MODELS IN MAY

Nouemie Goudal: Les Amants (Cascade)

The Saatchi gallery's stimulating 38-strong survey of photographers provides a chance to assess trends. It illustrates the switch away from photography’s being largely about seeking out and recording what's in the world. Probably only a third of the selection could be described in that way: most follow other models such as searching out pre-existing images to reuse (eg John Stezaker, Marlo Pascual); creating scenarios (eg Ryan McGinley, Laurel Nakadate) or constructing objects (Matt Lipps, Nouemie Goudal) specifically to be photographed; or manipulating the photographic process itself (Jennifer West, David Benjamin Sherry). Much the same can be said of the other most interesting current photography shows such as those of Dan Holdsworth at Brancolini Grimaldi, Alex Prager at Michael Hoppen, Shari Hatt at Space Station Sixty-Five, Sarah Hardacre at Paul Stolper, Hans-Peter Feldmann at the Serpentine and Zoe Leonard at Camden as well as the five shows with which I kick off with below…

Demobilisation Suit - 1945

Stan Douglas: Midcentury Studio @ Victoria Miro, 16 Wharf Rd – Hoxton

To 6 May: www.victoria-miro.com

Confused by the Rodney Graham - Douglas Gordon – Donald Rodney - Dan Graham – Stan Douglas nexus of names?  Well, all you need to know for now is that the last of those has this broodingly powerful show of 16 large format black and white photographs. They’re created in the alter ego of a 1940’s photojournalist: some reconstruct actual images of the time, others are newly imagined versions of such images – such as ‘Demobilisation Suit’, which adds a cold war overtone to the isolation of a shirt for advertising purposes. The twists come from neat narrative links (eg between different types of grip), those telling details – such as of race – which differ from the sources, and the knowledge we now bring of where the fifties led.

Walead Beshty: Travel Pictures @ Thomas Dane Gallery, 11 & 3 Duke Street St James’s – Central

To 26 May: www.thomasdane.com

LA-based Walead Beshty provides plenty of themes to unravel as he becomes the first to make strategic use of the separated nature of Thomas Dane’s spaces. No. 11 shows one of his well-known FedEx boxes, cracked by its successive transits; several of his Travel Pictures, which exploit the chance effects of an airport’s X-ray security machines on his unexposed film of an abandoned Iraqi diplomatic mission; and a 24 hour reel of ‘cold war apocalypse films’. No. 3 has a FedEx box which finally collapsed, and has been shored up by an internal armature; Travel Pictures which have been negated by a hole-punching process; and the 24 hour reel run backwards, which is, I suppose, part of how we see the cold war now.

Steven Pippin: Cannon 35mm shot in the back with .25 calibre

Resistance: Subverting the Camera @ The Fine Art Society Contemporary, 148 New Bond St – Central

To 26 May: www.faslondon.com

Janet Laurence’s Sumatran animals caught in a ‘camera trap’ are one highlight of this stimulating eight artist collection of cameraless photographs and other unconventional approaches. The other is a too-rare sighting of new work by 1999 Turner Prize shortlistee Steven Pippin (he’s the rigorous type, and has just spent ten years working out how to balance a pencil on a skyscraper). Pippin’s ‘End of Photography’ project required a firearm license and hair-trigger electronics: we see the death of analogue means made literal as cameras are shot, documented by an external photographic record, by the shattered cameras themselves, and last – violently beautiful - images extracted from the victim equipment’s moment of impact.

Daily No. 2 (Asher)

Thomas Demand: The Dailies @ Spruth Magers, 7a Grafton St – Central

To 31 May: www.spruethmagers.com

German star Thomas Demand is known for photographing his cardboard models of politically charged scenes so that our slow-burn detection of their constructed nature parallels the journalistic process of uncovering awkward truths. Here he applies the same process of recording an absent reality to his own rather Wentworthian phone snaps of incidental items, elevating their status through the labour he gives them in a move somewhat parallel to hyper-realist painting. That may sound a bit duller than his main stream, but the gloriously dye-transfer printed results work brilliantly. Look out for the mirror made by such mundane means...

Damien Meade - Untitled

The Smallest Composite Number @ Standpoint, 45 Coronet St – Hoxton

To 19 May: www.standpointgallery

Curator Peter Ashton Jones has brought together four painters who start with aspects of still life and arrive at variously abstract takes on the ambiguities around object, painted object, painting as object and the organic development of the object into something else entirely. The interplay is good between Clive Hodgson, Vicky Wright, Brian Sayers and Damien Meade - who takes up an aspect of Thomas Demand’s approach to photography, as the subject of his paintings are his own objects made out of modelling clay and wire. They’re a peculiar and compelling mix of abject, assertive and grotesque.

Otto lettere dall'Afghanistan, 1972

Alighiero Boetti @ Tate Modern (to 27 May), Sprovieri (23 Heddon St to 16 June) & Carlson (6 Heddon St to 1 June)

It’s a tough choice at Tate Modern: whether to queue up to queue further inside a crowded run-through of mostly too-familiar work; or to walk straight in to a beautiful yet unpeopled curation of thoughtful innovation? And if you do choose Boetti, then his current festival continues with two shows in Heddon Street. Sprovieri’s extensive selection of work on paper includes particularly fine late drawings and stamp works: the crescents make for extra visual and political echoes in this one’s typical combination of order (repetition, the postal system, the logic of placement) and disorder (inversions, surplus value, aesthetically arbitrary cancellations). Carlson has a vast and magnificent range of embroidered works.

Painting, 1939

Ben Nicholson @ Bernard Jacobson Gallery, 6 Cork St

To 30 June: www.jacobsongallery.com

Ben Nicholson is also having something of a moment: doing pretty well up against Mondrian at the Courtauld and Picasso at Tate Britain, and now getting all three of Bernard Jacobson’s showrooms. That allows for a 39 work survey which includes top-notch examples of everything you’d want (except a white relief, which is where the Courtauld scores). Jacobson has early landscapes, early abstracts; carved and scumbled reliefs; late landscape-come-abstracts; natural wood constructions; townscape, treescape and still life drawings… After Bacon, Nash and Lewis, our most important C20th painter? Of related note: the often quite Nicholsonian drawings of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham  at Art First.

Jamie Shovlin: Various Arrangements @ Haunch of Venison, 103 New Bond St - Central

To 26 May: www.haunchofvenison.com

Back in 2005, Jamie Shovlin showed imagined covers for planned-but-unpublished extensions to the Fontana Modern Masters books on great thinkers, subverting the postmodern credentials of the series’ design and asserting their status as paintings through casually artful dripping. Now they’ve returned bigger and yet subtler: the drips are confined to the sides of the canvas and the barely visible layers behind the front image of 17 acrylic paintings, each bigger than you, which contain 80 possible cover designs between them. Each is a dance between theory (the application of a complex set of criteria to determine the successive colour options) and intuition (Shovlin deciding if he likes the result or will change it) - which may well chime with how the insights of Merleau-Ponty, Benjamin and Derrida et al came about…





Alice Walton: In The Pleasing @ Tintype, 18 St Cross St - Farringdon

To 26 May: www.tintypegallery.com

Alice Walton takes a turn towards the geometric at Tintype, now well settled in their permanent space near Hatton Garden. She has previously hidden and selectively revealed images by maskings of tape: here that role is played by constructions built from a variety of sliver surfaces and placed on the images, which they cover, distort and reflect in turn. Add that this all takes place on a chunky table made from silver-covered insulation material, and that most of the found images masked have a nineteenth century aspect, and you get a sense of the range of dialogues quietly set up. Do: ask to see the collages, too. Don’t: confuse the artist with the Wallmart heiress.

Snowglobe

Sean Landers @ Greengrassi, 1a Kempsford Rd – Kennington

To 6 June: www.greengrassi.com

This show looks like a scholarly library in which Landers, who's been sending himself up for so long he must mean it seriously, links Melville, Beckett and Dickinson to his own entertaining  screeds on his futile compulsion to make art. The words form the titles of the books depicted in five paintings of loaded bookshelves: ‘I AM NOT A MASOCHIST ALTHOUGH THIS IS WHAT IT IS HAS COME TO’ gives a flavour. The writers come courtesy of eight steel busts of greats who have lived on through their work. Their presence implies the question: will Landers? A devilish Pan stands in the courtyard, ready, perhaps, to comment….

GLASGOW INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL OF VISUAL ART 2012

The Glasgow Festival’s opening weekend (20-22 April) made for maximum stimulation: the 45 participating locations become an excuse to explore the city throughout which they are spread in such various locations as a railway waiting room to a university roof to Ruth Ewan’s history of Socialist Sunday Schools, perfectly placed at the Scotland Street School Museum. Then there were the talks, the performances, the openings, the alternative spaces, the parties… The balance between Scots and others was good, reflected in the artists I focus on below: six Celts, two Sassenachs, six from beyond these shores. There was a theme – ‘Real Time’ – but what couldn’t be made to relate to something so broad? Yet there did seem to be plenty of reference to or interaction with times past...

Karla Black at the Gallery of Modern Art

Recent Turner Prize shortlistee Karla Black uses uses fragile and potentially ephemeral materials. That made for an immediate source of productive contrast from giving her the run of GoMA’s imposing classically-columned main hall, historically the focus of Glasgow’s financial trading business. Cue the ravishing combination of ‘Empty Now’ – 17 tons of variously woods’ sawdusts, layered like the mother of all tiramsus – and ‘Will Attach’, 170 cellophane twists hung from the ceiling in a gradually descending formation so that they started well overhead but the viewer was in among them by the other end of the hall. Here bigger, pointing up the originality of Black’s sculptural forms, was definitely better.

Jeremy Deller: ‘Sacrilege’ on Glasgow Green

Even before the waiting classes of children streamed onto it, this was obviously a public art coup, up there with Olafur Eliasson’s Sun and  Carsten Höller’s slides. Jeremy Deller, the art world’s arch-combiner of popular tastes with audience involvement, has made what must be the world’s biggest bouncy castle in the form of a full size inflatable version of Stonehenge. ‘No shoes, no sharp objects, no human sacrifice’ warned the notice alongside. It’s a homage, says Deller, ‘not only to Stonehenge itself but to the anarchic freak-out culture of Hawkwind, Bruce Lacey and Ken Russell’. It travels to London for the Olympics, and, of course, the kids loved it more than they would the fenced-off original…

Ian Giles: ‘Listen Harder’ in ‘Arrives in Starting’ at The Lighthouse

Fiona Mackay and Rachel Adams showed well in the Duchy Gallery’s mixed selection of work by recent Glasgow graduates, but the attention grabber was London-based video and performance artist Ian Giles’ pair of sculptures posing the immediate question: what would you hear if you listen to a rock? Not some sort of musical pun, the headphones revealed, but the ancient sound of the naturally occurring phenomenon of Acoustic Emission, whereby external stimuli such as earthquakes generate sources of elastic waves inside rocks. The work contains 44,000 sound clips of Acoustic Emissions collected by the Rock and Ice Physics Laboratory at University College London, lowered to an audible frequency. Groovy...


Sea-snail Camera

Niall Macdonald in ‘Petrosphere’ at Skypark

The basement of a shinily-clad office block (in which o2 employs thousands) hosted the second half of a lively Greco-Caledonian exchange, the Scots in it having already shown in Athens. I was struck by how Niall Macdonald combined timeless natural forms from his Hebridian home with the more temporary contemporary in violently contrasting scales: a neon ring plus whale vertebrae either side of a column the size of a small cetacean; and a delicate combination of camera and snails, for which he had found an unusually smooth means of casting items in pure white plaster.

Richard Wright: ‘Works on Paper’ at Kelvingrove

In 2009 Glasgow-based Richard Wright won the Turner Prize – as Scots often do – for his site-specific and necessarily temporary practise of drawing on gallery walls. This first ever show dedicated to his work on paper covered a dozen years through 30 varied drawings: realistic depictions of castle architecture; a giant silver hand; geometric abstraction; pulsing cloud-like patterns applied with gold leaf; and complex symmetrical eastern-flavoured drawings of great delicacy. Most of these related directly to site-specific projects, making them, perhaps, an exploration of the opposite effect of decontextualisation. They were attractive, but I was still more excited by some fantastic Vuillard taking pattern to the max in the adjoining room…

Charlotte Prodger: ':-*' at the Centre for Contemporary Arts Intermedia Gallery

Charlotte Prodger presents a complex but compelling installation which draws analogies between structural film and themes of obsession and obsolescence in popular/gay culture using four elements: on-line footage of the fetishisation of black and white Nike trainers, including cutting and pulling them apart in what seems a rather sexual desire to see and understand all of an adored object; a double 8mm film splitter standing in for how mid-sixties artists deconstructed film into its constituent elements; a Sharp GF 777 boombox, now more for display than for use on the street; and a fragmentary narrative playing on it which links all that to the opening and closing of the blinds in a sex club in Berlin… ‘Phew!’ you might say, and yes, it was a bit amazing that it worked…

David Korty at Mary Mary project space

Los Angeles painter David Korty has produced a new stream of work in the past few months while living in Vancouver – but with this Glasgow show in mind. They’re modest works on paper which take the organisation of a newspaper as their template, thus connecting to Korty’s established interest in communication and design in everyday living. The text is reduced to patterns without letters, so that information is represented but not transmitted. There are Dada, Constructivist, Bauhaus and Minimalist echoes. Puns emerge between ‘pages’ such as collaged-on paper from a hole-puncher and equally-sized circles made on the surface and – by way of Scots tribute perhaps – they all smuggle in a version of St Andrew’s Cross. I found myself liking them more the more I looked.

Moyra Davey: still from 'The Goddesses'

Erica Eyres: ‘Inside the Minds’ at Southside Studios and Moyra Davey: ‘Les Goddesses’ at Tramway

The Festival is fairly light on films, but two of the few are outstanding – and both made by Canadians. Erica Eyres’ elliptical yet stark tale of apparent abuse, ‘Inside the Minds’, is well hidden at the back of the Southside artists’ studios near Queens Park (but you can see it here: http://vimeo.com/40407725). It travels a long way in five minutes, even though most of it shows a whitewashed wall. Moyra Davey’s far more expansive ‘Les Goddesses’ takes an indirect and multi-stranded hour to relate the artist’s own family history through the project of describing Mary Wollstonecraft’s. This is told through Davey pacing her flat repeating into a Dictaphone the apparently pre-recorded words feeding into one ear. That amplifies the contrast between the diaristic and the measured which is one of the many themes – Goethe, muses, Rome, Freud, adolescence, siblinghood, Benjamin, laudanum and writing in public – woven into Davey’s intimately hesitant meditation.

Wolfgang Tillmans: ‘Works from the Arts Council Collection, ‘Onion’ and ‘Headlights’’ at The Common Guild

A clumsy, if descriptive, heading for a wide representation of Tillmans’ subjects through 32 photographs presented in a typically diverse manner all around a Victorian townhouse. Plenty of known favourites are included, and an apparent match-up between the organic patterning in waterfall and trees worked beautifully. The highlights, though, consistent with Tillmans’ ability to refocus the banal, were the new subject of car headlights: as you climbed the stairs you saw a small non-matching pair directly, then a much bigger-than-life-size single headlight first in a mirror, car rear-view style; and only later directly, on the stairwell wall above you.

Folkert de Jong: ‘The Immortals’ at the Mackintosh Gallery, Glasgow School of Art

The Dutch artist makes his groups of figures by recasting elements using the ‘unethical’ industrial material of Styrofoam, which is both environmentally contaminating (as it won’t beak down) and dangerous in itself – so much so that de Jong has to wear a gas mask when working, and the process degrades the cast, so causing each repetition to vary. He clearly relishes his material, though, and it’s suited such sardonic takes on corruption and imperialism as his masterful groups of pirate traders. Applying it to Mackintosh’s circle played neatly off their self-given name (‘The Immortals’) and the role of more perfect plaster casts (included in the installation) as drawing models in the School – but it didn’t feel comparably urgent.

Clive Hodgson: ‘Untitled’ in ‘Ever Since I Put Your Picture in a Frame’ at 42 Carlton Place

Painter couple Carol Rhodes and Merlin James have converted the ground floor of their elegant Clydeside house into a project space. The first show, curated by the latter, is a comparably elegant selection of paintings. Clive Hodgson will have the first solo show here, and can currently be seen at London’s Standpoint Gallery. Here his feathery, delicately- hued ‘Untitled’, pointing only towards its own absence of a dominant direction, seemed to tremor with the freshness of having just tipped into abstraction.

Kilian Rüthemann & Kate V Robertson at David Dale Gallery

This Swiss-Scottish dual show makes beautifully poised use of a newly available East End industrial unit, which the work serves to dissolve. Rüthemann has leaned pseudo-ill-fitting steel sheets against the internal girders to exaggerate how they already divide the room. Robertson co-opts the space into how her works change state: they include a wax plinth-come-candle big enough to burn through the entire six week run; crumpled paper cast in concrete; and the projection of a screen saver with a bouncing sun motif onto a screen of ice which melts away in the course of each day.



Images courtsey of the relevant artists and galleries + Ruth Clark / Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne (Black),
Gagosian (Wright), Maureen Paley (Tillmans) and Janet Wilson (de Jong)

EASTER EXTRA

Or should that be 'Easter Eggstra'? Thought not... There's enough interesting stuff round at the moment that I found myself identifying some extra shows which run into late April. We come into colour slowly, and not very far until a late burst before the end piece, part of an end-of-analogue TV show moment which also includes the ICA and Galerie8...



Molly

Shari Hatt: 'I just want to be taken seriously as an artist . . . etc' @ Space Station Sixty-Five, 373 Kennington Rd – Kennington

To 25 May: http://www.spacestationsixtyfive.com/

Canadian photographer Shari Hatt takes on cliché with some panache in the first show at this decade-old gallery’s new space / station. First dogs, which she photographs rather attractively, some as black on black – only with such an attention to detail, lighting and eye contact as to lampoon the pretensions of portrait photography by applying them to canine subjects. Second, clowns: other artists dress up to enact an uncomfortably direct parody of a critic’s visit to her studio; and Hatt has a striking range of professional clowns and burlesque performers (Red Bastard is especially good) tell art-referencing jokes so dreadful they may have to be taken seriously…





  Elisabeth Scherffig: Vitrea @ Faggionato Fine Arts, 49 Albemarle St – Central

To 27 April (not weekends): http://www.faggionato.com/

An ideal match of space and art ranges Elisabeth Scherffig’s intensely intricate drawings of industrial glass in front of one of London’s finest gallery windows. Scherffig (born in Düsseldorf, home of the Museum of Glass, in 1949) derives impressive variety from combinations of pattern, opacity and light, together with an occasional hint of what might lie beyond. There are plenty of analogies to pursue in that, or you can just admire the dark sepia pastel  technique, especially in the bigger works and in the huge drawing of a construction site (from an earlier series) in the office.

Kelly Barrie & Sherin Guirguis: Slow Dance (Enta Omry)

 

Sweethearts @ Pippy Houldsworth, 6 Heddon St - Central

To 21 April: http://www.houldsworth.co.uk/

As you’d expect, some things work better than others in this show featuring seven artist couples who work separately yet agreed to collaborate – but it’s all interesting. Hume-Hopton and Rauch-Loy are good, but the stand-out piece is by the least-known couple. Egyptian artist Sherin Guirguis works with Islamic patterns, her husband Kelly Barrie is a process-based photographer. They made a patterned ‘rug’ from photo-luminescent powder on back paper, then danced across it to form the basis for a photographic print. Thus a romantic creative action led to a joint creation which disrupted the grid as it merged their cultures and approaches…





Large Dark Line Vertical Grid

Winston Roeth @ Bartha Contemporary, 25 Margaret St – Fitzrovia

To 19 May: http://www.barthacontemporary.com/

Beacon-based New Yorker Winston Roeth has been honing the monochrome and the grid for three decades, out of which experience he demonstrates three ways of undermining our perceptual habits at the newly central Bartha Contemporary: diptychal plays on window or landscape, sea or sky; sparkle-infected grids, in which accidental but manipulated irregularities produce a shimmer effect which comes and goes at the junctions; and the use of untraditional materials – notably commercial slate tiles, ready to be hung on pre-driven nail holes – as a colour-ground with its own anti-flat character.

The Ideal is Unattainable

Margo Trushina: Sublime and Instruction @ Salon Vert, 21 Park Square East – Regent’s Park

To 29 April: http://www.salon-vert.com/

Young Russsian Margo Trushina has three floors and a yard to explore our post-romantic perception of the sublime through photo-lightworks paying tribute to the mythic romance of the road; an installation which gives the sunset a political edge; and an artificially produced ‘Personal Rainbow’ (best seen at dusk). The highlight, though, is the room combining video, industrial materials, mirrors, lighting, sound and a trembling curtain of thread to create a version of the Iguazu Falls in Brazil which sets up a compelling dialogue between the platonic and the ramshackle.



Pascual Sisto: still from '28 Years in the Implicate Order'

  Graham Dolphin: What is the word & Pascual Sisto: Fill_In_The_Blanks @ Seventeen, 17 Kingsland Rd – Hoxton

To 5 May: http://www.seventeengallery.com/   (and films at http://www.pascualsisto.com/ )

It’s double time at Seventeen: at ground level Graham Dolphin continues to mine last documents and memorials with the passion of a fan in a high octane graphite-based mural taken from tributes to Ian Curtis and versions of such items as the last note written by Aldous Huxley to his wife (‘Try LSD…’) and the last of the concluding blizzard of angel images made by Paul Klee. In the basement you can see why Spanish American artist Pascual Sisto has made an internet impact – which he’s now trying to translate to the object world - with his hypnotising animations of a chair possessed and of a cityscape in which 28 independent red balls eerily bounce in and out of synchrony.

 

Michael Samuels: Tragedy of the Commons @ Rokeby, 5-9 Hatton Wall - Farringdon

To 12 May: http://www.rokebygallery.com/

Michael Samuels repurposes furniture to make sculptures. They bring constructivist and deconstructivist modes into alliance to form abstractions in which the historic utility of the items involved still pulls the viewer in. Neat touches include the provisional attachment of parts with G-clamps and ratchet straps, and the use of desk lights to differentially illuminate found colours. Here there’s just one elegantly integrated barrier across the gallery like a wall, a giant picture or even a window into some perverse reorganization of an office and, by impaction, its life and many of ours’. ..

George Young @ Hilary Crisp Gallery,2nd Floor, 33 White Church Lane - Whitechapel

To 21 April: http://www.hilarycrisp.com/

Hilary Crisp has moved east – a stone’s throw from the Whitechapel (though she herself has moved south for a few months, accompanying husband Graham Hudson to an artist’s residence in Italy). This is a more extensive selection of George Young’s fluently typically fluent yet poster-like paintings of stock images than could readily be show in the space. How so? There are heaps and boxes full of them, which visitors are unpreciously encouraged to leaf through – all at one with Young’s ongoing subversion of standard display modes in favour of apparent disposability, which has included separating painting and frame, leaning paintings into odd curvatures and attacking his own images in various ways.

 

Stuart Brisley: Next Door (the missing subject) @ Peer, 97 & 99 Hoxton St - Hoxton

To 28 April (talk 24 April): http://www.peeruk.org/

The punchiest political statement to be seen just now is this highly edited half hour record of ten days during which the veteran provocateur Stuart Brisley made symbolic sculptural statements on the state of the nation by piling up the items abandoned in the closed-down shop which is now the extension to Peer’s space and where the film is being shown. Sound dull? Oddly, it isn’t: there’s shambolic comedy, atmospheric sounds, voyeuristic passers by, Brisley’s punchy explanatory diary text, and the way its sequence of morphing abstractions build their own aesthetic.

Gilbert & George: London Pictures @ White Cube - Mason’s Yard, Hoxton Square and Bermondsey

To 14 April (Hoxton) / 12 May (Mason’s Yard & Bermondsey): http://whitecube.com/

The London Pictures, well-timed to deflate Olympic puffery, strike me as Gilbert & George’s best set this century. Why so? First, there’s logic to the multiplicity: the number (292!) is driven by the categorisation of key words in news vendor posters, and rams home the everyday banality of disturbing events. Second, the directness of focus – emphasised by a restricted palette of black, white, red and flesh – suits the subject. Third, the apparently straightforward, rule-driven images, are actually quite complicated layerings of four elements: the headlines; the background made from eccentric views of the East End, mainly its brickwork, reflections in cars windows, and houses wearing lace curtains ‘like burkas’; the ghostly figures of G&G haunting their territory; and the Queen, differently worn down and damaged in each coin-sourced profile, appearing to give her imprimatur.

Josephine King: I told him I was an artist. He said, “Can you cook?” @ Riflemaker, 79 Beak St - Soho

To 21 April: http://www.riflemaker.org/

There’s no holding back in Josephine King’s work: a helter skelter of influences – Egypt, Art Nouveau, Klimt, Malevich, Jawlensky, Emin, the many countries she’s lived in; savage, headlong, self-absorbed border texts out of bipolarity and a sense of injustice; full blast colours in her favourite inks, including harlequin patchworks all over the skin of her full-length nude self-portraits... In a way it sounds terrible, and in a way it is – but compulsively so, and I found myself convinced that King is something of a Queen in her mode.

David Hall: End Piece @ Ambica P3, 35 Marylebone Rd – Baker St

To 22 April: http://www.p4exhibitions.com/

David Hall’s is the name which comes to mind in the category ‘70’s British TV artist’ – his snippets of film used to interrupt broadcasts are seminal. They’re shown here (interrupting each other) along with a Naumanesque chance to see yourself from odd angles in several screens (is that a bald spot?) and a floorscape made from analogue TV Sets. That has both a fickeringly cacophonous aesthetic impact and a narrative logic, as the screens go blank in turn as the switch to digital TV occurs in April: by the end of its run, there will be no pictures.

Images courtesy of the relevant artists and galleries + Maya Balcioglu (Brisley)





NO PAINTING IN APRIL

The best show in London now is the exemplary Boetti survey at Tate Modern (to 27 May) and it has two very worthwhile pendants: three floors (used for the first time) of neatly complementary works at Spruth Magers (to 31 March)  and Gavin Turk’s homage at Ben Brown (to 20 April). Another fine group of three shows are spread across the two Lisson spaces: Dan Grahams’s pavilions,  Jorinde Voigt’s striking full UK debut (see my New York recommendations) and a particularly inventive set of explorations by Spencer Finch (all three to 28 April).  Once you’ve seen those six (!), I also recommend the following, which similarly fail to feature paintings… the late Dubuffet show at Waddington would be my choice for those who want some.

Ximena Garrido-Lecca: Paisaje Antrópico @ Max Wigram Gallery, 106 New Bond St – Central

To 5 May: http://www.maxwigram.com/

Young London-based Peruvian Ximena Garrido-Lecca makes realistic versions of objects you might find in the street in her homeland – a fountain, a gate, a wall, a fence out of oil drums - but infects them with symbolic and historical resonance (Doris Salcedo came to mind). The undertones in these ‘anthropic landscapes’ are made explicit in striking footage of the ‘Blood Festival’ from a Peruvian village: a condor is strapped to the back of a bull, and a battle ensues in which the bird pecks and the beast tries to shake it off – or its brains fatally about. According to Ximena, the odds favour the bull – but the ritual is more controlled nowadays, partly because the condor is an endangered species.

'Crucifixes for Various Amphibians', 2000 - a boyhood collection of lolly sticks...

Marcus Coates: ‘Proxy’ @ Kate MacGarry, 27 Old Nichol St – Shoreditch

To 14 April: http://www.katemacgarry.com/


Marcus Coates develops links between human and animal worlds in a manner at once plausible and playful. This diverse survey of his unusual practice opens with a Spotted Eagle Ray, filmed as an exemplar of an ability to inhabit alternative realities which might help us to resolve inner conflicts. The show then conjures with such alternatives as the space taken up by a running wolf, translated for spiritual purposes into a surprisingly sleek plinth-like form; the artist disguised by means of shaving foam as twenty species of British moth; and a range of wild faeces charmed into bronze. It’s an enjoyable way to ponder how far we’ve come from our natural roots, and how we might seek a reconnection.

RA1884

Roger Ackling: High Noon @ Annely Juda, 23 Dering St – Central

To 28 April: http://www.annelyjudafineart.co.uk/

For forty years Roger Ackling born (1947) has been using a magnifying glass to burn the sun into geometric patterns on found items or pieces of wood. Thus, ritualistic process meets minimalist language to produce altered readymades which take art out of the studio to interact with the environment. The results are harmonious, surprisingly varied, and bring a certain wit to the deconstruction of objects’ original purposes, for what is of lasting use in the context of the solar time which is inscribed by the sun’s path? So Ackling starts with a boyhood game and turns it by sheer persistence into his own route to eternity.

Salame

Santo Tolone: Three Times Once @ Limoncello

To 28 April: http://www.limoncellogallery.co.uk/

Perversely enough, in this last show at the small and narrow Limocello space before a move to larger quarters, there are three invigilators at all times! That’s by way of a performance rather than Gagosianic security, and forms one part of a witty show made up of three sets of works which almost repeat themselves. They all play with presenting ‘meanings deprived of their original signifiers’: the locations of peppercorns in a salami which has gone; elements of public sculptures removed from their context; an erection responding to a porn film we can’t see… Tolone, by the way, is a young Italian artist, and not – as I’d thought likely – another outcrop of Ryan Gander, though I dare say there are three of him…

From 'Dust of Stars', 2007/09

Franz Erhard Walther: DRAWINGS - Frame / Line / Action / Drawn Novel @ The Drawing Room, 12 Rich Estate, Crimscott Street - Bermondsey

To 28 April: http://www.drawingroom.org.uk/

The Drawing Room’s spacious new premises – handily close to White Cube’s new Bermondsey outpost – allow for a comprehensive look at fifty years of the influential German Franz Erhard Walther’s drawing-driven practice. There are experiments with materials, including the striking ‘air enclosures’ between two sheets of paper; documentation and ‘instruments’ from drawing actions in the landscape; and 71 selected memories from the remarkable 524 sheet cycle ‘Dust of Stars’ (2007-09), which combines drawing and diaristic writing (translations available) to track Walther’s personal, cultural and artistic development with a winning mixture of charm and obsession.

Bag

Linda Aloysius: New Model Army @ Madder 139, 137-13 Whitecross St – Barbican

To 28 April: http://www.madder139.com/

Back in her original premises, Debbie Carslaw hosts a standing army – no reclining nudes here - of 14 life-size women, who assert themselves with considerable vim, cartoonish individuality and not a little well-aimed vulgarity against the historically male zones of the building industry (in which Aloysius has herself worked) and monumental statuary. The fun is in the wittily economical spontaneity of that deconstruction.The opening salvo, which combines concrete high heels with a cement bag head-come-cover in mocking reference to a term of abuse which might be shouted from a scaffold, seems to be heading out of the gallery to admonish any such taunters.

nudes dr02

Thomas Ruff @ Gagosian Galleries - Central & King's Cross

To 21 April: http://www.gagosian.com/


Thomas Ruff, a master of presenting images sourced at one remove, applies himself to the stuff of fantasy across both Gagosian spaces. Britannia Street concentrates on the science fiction standby of Mars, sourcing images from NASA and modulating colour and scale and in some cases introducing 3D effects to move them towards sculptural abstraction. The starting point in the smaller Davies Street space is Internet pornography: new additions to a long-running series which looks to build up an etymology of sexual possibilities from a source Ruff regards as more honest than artistic nude photographs, and inject them all with an unexpected beauty by manipulating the pixels. Add extracts from two other series, and you good feel for Ruff’s consistently diverse practice.

Foothills

Boo Ritson: On the Way to the Ocean @ Poppy Sebire, 6 Copperfield St – Southwark

To 5 May: http://www.poppysebire.com/

Here Boo Ritson – present as a winningly wide-eyed Plasticine avatar – is doubly brave, eschewing her signature application of paint to people and adopting the low art status medium of Photoshop, which she uses with knowingly sculptural obviousness. Continuities with her earlier work include the interplay of depth and surface and an ongoing fascination with the American Dream: we travel from dawn to dusk through a cycle of iconic western landscapes, all of which turn out to be made up from Ritson’s photographs of England. Once you realise that, it’s like walking behind a film set, giving the optimistic exploration a troubling aspect even before we happen on a snake in Eden and a Styxian finale…



International Lawns (Regional Aesthetics 1)

 Andrew Curtis: House Plants @ PayneShurvell, 16 Hewett St – Shoreditch

To 28 April (talk 12 April): http://www.payneshurvell.com/

On to English atmospherics: Andrew Curtis’ first show at PayneShurvell, ‘Wild England’, introduced a sinister edge to suburbia by simultaneously censoring and emphasising trees so that they took on an alien presence. His new series, ‘International Lawns’, does something related to architectural photographs by covering the windows with household enamel as if they were garage doors. Curtis also introduces a negative equivalent: exotic garden plants are left isolated as everything else in the image is voided by the intricately rhythmic accretions of black Rotring ink (which you have to see up close to appreciate), so isolating decisions of taste while negating the domestic in favour of the unknown...

Fernando Casasempere: Out of Sync @ Somerset House, The Strand - Central

To 27 April (08.00 – 23.00 daily): http://www.somersethouse.org.uk/

Somerset House is triply worth a visit in April. London-based Chilean Fernando Casasempere has filled the freshly-grassed courtyard of the Fountain Court with 10,000 rhythmically-spaced ceramic flowers. Their browns and creams, derived from the Atacama desert, make for an attractive and more reliable alternative to natural blooms. The Crisis Commission charity auction show for the homeless (to 22 April) is also excellent: the stand-out lots are Tracey Emin’s painted drawings of herself naked and blue, Bob and Roberta Smith’s alternative kite, and Nika Neelova’s whole room multi-parting merry-go-round of doors cast from the building’s own Georgian portals. And the excellent Mondrian – Nicholson show carries on till 20 May at the Courtauld.



Images courtesy of the the relevant galleries and artists + Franz Erhard Walther Foundation / VG-Bild-Kunst, Bonn (Walther) except Somerset House - my photo in which my wife and mother unobtrusively appear!

A NEW YORK VISITOR’S TOP TEN – MARCH INTO APRIL

There’s more art in New York than anywhere else, and Armory week boasted several fairs as well as the usual 50-odd institutional spaces, some of them huge, and over 400 commercial galleries - roughly half in Chelsea, a quarter mid-town and on the upper east side, and a quarter down town in the more recently thriving Soho / Bowery area. Pretty hard to narrow to ten plus an out of town bonus, but here goes...

Lot 12281 (the double extension)


 Donald Moffett: The Radiant Future @ Marianne Boesky Gallery – Chelsea

To April 7: http://www.marianneboeskygallery.com/

Several New York galleries are showing abstract paintings which emphasised their objecthood (I also liked James Busby at Stux, Michiel Ceulars at Anna Cristea and Zak Prekop at Harris Lieberman). Donald Moffett may have taken that furthest. He had already established a repertoire of holes, together with a similarly fetishistic way of extruding paint into a texture like artificial grass. Now he extends the holes into tunnels through contraptions which hold the paintings away from the wall, feeling that the wall ‘has let him down’ as a place to put paintings.

Martin Roth: Untitled (Persian Rugs) @ Louis B. James, 143b Orchard St

To 14 April: http://www.louisbjames.com/

On to real grass: downstairs at this young gallery the New York based Austrian artist Martin Roth, whose CV includes releasing crickets as a sound piece and turning his studio into a bird retreat, had persuaded it to grow through Persian carpets. This - especially after seeing Moffett’s show – seemed a further step in radicalising the painting process as well as combining inside / outside and nature / culture in a way which reminded me of Walter de Maria’s nearby Earth Room, which Dia still maintains. And Wardell Milan, upstairs at Louis B. James, is also interesting.

The Hot Winds That Blow From The West

Bharti Kher: The Hot Winds That Blow from the West @ Hauser & Wirth, 32 East 69th St.

To 14 April: http://www.hauserwirth.com/

Newcastle-born Indian Bharti Kher swells domestic concerns to fabulous size and fabulent effect. There are fresh variations on her characteristic use of bindis, some on shattered mirrors, some on a found staircase reaching only to the ceiling. The title work is a room of old American radiators which Kher assured me really had been shipped to India and back, picking up an aura as well as shipping costs along the way. Bodes well for her biggest British showing yet – at the Parasol Unit in September…

Polly Apfelbaum: ‘Flatland: Colour Revolt’ @ The Hansel and Gretel Picture Garden,
511 West 20th St 

To 28 April:  http://hanselandgretelpicturegarden.com/ 

This gallery, small by New York standards, is packed with tables on which which Polly Apfelbaum has arranged explosions of colour and glitter which can be moved only with great horizontal care. Adventurous, but consistent with her previous conflations of painting and installation through fabric works on the floor. The result was startling and beautiful enough that the 'revolts' were selling despite the challenges of moving and displaying them.

Task Chair

Jeanne Silverthorne: Peripheral Vision @ McKee Gallery, 745 Fifth Avenue

To 18 April: http://www.mckeegallery.com/

Jeanne Silverthorne mines her 19th century Soho studio as a physical, emotional and creative place through thirty new sculptures, made in clay after the studio’s features then cast in silicone rubber to haunting effect. They include floor pieces with grow-through dandelions, a light bulb with a genuinely circling moth, a series of storage crates (are they the work or its containers?) and - slightly more off kilter - sticks of dynamite, and the abstract presentation of offcut globs of rubber. Peripheral, perhaps, but peculiarly affecting.

Divine Ricochet, 1991

John Chamberlain: Choices @ the Guggenheim, 1071 Fifth Avenue

To May 13: http://www.guggenheim.org/
 
My favourite among the major shows was the timely retrospective of John Chamberlain (1927-2011) at the Gugggenheim. A chronological spiral up the ramp revealed more variation than I had expected from the his base of combining junked cars: the addition of expressive colour to the found elements from 1972 onwards, crushed box and foam works which foreground process, smaller works made from Tonka toys, the late adoption of a more minimalist chrome and white palette using only selected parts of the cars, and alumnium foil works. It all looked tremendous.




Jorinde Voigt @ David Nolan Gallery, 527 W 29th St

To 28 April: http://www.davidnolangallery.com/

When I asked how to spot upcoming German artist Jorinde Voigt at her crowded opening, I was told she looked like a model – tall and beautiful with a trendy short haircut. So it proved, and her work is just as striking: cool objects and intricately annotated rhythmic drawings which pull you in whether or not you follow through on the complex intellectual algorithms which underpin them. The Lisson Gallery brings an overview of her previous work to England 21 March - 28 April .

Odalisque, 1980

Francesca Woodman: The Blueprints @ Marian Goodman Gallery, 24 West 57th Street


To 28 April: http://www.mariangoodman.com/
 

Francesca Woodman, who killed herself aged only 22 in 1981, is having something of a posthumous moment in New York. That includes a retrospective at the Guggenheim; her largest single work, 'Blueprint for a Temple', on show at the Met; and this broader exploration of her blueprints (ie photographs, drawings and texts run through an architects' blueprint machine) from the summer of 1980. They're actually sepia and purple as well as blue, and combine zig-zag motifs with a broader cultural references than the  intimate black and white photographs for which she's best-known. Is the myth too big for the work? Perhaps not.

Jonathan Horowitz: Self-portraits in Mirror #1 @ Gavin Brown’s enterprise, 620 Greenwich St 

To 21 April: http://www.gavinbrown.biz/

What looks at first like a room full of those Lichtenstein mirror paintings which combine a metaphor for painting with a paradoxical failure to reflect proves to be a series of copies made by Horowitz and 19 other artists from a small image of the original. Consequently the results are rather variable, emphasising the differences of hand and eye. Thus, they constitute self-portraits of a sort, leaving their multiply-unreflected viewers to ponder where they stand.

Sails, 1986

Dan Flavin: Drawings @ the Morgan Library, 225 Madison Avenue

To 1 July: http://www.themorgan.org/

This is a surprisingly broad and fascinating account of the role of drawing in Flavin’s life: his early use of it to teach himself; plans for possible light pieces; records – by others under his supervision – of finished installations; impressively economical portraits, landscapes and seascapes he sketched for pleasure; and items from his own collection of master drawings with a comparable emphasis on the exploratory rather than the finely worked.

Jean-Luc Moulène: La Vigie @ Dia Beacon

To 31 Dec: http://www.diaart.org/

A pleasant 75 minute train trip north brings you to Beacon, where the Dia Foundation has spectacularly converted a factory to show its mass holdings of Flavin, LeWitt, Serra, Bourgeios, Knoebel, Heizer, Martin, Beuys etc in ideal conditions. I was also impressed by the temporary exhibition of French artist Jean-Luc Moulène, especially ‘La Vigie’ (‘The Lookout Man’) a series of 299 photos telling the seven year(!) story of the life of a Parisian weed and its surroundings near the Ministry for the Economy, Industry and Employment. We see the weed flourishing and cut back in turn, an outsider dealing with hostility…



Images courtesy of the relevant artists and galleries.