ANTHOLOGY

'Anthology' at CHARLIE SMITH London, 336 Old St, 5-20 Aug

I have to declare an interest in the juried prize show 'Anthology', which opens on the evening of Thursday 4 August (when the winner will be announced) and runs to 20 August: I’m one of the five judges behind the  choice of ten artists. There were 650 applicants, and the spread of good work was such that 43 entrants were in the top ten of at least one judge! To illustrate that depth, I’ve chosen to highlight:

• five artists who are in the exhibited ten (the others are Jake Clark, Emma Critchley, Harold de Bree, Enzo Marra and Michelle Sank); and

• five artists who didn’t make the show, but whose work I particularly liked.

That’s fifteen artists, and I could happily have included an alternative fifteen in the show, say Mara Bodis-Wollner,, Simona Brinkmann, Ros Hansen, Marguerite Horner, Hannah Hur, Rinaldo Hopf, Colin McMaster, Sarah Pager, Pascale Rousson, Alli Sharma, Kate Vrijmoet, Imogen Welch, Simon Willems, Miranda Whall and Willem Weisman.


FIVE FINALISTS

Vestigial

 Andy Harper


Andy Harper is known for his hyper-detailed renderings of real and imagined plant life in an old-masterly oil palette with greens and browns dominant. If their somewhat claustrophobic spaces suggest analogies between the vegetable world and our own interior physical workings, then this recent series sees Harper move into more mental territory. The intricate tantrically-tinged patterns evoke the Marsh Chapel Experiment run under the supervision of Timothy Leary. That purported to show that psychedelic drugs increase our propensity to experience religious feelings - and these paintings do indeed take Harper’s practice to another level.


Beauty Is in the Eyes of the Collective

 Steve Morgana

There’s something to be said for a little interactive fun in a show, and up-and-coming Australian Steve Morgana, who has worked with a physicist, could provide that. For example ‘Co-operative Kaleidoscope (You’re a Star!)’ needs two viewers to stand at either end before either can see the star patterning produced, and his ‘Lamps’ react to the spectator’s movements to vary their ‘auroral chromatic’. They’re more than ingenious fun, too, with points to make about social collaboration, the subjectivity of perception and the impact we have on our surroundings.

 

Suncatcher II

Tom Ormond

The young British painter Tom Ormond makes paintings inspired by utopian architectural schemes, building up multiple abstract elements as if they might tell us how to construct a future. He has in the past based the overall shapes on nuclear explosions, but here he more optimistically declares his inspiration to be the light by means of which we see those structures, which he calls ‘a symbol for creative optimism and enthusiasm’.

Elevator II

Alex Hudson

The young British painter Alex Hudson  uses a naggingly nostalgic near-monochrome technique to conflate timescales and set up the potential to reach spaces beyond the scene depicted. In ‘Elevator II’, for example, we see a romantically-depicted landscape in which a geometric white form makes a modernist incursion. Their combination suggests such questions as: what means of escape are possible from received approaches?  What would the past have imagined of the future compared with what we know of it as the present? And what does that tell us about our own futures?

Athne

Suzanne Moxhay


Suzanne Moxhay’s photographs of elaborate three dimensional collages make apocalyptic, futuristic landscapes out of the everyday nostalgia of old magazines such as the National Geographic. The outcome is a manipulated reality in which the conjunction of real and illusory space is matched by the combination of real and imagined time. What lures the viewer in is the contrast, referencing its parallel in film sets, between the banality of the set-ups and the convincing deceptions to which they gives rise.

FIVE OTHERS I LIKED

Garter Order

Christina Niederberger

London-based Swiss painter Christina Niederberger re-imagines and yet contradicts such modernist standbys such as grids, circles and Klein’s anthropometries by using lace, net curtains, doilies or soft toys as the stencil starting points for oil, acrylic and spray paint. Sometimes (as in the submitted ‘Trophy’) she combs fake fur stretched over the canvas to make it look like paint, so achieving an even more direct collision between high art and kitsch.  The results are intriguingly ambiguous. Are they realist depictions of the constituent elements, or abstractions? Are they tributes or critiques? Are they stupid enough to be  clever, or is it the other way round?

I Felt the Plastic Bag Begin to Give Way

Stuart Hartley


Stuart Hartley’s plywood sculptures have the appearance of paintings which have been interrupted by events. They call to mind both the molecular activity which underlies the surface stability of ordinary objects; and those random irruptions which flavour our everyday routines – as signalled by such witty titles as ‘One Foot the Bath and the Doorbell Rang ‘. The result is a lively sense of the works representing their own creation, just as they establish an attractive aesthetic based on setting off inner and outer elements and natural and artificial colours.

Pool

Dieter Mammel

Dieter Mammel’s characteristic medium is the unusual one of monochrome ink and watercolor on ungrounded canvas, which he deploys with a brilliant use of semi-accidental effects. In his ‘Under Deep Water’ cycle he builds that directly into his conceptual schema by showing people – and we’re 60% water, after all – submerged in the element from which they seem to be doubly made. Mammel, in his own words, ‘plunges into the flow of colour’ to emerge with these blueberry gestures towards a reality from which the bravura technique keeps us at one remove.




Vom Shit Dog 6

Jock Mooney

Planet Mooney is crazy in a good way: it’s hard not to smile at the relish with which  high and low are combined in vivid hand-sculpted tableaux of silly jokes, religious icons, bodily expulsions, floral beauty and schoolboy magic… There’s an acceptance of manifold human drives for their own sakes which achieves a rambunctious register peculiar to Mooney.  Maybe we’re all mad at some level, he seems to suggest, in which case why should we worry? 



Ossian Ward on Tracey Emin at White Cube, from the series Art Review Graphs

EA Byrne

If only, an artist might dream, art could pre-empt its own reception! That’s the neat trick EA Byrne implies in using the phrases from art reviews to form graph-like abstractions. In so doing she simultaneously pays tribute to the value created by critical evaluation while playfully undermining its claims to objectivity through the absurd pretence that the opinions cited are amenable to a scientific system of quantification. This quiet work seemed to me the most interesting exploration of the on-trend interface between art and language.


TWO BY TWO IN AUGUST

July into August is traditionally time the time of summer group shows, and there are some good ones around: at Frith Street, Poppy Sebire, the Zabludowicz Collection, Calvert22, Ancient & Modern, Galleri8, Salon Vert, Simon Lee, Asylum, Fold and Seventeen, for example, or the Hungarian photography at the RA and the festival of animation at the Barbican – to stretch the concept a little. But I’ve concentrated mostly on ‘dual shows’: one artist in more than one gallery, or the two-person exhibition which allows for contrast while showing a substantial amount of each artist’s work. Despite looming summer breaks, all these shows run well into August, at least.

Jake or Dinos Chapman @ White Cube East & West

To 17 Sept: http://www.whitecube.com/

‘Sensational’ may be too tired a word for the lovable(?) rogues’ vast two gallery survey of their tendencies, but it feels apt. Children’s book drawings, cardboard sculptures, defaced Goyas, re-faced mannequins, altered old paintings, it’s all here in bulk plus the new and memorable 30-strong troop of jet black Nazi art enthusiasts at Mason’s Yard and accretions of bronze cotton buds (don’t use them at home!) at Hoxton Square . The publicity emphasizes that the brothers worked separately, but de-collaboration doesn’t seem to have changed their style. They still ought to be shortlisted as one artist for next year’s Turner Prize, along perhaps with Mike Nelson, Tacita Dean and Tracey Emin to guarantee that it goes to one of the non-winners who’ve done more than most of the winners to set the direction of British art in the last twenty years...




Nicolas Poussin: Apollo and the Muses on Parnassus

Twombly and Poussin: Arcadian Painters @ Dulwich Picture Gallery

To Sept 25: http://www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk/

The relationship between Poussin and Twombly feels somewhat overcooked here, no matter that they both arrived in Rome at 30 with a love of myth and literature. That’s more than offset, though, by the sheer pleasure of so much Poussin alongside the now-memorial selection of Twombly. Plus there are three bonuses: five of Poussin’s great series of ‘Sacrements’ shown separately, Tacita Dean’s latest sensitive portrait of a soon-to-die old man of the arts (Mario Merz, Michael Hamburger and Merce Cunningham having preceded this film of Twombly), and of the course the permanent collection from dress-sweep of Gainborough to milk-spray of Rubens.

Giuseppe Penone: Skin of Graphite

Richard Long & Giusepe Penone @ Haunch of Venison

To 20 Aug 2011: http://www.haunchofvenison.com/

This second heavyweight pairing of the summer is the last in Haunch of Venison’s huge temporary home before they move back to the yard which gave the gallery its name. On one side Richard Long, 72, who trains by walking everywhere; on the other, the Italian arte povera star Giuseppe Penone, 64, in his most extensive London showing yet. It includes the largest-scale set of his ‘Skin of Graphite’ drawings that I’ve ever seen, turning the body's surface into topography, along with a representative selection of sculptures -   mapping trees from inside and out and musing beautifully on man and nature.

Paul Etienne Lincoln: installation view of 'Aurelian Labyrinth'

Tue Greenfort: Where the People Will Go & Paul Etienne Lincoln: An Aurelian Labyrinth and Other Explications @ the South London Gallery, 65 Peckham Rd – Peckham

To 11 Sept (Greenfort) / 18 Sept (Lincoln): http//www.southlondongallery.org
Environmentally-inclined Dane Tue Greenfort’s soft parquetry, mushroom growths, wood decay demo and critique of the structure of London local government through its binbags are well worth pondering. But the upstairs space finds New York based Briton Lincoln in super-charged imaginative form which put me in mind of Raymond Rousell: detailed descriptions, drawings and maquettes relating to some compellingly ludicrous installation proposals. The titular piece, for example, envisages that a Bach score be fed into the mechanics of an irrigation system to produce maze patterns on a field of genetically modified pansies, chosen – need you ask? - for their petals’ similarity to the wings of the Camberwell Beauty butterfly.

Still from 'Golden Underground'

Appau Junior Boakye-Yiadom & Gabriel Hartley: Peacock Trousers @ Josh Lilley Gallery, 44-46 Riding House St – Fitzrovia

To 10 Aug: http://www.joshlilleygallery.com/

There’s a certain perverse pleasure to be had from Gabriel Hartley’s fey-monumental sculptural forms which turn out to have been built from rolls of paper, but for me the main attraction here is the sharp and amiable wit of the impressively named Appau Junior Boakye-Yiadom, who presents the surreal afterlife of implied performances. ‘Peacock’ conjures multiple resonances from a succession of bulbs lit by variously-coloured light: from snooker to still life to eggs to interrogation to pondering the light in or out of a painting; and the jaunty paintbrush-plays-a-piano video loop ‘Golden Underground’ is somehow made more entertaining by the absence of an image for most of the time.

My Sun's Holiday

Patrick Hughes at Flowers & Flowers East

To 3 Sept: http://www.flowergalleries.com/

You may think you've seen enough of Patrick Hughes’ crowd-pleasing reverse perspective paintings, which appear to move as you do, and of which there are plenty of new examples in the Cork Street half of this show. Still, it's refreshing to be reminded of the variety of witty ideas which Hughes has come up with over the years in the extensive retrospective at Flowers East: the painting as suitcase, for example, the sun at rest, the sexual jigsaw, the self-masturbating penis, the rainbow hung on the moon. And actually the reverse perspectives do move on, recently playing with internal repetition and infinite regress. The painting may be  more functional rather than inspired, that’s also an avoidance of distraction that fits in with Hughes’ obvious affinity with Magritte.

Mat Collishaw in Ron Arad's 'Curtain Call' @ the Roundhouse, Chalk Farm Rd - Camden

9-29 Aug: http://www.roundhouse.org.uk/

This Bloomberg Summer exhibition isn't strictly dual, but centeres around Ron Arad’s 5,600 suspended silicon rods serving as a novel screen in the round (which you can view from inside or outside) for the 15 projectors used for Mat Collishaw’s new video work 'Sordid Earth'. That will depict flowers in a panoramic landsape over the course of a day: the flowers will blossom and contract digitally added infections - which lead to sores, pustules, decay and death in typically melodramatic Collishaw style.  Ori Gersht, David Shrigley and Christain Marclay are among those who will also feature in the wide-ranging programme.

Jess Flood-Paddock: Fantastic Voyage @ Carl Freedman, 44a Charlotte Rd - Hoxton

To 13 Aug: http://carlfreedmangallery.com/

Young sculptor Jess Flood-Paddock is highly visible at the moment: anthropomorphic versions of Japanese snacks at Wilkinson; a Del Boy car in this year’s Bold Tendencies, the entertaining summer sculpture survey in Peckham Rye’s multistorey car park; and her own show at Carl Freedman. ‘Fantastic Voyage’ sets a tent-sized hip-hop-trendy New Era 50 baseball cap with a brain design on it against a backdrop of membranous tie-dyed pink fabric. That hints at being inside a brain, too, perhaps one covetous of the latest consumer fashion. Comical, and yet enough to spark matters in your own head.

Michelle Sank: Bye Bye Baby III

Anthology @ CHARLIE SMITH London, 336 Old St - Hoxton
5-20 Aug: http://www.charliesmithlondon.com/

I have to declare an interest here in that I was one of the five judges for the open competition leading to a choice of ten artists for this prize show. There were 650 applicants, and the spread of good work was such that 43 entrants were in the top ten of at least one judge! Not surprsingly, the show is interesting, and includes several artists I particularly like. I’ve posted a sample of the finalists and wider entries at paulartworld.blogspot.com which shows what I mean. The winner - Tom Ormond - was chosen on 4 August from a field which ranged from English painter Andy Harper’s vegetative abstraction to the social documentary portraits of South African photographer Michelle Sank to sculpture made for viewer participation by Australian Steven Morgana.



Flowing in Black

Marta Marcé @ Riflemaker, 79 Beak St - Soho

To 3 Sept: http://www.riflemaker.org/

Last month’s selection of ‘galleries you could walk by unknowingly’ might have included Riflemaker, which is still disguised as a gunshop eight years after opening. Three previous exhibitions already made the Anglo-Spanish painter Tot and Virginia’s most-shown, and now Marta Marcé returns – or at least her paintings do, as she herself is stuck in Barcelona, too pregnant to fly. Here s sequence of six big canvasses, three of them diptychs, test the dimensions of the rickety space. They provide the grandest exploration yet of Marcé’s signature use of games, such as tangram, as a means of driving purposed abstraction. Geometric, yet warmly engaged.

Image credits: relevant artists and galleries.

REASONS TO VISIT PARIS

Edouard Manet: Gipsy with a Cigarette, 1862

For those seeking reasons to visit Paris (how hard can it be?), the substantial Manet show at the Musée  D’Orsay has been extended to 17 July. What, the Louvre aside, might go with that? Two other highlights  - a comprehensive book-driven look at Richard Prince’s world at the Bibliothéque Nationale and Francois Morellet’s imaginatively laid out ‘Reinstallations’ at the Pompidou - are at the end of their runs. Several of the obvious big hitters (Palais de Tokyo, Musée d’Art Moderne, Foundation Cartier, Pinacothéque, Perrotin, Marian Goodman, Karsten Greve, Yvon Lambert) are underpowered at present. But on the other hand:

Shari Boyle: King Cobra

My Winnipeg @ La Maison Rouge, 10 Boulevard de la Bastille – 12th Arrondissement

To 25 Sept: http://www.lamaisonrouge.org/

Who’d have thought that the Canadian city of Winnipeg (pop 700,000), best-known for isolation, cold and having once housed Marshall McCluhan and Neil Young, had more than 70 recent artists worth exploring? Perhaps it hasn’t, but it has enough to make this big party of a show thoroughly enjoyable, mostly in a quirky way which casts the Royal Art Lodge (Dzama, Pylychuk, Farber etc) rather than the edgier General Idea (claimed for Winnipeg through college attendance, though more associated with Toronto) as the defining collective. Nor had I realised that Erica Eyres, Karel Funk and Kent Monkman were all born in Winnipeg. Highlights include the Guy Maddin docu-fantasia which provides the show’s name, and ‘Winter Kept Us Warm’, a basement full of work showcasing the potential for erotic action during the snow-bound months.

Joe Bradley: Big Indian

Joe Bradley: ‘Duckling Fantasy’ & Peter Peri: ‘We, The Children of the Twentieth Century’ @ Galeie Almine Rech, 40 Rue de Saintonge – 3rd Arrondissement

To 30.7: http://www.alminerech.com/

Joe Bradley is a hot young artist in New York, but has shown little in Europe. His work varies greatly from series to series, and though I preferred this energetically childish set to the shaped monochromes grouped into figures at the Saatchi Gallery last year, the play between them enhances both. ‘Duckling Fantasy’ presents dirty abstraction (largely due to Bradley walking on the work) with underlying comic cuts in pseudo-clunky style: a tweaking of action painting’s tail to go with his earlier pulling of Ellsworth Kelly’s leg. And then there’s Rech’s other floor, of the dependably excellent Peter Peri...

Contemporary Grotesque: Walking

Keith Tyson: Contemporary Grotesque @ Galerie Vallois, 36 Rue de Seine – 6th Arrondissement

To 30 July: http://www.galerie-vallois.com/


I wouldn’t have guessed that the extraordinary graphite and resin ‘Contemporary Grotesques’, in a register round about Ashley Bickerton meets John Currin, were by Keith Tyson. But in his established way of bringing scientific issues into art, Tyson see them as ‘defences against accepting that each person has an identical character’, shown in the carbon from which we’re all made. I’ve no idea whether I liked the skeletal dancer, walrus-rider , triple group of urinators etc, but they certainly grabbed my attention.

Julien Prévieux: Dimensions in Modern Management @ Jousse Entreprise, 6 Rue St Claude – 3rd Arrondissement

To 28 July: http://www.jousse-entreprise.com/

This first of two neighbouring conceptual installations utilising books sees young French artist Julien Prévieux range from google sketching to patented gestures. It centres on ‘Forget the Money’, an installation of a hundred books acquired in the post-conviction sale of the assets of Bernard Madoff, who notoriously made off with so much cash from other people. Prévieux extracts from these those sentences which contain the word ‘money’. In sound and writing, they form both a disquisition on obsession and an unbalanced pseudo-narrative which comes worryingly close to sense at times.

Untitled (Walt)

Gareth Long: Four Stories @ Torri, 7 Rue St Claude – 3rd Arrondissement

To 16 July: http://www.galerietorri.com/

New-York based Canadian Gareth Long plays off the iconic US designs for J.D. Sa¬lin¬ger’s novels. The books themselves appear with all but the diagonal rainbow flashes erased from their covers, perhaps referencing Salinger’s notorious secrecy. That pattern is then transmuted into large lenticular prints which distort the geometric modernist content as the moving viewer reads them, paralleling the way in which Salinger’s writing fractured modernist approaches. What’s nice is how the shifting Louis-come-Stella-come-Riley references draw you so effectively into the story of the work.

Jean-Michel Othoniel

Paris - Delhi – Bombay @ the Pompidou Centre - 3rd Arrondissement

To 19 Sept: http://www.centrepompidou.fr/

The Pompidou’s main summer show is a riot of mostly big, high impact pieces by 50 of the best-known artists from France and India, most of it made specifically for the show on the theme of ‘What is India Today?’, and shown in themed groups such as ‘home’ and ‘religion’. It makes for a suitably teeming experience, in which I particularly liked Loris Gréaud’s tantric room and Jean-Michel Othoniel’s first musical instrument sculpture on the French side; and Dayanita Singh’s night photographs and Sunil Gawde’s garlands of razor blades - two of the less spectacular Indian contributions compared with, say, the biggest installation of kitchen utensils I’ve ever seen from Subodh Gupta – and I’ve seen a few…

SOMEWHAT HIDDEN IN JULY

All but the last of my choices this month are in galleries of which one can imagine the casual passer-by remaining unaware, even if they walk right by. Carlson and Sprovieri are hidden up on the second floors either side of Heddon Street. Nor do Ritter / Zamet, Simon Oldfield, Laurent Delaye or The Approach have any street level presence. WW is in the gallerists’ house in Hackney. The Skylon is primarily a restaurant. How come, then, we start with Hauser & Wirth?

Piccadilly Community Centre, 196A Piccadilly - Central

To 30 July: piccadillycommunitycentre.org

Is it plausible to include one of the biggest galleries in London in the list of the potentially overlooked? Pretty plausible, when Hauser & Wirth’s Piccadilly space has been disguised as a functioning community centre. You can seek advice, use the gym, browse the fund-raising shop, drop into the café, hang out in the basement bar… Your suspicions may be raised if you saw Christoph Buchel’s equally thorough though less participative takeover of the gallery’s Coppermill Project Space in 2007. Climb to the attic, even out on the roof – to find squatters have laid out their makeshift beds – and your doubts will be confirmed. Unmissably improbable.

Dan Colen: Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are! @ Carlson, 6 Heddon St – Central

To 31 July: http://www.carlsongalery.co.uk/

Dan Colen is one of the brash young artists who emerged in New York a decade back and are linked to the late Dash Snow, to whom this show is dedicated. It’s energetically varied: confetti, tar and feathers as painting materials; a pile of Abe Hoffman's classic how-to-be-rebellious guide 'Steal This Book', copies of which you can't steal because you're meant to; photos of Colen ripping from his flesh a badge supporting ‘Nobody for President’, as if even that is too much commitment; and a whole-room installation inspired by Houdini which scatters all manner of chains, cages and other means of restraint in paradoxically unrestrained manner.

Joby Williamson: Geraldo's Mirage

Tonic @ Skylon, South Bank Centre – Waterloo

To late Aug: www.skylon-restaurant.co.uk/festival-of-britain

Over the summer, the South Bank Centre has lively celebrations in place for the 60th anniversary of the Festival of Britain. There’s plenty of bunting about, and the Skylon Restaurant – which overlooks the river from the Festival Hall’s first floor – is open to all to see work by artists Craig Wheatley and Joby Williamson. Wheatley has made ceramic bunting which mimics a gappy childhood smile - hence the title ‘Say Cheese’. Williamson contributes neon versions and colour photograms of original 1951 bunting, nostaligically aged, colours reversed by the process, and revealing that it was double the size of the modern stuff. Add fun with badges and commemorative chocolate coins and it’s well worth popping in, even if you’re not hungry…



Marguerite Horner: In Between

 Wendy Elia & Marguerite Horner: The MacGuffin @ The WW Gallery, 30 Queensdown Rd - Hackney

To 17 July (weekends or by appointment): http://www.wilsonwilliamsgallery.com/

The WW Gallery presents a neatly-themed show: paintings seen as film stills by playing off the Hitchcockian notion of ‘The MacGuffin’ – the incidental device which triggers the suspense. Marguerite Horner’s rather beautifully mysterious modulations, in a key of grey with occasional startles of colour, often filter their air of the ominous through the MacGuffin of trees and power lines. Wendy Elia half-counters a wider range of MacGuffins - from shoes to ships to patchings of tape - through a more upbeat use of colour.



Jane Harris: Sixes and Sevens


Friendship of the Peoples @ Simon Oldfield, 9 Henrietta St – Covent Garden

To 23 July: http://www.simonoldfield.com/

For this feel-good 40-piece summer show, 20 artists were asked to make an A1-sized work on paper - a poster format, in effect – and to choose another artist to do the same. The forced format makes for some interesting adaptations: I was reminded of the spirit of the RCA’s ‘secret postcard’ show. The dialogue between works is lively, and I particularly liked Daniel Sturgis’ ‘Boulder 4’, Leo Fitzmaurice’s ‘Red Shift’ diptych and Roy Voss’s cheekily ‘wanted’ image of a bride, as well as this typically poised and intense – if not quite A1! – drawing by Jane Harris..



Ronald Hickman


Stuart Cumberland: Four Circle Paintings @ The Approach , 1st Floor, 27 Approach Rd – Cambridge Heath

To 31 July: http://www.theapproach.co.uk/

The well-known above-pub space presents the latest in Stuart Cumberland’s ingenious riffs on the real and unreal in painting: here, he adopts the motif of four circles as a means of exploring the extensive use of hand-drawn and cut-out stencils made from an initial painting – even to the extent of stencilliing drips – so that in Cumberland’s words in the excellent accompanying booklet ‘the stenciled painted surface signifies a wet, dripping painted line rather than actually being one’. The odd titles, incidentally, are selected from newspaper obituaries to memorialise the day of production.

Nan Goldin: Fireleap @ Sprovieri, 23 Heddon St – Central

To 6 Aug: http://www.sprovieri.com/

Sprovieri has trebled its first floor space. by expanding into a beautifully lit room which features recent landscapes and experimental photographs – such as double-exposures and grid formations - by Nan Goldin. Her slideshows (most famously ‘The Ballad of Sexual Dependency’) are always the most crowded places in group shows, so the old room provides a more comfortable chance to see 'Fireleap': 15 minutes of children in image and song, many of them from Goldin’s impressive tally of godchildren. Sentiment, true, but also a sense of potentiality not without forboding…

Mortgage

Danica Phelps: Bankrupt @ Ritter / Zamet, Unit 8, 80A Ashfield St - Whitechapel

To 23 July: http://www.ritterzamet.com/

Where Goldin does her life through people, Phelps filters hers through financial transactions using a stripe per dollar system to produce intricate abstract paintings (she’s a much more meticulous accountant than me, even though I’m the one with the relevant professional qualification). In this case, they’re bound up with the tale of her mortgage and the insurmountable problems she’s faced in attempting to eject her ex-lover from her house. Other drawings anatomise the house itself, but Danica isn’t reshowing any of her 2004 series ‘Making Love with Debi’, from the relationship’s less fractious days…

Total, 1991

Bill Culbert: Back Light @ Laurent Delaye, 11 Savile Row - Central

To July 30: http://www.laurentdelaye.com/


Laurent Delaye is just yards from the big new Hauser & Wirth space, and right now I prefer his space. Bill Culbert is a New Zealander who’s had solo shows at the Serpentine (1976) and ICA (1983 and 1986) but a lower UK profile in recent years. This five decade retrospective selection provides a varied demonstration of the poetry he brings to the genre of assisted readymades with light, with not a little incidental foreshadowing of David Batchelor. At the opening, the influential painting professor Gerard Hemsworth suggested that I might include more personal data in this blog. I wasn’t sure that was relevant, and yet…

  

Tom Friedman: Circle Dance

All that Glisters @ Stephen Friedman Gallery, 25-28 Old Burlington Street – Central
To 16 July: http://www.stephenfriedman.com/

The Stephen Friedman Gallery, newly-expanded into spaces either side of Old Burlington Street, provides by contrast one of London’s best views of art from the pavement. The front window currently features Tom Friedman’s exuberant version of Matisse’s ‘The Dance’, which had already made sufficient impact on me when I failed to duck fully on emerging from the centre of the ring. This being the full-sized stainless steel version rather than Friedman’s melted baking tray maquette, there was plenty of blood - though not enough to stop me enjoying the rest of a glittering summer group show, in which Tara Donovan’s ‘painting’ made of too many pins to count and Jim Hodges’ pair of delicate abstracts melded with the wall are other highlights. Go see, but take care…


Also recommended:

Max Bill @ Annely Juda to 30 July: The Swiss (1908-94) painter’s ‘Rotation Around Expanding White’ (which reminds me of Matisse’s ‘L’Escargot’) must be the fizziest colour experience right now, and much of Bill’s work from the 70’s is similarly ebullient.

William Copley: X-rated @ Sadie Coles South Audley St to 27 Aug: Copley’s 1970’s paintings try to turn porn into art by filtering it through cartoons and – like Bill, I think – Matisse. I enjoyed wondering whether they succeeded.

Cecily Brown @ Gagosian Gallery, Davies Street to 29 July: small paintings and her first publicly-shown watercolours - the scale, Brown feels, influenced by her being pregnant. ‘Turgid and wearying’, said Arian Searle in The Guardian, but I rather liked them.

Elizabeth Wright @ Swiss Cottage Library to 3 July: hurry en route to Camden Arts Centre to see this unusually beautiful library’s book-riffing architecture by Sir Basil Spence form in turn the starting point for sculptural interventions.

Lights Are On But Nobody’s Home @ Standpoint: an exploration of the not-quite-fashionable genre of the portrait which features such worthwhile names as Glenn & Jemima Brown, Nick Hornby, Liane Lang and Fiona MacDonald

Giuseppe Penone @ Haunch of Venison to 2 Aug: Arte Povera veteran Penone is probably the best living Italian artist, and this is his biggest show in London since who knows when. Richard Long, also on view, is a decent support act.

Double helpings of the interesting young artist Junior Boakye-Yiadom along with Gabriel Hartley (@ Josh Lilley to 13 Aug) and in a group show with several up and coming sculptors (@ Poppy Sebire to 6 Aug)

Treble solo helpings of Frank Bowling’s patchwork abstraction neatly stud the principal art zones of Mayfair, Fitzrovia and Hoxton / Shoreditch: work on paper at the RA (to 23 Oct), small to middling paintings at Rollo (to 1 July) and big paintings at Hales (to 30 July).

The Great Alonso @ Gallery Primo Alonso to 10 July: the end of the Hackney Road for this lively artist-run space reunites artists from its 3 year run. The good news is that Paul, Richard and Angelica are planning to pop up with shows elsewhere…

Miro @ Tate Modern to 11 Sept: not really one to fit my ‘hard to spot’ theme, but a wonderful retrospective for how clearly Miro’s variety is laid out to confound any pigeon-holers.


Image credits: relevant galleries and artists + Stephen White (Friedman)

SCULPTURE-FEST

Gary Webb at the Zabludowicz Collection


The first sculpture-only show at the Saatchi Gallery’s Chelsea incarnation heads up a strong month for sculpture generally and wide-ranging surveys of the form in particular: there’s still time (to 12 June) to see the Zabludowicz Collection’s extensive presentation by a 22-strong mixture of emerging, mid career and veteran artists – all made in the last five years, which is much more logical connector than selecting by the age of the contributors; the Pangolin Gallery sees 15 often-witty ‘Women Make Sculpture’; and plenty of the hundred-odd works by 35 artists in ‘Young London’ at V22’s 50,000 foot ex-Biscuit Factory in Bermondsey are in 3D. My next half dozen choices add to the sculpture-fest, and that without bringing in the recent high profile openings of Ai Wei Wei, Tracey Emin, Fred Sandbach, John Chamberlain, Richard Long and Giuseppe Penone; nor Dan Colen at Carlson, Bouke de Vries at Vegas, Carl Plackman at Hales and Marie Lund at Laura Barlett, which I also like…

Folkert de Jong: The Dance

The Shape of Things to Come: New Sculpture @ the Saatchi Gallery, Duke of York’s HQ, Kings Rd – Sloan Square

To 16 Oct: http://www.saatchigallery.com/

In this best use yet of the Saatchi’s Chelsea space, many of the 14 galleries contain just a few high impact sculptures by one artist. One recurring theme is how variously the human form can be re-imagined: provisional in Thomas Houseago, beyond cliché in Rebecca Warren, metamorphic in David Altmejd and, best of all perhaps, all the above in Dutch sculptor Folkert de Jong’s sardonic dance of seventeenth century trader types on the ghosts of the colonial. The low countries do well, in fact – there are as many artists working in Ghent as in London – in a geographically and conceptually wide-ranging show in which Dirk Skreber, Kris Martin, Sterling Ruby and Bjorn Dahlem are also shown to particular advantage. I wasn't too worried by the little irony of titling: that the work in 'The Shape of Things to Come' is typically rather older than that in the Zabludowicz's 'The Shape We're In'.

Upside Down Cloak from the Buhuu Suite


Nicole Wermers: Buhuu Suite @ Herald St, 2 Herald St – Bethnal Green

To 28 June: http://www.heraldst.com/

HERALD ST PRESS RELEASES USE CAPITALS ONLY , which can be wearying, but then this is a capital show: while you might look for an artist you like to take one interesting new direction, London-based German Nicole Wermers adds two fresh modes to her elegant sculptural plays on the thresholds between spaces and between art and design. First, the room-filling set of designed and found objects linked - as if against theft as well as by thematic intent - by chains. Second, her first straight (rather than collaged) photographs, reflecting on Rodin’s house and its ghosts (‘Buhuu’ is German onomatopoeia for their sounds) in cunningly-shaped clip-frames which become part of the work.


Ground floor view

Jodie Carey: Somewhere, Nowhere @ The Pump House Gallery, Battersea Park

To 19 June: http://www.pumphousegallery.org.uk/

It’s a good time of year to stroll through Battersea Park to the unique four floor gallery which has – happily – survived a recent well-publicised grant reduction. Here Jodie Carey (no relation though she shares my maiden name!) uses a pared-back aesthetic to tease a fragile beauty from base materials, affirming life at the same time as evoking its vulnerability and potential addictions. Cumulatively, her installations - wallpaper patterns of cigarette ash; a marbled and surprisingly sparkly carpet of ground blood and dust; cast plaster slabs which incorporate the chance effects of coffee and lace - also bring a bodily presence to the architecture.


Exhaust (24 hours of exhaled air within foil balloons)

David Rickard: Time + Trace @ Sumarria Lunn Gallery, 36 South Molton Lane – Central (nb: South Moulton Lane not the parallel trendy Street)

9 June - 1 July: http://www.sumarrialunn.com/

This is the second show at young gallerists Will Lunn and Vishall Sumarria’s first permanent space after various pop-up appearances. In it, London-based New Zealander David Rickard embraces the complementary roles of order and chance by setting up tightly structured processes within which events are allowed to unfold and create their own aesthetic. Rickard’s inventive combinations of imagination and rigour, experiment and pratfall include the mapping of pigeon poop, glass differentially broken by being dropped from varying heights, shelving units loaded to collapse, catching a whole day's breath and dice-driven sculptures made out of dice.

Installation view

Mauro Bonacina: London.England.12.05.2011.18:00 @ Maria Stenfors, Unit 4, 21 Wren St - King Cross

To 25 June: http://www.maristenfors.com/
The towering physical presence of Italian artist Mauro Bonacina dominates this beautifully interlinked show - whether or not you saw the opening night’s eponymous performance, in which he made the gallery his canvas by spraying an impressively high horizon line right round it. The artist’s voice greets you outside the gallery and his actions are also present in photos which make his star jumps look like implausible attempts at flight; a surprisingly neat and effective painting made from his large footprints; the implausibly complete filling of a supermarket trolley with geometrically-shaped goods (a reminder, apparently, of the time Bonacina won a supermarket dash only to find his planning sabotaged on the day by the shop closing off the drink and electrical zones!).


Fairy steering butterfly from 'The Taming' at Danielle Arnaud

Tessa Farmer: ‘Nymphidia’ @ Danielle Arnaud, 123 Kennington Rd – Lambeth North & ‘Control Over Nature’ (with Amon Tobin) @ The Crypt Gallery, St Pancras Church, Euston Rd – Euston

To 5 June (Crypt) / 26 June (Arnaud): http://www.cryptgallery.org/ / http://www.daniellearnaud.com/

Pangolin has work by Polly Morgan, one of the two increasingly well-regarded women who work with taxidermy. And Danielle Arnaud’s elegant house-as-gallery and the gothic underspace opposite Euston station both feature the bizarre insect-freezing, small-animal-stuffing sculptural tableaux of the other: Tessa Farmer. She sends her evil fairies – like fly-sized skeletons with wings – into battle with their enemies, the hornets, with hedgehog spines as spears, flying skullships as military transport and mosquito slaves as footsoldiers… The Crypt combines theatrical displays with Amon Tobin’s soundscape, and both venues also feature Farmer’s hybrid creatures in animated film action: the compellingly weird future of Victorian occult.


I Don't Fancy You, Lee

Lee Edwards: How to disappear completely @ DomoBaal, 3 John St – Clerkenwell

To 11 June: http://www.domobaal.com/

Kid A in this case is young artist Lee Edwards, who’s just as effective as Farmer at drawing the viewer into the odd and diminutive in London’s other leading house-as-gallery. He uses the knots on found pieces of wood as a starting point for portraits of eleven women for whom he has longed. These succeed both as sensitively-painted versions of his photographic sources,enhanced by how they interact with the grain and rings; and as a narrative of nostalgia likely to echo the viewer’s own experiences, and triggered by such titles as ‘I Was Too Shy’, ‘My Aunt’s Friend’, ‘We Kissed in the Rain’ and the direct‘I Don’t Fancy You, Lee’, which is painted on a conker.


Standing Nude with Orange Stockings, 1914

Egon Schiele: Women @ Richard Nagy Ltd, 22 Old Bond St - Central

To 30 June: http://www.richardnagy.com/

It doesn’t sound the greatest premise: a private dealer opens a gallery, hidden away on the second floor, to show work he’s borrowed back from past clients. But Richard Nagy has handled much of the best of Egon Schiele (1890-1918), and this first part of a thematic series is no arbitrary accumulation: 45 works on paper cut to the quick of Schiele’s unsettlingly intense focus on women. Most are nervy and erotically driven; though his last phase, between the military service which interrupted his production and the flu which killed him, can take a serener path. And if you like Tracey, then you’ll love Egon.


The Back that Used to be the Front

George Shaw: The Sly And Unseen Day @ South London Gallery,65-67 Peckham Rd – Camberwell / Peckham Rye

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

Living in Devon hasn’t yet deflected George Shaw from his fifteen year project of humbrol enamel paintings triggered by his childhood suburbscape, the Tile Hill Estate in Coventry. This 25-strong retrospective therefrom, already well-received at its bigger Baltic showing, now comes with the imprimatur of the Turner Prize shortlist. Evocatively obsessive or too static and repetititious? I go the first way, which this selection assists in that only a small minority show the views of houses and garages which probably constitute most people’s mental image of Shaw’s work. And it’s cunningly paired with Simon and Tom Bloor’s alternative take on the settings of childhood. Odd, though, to hear people hail Shaw's shortlisting as a return of painting, when that's so subsidary to his conceptual end.


Artist's Proof

Tala Madani: Manual Man @ Pilar Corrias, 54 Eastcastle St – Fitzrovia

To 18.6: http://www.pilarcorrias.com/

Even were I not already a follower of internationally-based Iranian painter Tala Madani’s energetic pastiches of stereotypes, it would be hard not to be curious about a show of paintings with titles such as ‘Chinballs with Flag’, ‘Strangulation by Stained Glass’, and ‘Cupid Piss with Goggles’. In Ancient Iran, claims the press release, to dream of urine is a sign that great wealth and power will follow... meanwhile, Madani’s zesty militaristic characters keep us guessing about what is real at some level, and what is entirely staged. 'Artist's Proof', though, is from a new stream which sees animated letters poke fun at various targets.

Picture credits: relevant artists + galleries + Stephen White (Zabludowicz), Matthew Booth (Pumphouse), Andy Keate (DomoBaal) + Manuel Vason (Sumarria Lunn)

NEW IN AMSTERDAM

It's no news that Amsterdam makes for an ideal long weekend, but what about its Art Fair? The recent Art Amsterdam (11-15 May), while not quite small with some 130 galleries, was of manageable size. It focused mainly on the Netherlands, with only 30% of the galleries being from elsewhere (just three of those were London-based - Vegas, Patrick Heide and White Space - but all had interesting main and project stands). In the absence of the usual big fair galleries, there was plenty of chance to find artists new to me:



Dieter Lutsch: Yet to be Titled @ Jarmuschek + Partner, Berlin

Berlin-based Romanian-born installation artist Dieter Lutsch’s attention-grabbing chemistry set proved decidedly artful: not only did the foam oozing out of colourful liquids make for faecal sculptural shape-shifting, its apparent whiteness was betrayed by the way it came together in a suitably dirty brown in the lower container (sory, just out of shot!), leading one back to spot the separate elements of faint colour which closer inspection revealed were retained in the foam. Thus was the difference between light and substance in the matter of colour neatly skewered.




Douglas Henderson: Wonder Woman @ Gallery Mario Mazzoli, Berlin

Berlin-based American sound artist and composer Douglas Henderson showed the latest of his active sculptures taking an off-kilter look at superheroes with a gallery which, uniquely I think, focuses on works which use sound. His version of Wonder Woman was dominated by gyrating breasts formed from reversed loudspeakers, emitting the surprisingly bell-like and appropriately pre-cinematic sounds of popcorn rat-tatting against the saucepan lid as it cooked. By happy coincidence, the Stedelik Museum’s new exploration of TV in art included Dara Birnbaum’s seminal video appropriating Wonder Woman’s transformative moments.




Simon Gush: In the Company Of @ West, The Hague

My favourite video at the Fair, which had few, was by the South African Simon Gush, who had organized and filmed a football match between teams of immigrants on a Belgian railway track. Cue references to the centrality of travel to the players, the contrast between the fluid movement of professional footballers in a global business and the obstacles faced by the mass of would-be-emigrants, and tracks doubling as pitch markings of a sort and a modernist grid. But mostly it was fascinating spectacle, both as a visual setting and for how deftly the players dealt with the constraints and random deflections of their improbable field of action.




Mitsy Goenendijk: Mr Punch @ Gallery Majke Hüsstege, Den Bosch

There was a double helping of primate at the Fair: Albert Watson’s well-known photographs of chimpanzees - trying on masks, one holding a gun - and one of Dutch sculptor Mitsy Goenendijk’s disquieting sculptures of clothed monkeys. I found it compelling in a way in which, to be honest, I wasn't sure I wanted to be compelled. Is some backwards development, some de-evolution, being hinted at? 'Mr Punch' was almost as striking as running across Mitsy herself, helping out at the Torch Gallery's interesting Terry Rogers show, where she was working on another monkey stretched across the desk…




Aurelia Gratzer: Flatwerk @ Huchentoot, Berlin

Among the themes one could pick out at the Fair, there was plenty of interface between architecture and art, including in the attractively confused spaces of the young Austrian painter Aurelia Gratzer, which reminded me – by curious coincidence presumably – of Wyndham Lewis. Gratzer studied maths first and art second, and recently won the Central Europe’s Strabag Artaward. Her small canvases illogically combine layered perspectives taken from various photographic sources, and bring nostalgically earthy colouration to the apparently modern. Here, in the visual hurly-burly of competing visions, was a quiet corner which felt right.




Michael Wolf: Real Fake Art – Richter Candles @ Gallery Wouter van Leeuwen, Amsterdam

Michael Wolf, a German photographer who has spent much of his career in Asia, has developed several interesting projects, with subjects including toys made in China, Hong Kong high rise living and the press of the Tokyo subway system. The series ‘Real Fake Art’ focuses on the business that has developed in China for copying modern art works, mainly for export to the West. The Chinese copyists were shown with their creations, alongside the actual copy which Wolf had purchased from them, to yield a fresh take on the nature of originality together with the opportunity, rather neatly taken in the mops and candles scenario here, to mine formal similarities between object, surroundings and artist.




Peter Davis: Untitled (Red) @ Slewe, Amsterdam

British painter Peter Davis – not to be confused with the differently excellent Peter Davies - has shown his abstract process paintings in London intermittently since the early 1990s, but I hadn’t seen much of him for real. He’s made a lot of work on aluminium car panels, but his latest series uses gloss paint on glass over the top of a coloured board. Little of the effect, I fear, comes over in reproduction but the objects themselves generate an eerily seductive glow which we lured me in to work out the cause, and then to encounter a natural-seeming emotional charge escaping from the rules of their making.


There were strong shows elsewhere in the city – Ryan Gander, Navid Nuur, Maaike Schoorel, Michiel Cuellars, Ryan McGinley, Terry Rodgers… - plus an Aselm Keifer installation in the Rijksmuseum, new displays in the ‘temporary Stedelik’ – both major museums remain in the throws of redevelopment - and also more new artists to be found dotted around the canals. Here are three Dutch artists who appealed:



Dana Lixenberg: Fire Training Ground, Schiphol from ‘Set Amsterdam’ @ FOAM

One of the shows at the large and lively FOAM, a public photography institute which publishes the excellent journal of that name, was by the well-regarded New York resident Dana Lixenberg. In ‘Set Amsterdam’ she portrays her native city through landscapes and interiors emptied of people so as to resemble a film set, created by the lives soon due to retake centre stage. Possibly not the most original premise, but one which worked extremely well through the choice of elemental locations – from hostel to garbage incinerator to sex theatre – and the details on which she homed in.




Roderick Hietbrink: The Living Room @ Ron Mandos Gallery

The multimedia artist Roderick Hietbrink neatly combined photographs dealing with how the Chinese cover things in public spaces with a more local invasion of private space. His three channel video installation ‘The Living Room’ is set in the typically Dutch ‘doorzonwoning’ (literally ‘sun-through-house’), in which sunlight is maximised by means of a living room which stretches from the front of the house all the way to the back. The camera dwells a while on the furniture, potted plants, photos and personal possessions before a large oak tree invades in triple view, being dragged through the room to destructive effect.




Conny Kuilboer @ Actionfields Gallery, Belgium

The lively and centrally-placed Belgian cultural institute featured young artists from three galleries, including the Ghent-studying Dutch sculptor Conny Kuilboer, She most typically uses blankets, attracted by their warmth-giving yet constrictive character as well as the texture and available colours. The choice of such a constraining medium plays well with making unlikely connections, and here I liked the outlandish wit in the forcibly rough-cut link between animal and vegetable.