Jonny Briggs &
Evy Jokhova: The Manicured Wild @ Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, 533 Old
York Road – Wandsworth Town
To 2 Sept: www. kristinhjellegjerde.com
|
______________
Florence Peake: WE perform I am in love with my body @ Bosse & Baum, Unit BGC, Bussey Building, 133 Rye Lane - Peckham
To 8 Sept: www.bosseandbaum.com 
It sounds
too easy: simply to draw around the movement of your own body on the floor, like
a selfie version of the police at a murder scene, then raise the result to the
vertical. There again it seems too hard, because the last thing you want to
look is dead. Dance-trained Florence
Peake did just that in her studio, and the outcomes are much more lively and
surprising - including one view from
above – than I would have expected. She describes the process as ‘falling in
love with the sensation of movement’, and that's how it feels as her falling
actions rise up onto the wall.
And while you're in the area. pop into two unusual locations: the top of the Rye Lane
multistorey, where this year's BOLD TENDENCIES (to 30 Sept) brings
Trafalgar Square to Peckam in the form of 2017 Ewa Axelrad's Let’s go. Yes, let’s go. (They do not move); and the hair salon DKUK,in Holdrons Arcade off
135a Rye Lane, where Clare Price's equally performative abstract
paintings will envelop you (to 20 Aug).
Jonny Briggs & Evy Jokhova: The Manicured Wild @ Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, 533 Old York Road – Wandsworth Town ______________
To 2 Sept: www. kristinhjellegjerde.com
Jodie Carey: Earthcasts @ Edel Assanti, 74a Newman St – Fitzrovia
To 1 Sept:
www.edelassanti.com
With
all the Giacometti up in London at the moment*, it’s hard not to find
an echo in Jodie Carey’s gallery-filling installation of 50 spindly
figure-surrogates. But of course, there’s a lot more to both artists
than attenuation. Carey made her earthcasts by burying timbers from the
historically resonant source of the V&A, and replacing the wood
with plaster – accepting the many contingencies caused by relative
ground wetness, soil type and local matter, and adding some of her own
such as the cut-aways and flecks of rainbow pastel. Wandering through
the forest of casts makes for fascinating variety-in-sameness along with
the references to nature, burial, rebirth, ritual… and maybe even
Giacometti.
* Tate Modern, Thomas Gibson, Gagosian Brittania Street  ___________________  | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Installation
view with Daniel Rapley's scaled up transcription of his son's drawing,
Christina Niederberger's crochet-style taming of de Kooning even as
she pays homage,and Cheryl Papasian's geode sweets
|
I’m sorry that a family wedding has prevented me attending
to meet the artists. My first task was to choose 31 from the 110 who put their
work forward. The standard was high, and there were probably 50 with something
about them I liked, so I aimed to maximise variety where decisions were
marginal. Even so, you’ll be relieved to hear, I won’t touch on all of my
choices. Apologies to those about to go
unmentioned, good to have you here!
On arriving at the gallery yesterday I was pleased to
confirm that several works would contribute to a distinctive atmosphere: Florence
Mytum’s pink spread of suckling points; Amanda Bracken’s jauntily interlinked
teacups; Corrina Dean and Duarte Santo’s ominous but beautifully textured air
raid shelter; and Henry Byrne’s lightbox illuming Lucy Smallbone’s fire. It was
also good to see some themes emerge – plenty of bridges and other architectural
echoes and strong geometries, offset by some punchy figuration, and
interspersed with summer-friendly abstractions dotted around somewhat florally.
I was also delighted that such well-established artists as Michael Ajerman,
Christina Niederberger and Rebecca Meanly – all of whom I’ve admired for some
years – had submitted strong pieces which could be seen alongside those new to
me: I’d like to see more, for example, of Fabio Almeida’s subtly modulated
grid-and-text explorations of how the modern increase in connectivity fails us.
Spending an hour in the space as Darren was hanging the
show, the work which grew on me most was Lucie Bennett’s amalgam of organ-like
shapes, which delicately touches on abstraction, cartoon, medical diagram and
children’s book illustration. It’s a small painting, though, so I thought she
might welcome the materials prize!
I also wondered which of those artists who
haven’t shown a lot previously at ASC would make for a stimulating solo show
here. Three artists appealed particularly: Daniel Rapley, whose painstaking
magnification of his son’s scribble drawing is both typical and atypical of an extremely varied but always
exacting conceptual practice; Nigel Grimmer, whose pictures within pictures –
one strand of several radical deconstructions of the family photo album - bring the exotic and the ordinary, the kitsch
and the bland, the vintage and the modern into witty dialogue; and Caroline
Jane Harris, whose intricate analogue processing of digital sources combines
photographic, printmaking, drawing and sculptural processes to explore how we code
and screen the world. It’s hard to
choose between such differently engaging bodies of work, so I was happy to pass
over to Darren to decide who would be the best fit for ASC’s programme (and he
opted for Caroline Jane Harris).  |
Installation
view with Henry Byrne's lightbox , Lucy Smallbone's 'Somebody's House',
Rosalind Barker's graphite mirror relecting both, and one of Rosalind
Davis' subtlest uses of thread over oil and acrylic.
______________ In Residence and Window Sill @ the Griffin Gallery, 21 Evesham St – Latimer Road
For a group show of artists who just happen to have had a studio at the Griffin Gallery complex, ‘In Residence’ is a surprisingly coherent mix, focused largely on the use of materials, with Thomas Platt’s sculptural puzzle figure plucked from an abstract painting and Odilia Suanzes’ vast graphite overdrawing of would-be-ephemeral traces particularly appealing. Even better is the series of witty riffs on the impromptu displays of kitsch objects in seaside windows, complete with lace curtains, in the project space viewable from outside. That includes several interesting painters – Adam Dix, Sasha Bowles, Neil Zakiewicz, Darren O’Brien – coming out as sculptors, though in O’Brien’s case his ham sandwich keeps one trotter in the double-sided painting camp. It’s an entertainingly varied sequence, with pandas, Bismark, a stuffed ermine and Roland Barthes’ love of Crème Caramel all featuring.
|
To 19 Aug: www.sadiecoles.com
 |
| Quick Count 2, 2017 - vacuum formed panels 130 x 133cm |
As an accountant who has seen a lot of art, I can testify that – for the best, I suspect - accountancy rarely features in the art. An exception is Gabriel Kuri’s cunning orchestration of clashes between the formal and the functional, the inchoate and the structured, the industrial and the organic, the man-made and the natural. The series of ‘Quick Count’ vacuum formed panels of bean shapes refer to the ‘bean counter’ nickname which we accountants rather dislike – and disrupt that lowly description of the function by falling out of order into disarray. Then there are five steel cubes, their minimalism disturbed by such incursions as a rather realistic rubber lettuce and – in ‘Box for Four’ – rolls of bank notes ready to be counted (or, they being Euros, counted out?).
 | |||||
| box for and with, 2017 - stainless steel, rubber, plastic, 63 x 50 x 50cm |
______________
Mark Leckey: Affect Bridge Age Regression @ Cubitt Gallery, 8 Angel Mews - Islington
To 30
July: http://cubittartists.org.uk
Last year,
Turner Prize winning artist and DJ Mark Leckey’s evocative film Dream English Kid 1964 – 1999
explored his childhood and adolescence in Liverpool through a collage of image
and music*. Affect Bridge Age Regression intensifies that by using a
model of a motorway bridge as a site of childhood experiences, symbol of the
early 70’s, link (OK, bridge) between then and now, and a site of traffic vibration suggesting how
formative experiences reverberate through the years. Posters and sodium lamplight complete the
visuals: the soundtrack has a team including Leckey chanting what amounts to an
exorcism of the negativity of the era: OUT THIS HOLLOW RESONANCE, VOID OF HOLY
IMMANENCE / RELIQUARY OF THE 20TH CENTURY, EMBALMED IN LUCOZADE…
* it can now be seen at Tate Britain
* it can now be seen at Tate Britain
_______________
Lisa Yuskavage @ David Zwirner, 24 Grafton Street – Central
To 28 July: www.davidzwirner.com
 |
| Housewarming, 2016 , 203 x 203 cm, oil on linen |
This
is ‘art for believers’ – you have to buy into Lisa Yuskavage’s wacky
world of 70’s soft porn meets cartoonish distortion meets art history.
Once you do, it’s all about painterly experiment and decision-making.
The new developments here are more couples, with the ‘emotional
formalism’ of colours coding their connectivity (or lack of it) with
each other and their surroundings; the use of multi-coloured grounds to
signal transformation (as in the renaissance use of cangiante rainbows
for angel’s wings) or of flesh ground to represent flesh so that, it
might be said, the naked body is the most naked part of the painting;
and greater variation than before in the degree of orthodox ‘finish’
within a painting.
 |
| Ludlow Street, 2017, 196 x 165 cm, oil on linen |
___________________
Philip Guston:
Laughter in the Dark, Drawings from 1971 & 1975 @ Hauser & Wirth, 23
Savile Row - Central
To 29 July: www.hauserwirth.com
Late Guston – the work produced 1970-80 following his
controversial shift away from abstraction, can seem the go-to influence for
every young painter. It’s remarkable, then, to find a 250-strong body of work
from that period which has hardly been seen. What’s more Guston’s savage critique
of Nixon-the-dickhead’s various shenanigans couldn’t be more timely in the all-too-comparable
context of the 45th President. The bulk of these drawings, styled as cartoon-strip
but also feeding the paintings, are from a three month blitz in1971, with a separate 1975 group lampooning Nixon’s self-pity
while suffering from phlebitis during his political and physical descent, having resigned in 1974.
___________________
Bridgette Ashton and Nicole Mollet: Only The World Remains @ Space Station 65, 373 Kennington Road - Kennington / Oval
To 28 July: www.spacestationsixtyfive.com
 |
| Installation view with Bridgette Ashton: A Summerhouse for George Howard, 2006 and Model for Banqueting Hall Cavern, 2014 |
Artist-run Space Station
65 has reopened with a teeming evocation of staged landscapes through such past
eccentricities as grottoes, follies and pleasure gardens of which – in
Diderot's phrase - ‘only the world remains’. Bridgette Ashton fills most of the
space with what look like architectural models for future projects, but imagine
how what has now disappeared might once have been planned, for example a summer
house encrusted with seashells, and a concert hall built into a cave. Nicole Mollett
amplifies the mood through painted and magic lantern slides and projections depicting
imaginary creatures and features and evocative words - which chime with a
further contribution from Ashton: posters announcing imaginary past events. The
regaining of lost innocence rubs up against the inevitability of our demise.
Nicole
Mollett: The Triumph of Time and Truth (Star Illuminant); Rustic Pissing
Portal, The Triumph of Time and Truth (Goodnight) and Rock Folly – all paint on
glass, 2017
___________________
Charlie Smith’s small backroom has been upgraded to ‘project space’
status, more than justified by this tri-dyptich combination of two painters who post-modernise Trompe-l'œil. Paint is paint as Hugh Mendes, known for his obituary
paintings, continues his series imagining the use of artist’s self-portraits to
memorialise them, and Alastair Gordon documents / re-imagines the studio walls
of the artists as the self-portrait was being made. We can read the walls as
collateral results of the act of painting and as an extension of the portrait
form: Bacon becomes an abstractionist in spite of himself; Craigie Aitchion’s
wall is his favourite pink; Michael Andrews pins his study from Giacometti to
the wall. Ah yes, Giacometti…
______________
] [ @ Annka Kultys, 472 Hackney Road – Cambridge Heath
To 29 July: www.annkakultys.com
 |
| Installation view with Jimmy Merris, Gabriele Beveridge, Jean-Luc Moulène prominent |
With
so much work now viewed online rather than in the gallery, curator and
commercial photographer of installations Damian Griffiths has taken the
logical step of setting up the show in order to allow optimal
photo-documentation from a fixed position camera rather than hang the
show to suit the gallery then figure out how best to photograph
it. Plus it’s an evolving show in which photos of previous iterations
will be shown. All very interesting, though actually the show looks
pretty normal! It’s primary appeal is the quality of work tending to
deconstruct the body, and hence physical presence, including Martin
Creed wondering what the fuck he’s doing, one of Jean-Luc Moulène’s
spooky heads made by filling a carnival balloon with concrete, a
particularly witty Richard Wentworth street photo, and a
shudder-crawling mass of animatronic heads from Jimmy Merris.
 |
Installation view with Martin Creed, Dustin Ericksen and Ivana Basic prominent______________ |
Colour, Order, System @ Sid Motion Gallery, 142 York Way - King's Cross - to 28 July: www.sidmotiongallery.co.uk
Cross Section / 04 @ dalla Rosa Gallery,
3 Leighton Place – Kentish Farm - to 29 July: www.dallarosagallery.com
 | ||||||
Roland Hicks: OSB 12 (On southern beaches), 2017 - gouache, coloured pencil, coloured paper on plywood panel, 23x30cm
Roland
Hicks features in both of these interesting shows with witty paintings
and sculptures in which the painting collapses into its ground and
things are not quite as you might assume: what looks like plywood in
Occupy Some Buildings, for example, is scrupulously so painted, and what
looks like paint is collaged crayon on paper. Hicks’ titles add to the
play, most of them suggesting what might be read into the apparent
abstractions by words with the initials OBR. At Sid Motion, behind a
window light adjusted by Fiona Grady's overlay, Hicks' work hides among
comparable-looking paintings by Sue Kennington and Richie Culver which
are what they seem. At dalla Rosa his is one of three miniature worlds
of their own. Catrin Morgan’s tiny notebooks abstract elements from the
history of art: buildings held by saints, for example, or their wounds
(as in the smile/gash below), Tom Hackney makes delicate ink drawings of
Duchamp’s own notations of his chess games, in the black, blue and red
pen colours he used in the 1920’s and 30’s.
|
You Are Looking at Something That Never Occurred and Zabludowicz Collection Invites Bea Bonafini @ the Zabludowicz Collection, 176 Prince of Wales Rd – Chalk Farm
To 9 July: www.zabludowiczcollection.com
 |
Lucas Blalock: Gaba with Fans, 2012 |
Paul Luckraft curates an impressive double bill at the Zabludowicz Collection. In the main space, fourteen artists use the indexical image as a mere starting point for their representation of the world, be that through appropriation, staging or manipulation. Lucas Blalock, for example, might be seen as a Brechtian user of Photoshop, making it a visible part of how he ‘depicts’ an oddball choice of subjects. In the project room, Bea Bonafini is the latest young artist to feature in the Collection’s ‘Invites’ series. Riffing on the building’s transition from religious to museological authority, she triple-tweaks hierarchical powerbases with a tapestry-come-carpet derived from battle scenes, a painting of an imagined chapel for non-believers, and a throne too spindly to support power viably.
 |
| Installation view of Dovetail's Nest, 2017 (Photo Tim Bowditch) |
______________
Sigrid Holmwood: The
Peasants Are Revolting! & Prunella Clough @ Annely Juda Fine Art
3rd & 4th Floors, 23 Dering Street – central
3rd & 4th Floors, 23 Dering Street – central
To 8 July: www.annelyjudafineart.co.uk
 |
Sigrid Holmwood: Peasants fighting with scythes, 2017 - Mayan blue made from woad, ink, and gesso, on calico mordant printed and dyed with dyer’s broom, buckthorn berries, and logwood, on board, 120 x 185 cm |
Sigrid Holmwood’s historico-conceptual paintings adopt the
peasant as both subject and carrier of attitudes which run counter to the
modernist mainstream. Part of that rebellion is against industrialised
production, and so Holmwood displays the making of cochineal (from
insect-infected catci) and Mayan blue (from the European indigo-producing plant,
woad, so adding a colonialist reversal into the mix). The making of the
paintings largely creates their subjects, which loop round on themselves with cheerful
energy, as in this dance-come-fight with scythes. Add that, upstirs, there’s a reliably
stimulating pick ‘n’ mix from across the career of Prunella Clough upstairs,
and that Ronchini and Vigo have good shows just now, and Dering Street is well
worth a visit…
 |
| Prunella Clough: Waterweed 6, 1988 - oil and string on board, 32 x 38 cm |
______________
Searching for magic and the distorted image falling from
your iCloud @ The Dot Project, 94 Fulham Rd - South Kensington
To 9 July: http://thedotproject.com
To 9 July: http://thedotproject.com
Konrad Wyrebek: KKKRInkOMan, 2016-2017
Oil and acrylic paint, uv ink, spray paint and varnish on
canvas 200 × 150 cm
There have
been quite a few shows exploring the interface between painting and the online world painting, but this one is better
than most. That’s because most of the 13 artists' works meets the simple-sounding but eminently
missable criteria of working as paintings, having some digital content, and
relating the two in an illuminating way – and with he processes explained to
the viewer. For example, in a contrast grounded in similarity. Konrad Wyrebek
shows a ‘Data Error’ paintings, this one from an image of someone jumping into
water, which Wyrebek corrupts until it reaches a point he wishes to paint from;
and Siebren Versteeg creates algorithmic programs that respond to
and distort online imagery, then presents the (unpainted) results as
painterly abstractions. Derek Mainella, Gordon Cheung, Kristian Touborg
and Ry David Bradley are also excellent…
Siebren Versteeg: Quavers, 2016:_Algorithmically generated image printed on canvas resin, 84x56.
______________
Vicky
Wright: Night Shift @ Josh Lilley Gallery, 44-46 Riding House St - Fitzrovia
To 4 July: www.joshlilley.com
LET IT BE MADE, 2017, Oil and natural gesso with geological mica on linen over aluminium panel. 119 x 85cm
Vicky Wright's
work has always been socially engaged, one sign of which has previously been
her preference for painting on the reverse of panels as the site of the back
story’s alterity. Here she paints on canvas with a directness suiting her
subject: portraits inspired by her grandmother, a seamstress who worked in the
mill by day and - inspired by the world of high couture - on dressmaking by
night,. Wright sees that compacting of her grandmother's time as precluding
today's more technological colonisation of the body. She calls their style
'calcified pop', though there's also plenty of cubist collage in the juicy mix.
DOPPLER-EFFECT, 2017, Oil and natural gesso with geological mica on linen over aluminium panel. 119 x 85cm
| |||||||||
THE HIGH LOW SHOW at Laure Genillard Gallery,
2 Hanway Place - Tottenham Court Rd
To 24 June: www.lglondon.org
 |
Kate MccGwire: Sentient, 2016 - Mixed media with goose feathers in bespoke cabinet
|
The High Low Show
is a site-responsive adventure in contrasts and connections. Each of
seven artists have work upstairs and downstairs in Laure Genillard's
distinctively divided space. Each artist's work operates between
registers of high and low, including altitude, viewpoint, mood, value
and cultural register. Bronwen Buckeridge, Susan Collis, Sara Haq, Tom
Lovelace, Kate MccGwire, Sarah Roberts and Julie Verhoeven
all rise impressively to my simple curatorial brief with nary an
unintended pratfall. Kate, for example, shows feather sculptures above
and drawings made by maggots below - not without duality, as there is a
sinister edge to the convolutions of Sentient...
 |
Kate MccGwire: Vermiculus, 2016 - graphite on paper |
___________________
Sara Barker: a weak spot in the earth @ The approach
To 25 June: http://theapproach.co.uk
hour-watching silver and exact
water is in water
within within within
2017 - aluminium sheet, mirrored steel, stainless steel rod, automotive paint
Glasgow
based Sarah Barker has typically played literary
inspirations – Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein come to mind - into her
fusions of painting and sculpture. They charateristically start with
paintings which she - usually, but not always - cuts into narrow
strips which are combined with metal rods to make
three dimensional structures. Now Barker writes a poem of her own which
operates like a chain of haiku to provide seemingly imagistic yet
elusive titles
for six of these conjunctions of border lines, viewing templates and
landscape settings
which suggest nature framed and excerpted. The key dynamic is between
the preciousness with which her process flirts, and the formal invention
which negates the risk.
- aluminium rod & sheet, canvas, oil paint, jesmonite
___________________
Paul Johnson: Teardrop Centre @ Camden Arts Centre, Arkwright Road - Camden
To 18 June: www.camdenartscentre.org
To 18 June: www.camdenartscentre.org
Whereas the chaos of Francis Bacon’s studio was reconstructed in identical disorder in Dublin, Paul Johnson has made what looks at first like chaos by shifting what may well have been his fairly tidy studio into Camden Arts Centre. On closer examination, aided by Johnson’s own 40-feature map of the room, it turns out that all is very fully considered: he has variously cut, cast, re-oriented, combined and layered items, using the contents of his studio as raw materials for discovery as – or transformation into - art. Walls become a table, crates form a sculptural barrier, a door stands islanded... As he oversees the scene in the form of a 'Stack-Man' made from piled newspapers, Johnson must be pleased with how this rejig has turned out - the more so as he’s paired with veteran Romanian avant-gardist Geta Brătescu making the most of her studio in the other galleries.
___________________
Peter Dreher: Day by Day, Good Day at The Mayor Gallery, 21 Cork St – Central
Tag um Tag guter Tag (Day by Day good Day) Nr. 1637 (Day), 2001
Oil on linen, 25.4 x 20.3 cm
Peter
Dreher is famous for having painted the same empty water glass over
5,000 times. I say famous, but ‘Day by Day, Good Day’ has been
little-seen in London. Here are 58 examples from 1991-2011, sequenced
day-night-day-night. The strongest contrasts are between sunny and
cloudy days, but all 58 demonstrate Dreher’s exceptional praxical
capacity to remain invested in the painting for itself, regardless of
subject even, as he regards the glass and its reflections intensely.
Obsessive? Oddly, I think not: he has other streams of work, and comes
across as more akin to a daily jogger than a monomaniac, though at 83,
he’s now too frail to jog.
 |
Night - Day - Night sequence |
| ___________________ |
Athena
Papadopoulos: The Smurfette @ Emalin, Unit 4, Huntingdon estate, Bethnal
Green Rd – Shoreditch
To June 3: http://emalin.co.uk
 |
| Installation view |
A love of stains and excess characterises London-based Greek-Canadian
Athena Papadopoulos's bedsheet-like transfer collages, dense with scrawled
overwriting. They’re the backdrop for coat stands as figures (is that a dig at Allen
Jones’ Hatstand?), their several legs
shod in concrete platform shoes, dripping with jewellery and so much other
stuff that 35 materials are listed for CHEWED UP. That, like the other four
'Smurfettes' which occupy the gallery together with three child-sized versions,
carries stuffed letters which spell out the title and seem to indicate that language,
as well as attitudes, lies behind the construction of such assertively abject selves.
So, we wonder, is Papadopoulos a smurfette?
 |
Detail of Smurfette,CHEWED UP,
2017 - wood dowels, screws, glue, antlers, self-tanner, synthetic
hair, taxidermy insects,jewellery chain, wire, pigmented
polyester resin, freeze dried worms, crustaceans andfish, crows
feet with nail polish, confetti, bird feathers, taxidermy bird, image
transfers,hair dye, lipstick on fabric and wool, lingerie, dyed
fur, trimmings and thread, Pepto Bismol, Berocca, red wine,
Malox, Gaviscon, foundation and bleach on carpet, auto-body paint
and clear lacquer on pigmented concrete - 216 x 110 x 120 cm
|
___________________
Alberto Giacometti, Suspended Ball (1930-1931). Plaster and metal. Collection Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti, Paris at Tate Modern
Giacometti and Picasso are dominant just now, and Photo London and Peckham 24 are coming up - but there's plenty else...
 |
To 27 May: www.simonleegallery.com
 |
| Detail from '10', 2017 |
 |
| '10', 2017 - 244 x 201 cm |
___________________
Paola Pivi: You Don't Have to Believe Me @ Massimo De Carlo, 55 South Audley St - Mayfair
To May 27: http://www.massimodecarlo.com
 |
| I am a professional bear, 2017 - urethane foam, plastic, feathers |
___________________
William Mackrell: Hold Up @ The Ryder, 19a Herald St - Bethnal Green
To 27 May: www.theryderprojects.com
 | ||||||
Installation view with Interruption and Convulsive Repulse.
'Hold Up' enacts a round of bodily vulnerabilities
and frustrations against the threatening backdrops of authority and non-existence.
A bank of malfunctioning fluorescent
tubes splutter noisily into intermittent non-death. A performer lies* on a flickeringly
illumined shelf, also made with lighting fixtures, emitting her inner response to its
pulses. A record plays, but displaces to the back room, a collage of purgatorial
call centre music. The redacted part of a Diane Arbus photograph (censored on
entry into the United Arab Emirates) is made stark through the veiling of the
remaining image by subtly stippling it with a scalpel. All feels connected, but
somewhere just out of rational grasp.
* Performance runs every Saturday, 2-6pm
Annette Messager: Avec et Sans Reasons @ Marin Goodman Gallery, 5-8 Lower John St – Soho
To 27 May: www.mariangoodman.com
Annette
Messager’s agreeably wild show packs more than 50 works, many of them
multi-part, into the downstairs galleries (leaving Sol Lewitt wall
drawings to run on upstairs). Snails wear breasts for shells; a uterus
dances in a tutu in room with fallopian wallpaper; Pinochio gets caught
up in his viscera… yet gloves, with pencils for fingers, outline calm
geometries. The title poses the question: is Messager with it, or not?
I’m not sure it matters for
the purposes of enjoying the show, but you should behave yourself: 68
pictograms from round the world forbid pissing, tattoos, photography,
music and driving in a burkha. On the other hand, 69thly, interdictions
are themselves banned, so do as you wish…
|
Athena
Papadopoulos: The Smurfette @ Emalin, Unit 4, Huntingdon estate, Bethnal
Green Rd – Shoreditch
To June 3: http://emalin.co.uk
|
| Installation view |
A love of stains and excess characterises London-based Greek-Canadian
Athena Papadopoulos's bedsheet-like transfer collages, dense with scrawled
overwriting. They’re the backdrop for coat stands as figures (is that a dig at Allen
Jones’ Hatstand?), their several legs
shod in concrete platform shoes, dripping with jewellery and so much other
stuff that 35 materials are listed for CHEWED UP. That, like the other four
'Smurfettes' which occupy the gallery together with three child-sized versions,
carries stuffed letters which spell out the title and seem to indicate that language,
as well as attitudes, lies behind the construction of such assertively abject selves.
So, we wonder, is Papadopoulos a smurfette?
|
Detail of Smurfette,CHEWED UP,
2017 - wood dowels, screws, glue, antlers, self-tanner, synthetic
hair, taxidermy insects,jewellery chain, wire, pigmented
polyester resin, freeze dried worms, crustaceans andfish, crows
feet with nail polish, confetti, bird feathers, taxidermy bird, image
transfers,hair dye, lipstick on fabric and wool, lingerie, dyed
fur, trimmings and thread, Pepto Bismol, Berocca, red wine,
Malox, Gaviscon, foundation and bleach on carpet, auto-body paint
and clear lacquer on pigmented concrete - 216 x 110 x 120 cm
|
Elger Esser: Morgenland @ Parasol unit, Wharf Rd - Hoxton
To 21 May: http://parasol-unit.org
 |
| Salwa Bahry I (detail), Egypt, 2011. C-print, Diasec, 97 x 124 cm |
The
key to German Elger Esser’s photographs of conflicted territories which
appear ‘too quiet’, in the classic Wayne-spoken formulation of the
American Western, is his perfect pitch. That brings just the right
degree of implication to modest-sounding proposals: ‘fake an archive of
views from Israel / Palestine in 1948’; ‘make
big modern photos of Lebanon and the Nile look like fading postcards’;
‘ask another artist to complement your travelogue with paintings of
local orchids’ and, best of all, 'show either side of a border view
printed on either side of a sculpturally propped sheet of copper’.
 |
Installation view with 'One Sky' series centre: Photography by Ben Westoby, Courtesy of Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art
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George Rickey: Sculpture from the Estate & Sarah Braman: Here @ Marlborough & Marlborough Contemporary, 6 Albemarle St - Central
To May 20 (Rickey) / May 27 (Braman): www.marlboroughcontemporary.com
George Rickey: Column of Six Cubes with Gimbal, 1996 - Stainless steel, polychrome 83 x 32 x 32 in.
Marlborough has two outstanding sculptural shows by American artists. Downstairs are the elegant kinetics of George Rickey (1907-2002),
all powered with expert calibration by the odd ceiling fan: not just
his gleaming geometrical transformations, but a wild carrot and a sample
of his more painterly late style - the rotating coloured cubes of
which link seamlessly to the language of Sarah Braman upstairs. Her
radical combinations of high art and vernacular, natural and fabricated,
industrial and organic elements fuse, for example, tinted glass and
welded cubes of steel with salvaged doors and rough-hewn tree stumps
(she’s really enjoying a new chainsaw, she says). They include this
fantastical parody of a bookcase, which is fully usable - but for just
the one book.
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| Sarah Braman: Learning to Read, 2017, found chair, wood, fabric dye, acrylic paint, book, 49x49x42in. |
Katarina Rankovic: ‘Vernacular Spectacular’ in Xhibit 2007 at Art Bermondsey Project Space, 183-185 Bermondsey St – Bermondsey
To 14 May: www.arts-su.com/xhibit
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The Widow |
There are obvious and less obvious reasons to visit
Bermondsey at present: Larry Bell’s sculptural rooms of glass at White Cube,
David Batchelor’s first wall paintings at Matt’s, Waltercio Caldas’ resonant
precision at Cecelia Brunson Projects, Anita Klein’s joyous linocuts at Eames,
a delightfully sharp survey of the ‘Eccentric Geometric’ at ARTHOUSE1… There’s also a showcase for 32 University of
the Arts London students, of which one would expect less. Yet several
interesting works feature across three levels, and the basement includes a showreel
of films by Katarina Rankovic which piqued my interest as much as anything in
the area. Her practice, which she describes as a ‘one woman empathy circus’,
sees her adapt her appearance, accent and manner to a range of characters in
short monologues. They are knowingly theatrical yet convincing, astutely witty,
and carry their sub-texts about the construction of the self and the making of
art with a natural ease. Go there or –
as there isn’t long left – to https://vimeo.com/katarinarankovic
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Others Will Love Me |