This month’s selection features some shows you might not have found, including several spaces which I have not previously featured, such is the number of new galleries opening despite all economic trends… there are also, more coincidentally, three Australian artists…
Juan Munoz: An Inaccessible Moment @ Frith Street Gallery,
It’s hard not to feel that Ron Muecks’s recent use
of altered scale and Yue Minjun’s focus on a fixed expression are combined to
better effect than either in the work of Juan Munoz, as seen in the matte grey
2/3-sized versions of his brother
installed in his 2001 Turbine Hall otherworld. A decade on from Munoz’s
untimely death, this show brings us up close to figures made in preparation for the Tate’s ‘Double Bind’,
plus works on paper covering several of the Spanish trickster’s main themes. ‘My work is about a man in a room, waiting
for nothing’, said Munoz, out of which he brings an uncanny presence to the
theatre of what cannot be said.
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| Still from 'Night Street Touch' |
Graham Gussin
@ Siobhan Davies
Studios, 85 St George’s
To 1 July (talk
25 June): www.siobhandavies.com
Artist-curator Charles Danby has put together a retrospective of Graham Gussin’s painting, photography, video and installation with plenty of implied and actual sound and movement in tune with the function of the architectural award-winning dance studios. They include a list of possible films, such as ‘Film things that are hard to explain’, ‘Film prevention’ and ‘Film text works’ – which is what happens to the list. I particularly liked the short videos of rapid touching of objects, one of the ways in which Gussin intervenes to call attention to spaces or things: his use of illumination rigs and dry ice (as in the well-known ‘Spill’, currently on show at Tate Britain) work similarly.
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| My Wife, custom photo throw |
Katie Steciw: Live Laugh Love @ The Green
Room, Lower Level, Rich Mix, 35-47
Bethnal Green Rd
To 17 June: www.thecomposingrooms.com
The Green Room, hidden under the cinema
near Shoreditch High Street station, is only open on Sundays and by appointment
with its energetic curator, Ché Zara Blomfield. New Yorker Kate Steciw’s
European debut is well worth catching though, as she takes cloying
sentimentality, hackneyed subject matter and kitschy means of reproducing
photographs (on tiles, canvas and blankets) and undermines all that by turning
their combinations into something quite other. The eponymous keywork distorts
several copies of the commercially available metal wall text ‘Live Laugh Love’
into near-abstract sculptures which summarise the sardonic approach.
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| Installation view with 'The Magick Door (Kissing Gate)' |
Alison Gill: ‘Legend Trip’ @ Charlie
Dutton Gallery, 1a Princeton St
A legend trip – for example to the site of a notorious
murder – is a rite of passage which stands here for the inner and outer journeys
triggered by sculptures and sculpturally-constructed drawings and collages –
all of which exchange forms seamlessly with the black-beamed patterns of
Charlie Dutton’s distinctive Tudor space.
The centrepiece is a circular Kissing Gate: it turns to suit, and is
draped with enough patched-up bicycle inner tubes to tell of considerable
travel. Add Klein Bottles, folklore and
an imaginative programme of events, and there’s good reason to make the trip to
Alison Gill’s first home city solo show in nearly a decade.
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| Modern Paintings EW492(Medusa) |
To 16 June: www.maxwigram.com
This wittily-titled exhibition consists of
erotic-tending paintings by late amateur Anglo-German artist Eddie Wolfram...
only Manchester-based Czech Pavel Büchler, who delights in the deconstruction
of meanings, bought them from his local
Oxfam shop, stripped the paint off in patches, put the canvas through a washing
machine, and recombined the pieces of paint back-to-front on the restretched
canvas to make abstracts with a suitably washed-out look. The six ‘Modern
Paintings’ which result are not only clean, but compelling in their nothing-newness.
That said, you can see a wholly new
work in the back room, a text piece which says ‘No New Work’ – but, logically
enough, it’s not part of the official show.
Steven Morgana: ‘The Future Feels Like a Phantom Limb’ @ La Scatola Gallery, I Snowden St (off
To 15 June: www.lascatolagallery.com
It makes sense that Franco-Australian
artist Steven Morgana should show in the corporate lobby-like La Scatola
Gallery, for he proceeds to lure the viewer by transformation and beauty, only
to lambast the energy-hungry nature of capitalism. A neon rainbow turns out to
be fed by a petrol generator; a geosodic dome is built from boxes, the triangular
basis of which generates the wasteful volume of off-cuts used as a
counter-balance to keep the structure hovering above the gallery floor; and
photographs of petrol in water bottles are titled to point out that the
original water was the more expensive content.
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| A Place to Cry |
Hany Armanious: The Plagiarist of my Subconscious @ Southard Reid, 67 Dean St Soho
To 30 June: www.southardreid.com
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| The Exquisite Pirate (Pink North Sea) |
Sally Smart: The Exquisite Pirate @ Purdy Hicks Gallery,
To 18 June: www.purdyhicks.com
Sticking with Australians, Sally Smart tweaks the politically-charged history of collage to give a very lively account of one possible answer to her
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| Resolution |
Clare Price: New Paintings @ Studio 1.1, 57a Redchurch St
To 10 June: www.studio1-1.co.uk
Here window meets computer screen meets wall on the
spatially ambiguous ground of the canvas: what seem to be the romantic
landscapes underlying Clare Price’s work have previously struggled to escape
creeping pixellisation and chemical fluorescence. Her latest set of large
paintings ease back the colour register, but now the scenic views must also
contend with a good deal of veiling as well as a wide range of urban-tinged
marks including a notably varied way with the drip. Not to mention the battle
between four types of paint: oil, acrylic, household and spray. It all makes
for productive tension, not least with the push and pull of old-fashioned
beauty.
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| Garments of the Dominators 1 |
Vicky Wright: The Garments of the Dominators @ Josh
Lilley Gallery, 44-46 Riding House
St – Fitzrovia
1 June – 6 July: www.joshlillygallery.com
Bolton-born painter Vicky Wright is interested in the other,
unofficial, side of stories: here, conspiracy theories behind the London riots. That suits
her use of highly-grained wood (which looks like it might belong on the back of
the painting) and crates (in which art is normally moved) as the surfaces for
her melding of genres. Portrait, industrial landscape and still life elements
emerge as essences discovered in the sweeps and stains, drips and bleeds which
make up what could initially pass as abstraction. Wright is also a notably
effective user of earthy browns, suggesting other origins and helping to
generate a satisfyingly distinct aesthetic.
Blain|Southern will no doubt put on more spectacular displays when they move to their permanent premises in Hanover Square,
but meantime Buddhist-influenced Korean-American Michael Joo’s
exploration of the territorial impulse makes a focused impression. A
philosophical backdrop feeds into the works’ complex titles, but at a
simple level three means of asserting spatial supremacy are subverted:
the velvet ropes which limit the encroachment of non-VIPs become
dysfunctionally horizontal wall sculptures; riot shields act as
reflective screens through which the viewer is drawn into the results of
paint-bombing; and deer antlers, a signature motif of Joo’s, are
defused as weapons by being covered in liquid rubber before being cast
in polyurethane resin of a suitably aqueous blue.
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| Dryland Farming #21 |
Edward Burtynsky and Julie Cockburn @ Flowers, 21 Cork St and The
Photographers’ Gallery, 16-18 Ramilles St – Central
To 23 June (Flowers) / 1 July (Photographers)
No, that’s not a typo… both Flowers and the newly-reopened Photographers Gallery currently feature Julie Cockburn’s sassy reworkings of found images and Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky’s magisterially broad depictions of landscapes shaped by
human activity: the biggest, mostest and baddest of all things oil in Ramilles Street, Spanish dryland farming in Cork Street. The latter are part of Burtynsky’s recent switch in thematic focus from oil to water. They catch abstract earth and crop patterns with such an eerily painterly effect such that – in a neat reversal of the double-take provoked by photorealist painting – I couldn’t believe they were just photographs. They're achieved, it seems, by no more than shooting from a helicopter 2,000 feet up in dim light, and controlling the contrast.
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| Man Made Monstrous (Noesis) |
Michael Joo: Exit from the House of Being @ Blain|Southern, 21 Dering St - Central
To 30 June: www.blainsouthern.com