Leila Jeffreys: Wild Cockatoos @ Purdy Hicks, 65 Hopton Street - Bankside
To 10 Jan: www.purdyhicks.com
You might expect a species by species account of bird families to yield a
Becher-style objective typology, but Leila Jeffreys admires photographers who
capture emotion, and it shows: her spectacular bigger-than-life portraits of
the Cacatuidae come with her stories of the individuals, and spark with a life
attributable to her patient methods. She introduces carefully selected cockies
over several hours into a sympathetically prepared mobile studio, and talks to
them continuously – exciting ‘Pete’ so much that his crest almost engulfs his
face. Owls - in a separte room - require a different approach,
and Jefferys has the complexities of bower birds in mind as one future possibility. A
neat compare and contrast is with Hiroshi Sugimoto’s immersive photographs of museum
dioramas at Pace…
João Onofre: Tacet @ Marlborough Contemporary, 6 Albemarle Street - Central
To Jan 10: www.marlboroughcontemporary.com
João Onofre likes to generate music from paradoxical nojunctions, and thid show centres on a performance of the notorious 4’33’’, for which John Cage's only instruction is 'tacet' - it is silent. Ambient sounds are a large part of Cage's point, but here they come from the piano and with some spectacle as the pianist sets it alight. Other works with a strong sense of time passing complete show: the seasonal medium of a haiku embossed on the Portuguese parliament; wind chimes tuned to the notes D.E.A.D. in reference to a 1968 Bruce Nauman piece; and a large aquatint,in which binary code for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, takes on a calendar-like formation.
Elina Brotherus:12 ans
après @ Wapping Project, Mallett, Ely House, 37 Dover St
To 19 Dec: www.thewappingprojectbankside.com
The Wapping Project, having relocated impressively to the
top of Ely House in Mayfair, shows selections from two linked series of work by
the Elina Brotherus, a photographer who splits her time between her native
Finland and France. The first series (Suite
françaises, 1999) documents her residency in Chalon-sur-Saône, aged 27, and
includes the post-it slips from her efforts to learn French. She loves to play
with reflections and the part-hidden, and the way her face is covered by the
word ‘Le Reflet’ typifies that. In 12 ans
après, 2014, Brotherus has returned to the school where she studied,
looking back at 40 in a sort of time travel experiment with a strong undertow
of melancholy – but also of wit, repurposing the post-it notes, and beauty:
concentrating on landscapes and interiors, her eye for colour is clear through
the necessarily deliberate means of her heavy and old-fashioned tripod-mounted
camera.
_______________________
Jonathan Parsons @ New Art Projects, 17 Riding House Street - Fitzrovia
To 22 Dec: www.newartprojects.com
Jonathan Parsons’ ever-evolving colour and process experiments generate alluring
aesthetics. Break of Day is perhaps the most complex: Parsons has let white paint cascade down
a grid of canvasses on a grey ground which causes the edges to blend seamlessly
with their shadow on the wall. You can still see the raw white in the top strip
and the intersticial traces, but most of that casual dripping has been
painstakingly painted over in sequenced sets of primary colours. Most of the show plays related gamesis on circular panels of
birchwood, blending chance, deliberation and colour
theory to draw the viewer into the mildly paradoxical pleasure of decoding narratives in abstraction.
_______________________ Ben Nicholson @ Richard Green, 33 New Bond St & Francesca Simon: Site Lines @ Beardsmore Gallery, 23-24 Prince of Wales Road - Kentish Town
To 19 Dec (Nicholson) www.richardgreen.com /
20 Dec (Simon) www.beardsmoregallery.com
If
you savour the prospect of nine superb Ben Nicholson paintings spanning
forty years of shifting angles on the organic geometry of landscape -
and why
wouldn't you? – then I also recommend Francesca Simon's show. She
applies a
related language to a modern urban setting: the elegant, largely muted,
layered
and scraped back gesso and acrylic surfaces in the neatly punning Site
Lines
are all derived from her studio's view out over the ongoing construction
of Crossrail.
That's made clear by the accompanying photographs, in which you can
identify
the double girder crane source of the comparatively strident yellow
which
animates most of the works. Moreover, you can see the ghosts of previous
compositions - like those of previous buildings – where the top
surface is slightly
raised. If you need to deal in the odd thousand rather than hundreds or
millions, then a Simon may appeal. Having said which, I rather like the
eccentrically vertical and voluptuous negatively articulated goblet
above, which at £85,000 is 5-10% of the price of a top-valued example.
_______________________
David Hammons @
White Cube, Mason’s Yard – Central
To 3 Jan 2015
________________
Gerhard Richter: @ Marian Goodman Gallery, 5-8 Lower John St – Central
Enough new foreign
galleries are opening in Mayfair that one might get blasé… but
Marian Goodman’s is heroically scaled, and kicks off with a refreshing account
of Richter’s recent work: not the auction-friendly strands of scraped abstracts
or blurred photo-realism, but...
* a seven-pane glass sculpture;
* eight of the rigorously
self-deconstructing photo-derived ‘Strip’ versions of his own painting, the
biggest ten metres wide;
* nine explorations of the grey monochrome, with oil on
board, oil on glass and enamel behind glass showing their different effects;
* eleven ‘Flow' paintings – multi-coloured pools of paint, its movement stilled by being trapped beneath glass;
* a particularly good set of 17 small oil on photograph works; and
* four colour-square works, cheekily installed to hint at the even grander space in which Richter
has employed the motif in stained glass. This Adjaye-designed gallery isn’t quite Cologne
Cathedral, but is closer than most...
 Flow 933-3, 2013 | Artie Vierkant: Antoine Office, Antoine Casual @ Carl Kostyál, 12a Savile Row – Central
To 4 Jan: www.kostyal.com/london
 New York based Artie Vierkant is among the best-known of the young artists explicitly working with the influence of the Internet. His second London solo show – in Carl Kostyál's contrasting wood-panelled space - constructs ‘Antoine’ in office and leisure dress, then animates him, via stock motion capture data, through a succession of short extracts from the body movements of others. Until you know that, it's hard to pin down what’s odd about Antoine's movements. On the wall are grey near-abstracts which turn out to be flat files of the clothing maps used to clad the digital Antoines - and all within the constraints of patents licensed by Vierkant in order to make intellectual property one of the work's materials. The data, it might be said, also comes in formal and casual modes, and the result has the sci-fi feel of a time in which we might borrow bodies as easily as clothes. 
_________________________
______________________
To
14 Dec: www.cryptgallery.org.uk
The extensive crypt under
St Pancras Church holds an overview of the fascinatingly eccentric Belgian
artist Koen Vanmechelen. Over two decades and 18 generations, he’s been breeding
gallus gallus as a rigourously
structured analogy for human society: the aim is to demonstrate the benefits of
diversity by successively combining national characteristics to produce the
ultimate ‘Cosmopolitan Chicken’. Often, he includes live chickens in
installations, but here we have a Himalayan jungle and a pond recreating the
natural environments from which they have become the most transformed of
animals; giant photographs and stuffed chickens demonstrating the breeding
programme; Vanmechelen eating chicken; sculptures out of glass eggs - and
chickens in conversation, presumably about how they become art.
Pedro Cabrita Reis: The London Angles @ Sprovieri, 23 Heddon Street - CentralTo 6 Dec: www.sprovieri.com
As a collateral event, having represented Portugal officially in 2003, Pedro Cabrita Reis made one of the best installations of the last Venice Biennale. He's been little shown in London, though, making this a welcome chance to see his typical constructions of architectural elements and integrated light, playing with the experience and energies of viewing in space. There are also newer streams of work: sculptures which play off the columns of Sprovirei’s main gallery to create – in the subsidiary room - the eponymous ‘London Angles’, in which the object is light and its apparent shadow an object; and monochrome paintings which deflect attention to their architectural framing, the inside of which turns out to be the most painterly element. It’s all beautifully judged.
To 30 Nov: www.ravenrow.org
_______________________
Sarah Adams @ The Maas Gallery,15 A Clifford Street - Central
To 23 Nov (Secunda) http://www.jessicacarlisle.
29 Nov (Adams) www.maasgallery.co.uk
Rocks
may be slow-moving, but you’ll have to act
fast to catch these two short-run geologically-tinged shows in spaces
somewhat
off the usual contemporary beat. Piers Secunda’s images of the heroic
age of
oil exploration – made with oil from the relevant source on industrial
floor
paint, which is itself a related product – merge conceptual rigour and
still-relevant history. The Maas Gallery's only living artist
specialises with Morandi-like concsistency, on rocks and caves around
the
Cornish coast. The tide coming in, for example, would be a seismic
shift, yet her own ongoing excitement comes across in this latest
sell-out show. A repeated wet on
dry process allows for a layered spontaneity which parallels the
geological
processes being depicted, and calls to mind abstraction and Lyonel
Feininger as well
as the 19th century romantic tradition.
|
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_______________________
...and the stage darkens (or this voice is a big whale) @ Laure Genillard, 2 Hanway Place - Tottenham Court Rd
To 22 Nov: www.lglondon.org
 |
| Franz Walther lithograph, 1974 |
Seven artists on proprioception
immediately sounds like a great idea to me. I’m not
sure, having said that, this show delivers the premise – we’re never
disoriented – but it is by turns seminal, funny and hypnotic. Seminal: a
portfolio by Franz Erhard Walther, the 75 year old German who preceded
Franz
West and Bruce Nauman into the body zone. Funny: Ryan Gander sets a lion
to
play in an open cube by Sol Lewitt;
Laure Provost installs a video face down to the floor, and wishes in her
OTT
French accent that ‘the work was deeper’:.. Hypnotic: the way Haroon
Mirza’s
triple stack of would-be-banal videos of a Tesco filmed from a car at
night interact. A copper wire picks up the
fluctuations in the lower scene, turns them into a fuzzing signal on
screen
two, which drives the flickering Tesco sign at the top. The off-kilter
process put me in mind of the store's profit mis-statements, but then I
am an accountant. The
title is from Peter Shaffer's ‘Black Comedy’, in whihc the audience
sees the actors when they act as in darkness, and is in total darkness
when the actors can see...
 |
| Laure Prouvost |
_______________________
Paul Nash: Watercolours 1920-46 @ Piano Nobile, 129 Portland Road - Holland Park
To 22 Nov: www.piano-nobile.com
 |
| Ruined Country: Old Battlefield, Vimy, near La Folle Wood , 1917-18 |
Paul Nash has no rival as an artist who captured both world wars, and there’s no doubt about what his art owes to the experience of conflict. Yet the landscape, modernised and psychologised (wounded ground, erotic trees) is what drives Nash’s uniquely persuasive combination of English and modern, and what better way to show that than through the immediacy of his watercolours? Piano Nobile has somehow gathered 35 of the highest quality, and commissioned David Boyd Hancock to write the exemplary catalogue. Quite possibly the best value show in London: £50,000 would secure you what I suspect is the passing fad of a David Ostrowski, or the perky ambiguities of ‘Comment on Leda’, 1935…
 |
| Comment on Leda, 1935 |
_______________________
Justin Adian: Strangers @ Skarstedt Gallery, 23 Old Bond Street - Central
To Nov 22: www.skarstedt.com
 |
Bellini, 2014 oil enamel and spray paint on ester foam and canvas
|
American
artist Justin Adian’s first UK exhibition
is in line with current trends in deconstructing painting (yet again! –
see, e.g.
the 12 strong 'Beware Wet Paint!' at the ICA). His bulging, shaped,
glossy canvases
– often combines – go halfway to sculpture in their anti-traditional
form. Add
in his titles, though, and they turn out to have more figurative origins
than
you’d have thought, pricking the
seriousness with which, say, Mondrian and Malevich are regarded.
‘Bikini’, 'Baffle' and the creased but intact 'Never Break' are among
the knock-about titles. The jokes are consistent with the material: the
canvas
is wrapped around the sort of foam in which paintings are normally
transported
– so they are in a way the packaging of art moved inside to masquerade
as art.
______________________
Celia Hempton: Chat Random @ Southard Reid, 7 Royalty Mews (off Dean St) - Soho
To 22 Nov: www.southardreid.com
 |
| Aldo and Jesi, Albania, 16th-august 2014 |
_______________________
London is having a something of a Japanese moment: Yoshimoto Nara at the Dairy and Shinro Ohtake
at Parasol unit probably need little introduction, but there’s also Aiko
Miyanaga at the newly opened Japanese-run White Rainbow, and, at Berloni, the fruit of Carl Randall’s ten
years of living in Tokyo.
Carl Randall’s practice all stems from observation of
people, but leads to very varied results from individual portraits (sometimes
knowingly kitsch) to orientally-styled ink drawings to storyboard triptychs
putting faces into their life contexts to the combination of many individuals
into serried and meticulous multi-portraits which suggest isolation in the
midst of overcrowding. Those last are Randall’s signature and strongest works,
along with a grid of 68 instant hand-sized sketches by which he notes
characters seen on the underground.
Aiko Miyanaga - Strata: Origins @ White Rainbow, 47 Mortimer
St – Fitzrovia
AIko
Miyanaga’s interest in origins, in whether one can pin
down the decisive moment at which one thing becomes another, feeds into
some
gently impressive work for White Rainbow’s inaugural show. Items -
notably keys set to unlock the knowledge in resin books - are cast in
the volatile compound of naphthalene, better known from moth balls,
which
evaporates and resolidifies according to conditions. That leads to frost
the
glass of enclosed items. In the back room is a subtle in which you can -
no, really - hear the sound of ceramic pots.  |
| Soramimimisora |
______________________
Carl Randall:
Shōzō / 肖像 @ Berloni, 63 Margaret St – Fitzrovia
To 15 Nov: www.berlonigallery.com |
| Tokyo Portrait 2, 2011 |
Andrea Büttner @ Hollybush Gardens, 1–2 Warner Yard - Clerkenwell
To 15 Nov: http://hollybushgardens.co.uk
 |
| Installation view with moss |
 |
| Ramp |
_______________________
Mel Bochner: GOING OUT OF BUSINESS! (and other recent paintings on velvet) @ Simon Lee Gallery, 12 Berkeley Street - Central
Mark Hagen: A Parliament of some things @ Almine Rech Gallery, 11 Savile Row, 1st Floor - Central
To 14 Nov (Bochner) / 18 Nov (Hagen)
 |
| Mel Bochner: Chuckle, 2013 |
These shows both reach apparently painterly ends
by ingenious mechanical means. Simon Lee has a good range (in colour, size, emotional
content, and mood) of Mel Bochner's long running series of Thesaurus paintings.
All are on velvet, which Bochner says is the textile most able, unprimed, to hold
up paint. He puts large quantities into acetate
templates of the phrases he has selected, then a hydraulic press is used to
force it smeary-sculpturally onto the surface. Mark Hagen pushes black and
white paint through rough burlap onto various textured surfaces such as packing
tape and cut tiles, peels off the result, and reattaches it in reverse. The
results are shown in customised frames and alongside modular sculptures, both
of which take on rainbow colours from the anodisation of Diet Coke. The results,
for both Bochner and Hagen, are much more alluring than the methods would lead
you to expect.
 |
| Mark Hagen installation _______________________ |
Martine Poppe: Anatidaephobia @ Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, 533 Old York Road - Wandsworth
To 16 Nov: www.kristinhjellegjerde.com
 |
| Martine Poppe at the private view |
London-based
Norwegian
Martine Poppe disguises and
half reveals the object represented as the viewer moves around her
paintings. Inspired during a Greek holiday by a list of imaginary
phobias, one being
fear of ducks, Poppe has applied her method to beach scenes in which
she tracks
between the view as experienced, its photographic
representation ( several complete with 'bloopers' such as her finger over the
lens or her own shadow), those photographs as the material for sculptures
of boats, and her painted version of the photographs. The results are
satisfying both for the complexity of investigation of different levels of
remove from reality, and for the what the press release calls the 'signature
soft opalescent fracture' of the painted surfaces.
 |
| Analogical change #30 (Pool), 2014 |
_______________________
To 10 Nov (Vigo) / 28 Nov (Lilley)
 |
| Kathleen Ryan's glazed ceramic and epoxy putty over steel stair rail |
Control Lapse consists of cast objects, the title indicating that the nine artists chosen - largely American - allow processes to develop their own logic. The standard is high: this is the first London show for Scott Niall Macdonald's clinically surreal combinations of objects cast into white plaster purity. Ruairiadh O'Connell combines security railings with casts of net curtains caught up in them in a stand-off of privacies, linking neatly to Kathleen Ryan's ceramic cast over a railing, which takes on an angularly animated pose. An obvious missing artist is Nika Neelova... But no problem: her latest castings, silicon rubber versions of the packaging from her own discarded sculptures, so refocusing onto her own practice her way of trapping the past in the present, are one of several highlights in the excellent 'Brand New Second Hand' at Vigo. I could also mention Matthew Barney's decidedly high end castings in zinc, gold and silver at Sadie Coles, which include examples of the 'water casting' process whereby molten metal is poured directly into water.
 |
| Nika Neelova 2011-2014 (the practice of conscious dying), 2014 |
John McAllister: stellar crush the sea @ Carl Freedman
Gallery, 29 Charlotte Rd & Nogah
Engler and Ori Gersht: On Reflection
@ Mummery + Schnelle, 44A Charlotte Rd - Shoreditch
To 8 Nov - www.carlfreedman.com / 29 Nov - www.mummeryschnelle.com
 |
John McAllister: botanic ocean, 2014 |
There
are four reasons to visit Charlotte Road now. On one side, John
McAllister’s hotly-coloured paintings play with pattern, borders and
pictures within pictures as he luxuriates in gardens like an American
Bonnard (it's also worth checking the prints and collage downstairs). On
the other, husband and wife Ori Gersht and Nogah Engler team up to turn
buttterflies into Venetian masks in a wing-light adjunct to their
separate practices - as well as showing her painterly fracturing of
memory in landscape, his photographic fragmentation of apparent flowers
in mirrors.
 |
Nogah Engler & Ori Gersht: Virgin Parade 02, 2014 |
What Marcel Duchamp Taught Me @ The Fine Art Society, 148 New Bond Street - Central
To 5 Nov: www.faslondon.com
 |
| Annie Kevans: Marcel Duchamp as Rrose Selavy, 2014 |
The oldest commercial Gallery space in London commemorates 100 years since Duchamp's first ready-made with a riot of a show: over 50 artists on all five floors provide thoughts on the great enigma as well as work inspired by him, plus you can take a knockabout guided headset tour of the building's history. It's uneven, but all entertaining, and among the many highlights are Juliette Losq's take on Étant donnés, Alistair Mackie's forest and cuttlebones, Alex Seton's marble Glory Hole and Cedric Chritsie's branding of the stairwells. Among the artists' comments I was struck by David Mach ('Duchamp didn't just move the goalposts, he obliterated the pitch') and David Shrigley quoting Bruce McLean: 'all the best artists piss about. Duchamp was brilliant at pissing about.'
 |
| Michael Craig Martin: Art and Design, 1917, 2013 |
______________________
Paolo Scheggi @ Robilant +
Voena, 38 Dover St
To 4 Nov
 |
| Rosso, 1962 |
Italian art from the sixties is very much the
current market darling, and you can see beautifully installed evidence of that
at the new Mazzoleni and Dominque Levy galleries, and a little known stream of
Boetti at Lexington Dayan. Yet the must-see show in this zone is Robilant +
Voena’s account of Paolo Scheggi, which does for him what the same gallery did
for Augusto Bonalumi last year: big range, first British showing of a walk-in
installation, scholarly catalogue of some heft. Scheggi died of heart disease at
just 31, having made only 300 mature works, so more tyan 10% of it is here, making
this the perfect chance to decide whether its combination of layering,
puncturing and intense monochrome colouring amounts to a radical combination of
Arp and Mondrian, or just a conversion of Fontana, Dadamaino and Klein’s
insights to handsome design.
 |
| Intercamera Plastica, 1967 |
______________________
To 25 Oct (Curry) / 15 March 2015 (Tang) : www.vitrinegallery.co.uk
 |
| Blue Curry: details from 'Souvenir' |
Vitrine runs parallel programmes in the gallery (Jonathan Bladock's lively orifice-themed soft sculptures at present) and - round the clock - on nearby Bermondsey Square. The latter currently features an inspired pairing which works especially well by night. From a distance it looks as if some sort of blobby monster has just emerged from a sea littered with distant ships. Get close and the monster is revealed as Karen Tang’s colourful firebreglass sci-fi meets Franz West sculpture. The sea is in an aquamarine window frontage, and each of the dozen ships is actually four identical combs, the quartets alternating between those of one colour (monocombs, I suppose) and those of many. A Brazilian sensibility, I’d say, informs Bahaman Blue Curry’s ‘Souvenir’. So if you’re in Bermondsey to see Tracey’s show (can I stop you?) be sure to pop along.
 |
| Karen Tang: Synapsid, 2014 |
______________________
Sigalit Landau: Knafeh @ Marlborough Contemporary, 6 Albemarle St -
Central
To 1 Nov: www.marlboroughcontemporary.com
The
titular Knafeh refers to a video in which the preparation and division of the
sweetmeat, which is equally popular in Palestine and Israel, takes on a
mutating spin-painterly quality in what Landau calls a ‘composition in motion’
over 15 minutes. That cues us in to the surrounding works: photographs of games
in which demarcations are made in the sand, Tapies-like ‘sand works’ which set
that into a more directly artistic context, marble sculptures of breastfeeding
pillows which reinforce the body references and allude to Henry Moore, Louise
Bourgeois and Sarah Lucas. Add some of Landau’s well-known stream of salt
encrustations, and you have a resonant meditation on themes of nurture and
conflict.
 |
| Azkelon, Freeze-Frame #2, 2011. Inkjet print |
______________________
Korakrit
Arunanondchai 2557 (Painting with history in a room filled with
men with funny names 2) (with Korapat Arunanondchai) @ Carlos Ishikawa, Unit 4,
88 Mile End Road – Whitechapel - also in 'Beware Wet Paint; at the ICA to 16 Nov
To 1 Nov: gallery@carlosishikawa.com
The
summary here might be interesting exhibition, great chairs! The show
combines mannequins, cushions and video which both form Part 3 (2557 is
the year 2014 in the Buddhist Calendar) of an ongoing account of New
York based Bangkok born Korakrit Arunanondchai’s life and performances,
and lead to the paintings shown. The whole merge Thai and Western media
and art: a kitschy temple, burnt denim, body painting inspired by a TV
game show, and Manchester United all play. The paintings are just one
aspect, but striking enough in themselves that Gregor Muir has included
one in the ICA’s punchy survey of current trends. All the same,
visitors may remember the show mainly for the invitation to view it from
much the most pleasurable massage chairs I have encountered.
To 5 Nov: by appointment via alison@suttonpr.com / 4 Oct www.stephenfriedman.com
 |
| Kendell Geers: Monument to the F-Word, 2010 |
If you saw the seven floors of HS Projects' Interchange Junctions in the
as-yet-unlet areas of this sparkling new office block, you might ask why only
five floors? But of course, this seventeen artist examination of the interface
between design and society is still huge. The highlights include and a face-off between Pilar Corrias (Elizabeth
Neel, Tobias Rehberger, Ulla von Brandenburg) and Stephen Friedman (Beatrice
Milhazes, Claire
Barclay, David Shrigley, Kendell Geers). When the
Belgian-based Africaans
artist makes political work, it carries an authentic backstory, as he
left his
native South Africa when faced with spending six years in gaol for
treasonable
actions against apartheid. Here and in Geers’ concurrent solo show,
that
gives extra heft to his use of ideologically-charged readymade materials
(such
as razor wire), language (such as the four letter word, the negative
shapes
from which are insinuated into his Monuments to the F-Word) and his
striking new use of plaster soaked in rust-saturated water to make
skulls in which his own handmarks are prominent, as if clawing at death.
 |
| Kendel Geers: Kaput Mortuum XXXII, 2012 ____________________ |
Pangaea: New Art From Africa and Latin America @ the Saatchi Gallery - Sloan Square
To 2 Nov: www.saatchigallery.com
There are plenty of big shows which it hardly seems necessary to mention: such brilliance as Matisse at the Tate Modern; Veronese, all theatre and colour at the National Gallery, any lack of depth well-aligned to modern tastes – or at any rate to mine; Phyllida Barlow in ramshackle glory at Tate Britain; and Giuseppe Penone at Gagosian. And the less convincing: Schnabel at The Dairy, for example, or Herman Bas's two sites for Victoria Miro. Then there are mixtures like Chris Marker at the Whitechapel, and Saatchi’s new ragbag of South America and Africa… if you’ve never been to the excellent Jack Bell Gallery, there’s a crash course here as three rooms are given over entirely to expanded versions of four of the African explorer’s lively shows. Still, Pangaea’s signature room is its first: Rafael Gómezbarros' 440 giant ants swarm the walls, each made of two cast human skulls with branches for legs, and held together by dirty bandaging.
To 2 Nov: www.saatchigallery.com
 |
| Rafael Gómezbarros: 'Casa Tomada' (Seized House) |
There are plenty of big shows which it hardly seems necessary to mention: such brilliance as Matisse at the Tate Modern; Veronese, all theatre and colour at the National Gallery, any lack of depth well-aligned to modern tastes – or at any rate to mine; Phyllida Barlow in ramshackle glory at Tate Britain; and Giuseppe Penone at Gagosian. And the less convincing: Schnabel at The Dairy, for example, or Herman Bas's two sites for Victoria Miro. Then there are mixtures like Chris Marker at the Whitechapel, and Saatchi’s new ragbag of South America and Africa… if you’ve never been to the excellent Jack Bell Gallery, there’s a crash course here as three rooms are given over entirely to expanded versions of four of the African explorer’s lively shows. Still, Pangaea’s signature room is its first: Rafael Gómezbarros' 440 giant ants swarm the walls, each made of two cast human skulls with branches for legs, and held together by dirty bandaging.
Mela Yerka: And the — the surface is fine and powdery @ Maria Stenfors, Unit 10, 21 Wren St - near Kings Cross
To 18 Oct: www.mariastenfors.com
 | ||
| Mela Yerka with 'Rachel Felix', 2014 |
Polish painter Mela Yerka's show is titled from was Neil Armstrong's second
sentence on the moon, neatly introducing a painterly exploration of the
overlooked. Five portraits of talented women - but whose lack of fame
contrasts with that of their male lovers - are rendered in fluid
mixtures of fresco, graphic and gestural abstract styles. A separate
room holds a blindingly lit and apparently empty canvas: only as the
light - by which we normally expect paintings to be revealed - fades
away in a three minute cycle does a landscape appear. It's of Mars, and
looks very ordinary - suggesting that location is all: were it here on
earth, it would be totally overlooked.
 |
| Installation view with Mars II, 2014 - acrylic and fluorescent paint on linen, dark mode ______________________ |
To 11 Oct: www.husgalleries.com
 | ||
| Nathan Green: Seaandsky, 2014 - Spray insulation foam, paper mache, sawdust, latex, wood, hardware |
This Danish run space ('Hus' is 'house') has built an intelligent presence over its first year in the West End. 'Space Age', titled from Lucio Fontana, repurposes artists in a future-oriented manner: Santiago Taccetti - also born in Argentina - references Fontana most directly; German Ophelia Finke's painted coats mix Holbein with astronauts and the fashion store; Czech Konrad Wyrebek
shows us what photoshopped version of a classic Canova marble might
look like; and Texan Nathan Green nods to Georgia O’Keefe as well as
minimalism, framing painterly inventories of sculptural forms to push
and pull the presence and absence of a curious old-new material: spray
expanding foam with papier-mâché and sawdust.
+x+85+(h)+x+55+(w)+cm,+2011-13.jpg) |
| Konrad Wyrebek: Amour & Psyche, 2014 - CNC routed and laser cut Polyurethane |
.. ______________________
Richard Stone: Gleam @ Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, 533 Old Yorke Rd - Wandsworth
To Oct 12: www.kristinhjellegjerde.com
 |
| passing through a seascape, 2014 - oil on antique painting, limewood |
Richard Stone recasts art history
through processes of removal, movement and addition, and Gleam’s grisaille combinations take that forward with the added
benefit of a recent residency at an Italian bronze foundry. Thus the sanding
away of an old painting may produce a ghostly homage to Turner; fresh
abstracted landscapes emerge from paint slid across aluminium; when a land becomes a sea might have
been called when my paintings of
tide-washed rocks mutate; and what Stone previously discovered by dipping
found sculptures into liquid wax to yield new hybrids, he now creates as primary
forms in bronze or marble, like some sort of reverse play on the Venus de Milo.
 | ||
| Richard Stone with 'When a Land Becomes a Sea', 2014 |
______________________
Guy Ben-Ner: Soundtrack @ Gimpel Fils, 30 Davies Street - near Bond St
To 11 October: www.gimpelfils.com
The most
entertaining eleven minutes in a London gallery right now (make that 22
minutes: you’ll watch it twice) uses a brilliant formal device to deliver a
distinctly current political charge. The Soundtrack
in question is
minutes 22-33 of Stephen Spielberg’s HG Wells adaptation ‘War of the
Worlds’: a stream of gags enables Ben-Ner to match its sounds and
dialogue to a
home movie of him with his children: the
blender stands in for a plane taking off, and there's plenty of smashing
and burning as the artist-father struggles to cook. Then a laptop shows
the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict: domestic conflict turns out not just to imitate the film, but
also to
stand in for wider politics – not so much the effect on the family of
Hamas
rockets (almost all exploded midair by the ‘Iron Dome’ defences) - but
for the
disproportionate impact on Palestinians of Israeli attacks.
______________________
New Wrinkles (After Judd)
@ MDC, 55 South Audley St – Mayfair
To Oct 8: www.massimodecarlo.com
 |
| Donald Judd: Untitled, 1972/73 |
Contrasting somewhat with Diego Perrone’s
restraint-free ‘Void-Cinema-Congress-Death’
(!) downstairs, all the right artists are chosen for a selection of
abstract
works featuring folding, crumpling and
creasing, and Lygia Clark, John Chamberlain, Steven Parrino and Tauba
Auerbach relate beautifully to the architectural setting of MDC’s
upper rooms. It’s more surprising to see Alighiero Boetti’s colourful Zig Zag, like a condensation of
deckchairs; Luciano Fabro screwing up a leather map of Italy; and Judd as the
apparent starting point, given his reputation for smooth finishes. Untitled
(1972/73), though, did involve folding sheets of galvanised iron. Its
painterly quality - as the only metal with a surface pattern - plays
strongly here.
 | |||||||||||||
| Installation view with Alighiero Boetti: Zig Zag |
______________________
PREVIOUS CHOICES STILL ON
____________________
Sachin Kaeley (plus the group show 'Neither') @ Seventeen, Acton Mews, 270-276 Kingsland Road - Dalston
To 4 Oct: www.seventeengallery.com
Seventeen's big, square, new main space proves - in the first show after
relocation – to be just the size for Sachin Kaeley’s cycle of ten paintings named literally for their materials.
They start from a small (28.5 x 22 cm) orignating plaster cast, scraped, spray-painted and itself
cast in a rubber material. That rubber cast is stretched to 110%, then cast in plaster and
spray-painted in its turn. And so on, until we’ve reached the 116 x 89.5 cm of the tenth work. Add
the acretion of textures, a cycle of colour and the cobbling together of the 7th out of two fractured
casts of No6, and you have a facinating analogue evolution of forms which somehow have the look of the digital about them.
 |
| Spray paint and plaster on board, 2014 82 x 63 cm |
______________________
Boris Nzebo: Prince de Ville @ Jack Bell Gallery, 13 Mason's Yard - Central
To 4 Oct: www.jackbellgallery.com
 |
| Cameroonian Streets, 2014 |
It's
no surprise that Cameroonian artist Boris Nzebo
sports impressive dreadlocks, for these visions of his home city of
Douala interlace elaborate hairstyles with busy architecture to merge
individual and collective streetlife
to dizzying effect. Two room-high triptychs push Jack Bell's modest
space to the max. The complexity is kept under control by a clean
painting style with echoes of Picabia, Lichtenstein and Craig Martin, as
well as of linocuts and the hand-painted adverts found in African
beauty parlors.
______________________
Daniel Sturgis: Strict and Lax @ Art First, 21 Eastcastle St - Fitzrovia
Daniel Sturgis, for all this is his first Art First outing, has been
riffing on abstract langauges – notably the check and the
blob - for two decades. Yet his approach remains fresh, and I like the
way each painting is set slightly differently off kilter here, often using the
device of irregular white bands around the coloured zones. The results are playful yet generate a certain anxiety. Learning to Fail, for
example, in which the black and white Riley references (which dominate elsewhere)
are reduced to a token, sees the boundary give the illogical impression that
there wasn’t room to fit all the stop sign onto the canvas, so some has
slid round to the other side.
 |
| Happy in Your Skin, 2014 |
______________________
To 12 Oct: www.aptstudios.org/gallery
 |
| Laura Smith: Mirror II, 2014 |
Deptford
is particularly lively during the Deptford X festival (26 Sept –
5 Oct) when there are dozens of shows and many open studios to tour. The
decidedly spacious A.P.T. Gallery hosts a dozen recent graduates’ peppy
exploration
of how work can contain forces or expose its acts of
production. To take one artist from each tendency, Sarah Pettitt’s
sculptural
jest paintings include one holding the mummified news in a pouch, one
which looks
like a body bag puckering up for a kiss, and several which take the
deconstructed
form of garlands, hung triumphally high by curators Laura Smith, Morgan
Feely
and Poppy Whatmore. Smith herself makes the slide of paint across
aluminium seductively
visible, and I like how her two mirror paintings don’t quite reflect each other and
would
have reflected me better without their own painted image. Look out, too,
for a beguiling daisy chain hand-out in which each artist
discusses
the work of one of their co-exhibitors…
 |
| Sarah Pettitt: Saturday, 2014 |
______________________
Keita Miyazaki (& Bongsu Park): Sound & Vision @ Rosenfeld
Porcini, 37 Rathbone St – Fitzrovia
To 30 Sept: www.rosenfeldporcini.com
 |
| Collective Practice, 2014: aluminium bronze, felt, exhaust pipe |
Young Japanese artist Keita
Miyazaki has a resonant-enough central idea for his new sculptures, which look
to create some sort of utopian mode, however ironic, out of the post-tsunamic
landscape by combining parts of old car engines, festooning them with colourfully intricate paper forms, and building in tinkling melodies broadcast at railway stations to discourage suicide on the tracks. That
said, I can imagine it turning null, but Mizazaki’s forms take on an unpredictable
almost animal life as their contrasts hint at post-recessionary flowering, industry
in the community, and party streamers threatening to trump environmental
issues. The no-nonsense aesthetic and political charge of the car engine have
made it a fairly frequent component of conceptual art – see Thomas Bayrle,
Matthew Barney and Roger Hiorns (though maybe not John Chamberlain: 'I didn’t
want engine parts, wheels, upholstery, glass, oil, tires, muffler
systems or transmissions. Just the sheet metal').
 |
| Quarantine, 2014:
felt, paper, exhaust pipe Images courtesy of the relevant galleries and artists |
____________________
Eric van Hove: V12 @ Copperfield Gallery, 6 Copperfield Street - Southwark
To 1 Aug, then 1-20 Sept: www.copperfieldgallery.com
 |
| V12 Laraki: Alternator (2013): Yellow copper, red copper, nickel silver, mahogany wood, cedar wood, cow bone, sand stone, cotton, ram's horn, cowskin, tin, chinese superglue and cow horn. |
In
an unusual twist on work not being what it seems, the apparent bling of
intricate abstract sculptures in the second show of the third gallery
to use this spacious former church hall is far from the point. Rather,
they’re part of a project which revisits a failed dream of manufacturing
a luxury sports car wholly in Morocco by commissioning to-scale
versions of the 463 components in the Mercedes V12 engine which Abdeslam
Laraki was eventually forced to use in the ‘Luraki Fulgara’. As such,
it’s a social sculpture project orchestrated by the multi-national Van
Hove to empower 57 of the estimated three million self-employed Moroccan
craftsmen to make something other than tourist fodder. They worked
reclaimed and traditional materials such as cow bone and recycled
aluminium to the point of looking precious, so harnessing traditional
skills in a sort of reverse engineering of factory line production.
 |
| V12 Laraki: Alternator (2013) - exploded view |
_________________
An Impossible
Bouquet: Four Masterpieces by Jan van Huysum @ Dulwich Picture Gallery
To 21 Sept: www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk
 |
| Vase with Flowers, c. 1715 |
The obvious reasons to visit the country’s oldest public gallery are the permanent collection (all that Poussin!) and (also to 21 Sept) a winning account of Ben and Winifred Nicholson and their circle in the 1920s. Yet there’s also a focussed gathering of four floral still lives by the Dutch painter Jan van Huysum (1682-1749). Dulwich’s own example, set against a dark background, is from 1715. Here it’s joined by three loans which follow his 1720 switch in to setting his Rococo bouquets against gardens with statuary. Their pre-refrigeration ‘impossibility’ is, of course, that Huysum took up to two years over each painting, and so shows blooms from quite different seasons - up to 40 different species plus maybe ten insects in each - all of which are informatively set out by means of interpretative keys.
 |
| Flowers in a Vase with Crown Imperial and Apple Blossom at the Top and a Statue of Flora, 1731-32 _________________ |
Candida Höfer: Villa Borghese at Ben Brown Fine Arts, 12 Brook's Mews - Mayfair
To 19 Sept: www.benbrownfinearts.com
 |
| Villa Borghese Roma XVIII, 2012 |
Candida Höfer's Villa Borghese series is typical of her intimately
monumental, formally similar records of culturally significant public interiors:
she uses natural light only (Höfer adjusts her exposure time from minutes to
hours as necessary), includes no people (though this set is statue-heavy by way
of stand-in), centres the far wall from a slightly raised viewpoint, and generates
an air of splendour and permanence. Indeed, despite the lack of digital
intervention, you might say that Höfer presents such spaces more as we might imagine
them to be than as they would be likely to appear to us, were we there.
_____________________
|
 |
| Lotus, 2014 |
Brazilians bring a particular aesthetic wit to the assisted readymade, witness the recent solos for Valeska Soares (at Max Wigram), Alexandre da Cunha (at Thomas Dane) and Jac Leirner (at White Cube). Adriano Costa – who shares a Sao Paulo studio with Leirnier - is no exception, and he brings that sensibility to bear on locally-sourced items over the extensive domain of Sadie Coles’ newest space. So whether you want a floral formation of socks (Lotus) architectural plans from umbrella sticks (Project for a New Museum), phallic sculptures spotted with attractively worrying globules (International Herpes Society) or a walk on steel food (Norwegian Cheese 2), you’ll be appropriately entertained here. One floor work looks like a Carl Andre – if it was, you could walk on it – only it's wrapped in protective plastic… so are you doubly able to tread on it? No, as the title indicates: Oven 25 minutes / You Cannot Walk on This One…
 |
| Norwegian Cheese 2, 2014 (detail) |
______________________
Eleni Bagaki, Stéphane Blumer, Heena Kim and Soomeen Kim: I
Meet Together, I Agree
@ VITRINE, 183-5 Bermondsey St and on Bermondsey Square - Bermondsey
 |
| Stéphane Blumer: installation on Bermondsey Square |
Here the overarching theme is the nature of the local from foreign perspectives. That’s most direct in Stéphane Blumer’s soundpiece, in which he asked 50 Londoners to tell him a secret. Only five did, so the result is something of a communicative desert, consistent with the Swiss artist’s other works: a giant hashtag in soundproof packing foam, like an anti-advert for our times; and a panoramic hour-long montage of 25 film scenes featuring lone protagonists in desert landscapes, to meditative and convention-revealing effect. Add ‘Forgetten Materials’, Soomeen’s beautifully judged installation of slates found in nearby building sites and co-opted into her performative inventory; fellow Korean Heena’s near-abstract paintings derived from the regulation of laundry; and some streaky Bagaki bacon a la Greque.. the four artists, along with Indian-born curator Mary George, and have conjured a lively and coherent show from their summer residencies at Vitrine.
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| Soomeen Kim: ‘Forgetten Materials’, 2014 (detail) |
Soon Hak Kwon: Truth is in the Detail @ Union Gallery, 94
Teesdale St – Cambridge Heath
To 13 Sept: www.uniongallery.com
 |
| History of UNION Gallery IV, 2014. Digital Prints on 42 Aluminium Panels |
Through his ongoing History Of project, London based Korean Soon Hak Kwon has built a practice
out of photographing gallery walls in high resolution and installing the
results… on gallery walls, so making the supporting act of display excessively
visible. That’s treble-tweaked in this cunning exhibition. First, Union’s own
walls are represented in 42 panels mimicking how the Kepler Telescope image
sensor array shows the results of its seeking out other planets. Second, the
accidental test shot presence of the ladder used to shoot an altarpiece builds the
method into its being photographed echoes Kepler’s upward aspirations. Third,
the other two walls, left blank but spotlit, gain their own fresh presence.
Quite a bit of content for a painting show with no paint.
 |
| Ecce Homo, 2014, Giclee Print on Alumium |
_________________
Schema –
Sukima @ Laure Genillard, 2 Hanway Place – Tottenham Court Rd
To 13
Sept: www.lglondon.org
 |
| Installation view with Yasuko Otsuka left, Kenneth Dingwall ahead, Yoko Terauchi right |
This six-strong
Anglo-Japanese curation by David Connearn can be viewed at two levels, and not
just Laure Genillard’s ground floor and basement: on the one hand, a post- Heideggerian account of Kant which uses the
linguistic coincidence set out in an accompanying newspaper that the English schema (plan) and the Japanese sukima (crevices) are pronounced the
same as a starting point (phew!) or as a delicately beautiful collection of
interventions which contrast eastern gradations (Yasuko Otsuka’s subtle
duochrome lithographs on cotton, Yoko Terauchi’s shifting perspective of the
gallery space using graphite on paint to shadow the floor, Hakudo Atsuo’s
silver dust drawings) with western
clarity (Gary Woodley’s line sliced through
the stairs, Kenneth Dingwall’s more logical colour-sets, Tom Benson’s white
painting with an accompanying text which makes for a neat face-off with the
canvas at the centre of Yasmina Reza’s play ‘Art’). Recommended either way.
 | ||
| Gary Woodley: Impingement no. 62. double helix, 2014 |
_________________
Giulio Paolini: ‘To Be or Not To Be’
& Francis Upritchard: ‘Do What You Will’ at the Whitechapel Gallery
To 14 Sept (Paolini) / 28 Sept
(Upritchard)
Giulio Paolini: Delphi, 1965
There’s much to be said for the
unusual coupling of Giulio
Paolini’s coolly effervescent Arte Povera teasing at the roles of artist
and spectator, with Francis Uprichard’s children’s commission.
Paolini is most characteristically present in not quite making a straightforward
appearance in 40 years of such putative self-portraits as Delphi,
in which he seems to be looking through a canvas, distanced by
stretcher bars and sunglasses, while we're round the back. Upritchard
takes on the classroom
staple of the dinosaur, making new variants out of balata, a rubber-like
Amazonian material, to gloriously gloopy goofy effect.
 |
| One of Francis Upritchard's balata dinosaurs (on a plinth by Martino Gamper) |
______________________
To 10 Sept: www.castorprojects.co.uk
 |
| Alan Magee: Return to glory, 2014 |
Castor
Projects have co-opted a west end gallery during its summer close for
their first exhibition, bringing together a group of artists who tweak
the process of fabrication. Andy Wicks turns picture fittings into
sculptural forms which confuse work
and support; Alan Magee sort of repairs the holes in hula-hoops by
filling them with plaster; Rachel Champion adapts pea shingle to the
gallery environment; amd Matt Blackler magnifies a damaged drillbit into
a mountainous precipice which is still the smallest piece in the show.
Meanwhile Matt Calderwood’s 15 minute film sees him make and unmake
versions of the monumental by rearranging six bricks in six ways via
many - equally valid? - interim stages.
 |
| Still from Matt Calderwood: Six Sculptures, 2011 |
______________________
_________________
A
Poem for Raoul and Agnes @ Ancient & Modern, 201 Whitecross Street - near The Barbican
To 6 Sept (but closed 10-26
Aug): www.ancientandmodern.org
 |
| Winifrid Nicholson: Palm, 1980 |
Talking of flowers, here are 14
floral works, chosen by Sherman Sam with a poem of accepting transience by
another art critic – Barry Schwabsky – in mind: ….’We more than wounded know nothing
/ of flowers but the ripe pod / scatters its seed regardless’. Cue a Winifred Nicholson worthy of Dulwich; Phoebe
Unwin’s nuanced nude disguised in a bloomscape; Alex Katz alongside his under-seen
peer Jane Freilicher; Eithne Jordan’s
play in the office - hardly separate given Ancient & Modern’s scale – with the
separate lobby of Spruth Magers; and various other seasonal subtleties in one
of the most enjoyable summer shows around (Simon Lee and Laura Bartlett’s
project space are also commended).
| |||
_________________
Sam Francis @ Bernard Jacobson Gallery, 6 Cork St – Central
To 31 Aug: www.jacobsongallery.com
 |
| Untitled (#2 Pri-Rain), 1964 - gouache on paper |
As John Yau says in the accompanying
book to this extensive and beautiful survey of works on paper by the
Californian artist Sam Francis (1923-94), he’s hard to place as an American
abstractionist, being neither an Expressionist nor a Colour Field painter.
Plenty lay behind his fluid and spontaneous-looking work – flight, botany, Zen,
Jung, alchemy, dreams and his considerable physical sufferings from a plane
crash, tuberculosis, kidney disease and cancer. This show ranges from early Tobeyesque
explorations to his petal-like phase to his radical use of the ‘empty centre’,
to the ‘blue balls’ to structured pours as those background factors are
reflected in different formal approaches. All of which might be bracketed as using
colour to trammel between the physical world of paint and ground and the
immaterial world of thought and air.
 |
| Untitled (L.A.), 1976 |
___________________
 |
| Katerina Blannin: Three Piece Suite, Vert, 2014 |
Becca Pelly-Fry, the
director of Winsor & Newton's lively space, has chosen ten
artists whose work, shares an underlying 'perfectionism of process'. As teed up by an intelligently ludic wall text by Nick Hornby, they
range from Lee Edwards’ intimate portraits on wood knolls to Inbal
Strauss’ meticulously wrought pseudo-functional sculptures to Dale
Adcock’s paradoxically intricate control of monumental surfaces to Iavor
Lubomirov's canny sculpting of W&N's own graph paper. Katrina
Blannin derives angular geometries from grids, then groups the forms
into triptychs to complicate their visual dance of ghosting and
mirroring. It's all precisely calibrated, yet the weave of the linen,
along with the odd stray hair, is allowed to insinuate humanising
touches of what one might call perfectly judged imperfections.
 |
| Dale Adcock: Tomb, 2012 |
_____________________
To 31 Aug: www.thecornershoponline.com
Felt artist Lucy Sparrow has opened a corner shop in which all 3,000-odd items – from packets of crisps
to ice cream to top shelf soft porn to should-be-soft loo paper to the till
itself - results from a seven month
binge of sewing. It’s all for sale, as impressively set out on the website. This wackiness has its precedents: Yayoi Kusama’s phallus infestations,
Olek covering everything in crochet. Galleries are, of course, shops of a sort.
And the best thing in White Cube’s Masons Yard summer show is the assistants’
shoes. All the same, the question arises: is this art or hobbyist obsession? Pure
fun or a heartfelt paean to the disappearance of independent shops?
 |
| Parker Cheeto's shoes as worn at White Cube |
Will Cotton @ Ronchini Gallery, 22 Dering St - Mayfair
To 9 August: ronchinigallery.com
 |
| The Deferred Promise of Complete Satisfaction, 2014 - oil on linen |
New Yorker Will Cotton’s first British show neatly summarises his practice in the pinks and whites of a macaron-hatted portrait; a candy floss cloudscape; an abstracted wax-textured close-up of cake decor; and a photorealistic nude riding an ice cream fish. Koons, Johns and Boucher come to mind, and there are painterly issues at stake in, for example, the variety of colours in the whites. The dominant impression, though, is of sweetness pushed to an extreme which is both repulsive and compulsive, setting up the questions of which wins – of whether humankind is trapped by incessant desire or blessed by the gratification available – and of whether Cotton subverts or exploits the lure of what he so elaborately bakes and paints.
 |
| Persistence of Desire 3, 2014, oil and wax on linen |
_____________________
Jimmie Durham: Traces and Shiny Evidence @ the Parasol Unit, 14 Wharf Road
To 9 Aug: www.parasol-unit.org
 |
| Smashing, 2004 (video still) |
Some works lure you into a repetitive logic to compelling effect. I
found myself repeatedly watching ‘just one more’ object get dispatched in
Jimmie Durham’s 90 minute video of bureaucratic smashing .
Durham, in a suit, sits at a desk. Assistants hand him a stream of items, each
of which he pounds impassively with a prehistoric rock, whether with one blow
or with mechanical persistence (he comes down 30 times on an alarm clock). Then
he stamps and signs a certificate, and puts
away the pen, ink pad and die we
know he’ll need again in a minute. That's upstairs: below, the
Berlin-based Cherokee's colourful installation of oil drums, pipes and
spills proposes a compelling, if simple, echo of destruction.
 |
| Traces and Shiny Evidence, 2014 (detail) |
______________________
Sigrid Holmwood: A Peasant Painter’s Garden @ ASC Gallery, Erlang
House, 128 Blackfriars Rd - near St George’s Circus, Southwark
To 8 Aug: www.ascstudios.co.uk
Anglo-Swede Sigrid Holmwood, whose family background is in farming, has
studied how the peasant paintings of South West Sweden emerged from
medieval sources. Seeing them as an alternative to bourgeois accounts of art history,
she’s remade the types of brush, and the earth, mineral and plant-based
pigments they used, and depicted the peasant painter's world as one ‘full of magic,
where meaning and emotion are inscribed into all materials, and the animal,
vegetable, human and super-natural are all interconnected'. Her way of painting
parallels returning to traditional farming in contradistinction to modern
machine-dominated methods. Holmwood’s lively style is at one with a
filmed performance in which she rides a giant paintbrush-come hobby horse as if it were a
broomstick…. Add spalting, secret hex signs, mycorrhizal relationships
and the modern twist of using mushroom colours, and there's plenty going on. |
| Three Women and a Cow, 2013: Mushroom pigment made from blood red webcaps (cortinarius sanguineus), chalk, chrome yellow, indigo, and red lead bound in egg on hand woven linen |
 |
| Sigrid Holmwood with brush |
_________________
Samara Scott:
High Street @ the Zabludowicz Collecton, 176 Prince of Wales Rd – Chalk Farm
To 10 Aug: www.zabludowiczcollection.com
Samara Scott describes her practice as a ‘slow digestion of
cosmetic, edible and chemical cultural bedris’. That turns out to be largely a
means of trapping the fluorescently pastel-coloured experiences of a
synthetically freed body. The key development in her language here are resinous
horizontal paintings – come sculptural accumulations – come low tables - come
flatbed scanners, raised on various props. Add a toothpaste drawing on the
wall, rolls of sellotape inserted into textile, and a multi-hued painting
featuring the gussets from tights, and plenty else, and you have one of five
good reasons to visit Anita Z’s summer shows, the other highlights being a
persuasive selection of Sam Falls’ paintings, sculpture and less often seen
videos; and a rebooted version of Rachel Pimm’s excellent show from Enclave in April.
 | |||
_________________
Flat Pack/ Wrapped/St
To 15 Aug: punkandsheep.weebly.com
 |
| Jonathan Trayte: Unifine and Rob Leech: Barry Box prominent and Sam Plagerson's improbably-sized contribution at the back. |
This
appointment only space on a Canary Wharf 5th floor, named for the
gallerist couple’s pet names for each other, currently features 30 artists whom
curator Tim Ellis invited to produce a sculpture not to exceed 50 x 50 x50 cm and
to cost less than £100 to make, and to be posted to the Gallery in a box on
which they are displayed with the artist ‘relinquishing control’ from then on.
The prevailing mode of quiet wit includes several cunning wheezes to bend the
rules – Kate Howard’s inflatable, Graham Reid’s sections to be reconstructed
ceiling high, Rob Leech’s box which makes for a big two box sculpture - and a
couple of the blatant cheats which I feel Ellis should have cut in half. It’s all
well-suited to the surrounding financial services industry. I particularly liked Jonathan Trayte’s iron and ceramic full
box-worth of bread, a move on from his fetishitically finished fruit to a sort of reductio ad absurdum of mass food production –
though I did wonder about the £100 limit…
 |
| Installation view with Kate Howard at the front and Graham Reid showing height |
_________________
Rachael Champion: Primary Producers @ Hales Gallery, Tea Building, 7 Bethnal Green Rd – Shoreditch
To 1 Aug: www.halesgallery.com
 |
| Primary Producers, 2014 |
Hales’ space has two highly intrusive distinctive
central columns. Far from worrying about sightlines, London-based New Yorker Rachael
Champion uses them as the starting point for a modularly irregular, organically
geometric set of shapes – half-building, half-landscape – which subsube the
gallery in a combination of pebbledash (publicly derided by many, but secretly loved
equally?), water, and the basic life form of algae (cleared from garden ponds,
but an important source of oxygen, a super-food and a putative fuel)… The result is a striking multi-ponded suburban
takeover of Shoreditch’s cool which may speak, as the show’s blurb has it, of our
‘ever-mounting Anthropocene crises’.
Phantom Limbs @ Pilar Corrias, 54 Eastcastle Street - Fitzrovia
 |
| Antoine Catala: :) |
I was fascinated, if not wholly unbaffled, by Phantom Limbs. It posits
a parallel between the way the digital affects us at a distance with
the phenomenon of a lost body part which is still perceived as being
present. Two artists new to me making striking contributions. Rachel
Rose’s 10 minute film Palisades in Palisades (2014),
projected with a welcome lounging mat, swoops atmospherically
between remote distance and intense close-ups as it explores the site
where a battle from the American Revolutionary War was fought. Antoine Catala’s :) (2014),
is an emoticon turned into a mildly robotic kinetic sculpture which
varies its expression winningly as it trundles towards you; while his Storage (2013)
represents residual memory by varying shape according to whether a
vacuum sucks it in or not: a sort of reverse inflatable.
 |
| Antoine Catala: :) |
_________________
Phyllida Barlow: Fifty Years of Drawings @ Hauser & Wirth, 23 Savile Row - Central
To 26 July: www.hauserwirth.com - has 123 images of the show!
 |
| 7 Bathing Hut, circa 1970 |
Filling a run of large galleries with 500 or so
drawings culled from the archive of a sculptor may not sound the most
stimulating prospect, yet this feels far more than a supplement to Phyllida's
Barlow's feisty occupation of Tate Britain. She has a four stage process:
(1) initial idea sketches (2) worked up 'drawings', which are typically
paintings full of colour (3) sculptural forms (4) combination / reuse of those
forms. Here we have stage 2: given the historically temporary nature of most of
Barlow's stage 4 production, as close as we'll get to a full retrospective – an
energising demonstration of sculptural thinking with more ideas for painting than the
average dauber could shake a brush at...
 |
| Untitled 2001 |
The Combinational @
Studio 1.1, 57a Redchurch St – Shoreditch
 |
| Sarah Anne Johnson: Kissing Gold, 2013 |
It would be illogical not
to recommend my own show! It starts from the found and the collaged as dominant
modern modes, and looks at how six artists combine materials in sculpture,
video, painting, photography and mergers thereof, to reflect on how we live
together. Moreover, the show is itself a combination of Canadians – Sarah Anne
Johnson and Wil Murray – and Britons – Susan Collis, Appau Junior Boakye-Yiadom,
Suzanne Moxhay and Catherine Herbert. Sarah, who flew in from Winnipeg for the
opening, has installed 34 photographs from her Wonderlust series. She travelled
throughout Canada to find people willing (but not too willing!) to be
photographed in their homes during intimate moments which she then altered to
enhance a refreshing variety of moods from tender to comedic to absurd.
 |
| Sarah Anne Johnson: Burnt, 2013 |
_____________________
Leo Fitzmaurice: /_\ @ The Sunday Painter, 1st Floor, 12-16 Blenheim Grove - Peckham
To 27 July: www.thesundaypainter.co.uk
 |
| /_\, 2014 - gummed paper tape on gallery walls |
As another wordless
title - /_\ - hints, this is a show of framing rather than direct content. Merseyside
artist Leo Fitzmaurice shows a near-empty gallery with what look like two small
abstract paintings, but turn out to be (or do they?) arrangements of J-cloths and
dusters - and how he got such a clean look,
perhaps. His primary interventions are to soften the light to a cool white by
applying a thin vinyl to the windows, and to run gummed brown tape along every
edge and join in the architecture. The effect is a deconstructive demonstration
of the parts from which the room is made… which proves, when one’s thoughts
turn to the collapsed distinction between production and display, to be content
enough.
 |
| J-cloth, 2013 - Permanent marker on tracing-paper |
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A.R. Hopwood: The False Memory Archive @ Carroll / Fletcher project space, 17A Riding House St - Fitzrovia
To 12 July (also at the Freud Museum to 3 Aug): www.carrollfletcher.com
 |
| From 'False Memory Archive Erased UFOs': collection of found UFO images with all evidence of the UFOs removed, presented in 242 used frames, 2012-13. |
Alistair Hopwood occupies both
Carroll / Fletcher’s new project space (in what was the Nettie Horn gallery)
and the rather appropriate Freud Museum for an extensive exploration of false memory with many fascinating examples.
Perhaps you think you’ve seen it already, but why not go again? Not least of
the pleasures is a wall of found
photographs, fitted to found frames, from which the supposed evidence of UFOs
has been removed. Often, Hopwood told me, the removal was of what had anyway
been a mere photoshop addition. Imagine generating a false memory of a
UFO sighting from forgetting that you yourself had doctored a photograph to
include one...
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Trujillo Paumier:
Men y Men @ New Art Projects, 17 Riding House St - Fitzrovia
To 20 July: www.newartprojects.com
 |
| Trujillo/Paumier 'Untitled (Moro 24)', 2012 |
This unusual
show by photographer-partners sees them working separately to contrast two
distinctive but visibly Catholic communities in the Mexican town of Oxaca: American
Brian Paumier’s Moros - portraits of cowboys and their steeds – are shown opposite Mexican Joaquin Trujillo’s trans-gender Muxes. The Moros and Muxes get on well,
though, as indicated by a table of inter-mixed images presented in ex votos
style, making this a celebration of difference. There’s also a film of the
cowboys, lyrically shot from a helicopter as they parade their horses in an
annual festival of thanksgiving, complete with the colour-bursts of traditional
family ribbons.
+(2009)++fred.jpg) |
| Trujillo/Paumier 'Untitled (Muxes 11)', 2009 |
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Architectural
Landscape @ Camilla Grimaldi, 2nd floor, 25 Old Burlington Gardens –
Central
To 18 July: www.camillagrimaldi.com
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Sean Scully:
Kind of Red @ Timothy Taylor Gallery, 15 Carlos Place – Mayfair
To 12 July:
www.timothytaylorgallery.com
NB possible related trip = Sean Scully Encounters: A New Master Among Old Masters – Christ Church Picture Gallery, Oxford - to 31 Aug
 |
| 'Kind of Red', 2013 |
It’s easy to fall for the solid luminosity of Sean Scully’s
paintings; nor is it hard to find they evolve rather slowly. Here, though, in his first London solo since
2010, Scully eases into the full horizontal stripes (or ‘landline’) for a change,
and where he employs his more characteristic city-inspired broken stripes, does so with some differences:
the lushness is looser; and though he’s painted on aluminium and cited musical
influences before, his exposure of more surrounding metal than previously adds to the sense
that these could be end-on views of Scully’s own sculptures, and exploits the
optical illusion whereby the aluminium appears to vary in colour depending on the
colours from under which it’s glimpsed. All of which suits the improvisational jazz aesthetic
of the vast quiptych ‘Kind of Red’.
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Bernard Frize: Colour Divides @ Simon Lee, 12 Berkeley
Street – Mayfair
To 24 June: www.simonleegallery.com
 |
| Riamo, 2014 |
I once congratulated Bernard Frize - as I saw it
- for how, no matter that he uses such imaginatively disparate processes to
make his paintings, they all look instantly like his work. That's a shame, he
said jestingly, I do my best to avoid that. Well, he's failed again here
- but then the seven large works here are variants on a 1986 painting
which tracked the labyrinthine course of the ceiling on which it was made, and they use an established strategy
of his: the application of several colours to a single brush. Various
doublings and reversals are then applied between and within paintings. In Riamo,
for example, the order of the colours on the brush is reversed below a
horizontal fault line. ‘In my beginning is my end’, as Eliot put it, and it’s
fascinating to see how the cycles play out as colour divides.
 | ||
| Lescilia, 2014 |
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Hannah Maybank: Bobhowlers and Blooms @ Gimpel Fils, 30 Davies Street - Mayfair
To 5 July 2014: www.gimpelfils.com
 |
| 'Angela', 2014 - synthetic dragon's blood and watercolour on stretched watercolour paper over polyester |
Hannah
Maybank’s
dangerously beautiful mixed media paintings have flowers or hawkmoths
as their starting point. Or do they? The floral works set out from a
Christian name of
significance to the artist, who then observes as the character of the
painting falls in with
or diverges from that of its inspiration. Maybank is technically
adventurous, exploring such materials as ‘synthetic gold’, ‘Japanese
glass pigment’ and ‘orasol’. There's less of the latex peeling effect
typical of her previous work, but there’s still a sense of vegetative
growth not
quite under control. That encourages environmental readings, but that
dangerous
beauty is the thing.
 |
| 'Bobolla', 2014 - synthetic dragon's blood, graphite and watercolour on linen |
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Jane Harris and Jiri Kratochvil: the devil is in the details @ Horatio Jr., The Lord
Nelson, 60 Canon Beck Rd – Rotherhithe
To 29 June: http://www.horatiojr.com
 |
| Jane Harris: 'Blue Bleu', 2013 |
Another show
by real life partners sees the basement of a former pub filled with Jiri
Kratochvil’s constructions, which make remarkably disparate found items
surprisingly cohesive: thus, repurposed French agricultural equipment, Dorset
limestone, and miniscule plastic models in sexual action make up Purely Physical. Jane Harris, in bar and chapel-like ex-gents, applies her language of ellipses to diptychs with triple inversions: the
colours in each of the pairs are the same, but the paint in the areas inside and
outside the scalloped shapes is applied with opposing directionality and the ellipses
making up the scallop are reversed. It sounds complex, but the modulations of hue achieved are simply seductive!
 |
| Jiri Kratochvil: 'Purely Physical', 2014 (detail) |
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To 21 June:
www.theagencygallery.com
London-based
Italian Simona Brinkmann uses leather and metal to form barriers suggesting shifting boundaries between private and public
and a femininist take on power structures. All sleekly attractive and
effectively tensed, but what makes ‘Hold On!’ interesting is its slippages - between
original and copy, and between urban and rural: these fetish-finished versions are
slightly out of wack with their originals; and their primary original isn’t
city railings but cattle grids. Are we, then, the docile cows / brutes? Whether or not, Brinkmann
is appropriately combined with Anja Carr’s performance-based horseplay (‘Let
Go!’) and a gallery with a garden.
+Docile+Brutes+IV+%28No+Go%29+low+res.jpeg) |
Docile Brutes IV (No Go) - 2014 Steel, leather, metal fittings.
|
+Underling+detail+4+low+res.jpeg) |
Foreground: Underling Background: Rig - 2014, both leather, oak, metal fittings.
Andrew Cross: Every seat @ Canal Projects, 60 De Beauvoir Crescent - Haggerston
To 22 June: http://canalprojects.info
 |
| From 'Every Seat' |
Andrew Cross is best-known for photography and
film projects which build the manner of travel into the way scenes are perceived,
but this may be his canal debut - and then as a location, rather than a mode.
The show is mainly a retrospective of his other main stream, the relationship
between place, memory and performance. Cue another chance to see The Solo (see paulsartworld.blogspot.co.uk/2010/12/serious-in-january.html); the absent stage of Knebworth; the bare essentials of the Somali
National Theatre; and 100 or so of 2,500 images which capture the view from
every seat in the Royal Opera House - with the stage curtain down. This
takes the rigorous documentary approach of the Düsseldorf School to an
impressively absurd extreme, and one which put me in mind of Alan Shearer and
Robbie Savage's subsequent charity stunt of sitting on every seat in Wembley
Stadium.
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David LaChapelle LAND SCAPE @ Robilant + Voena, 38 Dover St - Central
To 18 June: www.robilantvoena.com
 |
| Castle Rock, 2013 |
In
2006, David Lachapelle forswore his hugely successful career as a
commercial photographer in order to concentrate on fine art. The results
have
tended towards the overblown or trite – but I like 'Negative Currency'
(mostly 2010) and this new series. Lachapelle commissioned
the construction of models of the architecture of oil production and
distribution, using recycled and repurposed materials such as egg
cartons, hair
curlers, cardboard packaging and patio lights. He then photographed the
models,
dramatically and somewhat romantically lit, in relevant real landscapes:
refineries in the desert, petrol stations (alright, 'gas stations') in
the
jungles which are threatened now by the activity generated by the fuel
of their
predecessors... Result: spectacular and deceptive images with genuine
purchase
on the linkages between oil, lifestyle and the environment.
 |
| Gas 76, 2013 |
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Interchange Junctions @ 5 Howick Place, Victoria
To 21 June: www.howickplace.com - email info@hsprojects.com to arrange appointment.
 |
| Alice Anderson with 'Primary Material', 2014 - unattached sections of copper mesh. |
Well over 100,000 square feet across seven just built floors
– shortly to become offices - play temporary host to 25 artists
riffing off Yinka Shonibare, who has permanent work here. So: racial
stereotypes countered, colonial legacies challenged, the
history of trade examined… There’s some great and
unexpected stuff: Shonibare’s own totems with every colour of nail (and
Andy Wicks' monumentally photographed nails); David Blandy’s Japanese
garden
installation; Fiona Curran and Faig Ahmed’s carpet alterations; Alice
Anderson’s
instantly convincing new direction, making copper mesh perform with
trembling grace;
and Rose Finn-Kelcey’s funfair sign out of a mistransalation
in a Chinese restaurant menu - which led to ‘sad and lonely, set meal
for one’.
You won’t be sad, you’ll be amazed.
 |
| Rose Finn-Kelcey: 'Sad And Lonely (Set Meal For One)', 2006 |
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Steven Allan: Steady Rolling @ Berloni, 63 Margaret Street - Fitzrovia
To 5 July: www.berlonigallery.com
 |
| Nice Float, 2014 |
London-based Aberdonian Steven Allan made a strong impression in his degree show a couple of years back by merging the aesthetics of print and paint to create a distinctive dirty yellow world populated by banana-men. ‘Steady Rolling’ finds Allan in more gestural territory on what seems a confidently impressive scale. Paradoxically, though, what he dramatizes is the self-doubt of the artist trapped in his studio with no means of telling if he’s making progress or going bananas. Whether he presents himself as the returning fruit construct, a baby acting the great artist, or a dung beetle straining to move the work forward, Allan’s task appears gloomily Sisyphean. And yet… the results are actually pretty funny.
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Income's Outcome (part four): A drawing project by Danica Phelps + Works on paper by Katherine Murphy @ Patrick Heide, 11 Church Street - Marylebone
To 28 June: www.patrickheide.com & www.danicaphelps.com
 |
| Danica with son Orion in front of drawings detailing their life together |
For two decades American conceptual artist Danica Phelps has effected a rare combination of objectivity and intimacy: objectivity in the rigorous recording of her income (in green stripes) and expenditure (red): intimacy in the fluid drawings which diarise how the money is earned and spent. Her personal life over has provided plenty of fodder: coming out as gay; a grand passion; an IVF conception in India; a tempestuous break-up; legal disputes – but here we see payments for rent, car insurance, milk, parking tickets, a children’s party… Trivia and drama is accounted for alike, and the normally hidden economics of art built in too, as work and life combine. Here’s she’s neatly paired with Katherine Murphy, who itemises the plain realities of minimum wage labour.
 |
Income's Outcome 165 'Income’s Outcome 165': (10.75″x10.25″) $1,200 shows the flow of a dollars in 1,000 lines from Danica's window to her landlord's and the resulting depletion of her assets by $1,000 at one red stripe per dollar |
Everything Falls Faster Than An Anvil @ Pace, 6-10 Lexington
St – Soho
 |
| Catharine Ahearn: Incredible Hulk, 2014 |
The title of Tobias Czudej’s selection of art influenced by
cartoons references Mark O'Donnell's ‘Laws of Cartoon Motion’ which have also been gleefully
explored by Andy Holden (see eg www.youtube.com/watch?v=toEH3SQ6LVE). He’s absent
here, but a suitably lively mix of established and upcoming artists is set
against Carl Ostendarp’s pink ‘Fruit and Icebergs’ drip murals. The highlights, spinning off a small Guston, take
cartoonery to darker places: Catherine Ahearn reduces the Incredible Hulk to a powerless
absurdity of hands; Tala Madani illuminates her bald man characters as tree
decorations; Peter Wachler’s mournfully anthropomorphic metal piping sculpture
fitfully invades the space with the sound of panpipes.
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Stephan Baumkötter @ Bartha Contemporary, 25 Margaret St - Fitzrovia
To June 28: www.barthacontemporary.com
Juan Uslé: Al Clarear @ Frith Street, 17-18 Golden Square, Soho
To 26 June: www.frithstreetgallery.com
 |
| Soñé que Revelabas (Aurora), 2014 - Vinyl, dispersion and dry pigment on canvas |
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Into And Out Of Abstraction @ Lubomirov-Easton, Resolution Way - Deptford
To 21 June (late opening 30 May): www.lubomirov-easton.com/Into-and-Out-of-Abstraction
 |
| Gunther Herbst: The Ice Island 2 |
It’s
hard not recommend my own ‘Into And Out of Abstraction’ (see separate
post), as I
love how the fascinating painting practices of Danny Rolph, Gunther
Herbst and
Colin Crumplin play off each other. London-based South African Herbst
sneaks modernism into the history of imperialism in his new paintings of
boats, combining such painterly styles within a work: her one might
cite Stella and Ellsworth Kelly in the boats, the topographical work of
William Hodge (who traveled with Captain Cook) in the glacier, abstract
expressionism in the sky and Richter's blur in the reflection. Deptford
is worth a visit anyway for the run of galleries at The Enclave and the nearby Bearspace and A.P.T.
