CHOICES FROM JAN - APRIL 2016 NOW CLOSED

Mark Wallinger @ Hauser & Wirth, Savile Row – Central

To 7 May: www.hauserwirth.com

id Painting 12, 2015 - Acrylic on canvas, 360 x 180 cm

Mark Wallinger’s first solo show for Hauser & Wirth fills both impressive spaces and gains traction from how several works build to a vision of the self – not as straightforwardly unified, but rich in variant perspectives. One gallery is full of the 3.8m high ‘Id Paintings’ which explore the tall dark format of Wallinger’s versions of the I from different fonts, but with expressionist gestures applied with the hand and laboriously replicated in Rosrchach-like way.   The other contains the superego of a giant mirror revolvingon high, national identity linked to revolving views of an oak tree on a roundabout in Essex, and the artist as flaneur seen only as the shadow which precedes him through the city as he walks to experience it. 

Orrery, 2016 -  4-channel video installation, sound

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Finbar Ward: In Absence at FOLD, 158 New Cavendish St – Fitzrovia

To 7 May: www.foldgallery.com

It hardly sounds feasible to merge Robert Ryman, Steven Spielberg and Carlos Cruz-Diez, yet they all came to mind at Finbar Ward’s novel sculptural installation of 300 small paintings.  Ryman as the face of each is a deceptively painterly monochrome, predominantly white but not without colour – a framing device of artist-ground cobalt violet. Spielberg because the obsessive line-up of fin-shaped canvasses brought a certain film to mind. Cruz-Diez bacause if you walked past the serried whitenesses then turned back, you saw the scuffed and contingent rear sides of Ward’s offcuts of found wood, many of them festooned with a notational ‘b’ for back, setting up a contrast worthy of a Physiochromie.

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Anna Barriball: New Works @ Frith Street Gallery, Golden Square - Soho

To 7 May: www.frithstreetgallery.com

Night Window with Leaves, 2015 -  Pigment and beeswax picture varnish on paper,            235 x 124 cm

I’ve never seen Anna Barriball apply her signature frottage with more resonance than here, moving from morning blinds; to her studio windows, pressed full of light; to a candle-smoked evening; and through to the first sunrays of a new a diurnal cycle, taken from lead window designs. She’s in there too, via the sequins on her T-shirt vibrating to her heartbeat. That suggests ultrasound, and Barriball has indeed just given birth, setting up a contrast with Night Window with Leaves, which memorialises a former neighbour. All use the exacting indexical sculpting of a small pencil to press her work up against the world, as if to avoid, in her words ‘the space between looking and representation’. 

Sunrays II, 2016 -  Pencil on paper,  52 x 53 cm

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Dunhill and O'Brien: Rockery @ White Conduit Projects, 1 White Conduit Street - Islington

 To 30 April:  http://whiteconduitprojects.uk   (artist talk 21 April)

A few weeks ago I mentioned in my weekly column that Islington made for a good gallery tour, and that’s still true now * – including this fascinating show which compares the Japanese and British attitudes to rocks. Just as Tracey Emin has confounded the usual relative expectations by marrying a stone, long-time collaborators Mark Dunhill and Tamiko O’Brien ponder two Japanese traditions of rock veneration. They apply Suiseki - the ‘Art of Stone Appreciation’ - to glacial rocks in Britain through a series of videos; and make a window display echoing the nearby Chapel Market out of cardboard versions of the Edo period’s Fujizuka – the construction or selection of surrogates of Mount Fuji for the edification of women then disbarred from the mountain itself.  Add a witty ‘surprise yourself with a rock sculpture by doing it blind’ and the show, erm… rocks.

Stone Appreciation: having discovered ‘celebrity’ rocks by purchasing postcards on the Internet, Dunhill and O’Brien  visit and measured these much photographed landmarks, such as the Bowder Stone in Cumbria.

 * it’s worth mentioning Liane Lang & Nigel Grimer at the James Freeman Gallery   and Joby Williamson at Tintype

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The Missing: Rebuilding the Past @ Jessica Carlisle, 4 Mandeville Place – near the Wallace Collection

To 7 May: www.jessicacarlisle.com

Still from 'The Quake'

What’s just the second show in Jessica Carlisle’s handsome permanent space is a timely artistic response to the iconoclasm in Syria. It effects a mournful tone which nonetheless mines the uncomfortable aesthetic attraction which ruins acquire. Piers Secunda consistently operates in that area, as in his head with and without casts of bullet holes from a frontline Syrian village; less expectedly, Matteo Barzini’s impactful reportage film The Quake, 2015, features a soundtrack by Ennio Morricone which wrests a haunting beauty from the noise of destruction. Turning to reconstruction of sorts, Syrian refugee Tmam Aikhidaiwi Alnabilsi replicates a now-damaged mosque, and the Institute of Digital Archeology shows the maquette for what will soon become a full-size 3D print of the Triumphal Arch of Palmyra in Trafalgar Square. Add three more artists, including James Brooks’ poignant classically-infected meditations*, and the range impresses.     

Piers Secunda: ISIS Bullet Hole Painting (Assyrian Head), 2015-16 - industrial floor paint, metal fixtures

* see my Feb 2016 choices for a fuller discussion

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The Conformist @ Belmacz, 45 Davies St – Mayfair

To 16 April:  www.belmacz.com/gallery/

David Parkinson: Untitled, 1970

More fine writing (by James Cahill, incorporating quotes from brass kissing to cross dressing from Denton Welch’s weird novel ‘In Youth is Pleasure’) accompanies this hugely enjoyable answer to the question: how many rebellious non-conformists can you fit into one of London’s smaller gallery spaces? The answer turns out to be 20 plus a soundtrack from Jah Wobble, covering the gamut of fashion, advertising, fine art and jewellery, with highlights including Julie Verhoeven’s manic new film Phlegm & Fluff, corn masks by Jonathan Baldock, Helen Chadwick’s self as ruin, and the rediscovery-worthy photographs of David Parkinson (1946-75).

Julie Verhoeven: Phlegm & Fluff, 2015, Film, 04:19

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Michael Joo: Radiohalo @ Blain Southern, 4 Hanover Square – Mayfair

To 9 April:  www.blainsouthern.com

Untitled, To (Sleep), 2015-16 - Silver nitrate and epoxy ink on canvas 91 x 71 cm

Does this show have the substance to justify its rhetoric and scale? American Michael Joo is onto something in exploring the body as a generator and consumer of energy (hence the integration of calorific values for its actions) combined with the use of silver nitrate to make painting-come-photographic events which go halfway towards reflecting our own actions into the scenario. A monumental marble billboard adds convincing sculptural / architectural language, contrasting the marble’s own painterly effect on the front with a silvered rear at a height which brings in the space but not the viewer, and playing reflected transience off against geological timescale. Yet add in the eponymous radiohalo, the faultline in New York, Buddhism, and the graphite legs of endangered cranes scratching drawings over the stairs, and I have trouble putting it all together coherently - but it’s impressive enough to be worth puzzling on yourself.

Installation view with Prologue (Montclair Danby Vein Cut), 2014-15 - picture Peter Mallet

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Preview Special: Having written the catalogue essay for John Stark's forthcoming show, I can predict it will be interesting. Moreover, it has its own comet:

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Shows to see in 2016

There are perhaps too many shows in the world to choose meaningfully for the year ahead, especially if you include commercial galleries, so this  cunningly biased list is just my planning list of some institutional exhibitions I’ll be placed to see and am looking forward to…

London

Heather Phillipson: more flinching -  Whitechapel Gallery 12.2 – 17.4

Rana Begum - Parasol Unit - July- Sept

Under the Same Sun: Art from Latin America Today - South London Gallery – 10.6 – 4.9

Ragnar Kjartansson - Barbican - 14.7 - 4.9

Abstract Expressionism – Royal Academy, 24.9 – 2.1.17

Paul Nash – Tate Modern 26.10 – 5.3.17

Robert Rauschenberg – Tate Modern 1.12 – 2.4.17

UK

Michael Simpson: Flat Surface Painting - Spike Island, Bristol – 14.1 – 27.3

Gerard Byrne: 1/25 of a Second -  Mead Gallery, Warwickshire – 16.1 – 12.3

Prunella Clough: Unknown Countries – Jerwood Gallery, Hastings 23.4 – 6.7

Tonico Lemos Auad – de la Warr, Bexhill –  30.1 – 10.4

Francis Bacon: Invisible Rooms – tate Liverpool – 18.5 – 18.9

Europe

Francesca Woodman: On Being an Angel – Foam, Amsterdam – to 9.3

Hieronymus Bosch: Vision of Genius – Nordrabants Museum, Den Bosch 13.2 – 8.5

Francis Picabia: Our Heads Are Round So Out Thoughts Can Change Direction – Kunsthaus Zurich – 6.3 – 25.9

Paula Modersohn-Becker: Intensity of a Glance – Musse d’Art Moderne, Paris – 8.4 – 21.8

Reinhard Mucha - Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel 19.3 – 16.10

                                         

Liam Scully: A Digital Suicide

 @ Union Gallery, 94 Teesdale Street - Cambridge Heath

To 22 April: www.union-gallery.com

 

What sounds like a dry technical exercise – Liam Scully’s bid to commit ‘digital suicide’ by eliminating all his online information, and compiling it into a book instead – proves very hands-on and lively. There are three reasons for that: the use as ground of pink electro-cardiographic paper resulting from another personal link, his participation in medical tests; the very free drawings which he lays over the data streams on these grounds, being versions of the images in his Facebook stream annotated to comment on the messages and images beneath; and the sheer grid-force of having 300 originals crowd out the gallery’s walls (from the book's 953 pages:the others are on video) . In sum, the serious undercurrent of reclaiming control of one’s own data becomes a worthy addition to the tradition of obsessive recording of the self in art: stick this with, say, Roman Opalka, Tehching Hsieh, Danica Phelps, On Kawara and Philip Ackerman and you'd have quite a show...

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Thomas Mailaender: Gone Fishing @ Roman Road, 69 Roman Road – Bethnal Geen - and at Tate Modern 

To 15 April (Roman) / 12 June (Tate): www.romanroad.com

In this satirically simple satire on male irresponsibility, the French artist Thomas Mailaender tells the story of a man abandoning his wife and child in order to find himself through a series of physical and sporting challenges. He writes home, boasting of his exploits, declaring his undying love and moutiing bafflement that he gets no replies. Actions speak louder than words, and each letter has a photograph of his triumphs – landing a shark, say – for which Mailaender has digitally inserted his own face onto images found on the Internet. The artist wasn’t at the opening, as he was off skiing with his wife and children – demonstrating his contrasting responsibility or paralleling it by abandoning that to his gallerist? I don’t think she can complain, as you can see the same material in a different installation in Performing for the Camera at Tate Modern.

Installation view at Roman Road: letters with photos and the whole room covered in fake brick effect

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Frequent Long Walks @ Hannah Barry Gallery, 4 Holly Grove - Peckham

To 23 April: www.hannahbarry.com

Michael Dumontier & Neil Farber: I grew these trees to hold up this message of patience, 2015 - acrylic on cardboard, 18 x 18 cm

 

Hannah Barry and her artist Christopher Green, who has curated and contributed a cheekily self-effacing painting which acts as the sign between floors, have done wonders in pulling together a stellar cast of 14 for this exploration of work which possesses, says Green 'a kind of slowness' in the manner of taking a long walk in which you don't worry if your route in the fastest. Archive material from Agnes Martin and Anne Truitt - explaining how she tries to move colour out into space -  set the mood nicely. Vija Celmins, Ian Hamilton Finlay and Hreinn Fridfinnsson feel like logically enjoyable choices, but Mary Heilmann's painting-chair pairing, the dotting around of Richard Artschwager blps, and five typically laconic little paintings by Michael Dumontier & Neil Farber provide less expected aptness, and then n there are 11 photographs of kitchen compost by Nigel Shafran. Hmmm...  

Nigel Shafran: from 'Compost Pictures'

Aglaé Bassens and Eric Oglander: What You Can’t See @ Revue Gallery
14 Greek Street - Soho

To 27 March: http://sohorevue.com/revue-gallery/current/

Aglaé Bassens: Don't Look Back, 2015 - oil and acrylic on canvas, 168 x 127 cm

Suddenly, as it seems, a big, centrally placed gallery I haven't heard of puts on an extensive show, complete with an impressive commissioned mural and lively catalogue, of one of  London's best young painters. Aglaé Bassens generates brooding atmospherics, alluring painterly effects, awareness of process and art historical references from near-empty content: curtains, sofas and fishless aquaria take centre stage here, the green murk in one of the latter being titled ‘Dear Algae’ in a cute reference to how often people mis-spell her (Franco-Belgian) name.  The painting shown depicts a rain-occluded windscreen and car mirror reflecting the rear window's heating elements, linking neatly to would-be-empty content of a different order: pictures taken by people looking to sell mirrors online, as selected by American Instagram star Eric Oglander for what they accidentally fracture or reveal.

Eric Oglander: from the Craiglist Mirrors project, ongoing

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Jeff McMillan: South Face @  Handel Street Projects, 14 Florence Street - Islington & Tell it Slant @ Frith Street Gallery. Soho Square, 60 Frith Street- Soho

To 26 March (Handel) / 29 April (Frith)

Jeff McMillan: Offside Drawing, 2015 - Gloss paint and ink on paper, 28 x 21 cm

 Jeff McMillan has unusual double. Handel Street Projects has two strands of his own post-painterly painting: he has previously dipped found paintings in paint to disrupt them by semi-abstraction, now he applies the process to graph paper to fully abstract effect; and inks the back of other found paintings before leaving them outside to take on the whatever a painting’s equivalent of patina in called.  Meanwhile, at his partner Cornelia Parker’s gallery, he’s made  a wonderfully eclectic section of a dozen artists using abstract drawing in a wide sense:  from  Louise Bourgeois’  construction from a lifetime’s fabrics, to the coded outside carpentry of Zebedee Armstrong, to the folded aeroplane which had been unfolded as the basis for a drawing of sculptural potential by Massimo Bartolini -  who is himself next up in Frith Street Soho Square space.  

Massimo Bartolini: Untitled (airplane), 2012 - Ink on paper, 160 x 110 cm

 Kazuo Katase : mimesis: u tsu su @ White Rainbow, 47 Mortimer Street

To 24 March:  http://white-rainbow.co.uk

Kazuo Katase Bowl 7.4.2024 -  Pastel on hand-made paper, 105 x 140cm

Pastel is faring well this year: hot on the heels of its classical master (Jean-Etienne Liotard at the Royal Academy),  the freshest works in Chantal Joffe’s show at Victoria Miro also uses it. The German-based Japanese artist Kazuo Katase, on the back of a substantial history of conceptual installation, has used it since 2011 to boil down his thinking into an ongoing series of  empty bowls, which act as semi-hemispheres ready to be the halves of a globe in an east-west duality. Despite their uninfected rendering, they gain a zen-tinged standing-yet-floating contemplative presence through eerie lighting and the ectoplasmic mist in some images. If you asked Morandi and Turrell to collaborate in India, you might arrive somewhere like this…

Kazuo Katase Bowl 24.3.2012 - Pastel on hand-made paper. - 105 x 140cm

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Jost Münster: New Neighbours @ Tintype, 107 Essex Road - Islington

To 26 March:  www.tintypegallery.com/

Installation view with Neighbour No. 7 centre

This seems a straightforward show: London-based German Jost Münster riffs on the architectural features of what could be his neighbours’ properties, layering them ambiguously into large acrylics, made liquidly on the floor, then sees how they play out as neighbours to each other.  But there are also small watercolour studies, a ‘Waiting List’ from which you can play the judge of what to develop at scale; and in one case we have a preliminary pencil study as well as a watercolour still on the list even though it’s become New Neighbour 7. And that’s a curveball: from colourful study to just black on raw canvas (and using a new-fangled acrylic pen applicator rather than a brush); and where the others use rectangular geometries, a one-line labyrinth of curl. Not everyone fits straight in to a neighbourhood, but then again perhaps the strangers, potentially, can.

The 'Waiting List' with preparatory stages for No 7 top left

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Miriam Austin: Lupercalia @ Bosse & Baum, Copeland Estate, 133 Copeland Road - Peckham

To 25 March bosseandbaum.com 

Miriam Austin’s biggest solo presentation to date sees her take over Bosse & Baum’s substantial warehouse space, largely with her signature beautiful – though often poisonous - material of plant forms covered in prosthetic silicone to make somehwta corporeal regalia which looks as if it could be worn in performance (though when Austin performed at the opening, she was in her full body fish skin).The illustrated elements of Prosthetics for Hostile Contexts become, rather, a sculpture which itself performs, as ice drips into a mesmerising deep blue pool (with delphiniums and red cabbage stained water). Elsewhere, the gorgeous palette of frozen floral fades is offset by serried ranks of aluminium tools, elegant forms which look as if they could be just the new invention her rituals require – though it’s not at all obvious how to use them. 

 

Ryan Mosley: Anatomy and The Wall @ Alison Jacques Gallery, 16-18 Berners St - Fitzrovia

To 12 March: www.alisonjacquesgallery.com

Expedition to the Interior, 2016 - Oil on canvas,210 x 155 cm

Ryan Mosley may be the closest Britain has to Neo Rauch's way of painting - but where Rauch segues pre-communist and more recent elements into baffling narratives with a faded poster palette, Mosley conjoins the nineteenth century with ours in surreal situations which tend towards the hallucinogenic. Here a range of character portraits combine with more complex compositions  which feature - by way of my illustrated examples - the humps of a fluorescent camel rhyming with a beard under a black sun; and a skeleton atop a cabinet, pipesmoke forming a moon, Afro hairstyles matching another beard on people most of whom who could be just pictures, with a bottom right sector resembling  passage from Thomas Scheibitz. The result is too much enjoyment to fuss about meaning.

Posturing for Conversation, 2016 - Oil on canvas, 183 x 150 cm

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Kate Lyddon: On Drool @ CABIN, 11 Brookwood Road - Southfields

To 12 March: www.cabin-gallery.com

Installation view

Kate Lyddon has moved from making paintings with various materials collaged on to them to installations which separate the sculpture from the painting. Both elements propose that what may seem ugly could be beautiful and the conventionally beautiful be left as ugly – both in how they look and in the materials they use*. At Cabin, moreover, the paintings (mostly portraits of a sort) are connected to the sculptures (body parts of a sort) by copper tubes and cutlery: we’re reminded of the tubes as plumbing inside the body, standing in for the processes of flow and waste, and the spoons as transporters of sustenance. A circuit is proposed, relating – in a paradoxically feel-good way – to the biggest contrast of all.

*I term her position a form of contrastivism in my essay at 
http://www.cabin-gallery.com/kate-lyddon-exhibition-february-march-2016

VIP2, 2015

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Fiona Banner: Study #13. Every Word Unmade @ David Roberts Art Foundation, Symes Mews - Mornington Cresent

To 5 March:  http://davidrobertsartfoundation.com

Every Word Unmade, 2007: 26 neon parts bent by the artist, paper templates, clamps, wire, and transformers 70 x 100 cm each

 

Pretty often I reckon I’ve seen enough neon, but Fiona Banner – though not greatly associated with the medium – uses it freshly as part of what proves to be a concise retrospective in the guise of DRAF’s study programme. Her first, Neon Full Stop (1997), is wittily minimal and maximal at once, a breath encapsulated in glass which prefigures her move to big, shaped full stops – present here as bean bags. Every Word Unmade (2007) is a large and stutteringly clunky white neon alphabet ready to create meaning. It was  checked against the paper templates on which the letters were drawn, causing rather alluring burn marks. Beagle Punctuation (2011) turns punctuation marks into Snoopy. The Vanity Press (2013) is an ISBN number published as a book with that reference under Banner’s own imprint. 

Neon Full Stop, 1997 - Neon, wire, transformer, wooden box

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Marie Jeschke: Can’t Remember Always Always @ l'étrangère, 44a Charlotte Rd - Shoreditch

To 5 March: http://letrangere.net

'Kieshofer Moor, Always'

Berlin-based Marie Jeschke goes against gender stereotypes by using blown-up versions of collectible football stickers as the most prominent aspect of her main installation: they are shaped into the  form of familial symbols – dating back to pre-literate times – from Heddensee Island in Northern Germany, still used as signs on houses. That suggests one form of social identity usurping another, and Jeschke makes it personal by mounting the images on her grandfather’s images of the moors nearby, A similar back and forth features in a second room in which she immerses photographs of childhood scenes she says she’s forgotten in tanks of liquids from her current life to activate the past through the distortions of the present.

‘Can’t Remember Always Always’, with photos in liquids at front, bottles of liquids at right, processed photos behind

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Jamie Fitzpatrick: (loudly) chomp, chomp, chomp @ Vitrine, Bermondsey Square & Richard Ducker: This is the second evening I see 13 rabbits on the grass @ Arthouse 1,  

45 Grange Rd – Bermondsey

To 9 April www.vitrinegallery.co.uk  / 27 Feb www.arthouse1.co.uk

 

 

Perhaps theatrically paradoxical sculpture is a trend when two examples open close to each other on the same night. From the class of 2015 comes widely-noticed recent graduate Jamie Fitzpatrick, with a window (dis)play in which the hierarchies of human over horse are a source of conflict, just as the authority traditionally asserted by sculptures of great men is undermined by his use of base materials, shoddily impermanent aesthetic and cheeky mechanical movement. A sort of mash-up of Paul McCarthy and Phyllida Barlow which generates some transgressive clout. 1991 Goldsmiths graduate Richard Ducker constructs a complex account of what may be his inner life or just a range of proofs that the self is a construct. You get organic sci-fi; homely aliens; turntable-spun modernism;, self-portraits as a boy; wall texts channeling spam emails, misery from Facebook and the creeds of a manic cult; and  a psychic’s reading of the artist’s three past lives. I‘m not sure it’s worth untangling, as I’m not sure I’ve untangled it, but it is worth trying to decide whether it’s worth untangling.

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Second Edition at the Averard Hotel @ 10 Lancaster Gate - Lancaster Gate

            To 28 Feb: www.slateprojects.com

          Ken Sortais: It is In Nature Always That One Should Seek Advice, 2015                  

The dilapidated Art Deco interiors of the Averard Hotel form a characterful backdrop to a series of six pre-renovation shows organised by Alex Meurice’s Slate Projects through to October.  The current five projects are generally good, evidence the presence of Damien Meade, Neil Gall, Raphael Zarka, Nika Neelova and Rae Hicks, solo shows from whom have all been among my previous selections. French curator Karina El Helou’s ‘A City Without A Song’ makes best use of the location to build a fictional city of romance past from cast and subverted elements. She includes Taisuké Mohri’s version of a Greuze portrait with the illusion of broken glass and the corporeal-tending double-take of Ken Sortais’ latex cast of the iconic Guimard art nouveau entrance décor from a Parisian Métro station (86/141 of which survive from 1900-12). 

Taisuké Mohri: The Cracked Portrait: Greuze's Boy in a Red Waistcoat, 2015

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Mykola Ridnyi: Under Suspicion @ Edel Assanti, 74a Newman Street - Fitzrovia

To 20 Feb: www.edelassanti.com/  and  http://www.mykolaridnyi.com

From Under suspicion, slide projection of 33 frames, 2015

Upstairs at Edel Assanti is like a warzone, but is actually just Jesse Hlebo's dark and noisy curation. Downstairs is quieter and more measured… but we’re in Kharkiv, which really was on the verge of the war on the East of Ukraine, courtesy of one of the nations leading artists, Mykola Ridnyi. In Regular Places the camera is static, the city calm – but the soundtrack periodically bursts into the protests and violence which took place six months earlier. Under Suspicion lays bare the Government’s paranoia through photographs which imitate police archives by applying literally the instructions in official leaflets about what to take seriously as a terror threat - ie circling pretty much everything of interest. But as we know, being paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.

Still from Regular places, HD video, 15:23 min., 2014-2015                          

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Marianna Simnett: Valves Collapse @ Seventeen, 270-276 Kingsland Rd – Haggerston

To 20 Feb: www.seventeengallery.com

Still from Blue Roses, 2015

Varicose veins and hyperventilation are the unlikely main subjects of Marianna Simnett’s striking show. The former are tackled by both surgery and remote-controlled cockroaches in the repulsively inviting film Blue Roses. Simnett has performed the latter to the point of fainting: here the soundtrack derived from such actions controls the pulses of light in the 10 minute cycle of the installation Faint with Light, built onsite. The relentless anxiety generated put me in mind of Tony Ousler, but without image or words being necessary – the most economically aggressive use of white light I can recall since Alfredo Jaar's  Lament of the Images, 2002.

Faint with Light, 2016

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Frame thy Fearful Symmetry @ Collyer Bristow Gallery, 4 Bedford Row – Holborn & Rachel Mclean at the Zabludowicz Collection, 176 Prince of Wales Road - Chalk Farm

To 24 Feb: (weekdays, by appointment): www.collyerbristow.com 
To 21 Feb: www.zabludowiczcollection.com

Rachel Maclean: The Massacre of the Innocents, 2011

Curatorial duo Hi Barbara’s choices for the unusual location of lawyers’ offices combine a witty shelf of Richard Wentworth prints with a younger generation of photo-based interdisciplinary artists –  Ruth Proctor, Tom Lovelace, David Raymond Conroy, Eva Stenram, Rachel Maclean and Tina Hage – who reframe reality through performance, construction, re-presentation and manipulation. For example, those last two present themselves as the sole actor to contrasting effect; Stenram shows new twists on the questionable but compelling, quaint yet dark voyeurism she extracts from rephotographing and digitally altering sixties glamour shots; artist and ice skating coach Proctor documents her attempts to land the jumps she could nail in her competitive prime, opening up the possibility of failing better – if that’s what falling more often makes for – as she grows older.

Eva Stenram: Drape (Centrefold II), 2012

What's been missing from that long-running show has been a film by Rachel Mclean, but now you can see an excellent presentation of Lolcats, 2013, one of the current choices at the Zabludowicz Collection*.  Mclean, as ever, plays all the characters from  posh cats to  Katy Perry, cyborgs and a gothic surgeon in maximalist makeup for this grotesquely sweet 15 minute tale in which a Tower of Babel tourist park forms the setting for her pussy-girl's journey through linguistic confusion, feline worship and trippy music. It could be a critique of both nationalism and pop culture's constructions of female identity - but mainly it's wow-factor fun.

* part of the group show Use/User/Used/ which is the Collection's annual Testing Ground show curated by MA curating students 

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Julia Wachtel @ Vilma Gold and in Champagne Life @ Saatchi Gallery 

To 13 Feb (Gold) / 9 March (Saatchi) 

Hero, 2015 oil, flashe, lacquer ink on canvas, 152.5 x 320 cm

You have two chances to see recent work by Julia Wachtel, an American associated with the ‘Pictures Generation’ who has since the 1980’s been exploring how our take on images appropriated from popular culture can be affected by repetition, juxtaposition, changes of scale and clashes of register – in ways which predated the Internet but now feed off it. Each multi-panel work combines painted and digital realisations of her sources to further complicate the status of what we see. To take one example from each show, Landscape No. 19 (Witness), 2014, shows her typical use of cartoon characters from greeting cards to puncture the psychology of a scene. Hero, 2015, suggests that even a superhero – let alone one sourced from a fancy dress catalogue – is helpless in the face of the global warming represented by a stranded polar bear.

Landscape No19 (Witness). 2014 -  Oil, flashe and acrylic ink on canvas, 6 panels, overall: 152 x 325 cm

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Leipzig Unfolding @ Lloyds Club, 42 Crutched Friars - Tower Hill

To 17 Feb: appointments via email to freitas.lavinia@gmail.com

Christoph Ruckhäberle: Netsuke 19, 2015 - enamel on canvas, 40 x 60 cm

A spacious city lunch club provides the unusual location for a 50 work primer of current trends out of Liepzig's Hochshule fur Grafik und Buchkunst, which has a track record for producing painters.   The fifteen artists chosen by curator Lavinia Feitas studied with such forbears as Bernhard Hesig, Arno Rink and Neo Rauch. Christoph Ruckhäberle, perhaps the best-known name, shows small scale but high impact enamels of his decoratively posed figures. Rosa Loy, Tilo Baumgartel and Hans Aichinger provide more of the mysterious cross-historical figuration associated with the Leipzig School, but there’s plenty else: Henriette Grahnert’s jokes about abstraction; Claus Georg Stabe’s ethereally obsessive biro drawings; Martin Gross’s intricately gridded woodblock overprintings; Thomas Sommer’s landscape dioramas…

Rosa Loy: Tuft, 2013 - casein on paper, 40 x 30 cm 

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Nathaniel Rackowe: The Luminous City @ Lobby One Canada Square - Canary Wharf

To 12 Feb: www.canarywharf.com

The Consequence of Light, 2015, at Canary Wharf

London is been ablaze with light art. Nathaniel Rackowe features in the centrally Lumiere London, complements the Winter Lights show at Canary Wharf, and also has an external piece near Berkeley Square. Rackowe's work - essentially a re-purposing of urban architectural elements as art and half the way back again – may not be ideally placed in a marbled corporate lobby, but is strong enough to assert itself. There are expanded and  collapsed versions of a shed lit from within, a construction to be complemented by dancers, and the kinetic The Consequence of Light, in which the rise and fall of 48 neon tubes makes for a surprisingly epiphanic evocation of sunrise and sunset.  Another innovation is the use of dichroic glass, also seen at  Hay Hill. It contains no pigment but takes on different hues from different angles due to coverings of ultra-thin metal crystals.

Portal, 2015, outside the 12 Hay Hill Club

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Rebecca Meanley: When Paint Takes Over @ Art Works Project Space, 114 Blackhorse Lane – Blackhorse Road tube

To 14 Feb: www.rebeccameanley.com

Untitled no 1 (dark ground), 2015 - oil on canvas, 146 x 186 cm

Rebecca Meanley looks for that moment when she loses control of what may seem a rather well-managed process of building from a dark ground made from multiple colours – no black allowed – into brighter hues brushed over wet-on-wet. The tricky bit then, I suspect, is judging which losses of control are fruitful. She talks of the ‘sheer inability to know beforehand ‘ but seems to get it right in retrospect in the four big canvases here: the space develops a luminous depth akin to Sean Scully’s, the thin strokes flicker between Twomblyesque and vegetal, the scale is right to immerse us in  a forest of speculation. Are we plunging into sombre thoughts or rising to liquid hope?

Rebecca Meanley with Untitled no 4 (dark ground), 2015 - photo, Olivia Bradford

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James Brooks: Geometra @ Canal, 60 De Beauvoir Crescent – Haggerston

To  6 Feb:  www.canalprojects.info

Still from Stoic Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, 2016

James Brooks’ subtle drawing-originated practice delights in using coded realities as the basis for apparent abstraction, and the seven methodological strands of Geometra also link the classical world to contemporary communications and terrorism. The result is the simplest-seeming complex show you could wish for. The audio slideshow Stoic Meditations of Marcus Aurelius combines three elements: seven black and white images of Syrian ruins as they were before the current conflict; seven selections from the ancient text chosen for resonance in the context; and a musical score for harp and flute derived from the sequencing of letters in the quotes. We’re flickering between chance and calamity, yet the 22 minute whole is ambiently meditative.

Still from Stoic Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, 2016

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Mark Davey: Blend @ The Ryder, 19a Herald St – Bethnal Green

To 9 Feb: www.theryderprojects.com

 

'Hold', 2015 Painted steel, fluorescent lights, chain-link fence, stainless steel 73 cm x 60 cm

It’s a good time to visit the five galleries on the Herald Street block: several strong shows include such original turns as Kaye Donachie’s face-off of painting and cyanotype  at Maureen Paley and Simon Fujiwara’s shaved fur coats at Laura Bartlett. Nor is the newest of them outclassed: The Ryder’s garage-with-door space proves well suited to Mark Davey’s industrial yet corporeal sculptures, which bring human hesitancy to the mechanical as they trace a neo-romantic path around the walls: from the hypnotic rise and catch of the pair of anthropomorphised neon tunes which constitute Us; to the chain-link and light of Hold (for which, Davey says, he chose two of the 400 available colours of plastic filters) to the poignant dual simplicity of After You Left.

'After You Left', 2015 Painted steel and copper 22 cm x 42 cm

  

Nika Neelova: Faults Folds Faults @ Vigo, 21 Dering St – Bond St

To 23 Jan: www.vigogallery.com

untitled (folding chairs) I   2015 Steel, brass, aluminium   90 x 70 x 24 cm 

There is no more temporally resonant exploiter of casting then the London-based Russian sculptor Nika Neelova. Here she conjures a geology from the deconstruction and reconfiguration of seemingly casual everyday forms and practices: a foam version of her studio's gate takes on a lunar surface; the outlines of her studio become re-positionable steel drawings in space; chair frames are re-imagined as wall hangings, in brass which melds its way to aluminium; copper and brass dust are the muted colours of plaster versions of chair legs; and a floor heap which looks like glass but proves to be plastic versions of crowd control barriers which can regulate nothing.  Over time, Neelova suggests, ‘the folds have merged with the object, adopted their forms, discarded their purposes and have become static, hibernating into their future (non)existence’. I think of them as post-modern fossils. 

untitled (folded studio)   2015 - Steel structure based on the perimeter of the studio, folded (welded steel, hinges)   220 x 390 x 140 cm and untitled (gate)   2015 - street dust cast in foam, steel armature (welded steel, cast foam, dust)   200 x 220 x 2.5 cm

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Mark Fairnington: Collected and Possessed @ Horniman Museum and Gardens, 100 London Road – Forest Hill

To 24 Jan - www.horniman.ac.uk/

Face Monkey, oil on panel, 10x10cm, 2012

The Horniman Museum, already a fascinating place, is currently enhanced by an extensive retrospective of Mark Fairnington's photo-realistic yet uncanny paintings inspired by this and other museum collections: they include life sized portraits of bulls, close-up tondos of eyes, panoramic views of specimens in storage, mounted insects trade at human scale and curious heads from the Wellcome collection.  Fairnington has also delved into the Horniman collection to find on exhibited material show alongside his paintings., pointing up the constructed nature of the all that we see here.

The Ambassadors, oil on canvas, 204x256cm, 2007 (detail) 

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Derek Mainella: Infinity Poison @ castor Projects, 306 New Cross Rd – New Cross Gate

To 30 Jan: castorprojects.co.uk

Untitled (Yellow/Pink), 2015 - oil and acrylic on canvas, 145 x 125 cm - in the dark

Artist Andy Wicks has set up a project space in a café basement, and the first show there makes the best of its windowlessness by showing paintings lit only by the video flames made by a futile attempt to burn MDF furniture, the ‘infinity poison’ of the title. Canadian Derek Mainella’s attractively constructed semi-fluorescent abstracts loll out to suggest tongues, faces and trippy pills. As you join them ranged around the IKEA fire, you can also eat a banana, the artist having linked the environmental effect of hard-to-dispose-of modern materials to the  genetic vulnerability of the inbred plantain variety on which he recently lived almost exclusively. Quite a few exhibitions of paintings look better in the dark: this one’s meant to, but actually I liked the works as exposed by my flash…

Untitled (Yellow/Pink), 2015 - oil and acrylic on canvas, 145 x 125 cm - with flash

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Yoan Capote: Isla @ Ben Brown Fine Arts, 17 Brook’s Mews - Mayfair

To 29 Jan: www.benbrownfinearts.com

Isla (Ecepticismo), 2015  Oil, nails and fish-hooks on linen panel on plywood, 145 x 168 x 12 cm

What may sound a rather trivial, if impressively obsessive, idea – to attach fishhooks to twelve seascapes – proves visually effective and politically resonant. The aesthetic comes from the variety of light and weathers depicted and how the hooks – 10,000 on a typical picture, fired black to make them pliable – sculpturalise the sea’s seethings and create shadows around and within the image. The resonance comes from how we in the gallery as island look out through the windows of paintings hung to make the sea’s horizon consistent, and are reminded that the Caribbean acted as Cuba’s Iron Curtain during the Cold War – during which Yoan Capote grew up in Havana.

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Rob Pruitt: Therapy Paintings @ Massimo de Carlo, 55 South Audley St - Mayfair

To 30 Jan: www.massimodecarlo.com

Installation view

Rob Pruitt’s last London show was of ‘suicide paintings’. Things seem seem to be looking up, though, as his latest set finds a generative process in therapy.  Pruitt doodles on a small pad as a way of freeing himself up during each hour-long session. One wall holds 36 of these, some of which Shaw has then blown up by computer to various sizes up to 7 feet high, and overpainted in restrained colours true to the sketches’ medium of super-standard dark blue biro. Surrealist free association meets the magnification of small gestures used by such abstract painters as Kline and Hartung to produce compositions with more life than you might expect.  Sculptures of cats accompany the paintings by way of extra assurance, and it all feels pleasantly odd. 

                         

               

The original 10 x 15cm ballpoint drawing and the  215 x 165cm acrylic, ink oil and water painting for Therapy Painting 8/31/2015

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ART STUFF ON A TRAIN 151-160

‘Another Fine Mesh’: Paul’s ART STUFF ON A TRAIN #160

Alice Cattaneo: ‘Untitled’, 2012


London has enough galleries to make it easy enough to find another show to relate to any given one. All the same, I was surprised to find not just two exhibitions within two hundred meters in which upcoming artists make effective yet contrasting uses of mesh – as form, and as screen; in sculpture and on paintings – but also the great precedent of François Morellet at the Mayor Gallery (the French 90 year old has fine shows there and at Annely Juda). Rosenfeld Porcini (‘lifting the veil’ to 27 May) step into the trendy zone of all-woman shows with 11 choices cohering around a fragile sense of the precious. Italian sculptor Alice Catteneo, who perhaps fits that least, pushes aspects of Anthony Caro and Philip King towards vulnerability: coiled acetate gets trapped under iron; wire mesh intercedes delicately. The combination of differently-weighted materials – which she describes as ‘in between found and looked-for’ – generates a poised tension. TJ Boulting’s new show (‘Encounters’ to 7 May) is solo, yet also rather varied: partly because London-based South African HelenA Pritchard has so many ideas; partly because of the contrast she builds between TJ Boulting’s two spaces. The bigger room is close to white cube, with a few works spaciously distributed: the smaller is packed with a lively interplay of far more paintings, light effects with colour filters, items refracted and several pot plants. The signature material of the many used in her painting-objects is mesh, which covers years-worth of largely unseen layers, evidenced by the still-visible edges of the older applications as the viewer is tempted voyeuristically in, only to be denied full access. Moreover, HelenA (she’s not a Helena, but a Google-disambiguated Helen) uses multiple meshes – black embroidery fabric, net curtain material, a fine steel grid – to divergent effects.

*and Carroll/Fletcher have a very forward-looking group show called ‘Dense Mesh’!



HelenA Pritchard: ‘Square Triangle’, 2006-15



François Morellet’s mesh work ‘3 trames 0º, -22º5, +22º5’, 1971


Most days art Critic Paul Carey-Kent spends hours on the train, traveling between his home in Southampton and his day job in London. Could he, we asked, jot down whatever came into his head?

‘Posing Trumps Sliding’: Paul’s ART STUFF ON A TRAIN #159

The intersection of yoga and art is new to me, but Hamburg-based Y8 specialise in the combination, and they’ve come to London to activate the late work of the American artist Channa Horwitz (Raven Row to May 1). While it’s worth visiting anyway to see how Horwitz (1932 – 2013) explored intricate number-driven permutations of geometry and colour which operate on the intoxicating edge of our understanding of their evident systems, there’s also the chance to take part in the activation of the room-sized installation Displacement (2011 / 2016). My wife and I among eight participants – eight being Horvitz’s key number - split into two groups of four. We alternated between adopting set yoga positions and moving around eight black building blocks ranging from 35 to 188 cm high. Both actions demand precision, as the cuboids must be aligned as carefully as possible with an orange grid on the floor. We were encouraged to pause in our shape-shifting to observe the changing scene as the mutating architecture of shapes interacted with the varying positions of the other people.  That provided an external focus contrasting with the internal concentration of the yoga. Add the novelty – for me at least – of stretching into tricky positions or finding myself stood on my head, and an hour passed divertingly quickly. Post-performatively, moreover, the drawings which make up most of the show took on a different energy. It made zooming down a Holler seem rather superficial, however long (178m) the ArcelorMittal  Orbit slide will be…

Paul’s ART STUFF ON A TRAIN #158: ‘Breasts or Eyes?’

Das Institut installation at the Serpentine Gallery



YOKO, MICHELE, PAULINE, by Sarah Lucas, spread in front of George Jones’ painting ‘THE OPENING OF LONDON BRIDGE’ – photo Julian Simmons

There seem to be a recent convocation on the subject of breasts for eyes. In December I noted that Julian Simmons’ massive and detailed graphite drawings of concentric circles (at Lychee One) ‘resemble eyes and breasts by duck-rabbit turns’, so countering their meditative aspect with a little bawdy comedy. Simmons attributed his use of the theme to his partner, Sarah Lucas. ‘Eyes and breasts’, he told me ‘not so dissimilar …aesthetically, though formally… one takes energy, the other gives; not entirely, both ways since you enquire’. Lucas herself has (‘Power in Woman’ to 21 May) brought three literally topless muses back from their Venice Biennale presentation to the Soane Museum’s yellow drawing room – the original inspiration for the custard colour scheme of her British Pavilion. It features plaster casts of the bottom halves of three women, so no peeping boobs, but Lucas mentions as context how “Magritte’s painting, ‘Le Voil’, puts a woman’s naked body where her face ought to be. That is, on the front of her head, tits for eyes.” So I wasn’t too surprised, by now, to see the biggest work in the Serpentine’s Das Institut installation (to 15 May) described in the catalogue thus: ‘the neon breasts which greet the viewer at the entrance flick on and off, converting the nipples into blinking eyes’. Either way, both Lucas (rubbing up against Soane’s collection) and Das Institut (paired with one of their inspirations, the impressively out of time paintings of Hilma Af Klint) benefit from contexts which alter how we see things – whether as breasts or as eyes.

Julian Simmons: Orbicular Drawings, 2015


Most days art Critic Paul Carey-Kent spends hours on the train, traveling between his home in Southampton and his day job in London. Could he, we asked, jot down whatever came into his head?

Paul’s ART STUFF ON A TRAIN #157: ‘Lives of the Artists’

Betty Woodman's 'Theatre of the Domestic' at the ICA

Francesca Woodman, 'Self-Deceit # 1', Rome, 1978  © Betty and George Woodman

It’s an old debate: does the biography of the artist get in the way of the art, or enhance it? Betty Woodman’s ceramic-driven exhibition at the ICA is full of wit and vim, especially when it pitches painting and crockery together to muddle the boundaries between fine art and decoration, and – should the paradox make sense – between real vases and their ceramic depictions. It’s hard not to be more struck by the biographical, though: that she had her first retrospective nine years ago at 76, whereas her photographer daughter Francesca killed herself in 1981 at 22 and is, of course, long since canonical. I drift back to seeing the tremendous ‘On Being an Angel’ at Foam, Amsterdam earlier this year and suspect myself of thinking the wrong thoughts. Maybe these things are better left in the implied biography of the work: the German artist Knop Ferro makes delicate drawings in space out of trembling rods which catch a space somewhere between Alexander Calder and Jesús Rafael Soto – and he seems a most affable man… But an early work in his show at Maddox Arts (‘Gravity’ to 14 May) is of paper slashed with a knife. Suddenly the way those rods slice through the air takes on new undertones, and I start to wonder if the young Ferro was an underground enforcer. Actually he spent the 80’s as a playwright and actor in a Zurich based performance theatre, which makes just as much sense.


Knopp Ferro: ’20:28′, 2010 – iron


Knop Ferro sets a sculpture in gentle motion, a task he reserves to himself!

Paul’s ART STUFF ON A TRAIN #156: ‘Education Continues’

It’s always nice when you learn things as a contingent effect of looking at interesting art, and that’s especially so the case of two shows running to 2 April. Steven Claydon’s premise in the brilliantly installed sculpture-and-soundscape ‘The Gilded Bough’ at Sadie Coles is that covering an object can make it more visible. It’s a theory I’ve heard applied to sexy underwear, but Claydon’s more elevated reference and metaphor is scanning electron microscopy, where samples are coated in ultra-thin layers of gold before going under the microscope as “the conductive material increases the quantity of ‘secondary electrons’ that can be detected from their surfaces”. Trend-setting New York collaborative DIS are due to curate this year’s Berlin Biennale and since 2010 have run all sorts of fashion, design, art and commercial collaborations under the general concept of what might be termed a virtual magazine. At Project Native Informant they show three parodies of stock images, such as of ‘the public apology’, ready for the next speech by a shamed politician; and two versions of a family snapshot – one still but moving, as it’s on a sliding screen which covers and uncovers the second: a film of the family which moves but remains in one place. The learning was in first time I’ve watched Winbots at work, ie automatic glass-cleaning devices, which scuttle around on front of the ‘stock’ images as if they can clean content; and in the family’s exaggerated use of contouring make-up, which turns out to have a huge on-line presence which had passed me by completely.

 

Most days art Critic Paul Carey-Kent spends hours on the train, traveling between his home in Southampton and his day job in London. Could he, we asked, jot down whatever came into his head?

‘Poetry, Art and the Sucking of Cocks’: Paul’s ART STUFF ON A TRAIN #155

Installation view of Heather Phillipson at the Whitechapel

Visual artists often work with text, but at the moment two are going further by incorporating full blown poetry collections into their shows. For Heather Phillipson at the Whitechapel, it’s her own poetry: she’s been the Whitechapel’s writer in residence, and ‘more flinching’ (to 17 April) is mainly a way to present her new book, a tale of dog love which covers the gallery as its main sculptural element and is free to pick up. I’d recommend you do so, as Phillipson is that rare breed: a visual artist who is also a substantial poet[1]. At Modern Art, sculptor Oscar Tuazon and poet Ariana Reines are very much equal partners in ‘Pubic Space’, a fascinating show (to 9 April) themed around Greek herms[2]. It has three components: a soundtrack of renaissance viol music; tower-like modern herms, mainly of wood and concrete but also incorporating water, candles, and inaccessible books; and the contents of that book, a copy of which you cannot remove but can read at the gallery. It contains not just thirty-odd new poems by Reines, but an assortment of images and appropriated texts which the two Americans have put together, ranging from images of Greek herms to the contemporary priapic. Speaking of which Reines is unconstrained enough to have been asked at one reading[3] ‘Why all the cocksucking?’, her answer being that ‘the abjection and absurdity of relating to a penis that does not belong to one seems like it needs to be taken out of the sphere of the pornographic and reinstated into the kind of hilarity it deserves’.


Installation view of Oscar Tuazon and Ariana Reines at Modern Art

[1] See for example ‘A Is to D What E Is to H’ at
Heather Phillipson – A Is to D What E Is to H from The Wire Magazine on Vimeo.

[2] Herms originate as apotropaic tributes to Hermes, god of transitions and boundaries, and took the form of head, torso and phallus

[3]

Most days art Critic Paul Carey-Kent spends hours on the train, traveling between his home in Southampton and his day job in London. Could he, we asked, jot down whatever came into his head?

The Workers: Paul’s ART STUFF ON A TRAIN #154

Tamsin Casswell: ‘Plains’ 2015 – linen, cord & hand embroidery 33 x 42 cm

I must have seen over 10,0000 exhibitions, so it wouldn’t be surprising if they’ve covered all the basis categories – and yet this is the first time I’ve come across the seemingly obvious idea of presenting the work of an artist together with that of her team of assistants (Standpoint to 2nd April).
It reminds us that few artists can make ends meet without additional income, often from part-time jobs in the art world such as teacher, technician – or assistant. Add that the artist – Susan Collis – is one of my favourites, and that I knew some of the assistants as interesting artists without realising they have also worked for Collis for several years, and ‘The Workers’ is an attractive proposition. The show generates a shared aesthetic – muted, playing off craft traditions, somewhat inwardly focused. New drawings from Collis – and none of her assisted production – are shown alongside work by Tamsin Casswell, Lucy Clout (whose own show is now at Limoncello), Aileen Harvey, Caitlin Hinshelwood and Kate Morrell – it seems male assistants have never stayed the course. Casswell has the most work – there are seven of her intimately repaired landscape embroideries made out of discarded scraps. Morell’s Warp Set, 2016, arises very directly from her presence in the studio: the photocopy-originated versions of weights from a loom were her elegant counter-proposal to Collis’s tendency to keep drawings flat using any old thing which happened to be around.


Kate Morrell: ‘Warp Set’, 2016

‘The Point of Obsession’ Paul’s ART STUFF ON A TRAIN #152

Lee Edwards, ‘Opening’ pencil on A4 paper, 30 × 21cm

‘I could have done that – and in ten minutes!’, go two popular criticsms of contemporary art. That rather overlooks how easily a famous poet’s work can be copied out, but anyway there’s still plenty of skilled and obsessively labour-intensive art being made. Maria Taniguchi at Ibid (to 2 April) paints the white outline of bricks on a dark grey ground – maybe 3,000 bricks on a typical canvas – then shades most of the bricks black. The eight big paintings at Ibid look the same at first, but the point is how the unblacked patterns provide differing dynamics. She’s building abstraction. Gareth Nyandoro at Tiwani (to 19th March) has an elaborate technique of pasting posters on paper, razoring in hundreds of parallel lines, inking in his image and then ripping off the top surface to reveal only what bled into the slits. The violence makes sense in his geographical context: Zimbabwe. More traditionally, Lee Edwards makes minutely detailed small drawings (‘Fibre of Being’ at Domobaal to 12 March). The subjects are perplexing – used tissues, balled tights, torn knickers – until we realise that they were left behind by his somewhat messy girlfriend when she left him: all that time spent so intensely turns out to be a bravely vulnerable display of pain. Skill and patience in all three cases, yes – but the point in all three cases is – that isn’t the point.


Maria Taniguchi: ‘Untitled’, 2016 – acrylic, canvas, wood support, 274 x 122 cm


Detail of Gareth Nyandoro’s razor technique


 ‘The Back of Italians’ Paul’s ART STUFF ON A TRAIN #151:

The back of a Castellani

Will we ever see the back* of Italian art from the 1960’s in London? There’s no sign of it yet, but I can show you the rear of a typical work by Enrico Castellani: the nails, which produce such precise undulations on the front of his paintings, are applied to diagonal cross-planks. Castellani starts from the outside and works in to produce varying rhythms which he says follow unrevealed mathematical principles, but can look dynamically intuitive. Tornabuoni showed a range of less usually coloured canvasses at the last Frieze Masters, but Dominique Lévy’s show sticks to white and silver – favoured by Castellani as the colours (or non-colours?) which make the most of their surroundings. The Superficie bianche include some of the biggest and most complex examples, and are complemented by a paper stack sculpture and more recent, more assertively sculptural, works from the Biangolari and corner-nestling Angolari series. All of which shows more variation than might be expected in how Castellani pushes painting into three dimensions to play off architecture, light and viewer.
*Not that I want to… The latest clutch includes fine displays of Manzoni (at Mazzoleni to 9 April) and Castellani (at Dominique Lévy to 9 April), which opened on the same night, 56 years after they famously formed the gallery Azimut together in Milan; also Alighiero Boetti at Ben Brown, Arnaldo Pomodoro at Tornabuoni, Giacomo Manzù at the Estorick, Angelo Savelli at M&L Fine Art, and Agostino Bonalumi due soon at Cortesi. Phew!


Enrico Castellani: ‘Superficie’, 1974

Most days art Critic Paul Carey-Kent spends hours on the train, traveling between his home in Southampton and his day job in London. Could he, we asked, jot down whatever came into his head?

About Paul Carey-Kent

Art critic and curator, based in Southampton. I write most regularly for Art Monthly, Frieze, The Art Newspaper, Border Crossings, World of Interiors, Photomonitor, Art Critical, ArtLyst... and, of course, FAD - when I'm on the train to and from my job in London as a health and social care financial policy analyst.