat set in neon against the more outward
waves of the sea. The wave form is then
picked up more abstractly in stainless steel, while sculptural
combinations play on
the borders between natural and man-made, posing stone against metal,
glass against wood.
 |
| Borderline Series, Untitled 4, 2104 |
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Katy Moran @
Parasol unit, 14 Wharf Rd – Old Street
To 8 March: www.parasol-unit.org
 |
| Rock Face with a Face, 2013 - collage and acrylic on canvas |
Katy Moran’s approach to figurative painting is
sufficiently
un-illustrative she’s often taken to be an abstract artist. Maybe
that’s why, over the decade spanned by
this 51 work spread, bits of reality are increasing collaged in
directly, and her titles have become more descriptive of what you can
see. Moran doesn’t vary colour and scale drastically,
and most of the paintings arrive at a comparable way of balancing their
accidents,
energies and incidents – yet there’s a freshening sense that they might
not
have done, that they’re rediscoveries rather than applications of a
formula. All of which reminds me of Morandi. That said, there are
curveballs: Panther
Cat is on glass, the ursine presences of bear fun almost varnish into its board, Travelling Mercy is a triptych on found canvasses, and Slide out of View feels like Howard Hodgkin
on the moon.
 |
| bear fun, 2010 - acrylic and varnish on board |
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Vicky Wright: Poor Joys Asylum Level 71 @ Josh Lilley Gallery, 44 – 46 Riding House Street - Fitzrovia
To 12 March: www.joshlilleygallery.com
 |
| A Silver Branch Can Drop Without Seeds I, 2014 |
Vicky Wright, like Moran, is a non-illustrative figurative painter with a distinctive language, but to such different effect that I was reminded of Polke. Wright emphasises her supports by painting on what look like the backs of panels. That suggests a subversive take on more conventional images on the unseen side, and here that's a feminist agenda linked to a 19th century practice of confining women on the grounds of 'hysterical' tendencies. The paintings mash up witch lore, video games and degradations of classic male modernist forms to haunting post-Gothic effect, complemented by painted sticks referencing the geological (and implied psychological) taking of core samples. Perhaps the witch, standing for positive female energies historically repressed, is also the magical mixer of paints. Whatever, the spell is strong.
 |
| Installation view with Path of Exile: Poor joys Aylum IV (the sticks) and Path of Exile: Poor joys Aylum II |
_______________________
Richard Serra: Backdoor Pipeline, Ramble, Dead Load and London Cross @ Gagosian Britannia St - Kings Cross
To March 5: www.gagosian.com
 |
| Ramble, 2014 |
It’s
easy to forget that the Richard Serra show still looms at Gagosian -
fair enough, perhaps, given the effort required to install it. Yes, five
uniformed guards continue their arduous business of making sure that no
one walks off one of the smallest parts, which are mere five tonnes of
steel. That said, the combination of weight making space with the
seductive surface bloom of the Corten is a winner in each of the four
formats adopted: vast walk-through curve; cemetery of super slabs;
dangerously balanced overhead cross; and the ultimately heavy
sarcophagus. It’s as if the Britannia Street Gallery was built for it -
and in fact, it was, being engineered with Serra’s equally imposing show
2008 show in mind. Catch it (and I don’t quite mean as in Serra’s
seminal 1968 video ‘Hand Catching Lead’) in these last two months.
 |
| Dead Load, 2014 |
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The
Presence of Absence @ Berloni, 63 Margaret Street - Fitzrovia
To 14
March - curator's tours 2 pm on Sat 21 Feb & 2 pm on Sat 7 March: www.berlonigallery.com
+2013+anni+l.jpg) |
| Anni Leppälä: Evening (Embers), 2013 |
The last
place I look to describe a show is the gallery’s press release, lazily compliant trend as
that is. Yet, having written this one, I shall claim with it that ‘it’s often
said that negative space is as important as positive shapes in a composition.
The works in this show turn around a parallel feature of content, as opposed to
form: namely, what is not present is at least as important as what is present –
and so it is that a key role is played by the paradoxical sounding ‘presence of
absence’ in work by fourteen artists across a wide range of media’. And having
chosen such artists as John Smith, Nika Neelova, Giorgio Sadotti and Anni Leppälä,
what can I do but recommend it?
 |
| Jason Oddy: The Pentagon, Washington D.C., USA, 2003 |
________________________
Babajide Olatunji: Tribal Marks Series II @ Tafeta, 47-50 Margaret Street - Fitzrovia
By appointment only to 11 March 2015 via www.tafeta.com
.jpg) |
Tribal Marks Series II #7 - 114 x 150 cm |
.jpg) |
Tribal Marks Series II #5 - 112 x 177 cm
Pier Paolo Calzolari @ Ronchini
Gallery, 22 Dering St – Bond St
To 7 March: www.ronchinigallery.com
Untitled
[collage], 2012 - Graphite, talc, iron, rose petals, lead Photo: Michele Alberto Sereni
One could lose track of how many Italian artists of the 1960s have been
presented as discoveries in London over the past few years. Though pleased to see Pascali, Bonalumi, Dadamaino, Paolini, Schifano, Scheggi and Zorio, we
might reasonably have been asking: why not Pier Paolo Calzolari? And here he
is, not with the signature frosted works (which hum with refrigeration to
produce delicate surface whites) but with a good cross-section of his
classically-tinged take on Arte Povera.
Calzolari sets up, one might say, delicate pseudo-alchemical processes in
search of the absolute: a toy train pushes a feather; flames illumine salt; and
the septuagenarian seems to take a literally rose-tinted view of failing sight
through a pair of glasses in which the lenses are petals.
 |
Little Trains (Large Paper), 1972 - Paper glued on wood, wax pastel, oil pastel, tempera, iron, tracks, electric wire, feather, transformer Photo: Paolo Semprucci
|
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Güler Ates: Stilled @ Art First Project Space, 21 Eastcastle St - Fitzrovia
To 7 March: www.artfirst.co.uk
 | |
| Magic Lights, 2013 |
This show brings together 10 of the 16 photographs result from London-based Turkish artist Güler Ates (say 'Gooler Artes') 2012
residency at the City Palace Museum in Udaipur. That provides a
particularly rich background for her photographs of a classical Indian
dancer wholly covered by a sari in local textile - a set up which
presents the figure colourfully and sculpturally and might be seen as an
empowering of female privacy in an environment with male authoritarian
traditions behind it, rather than more restrictive interpretation of the
placed on the burka (see www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/24118241 for
a neat summary of head coverings: the sari's never worn as Ates shows
it). 'Magic Lights' is especially striking: look like a disco lights are
in fact naturally lit 16th century stained glass. Since then, Ates has
been working in a contrasting locations of Brazil and Eton College.
 |
| Flames, 2013 |
Beat Zoderer: Fold & Dip and Other Incidents @ Bartha Contemporary,
25 Margaret St – Fitzrovia
To 28 Feb: www.barthacontemporary.com
 |
| Dip and Fold (detail), 2014 |
Swiss artist Beat Zoderer
has the happy knack of achieving a distinctive aesthetic through an
ever-changing variety of methods and a characteristic way of using not-quite
primary colours as if they were primaries. This survey includes two of his
long-running steel band series together with three main new streams, focused on folding
(a circle is squared by that means, and vellum is successively folded and
dipped into paint to make chance concatenations with a structural logic); the
castings of balls in a range of sculptural ways; and multiple watercolour
applications of a templating process which yields intricately colourful results
in on Japanese paper, including as the fold-out book shown.
 | |||||||||||
| Leporello, 2012 |
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Indeterminacy @ large Glass, 392 Caledonian Road – Barnsbury
To 27 Feb: www.largeglass.co.uk
 |
| Window with Kathy Prendergast: Mt Fuji (2), 2014 |
John
Cage is an empathetic figure for many artists, and Charlotte Schepke is
a sensitive curator, so there was paradoxically little chance that
'Indeterminacy' wouldn't be an interesting show. Cage’s spirit is
present in the sound of his short stories and invoked by such as Ana
Prada’s happy conjunction of plastic spoons; the unknowable time of
Roger Hiorns’ crystal-covered clock; John Smith’s film combining cityscapes with
lost sounds on the now-lost medium of cassette tape, drifts of which are
filmed where it snagged around the streets of London; and the beautiful
Penone-echo of Kathy Prendergast’s conversion of the contour map of
Mount Fuji into the rings on a tree and a fingerprint, which she's blown
up into a big painting for the gallery's - large glass - window.
 |
| John Smith & Graeme Miller: still from Lost Sound, 1998-2001 |
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Kirk Palmer: Remembering Absence @ the Daiwa Foundation Japan House, 13-14 Cornwall Terrace – Baker Street
To 26 Feb: www.dajf.org.uk/events/current-exhibition
 |
| Still from War's End: An Island of Remembrance, 2012 |
A ‘sister show’ for The Presence of Absence might be Kirk Palmer recurrent meditations on what we can and cannot now reach of
the nuclear calamity which befell Japan in 1945. The photographs and two of the
films in this unhurriable show do that at one remove, by concentrating on the
landscape of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. War’s End: An Island of Remembrance
proposes, in effect, that the mountainous Yakushima, in the Ryuku
Archipelago, be seen as a memorial garden as the mission planes used it
as a reference point and circled overhead for 40 minutes before
proceeding, due to changing weather conditions, to bomb Nagasaki rather
than the original target of Kokura. Primeval views of nature are
accompanied by a
deep rumbling. That proves to be a recording of the bell from Nagasaki’s
destroyed cathedral, but slowed down to last the 40 minutes of the film.
 |
| Still from Hiroshima, 2007 |
Oscar Holloway: Diorama @ Divus (to 21 Feb); Maria Jose Arjonas @ ]performance space[ (to March) and Wolfgang
Berkowski @ Lubomirov-Easton
(to 21 Feb)
All at 50 Resolution Way - Deptford
 |
| Oscar Holloway from 'Dioramas' |
Counting three neighbouring small
galleries as one makes for a powerful international combination of male
posturing rendered absurd either side of female self-realisation. Oscar Holloway shows photographs of hunters
holding up their trophy deer - but with the killers edited out so that their
victims look at ease in a way which isn’t quite right. Leading Colombian
performance artist Maria Jose Arjonas straps microphones to her body in three
short films: she rubs herself with increasing speed to generate a sound like an
accelerating train; acts as drum skin for an accomplice; and lies among radios
which feed into her and then back with added bodily noises. Italian-based
German Wolfgang Berkowski has blown up a model made of drinking straws into a
laboriously made and comically phallic room-high inflatable cage which toys
with the constraints of minimalism.
 |
| Wolfgang Berkowski: |
Caroline Mesquita: Camping @ Union Pacific,17
Goulston St – Whitechapel
To 20 Feb:
www.unionpacific.co.uk
 |
| Installation view with Football Table, 2015 |
Young
French artist Caroline Mesquita, in the third show at this new space, makes
effective use of unusual materials to propose what comes across as an account of
the social rituals of an alternative society – either that, or she’s been to an
unusual camp site. Entertainment centres
on brass table top games, and gatherings of figures scratched into and painted
onto chemically-treated brass plaques with allusive straightforwardness, or more
evanescently washed onto paper with the metallic patina; the space is aerated
by seductive music which rises through a brass fitting and sounds as if it’s
played by striking and blowing through the mystery civilisation’s objects – too
gently, I’d say, to be dance music, though there’s a lot of dancing going on…
 |
| Dance Floor, 2015 - chemically treated brass |
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Christina Niederberger: Laced @ C 7C Gallery, 18 London Rd - Forest Hill
To 8 Feb: ccgallery.co.uk
 |
| Laced Mondrian, 2010 |
It’s worth a trip to Forest Hill to see Christina Niederberger tease modernism through several ways of creating large paintings by the laborious method of spraying through lace. To essay cubism, for example, in this way is to refuse its underlying way of thinking; use a domestic material with connotations contrary to the high ideals of modernism; counter male artists with a material traditionally made by women and worn by women to emphasise their femininity; and to suggest that painting is endgame, doomed – albeit with lightness and beauty – to revisiting its own historic themes as kitsch. What’s more, Niederger’s small ‘off duty’ paintings in a side-room are also compelling in a different mode.
____________________
Reiner Ruthenbeck @ The Serpentine Gallery - Kensington
To 15 Feb: www.serpentinegalleries.org
 |
| Lighting Attempt, 2004 |
Contrasting with Julio Le Parc’s somewhat trivial kinetics in the Sackler Gallery, Reiner Ruthenbeck provides more of a funfare for the mind in the Serpentine’s original space. The side galleries contain to the right, furniture either turned over to deny its function in favour of its aesthetic, and to left sculptures titled as furniture but so flimsy as to be useless. Meanwhile, ladders mate towards higher ends; a barrage of spotlights, grouped like figures, attempts to return a black painting to the condition of its surrounding wall, as if regretting having made it; a landscape emerges from piles of ash in conversation with geometric outlines on the wall; then we walk into a one bulb room and find it’s dusk.
 |
| Double Ladder, 1967 |
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Shana Moulton & Lucy Stein: Retention @ Gimpel Fils, 30 Davies St –
Mayfair
To 31 Jan: www.gimpelfils.com
 |
| Still from Polventon, 2013 |
The main film in this refreshingly ditzy multi-media show might be subtitled
‘Fun with PMS’. Moulton & Stein get ever-wackier from the serious-sounding
starting point of trying to track down from where on the cliffs near Polventon, Cornwall, from which Stein’s
grandfather leaped to his death. That soon gives way to investigations of such arts
as rolling down hills, the wearing of crabs, dancing round a phallic
lighthouse, and imitating Barbara Hepworth sculptures (the holes in which get leading
roles) – all to sonorous quotes from Peter Lanyon …. ‘A family which lives on
the edge of the sea is closest to the land’ seems to echo the pre-menstrual
theme of water retention. If, as a text painting on the window declares, it’s all hormonal, then the
effects are being reclaimed as druggy fun. The semi-medical japes go on in
video-inset massage chair, hemorrhoid pillow and modesty screen; and there are paintings...
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| Still from Polventon, 2013 |
______________
Michael Williams: Morning Zoo @ Michael Werner, 22 Upper Brook Street - Mayfair
To 31 Jan: www.michaelwerner.com
 |
| Barf Mother, 2014 |
New Yorker Michael Williams
(born 1978) aims to make off-kilter paintings which are ‘straightforward as a noodle’ (to quote one of
his titles) and ‘uncomfortable in their own skin’. Here he contrasts two
approaches, both of which start by blowing up the sardonic, self-deprecating, drawings
he makes on his computer onto canvases over eight feet high. Two remain as pure
inkjet, and can be read as showing the artist – rather unattractively in ‘Morning Zoo’ itself as a sort of Zen Pollock figure
contemplating his next move. Four benefit / suffer from
a blizzard of added spray and other paint markings which almost obliterate image and space as they tread a
line between chaos and order. The sextet forms a strong ensemble which give the
overall impression of trying to find a place somewhere between painterly
traditions and the digital world.
 |
| Installation view with 'Maybe I Wiped A Boogie On Your Coat', and 'Morning Zoo', 2014 |
______________
2014 was certainly a good year for public blockbusters: late Matisse, Turner and
Rembrandt, all of Veronese, Constable, Malevich, Polke and Kiefer, plus such
quirkier fare as Emily Carr and Martin Creed – not to mention strong programmes
at Camden, Chisenhale, Serpentine and the Zabludowitz Collection and the surprising scale of HS Projects' showings at 5 Howick Place.
Excluding,
with painful propriety, shows I was involved in, my top ten commercial /
artist run exhibitions would be something like:
Pierre Huyghe – H&W
Richard Serra – Gagosian
Gerhard Richter – Marian Goodman
David Hammons – White Cube
Paul Nash – Piano Nobile
Sigalit Landau - Marlborough
Contemporary
Ariel Reichman - Waterside Contemporary
Magali Reus - The approach
Guy Ben-Ner -
Gimpel Fils
Jim Lambie – Sadie Coles
It’s also worth mentioning three artists who had
impressive commercial shows backed by even better institutional showings: Tom
Dale @ Copperfield + Hansard, Southampton, Phyllida Barlow at Hauser &
Wirth and Tate Britain, and Glenn Ligon at Thomas Dane and Camden Arts Centre.
|
Temporal Measures @ White Rainbow, 47 Mortimer St – Fitzrovia
To 24 Jan:
www.white-rainbow.co.uk
 |
| Kouichi Tabata: 72 Colour (Birds) , 2014 - detail |
The gallery’s second show
unites three Berlin-based Japanese artists who quietly consider the subjective
experience of time. Kouichi Tabata deals with the fleeting moment: delicate
drawings on animator’s paper of the same two birds in 72 different colours are
sequence to form a tremblingly-hued film; Futo Akiyoshi makes all-gold
paintings in which the architecture of
a room can only just be discerned to yield what seems an eternal abstraction of
place; and Takahiro Ueda sets synthetic quartz against natural in an
installation of clocks, the uniform starting times of which are diverging
across the exhibition’s run due to the differing oscillation rates of different
crystals.
 |
| Futo Akiyoshi: Room, 2014 |
Linda Karshan:
Signs of Men and Footfalls @ The Redfern Gallery, 20 Cork St – Central
To 29 Jan www.redfern-gallery.com
 |
| II 2/5/14 |
What was already a substantial show of Linda Karshan’s
recent drawings and etchings is complemented here by a comparably sized
retrospective from the estate of a long-term collector. That enables a good
overview of how she has reduced down from intricate grids to simple outlines
then grown more complex and even taken on curves, as if her ouervre were
breathing in and out. That fits, as respiration
and movement are central to how the diminutively American dances her drawings
into being. She also looks increasingly in
control of the results: that, I guess, is practice for you.
.jpg) |
| 1995 |
____________________
A Crazed Flowering @ Frameless Gallery, 20 Clerkenwell Green – Clerkenwell
To 24 Jan: www.framelessgallery.com
 |
Lucy Whitford, Sunwall, 2014, mild steel, unfired earthenware clay, oak and hardwood dowel
|
This – like 'A Poem for Raoul and Agnes' at Ancient
& Modern just a few months back – is a show which reinvents flower painting
for our time. It does so on the back of The Crystal World, JG Ballard’s dystopian tale of a forest taken over
by remorseless chemistry, though I was more struck by how different are the
three flower worlds chosen by curator Kate Neave: the all-over bloom and boom
of Nicholas Johnson’s action painted fireworks; flowers as the characters and
people as the decorations in Freya Douglas-Morris’ more restful visions; and Lucy Whitford returning
flowers to the earth they sprang from in ceramics, some of the clay subject to
the pre-kiln process of burnishing, but none to the firing itself.
 |
Freya Douglas-Morris, Afternoon Sun, 2014, oil on canvas
|
To 18 Jan: www.vitrinegallery.co.uk
 |
| Karen David, Quathlamba Reconfigured III, 2013 |
There’s a definite new age vibe to Vitrine’s current cycle, as if Shana
Moulton’s influence is spreading through the city. Inside, Guy Patton shows big,
trippy abstractions which derive their layered colourfields from a range of
moves from the single sweep of a canvas-wide brush to sprayed-over objects to Perspex
scrape-overs to the incorporation of cyanotypes. Karen David has form in such
tropes, boosted by a trip to Santa Fe: here she set up tie-dyes, crystals and
cacti in a mock home environment in the windowscape which puts the vitrine in
Vitrine. If she gently mocks an aesthetic which pretends to picture the
spiritual, she does so in a way which simultaneously allows us its guilty
pleasures.
 |
| Guy Patton installation |
_________________________
Jasper Johns: Regrets & Egon Schiele: The Radical Nude @ the Courtauld Gallery, Somerset House - Strand
To 14 Dec (Johns) / 18 Jan (Schiele) www.courtauld.ac.uk
 |
| Egon Schiele Nude Self-Portrait in Gray with Open Mouth, 1910
Black chalk and gouache, The Leopold Museum, Vienna
|
Until
mid December there's the chance to see not one but two exceptional
shows at the Courtauld. Two rooms cover the drawings and watercolours of
Schiele's (1890-1918) last decade. The
swift, confident line is driven by an eroticism which, whilst sometimes
explicit, is offset by such mechanisms as lurid
colour, deliberately awkward poses, severe cropping, expressive
distortions, skeletal emaciation, deathly palor, challenging facial
expressions and odd hand gestures, and white highlighting around the
figure. Another room - in an oddly rare London show for the 84 year old -
contains Jasper Johns' games of mortality spun out of a creased and
battered John Minton photograph of Lucien Freud, as found in Francis
Bacon's studio. In Johns' versions the photograph's physical
characteristics become part of the image, and when he doubles by
mirroring, he finds a skull in the intersection.
 |
| Jasper Johns: Regrets, 2013 |
| _______________________ | ||||||||
Julie Verhoeven: Whiskers Between My Legs @ ICA, Pall Mall - Central &
Jonathan Meese: DR. PROST BRATWURSCHT – SHOOT YOUR DR. NO-SHOT!
(ERZ-Magical Mystery Pork Shoulder Sausage Bello-roll de Large) @
Modern Art, Helmet Row - Old Street
To Jan 10 (Modern Art) / Jan 18 (ICA)
The
ICA’s reading room has never contained so much sheer stuff as now, by
way of Julie Verhoeven’s way of putting the art into fashion and the
fashion into art. Her clothes-hung grotto, too brazen for Santa, packs
in soft body parts, a Franz West styled Zimmer frame, plenty of bog
rolls and several screens looping the cheeky video Whiskers Between My
Legs (a follow-up, I suppose, to her previous ‘Feathers Up My Arse’).
Verhoeven says it features ‘all things female: bums, tits, comedy
vaginas as chair covers’ – though there’s also room for a cartoon
dripping penis…. Fed up with Christmas stereotypes of what women want?
Yule love this... plus also, perhaps, Jonathan Meese's comparable
Christmas mayhem at Modern Art: straight from the tube oil paintings
along with food advert sculptures, mannequins, flashing lights, cheesy
music, a giant inflatable birthday cake, a monkey in a wig and a lobster
eating a hamburger... As Meese says in his equally OTT manifesto 'Art
is total totality'.
_________________________
S|2, 31 St George St - Mayfair
‘Infinite’ might be going a bit far, but this selection demonstrates the
under-appreciated range of Dadamaino’s work, all of which can be seen as
opening onto existential concerns. Born in Milan as Eduarda Maino (finite
timespan 1930-2004), Dadamaino was the most prominent woman artist in Manzoni’s
early sixties circle. She’s known for the Volumi
(cutting holes in the canvas) and Volumi
a Moduli (with overlapping layers of perforated semi-transparent material,
often ‘out of sync’) – but these 24 works provide a fuller view, including reliefs,
geometric abstraction, the Oggetto Ottico
Dinamico (aluminium plates on nylon wires), reliefs (including a fluorescent
example), the Ricerca del Colore
(investigating the interaction of colours) and the cloudlike Constellazione of tiny dots and dashes,
her main interest in the 1980’s...
________________________
|
The Opinion Makers
2 @ Londonewcastle Project Space, 28 Redchurch St - Shoreditch
To 16 Jan: www.alisn.org/The-Opinion-Makers-2
 |
| Marcus Harvey: Study for bronze or ceramic sculpture, 2014 - wax on plaster base |
This
Lubomirov and
Easton organised show takes the interesting tack of showing the work of
22 artist-curators
and artist-writers alongside their choice of artist, allowing
comparisons
between how they work and what they like. Still, it amounts to a group
show of
separately chosen works – a genre which can easily prove incoherent.
Here, though, the pacing round the Londonewcastle’s
large loop-back space works well as the themes, starting from Marcus
Harvey's striking entrance piece, move from drama to domesticity
to kitsch with a well-judged seasoning of geometric rigour. And much
of the work is
excellent, too: Mark Titchner’s psychedelic trance text film, Katerina
Blanin’s
radical triple of diamond-shaped canvases and Maurice Carlin’s
complicated use
of every available sheet size of paper drew me in, unsurprisingly,
perhaps; but so
did Peter Suchin, Keran James and Bill Howard, little known to me in
their
artist roles.
|
 |
| Maurice Carlin:Phantom Demographics Series No. 3, 2014 |
_________________________
Marie Lund: Dip @ Laura Bartlett, 4 Herald St – Bethnal Green
To 18 Jan: www.laurabartlettgallery.co.uk
 |
| Torso, 2014 |
This beautifully
muted show captures traces of everyday living through three processes. The spreading
Stills are the backdrop
and photos of a sort – of the effects of decades of light on found curtains,
now attached to canvas. The Hand Full bronzes cast the pockets of Lund’s
jeans as her hands would occupy them. And five blocky Torsos stand – or
lie – in for the body: for these a woollen cardigan or jumper was covered in
cement, but pulled out before it was totally dry, leaving a combination of
patterned imprint and pallid colour echoes around stray full chroma bursts
where fabric was stranded - like the heart, if you wanted to romanticise it; or
the skeleton, if you did not.
 |
| Installation view with Stills, 2014 |
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