NINE SINGULARITIES AND A RECONSIDERATION

It's always nice to think: well, I've never seen that before! Here, then, are nine current shows likely to provoke that reaction. They feature a pavement artist in the gallery; sixteen giant bindified mirrors; paintings flying through the air; the most stamps you've ever seen in a gallery; a group show of paintings without a corner in sight; water bottles as fetish objects; an invitation to look under a painting's skirt; the possibility of a fourth dimension; and, of course, zebra finches playing guitars… On the other hand you've probably seen quite a few paintings propped on elephant dung: my tenth recommendation is more likely a chance to consider the substance behind a spent surprise.


David Burton: Untitled, c. 1936

David Burton, Ruth Ewan, Brian Moran @ Rob Tufnell, 1 Sutton Lane – Clerkenwell

To 8 May: www.robtufnell.com

This is Rob Tufnell’s second turn in the timeshare arrangement whereby he uses Sutton Lane’s space, tucked in between Clerkenwell Road and Great Sutton Street. Rob is remarkably good at rediscovering the forgotten, in this case paintings produced at a wellwisher's prompting by London pavement artist David Burton. Hardly seen since he was one of Mass Observation's 'Unprofessional Painters' in a show which toured extensively in 1938-39, they're astonishingly fresh in condition, colour and the energy of their naïve and patriotic style. Burton is shown with Brian Moran’s cold war oriented redrawings of a wide range of source materials; and Ruth Ewan’s 34 postcards of the flags of former colonial powers, which she asked Bolivian children to deface with white paint. Result: a very lively treble take on aspects of imperialism.


6/18 of indra’s net mirrors

Bharti Kher: inevitable undeniable necessary @ Hauser & Wirth, 196a Piccadilly – Central

To 15 May: www.hauserwirth.com

One of the most successful British-born artists today is Bharti Kher, who left Newcastle for New Delhi in 1992, where she met and married the now famous Subodh Gupta. Bharti has stand-out work in the current Saatchi survey of Indian art, and now has her own varied, imaginative and extensive run of Hauser & Wirth - three floors plus the sculpture park behind the gallery. The show as a whole builds metaphysical explorations out of the application of everyday ritual: an automated singing bowl; a confessional room; a gently rocking unicorn; and the teeming application of stick-on bindis, which has become Kher’s trademark means of combining the symbolism of a ‘third eye’ while subverting the traditional expectations of female and national identities. She was first attracted by the more old-fashioned sperm or snake-shaped bindi – dual symbols of fertility which rather neatly unite male form with primarily female embellishment. Here she uses those on 21 medical charts, while a separate room seethes with the commoner spot bindis as partial cover for 16 large cracked mirrors. Spectacular, husband-trumping stuff.


Flying #13 - one of those in Paris, as it happens

Ilya & Emilia Kabakov: The Flying Paintings @ Sprovieri, 27 Heddon St – Central

To 29 May: www.sprovieri.com

Twenty years after emigrating to the USA, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov – surely the most significant living Russian artists – are still musing on the possibilities and impossibilities of utopian dreams. They have often used the idea of people flying to represent both the idealism of the communist system and attempts to escape it in either body or mind. See, for example, ‘The Flying Komarov’, as currently installed in ‘Star City’ at Nottingham Contemporary. They have also made paintings (‘Under the Snow’ 2004-06) which combine fragments of an idealised society with areas of blankness which suggest censorship, suppressed memories, and potentially counter-revolutionary abstraction. Their new series combines those two ideas by depicting paintings literally flying through white space, the implications being all the above plus opportunities to distort matters tellingly through inversion, scale differences, overlapping and anamorphic foreshortening. Sprovieri have a mini-retrospective of the Kabakovs plus three of the twenty flying paintings – enough to give you a flavour of their inventiveness, though either a flick through the catalogue or, utopically, an immediate visit to Thaddaeus Ropac in Paris is recommended for more.




Steve McQueen: Queen and Country @ the National Portrait Gallery, St Martins Place – Central

To 18 July: www.npg.org.uk

The NPG has become a very worthwhile contemporary art venue in recent years. Among the current offerings is Steve McQueen’s well-publicised project-come-campaign proposal to issue stamps showing all the British service personnel killed in Iraq in 2003-09. I hadn’t really thought about how it would be displayed, but the answer is an effective one: through 14 x 12 stamp sheets for each of the 160 soldiers featured in vertically pulled out philatelic presentation drawers. I make that 26,880 stamps in total. It’s a serious and moving display which remains topical in the context of the mounting casualty count in Afghanistan, yet there remains something diminishing, maybe almost childish, about art on stamps. That may be why I found myself rather inappropriately thinking that McQueen has just the name it would suit to be the first black Scottish transsexual monarch…

Jeremy Butler: 'Death Star'

Tondo @ Fine Art Society Contemporary, 148 New Bond St – Central

To 8 May: www.fascontemporary.com

Here a dozen mostly monochrome and completely round abstract paintings make for an unusual and surprisingly varied show. The format naturally suggests a whole world, but of what? Rubbish, in the case of Jeremy Butler’s Death Star, which is a blackness made of miniaturised binbags, tyres and detritus. Perceptual conundrums for Oliver Marsden, who has plenty of previous as a tondophilliac. Changing light for Rob and Nick Carter. Gestures for Jason Martin, whose brushy abstractions have entered a florid gold phase. And Fernando Mastrangelo crams in the sociological, religious and economic issues by colouring staple foods like sugar, beans and corn so they resemble precious stones, all in the shape of ceiling medallions from opulent homes and in the colours of Aztec gods. You probably need rectangular stuff to buy them with, though.


'Death Star Mk II' - for Ducker and, oddly enough, for this blog...

Richard Ducker: Null & Void @ Oblong, 69a Southgate Rd – Dalston

To 25 April: www.oblonggallery.com

Actually I suppose it may be that more galleries are oblongs than classic white cubes, but this year-old space’s name presumably signals a desire to be different. Never mind the width not equaling the length, though, what about the quality? Pretty good in the case of Richard Ducker’s domestic yet sensual sculptures, which seem to be able to make a fetish of anything – plastic water bottles by covering them with a black flock which would hardly play well down the throat, lumps of concrete by gold-plating them and adding the finishing touch of a brass drawer knob - and even of nothing: his ‘Sybaritic Suggestions’ appear to be no more than empty black bags on shelves, their titular love of luxury all in the absence. The titles pretend to ham things up through wry overstatement: ‘Eternity’; ‘I’m Not Unhappy Enough’; and ‘Hilarious’, which, of course, wryly isn’t.


'Look behind the picture...'


Laure Prouvost: all these things think link @ Flat Time House, 210 Bellenden Rd – Peckham Rye

To 25 April: www.flattimeho.org.uk

The house in which John Latham lived and worked is worth visiting in its own right, but the experience is enhanced for three weeks by the interventions of Laure Provost, who assisted Latham (1921-2006) in his last years. She has installed five short video loops which play off her own spry rearrangements of, and additions to, the house’s contents – for example by leaving teabags to dry on a radiator, as Latham was wont to do, and inserting her own secrets behind a work with the subversive-sounding video instruction to ‘look behind that picture – when they’re not looking’ (it’s OK, you can). Elsewhere Prouvost seems to smash the vase we can see on a shelf, indulges in warped narratives and gives a massage to a book on Latham, who was more inclined to slice books up, as evidenced all around. Latham’s art reflected his belief that time and events were more basic building blocks for the world than space and matter. If Prouvost supports the thesis, it is by slyly undermining both time and events. This is fun, but might turn to chaos on 24 April, when she invites five other artists to make a show in her show in Latham’s show…

See also my previous entry on Laure Prouvost’s ongoing (to 2 May) presence in Tate Britain’s Lightbox. For more John Latham, visit the Whitechapel (to 5 September) and Lisson (May 5 – June 5) galleries.


Still from '3 to 4'

Krysten Cunningham: 3 to 4 @ Ritter Zamet, Unit 8, 80A Ashfield St - Whitechapel

To 15 May: www.ritterzamet.com

Look carefully to track down a first floor industrial unit just south of Whitechapel tube station, and you'll also find more of the recent trend towards sculpture with a video context. Krysten Cunningham has worked as a technician in a physics lab at the University of California over the past decade. In ‘Hypercube’ she re-narrated one of the lab’s educational films - of computer-generated cubes multiplying - to speculate on the possibility of a fourth dimension. This argued that there are four dimensions, and so if we have only three dimensions then all our thoughts and experiences must take place in the mind of a higher being. If we don’t agree with this, says the voiceover, we must recognise ourselves as beings of four dimensions - albeit we may not be conscious of the fourth. All of which feeds into a new video, in which up to six figures in red, green and blue demonstrate similar geographies in a kind of pose-dance with rods through which Cunningham hopes “we might ‘touch’ or glimpse a new spatial dimension”. The sculptures echo those concerns while mixing readymade and woven forms in a hippy meets op art meets native Indian style. So: equal parts science and mysticism, new age and Bauhaus pushing at the borders of craft and daft. Somehow it all coheres rather hypnotically, as we wonder how much is aesthetic and how much is cod. In a way, quite Lathamesque…


from here to ear

Céleste Boursier-Mougenot: @ Curve Gallery, Barbican - Farringdon

To 23 May: www.barbican.org.uk/artgallery

Boursier-Mougenot is a French musician and artist who explores unexpected means of making sound. His best-known previous works are a paddling pool with floating crockery which chimes as it collides, and a fleet of hoovers attached to harmonicas. The Curve features close up film of guitar players but to the ‘sound of the images’, ie derived from the video signal, leading into the main event: a flock of 40 zebra finches, kept in place by light levels alone, create a soundscape as they hop on and off guitars. Their movements are largely in response to the 25 visitors allowed to wander among them at any one time, and the resulting chirpy-chirpy thrum-thrum works remarkably well - and much more consistently than you might expect. Aurally it ends up somewhere in the middle of John Cage’s use of chance, Messian’s bird song transcriptions and an outcrop from Sonic Youth’s unorthodox tunings. The whole ensemble may well be the most memorable in a London gallery now.


From 'Afromuses'

Chris Ofili @ Tate Britain – Millbank

To 16 May: www.tate.org.uk

It's a while since Chris Ofili's use of poo was a 'well I never' moment, and maybe most who fancy this show will have seen it by now... But it's on for a few weeks yet and I’d like to dissent from what has emerged as the conventional critical view. That seems to be that Ofili is spot on with his decoratively disgusting mix until you get to the Upper Room (started 1999) – which is the pinnacle or excess of the early elephant dung style, depending on taste – but then fails to find a convincing new language, especially since his move to Trinidad in 2005. Certainly the early work has kept its pzazz, but Ofili’s subsequent output includes the red, black and green series shown in Venice in 2003; most of his zingily relaxed watercolours; the subtle and persuasive drawing language of ‘7 Brides for 7 Bros’(2007); and the gloweringly deep ‘blues’ of 2006-08. All of that is full throttle stuff. Only in the last room and last couple of years of a big exhibition did I feel that a new direction remained to be worked through to the success which, the record suggests, Ofili will make of it.

Still showing from previous lists: David Korty to 17 April, Annie Albers to 17 April, Nathaniel Rackowe to 23 April, William Tucker to 24 April, Bas van den Hurk to 24 April, Benjamin Beker to 24 April, Henning Bohl to 25 April, Mob Remedies to 25 April, Laure Prouvost @ Tate Britain to 2 May, Ben Rivers to 2 May, Mat Collishaw to 9 May, William Tillyer to 15 May, Céleste Boursier-Mougenot to 23 May.

www.newexhibitions.com gives full address and opening time details of most shows

TEN FOR THE FUTURE

I am looking forward to:

Jean-Luc Mylayne @ Sprueth Magers 16.4 – 6.6

Leigh Ledare @ Pilar Corrias 16.4 – 6.6

JaffaCakes Tel Aviv @ 33-34 Hoxton Square 16.4 - 15.5

Lisa Yuskavage @ Greengrassi: 20.4 - 29.5

Martin Mull @ Ben Brown 21.4 – 5.6

Antoni Tàpies @ Waddington 21.4 – 15.5

Pyllida Barlow @ Studio Voltire: 23.4 - 29.5

Jannis Kounellis @ P3: 23.4 – 30.5

Gerry Fox @ Eleven: 29.4 - 5.6

Ximena Garrido-Lecca @ Civic Room: 29.4 - 30.5

.

NOT SO OBVIOUS IN APRIL

By and large the big shows in the big galleries may be best - but the smaller galleries and temporary spaces and sub-projects of major players offer the pleasure of the less expected, the chance to make discoveries ahead of the curve, the gallerist there to talk to you in person rather than an assistant - all of which may come with high quality, too. In which spirit I have this time around set aside such excellent shows as at Camden, the Parasol Unit, Alison Jacques, Lisson, Modern Art and the Dulwich Picture Gallery to stick to what may for various reasons be a little less obvious...


Piers Secunda

Mob Remedies @ Gallery Primo Alonso, 395-397 Hackney Road – Cambridge Heath

To 25 April: www.primoalonso.com

The visibly non-commercial Primo Alonso – just east of the Hackney City Farm – has been run rather heroically against the odds for three years now by young artists Angelica Sule, Paul Murphy and Richard Gallagher. In this typically adventurous installation guest curator Piers Secunda (born 1976) shows a new work made from some half a mile of wires sculpted with paint. He’s joined by Lothar Götz, who gives the show an architectural stage through colour blocks on the walls; Natasha Kidd, who pumps paint round the space like a vital fluid; and George Barber, who shows a film of action painting carried out by cars. It’s an uplifting totality: not a canvas in sight, but full of the joy of paint and colour unlimited by any such constraints.


My Work Here is Done X

Steve Bishop: Sheer Fatigue @ Christopher Crescent. 24 Tudor Grove - Hackney

To 10 April: www.christophercrescent.co.uk

Simon Christopher’s unmarked first floor space on a back road two turns off Mare Street is in the middle of a run of shows by recent RCA students. Steve Bishop has already gained attention for his sculptural combinations of taxidermied foxes with neon tubes, but ‘Sheer Fatigue’ is much cooler fare. ‘My Work Here is Done’ is a series in which said tights are stretched around glass from coffee tables and TV stands to make fetishised abstractions which achieve improbably painterly effects by exploiting the accidents of process – most of Bishop’s work here is done in the selection of materials. Another accident is implied by smashed safety glass from just such panels (it does shatter, right enough, but not into jagged shards). That litters the floor and links the tights, along with the pun on ‘sheer’, to the cracked paving stone of the photograph ‘Sheer Fatigue’. Not just tights, but tight.




Bas van den Hurk: Organising the Non-obvious II @ Rod Barton, 1 Paget St - Angel Islington

To 24 April (Saturdays 12-6): www.rodbarton.com

A garage hidden in a side-street near Sadler's Wells, open six hours a week and showing just a few Dutch metapaintings? That's as non-obvious as it gets, I grant, but Bas van den Hurk's work is actually well worth seeking out. When I say he makes metapaintings, I mean that rather as a philosopher is more interested in the question 'is there a world in which lunch will occur?' than 'what's on the menu?', Van den Hurk is more interested in the question 'is that a painting?' than 'what is that a painting of?'. What if, for example, the picture represents itself but hung askew, or a necklace is hanging off the bottom of the canvas, or a cheap reproduction of a previous work forms the background? What if, just as you are marvelling at the painter's skill in capturing a marbled pattern, you notice that the canvas is, in fact, covered by a printed fabric? The questions go back at least as far as Frank Stella and Blinky Palermo in the sixties, but Van den Hurk's fresh examination generates its own aesthetic. And part I of the show? It's in Amsterdam, obviously.



The bathroom scales from 'Home Suite' (Voice-over:'I don't trust them all that much actually'.)

John Smith - Solo Show @ the Royal College of Art, Kensington Gore

To 13 April: www.johnsmithsoloshow.com

The RCA students of curating have put on a large overview of the films of John Smith, ranging from what he himself made at the RCA forty years ago to brand new material. There are 16 works which would take six hours to watch in their entirety, but they're made navigable by excellent presentation: varied installations; run times clearly given; medium length items can be started on demand; longer more narrative items - though Smith loves to pull you into a narrative then out again by revealing its artifice - have advertised start times. Smith's most consistent strand sees almost perversely banal images given a humorous and revealing spin through his deadpan and structurally savvy commentaries, playing, for example, with how sound can trump image. Thus in the seminal 'The Girl Chewing Gum' (1972) the director of a film absurdly pretends to control action he is merely describing; in Home Suite (1993-94) a tip of a house is described with implausible affection; and in Hotel Diaries
(2001-07) the hotel rooms are all we see of the narrator's international experiences. And it's a measure of Smith's range that this magnificent show still omits a couple of my favourites.




Henning Bohl: Corner of a Cornfield @ Cubitt, 8 Angel Mews - Islington

To 25 April 2010: www.cubbittartists.org.uk

Berlin-based Henning Bohl (born 1975) has his first substantial show in England at the artist collective’s space tucked away near Angel tube. It’s a playful and theatrical take on painting as sculpture. While perversely embracing the constraint of a pre-determined set of forms – abstracted from Kabucki Theatre faces – which he reworks obsessively, Bohl resists the more familiar expectations that works look pristine (sections appear to be peeling away from the canvas like curling posters, creating a novel aesthetic) and that paintings be hung on the gallery’s walls, which he pretty-much mocks by choosing instead to show them on elaborate trestle constructions. The title refers to a painting by the Liverpool pre-Raphaelite William Davis – an appropriately eccentric way for Bohl to indicate that he will not be following conventions, Davis having focused on an unregarded aspect of the scene. I wasn’t convinced that layer was necessary, but it does give a suitably implausible title to a show which may sound rather academic but feels far from stuffy.


Block 3

Benjamin Beker: Blocks @ Flowers East, 82 Kingsland Rd - Shoreditch

To 24 April: www.flowerseast.com

Flowers is 40 years old this year and not the most obscure gallery - but it would be easy to overlook a small exhibition hidden above the Peter Howson show in their big East End space. Howson himself provokes strong feelings, but those of a sensitive disposition can rush upstairs to the young Serbian photographer Benjamin Beker. He has developed three interesting sets of work out of the former socialist republic of Yugoslavia: cleanly edited re-presentations of monuments; the interiors of former government buildings; and as shown here, would-be ideal housing fallen on tougher times. In the 'The Blocks' Beker combines documentary elements to make artificial constructs in a way which resembles the curious nature of Yugoslavia, which was a melding of different nations into an artificial whole. His punchily attractive work deals, then, with the often tenuous distinctions between the real and the artificial, and with the disappointments but also the persistence of failed dreams and lost ideals.

See www.flowersgalleries.com/exhibitions/3872-blocks/ for my interview with Benjamin.


Still from Tereza Bušková: ‘Spring Equinox’,

All that Remains… the Teenagers of Socialism @ Waterside Project Space, Unit 8, 44-48 Wharf Rd – Hoxton

To 11 April: www.watersideprojectspace.org

Keep going north up Wharf Road past Victoria Miro for the surprisingly large Waterside Project Space, where you’ll find the work of eight artists who were teenagers when the Berlin Wall fell – see also Benjamin Beker above – and so have a ghostly view of socialism tied in to their memories of childhood. We see that mixture most directly in Ştefan Constantinescu’s beautifully constructed pop-up book ‘The Golden Age for Children’, an ironic history of Ceausescu’s Romania. But my favourite work here is Czech émigré Tereza Bušková’s (say ‘Bushkovar’) surreal ten minutes of ‘Spring Equinox’: it merges rural Moldavia with performance art in a celebration of traditional costumes and rituals, pointedly leapfrogging the communist period to make for a bright vernal fillip.




Laure Prouvost: It, hit, heat @ Tate Britain – Millbank

To 2 May: www.tate.org.uk

Tate Britain’s Lightbox is a more extreme version of my Flowers argument above - that a small show hidden in a big institution is easily overlooked. There you should allocate twelve minutes for a video mugging from London-based French artist Laure Prouvost. She starts - on the big, in-your-face screen - with the warning that the six minute film ‘requires all of your attention. Each detail of Part 1 will be essential to Part 2’. Her weapons are a dizzyingly rapid stream of mismatched images and words and a menacing drum. The countdown structure seems to imply a violent happening, but the narrative is as blurred as the style is sharp. There are instructions and tests. You will fail, I predict, but stay on for a second attempt.




Nathaniel Rackowe @ The Delfina Foundation, 29 Catherine Place - Victoria

To 23 April: www.delfinafoundation.com

Is Victoria the new Hoxton? If you add the lively stack of three galleries at 276 Vauxhall Bridge Road (in a one year project initiated by Edel Assanti) to Eleven, Orel, Postbox and the Delfina project space then you have the makings of a lively zone. The last of those is the area’s current stand-out: there the sculptor Nathaniel Rackowe, known for his liminal and theatrical light-spilling takes on the contested territories of modernism and its architectures, shows new work from a residency in Beirut. One boundary which Rackowe explores more fully than before is that between two and three dimensions. He moves towards the two dimensional in sculptures formed by a corrugated roof on the floor and a flatpack kit for a shed against a wall, and arrives there fully in the first paintings/drawings he has exhibited: a duo-toned series which stays true to the built environment by combining bitumen and household gloss to great effect. They are based on features isolated from building sites in Beirut, where incidentally Rackowe went with his wife,Rana Begum, whose equally good show preceded her husband's at Delfina.




Anni Albers: Prints and Studies @ Alan Cristea, 31 Cork St - Central

To 17 April: www.alancristea.com

Talking of husbands and wives, a major Albers retrospective may sound decidedly mainstream - but this is Anni Albers, not yet another presentation of Josef's homages to the square. Sexist attitudes restricted Anni (1899-1993) to the textile workshop at the Bauhaus in the 20's and early 30's, but she became the most famous weaver of her day. She was also, to quote the ceramicist Edmund de Waal (a fan who gave an illuminating introductory talk and is showing with her at Alan Cristea) a 'ferocious teacher' and 'polemical writer'. Albers switched to prints from 1963 onwards, and they're all here. The rhythm and seriality of the loom may lie behind her use of repetition 'not just as a way of pacing a life, but as a way of making sense of what you do' - de Waal again - though they are much more geometric and less handmade in appearance than one might expect from her background. For me, they work because her energy comes through: a favourite motif is multiple triangles, and they really do dance.

Still showing from previous lists: William Tillyer to 3 April, Dan Perfect to 7 April, Paul Feiler to 9 April, Pierre Ardouvin to 9 April, Alex Katz to 9 April, Kathy Prendergast to 10 April, David Hockney/Andy Holden to 10 April, Uriel Orlow to 10 April, Kay Donachie to 11 April, David Korty to 17 April, William Tucker to 24 April, Ben Rivers to 2 May, Mat Collishaw to 9 May, Céleste Boursier-Mougenot to 23 May.

www.newexhibitions.com gives full address and opening time details of most shows


TEN FOR THE FUTURE

I am looking forward to:

Ilya & Emilia Kabakov @ Sprovieri 30.3 - 30.5

Angela de la Cruz @ Camden Arts Centre 2.4 – 30.5

Martin Honert @ Bloomberg 7.4 - 15.5

Laure Prouvost @ Flat Time House 8.4 - 25.4

Jean-Luc Mylayne @ Sprueth Magers 16.4 – 6.6

Leigh Ledare @ Pilar Corrias 16.4 – 6.6

JaffaCakes Tel Aviv @ 33-34 Hoxton Square 16.4 - 15.5

Martin Mull @ Ben Brown 21.4 – 5.6

Antoni Tàpies @ Waddington 21.4 – 15.5

Jannis Kounellis @ P3: 23.4 – 30.5

THE AGES OF MARCH...

This is something of a ‘grand old man’ special. Cork Street is by now the grand old man of art gallery streets, and as a whole is increasingly off the pace - but it still has several excellent galleries. Currently you can see two rather underrated grand old men there - William Tillyer (71) and Paul Feiler (91). Add Alex Katz (82) at Timothy Taylor and William Tucker (75) at Pangolin (and note in passing that Richard Hamilton (88) is currently occupying the Serpentine) and a theme begins to emerge - though there are plenty of young pretenders, too, and not of course all men. So, in order of date of birth, from 1918 onwards, we have:

Square Relief XIX

Paul Feiler: Elusive Space @ The Redfern Gallery, 20 Cork St – Central

To 9 April: www.redfern-gallery.com

Paul Feiler, who was born in Frankfurt during World War I and interned in England during World War II, showed with Lanyon, Scott and Heron in the 1950’s. This 70-work survey takes you from more generic school of St Ives work through to the 'circle in square' motif on which Feiler has focused obsessively in recent decades as he came late into his characteristic voice - though there is no work from the 70's or 80's, perhaps related to the long-lasting Redfern representing Feiler only in the 50's and since 1993. Playing on the palindrome of his name (Feiler-Relief), Feiler often uses intricate constructions in order to complicate the painted space – most recently exploiting the way pieces of perspex can be seen and seen through and react to their surroundings. The total effect is a geometrically-based intensity which takes on a spiritual aspect with the suggestion of something unknown lying beyond a shrine-like gateway: consonant with Mondrian's goals,perhaps, but retuned to Cornwall's atmosphere and colours.



Alex Katz @ Timothy Taylor, 15 Carlos Place - Mayfair

To 9 April: www.timothytaylorgallery.com/exhibitions/alex-katz1 Ada

I'll be honest and say up front that the now-very-fashionable American painter Alex Katz (born 1928) hasn't been a particular past favourite of mine. All the more interesting, then, to find myself struck by the dramatic and large scale emergence from black of the latest portrait of his poised and elegant wife. Ada Katz (née del Moro, a biologist from an Italian family in the Bronx) can surely claim some kind of muse record, having been Alex's constant model during more than fifty years of marriage. She is well into her seventies now, but her husband's cooly elegant style of fluid wet in wet simplification has no place for wrinkles, and she certainly looks enigmatically good on it here. It's no surprise, then, that Katz has called her 'the perfect model', being 'both a European beauty and an American beauty'. Reason to look forward to the National Portrait Gallery's Katz retrospective, scheduled for 15 May - 21 September.

Maquette for 'Emperor'

William Tucker @ Pangolin, Kings Place, 90 York Way – King’s Cross

To 24 April: www.pangolinlondon.com

William Tucker (born 1935) was one of the most visible sculptural presences in Britain among the post-Caro generation, but leaving for America in the mid-seventies has reduced his profile here. The foundry-linked gallery Pangolin is well-placed to rectify that with a mixture of maquettes and full-scale bronzes from the last two decades. Tucker’s method is to look for chance forms in the abstract shapes he makes in clay or plaster, and then exploit them. What at first appears to be a hulking non-figurative man-sized lump resolves itself into – say – a giant hand from one viewpoint, but remains resolutely abstract from other angles: the perceptual to-and-fro carries on. Another potential layer is added by the titles, often resonant of the ancient past from which these could be fragments. Don’t miss the extra drawings in the windows, and two of the biggest and best pieces – the fallen head of ‘Emperor’ and the massive take-off readied foot of ‘Messenger’ – in amongst the sculpture trail dotted round the concourse.


Aluminium Cloud

William Tillyer @ Bernard Jacobson, 6 Cork St - Central

To 3 April: www.jacobsongallery.com

Bernard Jacobson is giving William Tillyer (born 1938) the compliment of a four-show season: prints, paintings, watercolours, new paintings. The second part, which defines 'paintings' very broadly, reveals him as a man of metal and cloud. The metal is seen at its purest in the radically geometric early piece 'Fifteen Draw Pulls' and at its best in the recent works in which the modernist grid is made literal in the form of steel lattices which serve as the ground for paint. The clouds range from painterly and etched evocations to a cabinet of pebbles transformed by the title 'Twelve Stacked Clouds'. The two come together in 'Aluminium Cloud', one of a series in which, to quote Tillyer 'the surfaces and structures of the support were to be as a piece of hardware, and as an obstacle to the paint as a protest'. All of which - and more, such as one painting so bursting with ambition it has to be held back with nylon straps - reveals just how ceaselessly enquiring and innovative Tillyer has been in his combinations of man-made and natural sources over the past 40-odd years.


bouquet fané

Pierre Ardouvin: The Unnamable @ Museum 52, 52 Redchurch St - Shoreditch

To 9 April: www.museum52.com

French artist Pierre Ardouvin (born 1955) ranges widely, with previous work having spanned wheelbarrow people, an animated rubber ring and a bumper car with slowed-down karaoke. He aims to be wittily bleak, so it fits that the light which tracks your movements around Museum 52's back space should do so to mechanically-narrated fragments of Samuel Beckett. To get there you must pass through a stage curtain undermined by holes and an incongruous installation of flowers (on antique tables) and snowballs (on the floor). The latter are obviously fake - though even so, who threw them? - whereas the former are wilted and dying. What would be the point of making artificial flowers in that state? But fake, of course, they are. Add some collages which turn postcards into something else - such as a stalactited cave into a shaggy dog - by the addition of adjoining watercolour, and you have a perversely contradictory show, the exact atmosphere of which is just about... unnamable.


North American South West (detail)

Kathy Prendergast: The Black Map Series @ Peer, 99 Hoxton St – Hoxton

To 10 April: www.peeruk.org

It’s not unusual to find work which has a very different impact from afar than from up close (Chuck Close, for example). But these map works are impressively different from not two but three distances: from well back they look like black monochromes; from five feet away they look like the night sky, an effect caused by London-based Irish artist Kathy Prendergast (born 1958)inking out everything but the points of settlement; and from up close, when the names of the towns and other details can be discerned, they look like ominously redacted versions of Ecuador and Poland (to name two of the six). They are also, as Catherine Nash says in the informative accompanying booklet, ‘the product of abstracting and selecting from maps that are already abstractions, reductions, already partial’ and push the cartographic method further ‘to reveal an ambiguous poetics of pattern and absence’.




Mat Collishaw: Retrospectre @ BFI Gallery - South Bank

To 9 May: www.bfi.org.uk/gallery

What are the most innovative public spaces in London? They may not get the publicity, but you could certainly make a case for the Barbican’s Curve and the British Film Institute's gallery. Which YBA has had the best shows recently? He may not have the public profile of some others, but you could certainly make a case for Mat Collishaw (born 1966). He has been developing convincing new series using squashed butterflies, zoetropes and moving images in mirrors; and hot on the heels of his resonant matches with the Freud and Foundling Museums, has a spectacular new work at the BFI. ‘Retrospectre’ was commissioned to respond to a season of films by the cult Armenian film director Paradjanov, which it may well do, but it feels pure Collishaw: five minutes of psychologically-charged video collage – horses, lightning, animal cries, peacocks, smoke - are dramatically back-projected on the multiple screens of what he calls ‘a sort of wooden shrine, most of the width of the gallery space, made from salvaged sections of alterpieces and old sash windows’. Hold on to your pneuma, to use a word at one with Collishaw’s Victorianist tendencies…


I do believe that most of me floats under water


Kaye Donachie @ Maureen Paley,21 Herald St - Bethnal Green

To 11 April: www.maureenpaley.com

This fourth solo show with Maureen Paley for Kaye Donachie (born 1970) sees her supplement her paintings with an engaging 20 minute selection of short films. These range from the out-takes remaining from a lost film involving Duchamp to James Broughton’s ‘High Kukus’ reflections from a lake (‘never expect anything’ said the tadpole ‘and everything will surprise you’) to Edna St Vincent Millay reading a section of her poetry journal, which provides titles for the paintings:

I do believe that most of me
Floats under water; and men see
Above the wave a jagged small
Mountain of ice, and that is all.
Only the depths of other peaks
May know my substance when it speaks,
And steadfast through the grinding jam
Remain aware of what I am.
Myself, I think, shall never know
How far beneath the wave I go.

The films pick up on Donachie’s typically intimate engagement with historic countercultures, also seen in the six portraits of female icons such as Mina Loy, Nina Hamnett and Millay. What I like most, though, is how their faces are variously integrated with night skies, landscapes and still lives in a sort of muted take on surrealism which left me wondering whether the women are interiorizing or overwhelmed by their environments.

Television with Herringbone Wallpaper


David Korty @ Sadie Coles HQ, 69 South Audley St - Mayfair

To 17 April: www.sadiecoles.com

Alex Katz came to mind, and not I think just because I’d seen his show a few hundred yards away, in the recent work of LA painter David Korty (born 1971). Some of the same easy simplification, clear colour (whereas Korty used to have a penchant for the chalky) and melding of abstract elements into figuration. All of which works best in geometrically-inclined objects with a touch of Stuart Davies: a telephone booth, a gas pump, a television. The mask-like or actually masked faces in other paintings are less engaging, as if to suggest – paradoxically, perhaps, through the most traditional of media – the danger that the means of communication can nowadays hold more interest than the people we reach through them. Don’t miss the side room, which runs the themes through twenty-odd seductive watercolours.




Ben Rivers: Origin of the Species @ Kate MacGarry, 7a Vyner St – Cambridge Heath

To 2 May: www.katemacgarry.com

I’m always a little disappointed if a video – however good – is presented no differently in a gallery than it might have been at home. This is more like it: English artist Ben Rivers (born 1972), new to Kate MacGarry’s roster, very visibly uses analogue film – old stock with scratches and blips built in as if pre-distressed for an archive – and he presents it in a ramshackle hut. That’s doubly appropriate: first, because Rivers is thematically interested in the construction of worlds, for example by filming models as apparent realities, or tracking down loners living outside society; second, because this particular constructed world is that of an old man living in just such a hut in the Scottish highlands – his idyll, perhaps, if not all that luxurious. In it we see 16 minutes of beautifully gloom-lit footage focused on the man’s eccentric engineering and his forest surroundings while we hear him talk of a life-long obsession with evolution – all of which achieves an unsentimental acceptance of how people themselves turn out.


Still showing from previous lists: Bernard Frize to 24 March, Rula Halawani to 25 March, Chiharu Shiota to 27 March, Diamonds on the Soles of her Shoes to 27 March, Philipp Goldbach @ Annely Juda to 27 March, Graham Dolphin to 27 March, Sensescapes to 28 March, Frances Young to 28 March,Peeping Tom to 28 March, Crash: Homage to JG Ballard to 1 April, Franz Ackermann to 1 April, Ian Breakwell to 1 April, Dan Perfect to 7 April, David Hockney/Andy Holden to 10 April, Uriel Orlow to 10 April, Céleste Boursier-Mougenot to 23 May.

www.newexhibitions.com gives full address and opening time details of most shows


TEN FOR THE FUTURE

I am looking forward to:

Benjamin Beker @ Flowers East: 26.3 - 24.4

Nathaniel Rackowe @ Delfina Foundation 26.3 - 23.4

Ilya & Emilia Kabakov @ Sprovieri 30.3 - 30.5

Angela de la Cruz @ Camden Arts Centre 2.4 – 30.5

Martin Honert @ Bloomberg 7.4 - 15.5

Jean-Luc Mylayne @ Sprueth Magers 16.4 – 6.6

Leigh Ledare @ Pilar Corrias 16.4 – 6.6

Martin Mull @ Ben Brown 21.4 – 5.6

Antoni Tàpies @ Waddington 21.4 – 15.5

Jannis Kounellis @ P3: 23.4 – 30.5

WHERE TO LOOK IN MARCH

Of course lots of the artists on view in London's galleries are themselves from London, but it shows how London acts as a world centre for art that I can feature so many artists based elsewhere: Germany (Shiota, Werner, Ackermann, Goldbach), France (Zarka, Broisat, Boursier-Mougenot, Frize), USA (Burns), Switzerland (Orlow, Porritt) and Newcastle - Graham Dolphin's base is after all further from London than is Paris. Quite a few of the gallerists come from elsewhere, too, and the edgy watch-your-eyeliner video still above is from a short film by Vienna-based Esther Stocker which features in Rokeby's 'Zero Budget Biennial'.

from here to ear

Céleste Boursier-Mougenot: @ Curve Gallery, Barbican - Farringdon

To 23 May: www.barbican.org.uk/artgallery

Boursier-Mougenot is a French musician and artist who explores unexpected means of making sound: his best-known previous works are a paddling pool with floating crockery which chimes as it collides, and a fleet of hoovers attached to harmonicas. The Curve features close up film of guitar players but to the ‘sound of the images’, ie derived from the video signal, leading into the main event: a flock of 40 zebra finches, kept in place by light levels alone, create a soundscape as they hop on and off guitars. Their movements are largely in response to the 25 visitors allowed to wander among them at any one time, and the resulting chirpy-chirpy thrum-thrum works remarkably well - much more consistently than you might expect. Aurally it ends up somewhere in the middle of John Cage’s use of chance, Messian’s bird song transcriptions and an outcrop from Sonic Youth’s unorthodox tunings. The whole ensemble may well be the most memorable in a London gallery now.

One Place

Chiharu Shiota: One Place @ Haunch of Venison, 6 Burlington Gardens – Central

To 27 March: www.haunchofvenison.com

Berlin-based Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota showed one of her impenetrable room-enveloping cocoons of black thread in the Hayward’s ‘Walking in my Mind’ last year, and she does the same to powerful psychological effect here in ‘During Sleep’, a bed caught up in the thread drawing in air which originates in her own childhood dreams and anxieties. So far, so good if single trick, you might think, but the titular ‘One Place’ makes equally rich and spectacular use of 400 window frames collected from demolition sites near the Berlin Wall, making a ceiling-high barrier – albeit one as open as the former border now is – which recalls what people in East Germany could see but not reach before the wall came down. And the installation, with the windows reaching up as if seeking the high skylight, makes for Haunch of Venison’s best use yet of Burlington House.

Raphaël Zarka: still from 'Riding Modern Art'

Diamonds on the Soles of her Shoes @ Bischoff/Weiss, 14A Hay Hill – Central

To 27 March: www.bischoffweiss.com

It’s good to see that, following four years in Shoreditch, adventurous continental gallerists Raphaëlle Bischoff and Paola Weiss have reopened in Mayfair. Their first full show there sees Aicon’s Niru Ratnam guest curate a winning choice of three artists who give new contexts to what already exists. Appropriation plus, if you like, from Alicja Kwade, Matthew Smith and upcoming French artist Raphaël Zarka, who stars with his new uses for forms haunted by historical, scientific and cultural resonances. Here he shows beautiful photographs of minimalism found in remnants of built environments and a most diverting four minutes of French kids ‘Riding Modern Art’ – that is, showing off their skateboarding skills on geometric sculptures: Plato brought bang up to date.

Ian Burns: Glacier

Sensescapes @ Nettie Horn, 25B Vyner St – Cambridge Heath

To 28 March: www.nettiehorn.com

Two more female gallerists with French backgrounds? Mais oui, and Danielle Horn and Marie Favier must be among the hardest-working: very much hands-on in curating and installing a new show every month (no long runs for them!) as well as being the visible day to day faces of Nettie Horn. Their latest brings together four artists who use the technicalities of presentation to illustrate how subjectivity affects what we make of the world. That works most directly in the contrast between New York-based Australian Ian Burns’ mechanical sculpture, which makes the patently virtual look real by means of a video feed which turns a fan-blown plastic bag into a surprisingly convincing field of wind-swept ice; and Benoit Broisat’s reconstruction of a place he has never visited through the testimonies of its residents – the real made virtual. You can also see several of Sinta Werner’s cunningly illusory collages ahead of the solo show she – one of Germany’s best young artists – is due in the autumn.


View of 'Wait'

Franz Ackermann: Wait @ White Cube Mason’s Yard – Central

To 1 April: www.whitecube.com

A third White Cube show for the German painter, who sets his pictures in increasingly multi-faceted installations. So what’s it like? Download the 21st century geographies of big cities worldwide, mash up and turn into big near-abstracts with the cubism, dayglow and energy scales set to maximum. Throw in video, kinetics, barriers, detritus, cut-away effects and a pile of logs as the token – if dismembered – organic ingredient, and you start to get a feel for Franz’s distinctively pulsing world. Upstairs is the installation 'Wait', downstairs you are zapped mainly by stand-alone paintings. In a way this is also a chance, following on from Nettie Horn, to see more of Sinta Werner's work: as Ackermann's assistant, she gets to do quite a lot of the painting...


Still from 'Remnants of the Future'

Uriel Orlow: Remnants of the Future @ Laure Genillard, 2 Hanway Place – Tottenham Court

To 10 April (Wed to Sat 2-6 only): www.lauregenillard.com

French - wouldn't you know it - gallerist Laure Genillard presents the wide-ranging Swiss artist Uriel Orlow’s beautifully doomy first London solo show, convincingly grounded in a sense of how the future will never escape its pasts. We see a half hour video exploration of Mush, an Armenian housing project near the site of the 1915 genocides which was left unfinished when the Soviets withdrew and which Orlow sees as ‘ruins in reverse, oscillating between the not-yet and the no-longer’. It is shown to a soundtrack of dying stars, sounds which of course we detect long after the stars have vanished. There are also drawings made by tracing the mass-produced ceramic deathmasks which were a curious Russian tradition well into the photographic age, and stare as blankly as the unfinished houses’ windows; and photographs of an abandoned textile factory suggesting that society’s threads will not be pulled together any time soon. Enjoy…



Philipp Goldbach: Blackboards and Micrographs @ Annely Juda, 23 Dering St – Central
To 27 March: www.annelyjudafineart.co.uk

Young German artist Philipp Goldbach's 'Micrographs’ are six foot high pencil transcriptions in necessarily tiny but just-about legible writing of travel accounts and philosophical texts. That is said to be the whole of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason you can see here, which must be well over a million words – I’m not sure I believe that, but it’s certainly a lot of labour, which makes the drawing, perhaps, its own commentary and an unusually profound and thorough one! As a complement, Goldbach also presents photographs of wiped chalkboards in various German University rooms in which such as Adorno and Heidegger taught: they become abstractions with the trace of writings and ideas past. And to complement Goldbach, Annely Juda are showing Edwina Leapman’s harmonious abstractions on the floor above – and many of them feature a dance of broken parallel lines which have the look of text which has blurred and so cannot be read.

Going Forward

Sam Porritt: Life is a Journey @ Brown, 42 Hoxton Square - Hoxton

To 20 March: www.browngallery.co.uk

It takes courage to be simple, and young Zurich-based English artist Sam Porritt is courageous in his new show at Brown. 'Life is a Journey' spins off Paul Klee's 'taking a line for a walk' by following the adventures of a looped line within and between a whole gallery of drawings. The looped lines, which become art in the world, the literal subject of the drawings rather than a means of representation, have to navigate straight lines which appear set on blocking their progress - rather like conceptual boundaries constraining the urge towards figuration. What makes the drawings work, I think, are the groupings and titles, which provide a comic back-story to what we see: 'A Good Example of Bad Intentions', 'A Bad Example of Good Intentions', 'Bogus Progress', 'A Journey: The Highlights'.

Jim Morrison 1986

Graham Dolphin: Burn Away Fade Out @ Seventeen, 17 Kingsland Rd - Shoreditch

To 27 March: www.seventeen.gallery.com

Graham Dolphin has a niche: evocatively scratching very small writing into resonant sites - all the song lyrics onto a record by the Beatles, verses from the bible onto a poster of Kate Moss. I like that niche, but it's still good that his third show at Seventeen takes teenage fandom somewhere else by examining and remaking the myths which have themselves spun off from myths. Thus we see reproductions of alleged pop star suicide notes, influential but of doubtful veracity; a replica of the hyper-graffitied wooden bench that sits in Viretta Park, Seattle, overlooking the site of Kurt Cobain's suicide; and various states (hence the sub-title years), reconstructed from photographs, of the amateurish fan-made bust of Jim Morrison onto which visitors inscribed tributes at his grave in Paris - so reverentially that the bust was itself chipped away and stolen. It's a powerful mixture of sentiment, melodrama and recognition of the power of contemporary myth and the likely origins of myths past - points uderlined by their presentation at several removes from their origin.

From The Artist's Dream

Ian Breakwell: The Artist's Dream @ Anthony Reynolds, 60 Great Marlborough St - Central

To 1 April: www.anthonyreynolds.com

Ian Breakwell (1943-2005), who was the first artist to be shown by Anthony Reynolds back in 1985, is surely set to grow in reputation posthumously. A major retrospective, 'The Elusive State of Happiness' has just opened at the Quad in his home city, Derby, and this set of 13 works on paper from 1980 provides an ideal advert for it. One big plus for Breakwell is that, where not a few artists rather embarrass themselves if they add their own text to works, he could actually write very sharply - as in the diaries of quirky observation for which he is perhaps best-known. Here the counterpoint of collage, drawing and mock-self-deprecatory text (The artists is a reasonable man. He can account for his time. All his time is accountable. He is calm, cool, he keeps himself in check...) ought to trigger plans to travel to the midlands. Upstairs, incidentally, the gallery blows an equal fanfare for the late Leon Golub ahead of a survey in New York: I don't think that has quite the same justification, but you may disagree...



Still showing from previous lists: Stephen j Shanabrook to 13 March, Shudder to 14 March, Lara Viana to 20 March, Bernard Frize to 24 March, Frances Young to 28 March,Peeping Tom to 28 March, Crash: Homage to JG Ballard to 1 April, Dan Perfect to 7 April, David Hockney/Andy Holden to 10 April, Uriel Orlow to 10 April.

www.newexhibitions.com gives full address and opening time details of most shows


TEN FOR THE FUTURE

I am looking forward to:

William Tucker @ Pangolin: 10.3 - 24.4

Edwin Burdis @ Civic Room: 10-21.3

Tony Cragg @ Lisson Gallery: 17.3 - 17.4

Idris Khan @ Victoria Miro: 17.3 - 24.4

John Smith @ Royal College of Art 19.3 - 13.4

Adam Thomas @ Space 19.3 - 17.4

Steve McQueen @ National Portrait Gallery: 20.3 - 18.7

Benjamin Beker @ Flowers East: 26.3 - 24.4

Nathaniel Rackowe @ Delfina Foundation 26.3 - 23.4

Ilya & Emilia Kabakov @ Sprovieri 30.3 - 30.5

CHOICES FOR LATE FEBRUARY

Michelangelo: 'The Fall of Phaeton' (detail)

Just now the dead seem to have the best shows: Michelangelo at the Courtald, Van Gogh at the Royal Academy, Paul Nash at Dulwich, Ana Mendieta at Alison Jacques and the last decade of Arshile Gorky at Tate Modern and Gagosian West. But I’m sticking to the living – and there’s plenty to enjoy from the current crop, including a trend towards the voyeuristic, most notably in two teeming group shows. If you like the art of now, by the way, I would recommend a new Arts Council-supported initiative by the enterprising Room Gallery, which is organising visits to a mixture of galleries and artists' studios on 12,13 and 14 March for only £15 per day you choose: see www.contemporaryarttours.co.uk.


Richard Prince: Crashed

Crash: Homage to JG Ballard @ Gagosian Gallery, 6-24 Britannia St – King’s Cross

To April 1: www.gagosian.com

This is a stunning presentation of work by some fifty international stars - set in the context of JG Ballard's ideas, but thoroughly enjoyable even if you’ve never read a word by him (maybe, even, better thus: no need to worry that the connections might be tenuous). The emphasis is on sex, technology and destruction, with the most-cited of the novels being ‘High Rise’ and ‘Crash’ itself, in which Ballard says he ‘used the car not only as a sexual image, but as a total metaphor for man's life in today's society’. The biggest room takes its cue from that by surrounding a Richard Prince car with works referencing conventionally masculine concerns and violent acts (Newton, Prince and Delvaux’s fantasies of women, Lichtenstein’s explosion, Warhol and Hirst’s aftermaths, Glenn Brown’s sci-fi appropriation ‘The Pornography of Death etc) all topped off by Roger Hiorns’ testicularly-dangling pair of copper sulphate-covered car engines. Selecting a highlight is invidious, but it is remarkable how effectively Mike Nelson’s installation succeeds in creating its own peculiar atmosphere in the middle of the gallery.




Gretta Sarfaty Marchant: Through a Glass Darkly @ Sartorial Contemporary Art, 26 Argyle Square – King’s Cross

To 6 March: www.sartorialart.com

At the risk of spoiling something best encountered as a surprise, if you visit the Gagosian’s JG Ballard show on a Saturday, then 200 yards to the west you can spy through an office door’s narrow window a naked man blithely carrying on with his administrative work. This is, of course, an art work located in the back room of a gallery: curator/director Gretta Sarfaty Marchant advertised for ‘a nude male model. Preferably early 30's, blonde with beard, blue eyes and spectacles’ as part of her ongoing project to find an authentic muse. That gave a novel twist to the ‘private view’ – which is shown on a monitor along with stills – and on Saturdays the would-be-muse is there in the flesh. The encounter, ‘like a bizarrely displaced piece of internet pornography’ according to Olly Beck’s accompanying text, is a chance to reflect on the viewer’s involvement in art and how are ‘we are all voyeurs ultimately trying to find something of ourselves through the act of gazing’. I leave you to decide if this is profound or just profoundly silly...




David Rickard: Test Flights @ The Economist Plaza, 25 St. James's Street - Central

To 12 March: www.contemporaryartsociety.org

More crashes after Crash? The Contemporary Art Society’s Economist Plaza programme beats the Fourth Plinth if you want regularly changing exhibitions of contemporary sculpture in London’s streetscape, and young London-based New Zealander David Rickard has made a wittily site-specific intervention there. He has shown a previous fondness for dropping his sculpture to arrive at its final form, and his ‘Test Flights’ of spheres of clay have resulted in what look like crashed ceramic UFOs through their being dropped from the various heights of the towers surrounding the Plaza. They range from moderately compressed to thoroughly flattened to shattered according to how far they have fallen – a playful seriality which may give the lie to the smooth alien landings of sci-fi films. The ‘flights’ themselves can be seen at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhJ4-Je5pBI


Sophie Rickett: Pissing Woman Study

Peeping Tom: group exhibition curated by Keith Coventry @ Vegas, 45 Vyner St – Cambridge Heath

To 28 March: www.vegasgallery.co.uk

After more than two years in a Redchurch Street basement, the adventurous Dutch gallerist Suzanne Schurgers is enjoying the increased light and footfall of the former David Risley space. Having said that, the second Vegas show on Vyner Street might suit a more hidden venue: its salon-style hang packs in some fifty contributors on the theme of the Peeping Tom. On-trend artist Keith Coventry has chosen a wide and fascinating range of works which might be broadly split between those exploring the conditions of scopophiliac perception and those for which the artists themselves have pried – as artists should – where others might not. The former include Fiona Banner’s nude-by-words, one of Michael Landy’s intense portrait drawings, and Claire de Jong’s elegant multi-mirror abstraction. Some of the latter group shine a sometimes uncomfortable light on such topics such as female urination (Sophie Rickett), looking up women’s skirts (Mat Collishaw) and - bringing the show some controversy - amputee porn (Sebastian Horsely). And a special mention for Jemima Stehli and Jeremy Deller, the only artists to feature both here and in the not-unrelated Gagosian show.


Song of Farewell

Frances Young: Sites of Transition @ Madder 139, 1 Vyner St – Cambridge Heath

To 28 March (but not 4-7 March): www.madder139.com

Debbie Carslaw’s Madder 139, which used to be near the Barbican, is like Vegas a welcome recent migrant to Vyner Street. Frances, who is indeed Young, caught my eye last year with the brooding combination of deserted roller coaster, flock of starlings, vinyl end-static, slow motion and dusk which makes up 'Song of Farewell'. You might call it triple loop: of bird migration, coaster and video. There’s a chance to catch that along with five new works from an American crossing and residency which show a similar interest in using structural devices to underpin their content. The hypnotic ‘Oscillation’, on a slightly different tack, plays with the negation and transformation of content by turning video images into an apparently avant garde soundscape and then the sounds of that into abstract patterns on screen. Video can be awkward for time planning purposes (eg there's five hours of material in Candice Breitz's examination of twins at White Cube), but seeing all these in turn will only take you 20 minutes and it’s well worth that investment.


Paintress 1-8


Emma Biggs and Matthew Collings: Pattern Industry @ FAS Contemporary, 148 New Bond Street - Central

To 8 March: www.fascontemporary.com

Our culture can irritate when a leader in one field claims he should be taken seriously in another too, so it is tempting suggest that Matthew Collings – the critic who likes so little recent art – wouldn’t have much time for his own collaborative efforts with his mosaicist wife were they by anyone else. But it turns out that this show – inspired by the Five Sisters windows in York Cathedral – rather attractively succeeds in Biggs & Collings’ stated aim of combining the historical, modern and post-modern by ‘making an enormous recycling project not just literally with broken or fragmented forms, but exposing the historical fragments of ideas that underlie the way all of us see’. The patterns at work are in a sculptural mosaic of medieval pottery sherds; hand-painted wallpaper; and grisaille versions of their trademark diamond grid paintings, which are surprisingly rhythmic in the restricted pallet which references the cathedral’s unusual windows – themselves effectively collages of stained glass from centuries of varying replacements. Those who wish to pigeonhole Collings may find this annoyingly good.

Still from 'Background'

Magali Reus @ Ibid Projects, 21 Vyner St – Cambridge Heath

To 7 March: www.ibidprojects.com

If you like shows in which you circle round and come back to the beginning with a different perspective, then maybe you should go see this young Dutch artist’s first London solo outing without reading further. For her first room contains minimalist-tending sculptures which seem mainly to play elegant games such as exploring the spatial effects of eccentric positioning, or making metal look organic and silicone metallic. But the back room has a video in which three elements – a landscape of sandy aggregates, silver sculptural forms catching the sun, and six athletic men undertaking loosely choreographed but distinctly martial exercises – seem to be equated in some mysterious way. The film is called ‘Background’, and with that background the first gallery becomes a landscape and its minimal forms take on a military bearing: that swirl of green is camouflage, the high-perched form is a sniper’s hideout, a metal screen has a parade ground regularity. Aesthetics, Reus seems to suggest, are not so far from politics as we might assume.


'Physical, Emotional' - complete with crack from repair after a physical incident at the crowded opening left things a little emotional

Vanessa Billy: Who Shapes What @ Limoncello, 15a Cremer St – Shoreditch

To 13 March: www.limoncellogallery.co.uk

In a curious chime with Magali Reus’s show (and indeed Magali was at the opening) young Anglo-Swiss artist Vanessa Billy combines a video of gymnastics – a close-up of hands gripping, releasing and turning on a bar – with minimal-tending sculpture. But the tone and themes are very different, with Billy exploring what turns one thing into another and what turns anything into a sculpture. Radical elegance is the thing, my favourite being the paired flat-on-the-floor works which return glass to its origin in sand: ‘Glass Ceiling Once’, made from cement, soft sand and Vaseline and ‘Glass Ceiling Twice’, made from cement, sharp sand and polythene – and which, incidentally, had me Googling the different types of sand and their uses. Billy’s work tends to be fragile, and one piece was trodden-on at that opening – even though, in case you wonder, beer was served rather than the lemon-based Italian spirit from which Rebecca May-Marston’s gallery take its name. Other work includes Billy's characteristic use of water (or is it?)in polythene as a sculptural element and an engaging book, sharing its title with the show. Billy seemed omni-present in London last autumn (Photographer’s Gallery, Frieze sculpture park, Thomas Dane, Lisson) so one cannot say this solo is overdue, but it’s welcome nonetheless.



Stripped Away: Birgir Snæbjörn Birgisson, Helgi Hjaltalin Eyjolfsson & Helgi Thorgils Fridjónsson @ Tintype, 242 Cambridge Heath Rd – Cambridge Heath

To 14 March: www.tintypegallery.com

Tintype, which has no fixed abode, pops up in the old Wilkinson space with something a little different: a small show of three Icelandic artists. Birgir Snaebjörn Birgisson has previously lured me into his edgy explorations of racial identity and self-presentation such by persuading people to be photographed in implausibly blonde wigs and through his almost wholly white paintings of blonde nurses at work and of all the Miss World winners as blondes. Here he spins off into a series of 108 watercolour text works which laboriously reproduce ‘The Pretty Women of Paris’, an unofficial 1883 guidebook to Parisian prostitutes. This provides a mixture of chatty humane interest and crude assessment, making this a far from straightforward next step in Birgisson’s scrutiny of image (now without images) and objectification. Take Gertrude Stevens: ‘She is a divorced woman from New York, whence she arrived some six or seven years ago with her two children and her banjo after being fired at by her husband... She is as deaf as a post, but will not own to it, and answers her lovers anyhow by guess, making the most painfully ludicrous mistakes in consequence… She is noted for being one of the most clever women known for the expert consummation of oral pollution…’



Philipp Goldbach: Blackboards and Micrographs @ Annely Juda, 23 Dering St – Central

To 27 March: www.annelyjudafineart.co.uk

Birgisson’s textural labours are as nothing set against those of young German artist Philipp Goldbach. His ‘Micrographs’ are six foot high pencil transcription in necessarily tiny but just-about legible writing of travel accounts and philosophical texts. That is said to be the whole of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason you can see here, which must be well over a million words – I’m not sure I believe that, but it’s certainly a lot of labour, which makes the drawing, perhaps, its own commentary and an unusually profound and thorough one! As a complement, Goldbach also presents photographs of wiped chalkboards in various German University rooms in which such as Adorno and Heidegger taught: they become abstractions with the trace of writings and ideas past. And to complement Goldbach, Annely Juda are showing Edwina Leapman’s harmonious abstractions on the floor above – and many of them feature a dance of broken parallel lines which have the look of text which has blurred and so cannot be read.


Still showing from previous lists: Rana Begum to 2 March, John Gerrard to 6 March,Damien Roach to 6 March, Rula Halawani to 6 March, Simon Morse to 7 March, Eva Hesse & Katja Strunz to 7 March, Stephen j Shanabrook to 13 March, Shudder to 14 March, Lara Viana to 20 March, Bernard Frize to 24 March, Dan Perfect to 7 April, David Hockney/Andy Holden to 10 April, Uriel Orlow to 10 April.

www.newexhibitions.com gives full address and opening time details of most shows


TEN FOR THE FUTURE

I am looking forward to:

Members' Show @ Studio Voltaire 25.2 - 27.3

Mat Collishaw @ BFI 26.2 – 9.5

Kaye Donachie @ Mauren Paley 27.2 - 4.4

Céleste Boursier-Mougenot @ The Barbican 27.2 - 23.5

William Tillyer paintings @ Bernard Jacobson 3.3 - 3.4

Idris Khan @ Victoria Miro: 17.3 - 24.4

Adam Thomas @ Space 19.3 - 17.4

Nathaniel Rackowe @ Delfina Foundation 26.3 - 23.4

Ilya & Emilia Kabakov @ Sprovieri 30.3 - 30.5

Martin Honert @ Bloomberg 7.4 - 15.5