Byron Marmol: Paula Régil (a.b.a. con Paracelsus)
Between Two Worlds @ Edel Assanti, 276 Vauxhall Bridge Rd – Victoria
To 30 April: www.edelassanti.com
Evening Standard photography critic Sue Stewart has curated a stimulating survey of nine Latin American photographers, splitting the work broadly between reality on the second floor and fantasy on the third. My favourite realities are Alessandra Sanguinetti’s visceral visions of Argentinian farm life, and Oscar Fernando Gomez Rodriguez’s Mexican streetscapes shot with rapid fire voyeurism through – and framed by – his taxi window. Fantasy scores in Byron Marmol’s documentation of Guetemalans dressing up as manga players, bringing a cultural fracture to their role play games and making for an interesting comparison with Cao Fei’s well-known Cos series.
Tut tut. A Coup
Carla Busuttil: Rug & Gut & Gun @ Josh Lilley Gallery, 44-46 Ridinghouse St – Fitzrovia
To 28 April: www.joshlilleygallery.com
I say Boosoot’l, you say Bassert’l… I’m not sure which is right, but Ms B’s birth-giving absence from her own opening prevented my asking the ultimate referee. Either way, the South African with Armenian origins has grown up with a background of conflict: even prior to apartheid, her forebears fled a hundred years ago from the same persecution as did Arshile Gorky’s family. That’s reflected in the violent looseness of her figures, which give off an aura of criminality. The bigger they are, I feel, the bigger the impact – and there are some pretty big paintings here…
Yonin No KaoKentaro Kobuke: Mokume @ Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation, 13/14 Cornwall Terrace - Baker Street
To 6 May (not weekends): www.dajf.org.uk
This is a refreshing reminder that there’s more than bad news coming out of Japan. London-based Hiroshima-born Kentaro Kobuke’s makes elegantly obsessive, not-quite-childlike coloured pencil drawings for and against the grain of resonantly traditional cherry wood. Fantastical characters and narratives seem to emerge as naturally as knurls. He also makes more abstract-tending drawings on a worldwide range of airmail envelopes, which he outfolds in the manner of reverse origami to provide an intricately-shaped surface. And if you want your art indoors at 9.30 a.m., I know no other place.
Back in the MirrorStephan Balkenhol @ Stephen Friedman Gallery,25-28 Old Burlington Street - Central
To 16 April: www.stephenfriedman.com
German sculptor Stephan Balkenhol has been rough-hewing people onto bases out of single trunks of fissure-friendly wood for decades now, setting up what strikes me as the sculptural equivalent of a figure-ground relationship. But he keeps chipping away differently at both the tradition of monumental figures and the minimalism which turned away from it. Here, a tondo, a double-facing face in which one face is abstract, and a full length figure in a kind of wooden mirror are variants new to me. But on from wood to Woodrow…
Car Door, Armchair and Incident, 1981
Bill Woodrow: Sculptures 1981–1988 @ Waddington Custot Galleries, 11 Cork Street - Central
To 16 April: www.waddingtoncustot.com
A successful signature style can be a problem: do you carry on repeating it and risk descending into routine, or move boldly on and invite unfavourable comparisons with the earlier work? In the early 80’s Bill Woodrow hit on the brilliantly witty yet conceptually dense approach of making sculpture by cutting elements out of metal consumer goods while leaving the rest of the original object to take part in the implied narrative. In the following quarter century, Woodrow has opted firmly for the second horn of that dilemma, which makes this chance to see nineteen of his violently transformative 'cut-out' works all the fresher: many of those here also gain from an anthropoligical aspect, and the way in which two things bocome both different versions of themselves and a third separate thing.
Two Rainbow American Flags for Jasper in the Style of the Artist’s BoyfriendJonathan Horowitz: Art, History @ Sadie Coles, 4 New Burlington Place – Central
To 30 April: www.sadiecoles.com
American artist Jonathan Horowitz is known for his ironic and camp blending of politics and humour. This is a typically punchy exhibition, albeit one which relies on some visitor awareness of the work of Joel Shapiro, Sol LeWitt Richard Serra and Ellsworth Kelly. For it’s their work for the Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington which Horowitz parodies on the grounds that minimalist works are an inadequately engaged response to such horrors, e.g. a typical white Kelly shape is tipped towards the pink triangle which denoted Jewish homosexuals. Also in the mix is a biting lampoon of Mel Gibson, and a Jasper Johns flag in the style of Horowitz’s partner, fellow artist Rob Pruitt.
Two DinnersRichard Artschwager curated by Rob Pruitt @ Carlson, 6 Heddon St
To 15 April (not weekends): www.carlsongallery.co.uk
As it happens Rob Pruitt – who recently hit the headlines with his spoof ‘Art Oscars’ event - has curated a show 100 yards from his partner’s: a beautifully-judged selection of Richard Artschwager’s paintings. Pruitt supplies silver-foil-covered chairs for the purpose of contemplating them, so nodding to Artschwager’s own use of furniture. Mirrors are one of Artschwager’s favourite motifs, and the star work here uses them inside the picture’s frame to complete the sausages in ‘Two Dinners’. Pruitt was Artschwager’s assistant in New York at the time he painted this in 1988 and, in his suitably personal curatorial note, recalls eating off the table portrayed.
Installation viewMarcelo Cidade and André Komatsu: The Natural Order of Things
To 9 April: www.maxwigram.com
This collaboratively-conceived show of individual works by the Brazilian artists Cidade and Komatsu is a locally re-bought and installed version of a project first shown in Brazil. In the course of critiquing, I think, the natural order of international capitalist things, it provides a most cathartic chance to boot wheel-mounted blocks of concrete from one side of a gallery to the other. You can do so without wearing Doc Martens, but there are three pairs in show – their differently-coloured laces proposing tribal loyalties - along with a range of market commodities (the coffee smells frustratingly good), a blank street sign and 'paintings' made from industrial felt and drywall. Hard to pin down, and yet convincing.
Hadi Tabatabai: Thread Painting 2011-3Different Abstractions: Nadia Kaabi-Linke, Hadi Tabatabai and Hajra Waheed @ Green Cardamom, 5a Porchester Place – Marble Arch
To 15 April (not weekends): www.greencardamom.net
All three artists in this exhibition use abstraction interestingly. Tunisian Nadia Kaabi-Linke destroys the function of a bench by covering it with bird spikes. Canadian Hajra Waheed plays Islamic patterning and building plans off against surveillance aircraft and flowers to elusive effect. US-based Iranian Hadi Tabatabai makes intensely poised grid-based abstractions. Only close examination reveals that their meticulous construction uses threads just off the surface, or grout just below it, to create a stilled zone in which to contemplate the ambiguity of figure and ground, the nature of truth, the meaning of life...
Principles of Surrender, 2010 (work in show to be finished on site)Nika Neelova: Monuments @ CHARLIE SMITH London, 2nd floor, 336 Old St - Hoxton
8 - 30 April: www.charliesmithlondon.com
In what promises to be a fascinating merger of personal and public, past and present, the young winner of the 2010 Saatchi New Sensations will show three dark architectural installations including stairs to nowhere and flags of ash. In them Neelova attempts, by collaging elements from elsewhere, to recreate a sense of personally significant lost places from her own disparate pasts in Russia, France and the Netherlands – not as they were, but as she imagines they might be today: in effect, memories of now.
SummerfogGiorgio Sadotti & John Summers: For every action... ...justifies the means @ Studio 1.1, 57a Redchurch St. – Shoreditch
8 April – 1 May: www.studio1-1.co.uk
The artist-run Studio 1.1 hosts a collaboration of two artists who play random factors off against control. Summers assembles noisily ramshackle yet somehow aesthetic sculptures out of found elements. The pranksterish Sadotti’s previous ranges from asking other people to be him to whipping the Tate’s Chistmas tree to collaging coincidence. He also likes secrets, having showed anonymously at Milton Keynes in 2010, and asked me to keep some aspects of this show under wraps... I'd better say no more, but I’m sure it'll be spontaneous with an edge.
Also recommended
Philip Taaffe: Paintings 2009 – 2011 @ Gagosian Gallery, Britannia Street, April 7 - May 14: Surprisingly, a first British solo show for Taaffe's syntheses of abstract and representational motifs from myriad cultures, times and artistic movements.
Dieter Roth: ‘Reykjavik Slides (31,035) Every View of a City’ @ Hauser & Wirth, Savile Row to 30 April: let the widely spread rhythms of fourteen slide projectors lure you into the grey world of all the houses in the Icelandic capital.
Drawing 2011 Biennial Fundraiser @ The Drawing Room 7 April – 18 May: always a fascinating barometer of trends as well as a show of potentially affordable goodies.
Axel Antas: ‘New to Nature’ @ Rokeby Gallery to 30 April: artificial clouds and a life-sized film of a tree from the Finnish meditator on man and nature.
Angela de la Cruz: ‘Transfer’ @ the Lisson Gallery, 30 March – 30 April: I’m expecting further evidence of why she should have won the Turner Prize
Jonathan Trayte: 'Under a Pine Tree' @ Simon Oldfield Gallery to 23 April: sculptures good enough to eat in this solo debut – they’re mostly of food, after all, though in painted bronze…
Andrew Grassie @ Maureen Paley to 10 April: ‘outtakes’ from the master of egg tempera photorealist reflection on the conditions of art.
Hamidou Maiga: 'Talking Timbuktu' @ Jack Bell Gallery to 30 April: Not Seydou Keita but the sharer of his Mali studio in the seventies, and of comparable – if less widely appreciated – merit.
'Royal Family' @ Hayward Gallery to 2 May: a must if you haven’t yet caught Lars Laumann’s ‘Morrissey Foretelling the Death of Diana’, and the only way I can commend of celebrating the nuptials.
Shaun McDowell @ Hannah Barry Gallery, Peckham to 20 April: big industrial space with a large cycle of abstractions derived from the artist interacting with his model.
Images courtesy the relevant artists and galleries + Stephen White (Stephen Friedman)
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