EASTER EXTRA

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



Molly

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

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

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





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

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

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

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

 

Sweethearts @ Pippy Houldsworth, 6 Heddon St - Central

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

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





Large Dark Line Vertical Grid

Winston Roeth @ Bartha Contemporary, 25 Margaret St – Fitzrovia

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

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

The Ideal is Unattainable

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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





NO PAINTING IN APRIL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

RA1884

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

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

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

Salame

Santo Tolone: Three Times Once @ Limoncello

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

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

From 'Dust of Stars', 2007/09

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

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

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

Bag

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

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

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

nudes dr02

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

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


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

Foothills

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

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

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



International Lawns (Regional Aesthetics 1)

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

Lot 12281 (the double extension)


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

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

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

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

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

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

The Hot Winds That Blow From The West

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

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

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

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

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

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

Task Chair

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

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

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

Divine Ricochet, 1991

John Chamberlain: Choices @ the Guggenheim, 1071 Fifth Avenue

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




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

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

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

Odalisque, 1980

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


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

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

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

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

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

Sails, 1986

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

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

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

Jean-Luc Moulène: La Vigie @ Dia Beacon

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

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



Images courtesy of the relevant artists and galleries.

 

TWO FOR ONE IN MARCH


There's a trend towards double shows of a single artist: David Shrigley at the Hayward and Stephen Friedman; Yayoi Kusama at Tate Modern and Victoria Miro; Lucien Freud at the NPG and Blain / Southern and Alighiero e Boetti soon at Tate Modern and Spruth Magers, advance guard for which is Gavin Turk’s entertaining homage at Brown Fine Arts. No room here for those, though, nor for Thomas Zipp’s charged Freudian installation at Alison Jacques;  the Hauser & Wirth pairing of Michael Raedecker’s cut and re-sew with Mary Heilmann’s happy-pink hippy-punk; Goncalo Mabunda’s haunting masks of decommissioned weaponry at Jack Bell’s new space in Mason’s Yard; Ori Gersht's equally war-haunted films at the Imperial War Museum; and Iain Hales' sleek sculpture-painting propositions at Cole – but you’re advised to see those too! So there's plenty on: that’s a dozen shows already before I start…

'Der Bienenkorb' (The Straw Hive) 

Rosa Loy: Tautropfen @ Pippy Houldsworth, 6 Heddon St - Central

To 15 March: http://www.houldsworth.co.uk/

Leipzig-based painter Rosa Loy shows 18 quirkily characterful watercolour sketches, made at the time of Tautropfen (dewdrops) before she leaves the house for her studio, and travelling ahead of her towards her paintings (of which we see three). The images have the atmosphere of an alternative world, some of which may be down to them featuring thirty-odd women and no men. Loy told me it isn’t a strategy – as in Gilbert & George’s opposite tendency – but just how the drawings spontaneously turn out; there again, she's also said it's part of a vision for strengthening the role of women in society...  Either way, one man definitely at the opening was her husband Neo Rauch – and they’re among the couples who’ll collaborate on a work for Pippy Houldsworth’s innovative next show, Sweethearts.



Expedition Interior

Dolly Thompsett: The Torch in the Cave @ Vigo, First Floor, 22 Old Bond St - Central
To 23 March: http://www.vigogallery.com/

Seven ‘dizzying landscapes of the mind’, as the punchy press release puts it, see Dolly Thompsett’s fourth London solo show effect a double layering. Physically, by being painted on linen textiles, patterns from which show through; by the paint sitting under and over resin layers; and by the application of surface effects such as glitter. Then an equivalent layering of content, as a wide range of sources - historical, geographical and cinematic – come together to intricate yet dramatic effect. See www.vigogallery.com/?dollythompsettinterview for my conversation with Dolly, which includes an explanation of the evocative title.



Self-portraits from the series 'I Am Not I'

 Boris Mikhailov: Tryptichs @ Sprovieri, 23 Heddon St - Central

To 5 April

Sprovieri makes good use of its recently-expanded space to show a 50 year retrospective with a twist: a dozen triptychs each chosen from a different project by the hard-hitting Ukranian photographer Boris Mikhailov. Set up to echo religious themes and imply a series of beginnings, middles and ends, they include early examples of the ironically critical anti-Soviet work which could be defended as merely pursuing beauty; fully-fledged narratives taken from curious news reports; pseudo-edenic groupings of the poor; several from his disturbingly explicit yet humanely accepting cycles depicting the poor and homeless; and the artist himself, naked in the biggest prints, playing with a fake phallus.

Rasha Kahil: from the series 'In Your Home'

Photo Opportunity @ Maddox Arts, 52 Brooks Mews – Mayfair

To 31 March: www.maddoxarts.com

In a show concentrating on somewhat polite geometric interventions in photographs to create alternate perspectives, young London-based Lebanese photographer Rasha Kahil has a corner which stands out. She shows photographs, from a series of 36 taken opportunistically over three years, which innovatively skewer the boundary between private and public. Whenever friends left her alone in their houses, she rapidly photographed herself naked. Their reactions when she told them later are an implied aspect of the work, which combines a subversive invasion of space with an assertive use of the body: aspects of Vito Acconci, VALIE EXPORT and Larry Sultan came to mind, which can’t be bad…

Christine 10 Hollywood

Lise Sarfati – She @ Brancolini Grimaldi, 43-44 Albemarle St - Central

To 17 March: http://www.brancolinigrimaldi.com/


Calfornia-based French photographer Lise Sarfati’s 2005-09 series ‘She’ arguably takes off from classic Cindy Sherman more persuasively than Sherman’s own recent work. Every shot features one of the same four similar women - two sisters, their mother and her sister. They’re drained of normal identifiers by appearing in unfamiliar cities and in wigs, so it becomes unclear who’s who and to what extent they’re acting. The focus is thrown onto their faces – which give little away – and on the older women’s distinctive tattoos, which read as marks of life. Sarfati has called the result ‘a woman with four heads’: a confusing play across identities which draws you in as it pushes you away.

Plant Life of the Pacific World Uncatalogued Species 8

Carlos Noronha Feio: Plant Life of the Pacific World @ IMT, Unit 2/210 Cambridge Heath Road - Canbridge Heath

To 1 April:  http://www.imagemusictext.com/

Carlos Noronha Feio is a wide-ranging Portuguese experimentalist whose rigorously perverse videos of self-set tasks and richly conceptual rugs I have previously enjoyed. This show takes the rigorous perversion in a new direction, as it consists purely of collages of plant forms made from photographs of nuclear explosions. They’re classified according to the system used by botanist E.D. Merrill in his 1945 guide – for US military use – to the plant life of the Pacific World (do ask to see the book). It’s a neat way of yoking military and domestic, horror and beauty, creation and destruction etc, but the key is how the collages take on an unpredictable life of their own, as if the backstory is merely a pretext.

Alberto Burri: Form and Matter @ the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art, 39a Cannonbury Square – Islington

To 7 April: www.estorickcollection.com

Alberto Burri (1915-95) is a plausible challenger to Eduardo Chillida for the title ‘best footballer to become a famous artist’, but neither that nor his foreshadowing of Arte Povera and Nouveaux Realistes approaches have been enough to make him a big name in Britain. This three room 50 work overview goes beyond the relatively well-known works incorporating sacking or burnt elements to include early figuration; his late 1950s ‘paintings’ with iron and tar; the move to insulation Cellotex in his last decade; and the Cretti, which set up a process of cracking. Land and bodies often come to mind, though Burri denied such references, let alone the existential readings they can trigger – and, radical and violent as his methods were, the results do now seem mainly to be eerily beautiful and beautifully judged.




'Composition with Double Lines and Yellow', 1935 as bought by Winifred Nicholson, Mondrian's first British sale 

Mondrian║Nicholson:  In Parallel @ The Courtald Gallery,

To 20 May: www.courtauld.ac.uk


The most serene and yet assertive room in London must be at the Courtauld, which provides a more balanced face-off than Tate Britain’s Picasso-trounces-Brits. You get eight classic Mondrians (only two of them normally on show in London) set off against five of Nicholson’s white reliefs. So flat colour-delimiting lines of paint meet spatially-generated lines of shadow, both aiming to find the spiritual in abstraction. They’re all from the 1930’s, during which Nicholson championed Mondrian and facilitated his move to London (1938-40). There’s archive material, too: you can see that Ben didn’t plan to stay long when he visited Piet’s Paris studio on 21 October 1936, as his appointment diary says ‘2.00 Mondrian, 3.00 Skiing lesson’!


Video still from 'Night and Day'


John Wood and Paul Harrison: Things That Happen @ Carroll / Fletcher, 56-57 Eastcastle St – Fitzrovia


To 30 March: www.carrollfletcher.com

Carroll / Fletcher has quite a wow factor for a new start-up, featuring six purpose-designed spaces which allow for a very full chance to catch up with what Wood & Harrison have been up to since their last London show in 2005. They still tend to apply the tropes of minimalist repetition to push wittily against the boundaries of absurdity, but with a less straightforward reliance on their own performative actions to do so. Many of the new works seem to relish futility: I particularly like the elaborate construction of successively raised blinds which amount to no more than a ‘Blind Spot’; and the hundred quirky glimpses into imagined office lives which suggest such work is no more than a diversionary activity.

Cardinal SE SE

 Danny Rolph: Kissing Balloons in the Jungle @ Poppy Sebire, 6 Copperfield St – Southwark

To 24 March: www.poppysebire.com

Danny Rolph’s multiple artistic, scientific and cultural references from Tiepolo to particle physics, from children’s clothes to architecture play into abstract games without frontiers (with a twist: Peter Gabriel was kissing baboons in the song). He uses three modes which feed each other: the small collages through which ideas take form; the ‘triplewall’ which layers collage and painted elements across and within semi-transparent building plastic; and large acrylic canvases which pick up on the spatial complexity and divert it in more painterly directions. All three are featured here, but the paintings, bursting with contrasting visual languages, take centre stage.





Images courtesy of the relevant artists and galleries

TWELVE CHOICES: SEX IN TIME

Here I focus on a dozen works – rather than reviews of whole shows – which I’ve found of interest recently. We start with pre-history and end with the eternal. The middle has a genital tendency, though here too the infinite sneaks in.

Peter Coffin: Untitled (Prelapsarian), 2012 at Carl Kostyal & Herald St to 31 March

An oak-panelled room with real fire blazing on the first floor of Savile Row makes an appropriate setting for Peter Coffin’s figure awaiting a massage. From you? Well, his hairiness might give you pause, and the divergent big toes and elongated palms indicate that he’s a pre-human – representing, perhaps, the pre-linguistic instincts which still inform our behaviour. Has he had a hard day rioting? He also made me check whether gorillas have such naked soles... 

Kelly Richardson: Leviathan, 2011 at Edel Assanti to 17 March

Gordon Cheung has made the best of the rare chance to use three floors to theme his curation ‘Immortal Nature’ around the underworld, earth and afterlife on ascending levels. The most spectacular work is a 20 minute loop by another Canadian, environmentally-focused video artist Kelly Richardson, of the swampy Caddo Lake in Texas. It’s given an ominously drone of a soundtrack and digitally altered to toxify the colours and enhance the post-apocalyptic mood. The title’s allusions to Hobbs (“the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”) and the sea monster that guarded the gates of Hell fit right in…

Toby Ziegler: Metaplasmus, 2011 at Simon Lee to 25 Feb

This, from Ziegler’s most persuasive show to date, is one of his sculptures which play off the degradation of images by making 3D computer renditions from pictures of ancient art objects sourced from the internet, then realising them using oxidised aluminium panels. Approximation is built in, so that they tempt yet frustrate any attempt to deduce their origins, and the title ‘Metaplasmus’ suits, being the alteration of a word to create a rhetorical effect (such as calling a God a ‘goldlet’ to suggest limited powers). I also like the way the frame-come-plinth stands in for limbs.

Mel Ramos: H. Upmann, 1844, 2006 (from edition of 8) - sold for £97,250 at Phillips on 17 Feb

The auction houses have made for diverting viewing of late. Here the cigar ( a Cuban Corona Imperiales with a rich, oily flavor and long-lasting finish) accounts for the odd title . You might think it a comically phallic way to equate sexual and consumer desire, but Ramos protests – perhaps too much – that “people make references to my work as sex, which is simply not true. Sex is an activity and nudity is a condition. When I do a painting, everybody calls them pin-ups. When Picasso or Matisse did nude paintings, people called them nudes… Jesus.”

Bernhard Martin: Docks, 2012 at Union to 17 March

Bernhard Martin paints in many modes, but tends to push them all to extremes. Certainly the German's recent cycle of six pencil and wash drawings on canvas delivers in that respect, as most body parts become genital in a Genet-inspired romp through the territory of Freud, Bellmer and Dali. Others in the series, which gallerist Jari Lager says features 36 penises, see a cock-fingered hand wield a knife but also get stamped on. If this represents Martin’s search for his own ‘alien abysses and desires’, as the press release has it, that’s a refreshingly weird inner life he has there....

Yayoi Kusama: Accumulation Room at Tate Modern to 5 June

Martin’s cockery has nothing, though, on Yayoi Kusama’s retrospective, which gives rooms over to each of her attempts to reach infinity – through nets, aggregation, mirroring, obliteration, free love and collage as well as her Hirst-trumping spots. She says says ‘obsessional neurosis’ produces the hallucinations which her work represents. The aggregation room sees thousands of stuffed fabric phalli encrusting shoes, clothes, furniture,  accessories and even a boat she co-sourced with Donald Judd. Kusama liked to lie among them, and they seem to be friendly appendages, caught mid-wave in the manner of molluscs as the tide comes in.

Installation view of 'Situation' with 'Nice Tits' and  'Prière de Toucher'

Sarah Lucas: Nice Tits, 2011 at Sadie Coles New Burlington to 19 May

Sadie Coles has rented a sizable space over her newest gallery for a year, and handed it over to Sarah Lucas to do what she will. Lucas starts with her own work, and there’s surely a Kusama reference in ‘Nice Tits’, which actually mixes 'male’ and ‘female’ forms of her signature stuffed tights, ie those tied into a nipple end vs those completed with a seam which looks like a meatus urethrae externus, to get a bit medical! Sort of like + and – batteries, but funnier. So the male is sneaked in to the swipe, too jocular to be bitter, at the reduction of a woman to her boots and breasts.

Paradise Painting 3

Gary Hume: Paradise Paintings, 2011 at White Cube to 25 Feb

Gary Hume it was who opened a can of beer in suggestive manner for Lucas’s ‘Got a Salmon On (Prawn)’, 1994…  I’m not sure if I like the Paradise Paintings in the Mason’s Yard half of his two-site painting show ‘The Indifferent Owl’ , but they do combine courage and logic: the courage comes in choosing to paint birds in such a way that they also represent, in Hume’s words ‘pubescent girls, naked’ – the background forms are splayed legs, the beaks ‘are their pussies’ and the eyes are drops of menstrual blood, all in the manner of the duck / rabbit illusion. That makes the paintings doubly queasy: for content and for the sickly colour combinations, which does seem a logical way of upping the ante of Hume’s way of being too slick ‘n’ sickly to be joyful.

Donald Judd: ‘Untitled’, 1968 at Spruth Magers to 18 Feb

Ex-Judd fabricator Peter Ballantine chose 33 drawings from four different types for this behind-the-scenes show: some preparatory studies from the days (1962-64) when the future lover of Yayoi Kusma made his own sculptures; later ones giving instructions to his fabricators; more formal ‘portraits’ of sculptures as an alternative to photographic records; and drawings made by his fabricators to clarify the brief. The instructions – as above – are minimal enough to give plenty of license, or to ‘gain control by ceding control’, as Ballantine has it. And wasn’t there something Platonic and eternal about the results?

David Shrigley: Untitled, 2012 at Stephen Friedman to 10 March

This cute sort-of-picture of the unpicturable has – like many of David Shrigley’s zeit-jests – a Beckettian backdrop of boredom and death. London’s the board for a hail of his absurdist darts at the moment: both the Hayward’s career survey and Stephen Friedman’s show of new work represent his increasingly full range admirably – sculpture, ceramics, installation, taxidermy, sort-of-songs, animation, photography, books, sort-of-paintings – but it’s still the wonkily simple ironies of Shrigley’s drawings which hit the most bullseyes. And the text is much of the charm, as in ‘I Wrote These Words to Fill This Space’ and ‘It Is Possible To Get Lost In Your Own Brain’.



Installation view of 'The Curator's Egg'

Ruth Ewan: From ‘We Could Have Been Anything That We Wanted To Be’, 2011 in ‘The Curator’s Egg’ at Anthony Reynolds to 3 March

Your antennae should already be attuned to the absurd when you find that the kind of double-sided clock you expect to top a town hall’s tower is down on the floor. And indeed, Ruth Ewan has converted one side to the decimal, dividing the 24 hour day into ten hundred minute periods of a hundred seconds each, so that noon is five o’clock and midnight ten o’clock. This echoes, says Ewan, 5 October, 1793 ‘when the recently formed Republic of France abandoned the widely used Gregorian Calendar in favour of the French Republican Calendar, carrying the ideals of the new republic directly into the lives of every citizen.’ One of ten such clocks, of course, and one of many good bits in this ovum.

Steve Bishop: As If You Could Only Kill Time Without Injuring Eternity IV, 2011 at Supplement to 17 March

Upcoming London-based Steve Bishop’s solo show at Supplement, ‘Buildings are Heavy’, entertainingly exposes the history of the space, but the stand out works are a series of T-shirts, printed with images rendered illegible by how they are forced-fed into a box frame, around which mercury swims to produce an abstract effect somewhere between brain and mountain. Turn the frame around, and the mercury swims into a new formation, making for a potential eternity of process-derived ‘paintings without paint’.




All images courtesy of the relevant artists and galleries