Ella Kruglyanskaya: how to work together @ Studio Voltaire, 1a Nelsons Row – Clapham Common
To 8 June: www.studiovoltaire.org
________________________
Fleurs du mal @ Charlie Smith, 336 Old St, 2nd Floor - Shoreditch
This show is now on tour - a few hundred yards from its The
Lion & Lamb
origins! Dolly Thompsett's choices
include two canvas-free works: Michael Boffey memorialises flowers by
casting them into a blackened bronze ‘painting’; while Neal Rock's
surprisingly hollow silicone paint construction comes across like a rubber Dale Chihuly in
the colours of a Tiepolo sky come Delft pot come tattoo. Back at oil
on canvas, GL Brierley is at the more disturbing edge of the floral, Thompsett's own intricate mash-up of Fuseli, Gainsborough
and natural history is as odd as it sounds, and Bernhardt Martin’s ejaculatory amalgam
of popping champagne is well-placed above the bar. Sex, death and alcohol - what's not to like?
Michael Riedel: Laws of Form @ David Zwirner, 24 Grafton Street - Mayfair
________________________
To 31 May: www.davidzwirner.com
 David Zwirner is well worth a visit, both for Michael Dean and Fred Sandback (who share the top floor space) and for German prankster Michael Riedel, who gets two floors to himself. He needs them, given the expansive scale of the project, originating from his running an alternative gallery in Frankfurt (2000-11) which did nothing but copy and subvert exhibitions, performances and concerts from round about, advertising itself by means of the posters from the original events and is now itself recorded in a 500 page book. 'I am not the artist producing art', says Riedel 'I am creating a system that produces art' - yet it's one which generates its own aesthetic through intention-free reproduction, reshuffling, and computer-driven mergers to find a definite sense of liberation in its restriction to the closed loop of art made by others.
_________________________
Richard Galpin: Elephant (Ten Thousand Revolutions per
Minute) @ Hales Gallery, Tea Building, 7 Bethnal Green Rd – Shoreditch
Having developed a practice in which the material status of
photos of cityscapes was emphasised to architectural effect by cutting into
them with a scalpel, Richard Galpin has now switched weapons to attack
self-sized photographs with a 10,000 rpm sander. The images are of temporary
structures and sites around Elephant & Castle, but their language proves to
be abstract painting, though you can still spy the cut-away constructivist
Galpin down the sides of the steel structure which holds the ten photographs
away from the wall like advertising hoardings. What I like best are the passages
in which it gets hard to tell what’s deterioration in the subject as shot, and
what is damage done to the photographic surface.
_________________________
About Time @ Maddox Arts, 52 Brook’s Mews – Mayfair
To 31 May: www.maddoxarts.com
Assiduous followers may recall that I recently co-curated a show called ‘It’s About Time’ (see http://paulsartworld.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/its-about-time-asc-gallery-128.html), but Laura Culpan’s choice of six artists makes something very
different from a semantically similar starting point. The highlights are
Cuban Glenda León’s Waste of Time, an hourglass overflowing to a mountainous extent; Colombian Miler Lagos’ The Rings of Time,
a 2 km roll of a year of The Times which recycles the paper back into a
log; and Paul Huxley’s magisterially muted painting which looks
abstract and maybe out of place until you see the title: Metronome.
_________________________
Nessie Stonebridge: British Birds @ Carslaw St Lukes, 137 Whitecross St - Clerkenwell
To 31 May: www.carslawstlukes.com
Moving
from London to Norfolk has led Nessie Stonebridge to an interest in
birds, which adds a lively implication of wing-blur to her essentially
abstract gestural mark-making. She pushes the avian to an entertaining
extreme by fanning her canvases out into tail-like folds, then uses
parachute cords to hold them tense. If that hints at her experience with
climbing and skydiving, ‘Fighting Her Corner and Five Hundred Lines’
revisits the punishment Stonebridge received as an awkwardly dyslexic
schoolgirl – though the memory doesn't seem to trouble a personal
chirpiness which matches the paintings’ energies.
_________________________ To 30 May: www.grosvenorgallery.com
_________________________
To 23 May: www.newartprojects.com
 New Art Projects was brimming with bearded middle-aged men when I looked at James M Barrett’s 16 portrait photographs of mostly middle-aged men, 14 of them bearded. That, I was told by bewhiskered gallerist Fred Mann, is very much the current look. The photographs have an Old Testament / Old Master heft, which Barrett explained results from obsessive eight hour Photoshop sessions on each. He overlays a colour original with multiple black-and-white versions, so that an almost complete reduction of colour is achieved through a paradoxically additive process. He then modifies every detail of his 4 gigabyte files - repositioning features to suit, repainting each hair - to achieve a rugged look at some sort of odds with the mainstream norms of plastic surgery and airbrushing. ________________________
Mona Kuhn: Acido Dorado @ Flowers Gallery, 82 Kingsland Rd - Hoxton
To 10 May: www.flowersgallery.com
_________________________
Berndnaut Smilde: Antipode @ Ronchini Gallery, 22 Dering St – off Oxford St
To 12 May: www.ronchinigallery.com
_________________________
Red Tape: Stanley Casselman, Hyo Myoung Kim + window project by Michel Platnic @ Gazelli Arthouse, 9 Dover StreetTo 4 May: www.gazelliarthouse.com  Michel Platnic: from ' Three Studies for Portrait of John Edwards', 2013 More art recycling here: Stanley Casselman takes on the myth of originality not by copying Richters, but by making ‘original imitations’ in response to a challenge by Jerry Salz, so querying what the balance might be between branded method and specific inspiration. In the windows, Michel Platnic presents himself as a moving Bacon triptych, complete with accidents of paint, so getting at the slapstick behind the angst in Bacon. And Hyo Myoung Kim devises several interesting strategies for making digital riffs on art practices, overlaying 300 Monets, liquefying Mondrian in photoshop, presenting all 900 Richter paintings very small and all at once, and playing round effectively with a scanner and lightboxes. 
To 26 April: www.pacegallery.com
Chinese artist Liang Yuanwei specialises in
paintings which originate in floral fabric patterns and end up approaching the
immediate impression of wallpaper, but with very obvious brushwork up close and
a spontaneously generated rhythm as she repeats close to the same wet on wet markings in successive horizontal
strips as she works her way down the canvas. This new stream of 11 variably
sized, coloured and constructed paintings all derive from the same fabric
pattern, and Liang has declared her intention of carrying on with that one
pattern indefinitely. I like the sounds of such an obsessive focus, though you
could say it just points up the way in which most painters carry on portraying just
the one world…
_________________________
Rachel Pimm: Plants Under Glass @ Enclave, Resolution Way –
Deptford
To 19 April: www.EnclaveProjects.com & www.rachelpimm.tumblr.com
 Still from Princesses of the Vegetable Kingdom, 2014 On-the-rise Rachel Pimm (who’ll show at Anita Zubludowicz in June) invites us into a sleek green world full of how we relate to nature, as filtered through a consideration of cultivating plants in homes and workplaces. Why can’t some hybrids be returned to the wild? What is the process of ‘greenwashing’ a company’s products? Can plants be bred to imitate artificiality? Have you ever seen 1930’s neon bulbs shaped as flowers? How many words can you think of to describe a rubber plant’s leaves? Her videos and installations pose, and sometimes answer, the questions with style…
_________________________
Camille Henrot: The Pale Fox @ Chisenhale Gallery, 64
Chisenhale Rd - Globe Town
There’s a lot to take in at New York based Parisian Camille Henrot’s Chisenhale show: no surprise when this is the installation version of the 13 minute film history of the world, which won the Silver Lion for a young artist at last year’s Venice Biennale: anthropology, Leibniz, Chinese calligraphy, modernist shelving, a gothic radiator and any amount of stuff off Ebay in an undersea-blue hall. It’s very democratic: I was rather taken by Henrot’s own sculptures but she presents them as just another aspect of the mix. A radio-controlled snake gives the attendant extra purpose as it charmingly follows you around. I emerged, to be honest, no wiser – yet strangely satisfied…
_________________________
Charles Atlas: Martha, Martha, Martha, Martha, Martha @
Vilma Gold, 6 Minerva St – Cambridge Heath
Charles
Atlas’ five screen anthology of dance snippets
against a blazing background of his favourite orange may look a little
like
Christian Marclay’s recent territory… but it was made 14 years ago.
Virtually anything, it seems, can be categorised
as dance, from ballet to calisthenics, from go-go grinding to whirling
willies;
from sliding down stairs to footage of any film character called Martha
in this
not-especially reverent tribute which - breaking down her name - teases
Graham (1894 – 1991) as the Ma Ma of dance, as well as setting
up comparisons with the ‘art’ in ‘Martha’. As a portrait, then, it’s
rather indirect,
but as entertainment its seven minutes pass fast.
_________________________
Enantiodromia @ Fold Gallery, 15 Clerkenwell Close - Farringdon
To 26th April: www.foldgallery.com
Simon Callery has spoken about how the physical
qualities of a painting involve the viewer in an encounter analogous to the
experience of being in a landscape, and that’s aided here by the absence of any
flat rectangles. Callery, Lawrence Carroll, Angela de la Cruz and Onya
McCausland all invade the gallery space to make this a painting show which you
literally have to walk around. And the land feeds directly into McCausland's
process of digging the pigment - chalk, coal, iron oxide - out of the earth for
her tensile yet balanced dual abstractions. As for that tricky title, in Jungian
terms, 'enantiodromia' refers to an excess of one thing producing its opposite:
here, I guess, the contemporary super-abundance of digital imagery has yielded
material abstraction.
_________________________
Martino Gamper: design is a state of mind & Haim
Steinbach: once again the world is flat @ the Serpentine Galleries –
Kensington
To 21 April: www.serpentinegalleries.org
Here the Serpentine makes brilliant use of its
recent acquisition of a second space: the new gallery has Martino
Gamper’s extensive anthology of modern shelving design, on which many
fascinating collections are displayed, from Richard Wentworth’s alternatives to
the spade to Carl Andre’s assistant’s collection of bricks to Daniel
Eatock’s drinking glasses which came free - as packaging. In the old space is
Haim Steinbach’s forty year retrospective. His signature move is also to present
objects on shelves – though this is a far more varied show than one might have
expected, ranging from early abstract paintings to linoleum and wallpaper to
the re-presentation of other artists’ work. Both are fascinating shows, but
what makes one ‘art’ and the other ‘design’ plus ‘collections’?
_________________________
Elisabeth Scherffig:New Works @ Faggionato, 49 Albemarle Street - CentralTo April 17: www.faggionato.com
I guess it’s a simple idea: to make literal the pasts we sense all around us by using tracing paper to layer drawings of city maps from various eras over each other. But add in a realistically drawn aerial view of how it looks now, section the results off in the style of map folds or windows, and Elisabeth Scherffig’s evocative results are too complex to unravel with any confidence. Add mind-maps in the form of delicate heads in unfired fragments porcelain on silk, and the patterns of vineyards traced on steel, and the Düsseldorf-born (1949) Milan-based (since 1970) Scherffig provides a sensitivity to history and line which is well worth exploring.
_________________________
He Xiangyu @ White Cube, Bermondsey St - Bermondsey
This plus Darren Almond’s night photos and Franz Ackermann’s cathedral
of cities in the 9x9x9 space make for a good trip to Bermondsey, not to mention
there’s an excellent show across the street at Vitrine. The young Chinese
conceptualist He Xaingyou, ranges from the one child policy (a lone egg in a
gold eggbox), Tiananmen Square (a deflated leather tank), consumerism (rocks
which look like coke as in coal turn out to be the residue of burnt coke as in
cola) and his loneliness away from home (copper casts derived from the
internalising move of feeling his mouth with his tongue, set in an a palate-pink
room). My favourite work is the smallest: a pagoda which personalises a surreal
pun by incorporating his own wisdom teeth.
To 26 April: www.modernart.net
_________________________
Francis Upritchard @ Kate MacGarry, 27 Old Nichol Street - Shoreditch To 26 April: www.katemacgarry.com
London-based New Zealander Francis Upritchard – whose husband, Martino Gamper, has an excellent show at the Serpentine – says she’s combined two types of empty vessel in her new show: her ceramic bowls and spooky-faced lampshades, and her brainless modelling clay figures. Those characters, suspended somewhere between science fiction, hippydom and the medieval, are maybe two thirds lifesize, reduce the directness of their address, albeit they’re raised on plinths so as to look us in the eye. Nor are they innocent: the harlequin sports distancing sunglasses and an erection…
_________________________
Enantiodromia @ Fold Gallery, 15 Clerkenwell Close - Farringdon
To 26th April: www.foldgallery.com
Simon Callery has spoken about how the physical
qualities of a painting involve the viewer in an encounter analogous to the
experience of being in a landscape, and that’s aided here by the absence of any
flat rectangles. Callery, Lawrence Carroll, Angela de la Cruz and Onya
McCausland all invade the gallery space to make this a painting show which you
literally have to walk around. And the land feeds directly into McCausland's
process of digging the pigment - chalk, coal, iron oxide - out of the earth for
her tensile yet balanced dual abstractions. As for that tricky title, in Jungian
terms, 'enantiodromia' refers to an excess of one thing producing its opposite:
here, I guess, the contemporary super-abundance of digital imagery has yielded
material abstraction.
Walid Raad: Preface to the first
English edition @ Anthony Reynolds Gallery,
60 Great
Marlborough St - Soho
To 5
April: www.anthonyreynolds.com
Having grown up in war-torn Libya and come to
notice with his convincing fictional research documentary of its conflicts,
Walid Raad’s current rigorous-looking and yet somehow mysterious
long-term project considers the reception of Arab art and its means of
institutional display. Starting from the plans to construct a branch of the
Louvre in Abu Dhabi, Raad also finds plenty of beauty in the three
combined elements which make up the bulk of this first British version: a wallpaper
made from overlapping images of museum vitrines; small black and white
illustrations of some of the 18,000 Islamic items in the Louvre’s collection;
and large photographs of those objects, set in coloured overgrounds based on
the peculiar irregularities of disintegrating manuscripts. A film of morphing
artifacts similarly suggests how travel, means of display and historical
context will affect these works’ reception.
_________________________
Martino Gamper: design is a state of mind & Ham
Steinbach: once again the world is flat @ the Serpentine Galleries –
Kensington
To 21 April: www.serpentinegalleries.org
Here the Serpentine makes brilliant use of its
recent acquisition of a second space: the new gallery has Martino
Gamper’s extensive anthology of modern shelving design, on which many
fascinating collections are displayed, from Richard Wentworth’s alternatives to
the spade to Carl Andre’s assistant’s collection of bricks to Daniel
Eatock’s drinking glasses which came free - as packaging. In the old space is
Ham Steinbach’s forty year retrospective. His signature move is also to present
objects on shelves – though this is a far more varied show than one might have
expected, ranging from early abstract paintings to linoleum and wallpaper to
the re-presentation of other artists’ work. Both are fascinating shows, but
what makes one ‘art’ and the other ‘design’ plus ‘collections’?
_________________________
To 4 April: www.austindesmond.com & www.richardsaltoun.com
AK Dolven:
Teenagers Lifting the Sky @ Wilkinson Gallery, 50-58 Vyner St – Cambridge Heath
To 6 April: www.wilkinsongallery.com
A striking combination of rectitude and revelation in paint
and sound: the paintings, made with oil on hammered aluminium, are barely-there
traces of white on black or vice versa, but bear eloquent traces of the
artist’s movement. The sound is the 22 minute collaboration JA as long as I can with Buddhist performer and poet
John Giorno which features just the one word repeated by both: Dolven’s Ja
is her native Norwegian, expressive and sensual, and I wasn’t surprised when
she told me she’d had her eyes closed tracking back through memories. Giorno’s Ja
is a deep and constant chant, but also affirmative in his lover’s Swiss-German.
To 28 March: www.mayorgallery.com  | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Objet Plastique No. 1024, 2013 |
The Mayor Gallery has slipped above Cork Street’s
controversial building works by moving to Ben Brown’s former space on the
first floor. The stairs are well worth climbing for a magisterial survey of
Franco-Argentinian Luis Tomasello’s career – he’s just died at 98 - since
the epiphany of noticing coloured reflections in 1958. That led to his
characteristic 3D serially geometric naturally-illuminated lightworks, the
‘Chromoplastic Atmospheres’ in which colour touches the air. He kept
experimenting, as in the Black Lights, which work instead on absorbency; and
this recent animation of maximum red via pegs of differing heights:
intensity of colour matched by intensity of enquiry.
Walid Raad: Preface to the first
English edition @ Anthony Reynolds Gallery,
60 Great
Marlborough St - Soho
To 5
April: www.anthonyreynolds.com
Having grown up in war-torn Libya and come to
notice with his convincing fictional research documentary of its conflicts,
Walid Raad’s current rigorous-looking and yet somehow mysterious
long-term project considers the reception of Arab art and its means of
institutional display. Starting from the plans to construct a branch of the
Louvre in Abu Dhabi, Raad also finds plenty of beauty in the three
combined elements which make up the bulk of this first British version: a wallpaper
made from overlapping images of museum vitrines; small black and white
illustrations of some of the 18,000 Islamic items in the Louvre’s collection;
and large photographs of those objects, set in coloured overgrounds based on
the peculiar irregularities of disintegrating manuscripts. A film of morphing
artifacts similarly suggests how travel, means of display and historical
context will affect these works’ reception.
_________________________
Martino Gamper: design is a state of mind & Ham
Steinbach: once again the world is flat @ the Serpentine Galleries –
Kensington
To 21 April: www.serpentinegalleries.org
 |
Martino Gamper with Carl Andre bricks
|
Here the Serpentine makes brilliant use of its
recent acquisition of a second space: the new gallery has Martino
Gamper’s extensive anthology of modern shelving design, on which many
fascinating collections are displayed, from Richard Wentworth’s alternatives to
the spade to Carl Andre’s assistant’s collection of bricks to Daniel
Eatock’s drinking glasses which came free - as packaging. In the old space is
Ham Steinbach’s forty year retrospective. His signature move is also to present
objects on shelves – though this is a far more varied show than one might have
expected, ranging from early abstract paintings to linoleum and wallpaper to
the re-presentation of other artists’ work. Both are fascinating shows, but
what makes one ‘art’ and the other ‘design’ plus ‘collections’?
_________________________
To 4 April: www.austindesmond.com & www.richardsaltoun.com
 |
Richard Saltoun’s Giulia Casalini pays tribute to Otto
Muehl ’s Materialaktion 3, 1964
|
The Viennese Actionists have had little recent exposure in London, and so this twin-sited show provides a welcome introduction to how, in Otto Muehl ’s 1962 words, ‘the aesthetics of the dung heap’ were made ‘the moral means against conformism, materialism and stupidity’ for him and Günter Brus, Hermann Nitsch and Rudolf Schwarzkogler. The shows are at something of a safe remove from the original visceral and bodily performances (though there is a film evening on 27 March), but we do get Nitsch’s ritualistic red drip paintings, photos of many a naked provocation by Muehl, using his body as a canvas, and his later paintings, like van Gogh on acid; and a Schwarzkogler sequence which turns a head into a still life. Given the phallic nature of refusing to hold back the master artist’s expression with petty Freudian concerns, I warmed especially to a Günter Brus photo which is all balls and no visible cock…
_________________________
AK Dolven:
Teenagers Lifting the Sky @ Wilkinson Gallery, 50-58 Vyner St – Cambridge Heath
To 6 April: www.wilkinsongallery.com
 |
| how to reach every corner, 2013 |
A striking combination of rectitude and revelation in paint
and sound: the paintings, made with oil on hammered aluminium, are barely-there
traces of white on black or vice versa, but bear eloquent traces of the
artist’s movement. The sound is the 22 minute collaboration JA as long as I can with Buddhist performer and poet
John Giorno which features just the one word repeated by both: Dolven’s Ja
is her native Norwegian, expressive and sensual, and I wasn’t surprised when
she told me she’d had her eyes closed tracking back through memories. Giorno’s Ja
is a deep and constant chant, but also affirmative in his lover’s Swiss-German.
_________________________
Fleurs du mal @ The Lion and Lamb, 46 Fanshaw St – Hoxton
To 22 March: lionandlambgallery.co.uk
 |
| Neal Rock: Inked Prosopon, 2014 |
The
Lion & Lamb
specialises in artist-curated painting shows. Dolly Thompsett's choices
include two canvas-free works: Michael Boffey memorialises flowers by
casting them into a blackened bronze ‘painting’; while Neal Rock's
silicone paint construction comes across like a rubber Dale Chihuly in
the colours of a Tiepolo sky. Back at oil
on canvas, GL Brierley is at the more disturbing edge of the floral, Thompsett's own intricate mash-up of Fuseli, Gainsborough
and natural history is as odd as it sounds, and Bernhardt Martin’s ejaculatory amalgam
of popping champagne is well-placed by the bar. Sex, death, alcohol and pub hours - what's not to like?
_________________________
Elisabeth Scherffig:New Works @ Faggionato, 49 Albemarle Street - Central
To April 11: www.faggionato.com
 |
| Bologna II, 2012 |
I guess it’s a simple idea: to make literal the pasts we sense all around us by using tracing paper to layer drawings of city maps from various eras over each other. But add in a realistically drawn aerial view of how it looks now, section the results off in the style of map folds or windows, and Elisabeth Scherffig’s evocative results are too complex to unravel with any confidence. Add mind-maps in the form of delicate heads in unfired fragments porcelain on silk, and the patterns of vineyards traced on steel, and the Düsseldorf-born (1949) Milan-based (since 1970) Scherffig provides a sensitivity to history and line which is well worth exploring.
. |
| George Condo: The Discarded Human, 2013 |
George Condo: Headspace @ Simon Lee Gallery, 12 Berkeley Street and Ink Drawings @ Skarstedt, 23 Old Bond Street
To 22 March / 5 April: www.simonleegallery.com / www.skarstedt.com
George Condo is a master of imaginatively energetic drawing which bursts
out of a defined format. As such, he’s perfectly suited to this extremely coherent
two site show: big, dark watercolour figures at Skarstedt, and brightly painted
character portraits at Simon Lee. Picasso, Gris, Bacon and Giacometti are heavy
in a psychogical cubist mix which ends up looking 100% Condo (he says he ‘uses
every artist to become me’). My favourites are the kitschily architectural heads
which make an instant impact contradicting their complexity, and a grotesquely voluptuous
nude with both a displaced head and its shadowed absence.
_________________________
Georg Baselitz: Farewell Bill @ the Gagosian Gallery, 6-24
Britannia St – Kings Cross
To 29 March: www.gagosian.com
 |
| Licht wil raum mecht hern (Lef el rial bel), 2013 - 300 x 275 cm |
The Bill in question here is de Kooning who directly
inspires the colour schemes and freedom of approach in a dozen giant
self-portrait heads in which Baselitz wears a cap labelled ‘Zero’: just the
name of his paint suppliers, but close to making a nothing out of ‘Hero’ –
himself in the context of de Kooning, perhaps? Baselitz worked across them simultaneously on
the floor of his vast studio, so the scale at such close quarters undermined
his control. Consequently, the fluid markmaking often comes close to reducing
all except the word ‘Zero’ to an abstraction – and even that is, of course,
inverted along with the heads (with one playful exception, in which I guess
being the right way up makes the logo upside down).
_________________________
Daniel Lefcourt: Cast @ Campoli Presti, 223 Cambridge Heath
Rd – Bethnal Green
To 22 March: www.campolipresti.com
This is the archetypal Campoli Presti show, i.e. work which
explores slippages between object and representation and can tend towards a monochrome
result (see Eileen Quinlan, Liz Deschenes, Scott Lyall, Olivier Mosset…). It’s
interesting, though: Lefcourt has photographed studio dust and debris in
macro-resolution, used computers to turn the result into a relief model the
size of his pretty big paintings, filled the resultant mold with paint, let it
dry, peeled it off and stuck it to canvas.
This maximally complex path to a paintinig uses only one colour, but the
effect varies according to its resultant depth, so images of sorts emerge; and
they come in pairs with slightly different production processes applied. So
what are they, objects or representations? I knew we’d be asking that…
_________________________
New Order II: British Art Today @ the Saatchi Gallery, Duke of York’s HQ, King’s Road – Sloan
Square
To 23 March: www.saatchigallery.com
 |
| Tom Gidley: Pacifist, 2012 |
_________________________
Arcana @ Kristin Hjellegjerde, 533 Old York Road - Wandsworth
To 16 March: www.artecogallery.com
 |
| Martine Poppe: Analogical Change 15 |
It’s worth a trip to Wandsworth to see this lively three woman’ show. London-based
Norwegian Martine Poppe’s most recent
work discovers an innovative way to handle the still life: painting in oil over
polyester restorations fabric with large scale photographs beneath, she uses an
expressive brush mark, but repeated to the point of unemotionality, to
half-obliterate the subject as she represents it - and with the curious effect
that the brushstrokes take primacy over the image from the side, but it’s the other
way around from the front. Plus Gemma Nelson’s enamel candy intricacy applied to
all manner of ceremonies and myths, and Amy Stephens’ harmonic plays on space,
newly infected by a residency in the Sultanate of Oman.
_________________________
Amy Stephens: Patterns in the Chaos @ William Benington
Gallery, 20 Arlington Way – Angel
To 29 March: www.williambenington.co.uk
 |
| Minke, 2103 |
Wandsworth provides a taster of Amy Stephens, but her work
benefits from separate space, with which it can interact with intimations of
the time she spends working with architects. This fuller range of Stephens’ work includes
copper tube drawings; a delicate balance of desire and control as a flocked
wood rod courses tremblingly through Perspex; collages and paintings which imagine
sculptural forms; a bronze cast of a birch branch (welded laboriously from
eight separately-cast branchlets) and a whale’s vertebrae which she found being
used as a doorstop in Iceland. Stephens says the original bone was almost as
heavy as the bronze: I love the textural contrast of inner density and outer
shine, and the synecdochical way the bone stands in for the tail.
_________________________
He Xiangyu @ White Cube, Bermondsey St - Bermondsey
This plus Darren Almond’s night photos and Franz Ackermann’s cathedral
of cities in the 9x9x9 space make for a good trip to Bermondsey, not to mention
there’s an excellent show across the street at Vitrine. The young Chinese
conceptualist He Xaingyou, ranges from the one child policy (a lone egg in a
gold eggbox), Tiananmen Square (a deflated leather tank), consumerism (rocks
which look like coke as in coal turn out to be the residue of burnt coke as in
cola) and his loneliness away from home (copper casts derived from the
internalising move of feeling his mouth with his tongue, set in an a palate-pink
room). My favourite work is the smallest: a pagoda which personalises a surreal
pun by incorporating his own wisdom teeth.
_________________________
Nina Canell: Near Here & Silke Otto-Knapp: Monday or Tuesday @ Camden Arts Centre
To 30 March: www.camdenartscentre.org
 |
| Nini Canell: Near Here (1 Microsecond), 2014 - photocopying toner, nylon, floor carpet, perspex, 1,000,000 volts during 1 microsecond |
Camden Director Jenni Lomax has a way with the double header, here a match-up of insubstantialities delicately transformed. Silke Otto-Knapp uses black watercolours on canvas, into which she paints natural and literal stage sets by removing layers so that, in her neatly paradoxical words ‘I make a mark with a view to what it’ll look like when I wash it away’. Nina Canell explores such effects as coagulating air, shredding a sock, magnetising nails into a hanging Hokey Cokey and passing 1,000,000 volts through photocopying toner on nylon. Tuesday's my answer to Silke, by the way: the Centre's closed on Mondays…
_________________________
Ryan Mosley @ Alison Jacques Gallery, 16-18 Berners St –
Fitzrovia
To 15 March: www.alisonjacquesgallery.com
Surrealism tends towards a flatly factual style, but Ryan
Mosely is absurd yet painterly, which has fewer precedents – maybe Magritte’s Période vache . Here it’s
pretty much business as usual in his world of alternative myths: fewer pipes, true,
and more birds but a stable incidence
(lots) of big beards and more of a tendency to generate slippages between the
world-be-real and the avowedly abstract, most obviously in a man composed of
multi-coloured bananas. Plus there’s a good mix between complicated set pieces
and small-scale quirkiness such as the punning morbidity of a skull on a foot
being called Dead Leg and the ambiguously-sexed
and multi-faced Duchess of Oils.
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Ariel Reichman: Who distinguishes light from dark @ Waterside
Contemporary,
2 Clunbury St – Hoxton
 |
| You see my mother, she just doesn’t know how to light a lighter, 2014 |
Tel Aviv and Berlin-based Ariel Reichman insists a on cool
white minimalist space by refusing to use the walls. But the show has a dark
heart: a narrow pitch-black room in the middle – on the outside of which are drawings,
photographs and ‘a burnt stone’ - houses Reichman
just-about operating a wind-up torch fast enough to be visible on film. Yet his mother has it tougher,
struggling for five minutes to get the knack of igniting a cigarette lighter
for the first time. A couple of hundred attempts see her essay such moves as the
wrist-hold, the shake and the multi-flick until her thumb’s distinctly dented.
Given my DIY skills I empathise. Is it just as hard to find illumination in
art?
Images courtesy the relevant artists + galleries + Jochen Littkemann (Baselitz)
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Rupert Newman: Tripping the Light Fantastic @ Cock ‘n’ Bull Gallery, 32 Rivington St – Shoreditch
To 9 March: www.cocknbullgallery.com
 |
| Three screenshots from Changing Faces |
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Beth Collar: Some Chthonic Swamp Experience @ Tintype Project
Space, 107 Essex Rd – Islington
To 8 March: www.tintypegallery.com
Here’s the artist’s hand as you may not have seen it before: not painting, but drowning in clutched despair in earth pigments on acetate wrapped around the walls. That's an awkward enough combination to ensure a cartoonish quality to the apparently flood-prescient results of Beth Collar’s in-gallery residence. In front of all this, plaster hands are mounted on rickety tripod contraptions, part branch, part real. When I collared Beth for the meaning of those, she cited the superstition attributing power to the severed hand of a hanged man if it holds a candle made from his fat. That reminded me of Morten Viskun, the Norwegian who paints using a severed hand as a brush. Yet the chthonic title is from Camille Paglia. This show could take you anywhere…
Gary Webb: X7 City @ Bloomberg Space,
To 13 March: www.bloombergspace.com
Paul Klee: Making Visible @ Tate Modern
 |
Harmony of the Northern Flora 1927 |
Back in the autumn, it seemed a little unnecessary to mention these
140-odd paintings. Now perhaps, it’s worth pointing out that it’s still on. Even if Klee
had produced only nature pictures, or oil transfers, or geometric abstractions,
he would still be significant. In fact there are a dozen paintings here which
consist of little more than squares, and their variety of mood would justify a
room of their own – but that would deny another glory of this thorough
retrospective: how each of the 17 rooms takes us forward through stylistic
modulations in the exact, carefully numbered, order of Klee’s production.
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Adam Barker-Mill: Just Noticeable Differences @ Laure Genillard, 2 Hanway Place - Tottenham Court Rd
To 8 March 2014: www.lauregenillard.com
Adam Barker-Mill’s primary set-up here has a computer programme fade up,
hold and fade down the LED lamps which illumine an inner circle and outer ring
of colours at differential speeds over a 15 minute cycle. The effect’s a sort
of mini-Turrell, but with more chromatic range. There’s also a boxier work,
through the slats in which blue light alters its intensity as you move past: a
Cruz-Diez by other means? Maybe, except that Barker-Mill has come to these
meditative colour modulations from a career as a Lighting Cameraman. Two paths
to the waterfall…
.
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Dean Hughes @ Maria Stenfors, unit 10, 21 Wren St – KX?
To 8 March: www.mariastenfors.com
 |
| Drawn Edinburgh Shapes |
Talking of male embroiderers (away with those stereotypes!) there’s plenty of intricate sewing in Dean Hughes’ first move into the application of colour. Wooden frames are hung with shapes of calico, crazed by the creases which the dying process causes in such a sensitive material - and which remain visible even after they’ve been ironed (though actually I seem to achieve a related effect with cotton!). The effect is bunting / clothes dollies / paint samples / anthologies of abstraction with a hint of seriality and a sense of potential exchange – indeed, Hughes says he found himself swapping colours around once the works were in the gallery, though he’s not encouraging visitor revisions!
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Lotte Rose Kjær
Skau: United We/I Stand Etc. @ IMT, Unit 2/210 Cambridge Heath
Road – Cambridge Heath
Internet art hits the gallery as Danish artist Lotte Rose Kjær Skau merges Camgirl with Cindy Sherman in ten versions of herself in trance to – mostly unheard – beats. Each self-invention has a digital add-on, from subtle as hair-sparkle to blatant as lightning, so by the time you factor in what Kjær Skau is wearing, where she is, what she might be hearing, how she moves, who might be looking her and how she’s chosen to embellish her image, the play of identities gets quite complex – as does the accompanying essay, channelling Laing, which IMT have meritoriously commissioned from Morgan Qaintance.
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To 22 Feb: www.lubomirov-easton.com
Sculpting in the gallery with an unusual industrial material, Frances
Richardson’s Marx-quoting title casts her – with a little irony, surely - in
the role of alienated labourer generating surplus value. But she allows the
Concrete Canvas (www.concretecanvas.com),
more typically
used to make instant shelters in areas of conflict, the starring role.
Teetering
or propped, it brings a satisfying hardness to would-be-soft forms
suggesting
drapes, a discarded sleeping bag and a deadheaded flower. And their
mixture of the abject and the sensual comes in a slate grey which sets
off the stone-coloured walls
in Lubomirov-Easton’s programmatically non-white cube.
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Anni Leppälä @ Purdy Hicks, 65 Hopton Street - Bankside
To 22 Feb: www.purdyhicks.com
 |
| Leaves II (The Couple) |
Purdy Hicks make a good job of showing the excellent Helsinki School of
photographers, such as Jorma Puranen, Ola Kolehmainen, Susanna Majuri - and Anni Leppälä. She has a persuasive way of
presenting linking aesthetics (here, dark reds and clouded reflections),
subjects (forests, streams, her copper-haired sister) and approaches (a certain
indirectness: faces but glimpsed, one thing seen through another, the past
seemingly present) to form a cloud of potential narratives which suggest how
fictions emerge from the real. Or as she puts it, ‘to enable the ‘fixed points’
of the visible to be transformed into imaginary space’. Leaves II (The Couple)
might stand for her whole practice, as the fixed points of leaves
stuck on a photograph obscure the past space of the figures beneath.
Anissa Mack: Body Copy @ Josh Lilley, 44-46 Riding House St - Fitzrovia
To 20 Feb: www.joshlilleygallery.com
 |
| Dear Victoria, 2014 - Painted aquaresin, cloves - smells good... |
This complex but instantly captivating first London solo from Brooklyn
artist Anissa Mack turns on skewed religious imagery (legs presented like holy
relics, with slots for offered coins, ‘cathedrals’ of revolving ham tins filled
with amethyst), craft traditions (quilts, arrowheads), copies and fakes (the
quilts are cast in resin, the arrowheads are just chips of flint), the
obliquely personal (applying of her own freckle pattern to a photographed mannequin)
and how memories can degrade (the cast quilts are at one remove, but the
remnants of that process are then cast in pewter). What’s more, you get to carry
an artwork around as you go – which, as you’ll gather, you should...
Neil Zakiewicz: MDF Paintings @
Divus London, Enclave 5, 50 Resolution Way – Deptford
+blog.jpg)
Deptford’s five Enclave galleries, yards from Deptford station and so six
minutes from London Bridge, are well worth a February visit. Sculptor Neil
Zakiewicz has had furniture manufacturers make painting-cabinet hybrids which
neatly demonstrate the logic of their own making: spray-painted through their own
holes when folded up, then unfolded and hung so that gravity determines the
exhibited look – which is itself provisional, as rotation would change their
form as well as their orientation. Painting as a flatpacked game of
consequences.
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Adham Faramway: HYRDA @ Cell Project Space, 288 Cambridge Heath Rd –
Cambridge Heath
This ambitious installation by the in-demand recent
RA graduate posits water as a luxury product justifying conspicuous consumption.
Flat screens present hyper-hued and ripple-distorted drinking, washing and mud-masked
wrestling action to the sort of new age soundtrack you’d expect in a spa – only
Faramway’s sleek and many-headed manipulations of largely faked hydration
suggest that technology is cleansing the intimacy from our lives. How does that
relate to the abstract configurations of chunky cube spills, set on beds of
colour-shifting light? Good question, do they spell out logos? Either way, I like them, too…
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Josh Blackwell: Never Uses @ Kate MacGarry, Old Nichol St - Shoreditch
To 22 Feb: www.katemacgarry.com
 |
| Plastic Basket (Man O War), 2014 |
Biggs & Collings @ Vigo, Dering St - Central
 |
| Living Creature |
You know the score: Biggs the mosaicist lays down the ground, Collings the acid critic turned compliant husband fills it in. Whatever she say, goes on. Titles all from Genesis. They could be landscapes, but why, when it’s all about the marks? A couple of years ago, they seemed a bit inert. Suddenly, the whole hoopla loosens up and sort of soars. Less strict with the diamonds. More variably sized, and airy, heavy, wavy, scraped, translucent, scumbled. As if they’ve suddenly seen what rules are for. To tee up transgressions. Blimey! It’s OK.
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Magali Reus: In Lukes and Dregs @ The approach, 1st Floor, 47 Approach Road -
Bethnal Green
Bethnal Green
To 16 Feb: www.theapproach.co.uk
 |
| Dregs (Flash Batch), 2013 - Hand hammered and powder coated aluminium, mirror polished aluminium, sand blasted aluminium, snake-eye security nuts and bolts, laser cut and powder coated aluminium, rubber dipped burnt pizzas, cotton |
Magali Reus seems to have turned a vandalised kitchen showroom into a scarred
city: fridges play the part of tower blocks or maybe people, their open fronts (hence the lukewarmness of 'lukes')
providing
glimpses into lives in which takeaway food (and its 'dregs') seems to
loom large; stains spread; a touch of rioting is flagged by burned
pizzas; waste products are flushed away by pipes in the runnels left
around a
raised rubber-mat surface the Anglo-Dutch artist has installed over The
approach’s
wooden floor. None of this is appropriated, however: all is manufactured
to a faultless powder coated finish. We’re used to the abject being valued as sculpture: here Reus fetishises that aesthetic.
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Matter & Memory @ Alison Jacques, 16-18 Berners St - Fitzrovia
To 15 Feb: www.alisonjacquesgallery.com
 |
Philomene Pirecki: White Wall, Alison Jacques gallery (15:58, 16:03, 16:04, 16:02, 16:01 / daylight, 19-12-13), 2014
Machine mixed emulsion paint, emulsion and acrylic paint, C-type matt photograph, PhotoRag photograph
|
If this show did no more than provide a bigger stage for the stream of
work Philomene Pirecki showed at Supplement last year, that would be plenty.
She does indeed reprise one of her paintings which makes a near-abstraction of
the word ‘grey’ out of its component colours, and shuffles once more between
photographing the space, painting the space, and photographing her painting of
the space. Yet Pirecki’s just one of seven artists exploring ‘the
self-reflexive business of perception’, and it’s also good to see the results
of N. Dash’s cloth-stroking performances, Helen Barff’s felt-wrapped stones Charlotte
Posenenske’s modular version of ventilation units, even if I don’t fully
understand how they’re ‘inherently self-reflexive’.
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Uliana Apatina: Red Room @ Herrick Gallery, 1 French Place – Shoreditch
To 9 Feb (open 4-7 pm – it needs some darkness): www.herrickgallery.com
There are at least five ways to look at young Siberian artist Uliana Apatina’s simple yet rich installation of bath, light and salt in this one room gallery. Formally: what merges into red light from without proves to consist of pink, cerise and amber fluorescence, denying any straightforward red. Symbolically: is that salt as in the bible? Referentially: Dan Flavin meets Miroslav Balka… Biographically: suppose Apatina dreams of diving into salt, and grew up in a cramped flat with a photographer father who used the bathroom as a ‘darkroom’, the Russian for which literally translates as ‘red room’. Or, of course, personally: what does the strange scene trigger for you?
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Andrew Esiebo: Pride @ Tiwani Contemporary, 16 Little Portland Street - Fitzrovia
To 8 Feb: www.tiwani.co.uk
 |
| The Barbers Abidjan |
Nigerian photographer Andrew Esiebo presents men’s barbershops from
eight African cities, slyly equating the cutting of hair with the making of art
and the selection of a hairstyle with the forging of an artistic identity. Esiebo’s
lively images are far from typographic,
yet the shops’ retro-styling looks decidedly consistent: are there, I asked him,
subtle differences between nations? He thought not, seeing evidence of
underlying continental unity – along with a pride in hair – rather than as a
stage for diversity. One shop is recreated on site, allowing you to walk into
the photographs and pose as a customer…though I should warn those due a cut
that no barber is actually present.