EARLY SPRING SELECTION

TEN NEW SHOWS FOR EARLY SPRING

There are some obvious questions to be asked just now. How mad was van Gogh? What kind of bad is that Ofili shit? Should you dump in Landy’s art bin? Why is the ICA showing Billy Childish? Can Dylan paint? How much can a Giacometti be worth? Why is the Hayward closed for so long for refurbishment so soon after it was closed for so long for refurbishment? And who was Theo Van Doesburg? You’ll find none of the answers here, just ten lively new shows to visit, to which you can add a dozen previous recommendations which are still on view as I write...


Malbux

Bernard Frize @ Simon Lee,12 Berkeley St - Central

To 24 March: www.simonleegallery.com

Bernard Frize finds ever-more ways to let ‘the brush paint’, as he puts it, by setting up the imaginative procedural frameworks within which he can see where chance leads him and his collaborators (many of his paintings are multi-hand productions). Past procedures include painting a wide brush in various colours before use, games with a single stroke or how often lines can cross, and using extreme brush sizes or a spraygun. This exhibition introduces four new ideas of which the ten large paintings become the manifestation. Three of them lead – as has been usual – to paintings which look instantly and seductively ‘like Frizes’, despite the role of chance (‘that’s a harsh accusation’, he once teased me, ‘ I know that I have been doing the same thing for more than thirty years, but I am really trying to change.’). That makes ‘Lud’, which required two steps of blocking and washing the paint rather than his usual single hit approach, the most striking because least characteristic work here. Having shown at Frith Street before he moved to Simon Lee, Frize has been among the more visible French artists in London, but deserves a major public show. Until then, this is a welcome update.


What Verb Did Hunt

Simon Morse: I Cannot See the Trees But I Can Hear the Mountain @ Gooden Gallery, 25A Vyner St – Cambridge Heath

To 7 March: www.goodengallery.com

Della Gooden, who has only recently adopted a more upfront name for her former VINEspace, gives Simon Morse his third show in three years. He has moved in that time from perfect two-dimensional imaginings of control panels for comically-purposed machines towards actually making them in more visibly-used forms which suggest relics recently stranded in the march towards ever-more sophisticated computerisation. Extra buttons, switches, labels and instructions are added to the found items, and their edge-of-sense titles – ‘A Few Tricks I Can Do With a Knife’, ‘Welt Stable’, ‘What Cannot Henceforth Be Yet Unhenced’ – could be swapped between works without much changing their wacky slant on pseudo-functionality. I was reminded of how the banking system can appear: an absurdly-mislabelled farrago of apparent controls which connects to nothing in the way it claims.


Head (Amaethon)

Dan Perfect: Dæmonology @ Karsten Schubert, 5-8 Lower John St, Golden Square - Central

To 9 April: www.karstenschubert.com

There’s an eighties tinge to Dan Perfect’s work – the obvious influence is Basquiat – but why not? This illustration of the recessionary trend towards longer-running shows provides a helpful reminder of the big paintings teeming with totemic suggestions which characterised Perfect’s appearance at the Chisenhale two years ago. But the focus is on a sort of letterless alphabet, in which 26 head-sized near-abstractions exploit our instinct for finding a face by evoking an A-Z of dæmons plucked from a wide range of cultures: ‘Head (Amaethon)’ through to ‘Head (Zadkiel)’ via Furfur, Qadesh and Ungud. They could be out-crops from the big works, but with their hues ramped up and their marks hazed by Perfect’s process of digitally manipulating and computer-colouring drawings before painting the dæmons themselves from low resolution print-outs. A ‘Grimoire Perfectorium’ says the nice little book of the show.

Don’t turn up at the weekend, by the way, and don’t confuse with ‘Demonology’, a coincidentally-timed group show at Charlie Smith! That may not be Perfect, but does contain a wonderful new painting by John Stark…


Still from 'Remnants of the Future'

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

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

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


Sow Farm (near Libby, Oklahoma)

John Gerrard @ Thomas Dane, Ist Floor, 11 Duke St - Central

To 6 March: www.thomasdane.com

The Irish artist John Gerrard made a big impact with his collateral event at the Venice Biennale last year, and this is the first London showing for his realtime 3D animations. They use video gaming technology to make silent virtual reality versions of scenes which unfold over long periods. Two are shown large scale here: 'Sow Farm (near Libby, Oklahoma)', which recreates an unmanned, computer-controlled agricultural complex, and 'Lufkin (near Hugo, Colorado)', showing an oil derrick. Both circle round over a full year of changing light to produce a hyper-real yet oddly artificial portrait – neither documentary nor fiction, somehow, but a real form of the virtual – which matches the distanced and exploitative relationships between man and nature which they depict. The effect is at once painterly, cinematic and disturbingly clinical. In addition, ‘Oil Stick Work’, in which it takes a man thirty years to paint a silo with an oil stick until it becomes completely blackened – will soon be on view at Canary Wharf underground station over the full third year of its running, due to finish in 2038.


Stills from 'Whose Toes'

Shudder @ The Drawing Room, 55 Laburnum St – Haggerston

To 14 March: www.drawingroom.org.uk - ‘Whose Toes’ can also be seen at www.barrydoupe.ca

Europe’s only public gallery dedicated to drawing presents eight practitioners using animated forms. The show is named for the pleasingly low-tech means employed and the shudder as an intense response, but I was most taken by two artist who employ different strategies of disjuncture between sound and image. Raymond Pettibon is best known for captioned ink drawings, but I found the combination enhanced by his giving voice to the deadpan multiple-register commentaries in ‘Sunday Night Saturday Morning’. The much less famous young Canadian Barry Doupé brings the look of an out-of-focus video game to the mesmerising half hour computer animation ‘Whose Toes’, in which characters and events recur in a dizzying pattern of apparently violent near-narratives to the sound of the dialogue reduced to a hissing static. You are cast as a voyeur who can’t quite see or hear properly a stream such as swans, lifts, Princess Diana, a riderless motorbike, danced-around scissors, JFK and a glory hole...


No. 207 (detail)

Rana Begum @ The Delfina Foundation, 29 Catherine Place – Victoria

To 2 March: www.delfinafoundation.com

Young Anglo-Bangladeshi sculptor Rana Begum is best known for modular aluminium wallworks, which reveal intense colour effects in a fresh take on minimalism infected by Islamic abstraction and modern architecture. This show consists of just one multi-part work, ‘No. 207’, which emerged from a residency in Beirut. It plays that city’s vibrant nightlife off against the Delfina’s quiet spaces in a two-floor installation of neon tubes and geometrically-arranged plastic straws rendered fluorescent by ultraviolet light. This makes for an alluring new language, as if Dan Flavin has been reinvented for the nightclub and the playroom simultaneously.


Wild Horses Couldn't Drag Me Away (detail)

Stephen j Shanabrook: In Pills We Trust @ Orel Art, 2nd Floor, 7 Howick Place – Victoria

To 13 March: www.orelart.com

Ilona Orel’s very well-appointed gallery usually shows Russian artists, though Stephen j Shanabrook is an American with a Russian wife. Works made from prescription pill bottles and scalpel blades which draw parallels between drugs and religion may make you wonder whether Damien Hirst isn’t better left to pastiche himself, even though they pack a punch and Shanabrook has previous: he’s an ex-addict whose father was an obstetrician. I was more struck by his use of oven-melted toy horses, knitted together into chains which spill from a mouth on the wall to add a more original and macabre childhood twist to one aspect of addiction – and referring in passing to the one-way nature of horses’ throats: they can’t vomit and so are particularly susceptible to poisons.


Still from Artur Zmijewski's 'Two Monuments'

Scapegoat Society @ Guest Projects, Sunbury House, I Andrews Road - Cambridge Heath

To 21 Feb: www.nornprojects.org

Yinka Shonibare’s admirable project invites curators to propose shows in his space. Ali MacGilp and Cassandra Needham successfully suggested examining the hostile process whereby people absolve themselves from responsibility by moving blame towards another person or group. This strong and tightly interrelated show provides a nuanced view of the individual attitudes and social factors at work. Among the highlights are Jacek Niegoda’s examination of what happens when a man sets himself apart by walking on the spot up a down escalator and a new video from the normally confrontational but here winningly gentle Pole Artur Zmijewski, who invited immigrant Polish and unemployed Irish people to work together in Dublin to build sculptural monuments to cooperation. And if you have four hours free you can watch all of Rod Dickinson’s restaging of the infamous Milgram experiments, which sought to show how people would follow orders to administer pain: the experiments’ scientifically dubious artificiality is highlighted by the fact that, although all the participants are acting for Dickinson, that’s only one more actor than in the original.


Untitled (Table 4)

Lara Viana @ DomoBaal, 3 John St – Clerkenwell

To 20 March: www.domobaal.com

Viana, a Brazilian who has lived in London for 25 years, is a late developer whose first solo show of intimately-scaled paintings is well-suited to Domo’s warm space. They show interiors with commonplace art historical subjects such as figures, mirrors and still lives on tabletops. These are filtered through secondary sources – photographic, decorative or ceramic – and depicted with an increasingly confident mixture of baroque flourish and crisp precision. It’s as if a mind is attempting to reconstruct a past time which had more certainties in it. Make sure to catch the delicately pared-back watercolours hidden behind a door…


Still showing from previous lists: Philip Guston to 20 Feb, Danny Rolph to 20 Feb, Ornulf Opdahl to 26 Feb, William Eggleston to 27 Feb, Shoa Azari & Shahram Karimi to 27 Feb, Waseem Ahmed to 27 Feb, Zhang Enli to 27 Feb, Damien Roach to 6 March, Rula Halawani to 6 March, Eva Hesse & Katja Strunz to 7 March, Magali Reus to 7 March, David Hockney/Andy Holden to 10 April.

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


TEN FOR THE FUTURE

I am looking forward to:

Paul Nash @ Dulwich Picture Gallery 10.2 – 9.5

Vanessa Billy @ Limoncello 12.2 – 13.3

Peeping Tom (curated by Keith Coventry) @ Vegas 18.2 - 28.3

Kathy Prendergast @ Peer 18.2 – 10.4

Chiharu Shiota @ Haunch of Venison 19.2 - 27.3

Icelandic Artists @ Tintype 24.2 – 14.3

Members' Show @ Studio Voltaire 25.2 - 27.3

Mat Collishaw @ BFI 26.2 – 9.5

Kaye Donachie @ Mauren Paley 27.2 - 4.4

Céleste Boursier-Mougenot @ The Barbican 27.2 - 23.5

FEBRUARY HIGHLIGHTS

The glut of the new shows no sign of abating, so I have updated for some just-seen recommendations even as the only-slightly-older ones roll on… And that without mentioning – unless this counts – the Van Gogh, Michael Landy, Chris Ofili, Matthew Barney and Saatchi Indian exhibitions which are garnering most of the publicity at present.

Untitled

Waseem Ahmed @ Laurent Delaye, 1st Floor, 11 Savile Row – Central

To 27 Feb: www.laurentdelaye.com

Laurent Delaye visits Pakistan frequently to seek out its somewhat internationally under-exposed artists. His best discovery is Waseem Ahmed, who tackles charged topics – fundamentalism, conflict, tradition in the context of the modern, the status of women – through small paintings which exploit traditional miniatures techniques to counterpoint symbolic subject matter in a very contemporary way. Mullahs, gods, gardens, bullets, burqas, soldiers – and even a soldier wearing a burqa – appear against a virtuoso background effect made from tea stains. The stains turn menstrual or violent and sometimes incorporates abstract calligraphy which refers, says Ahmed, to how meaningless the Koran can become when learned by rote. Sounds heavy? It doesn’t feel so in front of the poised and delicate beauty of the paintings themselves. Bonus: a very informative hand-out.


Relief

Zhang Enli @ Hauser & Wirth, 196A Piccadilly - Central

To 27 Feb: www.hauserwirth.com

There’s no sign of the brash political pop one associates with contemporary Chinese painting in the everyday lyricism of Zhang Enli. His approach is figurative but far from realist, with a penchant for washed out colours and allowing paint’s drips to hint at time seeping: think Luc Tuymans meets Callum Innes. Even the biggest works are of quiet subjects: a two metre canvas show a circle, leaves or a basin. And I like Zhang best at his quietest, when his fluid contemplations of objects almost disappear into their context: a wall lamp, a relief and a peeled white wall could all stand in for what would otherwise be found where they are hung.

Reflections

Damien Roach: Shiiin, Jet Stream, White earphones @ David Roberts Art Foundation, 111 Great Titchfield St – Fitzrovia.

To 6 March: project blog @ www.fromadarkenedsunroof.com

Where to begin? Young conceptualist Damien Roach has drawn on his love of Japan to turn the Foundation into an immersive environment which is part garden (complete with pond), part house (with rooms demarcated by variously coloured semi-transparent screens). We come across both Roach’s work and his choices from the David Roberts Collection, and a roster of eccentric events is scheduled. Roach’s own pieces include video; slide shows; paintings laced with LSD; acoustic foam panels posing as minimalism; the back of a playing card entitled ‘Think of a Card’; and his characteristic collages which transformationally invert elements to make fake reflections - picked up in turn by a collection of twelve vinyl records all entitled ‘Reflections’. A chance, then, to escape from the everyday by reflecting on gently imaginative tweaks of same. Shiiin, in case you wonder, is the onomatopoetic form of absolute silence in Japan. If you’re reduced to it, it’ll be in a good way…

Untitled No. 1

Thérèse Oulton: Territory @ Marlborough Fine Art, 6 Albemarle St - Central

To 13 March: www.marlboroughfineart.com

Marlborough may not have a cutting edge image, but they have some excellent artists. Thérèse Oulton, who sounds more exotic than most who come from Shrewsbury, has built her reputation over thirty years through large abstract paintings with a geographical aura. Her new show does it the other way round through 24 small landscapes which use her own photographs from elevated vantage points as the source for unpeopled views. The paintings are vertiginous and yet calm, highly detailed and yet cloudy – and retain a strong feeling for the abstract. That includes abstraction from particular places: they are untitled, and both physically and emotionally distanced. Oulton suggests that may allude to how ‘fewer and fewer people do actually come from, stay on, one small patch of earth anymore’. An interesting comparison is with Carol Rhodes’ aerial views of marginal zones: it would be hard to like those – as I do – and not these.





David Hockney ‘Bigger Trees Near Water Or / Ou Peinture Sur Le Motif Pour Le Nouvel Age Post-Photographique’ & Andy Holden ‘Pyramid Piece and Return of the Pyramid Piece’ @ Tate Britain

To 10 April: www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/artnow

Given the clamorous claims of their blockbusters, it’s easy to overlook the rehangs and smaller shows in the Tates. The Millbank branch currently provides two explorations of scale by artists of contrasting age and fame. David Hockney’s biggest-ever painting is a view of a copse with a sycamore 30 feet high. Actually it’s 50 canvases worked on separately by reference to a computer mosaic of the whole plan – and for good measure the ex-exile techno-enthusiast has made two full scale photographic copies, so you get three full walls of trees. Meanwhile, in the adjoining Art Now room, Andy Holden has made a vast knitted version of a small boulder he stole from the pyramids of Giza when he was a boy (and which he shows himself guiltily trying to return in an accompanying video). Thus a small souvenir of the monumental is made mock-monumental through a laborious process of penance in medium associated with the domestic scale. Holden’s fragment undergoes a continuous metamorphosis, says Lizzie Carey-Thomas in her accompanying text: ‘a stone in the ground, a fragment of an edifice, a relic of a lost civilization, a tourist icon, a stolen souvenir, an object of guilt’. I found both rooms endearing in a slightly silly way…


Exotic Dancer

Ansel Krut @ Modern Art, 23-5 Eastcastle St – Fitzrovia

To 13 Feb: www.modernart.net

Ansel Krut (with the 'u' as in 'hoot') is a South African who has lived in London – and taught influentially – for getting on thirty years. This is his first outing in glitzier surroundings after showing previously at the excellent but more domestic DomoBaal. Krut’s quirky and spirited inventions play affectionately with any number of modern painting devices and communicate his own enjoyment in making them – indeed, he himself says it is a good sign if he laughs while at work. An energetic spiral form feautures in many of these works, and Krut has intensified his colours in recent years, and is one of those painters with an instantly recognizable palette. And if you’ve ever asked yourself what the personality of a vortex, onion or escalator might be, here are some entertaining possible answers…

The Happy Cactus

Ryan Mosley @ Alison Jacques, 16-18 Berners St – Fitzrovia

To 13 Feb: www.alisonjacquesgallery.com

Ryan Mosley (with the ‘o’ as in ‘hot’) is a rising young painter who, like Krut, creates a distinctive world of his own which draws you in to believing in its impossible logic. This, his first big solo show, features a bemusingly amusing range of the human treated like objects (free-floating feet, misplaced faces, a head in a snow shaker) merging with a peculiarly active non-human world (a happy cactus, invasions of pipes, snakes everywhere – indeed, they’re all we can see in the near-abstract ‘A View from a Window’). And they’re helped on their way by titles (‘A Concave Friar’, ‘Blue Bottle Mask’, ‘Snake in Drag’…) which point up the absurdly tangential wit.

Salisbury

Danny Rolph: Automatic Shoes @ Poppy Sebire, Piccadilly Arcade – Central

To 20 Feb: www.poppysebire.com

The second pop-up (poppy-up?) space for this new gallery is over three floors in a posh shopping arcade opposite the Royal Academy which has fallen on lease-freeing times. That layout facilitates a balanced presentation of Rolph’s works on paper, canvas and – most characteristically – the almost-clear polycarbonate building material triplewall. All teem with energy, colour and references to arrive at what seem to be abstractions of pretty-much everything. Like having, says Rolph, the right crossword but the wrong clues. The newest element are drawings after (not before) the triplewalls, the mix of which includes apparently hairy elements in a sly homage to Guston. I suppose I should admit that Danny is an established favourite of mine, and my interview with him forms part of the show’s documentation – but that doesn’t make it any less good!

Interview @ www.poppysebire.com/downloads/Rolph-interview-CareyKent.pdf

Untitled (Book), 1968

Philip Guston: Works on Paper @ Timothy Taylor, 15 Carlos Place – Mayfair

To 20 Feb: www.timothytaylorgallery.com

It’s always good to see work by the great and influential Philip Guston (1913-80)- especially when he looks to be in the mix behind Krut, Mosley and Rolph. Guston is hardly under-exposed, but this show provides a fresh angle by forming a retrospective of works on paper: from 50s abstract expressionist studies to fascinating transitional not-quite-figurative mid-60s drawings (from a time when Guston stopped painting) and on to a wide range in his cartoonish late style, including books as buildings, wonderfully simplified hooded figures and clusters of fruit and shoes. And they look great as a whole, with all 24 works restricted to black, white and Guston’s characteristic pinks.


Scren shot from 'Versions'

Oliver Laric: Versions / Real Talk @ Seventeen, 17 Kingsland Rd - Hoxton

To 13 Feb: wwww.seventeengallery.com

Young video-based artist Oliver Laric makes a striking triple-impression here. First, he plays telling games with originality though a six minute documentary about doctored images using material taken from the internet – from Iranian rocket strikes to celebrity porn to a multiverse of manipulations of Zidane’s world cup final headbut – which illustrates how ‘every lie creates a parallel world – the one in which it is true’. The film itself comes with voice-overs by four commentators who variously interpret the meaning of that content. Second, he draws analogies between the breaking up of graven images in the reformation and the extremely wide variation in the status of images in the internet age by presenting vari-coloured polyurethane versions of a damaged icon from Utrecht Cathedral. Third, he riffs on those themes by curating four films in the basement under the rubric ‘Real Talk’. I loved Aleksandra Domanovic’s version of ‘Annie Hall’, which literalises Woody Allen’s sound track by correlating it against images culled from the seventy million–strong Getty archive – with wildly varying effects as the nature of the match changes. Allow yourself plenty of time here!




Still showing from previous lists: Gordon Cheung to 7 Feb, Visible Invisible: Against the Security of the Real To 7 Feb, Ornulf Opdahl to 26 Feb, William Eggleston to 27 Feb, Shoa Azari & Shahram Karimi to 27 Feb, Rula Halawani to 6 March, Eva Hesse & Katja Strunz to 7 March.

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


TEN FOR THE FUTURE

I am looking forward to:

Mat Collishaw, Tracey Emin & Paulo Rego @ The Foundling 27.1 - 9.10

John Stezaker @ The Approach 29.1 - 7.3

Eileen Agar @ Redfern Gallery 2.2 - 25.2

John Gerrard @ Thomas Dane 3.2 – 6.3

William Tillyer season @ Bernard Jacobson (four shows from Feb 5)

Bernard Frize @ Simon Lee 10.2 – 24.3

Franz Ackermann @ White Cube 10.2 – 1.4

Paul Nash @ Dulwich Picture Gallery 10.2 – 9.5

Vanessa Billy @ Limoncello 12.2 – 13.3

Peeping Tom (curated by Keith Coventry) @ Vegas 18.2 - 28.3

NEW YEAR, NEW SHOWS

With almost everywhere opening afresh for the new decade, there’s almost too much to see at the moment – and that’s without factoring in the ongoing shows which I reached too late to list previously. So an honourable mention for the following hangovers from last year:

• an almost surreal life-force sparks the darkly humorous photographs in Lithuanian Rimaldas Viksraitis’s ‘Grimaces of a Weary Village’ at Anya Stonelake’s temporary base in an architect’s office near Euston (to 16 Jan);

• Viksraitis is strongly endorsed by Martin Parr, and a punchy retrospective of Parr’s own work runs
at Rocket until the end of the month;

• perhaps the best Howard Hodgkin show I’ve seen - not that I am in general his biggest fan – is at the Gagosian’s Davies Street branch to Jan 23: just nine beautifully straightforward and intimately-scaled paintings which seemed to link up into views through the window of a train through changing weather as I moved around the gallery;


• Rob Tufnell’s fascinating accumulation of ‘Hyperborean Manners’ in his new timeshare arrangement with Sutton Lane Gallery , including offbeat items specially acquired by him and a particularly good example of John Stezaker’s face/cave collages in which there is a powerful sense of the skull (to 30 Jan);

• the group show ‘Pretty Baa-Lambs’ @ Madder 139 (until 30 Jan) is named from Peter Jones’ small and rather disturbing portraits of vintage toy lambs in landscapes, but the stand-out picture is Guy Allot’s ‘Fredville Oak’, a big painting of a giant oak, through holes in which landscape views appear.

But on to the new stuff x 10…


Martin Maloney: Lolita

Detox @ Concrete Allotment Projects, 16 Hoxton Square – Hoxton

To 6 Feb: www.detoxme.org.uk

This lively group show set up by artist-curator-participants Kristen Lovelock and Jo Wilmot rather appropriately utilizes a former martial arts centre to present work in the gym, corridors and changing rooms. It starts from the new year premise that we will have a mighty post-noughties hangover requiring recovery modes – of self-improvement and self-presentation as much as of detox, it seemed to me: for example, in Agathe Snow’s ‘Total Attitude Work Out Video’, a parody of celebrity exercise regimes. All good, if somewhat uneven, fun though the two highest-impact artists seemed the least directly thematic: Rainer Ganhal’s video of himself risking plenty for art by cycling against the traffic in Brussels, and Martin Maloney’s fluid new set of multi-women which exaggerate the conventions of the modernist nude in super-zingy style.


Mali Morris: Sillett

Tag: From 3 to 36 – New London Painting @ Brown, 42 Hoxton Square – Hoxton

To 6 Feb: www.browngallery.co.uk

The mysterious title of the show at White Cube’s lively basement neighbour refers to a procedure whereby Kim Brown asked three young London painters to show one painting each and to choose another London painter, who in turn chose another to show and choose – and so on, until there were 36 paintings. That makes for a survey of painters and their connections which comes from a broader base than would a conventional selection. You can follow the tag game of who chose whom, look for trends or just pick your favourites – in my case Jill Mason’s sideways landscape; Geraldine Swayne’s curiously-proportioned hobby horse rider; Clare Price’s graffiti-tinged abstraction mixing acrylic gouache, spray paint and household lacquers; and Mali Morris’s lively swish ‘n’ spot at the invitation of her student Gabriel Hartley.


Giants of Modernism #1 (Vortex Head with Pipe)

Ansel Krut @ Modern Art, 23-5 Eastcastle St – Fitzrovia

To 13 Feb: www.modernart.net

Ansel Krut is a South African who has lived in London – and taught influentially –
for getting on thirty years. This is his first outing in glitzier surroundings after showing previously at the excellent but more domestic DomoBaal. Krut’s quirky and spirited inventions play affectionately with any number of modern painting devices and communicate his own enjoyment in making them – indeed, he himself says it is a good sign if he laughs while at work. Krut has intensified his colours in recent years, and is one of those painters with an instantly recognizable palette. And if you’ve ever asked yourself what the personality of a vortex, onion or escalator might be, here are some entertaining possible answers…


Takiing Care of the Crops

Ryan Mosley @ Alison Jacques, 16-18 Berners St – Fitzrovia

To 13 Feb: www.alisonjacquesgallery.com

Ryan Mosley (with the ‘o’ as in ‘hot’) is a rising young painter who, like Krut, creates a distinctive world of his own which draws you in to believing in its impossible logic. This, his first big solo show, features a bemusingly amusing range of the human treated like objects (free-floating feet, misplaced faces, a head in a snow shaker) merging with a peculiarly active non-human world (a happy cactus, invasions of pipes, snakes everywhere – indeed, they’re all we can see in the near-abstract ‘A View from a Window’). And they’re helped on their way by titles (‘A Concave Friar’, ‘Blue Bottle Mask’, ‘Snake in Drag’…) which point up the absurdly tangential wit.


Scren shot from 'Versions'

Oliver Laric: Versions / Real Talk @ Seventeen, 17 Kingsland Rd - Hoxton

To 13 Feb: wwww.seventeengallery.com

Young video-based artist Oliver Laric makes a striking triple-impression here. First, he plays telling games with originality though a six minute documentary about doctored images using material taken from the internet – from Iranian rocket strikes to celebrity porn to a multiverse of manipulations of Zidane’s world cup final headbut – which illustrates how ‘every lie creates a parallel world – the one in which it is true’. The film itself comes with voice-overs by four commentators who variously interpret the meaning of that content. Second, he draws analogies between the breaking up of graven images in the reformation and the extremely wide variation in the status of images in the internet age by presenting vari-coloured polyurethane versions of a damaged icon from Utrecht Cathedral. Third, he riffs on those themes by curating four films in the basement under the rubric ‘Real Talk’. I loved Aleksandra Domanovic’s version of ‘Annie Hall’, which literalises Woody Allen’s sound track by correlating it against images culled from the seventy million–strong Getty archive – with wildly varying effects as the nature of the match changes. Allow yourself plenty of time here!


The Fight

Shoa Azari & Shahram Karimi: Blazing Grace @ eastcentral, 23 Bateman’s Row – Shoreditch

To 27 Feb: www.eastcentralgalleries.com

The traditional layering techniques of oil painting are in limited evidence these days, but these western-based Iranian collaborators make a version for our times which, though it didn’t sound the best idea to me, achieves a haunting intensity: Aziri projects looped video onto Karimi’s paintings of exactly the same footage, paintings which are themselves overlaid on scarcely-visible Farsi texts. The luminous results are also oil paintings in another sense, as they show the burning oil fields in Kuwait, as set alight by Saddam Hussein’s retreating troops in 1991. And so enter echoes of current military and environmental concerns. This is, incidentally, the second show at eastcentral, a handsome though below-ground space which is ideally suited to video – and it is, I suppose, pretty much in the middle of the shape you would make by joining Victoria Miro, the Barbican, the Whitechapel and Vyner Street….


Lloyd George

Danny Rolph: Automatic Shoes @ Poppy Sebire, Piccadilly Arcade – Central

To 20 Feb: www.poppysebire.com

The second pop-up (poppy-up?) space for this new gallery is over three floors in a posh shopping arcade opposite the Royal Academy which has fallen on lease-freeing times. That layout facilitates a balanced presentation of Rolph’s works on paper, canvas and – most characteristically – the almost-clear polycarbonate building material triplewall. All teem with energy, colour and references to arrive at what seem to be abstractions of pretty-much everything. Like having, says Rolph, the right crossword but the wrong clues. I suppose I should admit that Danny is an established favourite of mine, and my interview with him forms part of the show’s documentation – but that doesn’t make it any less good!

Interview @ www.poppysebire.com/downloads/Rolph-interview-CareyKent.pdf


Untitled (Hooded Figure), 1969

Philip Guston: Works on Paper @ Timothy Taylor, 15 Carlos Place – Mayfair

To 20 Feb: www.timothytaylorgallery.com

It’s always good to see work by the great and influential Philip Guston (1913-80). He’s hardly under-exposed, but this show provides a fresh angle by forming a retrospective of works on paper: from 50s abstract expressionist studies to fascinating transitional not-quite-figurative mid-60s drawings (from a time when Guston stopped painting) and on to a wide range in his cartoonish late style, including books as buildings, wonderfully simplified hooded figures and clusters of fruit and shoes. And they look great as a whole, with all 24 works restricted to black, white and Guston’s characteristic pinks.


Untitled (Newspaper on Ground, Grass, California, 2000)

William Eggleston: 21st Century @ Victoria Miro, 16 Wharf Road - Hoxton

To 27 Feb: www.victoria-miro.com

This presentation of 22 of Eggleston’s photographs from the last decade – his seventh – has been widely praised, and I can’t swim against that tide: his uncommon takes on the commonplace seem to be moving towards a more abstract approach and to use less strident colours than the 1970’s images which made his name, but the results remain potently strange. The subjects indicate his continuing ability to achieve those effects from unpromising material: freezer with ice bags, Kentucky; soap on windshield, car wash, Memphis; water on dirt road, Las Pozas, Mexico…


Al Bira

Rula Halawani: Presence and Impressions @ Selma Feriani Gallery, 23 Maddox St – Mayfair

To 6 Mar: www.selmaferiani.com

‘Before and after’ is a well-worn trope, but given a powerful political charge at this recently-opened Near East oriented space just off Regent Street. Halawani is a Palestinian who was born and still lives in East Jerusalem, occupied by Jordan from 1948-67 and by Israel since then. Here she presents nine diptychs which match found photographs from historic archives of Palestinian villages as they were before the 1948 mass depopulation of Palestinian land with images of the destroyed or abandoned sites as they are now. The landscapes thus both represent and – in a quiet key but intensely – resist the effects of the longest occupation in modern times on a community and its culture.

Still showing from previous lists: Donald Judd to 29 Jan, Gordon Cheung to 30 Jan, Visible Invisible: Against the Security of the Real To 7 Feb, Ornulf Opdahl to 26 Feb, Eva Hesse & Katja Strunz to 7 March.

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


TEN FOR THE FUTURE

I am looking forward to:

Waseem Ahmed @ Laurent Delaye 22.1 – 27.2

Magali Reus @ Ibid Projects 22.1 – 7.3

Michael Landy @ South London Gallery 29.1 - 14.3

Eileen Agar @ Redfern Gallery 2.2 - 25.2

John Gerrard @ Thomas Dane 3.2 – 6.3

William Tillyer season @ Bernard Jacobson (four shows from Feb 5)

Bernard Frize @ Simon Lee 10.2 – 24.3

Franz Ackermann @ White Cube 10.2 – 1.4

Paul Nash @ Dulwich Picture Gallery 10.2 – 9.5

Vanessa Billy @ Limoncello 12.2 – 13.3

NEW YEAR CHOICES

For the most part this just rounds up what's still on of the shows I recommend ahead of the mid-January openings, but with pictures!
Meanwhile, in the bigger places, head to Trafalgar Square for a threefold dose of charged sculptural realism. The rightly lauded National Gallery show ‘The Sacred Made Real’ isn’t just a chance to see seven stunning paintings by Francisco de Zurbarán (though it is that, and suffice it to say that he fully measures up to the four from Valasquez),it also makes a strong case for how the art of polychromy – painting votive wooden statues – fed into the those Spanish works. Superbly-preserved examples by forgotten Spanish sculptors such as Juan de Mesa and Juan Martínez Montañés are shown alongside the tenebrous masterpieces which they influenced. Spotlit in gloom, the wooden figures teeter – often very effectively – on the edge of kitsch and surreal in the relish with which they recreate details such as Jesus’ flayed back.

The Chapman brothers may come to mind, or even Marc Quinn’s quinquennial cycle of heads cast from his own blood – and as it happens the National Portrait Gallery is now showing its recently-acquired version of 'Self'from 2006. And there’s some of the same spirit and crepuscular viewing conditions back at the National Gallery in Ed and Nancy Kienholz’s ‘The Hoerengracht’, a monumental restaging of the Amsterdam red light district in the 1980s complete with prostitutes life cast from visitors to the Kienholz studio – it’s magnificently seedy, and all held together by light, framing devices and resinous gloop. The installation seems to have got a bad press, not for the presence of such content in such an august institution, nor for the parallels drawn with Dutch paintings from the Golden Age, but for finger wagging attitudinising – maybe so, but I couldn’t work out what message was being preached.






The Epoch of Perpetual Happiness

Peter Davies @ The approach, 47 Approach Rd – Bethnal Green

To 17 Jan: www.theapproach.co.uk

If you like lists and quizzes you’ll love Peter Davies’ big painting ‘The Epoch of Perpetual Happiness’, which provides a pictorial spin on his well-known lists of a hundred hot or cool artists. It presents a huge range of art and pop references – the press release lists some 150 for you to spot but you can also gain bonus points for discovering unlisted inclusions: one of them is Gerhard Richter, represented through the filter of his candle on the cover of Sonic Youth’s ‘Daydream Nation’. Richter is also a presence in the show as a whole in the way in which Davies pursues parallel but very different strands of painting which themselves interrogate the nature of painting. The other two large canvasses here are an obsessively detailed take on colour field abstraction via thousands of small squares, and the conversion of gestural abstract expressionist marks into an anally retentive equivalent using carefully ruled straight lines.


Jessica Lagunas: The Better to Kiss You With

The Body in Women’s Art Now @ Rollo Contemporary Art, 51 Cleveland St (Fitzrovia)

To 20 Jan: www.rolloart.com/

The first part of a three-part survey of work created by women artists this century in which the body is central, ‘Embodied’ combines Regina José Galindo and Sigalit Landau’s recent video classics with less well known but also interesting work by Jessica Lagunas (who, like Galindo, grew up in Guatemala) and young British photographer Lydia Maria Julien. And there is an excellent catalogue. I recommend you start downstairs, where Lagunas piles on the beauty to edgily comic excess by applying lipstick and nail varnish for an hour, and then drop back between the shorter works to see how she’s getting on…


Ornulf Opdahl: 'Mood Paintings of the North' @ Kings Place gallery, 90 York Way - Kings Cross

To 26 Feb: www.kingsplace.com

Kings Place is very much worth a visit: not only is it a spectacularly appointed new building with a high quality music programme and a good café, it also has lots of visual art, courtesy of the Pangolin and Kings Place galleries. The former is unusual in showing primarily sculpture and being linked to a foundry, and exhibits many sculptures outside the gallery (a leaflet takes you round a trail, and there are striking front window displays).

The Kings Place Gallery spreads its wares across three levels outside the large but rather tucked away room of the gallery itself. Currently it is showing no fewer than 50 recent oils and watercolours by Ornulf Opdahl, who paints the mountains and fjords of Alesund on the west of Norway. If that sounds like a recipe for traditional romanticism, it is: in the accompanying ten minute film Opdahl himself talks about his recurring fascination for 'a landscape which always reflects my mind'. But he also says that he 'tries to be abstract all the time', and that is what gives his dramatic explorations of light and mood a modern inflexion - in another context, you might not guess the subject of 'The Mountain, Ramsen, Winter'...


Cecily Brown: Aujourd'hui Rose

Visible Invisible: Against the Security of the Real @ Parasol unit, 14 Wharf Rd - Hoxton

To 7 Feb: www.parasol-unit.org

Veteran Hans Josephsohn's figures dotted around the Parasol unit's elegant and considerable space are the counterpoints to four painters - Cecily Brown, Shaun McDowell, Katy Moran and Maaike Schoorel - who work in the space between figuration and abstraction. This show would be worth visiting just for the opening room of Katy Moran's intimate and astutely-judged apparent hesitations. But you also get Cecily Brown’s punning modulations between people and skulls; the flickeringly fleshy evocations of Shaun McDowell, rapidly emerging as the best known of the Hannah Barry Gallery's South London set; and Maaike Schoorel making a portrait of Roger Hiorns almost disappear into blankness as if she knew that he would fail to win the Turner Prize.


Painting 15 from 'Under the Snow'

Ilya & Emilia Kabakov: Under the Snow @ Sprovieri Gallery, 27 Heddon St – Central

To 17 Jan: www.sprovieri.com

Sprovieri is tucked away on the first floor behind the phone box (which features on the cover of Ziggy Stardust, incidentally) at the end of Heddon Street. It opened ten years ago with the New York based Russian émigrés Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, and has shown them regularly. If you think of the Kabakovs as producing hardcore conceptual installations turning on the legacies of Soviet history, then this gently lyrical set of large paintings from their extensive ‘Under the Snow’ suite will surprise you. They show a world blanketed in snow, varying gaps in which reveal people and landscapes. These play on memory, scale, and what is and isn’t hidden. There’s a hint, perhaps, of Ilya’s original career as a children’s book illustrator. White, say the Kabakovs, 'is the space of pure contemplation’ that ‘suddenly turns out to be inserted into the visual world' in the form of snow. There is also an intriguing extract from the complex project ‘The Teacher and The Student: Charles Rosenthal and Ilya Kabakov’, which consists of work shown as the products of a fictional version of Ilya and his teacher.


Eva Hesse & Katja Strunz @ Camden Arts Centre, Arkwright Rd

To 7 March: http://www.camdenartscentre.org

Camden has two strong shows at the moment. No surprise in the case of Eva Hesse’s tensely ambiguous, appropriately provisional ‘studioworks’ – poised between mathematical and organic, pictorial and abstract, male and female, prison and home: these tabletop displays got rave revies in Edinburgh. But German sculptor Katja Stunz fits in well with her ‘Sound of the Pregeometric Age’, a room full of instrument or musician-like found sculptural combinationals. They are set up stands, and wired for sound to give off the crackles, shrillings, rustles and bleeps of their world as if testing the acoustics of the space. This works especially well when the traffic outside joins in. Meanwhile the title points to echoes from the deep past – the ‘pregeometric age’ is not art before minimalism, but a scientific term for the time before the big bang.



Untitled (74-8)

Donald Judd: ‘Progressions 1960’s and 1970’s’ @ Simon Lee, 12 Berkeley St – Central

To 29 January: www.simonleegallery.com

The purest pleasure currently available in a London gallery may well be this series of six horizontal mounted wall works by the late American master of anti-illusion, Donald Judd. It’s a chance to track the subtle changes in shape and means from 1967 to 1975 in what, colour aside, may look near-identical works. In fact, Judd sought increasing perfection in line with the improving manufacturing capability, moving from galvanized iron painted with lacquer to highly polished brass to anodized aluminium, in which an electrical process maximizes the adhesion of the paint.


The Journey

Gordon Cheung @ Room, 31 Waterson St – Shoreditch

To 31 Jan: www.roomartspace.co.uk

Gordon Cheung has surfed the zeitgeist from one recession to the next with his imaginings of the end of civilisation with his characteristic integration of stock listings into paintings: here the close-up heads of those market beasts the bull and the bear ram home such themes. But is it time for a change? Cheung provides three with laser-burnt subversions of Durer etchings, and new lines in sculpture and video animation: the latter in particular are mesmerically well-suited to his psychedelically apocalyptic colours. And the four screens of cowboys come with the bonus of The Doors' seminal 'The End' as a soundtrack.


Bee Painting, Small Screen III, 2009

Klaus Weber @ Herald St, Bethnal Green

To 17 Jan: www.heraldst.com

And perhaps the weirdest pleasure, if pleasure it be, are these shit paintings. Not mere bad paintings; nor paint pretending to be shit as in Dan Colen; nor genuine balls of elephant shit as in Chris Ofili; nor even the canvases placed in the Swedish forest by Henrik Hakansson, who waits for swallows to make abstract patterns - that’s close, but not quite weird enough. The highly imaginative German artist Klaus Weber (you may have seen his people with fountains sprouting from their orifices on the South Bank or his vacuum sculptures) has radically delegated artistic control by exploiting the fact that bees are bunged up in the hive all winter, and then take a ‘cleansing flight’ during which they defecate on anything which is unnaturally white. Canvases placed in a bee-keeper’s yard were thus anointed by delicate yellow and light brown marks to become ‘bee paintings’. You can compare the bees with bomber planes. You can muse on how it must feel to be liberated from such a burden. You can ponder the bees’ easy desecration of the modernist purity of the white canvas. Or you can just say: well, that’s weird.



Hans-Peter Feldmann @ Ancient & Modern, 201 Whitecross Street – Barbican

To 16 Jan: http://www.ancientandmodern.org/

How often do you see 174 paintings of nudes in a contemporary gallery? Especially one with Ancient & Modern’s particularly modest scale? Well, it turns out to be an exact fit for Hans-Peter Feldmann’s installation of stamps, each showing just that. It’s a well-worn topic for thematic stamp collectors, but the gallery context alters their reception, just as it has that of the multifarious other selections the wide-ranging German has presented in the past in addition to his photographs.

TEN FOR THE FUTURE

I am looking forward to:

Ori Gersht @ Mummery & Schnelle 13.1 – 27.2

Oliver Laric @ Seventeen 13.1 – 13.2

Ryan Mosley @ Alison Jacques 13.1 – 13.2

Danny Rolph @ Poppy Sebire 14.1 – 20.2

William Eggleston @ Victoria Miro 15.1 – 27.2

Max Mosscrop @ Five Years: 16.1 – 31.1

Waseem Ahmed @ Laurent Delaye 22.1 – 27.2

Magali Reus @ Ibid Projects 22.1 – 7.3

Michael Landy @ South London Gallery 29.1 - 14.3

John Gerrard @ Thomas Dane 3.2 – 6.3

BEST OF 2009 + VENICE SPECIAL

Looking back at 2009, hardly a good year due to Art World closing, I nonetheless see that I saw impressive art in Bexhill, Eastbourne, Brighton, Southampton, Oxford, Birmingham, Manchester, Dusseldorf, Frankfurt, Berlin, Basel, Berne, Zurich, Paris, Copenhagen, Malaga, Venice and New York. But even sticking purely to London and strictly to contemporary, I am spoiled for choice, and shall allow myself a more than excessive 2 x 20 memorable shows in no particular order:

Non-commercial 20:

John Baldessari @ Tate Modern (& Spruth Magers)
Roni Horn @ Tate Modern
Ed Ruscha @ the Hayward
‘The Russian Linesman’ @ the Hayward
Design High @ Louise Blouin
Francis Alys @ NPG
Jeff Koons @ Serpentine
Robert Kusmirowski @ Barbican
‘My Yard’ @ Whitechapel
Richter Portaits @ NPG
Altermodern @ Tate Britain
Jeff McMillan @ Peer
Roger Hiorns for Artangel
Rebecca Warren @ Serpentine
Anish Kapoor @ Royal Academy
Iza Genzken @ Whitechapel
Michael Snow @ BFI Southbank
DJ Simpson @ Bloomberg
‘The Photographic Object’ @ The Photographer’s Gallery
Mat Collishaw @ The Freud Museum

Commercial 20:

André Butzer @ Alison Jacques
Tala Madani @ Pilar Corrias
Philip Allen @ The Approach
Cinthia Marcelle @ Sprovieri
David Claerbout @ Hauser & Wirth
‘In Between the Lines’ @ Trinity Contemporary
Alexis Harding @ Mummery & Schnelle
Caragh Thuring @ Thomas Dane
Phyllida Barlow @ One in the Other
Glenn Brown @ Gagosian
Keith Coventry @ Haunch of Venison
Richard Serra @ Gagosian
Leonardo Drew @ FAS
Cedric Chistie @ Flowers East
Marnie Weber @ Simon Lee
Sara Haq @ Alexia Goethe
Carter @ Hotel
Adeela Suleman @ Aicon
Oliver Laric @ Seventeen
‘Supersurface’ @ Laurent Delaye (Robyn Denny, Michael Stubbs,
Danny Rolph, Perry Roberts, Shaan Syed)

Mummery & Schnelle deserve a special mention, as Maria Chevska, Carol Rhodes and Robert Bordo were all top shows as well as Alexis Harding. It was tempting to include the current London and Oxford double of Miroslav Balka (or even treble as he showed at White Cube in January) as one show. I also liked several shows about – well, nothing really: parts II and III of Laure Genillard’s ‘Presque Rien’, ‘Beyond these Walls’ at the South London Gallery and not so much the retrospective of various voids initiated by from the Pompidou Centre and which I caught in Berne (how can voids go on tour?) as the fascinating catalogue which justified the show. Also Appau Junior Boakye-Yiadom as the most interesting new emergent, at both Primo Alonso and Josh Lilley, and Vanessa Billy and Ryan Mosley as rapid riders.

The best new galleries were Poppy Sebire (kicking off jointly with Alan Cristea through a lively two-location show of Boo Ritson), Josh Lilley, East Central and Calvert22 in a year in which, despite the recession, there was no reduction in the total number of spaces in London. And after something of a drift west in 2008, the trend reversed a bit in 2009, with the excellent Rokeby (star show Tom Badley)and Ritter/Zamet (star show Dolly Thompsett) moving east, and Vyner Street enhanced by the arrival of two of the liveliest galleries: Madder 139 and (imminently) Vegas.

So what about outside London? That’s a bit more arbitrary, but I liked:

Martin Kippenberger @ MOMA, New York
Vanessa Beecroft: VB64 @ Deitch Projects, New York
Kirsten Ortwed @ Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen
Beat Zoderer @ Bartha Garage, Basel
Giuseppe Penone @ Ikon, Birmingham
Alberto Giacometti @ Foundation Bayeler, Basel
Joseph Beuys @ de la Warr Pavilion, Bexhill
Chema Cobo & Wilhelm Sasnal @ CAC Malaga
Susan Collins @ de la Warr Pavilion, Bexhill
Clay Ketter @ Daniel Templon, Paris
Subversive Spaces @ Whitworth, Manchester
Shaun Gladwell (Australia), Martin Boyce (Scotland), John Gerrard
(collateral event) @ Venice Biennale - more on this below
‘Deterioration, They Said’ @ Migros, Zurich (mainly for the wonderful Shana Moulton)

Phew! And that’s not even to mention the best show of the year: the less contemporary Seurat survey ‘Figure and Space’, which I caught in Zurich.


WATER & LIGHT IN VENICE

The Venice Biennale closed on 22 November. With 77 national pavilions, Daniel Birnbaum’s colossal ‘Making Worlds’ exhibition (which itself featured 90 artists) and 44 collateral events, there can have been few artistic themes or approaches which were not covered. But Venice is the classic city of water and light, and there was certainly plenty of both in some of the best work to be seen.



Mike Bouchet: Watershed, 2009 in ‘Making Worlds’ - the house as it sank, and as it was later reinstalled

But we start with a problem. Two artists aimed very directly to occupy the waters of Venice. Mike Bouchet had what Daniel Birnbaum called the megalomaniac idea of building a replica of a typical American suburban home which would float incongruously on pontoons in the basin of the Arsenale, allowing the historic backdrop to highlight its modular repetition. Appropriately, perhaps, the house sank during installation. When reinstalled, it was with a little extra meaning to its take on the American dream.



Alexander Ponomarev: ‘SubTiziano’ from the ongoing cycle ‘Utilisation of Packs’ (1999-2009) in Grand Canal @ Universita Ca’ Foscari

Alexander Ponomarev, one of many Russians putting on a strong showing, took fewer risks in bringing a submarine to the archetypal Venetian light of the Grand Canal. Ponanarev sees this as a tribute to both Leonardo, original conceiver of he submarine, and Titian, conqueror of colour for whom it is painted with colourful ‘negative camouflage’. It is also the ninth in a series which turns a deadly weapon into a marker of aesthetic connections, emerging around the globe to demonstrate the power of art.



Aleksandra Mir: ‘VENEZIA (all places contain all others)’, 2009, in ‘Making Worlds’

The Italian-based Pole Aleksandra Mir chose a hundred images of watery scenes from around the world, over which she had the word ‘Venezia’ teasingly overlaid in a range of typical postcard styles. A million of these postcards are to be given away to Biennale visitors so that they can activate the work by posting them across the world. ‘The idea of waterways as a supra-national entity’, says Mir, ‘mirrors patterns of globalization, the erosion of the nation state through the growth of travel and communication and its reemergence as a brand to be marketed’.



Miquel Barceló: ‘Djoliba (Riu de Sang)’, 2009, for Spain

Newer media dominated in the national pavilions, but the Spanish featured the paintings and ceramics of Miquel Barceló, fresh from his controversial ceiling painting for the United Nations in Geneva, which used a hundred tons of paint in icicle forms. His newest, near-abstract, series shimmeringly capture the foam of waves off Mali in an all-over surface which exploits paint as a natural force: Barcelo visibly plays with how the application of wet and mobile paint leads to a dry and static result which looks wet and mobile.



Poitr Uklański: ‘Untitled (Dancing Nazis)’, 2008, in ‘Mapping the Studio’ @ Palazzo Grassi / Punta Della Dogana

New York / Warsaw based Pole Poitr Uklański featured in both halves of Francois Pinault’s vast presentation of just 20% of his collection – and infiltrated much of the Palazzo Grassi with the sound of his Untitled (Dancing Nazis). It combined portraits of actors playing Nazis with the rather un-Venetian light of a flashing disco floor as modernist grid. Whether it was about the role of the audience, the artificial construction of meanings, the aesthetic appeal of fascism or how close creation and destruction may be in human nature, this was a striking piece. Cheekily, too, this ‘new work’ was made out of reinstalling Uklański’s two signature pieces Dance Floor (1996) and The Nazis (1998).



Nikola Uzunovski: ‘My Sunshine’, 2007-09, for the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia

An ‘unlikely country award’ for the charming and generous project by Macedonia’s Nikola Uzunovski. He is studying how to make ‘artificial suns’ in polar areas to give their people more hours of light in winter, and presented serious-looking physics and video documentation of his ongoing experiments. They involve launching flying spheres so that they reflect sunlight and take on something of the sun’s appearance. An absurdist poke, perhaps, at the politics of global warming – while suggesting how hard it will be to solve those problems though technological means.



Iván Navarro: ‘Resistance’, 2009, for Chile

Iván Navarro grew up under Pinochet’s dictatorship but is now based in New York. For 'Resistance' he showed a chair made of fluorescent tubes, which itself adds a threatening edge to minimalist form: light is a symbol for hope but here suggests a machine for killing, too. The chair was attached it to a bicycle so that the chair was illuminated by pedaling the bike, and a video showed it being ridden around Times Square in New York, bringing a political edge to the comparisons between bodily-generated and commercial light. What kind of power was being criticized?



Spencer Finch: ‘Moonlight (Venice, March 10, 2009)’ in ‘Making Worlds’

American Spencer Finch combines light and dark and grids more poetically in paying homage to his ‘favourite Italian, Galileo Galilei’, who 400 years ago became the first to train a telescope on the moon. Finch shifts the colour of sunlight to that of the Venetian moonlight, which he measured using a colourometer at midnight on 10 March, 2009, by applying coloured filters to the windows of the Arsenale. The pay-off is that what sounds a dry scientific translation of our subjective experience actually proves decidedly beautiful.



Martin Boyce: ‘No Reflections’, 2009 @ Palazzo Pisani

Martin Boyce, for Scotland, also replaces one light source with another, swapping the elegant chandeliers of the 15th century Palazzo Pisani for metal lights. They use a set of forms derived from a 1925 concrete tree which Boyce has said represents ‘a perfect collapse of architecture and nature’. Seven rooms re-imagine the Palace as an urban garden, creating an atmosphere of displaced but atmospherically resonant decline. There is no water, but its former presence is implied by the visitor needing to use stepping stones to cross a room covered in crepe paper leaves left by evaporated pools – hence the title, ‘No Reflections’.



Bruce Nauman: ‘Three Head Fountain (Juliet, Andrew, Rinde)’, 2005, for USA

Quite apart from providing the key work for the ‘Mapping the Studio’ presentation of the Pinault collection, Bruce Nauman won the prize for best national pavilion for America with a retrospective across three buildings. Thus his aggressive explorations of our collective neuroses permeated the city. The works were linked by three threads, one of which was the water and light combination of ‘Fountains and Neons’. And the water gushed – oddly enough – from everywhere except the mouths - in two Three Head Fountains in a glass extension to the Gardenia Pavilion.



Tatsuo Miyajima: ‘Spirits in the Water with Cuban Artists’, 2009, in ‘In-Finitum’ @ the Palazzo Fortuny

The Japanese installation artist Tatsuo Miyajima is known for his sculptural use of repeatedly counting LED numbers. This work, well-suited to the Fortuny’s atmospheric and darkened display of old and new on themes around the infinite, is part of Miyajima’s ‘Time in Water’ series, which set the numbers in a pool. It relates specifically to a visit to Cuba following the hurricane in 2008, after which Miyajima paid tribute to the potential recuperative value of art by timing the counting to match the heartbeats of 300 Cuban artists. ‘I believe the greatest artists are not those participating in international art exhibitions’, he has said, ‘but human beings who inspire and who give hope to society’.