SCULPTURE-FEST

Gary Webb at the Zabludowicz Collection


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

Folkert de Jong: The Dance

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

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

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

Upside Down Cloak from the Buhuu Suite


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

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

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


Ground floor view

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

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

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


Exhaust (24 hours of exhaled air within foil balloons)

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

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

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

Installation view

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

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


Fairy steering butterfly from 'The Taming' at Danielle Arnaud

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

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

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


I Don't Fancy You, Lee

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

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

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


Standing Nude with Orange Stockings, 1914

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

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

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


The Back that Used to be the Front

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

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

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


Artist's Proof

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

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

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

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

NEW IN AMSTERDAM

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



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

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




Douglas Henderson: Wonder Woman @ Gallery Mario Mazzoli, Berlin

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




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

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




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

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




Aurelia Gratzer: Flatwerk @ Huchentoot, Berlin

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




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

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




Peter Davis: Untitled (Red) @ Slewe, Amsterdam

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


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



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

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




Roderick Hietbrink: The Living Room @ Ron Mandos Gallery

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




Conny Kuilboer @ Actionfields Gallery, Belgium

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

ABSTRACT DIRECTIONS

There seems to be enough interesting abstraction around at the moment to motivate a wide-ranging tour of London. I start with seven examples from seven different gallery zones which illustrate the variety which flows from differing motive forces for the work. I would crudely characterise those as appropriation and collage (Taaffe), chance and process(Baroff), drawing and gesture (Crosby), photography (Graham), conceptual play and language(Pirecki)and definitional issues (Mummery & Schnelle) as well as pure painting (Hoyland). Added to all of which I would also recommend Harold Cohen at Bernard Jacobson; Robin Foottit at Cole Contemporary; Kate Owens at Seventeen; Simon Dybbroe Møller at Laura Bartlett; 'Provisional Painting' at Modern Art; the forthcoming Callum Innes at Frith Street and Frank Bowling at Rollo; and the rather different perspective of Buddhist artist Yi Xuan at the Hua Gallery.



Ingo Meller: Königsblau hell, Mussini 485 | Königsblau dunkel, Mussini 486 | Lichtblau, Pebeo 33 | Ultramarinrosarot, Scheveningen 187, 2008/09

What If It's All True, What Then? @ Mummery & Schnelle, 83 Great Titchfield St - Fitzrovia

Part 1: 6 April - 14 May (Part 2: 18 May - 25 June): http://www.mummeryschnelle.com/
This overview of that fertile strand of abstraction which tweaks the distinction between painting and object has the incidental merit of invoking some excellent recent shows elsewhere(Angela de la Cruz and Peter Joseph at Lisson; Simon Callery at Fold; and Rebecca Salter, at the Beardsmore Gallery). Here's Ingo Meller’s radical follow-through on all those comments about figurative paintings being at the same time just paint: his curiously pleasing swathes are dragged onto linen, presented exceedingly plainly (no frame or support), and named after exactly what it says on the tubes of paint they come from and – in one way – represent.


Fuji Fujicolor HR400 400asa Beyond Caring 1984

Paul Graham: Films @ Anthony Reynolds, 60 Great Marlborough St – London

To 4 June: http://www.anthonyreynolds.com/
The English photographer Paul Graham, based in America for a decade now, has a 30 year retrospective at the Whitechapel. In it, he holds documentary and formal concerns in balance in depicting such subjects as unemployment offices (the 'Beyond Caring' sequence whihc is the source for the 'Films' image featured above), the Irish troubles and Japanese consumerism. Anthony Reynolds' show presents an abstract take on the same material by scanning unused frames and ends of the film stocks: the resulting images are titled for the stock used and photograph taken with it - rather in the manner of Ingo Meller above.


Earth Watcher (Mysteries 6)

John Hoyland: Mysteries @ Beaux Arts, 22 Cork Street – Central

To 7 May: http://www.beauxartslondon.co.uk/

I think of John Hoyland's 1979 retrospective as one of the Serpentine’s best shows – but I haven’t been convinced by much of his work since about 1985, which does sound a fairly lengthy ‘but’. I just didn’t pick up the same driving necessity as in his vigorously rigorous earlier work. It’s good, then, to report that many of the paintings here, made in his mid seventies despite health problems, are dark, brooding and somehow urgent abstractions with hints of voids and swamps as well as of night skies. There’s an aura of mortality, and it seems to be dark green.


Medallion Window

Philip Taaffe: Gagosian Gallery Britannia St - King’s Cross

To 14 May: http://www.gagosian.com/
Anything could be in the teeming mix of Philip Taaffe’s bright and big (up to 12 feet high) new cross-cultural,cross-historical multiplicities, which turn all manner of appropriated motifs into abstraction through sheer density of patterning. The history of decoration and the illustration of the natural world are favoured, and the most strikingly new works here look like mash-ups of stained glass, Islam and batik. Taaffe uses various methods – from printing more than from from painting – to steer well clear of expressionist tendencies while coming no closer to minimalism. Indeed, I struggle to think of another abstract painter who seems so far from both.




Untitled

Jill Baroff: The Edge of the World @ Bartha Contemporary, 136B Lancaster Rd – Ladbroke Grove

To 25 June: http://www.blogger.com/www.barthacontemporary.com
The last pre-move show in Bartha Contemporary’s current westerly location concentrates on the ‘floating line’ works of Brooklyn-based Jill Baroff. She colours a frame-like shape around delicate paper, cuts it out, then makes a ‘drawing’ out of the semi-haphazard way in which the cut-out element falls, sometimes colour side up, sometimes not. They make an effective and relatively instant contrast with the beautiful ‘tide drawings’ in which Baroff records 24 hour cycles of sea movement through variable line spacings - ask, and you can see those, too.


King Heroin

Clem Crosby @ Rachmaninoff’s, First Floor, Unit 106, 301 Kingsland Rd – Haggerston

To 28 May: http://www.rachmaninoffs.com/
Clem Crosby has been painting non-representationally for two decades. His chosen ground is formica, which provides a glossy, modern, industrial contrast to the more natural and historic oil paint, and also enables him to wipe off the paint at will until the ‘right’ spontaneous result is reached in the manner of a sketch made large. Crosby also has a neat way with titles: ‘Cartoon’ is half Tom and Jerry fight, half Renaissance whirlpool study; ‘The Greeks’ is an heroic attempt at the perfect orange; ‘King Heroin’ takes its cue from an anti-drugs leaflet and contains a more ironic echo of ‘hero’.


Philomene Pirecki - Grey Painting: Text Version

Aftermath: Objects From Projects @ the Chelsea Space,16 John Islip Street - Pimlico & Philomene Pirecki @ Laure Genillard, 2 Hanway Place – Tottenham Court Rd

3 May – 4 June (Objects) & 7 May – 16 July (Pirecki): http://www.chelseaspace.org/
Laure Genillard ended conventional programming at her eponymous gallery last year, yet it has a healthy after-life with two exhibitions in May. The Chelsea Space sees her curate an exploration of another kind of after-life: that of installation projects. What is left for posterity from Genillard’s collaborations with such as Maurizio Cattelan, Stephen Willats and Peter Wuethrich? Meanwhile, her premises are now the site of occasional shows supervised by curator-tenants Hana Noorali and Lynton Talbot. It should be worth attending the opening (6 May) and / or ringing (07598 778 985) to access a wide-ranging show by Philomene Pirecki - whose practice is much wider than the abstract paintings for which she is best-known - which will change over the generous run of the exhibition.


Durrington Towers I

David Hepher: A Song of the Earth and The Cry of Concrete @ Kings Place Gallery, 90 York Way – King’s Cross

6 May - 10 June: http://www.kingsplace.co.uk/
The King’s Place Gallery has a lot of space, and will use it all to survey some of David Hepher’s largest landscapes. As the show’s title suggests, it will feature not just his fairly often-seen urban collage paintings – which powerfully relocate the aesthetic effects of graffiti and neglect from tower block to canvas – but also his less familiar views of rural France. Either way, social concerns are present, but take second place to the echoes of the modernist grid in tower blocks, organic forms in farms and the contrasts between paint and more literal materials… so maybe I haven’t yet moved so far from the theme of abstraction.




Jemima Stehli: set up, sound check, end @ Vegas Gallery, 274 Poyser Street – Cambridge Heath

6-15 May: http://www.vegasgallery.co.uk/
One of my January recommendations was Andrew Cross’s surprisingly absorbing 30 minute film of drumming, ‘The Solo’. Now Jemima Stehli comes forward with a much longer video of a four piece band setting up and taking down a show. Stehli herself has been the lead actor in her fascinating explorations of body and image over the last fifteen years, but has recently moved towards real-time set-ups in which she is behind the camera. Until now, though, they've been shown only abroad. Something of an exodus is occurring from Vyner Street, incidentally: Kate MacGarry and Madder139 are moving back to their original areas (in Shoreditch and near the Barbican respectively) and this is Vegas’s second show elsewhere following a brief occupancy of the former David Risley space. Meanwhile, back in Vyner Street's biggest gallery…


Untitled

Miroslav Tichý @ Wilkinson Gallery,50-58 Vyner Street

6 May - 5 June: http://www.wilkinsongallery.com/Politically driven or politically incorrect? Miroslav Tichý, who has just died aged 85, was a trained artist restricted by the Czechoslovak Communist regime. From the late 60’s to mid 80’s, he made voyeuristic photographs of the women of Kyjov with a crude home-made pinhole cameras. So is it just the erratic focus, scratches, scribbles and awkward framing which turn them from his means of arousal into objects of art? Or was Tichý also marking out dissident territory, mindful of the political parallels of his thwarted desires and satirising the surveillance and paranoia of the state? Either way, this should prove a timely and (uncomfortably) alluring chance to take a view.

Images: courtesy relevant galleries and artists + Rob McKeever (Taaffe)

THE ARTIST'S HAND IN COLOGNE

In the romantic tradition, the artist’s hand is the paradigm indicator of the personal touch of genius. I noticed, though, that several interesting works at Cologne’s recent Art Fair (13-17 April) featured hands in more literal ways, typically glancing ironically at the tradition of the artist’s hand while also addressing other concerns.



John Miller: Everything is Said #7, 2009 @ Christian Nagel, Cologne

This painting purports to give the viewer the high emotion they might want from art… but being from arch-conceptualist Miller, who also had a parallel show at the Museum Ludwig, we should be suspicious. Indeed, this is one of a series taken from the TV show ‘I Love New York’, and so depicts fake feelings only and stands in – given the context of Miller’s oeuvre – for the fakery which runs through modern societies at every level. Those hands aren’t covering up the unbearable, but the inauthentic. And that shit brown is Miller’s most characteristic colour: many things get covered in it, though he has been known to turn it to gold…




Pierre Bismuth: The Right Hand of Joan Crawford in ‘Dancing Lady’, 2009 @ Team, New York

Here we can easily follow the artist’s hand, and yet... This is from a series in which Bismuth tracks the manual movements of screen icons by drawing onto a Plexiglas projection of the film. Bismuth then shows the resulting scribble-like path over a still from the film, taken from the point at which their hands lose contact. It makes for interesting power relations: the touchingly romantic hand in hand gesture is at the same time a little creepily submissive, and the presentation at once venerates and threatens to obliterate the star.



Horst Antes: White Profile with Long Yellow Arms @ Galerie Schlichtenmaier, Stuttgart

Horst Antes (born 1936) is one of those German artists (one might mention Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Gunther Forg, Imi Knoebel and Gunther Uecker) whose work crops up all over German fairs but is rarely seen in the UK. Taking de Kooning’s influence in a figurative rather than abstract direction in the early sixties, Antes developed his signature ‘Kopffüßler’ (‘Head-Footer’) figures, in which the head feeds directly into the legs with no intermediate body: it’s easy enough to read them as symbolising Germany’s cut down role in the post-war world. This looks like one of those, except that the edit means that there isn’t a body not to see, so to speak; and the hands take over from the eyes as the stunted man’s means of expression.



Laura Ford: Tree Figure, 2011 @ Scheffel, Frankfurt

Welsh sculptor Laura Ford was brought up in a fairground family, which fits almost too well with her surrealistically-tinged, slightly unsettling yet frankly appealing work. This tree figure economically combines human, animal and vegetable. But does it stand for our positive integration into the landscape, or a less healthy suggestion that no element of nature is safe from human takeover? Or, from the tree’s point of view, is the potential for animation liberating, or does it just make the lack of legs more of a frustration? Whatever the case, if those branches are arms, then this figure has a very useful number of hands.



Sterling Ruby: Transnailz / GPBRG, 2010 @ Foxy Productions, New York

The American sculptor, ceramist, painter and video maker assaults the masculine establishment power represented by minimalist structures with such antagonistic elements such as graffiti, social outsiderdom and explicit sexuality. Ruby has also cited the US’s maximum security prison system as the source of the ‘tension between an absolute repressive state and a liberated state’ in works such as this collage of sprayed card on plexiglass. It’s one of a series which combines geometric colourfields with found transsexual images (here just a well-nailed hand) and dribbles of nail varnish. I like how unenticing the description sounds, yet how insidiously attractive the object proves to be.





Claus Richter: Self-Portrait in Black with Soft Arms @ Clages, Cologne

There was plenty of Gerhardt at the fair, but not major works; and I’ve never much liked Daniel’s lurid paintings; so it was left to the third-most-famous German artist called Richter to appeal – with this engagingly doleful self-portrait in fabric and felt with arms escaping the frame as if ready to carry himself away. Perhaps, his gallerist speculated, Claus was worn to a flop by the effort that went into two recent solo shows. One is still up at the Cologne Kunstverien, a feel-good archive of his 70’s childhood interests featuring hundreds of toys ranging from Mickey Mouse’s Ferris Wheel to Butterscotch the Electric Pony, from Polly Pocket doll accessories to Harry Potter’s castle.



Des Hughes: In a Brown Study @ Ancient & Modern, London

Des may well be only the third best known British artist called Hughes after Patrick and Richard, but the gaps are smaller than between the Richters. His work might be summarised as: modernist design meets medievalism in a masquerade of materials. Much of this ensemble, which comes complete with water in the boot and an oddly insistent light, is made of resin, for example. Being 'in a brown study', incidentally, is a phrase first recorded in the 16th century and meaning to be deep in depressing thoughts. The hand, incidentally, is made out of hundreds of smaller hands in a neat fractal.

Installation shot

Laura Owens @ Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne

American painter Laura Owens is known for her refreshingly airy way with disparately-sourced imagery. So - although she has painted non-figuratively before - it was a surprise to see that she'd installed 14-strong banks of almost entirely abstract canvasses at Gisela Capitain (in one the many shows opening in Fair Week). They were also square, lively and bright to the point of occasional fluorescence – and quite a few sported clock-style hands which provided the bonus of movement and changes in the relationships between the paintings’ elements.

The wounded Vija Celmins makes the most of her good hand...

Vija Celmins: Desert, Sea and Stars @ the Museum Ludwig, Cologne

The star guest at Art Cologne was Vija Celmins (say ‘Veeya Selmins’), who had flown in from New York to install a severe, sublime, black-and- white-only retrospective of skies, oceans, deserts and webs - despite having broken her right wrist. She said she attempts to represent what interests her in a totally different – because small and flat – world, and to make that world more real than the memory in your head. The beauty is an incidental bi-product of her meditation on how much she can see, but one which certainly helps draw viewers into their own intense looking. You probably know the work, so here she is with her limited action hand.



Ayako Rokkaku: ‘Colours in My Hand’ hand-painting performance @ Delaive, Amsterdam

Japanese artist Ayako Rokkaku put in long days demonstrating the self-taught way in which she makes all her paintings: directly by hand. She’s repeating the public production process at Amsterdam’s Fair in May. I‘m not sure her post-Murakami pastel-teenypop style’s for me, and Baselitz and Sasnall remain my favorites among painters currently adept at fingerwork. Nonetheless, she certainly added to the fun of the Fair, and I have to hand it to her for grasping my theme…


Paul McCarthy at the entrance to Art Cologne

As for the Rhine as an April art destination: though Art Cologne, founded in 1967, was the market leader twenty years ago, it’s now less international and doesn’t have quite the same capacity to make major statements as the premium fairs in Basel, London, New York and Miami. Nor are there satellite fairs. On the other hand, Cologne is less crowded; there is still more than enough to see, especially if you like painting, which dominates; many German galleries are of a high standard; and the quantity and quality of contemporary art on offer across the adjacent cities of Dusseldorf, Cologne and Bonn taken together is probably comparable to London. They’re pleasant cities, too, so all-in-all it’s a worthwhile option for mid-April.

Photo credits: relevant galleries and artists + Simon Vogel (Laura Owens)and Art Cologne (view of the Fair)

FIGURING APRIL

The most literal kind of figurative is figures themselves: they haven’t always been fashionable but there are plenty around at the moment, ranging from Nancy Spero at the Serpentine to Bill Viola at Blain/Southern to the examples more to my taste with which I start, before moving on to works which evoke people less directly…



Byron Marmol: Paula Régil (a.b.a. con Paracelsus)

Between Two Worlds @ Edel Assanti, 276 Vauxhall Bridge Rd – Victoria

To 30 April: www.edelassanti.com

Evening Standard photography critic Sue Stewart has curated a stimulating survey of nine Latin American photographers, splitting the work broadly between reality on the second floor and fantasy on the third. My favourite realities are Alessandra Sanguinetti’s visceral visions of Argentinian farm life, and Oscar Fernando Gomez Rodriguez’s Mexican streetscapes shot with rapid fire voyeurism through – and framed by – his taxi window. Fantasy scores in Byron Marmol’s documentation of Guetemalans dressing up as manga players, bringing a cultural fracture to their role play games and making for an interesting comparison with Cao Fei’s well-known Cos series.


Tut tut. A Coup

Carla Busuttil: Rug & Gut & Gun @ Josh Lilley Gallery, 44-46 Ridinghouse St – Fitzrovia

To 28 April: www.joshlilleygallery.com

I say Boosoot’l, you say Bassert’l… I’m not sure which is right, but Ms B’s birth-giving absence from her own opening prevented my asking the ultimate referee. Either way, the South African with Armenian origins has grown up with a background of conflict: even prior to apartheid, her forebears fled a hundred years ago from the same persecution as did Arshile Gorky’s family. That’s reflected in the violent looseness of her figures, which give off an aura of criminality. The bigger they are, I feel, the bigger the impact – and there are some pretty big paintings here…


Yonin No Kao

Kentaro Kobuke: Mokume @ Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation, 13/14 Cornwall Terrace - Baker Street

To 6 May (not weekends): www.dajf.org.uk

This is a refreshing reminder that there’s more than bad news coming out of Japan. London-based Hiroshima-born Kentaro Kobuke’s makes elegantly obsessive, not-quite-childlike coloured pencil drawings for and against the grain of resonantly traditional cherry wood. Fantastical characters and narratives seem to emerge as naturally as knurls. He also makes more abstract-tending drawings on a worldwide range of airmail envelopes, which he outfolds in the manner of reverse origami to provide an intricately-shaped surface. And if you want your art indoors at 9.30 a.m., I know no other place.

Back in the Mirror

Stephan Balkenhol @ Stephen Friedman Gallery,25-28 Old Burlington Street - Central

To 16 April: www.stephenfriedman.com

German sculptor Stephan Balkenhol has been rough-hewing people onto bases out of single trunks of fissure-friendly wood for decades now, setting up what strikes me as the sculptural equivalent of a figure-ground relationship. But he keeps chipping away differently at both the tradition of monumental figures and the minimalism which turned away from it. Here, a tondo, a double-facing face in which one face is abstract, and a full length figure in a kind of wooden mirror are variants new to me. But on from wood to Woodrow…


Car Door, Armchair and Incident, 1981

Bill Woodrow: Sculptures 1981–1988 @ Waddington Custot Galleries, 11 Cork Street - Central

To 16 April: www.waddingtoncustot.com

A successful signature style can be a problem: do you carry on repeating it and risk descending into routine, or move boldly on and invite unfavourable comparisons with the earlier work? In the early 80’s Bill Woodrow hit on the brilliantly witty yet conceptually dense approach of making sculpture by cutting elements out of metal consumer goods while leaving the rest of the original object to take part in the implied narrative. In the following quarter century, Woodrow has opted firmly for the second horn of that dilemma, which makes this chance to see nineteen of his violently transformative 'cut-out' works all the fresher: many of those here also gain from an anthropoligical aspect, and the way in which two things bocome both different versions of themselves and a third separate thing.


Two Rainbow American Flags for Jasper in the Style of the Artist’s Boyfriend

Jonathan Horowitz: Art, History @ Sadie Coles, 4 New Burlington Place – Central

To 30 April: www.sadiecoles.com

American artist Jonathan Horowitz is known for his ironic and camp blending of politics and humour. This is a typically punchy exhibition, albeit one which relies on some visitor awareness of the work of Joel Shapiro, Sol LeWitt Richard Serra and Ellsworth Kelly. For it’s their work for the Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington which Horowitz parodies on the grounds that minimalist works are an inadequately engaged response to such horrors, e.g. a typical white Kelly shape is tipped towards the pink triangle which denoted Jewish homosexuals. Also in the mix is a biting lampoon of Mel Gibson, and a Jasper Johns flag in the style of Horowitz’s partner, fellow artist Rob Pruitt.

Two Dinners

Richard Artschwager curated by Rob Pruitt @ Carlson, 6 Heddon St

To 15 April (not weekends): www.carlsongallery.co.uk

As it happens Rob Pruitt – who recently hit the headlines with his spoof ‘Art Oscars’ event - has curated a show 100 yards from his partner’s: a beautifully-judged selection of Richard Artschwager’s paintings. Pruitt supplies silver-foil-covered chairs for the purpose of contemplating them, so nodding to Artschwager’s own use of furniture. Mirrors are one of Artschwager’s favourite motifs, and the star work here uses them inside the picture’s frame to complete the sausages in ‘Two Dinners’. Pruitt was Artschwager’s assistant in New York at the time he painted this in 1988 and, in his suitably personal curatorial note, recalls eating off the table portrayed.

Installation view

Marcelo Cidade and André Komatsu: The Natural Order of Things

To 9 April: www.maxwigram.com

This collaboratively-conceived show of individual works by the Brazilian artists Cidade and Komatsu is a locally re-bought and installed version of a project first shown in Brazil. In the course of critiquing, I think, the natural order of international capitalist things, it provides a most cathartic chance to boot wheel-mounted blocks of concrete from one side of a gallery to the other. You can do so without wearing Doc Martens, but there are three pairs in show – their differently-coloured laces proposing tribal loyalties - along with a range of market commodities (the coffee smells frustratingly good), a blank street sign and 'paintings' made from industrial felt and drywall. Hard to pin down, and yet convincing.

Hadi Tabatabai: Thread Painting 2011-3

Different Abstractions: Nadia Kaabi-Linke, Hadi Tabatabai and Hajra Waheed @ Green Cardamom, 5a Porchester Place – Marble Arch

To 15 April (not weekends): www.greencardamom.net

All three artists in this exhibition use abstraction interestingly. Tunisian Nadia Kaabi-Linke destroys the function of a bench by covering it with bird spikes. Canadian Hajra Waheed plays Islamic patterning and building plans off against surveillance aircraft and flowers to elusive effect. US-based Iranian Hadi Tabatabai makes intensely poised grid-based abstractions. Only close examination reveals that their meticulous construction uses threads just off the surface, or grout just below it, to create a stilled zone in which to contemplate the ambiguity of figure and ground, the nature of truth, the meaning of life...

Principles of Surrender, 2010 (work in show to be finished on site)

Nika Neelova: Monuments @ CHARLIE SMITH London, 2nd floor, 336 Old St - Hoxton

8 - 30 April: www.charliesmithlondon.com

In what promises to be a fascinating merger of personal and public, past and present, the young winner of the 2010 Saatchi New Sensations will show three dark architectural installations including stairs to nowhere and flags of ash. In them Neelova attempts, by collaging elements from elsewhere, to recreate a sense of personally significant lost places from her own disparate pasts in Russia, France and the Netherlands – not as they were, but as she imagines they might be today: in effect, memories of now.

Summerfog

Giorgio Sadotti & John Summers: For every action... ...justifies the means @ Studio 1.1, 57a Redchurch St. – Shoreditch

8 April – 1 May: www.studio1-1.co.uk

The artist-run Studio 1.1 hosts a collaboration of two artists who play random factors off against control. Summers assembles noisily ramshackle yet somehow aesthetic sculptures out of found elements. The pranksterish Sadotti’s previous ranges from asking other people to be him to whipping the Tate’s Chistmas tree to collaging coincidence. He also likes secrets, having showed anonymously at Milton Keynes in 2010, and asked me to keep some aspects of this show under wraps... I'd better say no more, but I’m sure it'll be spontaneous with an edge.

Also recommended

Philip Taaffe: Paintings 2009 – 2011 @ Gagosian Gallery, Britannia Street, April 7 - May 14: Surprisingly, a first British solo show for Taaffe's syntheses of abstract and representational motifs from myriad cultures, times and artistic movements.

Dieter Roth: ‘Reykjavik Slides (31,035) Every View of a City’ @ Hauser & Wirth, Savile Row to 30 April: let the widely spread rhythms of fourteen slide projectors lure you into the grey world of all the houses in the Icelandic capital.

Drawing 2011 Biennial Fundraiser @ The Drawing Room 7 April – 18 May: always a fascinating barometer of trends as well as a show of potentially affordable goodies.

Axel Antas: ‘New to Nature’ @ Rokeby Gallery to 30 April: artificial clouds and a life-sized film of a tree from the Finnish meditator on man and nature.

Angela de la Cruz: ‘Transfer’ @ the Lisson Gallery, 30 March – 30 April: I’m expecting further evidence of why she should have won the Turner Prize

Jonathan Trayte: 'Under a Pine Tree' @ Simon Oldfield Gallery to 23 April: sculptures good enough to eat in this solo debut – they’re mostly of food, after all, though in painted bronze…

Andrew Grassie @ Maureen Paley to 10 April: ‘outtakes’ from the master of egg tempera photorealist reflection on the conditions of art.

Hamidou Maiga: 'Talking Timbuktu' @ Jack Bell Gallery to 30 April: Not Seydou Keita but the sharer of his Mali studio in the seventies, and of comparable – if less widely appreciated – merit.

'Royal Family' @ Hayward Gallery to 2 May: a must if you haven’t yet caught Lars Laumann’s ‘Morrissey Foretelling the Death of Diana’, and the only way I can commend of celebrating the nuptials.

Shaun McDowell @ Hannah Barry Gallery, Peckham to 20 April: big industrial space with a large cycle of abstractions derived from the artist interacting with his model.


Images courtesy the relevant artists and galleries + Stephen White (Stephen Friedman)