August
sees reduced action: Picasso at Tate Modern and Abts at the Serpentine
are the obvious top shows, but there are some others...
Sinta Tantra: Your Private Sky @ Kristin Hjellegjerde - Wandsworth
To 1 Sept
 |
| Do You Wanna Funk With Me? II (Sylvester) , 2018 - Tempera on linen, 150 x 150 cm |
Sinta
Tantra's work has often featured hot Balinese colours, but that's only
true of half her new show, not that she hold back with the vibrant
patterns spilling onto the floor. But she has
also introduced more linear works in which she restricts herself to
brushed
brass, raw linen and the white of tempera in adopting an aspect of the
blueprint in musing on Buckminster Fuller's 'Your Private Sky' - the
1948 manuscript in which Fuller outlined his visionary design for a
glass geodesic structure. Add several sculptural elements, and this a
notably varied presentation of inspirational geometries.
 |
| Your Sky May Be Surfaced Inside (Buckminster Fuller) , 2018 - Tempera on Linen,
120 x 100 cm |
To 16 Sept
Racehorses, 1913
The Ben Uri Gallery is somewhat under-appreciated. Certainly the
current survey of David Bomberg is excellent: a national touring show featuring
plenty from the gallery’s own collection. That includes ‘Racehorses’, 1913, a
black chalk masterpiece of Bomberg’s vorticist style in which I find it takes a
while to ‘see’ how the race operates from left to right and make out the
spectators talking to bookies in the foreground – but then it all clicks
dynamically into place.The later Bomberg is appreciated most
for self-portraits and foreign landscapes in which precisely simplified architecture meets light
to reveal what he termed ‘the spirit in the mass’. ‘Cathedral, Toledo’ 1929 is
typical. ‘You must remember’, teased
Bomberg,‘I was a poor boy from the East End and I’d never seen the sun before’.
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| Cathedral, Toledo, 1929 |
To 19 Aug 2018
 |
Luiz Zerbini is essentially a painter who feeds off day-today observations of Rio de Janeiro, but his practice expands to cover membership of the performative collective Chelpa Ferro, and this ten year survey show includes a ‘3D painting’ / sculptural installation, monoprints made directly from plants, and films of Brazilian landscapes. A glitch in one of the films added coloured squares which Zerbini then adopted as a motif in his paintings, serendipitously linking that to tiling and architecture in his dense combination of natural and manmade. The whole makes for a rich account balanced between psycho-geography and aesthetics, as well as between intuitive and rational.
 |
| Still from Sertão, 2009 - colourful reflections in a river with added glitch colours. |
Yuko Mori: Voluta and Peter Fraser: Mathematics @ Camden Arts Centre
To 16 Sept
 |
| Seasonal light on two Untitled images from Mathematics - chairs and a thinker. |
Camden’s latest pairing is of Peter Fraser’s saturated
photographs with Yoko Mohri’s cutely contingent orchestration of objects. Is
there a connection? Maybe, if you see
the Japanese artist’s way with fish, spoons, bells and percussive Venetian
blinds as a model of our thoughts pinging round our brains. For Fraser’s
untitled photographs form the project ‘Mathematics’, which show (i) scenes which
remind him of how maths underlies reality and (ii) portraits of people asked to
imagine that something they had long held to be true had just been proved
false. So both can be related, but abstractly, to thought: for we can’t see
what Fraser’s subjects are thinking, and pretty much any items might have
illustrated the metaphysics of maths, given it’s attributed to everything. Both shows prove to be metaphysically knowing
in a wryly amusing way.
 |
| A spoon prepares to play a bell in Voluta |
______________
Dialogues with a Collection @ Laure Genillard, 2 Hanway Place – Tottenham Court Rd
To 16 Sept
 |
| Lucy Heyward: Face Up Face Down, 1998 |
The
premise for Laure Genillard’s new show sounds a tricky one
to pull off: ask 11 artists to show their own work as complement to one
of the
works she has in her own collection. It turns out, though, that the
original works,
the new works, the pairings, and the precise explantory texts supplied
come
together beautifully. Highlights include Gerhard Lang’s ‘visus signatus’
(unsighted) drawing of clouds alongside their meteorological data in
response to Frank Heath’s
penetratingly funny project of inscribing computer back up in laser cut
form;
Sarah Staton’s updating of the language in Stephen Willats’ 1960’s
rearrangable
clothing with text (‘poor / rich / sick…’) with categories from 2018
(‘pangender
/ neurodivergent / aromantic…’) and Lucy
Heyward's 'Face Up Face Down', which seems to derive some sort of merger
of sex and forensic anthropology from the attractively tweaked logic of
displaying a photogram of a plate-stand on that very plate-stand as if
it were itself a plate.. Laure also has as a good a Tomma Abts as you’ll
find at the Serpentine…
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| Tomma Abts: Zerka, 2015 |
Caroline Jane Harris: A Bright Haunting @ ASC Gallery, Taplow House, Thurlow Street - Elephant & Castle (to 10 Aug) and Superimposition @ Partners & Mucciaccia, 45 Dover St - Mayfair (to 31 Aug)
I’d
better start with a double bias-alert. I chose Caroline
Jane Harris as winner of a solo show at ASC Gallery; and I helped
write the text for the rather substantial catalogue of Catherine Loewe
and Michael Stubbs' curation. All the same, here are two excellent shows
which investigate the nature of image-making today.
Harris
uses all manner of technical
processes to expose and work through the digital aspects of such
quotidian
views as clouds seen through a window, which becomes the
screen of post-production. The intricately beautiful results emerge not
as a critique of any truth attributed to analogue indexicality, but (to
quote Jon K. Shaw's catalogue essay) as ‘an affirmation of the visual
mysteries of the everyday’.
Paul Morrison: Pyxide, 2010 - gold leaf and acrylic on linen, 72 x 54 cm
The superimposition in 'Superimposition' can be seen various ways: Barry
Reigate mixes modes over each other – carton,
graffiti, abstraction. Mark Titchner imposes language on pattern to
baroque effect. Michael Stubbs
obscures graphic signs with abstract overlays. Paul Morrison ruptures
space by
combining different scales and sources within the same pictorial space –
an
implied planar superimposition. All of which suggests the digital
overlaps of the screen without using its technologies directly, and
makes for a highly stimulating conversation of contrasting yet related
voices.
Mark Titchner: Up, 2012 - carved wood and imitation gold leaf, 141 x 141 x 10cm
______________
______________
 |
| Pablo Picasso: Woman on the Beach, 1932 |
Carol Bove @
David Zwirner, 24 Grafton St – Mayfair
To 3 Aug
 |
| May, 2018 |
Some of Carol Bove’s best known work uses peacock feathers,
quite an apparent contrast with the big all-metal collages here, which she
makes ‘in the air’ using a robust system of hoists, jacks and harnesses. Yet –
perhaps due to that – there’s a lightness to Bove’s combinations which she says
she ‘imagines fast’, as if working in clay. The results are compelling. Partly due
to the interplay of rusty found steel, manipulated and then powder coated steel
tubing, and highly polished steel discs. Partly due to the superbly orchestrated
‘abstract narrative’ (if I can be allowed the term) which unfolds over the two
floors.
 |
| View with Nike I and Nike II, 2018 |
______________
Aki Sasamoto: Clothes Line @ White Rainbow 47 Mortimer St - Fitzrovia
To 4 Aug (Tues-Fri 11-7)
 |
| Sasamoto making a performative drawing at the opening |
I wasn’t surprised when New York based Japanese artist Aki
Sasamoto told me she has experience as a stand-up comic. Her practice centres
on wry dialogues delivered in a Japanese accent as delightful as Laure Prouvost’s
French, all the while making drawings to illustrate her points. At White
Rainbow You can see the drawn result of her London performance alongside films of her actions
and resulting drawings from three further performance projects in America. To
give you a flavour, one starting point is to contrast the detailed view of the
dung beetle with the broad sweep of a bird. What kind of life do you want? One which
includes this show would be a sensible start…
______________ |
| Sasamoto in dung beetle mode in the film Yield Point |
Rafal Zajko: Jaka praca dziÅ› - takie nasze jutro * and Jutro @ Castor Projects, Resolution Way, Deptford
To 4 Aug
 |
| Anna Perach: The Red House Lord, 2018 - hand and gun tufting, artificial hair and yarn, 140 x 115 cm |
Now is the time to visit Deptford, as Andy Wicks is expanding from one of the enclaves at Resolution Way to take Castor into two - but for a while he has all three. The old space contains Rafal Zajko's solo show, which sees him move from a performance-based practice to an emphasis on sculptural forms derived from public art in his native Poland, but retaining a performative element: inserted ice melts, cracks and falls; visitors have the chance to add chewing gum. The new double unit holds a group show which elegantly plays wall-based sculptures off against each other, curated by Zajko together with Wicks and introducing some fresh Eastern European voices.
* The work of today – determines our tomorrow
 |
| Rafal Zajko: Technological Reliquary I (Current), 2018: Jesmonite, embroidery, steel, push button, ice 80 x 50 x 4.5 cm |
______________
Richard Woods: The Ideal Home Exhibition @ Alan Cristea Gallery, 43 Pall Mall - central
To 31 July
 |
| House with Solar Panels, 2018 |
At last year’s Folkestone triennial Richard Woods came
across the illogical combination of houses being sold as second homes because the
locals couldn’t afford to buy them as their only residence. That – in the form of implausibly colourful model
‘holiday homes’ - is the starting point for a rich mix of ideas bringing
the housing market to Woods’ characteristic modes. Fashionable cellar
extensions and solar panels are mocked. Eight prints of ‘Dream Homes’ refer to
the somewhat double-edged compliments of estate agents: does ‘mature garden’
mean it's overgrown, does ‘potential to convert’ indicate it's currently
uninhabitable? Another set converts Woods’ famous wood effect prints – by rotation,
cropping and minimal intervention – into ‘handheld landscapes’, ie views of
plots of ground to be sold.
______________
Summer is traditionally the time for group shows, typically
combining gallery artists with a sprinkling of guests and tied to a theme which
suits a fairly light curatorial touch. That can become formulaic, but it’s not
necessarily a bad formula. Timothy Taylor, Simon Lee have good examples and White Cube a grand version.  |
Handheld Landscape (51 acres), 2018 - Acrylic on birch plywood, 27 x 20 cm |
______________
Mask @ Kamel Mennour, 51 Brook Street – Mayfair
To 28 July
 |
| Installation view including François (left), Rondinone (centre) and Halilaj (right) |
An obvious enough theme avoids the obvious: Nobuyoshi Araki shows
half-face, half-flower collages of what were previously two separate
streams of work to propose 'a still life which masks the psychosexual
desire of the Japanese people'; Petrit Halilaj’s ‘Do you realise there
is a rainbow even if it’s night’ is a moth; Michel François half-masks
his then-wife Ann Veronica Janssens with a white liquid dip; Alberto
GarcÃa‑Alix photographs himself as partially self-masked - and so on,
with 13 artists in all… True, Ugo Rondinone appropriates the look of an
African tribal mask, but that winks at us, conspiratorially.
 |
| Araki collage |
Mute @ Amanda Wilkinson, 18 Brewer St -
Soho and Elizabeth Price: txtʃərz at Morley
College, 61 Westminster Bridge Rd - South Bank
(to 14 July including Art Night)
Derek Jarman: Household God III (Wagner), 1989
‘Mute’ is, quite simply but originally, a series of works which
keep themselves quiet in various ways. Angela Bulloch’s ‘On/Off Line Drawing
Machine’, 1991, allows itself hardly any expressive capacity as it proceeds to
build up a horizontal. Derek Jarman decapitated the busts of several composers,
replacing their implied music with rocks or objects found near Dungeoness.
France Alys provides a delicately hesistant drawn gesture. Jimmy Desana’s
figures are gagged. Isa Genzken’s radio is concrete.
An offsite extension to Elizabeth Price’s new film at the Morley
Gallery is very much on track: in her trademark ‘archive with disco’ style, she
presents the 6 minute story of a strike-of-sorts through which the governing
committees of universities and museums opt for wordlessness in – it would seem –
the face of increasing corporatisation of those institutions. The only visuals
are collaged video clips of magazine clippings showing long dresses as worn by
models c. 1960-80: on the one hand summoning better days for academic freedom
from commerce, on the other referencing hoe the dresses’ models had to pose for
the purpose of display, rather like a lecturer ticking inspectorial boxes.
 |
Elizabeth Price: still from txtʃərz
______________
|
Family Values: Polish
Photography Now @ Calvert 22 Foundation, 22 Calvert Avenue – Shoreditch
To 22 July
 |
From Zofia Rydet's Sociological Record
|
At the core of this show, despite its subtitle, are two
stunning long-term series from the last century. Zofia Rydet made an amazing 20,000 images of
Poles in their homes for her Sociological Record (1978-90) – detailed
orchestrations at a rate of five per day from age 67 to her death! Film maker
Józef Robakowski, banned from exhibiting his work, turned to the apolitically
personal, albeit with the texture of surveillance, as a way of protesting
obliquely at collectivist ideology. From My Window (1978-2000) is just that:
the neighbourhood’s coming and goings to a commentary which stresses their
personalities just as it transmits Rabakowski’s. There are also four recent
projects in the show. Remarkably, they assert themselves successfully in the context
of the older work, especially Aneta Grzeszykowska’s Negative Book and Aneta
Bartos’ startling dual portraits of herself with her bodybuilder father.
 |
From Aneta Grzeszykowska’s Negative Book
|
______________
Katharina Grosse: Prototypes of Imagination @ Gagosian, 6-24 Britannia Street to 27 July; Bernard Frize: Blackout in the Grid @ Simon Lee Gallery, 12 Berkeley St to 30 June; Juan Uslé: Open Night @ Frith Street, Golden Square to 23 June; Cipriano Martinez: Displacement @ Maddox Arts, 52 Brook's Mews
Katharina Grosse: Untitled, 2018, acrylic on canvas, 265 × 175 cm
If
you're attracted to harmless list-making, you
might consider who are the dozen top abstract painters in the world:
there's no
right and wrong, of course, and I may have forgotten someone obvious,
but a plausible
group seems to me Gerhard Richter, Bernard Frize, Bridget Riley,
Katharina
Grosse, Mary Heilmann, Charline von Heyl, Juan Uslé, Robert Ryman,
Beatriz
Milhazes, Sean Scully, Tomma Abts and Ding Yi. In which case London is
well
served, as Milhazes (see below) Grosse, Frize and Uslé have wonderful
shows on
now, and Tomma Abts is next up at the Serpentine. Moreover, a ten year
survey of Cipriano Martinez's politcally charged deconstructions of
architectural geometry in Caracas and London emphasises the variety of
means he has brought to a tight thematic focus, and makes for a worthy
10th anniversary show at Maddox Arts. Come to that, Richter has an
impressive presence in Southampton, which isn't so far away. Grosse uses
scale
to thrilling effect, Frize does what only he can do to the grid, and
Uslé
brings us something of the night.
Juan Uslé: Soñe que Revelabas (Sutlej-Indo), 2018
Vinyl, dispersion and dry pigment on canvas, 305 x 228 cm
 |
| Cipriano Martinez: Brilliante, 2011 |
______________
Beatriz Milhazes: Rio Azul @ White Cube Bermondsey
To 2 July
Installation image Ollie Hammick
There’s
everything in this exuberant show: big paintings, and even bigger tapestry,
collage, hanging sculptural combinations of found objects, and stage set and
opening performances by her sister's dance troupe (a little is here).
One way of looking at the show would be as a rebooting of the Manifesto Antropófago published in 1928
by Oswald de Andrade, for that proposed that European influences should
be 'cannibalised' - chewed up and digested to emerge in a South American form -
and Milhazes definitely integrates a tropical and carnival aspect into European
modernist tropes. This show is particularly heavy on circles, and there’s a
contrast between the dazzling intricacy of their intersections in most of the
work and the comparative simplification which emerges from the weaving process.
As irmãs em azul celeste, 2015-2018 - Collage on paper
86.5 x 76 cm, Photo: Manuel guas
______________
Lea Cetera: Expanding Brain @ Southard Reid - 7 Royalty Mews, Soho
To 30 June 2018
To 30 June 2018
 |
| Installation view |
Shows
about identity politics can get heavy handed, so Lea
Cetera’s light touch is welcome here. The central work is a 15 minute
‘artist
interview’ in which we see an artist - identified by number, hooded like
an assassin,
voice disguised – answer questions about her practice and background.
She complains
when asked how race informs her work on the basis that a white artist
wouldn’t
have been asked that, yet the show is largely about that, as well as
what the
interviewee says her work is about: on the one hand, mockingly, ‘it’s
about
everything, it’s about nothing’, on the other hand it’s about ‘the
psychological spaces we construct and operate within’. The rest
of the show features hyper-real sculptures of quotidian items (coffee
cups and
suchi are favourites) with emails integrated to indicate how the
artist’s
everyday experience is informed by the nature of art and identity. This
is all within the pretended
parameters of a progression chart which the Filipino New Yorker found
online, showing how to
accept then go beyond the role of ‘artist of colour’ to make work about
'whatever the fuck you want'.
 |
| Cup Construction, 2018 - plywood, formica, resin, porcelain, acrylic |
_____________
Brian Bress: Another Fine Mess @ Josh Lilley, 44-46 Riding House Street – Fitzrovia
To 27 June
 |
| Sunset Peacock (cutout), 2018 - 140 x 76cm |
American artist Brian Bress puts the fine into what’s far from a
mess with the most formally innovative show in London. On entering, you wonder
‘what is this?’ Several canvases curl down in curiously attractive tatters from
being cut away with a knife. Down in the
main space you find that those paintings were the main part of stage sets to
make films in which canvas and screen converge. Each start with an image which
gets cut away from behind so that the reverse side hangs down. Bress does the
cutting while wearing a suit with a third painting on it. Behind him is a
fourth painting. The balance between the four levels shifts mesmerisingly over
15-30 minute loops. And that is just one strand of Bress’s video panel
paintings shown here, relatable to Helena Almeida and Alex Hubbard, I suppose, but
effectively a new cross-medium.
 |
Still from Sunset Peacock, 2018 (29 minute video loop) |
New Relics @ Thames-Side Studios, Harrington Way, Woolwich
To 24 June
 |
| Michael Samuels: Logjam, 2016 |
Artist-curators Kate Terry and Tim Ellis fill the large
spaces of Thames-Side Studios’ gallery with no fewer than 56 sculptures,
providing an excellent cross-section of current practice well worth the trip to
Woolwich. The conceit of ‘New Relics’ is broad enough to allow considerable
variety, but many artists use their materials with a certain wit: take Vasilis
Asakopoulos’s resinous puddle in a chair (Shell
II, 2018); Simon Brinkman’s fetishistic Untitled
Anonymous, 2018, a black rubber, silicone and steel ramp to nowhere;
Michael Samuels’ oddly resonant boxing off of a ladder in Logjam, 2016; and Alan Magee’s Was,
is, shall be, 2015, a mere sprinkle of silicon which has been cast in the
holes of a colander – one of several small floor-dwelling works offsetting the general
up-thrust of forms. Oh, and Hamish Pearch’s kinetic Bambi, 2018 massages itself…
 |
| Alan Magee: Was,
is, shall be, 2015
Noémie Goudal:
Telluris @ Edel Assanti, 74a Newman
Street - Fitzrovia
To 23 June 
French photographer Noémie Goudal
presents three immersively installed takes on how we trammel between image and
reality and between manmade and natural. The upper space is filled with wooden
cube frames, within which lies the Telluris
series, depicting similar 25-cube constructions within the landscape, in the
forms used by analogue era scientists to model the geology of mountain
formation. Also incorporated is the Soulevement
series, in which rock formations turn out to be photographs of sets of mirrors
installed in the landscape. Downstairs, rock reflections take a different tack
through the stereoscopic installation Study
in Perspective III, which causes us to see similar images as differently
constructed. It’s a substantial investigation of illusory substance.
 ______________Molly Soda: Me and My Gurls @ Annka Kultys Gallery, 472 Hackney Road – Cambridge Heath
To 16 June
Molly Soda’s teeming and multifarious practice is most
naturally online. Here, then, she effectively transports her studio to the
gallery by covering the walls with images and footage from her laptop, complete
with a 15 foot printout of comments on one of her YouTube posts which takes
over the space sculturally. That is a make-up tutorial which pokes an artist’s fun
at the genre, yet evokes deadpan or mocking responses from people who take her
to be playing it straight. Indeed, Soda entertainingly subverts various roles
and genres. Instead of showing off her new clothes she adapts the format to
present her favourite Gifs: she likes ‘the delayed Gif experience’, as when a
flower keeps the viewer waiting before opening.
______________
|
To 3 June
London seems to be in something of a cave moment just now.
If you want paintings of them, see Mimei Thompson’s dark places in a show about
light at ArthouSE1; for a psychedelic encounter with the astro-cthonics of
alien abduction, spectacularly installed, head for Megan Broadmeadow at CGP.
But I like bats in my caves, and Maeve Brennan’s 43 minute film Listening in
the Dark makes the most of them, bringing the unintended fatal
consequences of
wind turbines on bats (their lungs explode in the pressure drop behind
the blades) together with ultrasound detection, scientific research
methods, geological
history and the operation of whale calls to explore bats as a symbol of
how convenient it can
seem to be to ignore what we are doing to the environment. It’s
effectively
paired in the Jerwood's 'Unintended Consequences' with Imran Perretta’s
film about refugees, something else
with which many would prefer to ignore.
* Jerwood's web coverage is unusually good
______________
Mequitta Ahuja: Notations @ Tiwani Contemporary, 16 Little Portland Street
To 2 June
Material Support, 2017 - 213 x 203cm
American
painter Mequitta Ahuja - mentored by Kerry Marshall - takes a
refreshingly unconventional view of the artist in the studio: both by
staging herself reading the paper and doing a crossword as well as
amongst various intersecting works; and by - in her words -
'positioning a woman-of-colour as primary picture-maker, in whose hands
the figurative tradition is refashioned'. The personal and political
aspects come together in Material Support, when we see her
covering a canvas which refers to the 1865 promise of Forty acres and a
mule for freed slaves - that it was never delivered is perhaps indicated
by the letters being written backwards.
 |
| Crossword, 2017 - 107 x 106 cm |
Hermann Nitsch: Das Orgien Mysterien Theater @ Massimo de Carlo, 55 South Audley St - Mayfair
To May 25
This three floor survey with extensive film documentation of
Nitsch's Theatre of Orgies and Mysteries, plenty of paintings and rooms full of
relics gives a powerful overview of what Hermann Nitsch has done these 60
years. Plenty of transgressive and blasphemous animal slaughter, ceremony,
nudity and crucifixion of course, but what’s it all about? Nitsch is an
existentialist who seeks to maximise intensity by embracing extremes as - in
his words - ‘the artist who is into meat and blood'. He believes that
natural human instincts have been repressed, and that the rituals will release
their energy, purify and redeem us. Even if you're not convinced, the spectacle
remains.
______________
Installation view with Karen David
Law firm Collyer Bristow have, remarkably, now been using
their offices to show art for 25 years*. And they’re big shows: 60-odd works by
20 artists appear in regulator curator Rosalind Davis’ latest, which uses a
Talking Heads lyric even older than the gallery to set off thoughts about what
the future might be like. Any danger of sci-fi similitude is countered by plenty
of wit (eg Kitty Sterling, David Worthington, Sasha Bowles) and a good sprinkling
of retro-futurism (Tim Ellis, John Greenwood and young German Arno Beck, who
has the surprising idea in one of his age of using a typewriter to convert digital images into deliciously delicate
analogue equivalents). Four artists contribute especially large and coherent
bodies of work: Dan Hays, Alison Turnbull, Ian Monroe and Karen David. You do
need to know, I think, that the candies** are in David’s pictured installation
because just that was used to lure E.T. from the woods.
* By appointment during office hours: and subject to meetings sometimes occupying rooms, so Friday afternoon is a good time to visit. Comes with a nice booklet. ** Odd what you can learn looking at art: Reese's Pieces are American packs of peanut butter candy spheres, manufactured by The Hershey Company in yellow, orange and brown. Sales tripled when, in one of the earliest such film product placements, they featured at a cost of $1m in ‘E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial’, 1982. 
Arno Beck: Textmode (Mountain), 2017 - typewriter drawing on Japanese paper
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