Katherine Murphy: Decay @ Patrick Heide, 11 Church St – Edgeware Road
To 17 Sept: www.patrickheide.com
Labour + Repetition = Decay (no.9), 2015
Katherine Murphy gives obsession a political inflexion, as her labour stands in for the under-acknowledged toil of the many carrying out repetitive tasks in the broader economy. That's explicit in her timesheet-based prints, but equally present in two new streams of work (and I mean work) in this, her first full solo show. The series Labour + Repetition = Decay requires the folding and unfolding of paper over several weeks to reach an aesthetic of ditressed geometry. For Decay by 100,000 pinholes Murphy has pricked as many as that into a large piece of paper, using a decreasing number of random numbers to decide where to pierce, so that ‘blank’ patches increase towards the right. That was six months of labour for – even if the piece is sold – no more than pin money.
Katherine Murphy in front of thousands of holes, not easily spotted in a photograph
______________
Overlay @ White Rainbow, 47 Mortimer St – Fitzrovia
To 17 Sept: www.white-rainbow.co.uk
Installation view with Zoë Paul's Moths and Lizards, 2016, in front of Nancy Holt's Trail Markers, 1969
In the inspiring presence of Nancy Holt’s Trail Markers, four young artists pick up on its aspects of journeys, materiality and sexual roles with an underlying contrast of natural and artificial. Cathy Haynes constructs an alphabet out of plastic imitation wood, each letter framed in real wood faked to look like oak; Claire Potter films herself in male action mode but taking mockingly little action; Zoë Paul plays with ritual through volcanic rock faces, marble staging, and mist machines; Hannah Lees explores wine as paint, incense as a sculptural element, and the detritus of river walks as content immured in plaster. The whole creates a subtle but immersive interplay: kudos to curator Jeremy Millar as well as to the artists.
______________
Niki de Saint Phalle: je Suis une Vache Suisse @ Omer Tiroche Contemporary Art, 21 Conduit St - Mayfair
To 10 Sept: www.otca.co.uk
Je Suis Une Vache Suisse, 1991 - oil, pencil and mirror on wood, 99 x 96 x 20 cm
There are some superb historical shows on at the moment: Louise Nevelson at Pace, Jean Dubuffet at Timothy Taylor, Gego at Dominique Lévy... Less obvious, perhaps,. is this co-selection with the Yorkshire Sculpture Park of Niki de Saint Phalle (1930 - 2002). It's seeded with darkness, All Over being one of the collages of everyday items (somewhat akin to Mike Kelley's later 'Memory Ware' series) which she stated making while in a mental institution following depression and prior to her famous shooting paintings. Omitting those, the show fast forwards to her brighter and more animalistic side, including the eponymous Swiss cow with cheesy holes; her usual fun with birds and snakes; and the plaster work showing her friend Clarice Rivers (Larry's wife) pregnant - which was to swell into the Nana series.
All Over, 1959-60 - objects i plaster on wood panel
______________
Katherine Murphy: Decay @ Patrick Heide, 11 Church St – Edgeware Road
To 17 Sept: www.patrickheide.com
To 17 Sept: www.patrickheide.com
 |
| Labour + Repetition = Decay (no.9), 2015 |
Katherine Murphy gives obsession a political inflexion, as her labour stands in for the under-acknowledged toil of the many carrying out repetitive tasks in the broader economy. That's explicit in her timesheet-based prints, but equally present in two new streams of work (and I mean work) in this, her first full solo show. The series Labour + Repetition = Decay requires the folding and unfolding of paper over several weeks to reach an aesthetic of ditressed geometry. For Decay by 100,000 pinholes Murphy has pricked as many as that into a large piece of paper, using a decreasing number of random numbers to decide where to pierce, so that ‘blank’ patches increase towards the right. That was six months of labour for – even if the piece is sold – no more than pin money.
 |
| Katherine Murphy in front of thousands of holes, not easily spotted in a photograph
______________
Overlay @ White Rainbow, 47 Mortimer St – Fitzrovia
To 17 Sept: www.white-rainbow.co.uk |
 |
Installation view with Zoë Paul's Moths and Lizards, 2016, in front of Nancy Holt's Trail Markers, 1969
|
In the inspiring presence of Nancy Holt’s Trail Markers, four young artists pick up on its aspects of journeys, materiality and sexual roles with an underlying contrast of natural and artificial. Cathy Haynes constructs an alphabet out of plastic imitation wood, each letter framed in real wood faked to look like oak; Claire Potter films herself in male action mode but taking mockingly little action; Zoë Paul plays with ritual through volcanic rock faces, marble staging, and mist machines; Hannah Lees explores wine as paint, incense as a sculptural element, and the detritus of river walks as content immured in plaster. The whole creates a subtle but immersive interplay: kudos to curator Jeremy Millar as well as to the artists.
______________
Niki de Saint Phalle: je Suis une Vache Suisse @ Omer Tiroche Contemporary Art, 21 Conduit St - Mayfair
To 10 Sept: www.otca.co.uk
To 10 Sept: www.otca.co.uk
|
| Je Suis Une Vache Suisse, 1991 - oil, pencil and mirror on wood, 99 x 96 x 20 cm |
|
| All Over, 1959-60 - objects i plaster on wood panel |
______________
Ragnar Kjartansson @ The Barbican
To 4 Sept: www.barbican.org.uk
Detail from Take Me Here by the Dishwasher: Memorial for a Marriage, 2011
The most talked-about show in London now is this one: as many as ten guitarists loll around singing the same phrase all day; two Edwardian women kiss for two hours; a band sings the same song for six hours straight; mother spits at you every five years with no end date set - and plenty more Ragnar Kjartansson takes the simple idea of repetition and applies it to crazy excess to see what emerges: difference, of course, and an off-beat humour, but also unpredictable outcrops of emotion. And it makes for a challenge: how much can you watch? How much do you want to watch?
Second Movement, 2016
_________________
Performer / Audience / Mirror @ Lisson Gallery, 68 Bell St - Edgeware Road
To 2 Sept plus on line: www.lissongallery.com/news/performer-audience-mirror-online-schedule
Still from Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg: Worship, 2016
One of the Lisson's gallery has three rooms dedicated to consective screening of three programmes of films by 18 artists, each emphasising one of the triad performer, audience and mirror from Dan Graham's seminal performance of that name, here presented within a Dan Graham pavilion. It ranges across classics such as that, Marina Abramovic's combing frenzy Art must be beautiful /Artist must be beautiful and Rodney Graham's Vexation Island to less famous works (Ceal Floyer's Downpour (Thorstrasse), 2004 is particularly neat) to new work, notably Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg's first claymation film for five years, whihc is relishably fruity. It;s also on line, and while not all the films are easy straight-through watches, especially if you don't plan to stay the whole day, you can ask to have them reordered...
Still from Marina Abramovic: Art must be beautiful /Artist must be beautiful, 1975
_________________
Francis Alÿs: Ciudad Juárez projects @ David Zwirner, 24 Grafton St – Mayfair
Paradox of Praxis 5: Sometimes we dream as we live & sometimes we live as we dream Ciudad Juárez, México, 2013 - Video, 7:49 minutes
The Mexico-based Belgian Francis Alÿs has a rare ability to cut through complex plenitudes to memorable metaphor. Here we have the latest in two long-running series: his engagement with children’s games shows us tag with shards of mirror in the notorious ‘murder capital’ of Ciudad Juárez; and the fifth of his ‘paradoxes of praxis’ takes on the aphorism ‘Sometimes we dream as we live & sometimes we live as we dream’ by kicking a flaming football through the streets of by night – a violent yet beautiful way to fleetingly illuminate the city’s problems while suggesting that the failure to grapple with them fully may be represented by ‘kicking the can down the road’.
Children's Game #15, Video still, in collaboration with Julien Devaux, Felix Blume
and Alejandro Morales, Ciudad Juárez, 2013. Photo:Francis Alys
______________
The Pineapple Show @ Tiwani Contemporary, 16 Little Portland St – Fitzrovia
To 13 Aug: www.tiwani.co.uk
Still from Ayana Evans and Zina Saro-Wiwa: Parasol, 2016
For a refreshing summer-themed show, try Tiwani’s annual hosting of an African Gallery: this year it’s curated by the founder of Nigeria’s Boys’ Quarter Project Space Zina Saro-Wiwa, who focuses on the cultural import of the pineapple (be sure to ask for her informative notes on each work). She contributes three short films of her own in which the fruit acts as a pendulum; gets chopped; and plays its exotic, stylish and sharp-leaved aspects into a performance by Ayana Evans. I also liked Odila Donald Odita’s apparently abstract pair of paintings which evoke a pineapple eating trip with the artist’s twin uncles, as shown in a snapshot alongside; Arlene Wandera’s evocation, voiced from a pineapple tin, of the thirteen cultivars of pineapple that have vanished in the past 150 years due to the commercial pressure for standardisation; Elizabeth Columba’s palpably modern self-portrait set as if she’s eating one in the times when they were prized rarities in Europe.
Elizabeth Columba: Through the Heart, 2016 (detail of watercolour)
_________________
Metatextile: Ruptured Narratives Exchanged Values @ Edel Assanti, 74a Newman St – Fitzrovia
To Aug 13: www.edelassanti.com
Nevet Yitzhak: War Rug #3, 2014 - 8 min video loop
Textiles have been on the way up as an art material in recent years, but you want a show of them to do more than illustrate that - as ‘Metatextile' does by drawing a parallel between form and content: just as textiles challenge the hegemony of oil on canvas, so 15 large examples challenge social hierarchies and perceived value systems. We’re led off by the historic examples of Liubov Popova’s hammer and sickle design (1923-24: she found great satisfaction in a peasant woman buying her material for a dress) and an Alighiero Boetti Afghanistan-made Mappa from 1983. And the most interesting strands stay east; both Adrian Esparza and Nazgol Ansarina unpick and differently restore existing piece of cloth; there are two of Pio Abad’s series of silk scarves in which he preserves with almost perverse colour crispness the personal possessions of Ferdinand and Imedla Marcos; and a digital version of one of the many ‘war rugs’ being made in Afghanistan , but with animated explosions turning it into a literal battlefield.
Pio Abad: Every Tool is a Weapon if You Hold it Right XXXVI and XXXVII, 2014 - acid dye print on silk twill
_________________
Wolfgang Tillmans @ Maureen Paley, 21 Herald Street* – Bethnal Green
To 7 Aug: www.maureenpaley.com
The State We’re In, A - unframed inkjet print, 2015 - 273 x 410 cm - exhibition view, ground floor gallery
Here’s another show with a different atmosphere post-Brexit: Wolfgang Tillmans’ pro-EU posters take on a mournful air outside the main rooms, in which he orchestrates three clusters of works cleverly tied in to ‘the visible and invisible borders that define and sometimes control us’. The stand-out photographs are a huge print of the open water of the Atlantic Ocean where international time lines intersect, and an image of blood flowing through plastic tubes, outside of the body during surgery. Tillmans runs through his range of distinctive installation methods, including the table grouping used for his truth study center series (2005 – ongoing), here giving minimalism an imaginative twist by presenting various national sizes of blank office paper, which come across as more unified than you might expect.
I refuse to be your enemy, 2, 2016 - wood, paper - exhibition view, first floor gallery
* This is the outstanding show in an increasingly rich art block centred on Tillmans’ gallery and his former studio. With recent arrivals Division of Labour and Breese Little, there are now seven spaces well worth visiting. Actually Tillmans, Francis Alys, Mona Hatoum (Tate), Rana Begum (Parasol Unit), Bas Jan Ader (Simon Lee), Mary Heilmann (Whitechapel) and the cornucopias at Camden Arts Centre and the Foundling Museum are probably the outstanding shows in London just now, but I’ve written about most of those elsewhere…
______________
Charlotte Colbert: Ordinary Madness @ Gazelli Art House, 39 Dover St – Mayfair
To 13 Aug: www.gazelliarthouse.com
Untitled Psychosis 2, 2016 - digital bromide
Charlotte Colbert shows 20-odd atmospheric photographs and a sharp 15 minute film. The former, looking like an update of Francesca Woodman’s aesthetic, see naked friends act out to camera wearing emoji masks in derelict settings. Strategic use of double exposure and blurring confuses the action and hints at the possibility of a dimension beyond. The film, The Silent Man, is a sex-reversed take on the true story of Oskar Kokoschka, who ordered a life-sized replica of his muse Alma Mahler when she left him in 1918. Here a woman takes delivery of her potentially ideal, as maximally compliant, mannequin mate - but of course it does not end happily ever after.
Still from The Silent Man (dummy on right)
______________
Sam Lewitt and Lucy Raven: Wild Sync & Weak Vocals @ Piar Corrias, 54 Eastcastle St – Fitzrovia
Entering Pilar Corrias, a well-established tease seems to be in play: have they finished installing the show? Of course, they have: the rather Beuysian combination of copper-clad heating circuits on felt packing blankets, together with digital counting units, is the work; and the door of the cupboard containing the gallery’s electrical switches is open for a reason. New York artist Sam Lewitt is treating the gallery as a computer unit in the copper-coated units maintain the temperature, and those alarm clock displays show its recalibration in response to as vistors' movements changing it. Global travellers have a parallel collective effect on the wider environment, connecting in turn to what the circuits can just about be seen to spell out, though it’s easier to cheat by looking at the diagrams in the cupboard: the Air B&B slogan 'Belong Anywhere'. Downstairs, just as interestingly, Texan Lucy Raven meshes surveillance, film history, searchlights, Robert Smithson and institutional scrutiny in a looping rotocaster light projection.
Installation view of Lucy Raven: Casters, 2016
_____________
This is a Voice @ the Wellcome Collection, 183 Euston Road – Euston
To 31 July: http://wellcomecollection.org
Marcus Coates: stills from 'Dawn Chorus'
After
a rather successful venture into monographic presentations, the
Wellcome Collection has returned to its primary mix of art and artifacts
linked to body and mind in medical science. ‘This is a Voice’ is the
best such show yet: it teems with fascinating and obscure byways from
voice disguisers to hunter-gatherer music to an ammoniaphone, though
simply the chance to see and hear Becket’s ‘Not I’, Marcus Coates’ ‘Dawn
Chorus’ multi-screen presentation of birdsong impressions, Laurie
Anderson’s ‘Oh Superman’, and Ted Kotcheff’s film-length phone call ‘The
Human Voice’ would be plenty of reason to visit. Moreover, the rotating
element in the less impressive second show ‘States of Mind’ is Kerry Tribe’s affecting 20 minute film study of ‘H.M.’, a man
whose memories were blank from 1953 until 20 seconds before the present
when he was filmed 50 years later.
Kerry Tribe: still from 'M.B.', which plays on two screens with a twenty second gap
_____________
Ragnar Kjartansson @ The Barbican
To 4 Sept: www.barbican.org.uk
 |
| Detail from Take Me Here by the Dishwasher: Memorial for a Marriage, 2011 |
The most talked-about show in London now is this one: as many as ten guitarists loll around singing the same phrase all day; two Edwardian women kiss for two hours; a band sings the same song for six hours straight; mother spits at you every five years with no end date set - and plenty more Ragnar Kjartansson takes the simple idea of repetition and applies it to crazy excess to see what emerges: difference, of course, and an off-beat humour, but also unpredictable outcrops of emotion. And it makes for a challenge: how much can you watch? How much do you want to watch?
 |
| Second Movement, 2016
_________________
Performer / Audience / Mirror @ Lisson Gallery, 68 Bell St - Edgeware Road
To 2 Sept plus on line: www.lissongallery.com/news/performer-audience-mirror-online-schedule
|
 |
| Still from Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg: Worship, 2016 |
One of the Lisson's gallery has three rooms dedicated to consective screening of three programmes of films by 18 artists, each emphasising one of the triad performer, audience and mirror from Dan Graham's seminal performance of that name, here presented within a Dan Graham pavilion. It ranges across classics such as that, Marina Abramovic's combing frenzy Art must be beautiful /Artist must be beautiful and Rodney Graham's Vexation Island to less famous works (Ceal Floyer's Downpour (Thorstrasse), 2004 is particularly neat) to new work, notably Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg's first claymation film for five years, whihc is relishably fruity. It;s also on line, and while not all the films are easy straight-through watches, especially if you don't plan to stay the whole day, you can ask to have them reordered...
 |
| Still from Marina Abramovic: Art must be beautiful /Artist must be beautiful, 1975 |
_________________
Francis Alÿs: Ciudad Juárez projects @ David Zwirner, 24 Grafton St – Mayfair
 |
Paradox of Praxis 5: Sometimes we dream as we live & sometimes we live as we dream Ciudad Juárez, México, 2013 - Video, 7:49 minutes
|
The Mexico-based Belgian Francis Alÿs has a rare ability to cut through complex plenitudes to memorable metaphor. Here we have the latest in two long-running series: his engagement with children’s games shows us tag with shards of mirror in the notorious ‘murder capital’ of Ciudad Juárez; and the fifth of his ‘paradoxes of praxis’ takes on the aphorism ‘Sometimes we dream as we live & sometimes we live as we dream’ by kicking a flaming football through the streets of by night – a violent yet beautiful way to fleetingly illuminate the city’s problems while suggesting that the failure to grapple with them fully may be represented by ‘kicking the can down the road’.
 |
Children's Game #15, Video still, in collaboration with Julien Devaux, Felix Blume
and Alejandro Morales, Ciudad Juárez, 2013. Photo:Francis Alys
|
The Pineapple Show @ Tiwani Contemporary, 16 Little Portland St – Fitzrovia
To 13 Aug: www.tiwani.co.uk
 |
| Still from Ayana Evans and Zina Saro-Wiwa: Parasol, 2016 |
For a refreshing summer-themed show, try Tiwani’s annual hosting of an African Gallery: this year it’s curated by the founder of Nigeria’s Boys’ Quarter Project Space Zina Saro-Wiwa, who focuses on the cultural import of the pineapple (be sure to ask for her informative notes on each work). She contributes three short films of her own in which the fruit acts as a pendulum; gets chopped; and plays its exotic, stylish and sharp-leaved aspects into a performance by Ayana Evans. I also liked Odila Donald Odita’s apparently abstract pair of paintings which evoke a pineapple eating trip with the artist’s twin uncles, as shown in a snapshot alongside; Arlene Wandera’s evocation, voiced from a pineapple tin, of the thirteen cultivars of pineapple that have vanished in the past 150 years due to the commercial pressure for standardisation; Elizabeth Columba’s palpably modern self-portrait set as if she’s eating one in the times when they were prized rarities in Europe.
 |
| Elizabeth Columba: Through the Heart, 2016 (detail of watercolour) |
_________________
Metatextile: Ruptured Narratives Exchanged Values @ Edel Assanti, 74a Newman St – Fitzrovia
To Aug 13: www.edelassanti.com
 |
| Nevet Yitzhak: War Rug #3, 2014 - 8 min video loop |
Textiles have been on the way up as an art material in recent years, but you want a show of them to do more than illustrate that - as ‘Metatextile' does by drawing a parallel between form and content: just as textiles challenge the hegemony of oil on canvas, so 15 large examples challenge social hierarchies and perceived value systems. We’re led off by the historic examples of Liubov Popova’s hammer and sickle design (1923-24: she found great satisfaction in a peasant woman buying her material for a dress) and an Alighiero Boetti Afghanistan-made Mappa from 1983. And the most interesting strands stay east; both Adrian Esparza and Nazgol Ansarina unpick and differently restore existing piece of cloth; there are two of Pio Abad’s series of silk scarves in which he preserves with almost perverse colour crispness the personal possessions of Ferdinand and Imedla Marcos; and a digital version of one of the many ‘war rugs’ being made in Afghanistan , but with animated explosions turning it into a literal battlefield.
 |
| Pio Abad: Every Tool is a Weapon if You Hold it Right XXXVI and XXXVII, 2014 - acid dye print on silk twill |
_________________
Wolfgang Tillmans @ Maureen Paley, 21 Herald Street* – Bethnal Green
To 7 Aug: www.maureenpaley.com
 |
| The State We’re In, A - unframed inkjet print, 2015 - 273 x 410 cm - exhibition view, ground floor gallery |
Here’s another show with a different atmosphere post-Brexit: Wolfgang Tillmans’ pro-EU posters take on a mournful air outside the main rooms, in which he orchestrates three clusters of works cleverly tied in to ‘the visible and invisible borders that define and sometimes control us’. The stand-out photographs are a huge print of the open water of the Atlantic Ocean where international time lines intersect, and an image of blood flowing through plastic tubes, outside of the body during surgery. Tillmans runs through his range of distinctive installation methods, including the table grouping used for his truth study center series (2005 – ongoing), here giving minimalism an imaginative twist by presenting various national sizes of blank office paper, which come across as more unified than you might expect.
 |
| I refuse to be your enemy, 2, 2016 - wood, paper - exhibition view, first floor gallery |
* This is the outstanding show in an increasingly rich art block centred on Tillmans’ gallery and his former studio. With recent arrivals Division of Labour and Breese Little, there are now seven spaces well worth visiting. Actually Tillmans, Francis Alys, Mona Hatoum (Tate), Rana Begum (Parasol Unit), Bas Jan Ader (Simon Lee), Mary Heilmann (Whitechapel) and the cornucopias at Camden Arts Centre and the Foundling Museum are probably the outstanding shows in London just now, but I’ve written about most of those elsewhere…
______________
Charlotte Colbert: Ordinary Madness @ Gazelli Art House, 39 Dover St – Mayfair
To 13 Aug: www.gazelliarthouse.com
 |
| Untitled Psychosis 2, 2016 - digital bromide |
Charlotte Colbert shows 20-odd atmospheric photographs and a sharp 15 minute film. The former, looking like an update of Francesca Woodman’s aesthetic, see naked friends act out to camera wearing emoji masks in derelict settings. Strategic use of double exposure and blurring confuses the action and hints at the possibility of a dimension beyond. The film, The Silent Man, is a sex-reversed take on the true story of Oskar Kokoschka, who ordered a life-sized replica of his muse Alma Mahler when she left him in 1918. Here a woman takes delivery of her potentially ideal, as maximally compliant, mannequin mate - but of course it does not end happily ever after.
 |
| Still from The Silent Man (dummy on right) |
______________
Sam Lewitt and Lucy Raven: Wild Sync & Weak Vocals @ Piar Corrias, 54 Eastcastle St – Fitzrovia
Entering Pilar Corrias, a well-established tease seems to be in play: have they finished installing the show? Of course, they have: the rather Beuysian combination of copper-clad heating circuits on felt packing blankets, together with digital counting units, is the work; and the door of the cupboard containing the gallery’s electrical switches is open for a reason. New York artist Sam Lewitt is treating the gallery as a computer unit in the copper-coated units maintain the temperature, and those alarm clock displays show its recalibration in response to as vistors' movements changing it. Global travellers have a parallel collective effect on the wider environment, connecting in turn to what the circuits can just about be seen to spell out, though it’s easier to cheat by looking at the diagrams in the cupboard: the Air B&B slogan 'Belong Anywhere'. Downstairs, just as interestingly, Texan Lucy Raven meshes surveillance, film history, searchlights, Robert Smithson and institutional scrutiny in a looping rotocaster light projection.
 |
| Installation view of Lucy Raven: Casters, 2016 |
_____________
This is a Voice @ the Wellcome Collection, 183 Euston Road – Euston
To 31 July: http://wellcomecollection.org
 |
| Marcus Coates: stills from 'Dawn Chorus' |
After
a rather successful venture into monographic presentations, the
Wellcome Collection has returned to its primary mix of art and artifacts
linked to body and mind in medical science. ‘This is a Voice’ is the
best such show yet: it teems with fascinating and obscure byways from
voice disguisers to hunter-gatherer music to an ammoniaphone, though
simply the chance to see and hear Becket’s ‘Not I’, Marcus Coates’ ‘Dawn
Chorus’ multi-screen presentation of birdsong impressions, Laurie
Anderson’s ‘Oh Superman’, and Ted Kotcheff’s film-length phone call ‘The
Human Voice’ would be plenty of reason to visit. Moreover, the rotating
element in the less impressive second show ‘States of Mind’ is Kerry Tribe’s affecting 20 minute film study of ‘H.M.’, a man
whose memories were blank from 1953 until 20 seconds before the present
when he was filmed 50 years later.
 |
| Kerry Tribe: still from 'M.B.', which plays on two screens with a twenty second gap |
_____________
Secret European Studio @ ARTHOUSE1, 45 Grange Rd - Bermondsey
To 30 July: www.arthouse1.co.uk
Installation view with Simona Brinkmann and Willem Weismann
In the wake of the unfortunate Brexit vote, I – admitting some bias here – have brought together six European artists working in London, whose work illustrates some of what London gains from the current ease of movement. Carlos Noronha Feio (Portugal) makes paintings which seek abstract equivalents for power structures, and also sets the show’s soundscape as he reflects on what ‘Universism’ might be; Alzbeta Jaresova (Czech Republic) puts her figures into tense psychological relationships with transparent yet unfathomable versions of London’s infrastructure; Simona Brinkmann (Italy) uses metal and foam-padded leather to form half-fetishistic, half-architectural objects which suggest shifting boundaries between private and public; Willem Weismann (Netherlands) seems to mock both dystopia in general and the putative death of painting in particular in his colourful cartoon-tinged tableaux; Franco-German collective Troika bring sublimity to trauma as they draw intricate webs of lightning, and run a smoke bomb through a labyrinthine maze; and Nadege Meriau (France) lets snails and mushrooms impose their own dark logics on her photographic underworld. The works emerging from these Secret European Studios cohere in a darkly intelligent overview of where we are now, with border issues recurrent and a tendency to yoke beauty to violence.
Nadege Mariu's lightboxes 'Petite Morts'
______________
Self @ Massimo De Carlo, 55 South Audley St – Mayfair
To 29 July: www.massimodecarlo.com
Kaari Upson Kiss (Woven), 2009-2015
There
are plenty of self-portraits around at the moment *. The most
imaginative are here: Kaari Upson's 'Kiss' diptychs in which she presses
her self-portrait onto that of an unknown man to yield a disturbing
merger; the four-strong Austrian collective Gelitin presenting
themselves as mirrors so that they combine with the viewer; Paweł Althamer as
the Polish cartoon character Matołek the Billy-Goat with a
startlingly-lit heart - against the background of Dan Colen's after
party scatter of the hand-made sculptures of fag-ends and empty wine
bottles; Andra Ursuta scattering the promise of her readiness to please
as an artist in the form of hundreds of cards advertising an 'ethnic
bimbo' offering ‘all services’… and a dozen more.
*
See for example the exhibitions culled from the Ruth Borchard
collection at the Jerwood in Hastings and at King’s Place in London
Installation view with Paweł Althamer and Dan Colen (Todd-White Art Photography)
______________
Gabriele Beveridge: Eternity Anyways @ Chewday’s, 139 Lambeth Walk – Vauxhall
To 9 July: www.chewdays.com
Dead Skin Living, 2016 [detail] chrome, hand-blown glass
You’d be a bit daft - if taking in the Koons - not to drop in on Chewday’s, just 100 yards south. Gabriele Beveridge’s best-known stream of work, appropriating hairdresser’s demo photos with variable fade, takes the window. Inside is an all-encompassing installation which has transformed the former clothes shop using… reconfigured clothes shop fittings, titivated by blown glass hung on clothes hanging fitments and the powder-coating of selected elements. The effect is more painterly than sculptural, in a way which suggest that the personal leaks through whatever the setting.
Clouds (I), 2016 found shop panels, powder-coated shop panels, uprights, pegs, hand-blown glass
_________________________
Rubén Grilo: Proof of Concept @ Union Pacific, 17 Goulston St - Aldgate
 |
| Installation view with Simona Brinkmann and Willem Weismann |
 |
| Nadege Mariu's lightboxes 'Petite Morts' |
Self @ Massimo De Carlo, 55 South Audley St – Mayfair
To 29 July: www.massimodecarlo.com
 |
| Kaari Upson Kiss (Woven), 2009-2015 |
There are plenty of self-portraits around at the moment *. The most imaginative are here: Kaari Upson's 'Kiss' diptychs in which she presses her self-portrait onto that of an unknown man to yield a disturbing merger; the four-strong Austrian collective Gelitin presenting themselves as mirrors so that they combine with the viewer; Paweł Althamer as the Polish cartoon character Matołek the Billy-Goat with a startlingly-lit heart - against the background of Dan Colen's after party scatter of the hand-made sculptures of fag-ends and empty wine bottles; Andra Ursuta scattering the promise of her readiness to please as an artist in the form of hundreds of cards advertising an 'ethnic bimbo' offering ‘all services’… and a dozen more.
*
See for example the exhibitions culled from the Ruth Borchard
collection at the Jerwood in Hastings and at King’s Place in London
 |
| Installation view with Paweł Althamer and Dan Colen (Todd-White Art Photography) |
______________
Dead Skin Living, 2016 [detail] chrome, hand-blown glass
 |
1 Milka Avellanas Enteras 32 Bites (Aprox), 3 Lindt 30 Bites, 1 Smarties Sharing Block 16 Bites, 4 Kit Kat 16 Bites, 5 Nestle Aero 28 Bites, 3 Green & Black‘s Thin Milk Chocolate 8 Bites, 4 Valor 11 Bites and 2 12 Bites, 3 Cadbury Dairy Milk Marvellous Creations Cookie Nut Crunch 16 Bites, 2 Reese‘s Filled with Peanut Butter 15 Bites, 4 Niederegger Lubeck Marzipan Classic 10 Bit, 2 Galaxy Smooth Milk 42 Bites, 2016, Tinted hard plastic, magnets, aluminum foil, laser-cut, bent and powder coated steel sheet, 179 cm x 73 cm
|
 |
Sincerely Yours (Outer Left Section), 2016, Automotive clay and clay modeling film on extruded polystyrene foam, mirror, chipboard, steel table and paper cups, 150 cm x 63 cm x 196 cm
|
____________________
Lisa Milroy: Out of Hand @ Laure Genillard, 2 Hanway Place – Tottenham Court Road
To 25 June: www.lglondon.org
 |
| Handbag, 2014, mixed media. approx 90 x 100 x 25cm. (FXP Photography, London) |
Lisa Milroy takes over the whole gallery-flat at Laure Genillard as art blends wittily into fashion and lifestyle to question their boundaries. There are stops at all of the Slade Head of Painting’s distinctive modes: a painting of shoes serried animatedly on off-white harks back to the 1990’s; figures evoke the Japanese influences which followed; then there are reversible paintings, one of them doubling as a handbag; woven paintings, some with bags fronting them up; dress ‘n’ painting combos, one with a bedspread thrown in; lipsticks aplenty in the loo; and Lisa’s own range of hand-painted dresses.
 |
| The Lisa Milroy collection of Hand-painted Dresses |
_________________________
Tomma Abts @ Greengrassi, 1a
Kempsford Road – Kennington
To 18 June: www.greengrassi.com
 |
| Menso 2016 - acrylic & oil on canvas and bronze 48 × 38 cm |
2006
Turner Prize winner Tomma Abts has made a move parallel with Beveridge’s part-powder painting
of the found object. She’s known, of course, for meticulously unplanned and
purely additive face-sized paintings, resulting in illusionistic yet inconsistently
rendered patterns and shadows, the history of making which builds up surface textures.
Abts has previously cast some of these in bronze or aluminium so preserving
just the sculptural raising of the paint. All that is enjoyably present here,
but so is a new hybrid: Menso is part-canvas,
part-bronze.
 | ||
| Opke 2015 - acrylic & oil on canvas, 48 × 38 cm |
_________________________
Alberto Giacometti & Yves Klein: In Search of the Absolute @ Gagosian Gallery,
To 11 June: www.gagosian.com
 |
| Installation view (photo Mike Bruce) |
Gagosian’s best London show
since Serra in 2014, and the best yet in the airy new central space, has three components. First,
25 works by Giacometti – top notch, but less surprising than the National Portrait Gallery and Luxembourg
& Dayan’s recent focus shows. Second, 30 works by Yves Klein, which do indeed form a
dazzling and unpredictable overview. There are, for example, ‘dynamic’ Athropometries which
obtain very different results from naked women as blue paintbrushes than do the
more often-seen ‘static’ versions, and also a fire version. The third component is the idea of combining the two, which
also works brilliantly, pinpointing the existential angst and human traces in
Klein’s fire and action paintings and the
conceptual purity of Giacometti’s etiolations.
 |
| Yves Klein: Peinture de feu sans titre (F 80), 1961 Scorched cardboard on panel, 175 × 90 cm |
To 29 Aug: http://benuri.org.uk/exhibitions/unseen/
Rasha Kahil: Anatomy of a Scandal @ Art First Projects, 21 Eastcastle St – Fitzrovia
To 11 June: www.artfirst.co.uk
 |
| Dorothy Bohm: Paris, 1955 |
Yet perhaps Rasha Kahil’s is the most unusual. The Beirut-born photographer and art director (of the Evening Standard's magazine) presented ‘In Your Home’ a series of nude self-portraits taken covertly in friends' houses which I commended here, in 2011-12. Only two years later did a TV mention lead to a blizzard of publicity ranging from condemnation to messages of support (some, it’s true, somewhat creepy) to offers of work as a pornographic actress. Kahil appropriates the original programme and email streams, and riffs on the now-censored versions of the original series so that one show generates the next to demonstrate, exploit and counter the power of social media.
_____________________
Christodoulos Panayiotou; ‘False Form’ @ Rodeo, 123 Charing Cross Road – Tottenham Court To 19 June: http://rodeo-gallery.com
 |
| Untitled, pendant. Actinolite pseudomorph after diopside,18ct yellow gold |
Christodoulos
Panayiotou (well-received as Cyprus’ representative in Venice last
year) presents an unorthodox theatrical examination of transformation
and iconography. There are four components: a painting which applies
traditional icon-painting techniques to – perversely - an abstraction; a
dozen jewellery-as-sculpture pieces which you can ask to be shown,
present for their status as pseudomorphs*; a walk to the British Museum
600 meters away, in the course of which there is plenty of
transformation and iconography to be seen; and, when you get there, the
designated last work in the show, the earliest known depiction of the
restoration of images in Byzantium after a period of inconoclasm. All of
which plays with the possibility of the staging upstaging the work…
* a mineral having the outward appearance of another mineral that it has replaced by chemical action.
* a mineral having the outward appearance of another mineral that it has replaced by chemical action.
 |
| Triumph of the Orthodoxy (c.1400, Marmara Region) in the British Museum |
Charlie Warde: Concrete Legacies @ the Muse Gallery, 269 Portabello Rd - Ladbrook Grove
To 19 June: www.themuseat269.com
Mike Ballard: Capital Slang @ Lubomirov / Angus Hughes, 26 Lower Clapton Rd
(at the junction of Urswick Rd) - Hackney
(at the junction of Urswick Rd) - Hackney
To 26 June: www.lubomirov-angus-hughes.com/
 |
Charlie Warde: Slab #8 and Slab #9 (Trellick Tower), 2016 - Acrylic on Aluminium, each
20 x 20 x 2.5cm
|
Iavor
Lubomirov has a hand in two congruent shows. Out west he curates
Charlie Warde, a big fan of Erno Goldfinger’s buildings who sees them
as harking
from 'a time when the state provided'. Warde puts in the time to show
his love by, for example, reproducing Goldfinger's architectural
surfaces in the double-take medium of acrylic paint. So what you have
above is ‘paint on the paint’, as Warde reproduces graffiti markings on
Trellick Tower. Back
east, in the gallery Lubomirov runs with Angus Hughes, Angelica Sule is
the curator for Mike Ballard’s constructions out of wonderfully
weathered found hoardings (which Ballard arranged to replace with new)
and his blow-ups to Ab Ex scale of paving stones as paintings. They feature real chewing gum and authentically sprayed utility markings*, alluding to the hidden world beneath our feet
· * According to Ballard it’s yellow for gas, red for electricity, blue for water and green for cable TV.
 |
| Mike Ballard installation view |
If, Spotify-style, you like Thomas Grünfeld (a favourite of mine who’s now showing at MdC) then you’ll also enjoy Berlin-based Simon Mullan’s similarly sleek series-based way of repurposing design and fashion as art with social import. This impressive installation in a former underground car park presents Mullan’s bomber jacket collages and geometric abstractions from cut tiles against the backdrop of a dark dance film. The film's audience, if you will, is Mullan's newest stream: self-standing metal frames which add an extra dimension to the pattern of the grout from the tile pieces, but without any tiles.
*The Surface
Dalila Gonçalves:
The clock has no place in the woods @ Lamb Arts, 10 White Horse Street – Green Park
To May 19: www.lamb-arts.com
 |
Edge, 2014: Plastic meridian of a desk globe and light and rotation
mechanism
|
An
artist asked to use found objects to explore time and
materiality might fear the best ideas had already been taken. Still, how
about
turning the implied time of playing a CD into a Judd-like specific
object of 750? Or arranging coins in order of the extent to which time
and human agency
had worn away the faces on them? Not bad, but it would be a step up to
immerse
lumps of dried clay in an aquarium and record and project the
break-down and its rumbling sound as if the scale
and speed were geological; and a museum-worthy coup to set the arm from a
globe
spinning on the wall, creating an implied diurnal temporality out of the
absence of our planet, and casting a sundial of shadow. All this and
more is in
the first London show by Porto-based Dalila Gonçalves. She brings
something of
a Brazilian sensibility to her practice, though maybe it’s Portugal
having a
London moment, as another fine show is Carlos Noronha Feio’s at
Narrative
Projects.
 |
Untitled (CD's), 2016, 750 CD's
|
Francis Bacon / Darren Coffield @ the Herrick Gallery, 93 Picadilly - Central
To 21 May - www.herrickgallery.com
 |
| Francis Bacon (?): Untitled, (blue pope) pastel and coloured paper collage, 148x99cm |
Alice Herrick, who moved east to west last year,
has come up with a fascinating pairing here: the first London chance to see the
large drawings somewhat controversially attributed to Francis Bacon (whether
his or not, I don't much like them); photos of Bacon by Neil Libbert; and new work
by Darren Coffield, who knew Bacon and is working on a history of his habitual
haunt, the Colony Room Club. Coffield (best known for jumbling faces' ups and downs) shows paintings which are cut into puzzle
templates, scrambled and reconstituted so that, as Eric Morcambe might have put
it, all the right notes are present, but not necessarily in the right order.
This proves a perceptual game with some queasy punch, especially in multiple portraits
of a curiously disparate group Coffield happens to know: here are 5 Alexei Sales, 4 Peter
Tatchells, 3 Margaret Zuckermans and 3 Hattie Hayridges, the pieces swapped across each the groups and sometimes extra unseen versions, too.
 |
| Darren Coffield: Peter Tatchel (i), 2015, acrylic on die-cut board, 42 x 32cm |
| Michelle Dovey The Colourful Sausage Trees @ Gimpel Fils, 30 Davies Street - Mayfair | |||||||||
To 27 May: www.gimpelfils.com
There’s no shortage of art gardens and flowers
available for spring, principally at the Royal Academy and the National
Gallery, but Gimpel Fils provides an alternative splash of colour for spring. Michelle
Dovey calls her current subject ‘sausage trees’, hinting slightly comically at
how the forms are broken down. They’re made in one-off wet on wet sessions in
her back garden in Wales, derive from her favorite oak, and utilise all the
colours she sees around her but not (as Eric Morecambe might have told her)
necessarily in the right order. The observation in all weathers takes us to
Monet, while her intuitive derivation of colour taken from - but free of - nature
might place her somewhere between Matisse’s Fauve and late periods. Can that be
such a bad place to be?
|
 |
Self Portrait as a Dancing Tree, 2016 - oil on canvas, 92 x 122 cm
|
Bonheur de Vivre @ Bernard Jacobson Gallery, 28 Duke St - Central
To 27 May: www.jacobsongallery.com
Henri Matisse: Jeune femme assise en robe grise, 1942
Most shows reflect
something of their gallerist, but rarely as explictly as Bernard Jacobson here declares
‘this is me’ through the art joys in his life. Matisse is God in Jacobson’s
world, and he makes an annual pilgrimage to the painter’s grave in Nice.
Matisse leads by way of colour and light to Miro, Calder, Sam Francis and the
show’s only living artist, William Tillyer. Jacobson regards Robert Motherwell
as the
greatest ever American painter. We differ slightly, as I don’t even rate
Motherwell as the best painter in his own house during his marriage to Helen
Frankenthaler*, but it’s good to see such a passionate show, and the selection
of 16 works is exemplary enough that I was surprised to learn it’s all for
sale.
*that said,
I haven’t read Jacobson’s book on Motherwell, which doubtless makes a case
Joan Miró: Femme et oiseau devant la nuit, 1944
 |
| Henri Matisse: Jeune femme assise en robe grise, 1942 |
Most shows reflect
something of their gallerist, but rarely as explictly as Bernard Jacobson here declares
‘this is me’ through the art joys in his life. Matisse is God in Jacobson’s
world, and he makes an annual pilgrimage to the painter’s grave in Nice.
Matisse leads by way of colour and light to Miro, Calder, Sam Francis and the
show’s only living artist, William Tillyer. Jacobson regards Robert Motherwell
as the
greatest ever American painter. We differ slightly, as I don’t even rate
Motherwell as the best painter in his own house during his marriage to Helen
Frankenthaler*, but it’s good to see such a passionate show, and the selection
of 16 works is exemplary enough that I was surprised to learn it’s all for
sale.
*that said,
I haven’t read Jacobson’s book on Motherwell, which doubtless makes a case
 |
| Joan Miró: Femme et oiseau devant la nuit, 1944 |
_________________________
Jane Bustin: Rehearsal @ Copperfield, 6 Copperfield Street - Southwark
 |
| Faun (2015) acrylic, polyeurathane, copper pins, balsa wood, 50cm x 100cm |
 |
| La Ronde (2015) Oxides on porcelain 23cm x 18cm |
_________________________
John Smith @ Kate MacGarry,27 Old Nicol St - Shoreditch
 |
| Still from ‘Dad’s Stick’, 2012 |
It’s good to see John Smith showing solo in a commercial
gallery in London, where his wry, structurally-aware films have tended to be
shown more often institutionally. Kate MacGarry brings together a neat quartet
of films themed for alterations in language: the comical effects of a
smartphone’s translator app on the archetypal information overload of shop
signage (‘Steve Hates Fish’, 2015); Smith’s droll assessment – heard forwards
and backwards – of life in pre-1989 communist regimes (‘White Hole’, 2014); a portrait of his father which feints
towards interpreting his DIY enthusiasms as the art moves of a precursor (‘Dad’s
Stick’, 2012); and the 1975 favourite ‘Associations’.
 |
| Still from ‘Steve Hates Fish’, 2015 |
_________________________
XL Catlin Art Prize
@ 28 Redchurch St, Shoreditch to 22 May; Aglaé
Bassens: Front Parting @ Cabin, Southfields to 11 June; Martine Poppe: Crinkled Escape Routes
and Other Somewhat Flat Things @ Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, Wandsworth to 18
June; Bread & Jam @ 52 Whitbread
Rd, Brockley 27 May – 5 June
 |
| Jane Hayes Greenwood: In Bits, 2016 (detail, photo Tom Carter) |
Early next year, I’ll be curating a show of my favourite
young figurative painters, and three of the four just opened on the same night
of 5 May! Jane Hayes Greenwood has gone big to big effect in the Caitlin prize
show, in which Jamie Fitzpatrick (frenetically), Neal Rock (subtly) and Christopher
Gray (horrifically) also stand out for distinctiveness of language. On to Southfields, near Wimbledon, where Aglaé
Bassens has a beautifully nuanced
interplay of transparences*; then Wandsworth, where Martine Poppe’s takes her
feathery technique to the cusp of abstraction in paintings derived from
photographs of an American road trip. As
for the fourth, Emma Cousin, she’s not idle, but will soon be playing curator
herself at the latest of the adventurous Bread & Jam shows in Brockley
(https://breadandjamwhitbread.wordpress.com).
* See my text at www.Cabin-gallery.com for more
 |
| Martine Poppe installation view with tumbleweed scrunched versions of the photographs featured |
_________________________
Jane Bustin: Rehearsal @ Copperfield, 6 Copperfield Street - Southwark
|
| Faun (2015) acrylic, polyeurathane, copper pins, balsa wood, 50cm x 100cm |
|
| La Ronde (2015) Oxides on porcelain 23cm x 18cm |
_________________________
Dalila Gonçalves: The clock has no place in the woods @ Lamb Arts, 10 White Horse Street – Green Park
To May 19: www.lamb-arts.com
|
Edge, 2014: Plastic meridian of a desk globe and light and rotation
mechanism
|
An
artist asked to use found objects to explore time and
materiality might fear the best ideas had already been taken. Still, how
about
turning the implied time of playing a CD into a Judd-like specific
object of 750? Or arranging coins in order of the extent to which time
and human agency
had worn away the faces on them? Not bad, but it would be a step up to
immerse
lumps of dried clay in an aquarium and record and project the
break-down and its rumbling sound as if the scale
and speed were geological; and a museum-worthy coup to set the arm from a
globe
spinning on the wall, creating an implied diurnal temporality out of the
absence of our planet, and casting a sundial of shadow. All this and
more is in
the first London show by Porto-based Dalila Gonçalves. She brings
something of
a Brazilian sensibility to her practice, though maybe it’s Portugal
having a
London moment, as another fine show is Carlos Noronha Feio’s at
Narrative
Projects.
|
Untitled (CD's), 2016, 750 CD's
|
Francis Bacon / Darren Coffield @ the Herrick Gallery, 93 Picadilly - Central
To 21 May - www.herrickgallery.com
|
| Francis Bacon (?): Untitled, (blue pope) pastel and coloured paper collage, 148x99cm |
Alice Herrick, who moved east to west last year,
has come up with a fascinating pairing here: the first London chance to see the
large drawings somewhat controversially attributed to Francis Bacon (whether
his or not, I don't much like them); photos of Bacon by Neil Libbert; and new work
by Darren Coffield, who knew Bacon and is working on a history of his habitual
haunt, the Colony Room Club. Coffield (best known for jumbling faces' ups and downs) shows paintings which are cut into puzzle
templates, scrambled and reconstituted so that, as Eric Morcambe might have put
it, all the right notes are present, but not necessarily in the right order.
This proves a perceptual game with some queasy punch, especially in multiple portraits
of a curiously disparate group Coffield happens to know: here are 5 Alexei Sales, 4 Peter
Tatchells, 3 Margaret Zuckermans and 3 Hattie Hayridges, the pieces swapped across each the groups and sometimes extra unseen versions, too.
|
| Darren Coffield: Peter Tatchel (i), 2015, acrylic on die-cut board, 42 x 32cm |
Das Institut @ the Serpentine Gallery – Kensington
To 15 May: www.serpentinegalleries.org
 |
| One of the 80 slides in the series 'When You See Me Again It Won't Be Me', 2014 |
Das Institut’s show applies a wide range of languages (graphic alphabets projected in light; slapstick slideshows; self-portrait photograms; marbled paint on mylar; stained glass brushstrokes…) and a cornucopia of identities – solo, dual, collaborative, fragmented, disguised, subconscious, oppositional. All to the point as the umlauted German duo Kerstin Brätsch and Adele Röder* explore the annihilation of the self through cooperative action (rather than losing one’s identity in the corporate and commercial world). Rebecca Lewin’s catalogue essay cites Deleuze’s notion of the ‘dividual', as a ‘a person made of data which can be endlessly subdivided and recombined. It’s complex, yes, but worth spending time on – the more so as the midpoint of a wander via Hilma Af Klint at the other Serpentine space and Slate Projects’ latest at the Averard Hotel.
* say ‘Bretsch’ and ‘Rerder’
 |
| Three of Adele Röder's 'Solar Body Prints', 2013 |
_________________________
To 14 May: www.canalprojects.info
________________________
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