Petrit Halilaj: “Do you realise there is a rainbow even if it’s night!?” @ kamel mennour, 51 Brook Street - Mayfair
To 26 Jan
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Installation view with Do you realise there is a rainbow even if it’s night!? (gold green), 2017 - Kilim carpet from Kosovo, flokati,
polyester, chenille wire, steel, brass; installation with flickering and
unflickering light bulbs - and various of the Moth drawings
French
gallery kamel mennour, a welcome
addition to Mayfair for 18 months now, presents the Berlin-based Kosovan
Petri Halilaj. Born in 1986, Halilaj is known for
the sensitive way in which his art reflects a traumatic upbringing in
the Yugoslav wars of 1991-99. He made an
impact at the Venice Biennale in both 2013 and 2017, and this show is a
version
of the latter. The antennae in his delicate ink drawings of moths expand
to
suggest the textile patterning of the Kilim rugs against which they are
shown. A giant moth sculpted from carpet and a flickering light,
to which moths are especially attracted – complete an atmospheric
installation. Not sure I've encountered a deliberately flickering light
before...
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Detail of Moth #7, 2017 - Wooden frame made by the artist, killim carpet from Kosovo, black ink on paper and metal pins
85 x 62 x 15 cm
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Ilya & Emilia Kabakov: Quotations @ Sprovieri, 23 Heddon St (also at Tate Modern)
To 27 Jan
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| Ilya Kabakov: Quotations #1, 2012 |
The
Tate's Kabakovs' retrospective (to 28 Jan) is a must-see, though it has
been criticised for having too many recent paintings when
installations are preferred. I disagree, but it is true that the choice
of paintings (which are Ilya's work alone) is a bit unbalanced: lots of
the image and history layering of the 'Two Times' and
'Collage' series, but only one each from the superb 'Under the Snow' and
'Colourful Noise' series, and nothing from the 'Quotations'. So it is a
worthwhile pendant to see two of that last set. In these, realistic
elements are not part-covered by snow or lost in TV-like static, but lie
behind a luminescent supremacist-style 'fence'. Sprovieri also
shows the collaborative 'unfinished installation', the text for which
explains, alluding perhaps to the plans for a new nation, that 'looking at a building under construction is much more interesting than looking at a finished one'.
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Ilya & Emelia Kabakov: Unfinished Installation, 1995-2017
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Hans Kotter: Point of View @ Patrick Heide Contemporary
Art,11 Church St - Marylebone
To 13 Jan
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| Installation view (photo Marcus Leith) |
The
gallery is celebrating its tenth year with a substantial and attractive
book which reveals how Patrick came to sign up each of the 33
artists he has represented, and builds to an account of how they have
taken his underlying preference for the language of abstract drawing in
innovative and consistently delicate directions. The German post-Zero
artist Hans Kotter is on to his fourth solo show. He draws with light,
and impresses with the range of ways in which he transforms his works’
immediate environments through colour changes, illusions of depth and
cyclical movement. There’s also some gentle humour in Practicing (Diptych), not a note I recall from before, and the chance to learn what a cuboctahedron looks like.
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| Practicing (Diptych), 2016-17 |
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| Phillip Hunt: Paperjet 4, 1999-2018 |
Niko Kos Earle pulls off a
refreshingly ambitious show in JGM's sparkling new space: very big
work brought in from across the world, united by an abstract intensity
bordering on the spiritual, and by how the four artists have – in the titular theme
– drifted around the world, between ways of being, and into different
materials. It hangs together beautifully
as, for example, Lluís Lleó, just returned
to Spain from America, achieves a
monumental delicacy on paper; Suki Jobson repurposes old dresses discovered in
her Irish birthplace; Anglo-New Zealander Simon energises architectural from
with implied movement; and Cape Cod
based Phillip Hunt revisits work he made in South Africa last century to
intoxicating effect *.
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Simon Allison: Spin Cycle and Debris, 2016
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* bias alert: I helped a little with the show - you can see
a fuller account of it here.
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XVII: The Age of Nymphs @ Mimosa House, 12 Princes Street - Oxford Circus
To 13 Jan
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| Upper installation view with Nika Neelova, Folded Rooms, perimeter of studio traced in stainless steel and wax and folded, 2017 - Photo: Damian Griffiths |
A
surprisingly extensive and central new project space makes
the most of its unusual set-up here through a Russian-oriented show
which has an underworld, a transitional corridor and a more ethereal
upper
zone, all tied in to the number 17 – as in the anniversary of 1917’
revolution,
the number of years Putin has been in power, and the time cicadas spend
underground prior to their ‘resurrection’ for a month of mating. Olga
Grotova’s
films hook us into the cyclic calm of nuns who look as if they’ve
stepped out
of a Helmut Newton photo; Nika Neelova turns the topography of a
shucked-off
exoskeleton hanging below into a coolly folded room above; Yelena Popova
provides both apparently evaporated portraits, as from the deep past,
and an
empty cut-out awaiting future faces; undeterred by their lack of tymbals
to
flex and wings to flick, Neelova and Mira Calix team up to imitate both
male
and female cicadas in the corridor, crossing sex and species boundaries
and
referencing the mythical transformation of people into the insects when
first
introduced to and overpowered by music. Does it all cohere? I’m not
sure, but
it’s certainly worth the pondering.
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Lower installation view with Olga Grotova, The Ice Rink, video, sound,
11’40, 2017 and Nika Neelova, Exuviae, 2017 - Photo: Damian Griffiths.
Marie Harnett: Still @ Alan Cristea Gallery,
43 Pall Mall – Central
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Marie Harnett with the linocut Grief, 2017
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Here Marie Harnett, known for her ravishingly
detailed small drawings of films, extends her scale and material scope and the
ways in which production and cinematic times relate. The frozen moment images are - still - all
taken from film trailers, Harnett preferring not to have her choices
influenced by the whole movie’s narrative, but the graphite works range from
postage stamp to cinema screen sizes. They include Picabaesque ‘overlap
drawings’ (as below), taken from frames in which one scene cuts to another; and some extensive abstract passages. She’s also made large linocuts which use curved
lines, suggesting fingerprints on celluloid filmstrips held up for inspection: they
look like plenty of work, so it’s bracing to learn that a 15 x 10cm drawing
takes her as long as cutting a two square metre triptych. The artist also reveals not her hand but her sources’ hands in the short film (or is a trailer?) ‘Hands’, collaged from – you guessed it – film trailers.
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Allerdale Hall, 2016 - Pencil on paper, 8 x 15cm
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Giorgio de Chirico: Getafisica da Giardino @ Nahmad Projects, 2 Cork St and Reading de Chirico @ Tornabuoni Art, 46 Albemarle St - Central
To 15 Dec (Nahmad) / 10 Jan (Tornabuoni)
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| Sun and Moon, 1972 |
Happy
times if , like me, you like all phases of de Chirico. Nahmad has the
odder of two substantial shows, for which Francesco Vezzoli installs
paintings against a wallpaper background of de Chirico motifs, complete
with astroturf floor. There are 18 de Chirico’s: first run 1920’s
classics,
later ‘self-copies’ of the same subjects, some misdated by the artist
(can you
forge yourself? Discuss), self-portraits in his ‘old master’ style… and
an
ante-room full of the little-known late motif of the sun as a character
which
can, for example, sit on a chair. Vezzoli contributes three works:
paintings
which vary de Chirico’s originals in appropriate spirit, and a classical
torso
to which he has added a de Chirico head à la tailor’s dummy. Great fun,
and well complemented by the more scholarly presentation of 25 de
Chiricos at Tornabuoni.
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| Installation view at Nahmad Projects |
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Tony Matelli: Past-Life @ Marlborough Contemporary, 6 Albemarle Street - Central
To Dec 22
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| Woman in the Wind, 2017 - marble and painted bronze |
Jasper Johns may be the subtlest investigator of the
differences between art and life (see the Royal Academy) and Giorgio de Chirico
the most atmospheric combiner of classical and modern (see Tornabuoni and Namhad
Projects) , but Tony Matelli acts as an inheritor of aspects of both with
his found statuary aged by sandblasting, truncation and patination,
topped with contrastingly perishable items, such as fruit, made permanent
in painted bronze and cast glass to yield a striking new twist on the
vanitas theme. Back stage, in the office, you'll find Matelli's best-known
stream of work - a bronze weed - and what looks like a dusty mirror, riffing
further on apparent age and insignificance.
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| Reclining Figure, 2017 - marble and painted bronze |
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Marc Vaux | The Edge and Beyond - constructed works 1977 - 2017 @ Bernard Jacobson Gallery, 28 Duke Street St. James's - Central
To 21 December
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| Cube 1, 2006: powder coated aluminium, glass, hand-painted wood, 22 x 22 x 22cm |
There's
a twist in the tail of this 40 work retrospective survey. For the last quarter
century of his production, Josef Albers (1888-1976) pretty much painted
just squares. Marc Vaux, a consummate painter-maker, focused primarily
on the square for forty years from the mid-sixties, exploring in
particular how vari-colouring the edge of a white square and / or taking
it towards three-dimensionality affect its light and space. This decade
though, Vaux has gone beyond Albers by turning towards the oval.
He says he wanted something which didn't operate on the horizontal and
vertical, and neither was it symmetrical. Add that the oval can look
quite different when its proportions are changed, can be tilted
interestingly, and has links to natural and human forms, and the new
direction he has taken into his eighties of his 80’s became clear.
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Untitled, 2017: Mixed media with acrylic, 30 x 50 x 15 cm
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To 22 Dec
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| Union City Drive-In, Union City, 1993 |
Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photographs of
movie theatres taken over the full course of a screening so that – typically -
170,000 images coalesce to form a white screen, tick enough conceptual boxes
(time, absence, abstraction…) to have become a staple of themed group shows.
But what is gained by seeing 20 of them together? Plenty, as it turns out: the
shadowed detail around the screen is captivating in large format, and varies
considerably between the sub-subjects here: still operative cinemas; abandoned
theatres in which Sugimoto reintroduced a screen and projected a film to take
his photograph; drive-in screens; and Italian opera houses – architectural
inspiration for the American theatres which Sugimoto first started filming in
1976 - for which the film is typically projected onto the stage curtains.
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| Paramount Theater, Newark, 2015 |
Florence Peake: Rite @ Studio Leigh, 6 Garden Walk – Shoreditch
To 16 Dec
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| Still from Rite |
Studio Leigh’s first show across the road from its former
space sees dancer-artist Florence Peake draw multi-formed multi-collaborative
inspiration from the Rite of Spring. Little of
the music is heard, but the centrepiece is a film in which Rosemary Lee,
shot from a dramatic overhead view, battles her way out from under a bed of wet
clay to the internalised sound of Stravinsky’s score, expiring after 14 minutes
of dancing herself into birth and then, as in the ballet, to death. That floor
has been cut into a grid and fired to make a performative sculpture. Peake
herself has danced Rite-rhythmed body drawings - onto oil-primed paper and a plywood
board with sand and plaster - and made half-cairn,
half-human sculptures tapping into the primitive forces of the Rite. The
elements come together to make an visceral and active composition.
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| Installation view with The Ancestors and Spring Rounds (on wall) |
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Tom Wesselmann: Bedroom Paintings @ Gagosian Davies Street & Tom Wesselmann @ Almine Rech, Grosvenor Hill - Mayfair
To Dec 16
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| Bedroom Painting #21, 1969-1975 |
I guess one thinks of breasts for Tom Wesselmann's pictures of body elements, but hands and feet star in the Gagosian
half of this double-bill. In the
oval Bedroom Painting #21, you might think they are set against abstract
elements, but that
radical black centre is a curtain, overlapping a green blind, allowing a
slither of landscape; and we see yellow flowers, a section of purple
wall and a light switch. And if you find it a little cold in its
rigorous,
formal, implicitly sexual organisation – what are these, adverts for
parts of women? - then there’s a warmer, more intimate feel to the
complementary show of later work in Almine Rech’s newly-opened basement space,
All include the face, such as this mother and baby study, which flowed into a shaped canvas of 1979-91.
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Study for Barbara and Baby, 1979
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It’s
hard to complain about the big institutional shows just
now: Whiteread, the Kabakovs, Modiligiani at the Tates; Monochrome
Painting and
Rodin at the National Gallery; Cezanne at the NPG; Rose Wiley at the
Serpentine Sackler; the US generational overview provided
by Wade Guyton (Serpentine), Seth Price (ICA) and Dan Colen (Newport
Street); Thomas Struth at Whitechapel; Soutine at the Courtauld;
Dali/Duchamp
and Jasper Johns at the RA… and all except Johns are up over Christmas.
Here
are a couple of examples of why, contrary to the mysteriously mixed
reviews the
show has received, I reckon anyone who hasn’t yet been should head to
'Something Resembling Truth' by
10 December:
Where ‘Flag’ was really a painting, ‘Fool’s House’, 1964,
presents a broom which is not only a real broom, but is labelled as such. The
same can be said of the cup and towel. The point is that the broom is actually
being used as a brush, the sweep of which – in a satire of ‘action painting’ –
has left a mark on the canvas. So if ‘meaning is use’, in the formulation of
Johns’ favourite philosopher, Wittgenstein, then the ‘broom’ ought to be
labelled ‘brush’. And so on: ‘mixing
pot’ not cup, ‘paint rag’ not ‘towel’.
Hence ‘Fool’s House’: the artist’s house has bled into his studio, and
he has foolishly failed to identify the difference. Yet we may suspect that art
and life are rightly seen as inextricable, or as Shakespeare had Lear put it:
‘this is not altogether fool’.
'Two Flags on Orange' from 1986-7 shows Johns continuing to
manipulate his foundational motifs, even as they remain – first and foremost -
the bearer of painterly effects which interrogate the relationship between art
and reality. Here orange ignites the ground enough to hint at contagion; and by
employing the ‘rotational effect’, whereby the flag dis- and re-appears at the
edges as if the image were cut from a cylinder, Johns defamiliarises the flag and might even mean to form the capital letter
‘I’ from the negative shape. That’s would be directly autobiographical, as more recently
explored by Mark Wallinger in paintings of the letter ‘I'; and also a typical
reference to Johns’ own art, in which letters have a prominent place – so making
one early motif out of another. The medium – ink on plastic – is unusual but as
typical of Johns as encaustic.
Chaim Soutine: Pastry Cook of Cagnes, 1922
The
place to be at the moment is Somerset House and surrounds: there's a
wonderful 21-work Soutine portrait show at the Courtauld, Hassan
Hajjaj has an innovative presentation in the Terrace Rooms, and Lisson
(with twenty major installations), Vinyl Factory and the Koenig Gallery
have projects a few yards away on the Strand and even the Courtauld's
library has a show (of Simon Morley)...
Richard Long's Avon mud painting for the Lisson show is, well, long - 60 metres...
And then there's this...
Melancholia. A Sebald Variation @ Inigo Rooms, King's College London, Somerset House East Wing
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| Still from Guido van de Werve: Nummer Veertien: Home, 2012 |
With so many big shows having opened for Frieze week it would be easy to omit the basement galleries under Somerset
House’s East Wing, but that would be a mistake. Rather, you should take two
hours out of the hurly-burly for this
paradoxically uplifting exploration of melancholy. Inspired by WG Sebald,
especially ‘On The Natural History of Destruction’, it starts with Durer, incorporates
the WW2 bombing of Germany and unseen work by Tacita Dean and Anselm Kiefer
among others, and pivots on a cinematic presentation of Guido Van der Werve’s
hypnotic 54 minute film Number Twelve,
Home, which starts on the hour and demands to be seen in full. Then you can
ponder whether ‘in the description of the disaster’, as Sebald claimed, ‘lies
the possibility of overcoming it’.
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| Jeremy Wood: My Ghost, 2015 - a GPS track of his movements around London over 15 years |
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Light in Motion: Balla, Dorazio, Zappettini @
Mazzoleni, 27 Albemarle St – Central
Giacomo
Balla, Compenetrazione iridiscente N. 15
, c. 1912
The Turin / London gallery uses its newly-expanded exhibition spaces
effectively to set up a series of cross-generational trialogues revealing the
affinities between the Italians Giacomo Balla (1871-1958), Piero Dorazio
(1927-2005) and Gianfranco Zappettini (born 1939). Balla’s ‘iridescent
interfaces’ in particular shimmer in the manner of work made 50 years later,
but the less directly futurist works seen here were largely forgotten until
championed by his much-younger friend Dorazio in the late 50’s. Dorazio himself
feeds the other key influences of Mondrian and Delaunay into explorations of
colour and wave which, judged by Frieze Masters, are increasingly sought after.
Zappettini draws the viewer into the optical and structural syncopation simply
by applying plastic – sometimes coloured – over black and white drawings.
Gianfranco Zappettini, Strutture in BX 2 , 1965-1967 , 80 x 80 cm
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Night Watch, 2011 - Maple, willow, OSB board, 295 x 310 x 122 cm - Photography by Benjamin Westoby
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A
storied fifty year career lies behind Martin Puryear’s overdue first UK
retrospective, which nods to his original training as a print maker but concentrates
on a substantial grouping of sculptures. They succeed by combining subtlety –
in the hand-honed use of wood in particular, in how undidactically the history
of the African diaspora is invoked - with a frequently large scale and
clarity of forms which achieve a human yet mysterious ‘rightness’ which is easy
to recognise but hard to pin down. There's plenty of ambiguity too: is Night
Watch a field of corn, a hair transplant writ large, a broom to sweep away or
bristle to enumerate the anxieties of insomnia, or a reference to
Rembrandt?
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Big Phrygian, 2010–2014. Painted red cedar, 147 x 102 x 193 cm, Photography by Benjamin Westoby
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Laurent Grasso: The Panoptes Project @ Olivier
Malingue, 143 New Bond Street – Central
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| Laurent Grasso, The Panoptes Project at Olivier Malingue, London. Photo: Marcus Peel |
This unusual, dramatically lit, dark-walled show comes from inviting Laurent Grasso (well-known
in France as winner of the Turner-equivalent Marcel Duchamp prize in 2008) to
combine his own work with choices from the gallery’s secondary market
collection: Ernst, Picabia, Picasso, Magritte, Brauner... Grasso immerses us in gazes echoing the myth
of Argos Panoptes, a giant covered with a myriad of eyes. His own additions
of floating eyes onto found landscapes, and eyes-only copies of historical
portraits, act as recurring motifs as surveillance, astrological observation
and voyeurism come into play…
 I |
Laurent Grasso, The Panoptes Project at Olivier Malingue, London. Photo: Marcus Peel
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To 26 Nov
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Chris Jones: Last Things Last, 2017 - book and magazine images, digital
printouts, wallpaper, lenticular postcards, paper, board, wire, polymer
varnish
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Three
interesting
shows in the same building...
The biggest is Becca Pelly-Fry’s exceptionally tight curation 'Stuff' on
over-accumulation. Comedian George Carlin (‘home is a place to keep
your stuff
while you go and get more’) sets the tone for seven artists, centered
around Chris
Jones' computer and surrounding detritus made mainly out
of magazine pictures. Phil Thompson presents a flash film of images
found on discarded USB sticks; Alice Mendelowitz's paintings are designed not to take up space; and Richard Pasquarelli
paints with precise simplification from his photographs of the homes of OCD organisers
and compulsive hoarders respectively*. Elsewhere Sarah Pager has a lively show as artist in
residence (towers of bins, lots of apples, a hypnotic animation made by multiplying one lone fly). And you can read my text
on the third show, Charlie Warde’s 'Disappearing Landscape', either here or on the basement gallery’s
wall.
* here Pasquarelli shows sentimental hoarders, who keep stuff
for its connections: he told me the other main types are information,
aesthetic and recycling hoarders
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| Richard Pasquarelli: Ed No.3 and Sirje No. 1, 2017 - oil on linen |
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| Installation shot: Sarah Pager, Harvest, 2017 |
Herman de
Vries: The Return of Beauty @ Cortesi Gallery, 41 & 43 Maddox St – Mayfair
Herman de
Vries (born 1931) was part of the zero movement in the early 60's,
from which material minimalism he has progressively infused the natural, its
relation to man, and – as flagged by the title here – the potential return to
beauty through the man-made’s reintegration with nature. He represented the
Netherlands in the 2015 Venice Biennale, but has shown little here, so this
impressive retrospective is most welcome. By way of a taster, it includes
thousands of rose buds; various shades of ashes; all the leaves from a given branch; meadowland
pressed behind glass; newspaper in systematically varied stages of
deterioration; and a text work which enjoins us to ‘be happy’ – as de Vries
does at the end of his phone calls - but repeats the word ‘happy’ thousands
of times in a rainbow of colours. You’ll be happier if you see it.
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Robert Longo: Let the Frame of Things Disjoint at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Ely House, 37 Dover Street - Central
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| Study of Eagle, 2017 - 92 x 107 cm |
This,
Robert Longo's most substantial show yet in Britain, features 30
works, many of them enormous charcoals in his signature, darkly
radiant, technique. True, Longo makes images because he loves them,
but he looks for subjects which resonate both personally and publicly
and come together to form an engaged account of the world with seduction
and power at its centre. Here the overview, under a title taken from
the doomed Macbeth, incorporates Ely
House's
former life as the home of the Abelmarle Club, terrorism, resonances
from art history, and a unsurprisingly
jaundiced view of America now. The backstory and interconnections
ratchet up the power of individual works, which include a friend in a
Burka, X-rays of famous paintings, a redacted Guernica, bullet holes in
glass, a ravaged stars and stripes, and the 'paths of the mind' which
merges tree and brain images in the wake of his stroke in 2013.
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Untitled (Copenhagen, February 14, 2015), 2017 - 260 x 3015 cm
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Leonardo Ulian: Real Reality @ Beers London, 1 Baldwin St - Old Street
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Fireworks (2017), copper and concrete on steel plinth, 210x30x30cm
London-based
Italian Leonardo Ulian, who has degrees in micro-electronics and fine
art, has become associated with intricate 'mandalas' built out of
computer components. He moves those on in his new show, focusing on the
hippy aspect of their 'tech meets spirit' vibe by integrating
backgrounds of graphic colour blocks such as a mystic-looking sun and
mountain. More radically, 'Fireworks' takes the looped copper wires
further into 3D as another transformative experience is summoned, with
economically surprising use of coloured sands on the wire ends to
imitate sparklers, flowers and nerve ends. And ‘Labor Intra 1001’ lays
out a complex but theoretically solvable maze to suggest both the
brain's circuitry and the thinking going on in ours should we attempt
it.
Labor Intra 1001 (2017), copper wire on canvas
____________
!Mediengruppe Bitnik: Are
You Online Now? @ Annka Kultys Gallery, 472 Hackney Rd – Cambridge Heath
The Swiss collective (read the odd name as ‘not mediengruppe bitnik’) imaginatively
subverts the online world, here with a striking installation which operates in appropriation and exposure mode, but also
metaphysically. When the ‘adultery arranging’ site Ashley Madison was hacked in
2015, it became clear that almost all the subscribers were men talking –
expensively – to an army of 75,000 female chatbots. Ashley
Madison Angels At Work in London allows us to screen test five of the 436 fembots ‘entertaining’
some 200,000 London-based users through various chat-up lines. Do they pass the
Turing test? You’ll think not, which just goes to show how fully – perhaps
desperately – their interlocutors must have suspended disbelief *. And yet this could be the future…
* Though not all of them: see the full story here
Andy
Holden & Peter Holden: Natural Selection @
former Newington Library, 155 Walworth Road - Elephant & Castle
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Andy Holden is one of our
best artists, and Art Angel have an unrivalled track record the commissioning
ambitious new work in unusual places... So it's hardly a surprise that you
should visit a disused
Victorian library which was previously father and son-run Cuming Museum.
There you will see Holden's
collaboration with his ornithologist father through two films with
accompanying
material and objects. First, 30 minutes on birds’ nests: how are they
made and
why do they take the form they do? How are the skills inherited? Might
they
possibly be art? What if Holden himself makes the nests? The other is a
social
history of collecting bird's eggs - the latter stages of which are
either a
rogue's gallery or sad case studies of obsessives born out of time
(alongside one of the most notorious illegal collections is displayed).
This is
fascinating and also leads us to reflect on what we take from our
parents, to
what extent we can escape it, the difference between instinct and art,
and what
is real here, and what (like the collection of eggs) is not.
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Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama (Hail, the Dark Lioness) @ Autograph ABP, Rivington Place - Shoreditch
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| Bester V, 2015 |
Zanele Muholi’s Faces and Phases
portraits (from 2006 ongoing) asserting the presence of the black LGBTQI
community in South Africa have been widely shown, but here we have only 70-odd
self-portraits from 2014-17. Is there room for more such work in the
post-Sherman, post-selfie age? This tremendous double exhibition - of her ‘Dark
Lioness’ series, and newly commissioned images of Muholi in a kimono in Kyoto
and a former prison in Johannesburg - proves there is. Race, class and personal
history are more prominent than sexual identity as Muholi intensifies her
blackness by increasing the contrast in black and white photographs and uses
potentially absurd yet aesthetically potent props to clue us in to
back-narratives. The scouring pad hat of Bester V. Mayotte, for example, both
dignifies and critiques her mother’s lifetime of domestic labour; while
Basizeni XI uses tyres to haunt the memorialising of her late sister with
colonial rubber production and execution by ‘necklacing’.
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| Basizeni XI, Cassilhaus, North Carolina, 2016 |
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Stano Filko: Reality of
Cosmos @ The Mayor Gallery, 21 Cork St
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| Map of the World (Rockets), 1967 - monotype on map, 95 x 180cm |
Lucia Gregorova Stach, of
Slovakia’s national gallery, has curated this show of 1960’s work by the second
most famous Slovakian conceptualist after Julius Koller. She pitches him as
somewhere between Beuys (Filko has a foundation myth of becoming an artist
following a near-death experience in a munitions factory) and Kabakov (he’s an oblique satirist of the communist
state). Thus Filko (1937-2015) displays proposals for buildings, cobbled together
anti-monumentally from found metal, so that they dominate an image of the
Bratislava skyline’s socialist utopia. He pitches red blood against blue cosmos,
male rockets against cavorting women in a pop-style assertion of
erotic over political against the collage background of a world map – which his
work, unlike his small country but consistent with what was apparently a big
personality, threatens to usurp.
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| Models of Observation Towers, 1966-67 - mixed media installation, 12 x 300 x 85cm |
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Sargent: The Watercolours at Dulwich Picture Gallery
To 8 Oct: http://www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk
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