WOMEN IN CHARGE IN APRIL

  

Lora Hristova: Self-Portrait (Money Shot)

There seems to be a lot of assertive female sexuality around at the moment: see Dorothy Iannone and Celia Hampton below, plus there's still just time to catch Lora Hristova's deconstructions of pornographic texts at the Zabludowitz Collection (to 7 April - failing that, look at her splendidly organised research site at www.oral-malkin.tumblr.com    ). She says of the above that she's 'referencing the pose at the climax of most pornographic films, in which the woman's face is presented to be ejaculated on. I like the theory that it's the visual representation of the invisible female orgasm, or rather a substitute for it, which offers undeniable evidence of enjoyment'.. and yet 'the facial expression is much more aggressive and confrontational than most porn, which undermines any alluring aspects'. But let's begin with what may be the ultimate blast of colour, followed by people as letters...

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Peter Halley: Paintings 2012-2013 at Waddington Custot, 11 Cork St - Central

11 Apr — 3 May (talk 11 May): www.waddingtoncustot.com

    

Bang Goes the Theory

25 years ago New York artist Peter Halley (rhymes with ‘valley’) decided  ‘that space we live in is defined by compartments connected by predetermined pathways’. He hit on a way to represent that: a combination of cool geometry and hot paint which politicised the minimalist square by making it stand for the prison cell to produce what Halley again thinks of ‘as a conversation between being connected and not being connected’. Those meanings remain relevant, but I suspect they’ve been in play so long that people judge the paintings mainly as abstracts which burn off the wall with Day-Glo light and Roll-a-Tex surfaces. These new ones, titled from TV show phrases which are differently infected by the paintings, look strong either way. All in two separate peice, incidentally... but why?

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Karina Bisch: La Moderne @ Hilary Crisp, 33 White Church Lane – Whitechapel

To 13 April: www.hilarycrisp.com    

French artist Karina Bisch, who conjoins fashion, dance and 20th century art history, condenses plenty into this small show. Centre stage is a 3 x Bisch-sized dress made up of canvases riffing on such as Matisse and Delaunay. On the wall, with matching illogicality, is a silk scarf which would suit a much bigger giant. On it, dancers make up the letters of ‘La Moderne’ through their poses, set against batik-like swirls of dropped ink. The spirit is caught in a collaborative interview with fashion artist Julie Verhoeven, in which Bisch’s answers have been spliced to make some kind of poetry: to balance exuberance, warmth and mayonnaise, I put it on my hair…

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Double Dutch: Bas Jan Ader, Stanley Brouwn and Ger van Elk @ Richard Saltoun, 111 Great Titchfield Street - Fitzrovia

To 10 May: www.richardsaltoun.com
 

Ger van Elk: detail from The Co-Founder of the Word O.K. - Hollywood, 1971

Richard Saltoun has taken over the ground floor of the former David Roberts space, and this agreeably contradictorily-titled show provides a chance to sample the sly wit of three renowned Dutch conceptualists' 60's - 80's work. It's all worth a look, but here van Elk poses with a framed letter in Hollywood to indicate that he - or maybe his work – is okay (odd how that's good for a person, but faint praise for an artwork). Apparently 'one source for the word OK comes from the nickname of US President Martin van Buren, known as Old Kinderhook. Van Buren, like Van Elk, a Dutchman living in the USA, adopted the political slogan Vote for O.K. for the 1840 presidential election. He lost the election'. 

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Barocci: Brilliance and Grace @ The National Gallery

To 19 May:  www.nationalgallery.org.uk  

    

Head study for St John the Evangelist

Critics have been raving about just how good is the little-known 16th century Urbino painter Federico Barocci (say 'Barotchi') and they're right: he's a draughtsman of genius, a dynamic and innovative iconographer of the Christian set pieces and a brilliant colourist (particularly  in blending facial highlights with such combinations as cream, pink and grey glazes). He left 1,500 preparatory works, enabling this show to present how drawings and oil sketches feed into the final painting in the most persuasive manner I've ever seen. Just go!

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Dorothy Iannone: Innocent and Aware & Serena Korda: Aping the Beast @ Camden Arts Centre - Finchley Rd

To 5 May: www.camdenartscentre.org 

Dorothy Iannone: The Next Great Moment in History is Ours, 1970

This neat match-up between Teuto-American DoROTHy Iannone’s hippyish 60s-originating assertive search for love and London newcomer Serena Korda’s edge-of-spoof animal interactions might be taken to show that if art was the new religion, film is the new paganism. Iannone’s urgently desirous video installations and  acrylic drawings of couples with disembodied genitals pop up often enough, but this is her first British solo show. Over forty years she's proselytised, too endearingly to shock, for us all to search out the sort of erotic intensity she found with her muse, Dieter Roth… whose diaries, incidentally, will be shown at Camden in May.

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Celia Hempton: Cur @ Southard Reid, 7 Royalty Mews - Soho

To 27 April: www.southardreid.com  

Bear

Celia Hempton applies landscape principles to the male (for a change) as well as female nude at Southard Reid's pleasant new Soho Mews space - using wall painting and freestanding geometrical components to extend a practice dynamised by the performative context of close relationships with her models, and by how the manner threatens to contradict the content. This could be seen as part of Peakes in the ascendant just now: there's a Mervyn Peake show at Eltham Collage; his daughter-in-law, Phyllida Barlow, has a display at the Contemporary Art Society; her daughter, Florence Peake, is at Tintype; her son, Eddie Peake, is at White Cube Bermondsey... and Celia, who features him in some paintings, is Eddie's partner.

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Stefana McClure: science is FICTION @ Bartha Contemporary, 25 Margaret Street –  Fitzrovia

To 11 May: www.barthacontemporary.com

Hinotori 1-9: dialogue to manga by Osamu Tezuka

Stefana McClure, a New York based artist who's lived in Japan, has a way of processing time into intimately poised minimalism which just suits Bartha Contemporary's new Fitzrovia venue. She's best known for wax paper works in which she overlays drawings of the complete subtitles of a film to form a concentrated and evocative blur. Here she applies that approach to 23 of Jean Painlevé's explorations of natural science, and extends it to Japanese manga comics, building up the text elements from Osuma Tezuka's 9 volume science fiction odyssey to produce a more all-over form of concentrated dialogue. It's as if we might be able to read not just the ghost of a narrative but also some Chomskian structure behind the accumulation of characters .

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Nathaniel Rackowe: Reflections on Space @ Bischoff/Weiss, 14a Hay Hill – Mayfair

To 4 May: www.bischoffweiss.com    

GP5

Fresh from major public installations and a piece for New York Fashion week which used £30,000 of materials and was in place for an hour, Nathaniel Rackowe – who has consistently worked with light – takes a more intimate turn here.  His Neon Line Pieces highlight the less strident side of neon in its raw red state as it fades to glass, while phosphor-coloured elements pulse sequentially in white. His Glass Pieces look somewhat like bathroom cabinets, and rather neatly play coloured wires off against tremblingly-painted lines in a context of mirror, wood and light.  Feels like too much emotion to shave in with comfort, but then Rackowe does sport a beard… 

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Jeremy Cooper et al: Postcard Narratives @ ROOM, 30 Manchester Street - near Baker St

4-27 April: www.roomartspace.co.uk

Leavers

In this unusual exhibition, Jeremy Cooper - insider track author of a book on YBA's at 50 - presents a cornucopia relating to his other recent book on artists' postcards. Here, for example, is his presentation of 169 'leavers' from Harrow School where his father taught. They are photographs given to friends or to those who taught the boy: these are given to Cooper himself or his father. That's just one corner of the show which also incorporates several artists, including Frances Richardson, Tracey Emin, Georgie Hopton and Julie Cockburn, invited to make artistic use of Cooper's huge collection. Possibly Daniel Eatock's pseudo-LeWittian deconstruction of the lines on a plain postcard is the highlight...

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David Nash at Kew Gardens 

To 14 April: www.kew.org/visit-kew-gardens/whats-on/david-nash 

    

Black Butt

Last chance to catch results of the Blaenau Ffestiniog sculptor inhabiting the 14,000 tree landscape at Kew. He has "quarried" (such is the intensity of the process) one large oak in situ and has extensive shows is in the Shirley Sherwood Gallery of botanical art and the temperate house as well as scattered around the grounds. Most, of course, is in wood, Nash's signature material, but he has been casting in bronze over the past decade - to illusory effect -  in order to improve durability and that's the case with this massive 18-section cast from a scorched elm. It does cost £16 to get in, but if you're going to visit Kew, now's the time...

Murmur (video still)

I would have featured Kirk Palmer's triptych of landscape meditations on the nuclear bombing of Japan (Murmur, 2006; Hiroshima, 2007; War's End: An Island of Remembrance, 2012 - to 13 April) at Paradise Row, but have nothing to add to the following in the excellent Photomonitor:

www.photomonitor.co.uk/2013/03/trauma-and-memory-in-the-works-of-kirk-palmer/

Images courtesy the relevant galleries and artists and Christoph Seibt Collection Contemporary Art (McClure)