MODELS IN MAY

Nouemie Goudal: Les Amants (Cascade)

The Saatchi gallery's stimulating 38-strong survey of photographers provides a chance to assess trends. It illustrates the switch away from photography’s being largely about seeking out and recording what's in the world. Probably only a third of the selection could be described in that way: most follow other models such as searching out pre-existing images to reuse (eg John Stezaker, Marlo Pascual); creating scenarios (eg Ryan McGinley, Laurel Nakadate) or constructing objects (Matt Lipps, Nouemie Goudal) specifically to be photographed; or manipulating the photographic process itself (Jennifer West, David Benjamin Sherry). Much the same can be said of the other most interesting current photography shows such as those of Dan Holdsworth at Brancolini Grimaldi, Alex Prager at Michael Hoppen, Shari Hatt at Space Station Sixty-Five, Sarah Hardacre at Paul Stolper, Hans-Peter Feldmann at the Serpentine and Zoe Leonard at Camden as well as the five shows with which I kick off with below…

Demobilisation Suit - 1945

Stan Douglas: Midcentury Studio @ Victoria Miro, 16 Wharf Rd – Hoxton

To 6 May: www.victoria-miro.com

Confused by the Rodney Graham - Douglas Gordon – Donald Rodney - Dan Graham – Stan Douglas nexus of names?  Well, all you need to know for now is that the last of those has this broodingly powerful show of 16 large format black and white photographs. They’re created in the alter ego of a 1940’s photojournalist: some reconstruct actual images of the time, others are newly imagined versions of such images – such as ‘Demobilisation Suit’, which adds a cold war overtone to the isolation of a shirt for advertising purposes. The twists come from neat narrative links (eg between different types of grip), those telling details – such as of race – which differ from the sources, and the knowledge we now bring of where the fifties led.

Walead Beshty: Travel Pictures @ Thomas Dane Gallery, 11 & 3 Duke Street St James’s – Central

To 26 May: www.thomasdane.com

LA-based Walead Beshty provides plenty of themes to unravel as he becomes the first to make strategic use of the separated nature of Thomas Dane’s spaces. No. 11 shows one of his well-known FedEx boxes, cracked by its successive transits; several of his Travel Pictures, which exploit the chance effects of an airport’s X-ray security machines on his unexposed film of an abandoned Iraqi diplomatic mission; and a 24 hour reel of ‘cold war apocalypse films’. No. 3 has a FedEx box which finally collapsed, and has been shored up by an internal armature; Travel Pictures which have been negated by a hole-punching process; and the 24 hour reel run backwards, which is, I suppose, part of how we see the cold war now.

Steven Pippin: Cannon 35mm shot in the back with .25 calibre

Resistance: Subverting the Camera @ The Fine Art Society Contemporary, 148 New Bond St – Central

To 26 May: www.faslondon.com

Janet Laurence’s Sumatran animals caught in a ‘camera trap’ are one highlight of this stimulating eight artist collection of cameraless photographs and other unconventional approaches. The other is a too-rare sighting of new work by 1999 Turner Prize shortlistee Steven Pippin (he’s the rigorous type, and has just spent ten years working out how to balance a pencil on a skyscraper). Pippin’s ‘End of Photography’ project required a firearm license and hair-trigger electronics: we see the death of analogue means made literal as cameras are shot, documented by an external photographic record, by the shattered cameras themselves, and last – violently beautiful - images extracted from the victim equipment’s moment of impact.

Daily No. 2 (Asher)

Thomas Demand: The Dailies @ Spruth Magers, 7a Grafton St – Central

To 31 May: www.spruethmagers.com

German star Thomas Demand is known for photographing his cardboard models of politically charged scenes so that our slow-burn detection of their constructed nature parallels the journalistic process of uncovering awkward truths. Here he applies the same process of recording an absent reality to his own rather Wentworthian phone snaps of incidental items, elevating their status through the labour he gives them in a move somewhat parallel to hyper-realist painting. That may sound a bit duller than his main stream, but the gloriously dye-transfer printed results work brilliantly. Look out for the mirror made by such mundane means...

Damien Meade - Untitled

The Smallest Composite Number @ Standpoint, 45 Coronet St – Hoxton

To 19 May: www.standpointgallery

Curator Peter Ashton Jones has brought together four painters who start with aspects of still life and arrive at variously abstract takes on the ambiguities around object, painted object, painting as object and the organic development of the object into something else entirely. The interplay is good between Clive Hodgson, Vicky Wright, Brian Sayers and Damien Meade - who takes up an aspect of Thomas Demand’s approach to photography, as the subject of his paintings are his own objects made out of modelling clay and wire. They’re a peculiar and compelling mix of abject, assertive and grotesque.

Otto lettere dall'Afghanistan, 1972

Alighiero Boetti @ Tate Modern (to 27 May), Sprovieri (23 Heddon St to 16 June) & Carlson (6 Heddon St to 1 June)

It’s a tough choice at Tate Modern: whether to queue up to queue further inside a crowded run-through of mostly too-familiar work; or to walk straight in to a beautiful yet unpeopled curation of thoughtful innovation? And if you do choose Boetti, then his current festival continues with two shows in Heddon Street. Sprovieri’s extensive selection of work on paper includes particularly fine late drawings and stamp works: the crescents make for extra visual and political echoes in this one’s typical combination of order (repetition, the postal system, the logic of placement) and disorder (inversions, surplus value, aesthetically arbitrary cancellations). Carlson has a vast and magnificent range of embroidered works.

Painting, 1939

Ben Nicholson @ Bernard Jacobson Gallery, 6 Cork St

To 30 June: www.jacobsongallery.com

Ben Nicholson is also having something of a moment: doing pretty well up against Mondrian at the Courtauld and Picasso at Tate Britain, and now getting all three of Bernard Jacobson’s showrooms. That allows for a 39 work survey which includes top-notch examples of everything you’d want (except a white relief, which is where the Courtauld scores). Jacobson has early landscapes, early abstracts; carved and scumbled reliefs; late landscape-come-abstracts; natural wood constructions; townscape, treescape and still life drawings… After Bacon, Nash and Lewis, our most important C20th painter? Of related note: the often quite Nicholsonian drawings of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham  at Art First.

Jamie Shovlin: Various Arrangements @ Haunch of Venison, 103 New Bond St - Central

To 26 May: www.haunchofvenison.com

Back in 2005, Jamie Shovlin showed imagined covers for planned-but-unpublished extensions to the Fontana Modern Masters books on great thinkers, subverting the postmodern credentials of the series’ design and asserting their status as paintings through casually artful dripping. Now they’ve returned bigger and yet subtler: the drips are confined to the sides of the canvas and the barely visible layers behind the front image of 17 acrylic paintings, each bigger than you, which contain 80 possible cover designs between them. Each is a dance between theory (the application of a complex set of criteria to determine the successive colour options) and intuition (Shovlin deciding if he likes the result or will change it) - which may well chime with how the insights of Merleau-Ponty, Benjamin and Derrida et al came about…





Alice Walton: In The Pleasing @ Tintype, 18 St Cross St - Farringdon

To 26 May: www.tintypegallery.com

Alice Walton takes a turn towards the geometric at Tintype, now well settled in their permanent space near Hatton Garden. She has previously hidden and selectively revealed images by maskings of tape: here that role is played by constructions built from a variety of sliver surfaces and placed on the images, which they cover, distort and reflect in turn. Add that this all takes place on a chunky table made from silver-covered insulation material, and that most of the found images masked have a nineteenth century aspect, and you get a sense of the range of dialogues quietly set up. Do: ask to see the collages, too. Don’t: confuse the artist with the Wallmart heiress.

Snowglobe

Sean Landers @ Greengrassi, 1a Kempsford Rd – Kennington

To 6 June: www.greengrassi.com

This show looks like a scholarly library in which Landers, who's been sending himself up for so long he must mean it seriously, links Melville, Beckett and Dickinson to his own entertaining  screeds on his futile compulsion to make art. The words form the titles of the books depicted in five paintings of loaded bookshelves: ‘I AM NOT A MASOCHIST ALTHOUGH THIS IS WHAT IT IS HAS COME TO’ gives a flavour. The writers come courtesy of eight steel busts of greats who have lived on through their work. Their presence implies the question: will Landers? A devilish Pan stands in the courtyard, ready, perhaps, to comment….

GLASGOW INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL OF VISUAL ART 2012

The Glasgow Festival’s opening weekend (20-22 April) made for maximum stimulation: the 45 participating locations become an excuse to explore the city throughout which they are spread in such various locations as a railway waiting room to a university roof to Ruth Ewan’s history of Socialist Sunday Schools, perfectly placed at the Scotland Street School Museum. Then there were the talks, the performances, the openings, the alternative spaces, the parties… The balance between Scots and others was good, reflected in the artists I focus on below: six Celts, two Sassenachs, six from beyond these shores. There was a theme – ‘Real Time’ – but what couldn’t be made to relate to something so broad? Yet there did seem to be plenty of reference to or interaction with times past...

Karla Black at the Gallery of Modern Art

Recent Turner Prize shortlistee Karla Black uses uses fragile and potentially ephemeral materials. That made for an immediate source of productive contrast from giving her the run of GoMA’s imposing classically-columned main hall, historically the focus of Glasgow’s financial trading business. Cue the ravishing combination of ‘Empty Now’ – 17 tons of variously woods’ sawdusts, layered like the mother of all tiramsus – and ‘Will Attach’, 170 cellophane twists hung from the ceiling in a gradually descending formation so that they started well overhead but the viewer was in among them by the other end of the hall. Here bigger, pointing up the originality of Black’s sculptural forms, was definitely better.

Jeremy Deller: ‘Sacrilege’ on Glasgow Green

Even before the waiting classes of children streamed onto it, this was obviously a public art coup, up there with Olafur Eliasson’s Sun and  Carsten Höller’s slides. Jeremy Deller, the art world’s arch-combiner of popular tastes with audience involvement, has made what must be the world’s biggest bouncy castle in the form of a full size inflatable version of Stonehenge. ‘No shoes, no sharp objects, no human sacrifice’ warned the notice alongside. It’s a homage, says Deller, ‘not only to Stonehenge itself but to the anarchic freak-out culture of Hawkwind, Bruce Lacey and Ken Russell’. It travels to London for the Olympics, and, of course, the kids loved it more than they would the fenced-off original…

Ian Giles: ‘Listen Harder’ in ‘Arrives in Starting’ at The Lighthouse

Fiona Mackay and Rachel Adams showed well in the Duchy Gallery’s mixed selection of work by recent Glasgow graduates, but the attention grabber was London-based video and performance artist Ian Giles’ pair of sculptures posing the immediate question: what would you hear if you listen to a rock? Not some sort of musical pun, the headphones revealed, but the ancient sound of the naturally occurring phenomenon of Acoustic Emission, whereby external stimuli such as earthquakes generate sources of elastic waves inside rocks. The work contains 44,000 sound clips of Acoustic Emissions collected by the Rock and Ice Physics Laboratory at University College London, lowered to an audible frequency. Groovy...


Sea-snail Camera

Niall Macdonald in ‘Petrosphere’ at Skypark

The basement of a shinily-clad office block (in which o2 employs thousands) hosted the second half of a lively Greco-Caledonian exchange, the Scots in it having already shown in Athens. I was struck by how Niall Macdonald combined timeless natural forms from his Hebridian home with the more temporary contemporary in violently contrasting scales: a neon ring plus whale vertebrae either side of a column the size of a small cetacean; and a delicate combination of camera and snails, for which he had found an unusually smooth means of casting items in pure white plaster.

Richard Wright: ‘Works on Paper’ at Kelvingrove

In 2009 Glasgow-based Richard Wright won the Turner Prize – as Scots often do – for his site-specific and necessarily temporary practise of drawing on gallery walls. This first ever show dedicated to his work on paper covered a dozen years through 30 varied drawings: realistic depictions of castle architecture; a giant silver hand; geometric abstraction; pulsing cloud-like patterns applied with gold leaf; and complex symmetrical eastern-flavoured drawings of great delicacy. Most of these related directly to site-specific projects, making them, perhaps, an exploration of the opposite effect of decontextualisation. They were attractive, but I was still more excited by some fantastic Vuillard taking pattern to the max in the adjoining room…

Charlotte Prodger: ':-*' at the Centre for Contemporary Arts Intermedia Gallery

Charlotte Prodger presents a complex but compelling installation which draws analogies between structural film and themes of obsession and obsolescence in popular/gay culture using four elements: on-line footage of the fetishisation of black and white Nike trainers, including cutting and pulling them apart in what seems a rather sexual desire to see and understand all of an adored object; a double 8mm film splitter standing in for how mid-sixties artists deconstructed film into its constituent elements; a Sharp GF 777 boombox, now more for display than for use on the street; and a fragmentary narrative playing on it which links all that to the opening and closing of the blinds in a sex club in Berlin… ‘Phew!’ you might say, and yes, it was a bit amazing that it worked…

David Korty at Mary Mary project space

Los Angeles painter David Korty has produced a new stream of work in the past few months while living in Vancouver – but with this Glasgow show in mind. They’re modest works on paper which take the organisation of a newspaper as their template, thus connecting to Korty’s established interest in communication and design in everyday living. The text is reduced to patterns without letters, so that information is represented but not transmitted. There are Dada, Constructivist, Bauhaus and Minimalist echoes. Puns emerge between ‘pages’ such as collaged-on paper from a hole-puncher and equally-sized circles made on the surface and – by way of Scots tribute perhaps – they all smuggle in a version of St Andrew’s Cross. I found myself liking them more the more I looked.

Moyra Davey: still from 'The Goddesses'

Erica Eyres: ‘Inside the Minds’ at Southside Studios and Moyra Davey: ‘Les Goddesses’ at Tramway

The Festival is fairly light on films, but two of the few are outstanding – and both made by Canadians. Erica Eyres’ elliptical yet stark tale of apparent abuse, ‘Inside the Minds’, is well hidden at the back of the Southside artists’ studios near Queens Park (but you can see it here: http://vimeo.com/40407725). It travels a long way in five minutes, even though most of it shows a whitewashed wall. Moyra Davey’s far more expansive ‘Les Goddesses’ takes an indirect and multi-stranded hour to relate the artist’s own family history through the project of describing Mary Wollstonecraft’s. This is told through Davey pacing her flat repeating into a Dictaphone the apparently pre-recorded words feeding into one ear. That amplifies the contrast between the diaristic and the measured which is one of the many themes – Goethe, muses, Rome, Freud, adolescence, siblinghood, Benjamin, laudanum and writing in public – woven into Davey’s intimately hesitant meditation.

Wolfgang Tillmans: ‘Works from the Arts Council Collection, ‘Onion’ and ‘Headlights’’ at The Common Guild

A clumsy, if descriptive, heading for a wide representation of Tillmans’ subjects through 32 photographs presented in a typically diverse manner all around a Victorian townhouse. Plenty of known favourites are included, and an apparent match-up between the organic patterning in waterfall and trees worked beautifully. The highlights, though, consistent with Tillmans’ ability to refocus the banal, were the new subject of car headlights: as you climbed the stairs you saw a small non-matching pair directly, then a much bigger-than-life-size single headlight first in a mirror, car rear-view style; and only later directly, on the stairwell wall above you.

Folkert de Jong: ‘The Immortals’ at the Mackintosh Gallery, Glasgow School of Art

The Dutch artist makes his groups of figures by recasting elements using the ‘unethical’ industrial material of Styrofoam, which is both environmentally contaminating (as it won’t beak down) and dangerous in itself – so much so that de Jong has to wear a gas mask when working, and the process degrades the cast, so causing each repetition to vary. He clearly relishes his material, though, and it’s suited such sardonic takes on corruption and imperialism as his masterful groups of pirate traders. Applying it to Mackintosh’s circle played neatly off their self-given name (‘The Immortals’) and the role of more perfect plaster casts (included in the installation) as drawing models in the School – but it didn’t feel comparably urgent.

Clive Hodgson: ‘Untitled’ in ‘Ever Since I Put Your Picture in a Frame’ at 42 Carlton Place

Painter couple Carol Rhodes and Merlin James have converted the ground floor of their elegant Clydeside house into a project space. The first show, curated by the latter, is a comparably elegant selection of paintings. Clive Hodgson will have the first solo show here, and can currently be seen at London’s Standpoint Gallery. Here his feathery, delicately- hued ‘Untitled’, pointing only towards its own absence of a dominant direction, seemed to tremor with the freshness of having just tipped into abstraction.

Kilian Rüthemann & Kate V Robertson at David Dale Gallery

This Swiss-Scottish dual show makes beautifully poised use of a newly available East End industrial unit, which the work serves to dissolve. Rüthemann has leaned pseudo-ill-fitting steel sheets against the internal girders to exaggerate how they already divide the room. Robertson co-opts the space into how her works change state: they include a wax plinth-come-candle big enough to burn through the entire six week run; crumpled paper cast in concrete; and the projection of a screen saver with a bouncing sun motif onto a screen of ice which melts away in the course of each day.



Images courtsey of the relevant artists and galleries + Ruth Clark / Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne (Black),
Gagosian (Wright), Maureen Paley (Tillmans) and Janet Wilson (de Jong)

EASTER EXTRA

Or should that be 'Easter Eggstra'? Thought not... There's enough interesting stuff round at the moment that I found myself identifying some extra shows which run into late April. We come into colour slowly, and not very far until a late burst before the end piece, part of an end-of-analogue TV show moment which also includes the ICA and Galerie8...



Molly

Shari Hatt: 'I just want to be taken seriously as an artist . . . etc' @ Space Station Sixty-Five, 373 Kennington Rd – Kennington

To 25 May: http://www.spacestationsixtyfive.com/

Canadian photographer Shari Hatt takes on cliché with some panache in the first show at this decade-old gallery’s new space / station. First dogs, which she photographs rather attractively, some as black on black – only with such an attention to detail, lighting and eye contact as to lampoon the pretensions of portrait photography by applying them to canine subjects. Second, clowns: other artists dress up to enact an uncomfortably direct parody of a critic’s visit to her studio; and Hatt has a striking range of professional clowns and burlesque performers (Red Bastard is especially good) tell art-referencing jokes so dreadful they may have to be taken seriously…





  Elisabeth Scherffig: Vitrea @ Faggionato Fine Arts, 49 Albemarle St – Central

To 27 April (not weekends): http://www.faggionato.com/

An ideal match of space and art ranges Elisabeth Scherffig’s intensely intricate drawings of industrial glass in front of one of London’s finest gallery windows. Scherffig (born in Düsseldorf, home of the Museum of Glass, in 1949) derives impressive variety from combinations of pattern, opacity and light, together with an occasional hint of what might lie beyond. There are plenty of analogies to pursue in that, or you can just admire the dark sepia pastel  technique, especially in the bigger works and in the huge drawing of a construction site (from an earlier series) in the office.

Kelly Barrie & Sherin Guirguis: Slow Dance (Enta Omry)

 

Sweethearts @ Pippy Houldsworth, 6 Heddon St - Central

To 21 April: http://www.houldsworth.co.uk/

As you’d expect, some things work better than others in this show featuring seven artist couples who work separately yet agreed to collaborate – but it’s all interesting. Hume-Hopton and Rauch-Loy are good, but the stand-out piece is by the least-known couple. Egyptian artist Sherin Guirguis works with Islamic patterns, her husband Kelly Barrie is a process-based photographer. They made a patterned ‘rug’ from photo-luminescent powder on back paper, then danced across it to form the basis for a photographic print. Thus a romantic creative action led to a joint creation which disrupted the grid as it merged their cultures and approaches…





Large Dark Line Vertical Grid

Winston Roeth @ Bartha Contemporary, 25 Margaret St – Fitzrovia

To 19 May: http://www.barthacontemporary.com/

Beacon-based New Yorker Winston Roeth has been honing the monochrome and the grid for three decades, out of which experience he demonstrates three ways of undermining our perceptual habits at the newly central Bartha Contemporary: diptychal plays on window or landscape, sea or sky; sparkle-infected grids, in which accidental but manipulated irregularities produce a shimmer effect which comes and goes at the junctions; and the use of untraditional materials – notably commercial slate tiles, ready to be hung on pre-driven nail holes – as a colour-ground with its own anti-flat character.

The Ideal is Unattainable

Margo Trushina: Sublime and Instruction @ Salon Vert, 21 Park Square East – Regent’s Park

To 29 April: http://www.salon-vert.com/

Young Russsian Margo Trushina has three floors and a yard to explore our post-romantic perception of the sublime through photo-lightworks paying tribute to the mythic romance of the road; an installation which gives the sunset a political edge; and an artificially produced ‘Personal Rainbow’ (best seen at dusk). The highlight, though, is the room combining video, industrial materials, mirrors, lighting, sound and a trembling curtain of thread to create a version of the Iguazu Falls in Brazil which sets up a compelling dialogue between the platonic and the ramshackle.



Pascual Sisto: still from '28 Years in the Implicate Order'

  Graham Dolphin: What is the word & Pascual Sisto: Fill_In_The_Blanks @ Seventeen, 17 Kingsland Rd – Hoxton

To 5 May: http://www.seventeengallery.com/   (and films at http://www.pascualsisto.com/ )

It’s double time at Seventeen: at ground level Graham Dolphin continues to mine last documents and memorials with the passion of a fan in a high octane graphite-based mural taken from tributes to Ian Curtis and versions of such items as the last note written by Aldous Huxley to his wife (‘Try LSD…’) and the last of the concluding blizzard of angel images made by Paul Klee. In the basement you can see why Spanish American artist Pascual Sisto has made an internet impact – which he’s now trying to translate to the object world - with his hypnotising animations of a chair possessed and of a cityscape in which 28 independent red balls eerily bounce in and out of synchrony.

 

Michael Samuels: Tragedy of the Commons @ Rokeby, 5-9 Hatton Wall - Farringdon

To 12 May: http://www.rokebygallery.com/

Michael Samuels repurposes furniture to make sculptures. They bring constructivist and deconstructivist modes into alliance to form abstractions in which the historic utility of the items involved still pulls the viewer in. Neat touches include the provisional attachment of parts with G-clamps and ratchet straps, and the use of desk lights to differentially illuminate found colours. Here there’s just one elegantly integrated barrier across the gallery like a wall, a giant picture or even a window into some perverse reorganization of an office and, by impaction, its life and many of ours’. ..

George Young @ Hilary Crisp Gallery,2nd Floor, 33 White Church Lane - Whitechapel

To 21 April: http://www.hilarycrisp.com/

Hilary Crisp has moved east – a stone’s throw from the Whitechapel (though she herself has moved south for a few months, accompanying husband Graham Hudson to an artist’s residence in Italy). This is a more extensive selection of George Young’s fluently typically fluent yet poster-like paintings of stock images than could readily be show in the space. How so? There are heaps and boxes full of them, which visitors are unpreciously encouraged to leaf through – all at one with Young’s ongoing subversion of standard display modes in favour of apparent disposability, which has included separating painting and frame, leaning paintings into odd curvatures and attacking his own images in various ways.

 

Stuart Brisley: Next Door (the missing subject) @ Peer, 97 & 99 Hoxton St - Hoxton

To 28 April (talk 24 April): http://www.peeruk.org/

The punchiest political statement to be seen just now is this highly edited half hour record of ten days during which the veteran provocateur Stuart Brisley made symbolic sculptural statements on the state of the nation by piling up the items abandoned in the closed-down shop which is now the extension to Peer’s space and where the film is being shown. Sound dull? Oddly, it isn’t: there’s shambolic comedy, atmospheric sounds, voyeuristic passers by, Brisley’s punchy explanatory diary text, and the way its sequence of morphing abstractions build their own aesthetic.

Gilbert & George: London Pictures @ White Cube - Mason’s Yard, Hoxton Square and Bermondsey

To 14 April (Hoxton) / 12 May (Mason’s Yard & Bermondsey): http://whitecube.com/

The London Pictures, well-timed to deflate Olympic puffery, strike me as Gilbert & George’s best set this century. Why so? First, there’s logic to the multiplicity: the number (292!) is driven by the categorisation of key words in news vendor posters, and rams home the everyday banality of disturbing events. Second, the directness of focus – emphasised by a restricted palette of black, white, red and flesh – suits the subject. Third, the apparently straightforward, rule-driven images, are actually quite complicated layerings of four elements: the headlines; the background made from eccentric views of the East End, mainly its brickwork, reflections in cars windows, and houses wearing lace curtains ‘like burkas’; the ghostly figures of G&G haunting their territory; and the Queen, differently worn down and damaged in each coin-sourced profile, appearing to give her imprimatur.

Josephine King: I told him I was an artist. He said, “Can you cook?” @ Riflemaker, 79 Beak St - Soho

To 21 April: http://www.riflemaker.org/

There’s no holding back in Josephine King’s work: a helter skelter of influences – Egypt, Art Nouveau, Klimt, Malevich, Jawlensky, Emin, the many countries she’s lived in; savage, headlong, self-absorbed border texts out of bipolarity and a sense of injustice; full blast colours in her favourite inks, including harlequin patchworks all over the skin of her full-length nude self-portraits... In a way it sounds terrible, and in a way it is – but compulsively so, and I found myself convinced that King is something of a Queen in her mode.

David Hall: End Piece @ Ambica P3, 35 Marylebone Rd – Baker St

To 22 April: http://www.p4exhibitions.com/

David Hall’s is the name which comes to mind in the category ‘70’s British TV artist’ – his snippets of film used to interrupt broadcasts are seminal. They’re shown here (interrupting each other) along with a Naumanesque chance to see yourself from odd angles in several screens (is that a bald spot?) and a floorscape made from analogue TV Sets. That has both a fickeringly cacophonous aesthetic impact and a narrative logic, as the screens go blank in turn as the switch to digital TV occurs in April: by the end of its run, there will be no pictures.

Images courtesy of the relevant artists and galleries + Maya Balcioglu (Brisley)