Paul's Art World

2011 IN REVIEW

2011-12-29T01:25:00.000-08:00

Obvious highlights of 2011 included Miro and Richter at the Tate, Leonardo at the National Gallery, Toulouse-Lautrec at the Courtald, Degas at the Royal Academy, Twombly/Poussin at Dulwich, Pistoletto at the Serpentine, Struth and Sasnal at the Whitechapel, New Sculpture at the Saatchi Gallery and the British Art Show at the Hayward. Good stuff too, all of which I’m ignoring in plumping for a lower profile selection:

* 10 London shows, 5 which featured in my recommendations and 5 which might have but for one reason or another (eg the timing of the show or of my visit) did not

* 10 from the ‘rest of the world’ – fairly narrowly defined, in this case as ‘the other places I happened to visit’ or, in Southampton’s case, be in.

5 favourites from my 10 recommended London shows per month:

Phyllida Barlow: RIG @ Hauser & Wirth

Phllyida Barlow was something of an artists’ artist until she retired from her influential teaching practice at the Slade – Rachel Whiteread, Tacita Dean and Douglas Gordon are among her former students - revved up her exhibition schedule and got signed by Hauser & Wirth, for whom this was her first solo outing. The distinctive wood-panelled former bank proved an ideal host building for infestation by her trademark brand of pseudo-slipshod anti-monumental constructions. The scale of infestation was impressive over four floors of very physical sculptural experience – it got in your way – with political overtones: barricades with the feel of the street in a place with a capitalist history. What’s more, Christoph Buchel’s Piccadilly Community Centre was pretty much as effective in a different register in the same building…

Emma Hart: To Do @ Matt’s Gallery, 42-44 Copperfield Rd – Mile End

Feel-good show of the year was Emma Hart’s chirpily hypnotic cacophony of 27 ‘assistants’ - which is to say tripod-based sculptures with avian features, each showing a short film on a pocket camera in which Hart herself makes jokes and calls out instructions. Hart explains that the bird-cameras sprung from their visual similarities as small things with beady eyes, and their shared ability to influence our behaviour, eg we try to spot both. Fun aside, this also picks up on her ongoing concern for the camera as an active creator of events, and sneaks in surveillance as a darker theme by way of twitching. Hart is currently in residence at the University of Kingston, by the way, and you can catch her performing there on 25 January.

Pino Pascali’s Final Works, 1967 – 1968 @ Camden Arts Centre

The way in which the Italian arte povera artists used everyday materials remains highly influential in current practice, but Pino Pascali (1936-68) had hardly been seen in Britain before this show, despite his prominent role at the start of the movement, and despite – or is it because of? – his glamorous lifestyle and potentially myth-making early death in a motorcycle crash. It proved a startlingly fresh show, conceptually and materially (even though it used lots of steel wool, which should by rights have disintegrated by now). There was something right, for example, about the wrongness of a six-legged spider...

Clockwise Stoppage (8.30pm-5am)

What If It's All True, What Then? @ Mummery & Schnelle

This two part 12 artist show surveyed that fertile strand of abstraction which tweaks the distinction between painting and object. It had the incidental merit of invoking some excellent recent shows elsewhere (Angela de la Cruz and Peter Joseph at Lisson; Simon Callery at Fold; Rebecca Salter at the Beardsmore Gallery) and prefiguring (pre-abstracting!?) a couple to come (Jon Thompson at Anthony Reynolds, Paul Caffell at Mummery & Schnelle itself). Alexis Harding’s performances of paint, in which the canvas is turned as the paint congeals, were one highlight…

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

June was the perfect time of year to stroll through Battersea Park to the unique four floor gallery which – happily – survived a well-publicised grant reduction. Here Jodie Carey used 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 brought a bodily presence to the architecture.

5 shows from London not previously featured:

Blue 25.05.11

David Batchelor: 2D3D @ Karsten Schubert

David Batchelor is known mainly as a sculptural bricoleur (eg of found light boxes) and colour theorist (eg his book ‘Cromophobia’). Novel as it was to see his paintings for the first time, their focus was, then, thematically unsurprising: pools of colour which provide the titles; a sculptural emphasis on how those pools wrinkle into intricate patterns when left to dry on sheet aluminium over several months; and a resemblance to forms on a plinth - whether they be abstract shapes, exhibited heads or, more cheerfully, liquorice allsorts.

Simon Periton & Alan Kane: The Asbo Mystery Play and Other Public Works @ Sadie Coles HQ

Sadie Coles might well be my gallery of the year, with an exceptional programme in both spaces. In cases such as William N Copley, Jonathan Horowitz, Andreas Slominski and Georg Herold that was no surprise, but I hadn’t know what to expect from Periton & Kane, though this was in fact the second collaboration between these artist-friends after an 18 year gap. An inventive and witty installation took as its theme the generation of absurd proposals for public works: how about giant cigarette lighters instead of streetlamps? Repainting the drains in disco colours? A tramp’s sculpture table? A pavilion based on a baseball cap? And so on, with many transparently affectionate ways to mock and yet pay obeisance to the possibilities of the monumental.

Untitled, 2011

Simon Liddiment @ the Standpoint Gallery

The Standpoint Gallery awards artist residencies which conclude with a quickfire show over a single weekend. I caught Simon Liddiment’s, which included a set of ‘male’ and ‘female’ anthropomorphic / phallic / mammary coat hooks, which Liddiment he’s painting daily until the ‘closure’ of touching is achieved: he expects that to take three years. Add an ingenious frieze of beer labels and a shelving bracket holding up a panda poster (deconstructing the frame’s role and setting up a half-rhyme between brackets and bamboo) and you had a satisfyingly focused and witty whole.

Floor Piece

Leah Capaldi @ The Hole

There’s a tradition of intense performance art in which the performer tests the endurance of themselves and the audience. Not so Leah Capaldi’s recent performances, as other people carry them out and they form part of the ambient scene. Her ‘Floor Piece’ at Simon Bedwell’s adventurous venue The Hole exposed just the crown of the head of an actor secreted beneath the floorboards in a memorable coup de theatre of exposure and vulnerability, offset by its humorous resemblance to a rodent. Capaldi also infiltrated both the Catlin Art Prize and New Contemporaries with overwhelming perfume, distracting viewers from the other works and pointing up those shows’ competitive edges.

Lovebird

Michiel Ceulers: MCHL CLRS DRNK TRBL @ Rod Barton

I happened to see three very different shows by the imaginative Belgian painter Michiel Ceulers. First, at Juliette Jongma in De Pijp, Amsterdam’s equivalent of the East End,were his included ‘matings’ of pairs of paintings found in the art college skip. Second, at Rod Barton in London, where what looked like crosswords-come-space invaders–come-abstract-geometries proved to be paint and vodka depictions of the QR codes which linked to an instructional video of how to make cocktails. So the paintings refer beyond themselves – to spirits in two senses, perhaps – and might even prove useful to the thirsty collector. Finally, at Maes & Matthys in Antwerp, he took an unexpected figurative turn.

Ten from Elsewhere

From 'I Modi'

RH Quaytman: Spine, Chapter 20 (Basel) Cherchez Holopherne, Chapter 21 (Cologne) and I Modi, Chapter 22 (Venice)

It was something of a year of triples, as I also saw three chapter’s of RH Quaytman’s increasingly well-regarded site-specific sets of paintings: in Basel (in dialogue with the exhibition history of the Kunsthalle, and also making up a retrospective through self-reference), Cologne (linked to an antiquarian bookshop) and Venice (inflected with nautical themes). All convinced in their context – and Spine, her own illustrated account of Chapters 1-20 – bid fair to be declared monograph of the year for and its nuanced self-exploration and the way it formed part of what it recorded (the strength of her following was shown when the launch run of 2,000 sold out on her opening night in Basle at $100 a pop).

Installation view with the levitating hoop 'Sunrise'

Eva Rothschild: Hot Touch @ The Hepworth, Wakefield

Wakefield’s new Hepworth Museum opened to general acclaim in May, and it certainly does its principal subject proud across six of the galleries. But there was plenty to be said, too, for the big solo show of Eva Rothschild’s ‘magic minimalism’, which took several cues from Hepworth whilst still infusing their materialism with a sense of looking for some mystery beyond. They seemed equally at home in Wakefield, whether laid on the floor, suspended from the ceiling by Buddhist hands, or constituted in large part by parodies of more orthodox plinths.

Lighthouse (East)

Catherine Yass @ the De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill

Catherine Yass’s retrospective at the iconically modernist and recently restored de la Warr Pavilion included new work featuring a striking lighthouse platform a couple of miles out to sea in Bexhill. That was given added power by its being just about visible from the pavilion roof, and for me personally from the fact that, though formerly local, I’d never noticed it before! I was also struck by Yass’s innovative use of blues and browns: blue, she say, is the one colour which floats behind and in front of the plane… And a London version of this show opens soon (13 Jan – 11 Feb at Alison Jacques).

The Fugue

Neo Rauch @ Museum Frieder Burda, Baden Baden

There was no shortage of outstanding painting restrospectives in London in 2011: Leonardo, Poussin/Twombly, Richter and Sasnal spring to mind. However, the highly influential Leipzig painter Neo Rauch remains little-seen in Britain, so it’s a shame these 40 works didn’t tour. True, Richard Meier’s new museum provided an ideal setting for the meeting of surreal individuality with collective memory which drives Rauch’s brand of enigmatic post-pop incongruities with one ghostly foot in the communist past… but I still reckon it was a Hayward-sized show. Better news here is that Rauch's underrated wife, Rosa Loy, has a solo show opening on 24 Feb at Pippy Houldsworth.

Still from 'Squeeze'

Mika Rottenberg: Cheese, Squeeze and Tropical Breeze: Video Work 2003-2010 @ Museum Leuven

The newly-extended museum Leuven, a university town twenty minutes from Brussels, has an interesting permanent collection and as many as six wide-ranging temporary shows on at any one time. This autumn those covered Gregorian chant and Dirk Braeckman’s photography as well as impressively sculptural installations of seven films by New York-based Argentinian Mika Rottenberg. Cue blissfully mad systems of manufacture which satirise capitalism and the roles it ascribes to women, such as the use of ultra-long hair in cheese making or recycling a bodybuilder’s sweat. Rottenberg’s most elaborate set-up yet – Squeeze – also features documentary shots of lettuce and rubber production made to seem almost as absurd as the invented elements.

Dress Vehicle

Haegue Yang: Teacher of Dance @ the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford

The Berlin-based Korean brought a charged domesticity and an implied sculptural dance of folding and unfolding to Oxford’s airy space. Her ‘Non-Unfoldables’ are similar clothes racks transformed by covering and hanging items, while the ‘Dress Vehicles’ are boxlike groupings of venetian blinds on wheels, allowing the visitor to enter and move around the gallery. Was it too much to see the eponymous teacher as meditating on how much of our existence takes place in our relations with such commonplace objects?

Thomas Hirschhorn: Crystal of Resistance @ the Venice Bienalle

Thomas Hirschhorn’s almost absurdly ambitious Swiss Pavilion was a standout work at the Venice Bienalle. He provided plenty to read about how love, philosophy, politics and aesthetics operated through his rigorously excessive and illogically beautiful installation, inspired by a rock crystal museum, sci-fi B-movie sets, crystal-meth labs and a cheaply-decorated provincial disco. It was hard to know where – or, sometimes, whether – to look as the large space was overrun by broken glass, cotton buds, mannequins, disturbing war images, chairs, Barbies, mobile phones, beer cans and the crystals themselves ‘resisting visibility’ – with plenty of Hirschhorn’s signature tape to mummify things / bind them all together

Series E, 1967-68

Charlotte Posenenske @ the Hansard Gallery, Southampton

The gallery linked to Southampton University presented the fullest account yet seen in Britain of Charlotte Posenenske (1930 -85), a German artist who has become widely known only since she featured in Documenta four years ago. The show concentrated on the influential work she made in 1967 before giving up art for a career in sociology – Judd-like scultures with a manufactured aesthetic but also an anti-market stance (unlimited editions at cost price) and a participative dimension, most obvious in those which can be rearranged by the viewer. Cerebral, cool and challenging.

Bear Creek

Boo Ritson: D is for Donut @ Southampton City Art Gallery

Two shows from Southampton may seem unbalanced but naturally enough I see everything in my home city, and it does have two excellent spaces. Body painting has become increasingly popular since Boo Ritson introduced her witty sculpture-painting-performance-photo narrative portraits of American characters five years ago. That may make them seem more mainstream than they are, so this, her first British retrospective, was a good chance to be reminded of their art credentials and punch – and of Ritson’s broader range from still lives to masks. It’s followed by a full show of new work at Poppy Sebire in the spring - to include landscapes on canvasses through which she puts people’s heads – such as ‘Bear Creek’ above.

Marcel Dzama: Untitled, 2000

My Winnipeg @ La Maison Rouge, Paris

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

Comet

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

This was a severe, sublime, black-and-white-only retrospective of skies, oceans, deserts and webs from the American who has found a way to unite the conceptual with the traditional. It showed, said Celmins, her attempts to represent what interests her in the totally different – because small and flat – world of the image, 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 – of her drawing as evidence of thinking - but that beauty certainly helps draw viewers into their own intense looking.

JANUARY COLLECTIVE

2011-12-26T03:27:00.000-08:00

It's in the nature of surveys and group shows that you won’t like everything, but a good one will have a high enough percentage to make a show within a show which particularly appeals, and the rest will provide valuable context. That’s a fair description of my first half dozen choices…

Douglas Gordon: Self Portrait of You + Me (David Bowie)

In Your Face @ SHOWstudio, 1-9 Bruton Place – Mayfair

To 4 Feb: http://www.showstudio.com/

Nick Knight, photographer-founder of the art of SHOWstudio, has packed forty artists into an energetic and confrontational mixture of art and fashion which focuses on the corporeal. It’s worth checking out just to remind yourself of the power of Abramović and Ulay’s ten minute shouting match projected up large. But the show also contains some original Viennese actionism, a blood-heavy mini-show of Franko B, Nancy Burson’s pre-Photoshop (ie pre-1990) blendings of faces across race and gender, Douglas Gordon’s burn-out of David Bowie, Nancy Fouts’ mummified boxing gloves, a near life-sized patterned nude by Orange County skateboarder-artist Ed Templeton… and more of like ilk, which is to say the best kind of worst kind of taste.

Leon Kossoff: Willesden Junction No 1, 1966

The Mystery of Appearance @ Haunch of Venison, 103 New Bond St – Central
To 18 Feb: http://www.haunchofvenison.com/

When Haunch of Venison returned to its eponymous space after a three year refit it was hard to spot the difference. Only now has the point been revealed: that the gallery has been extended to run right through to a new main entrance on New Bond Street. The blockbuster chosen to inaugurate the expansion takes a subject-based approach to trace the mutual influences of ten major post-war British painters. It’s a bit of a mixed bag (are those really the best Caulfields they could find?) but full of interest. The room of nudes, and all of the Auerbach and Kossoff are especially good (I've been known to distinguish their similar styles thus: if I like it, it must be Auerbach – but these are really top Kossoffs).

Jonathan Delafield Cook: Belanus Crenatus

Radical Drawing @ Purdy Hicks, 65 Hopton St - Southwark
To 28 Jan: http://www.purdyhicks.com/

London has been blessed with some fine drawing-based shows recently: ‘Polemically Small’ at Charlie Smith was excellent in December, and ‘A Piece of Paper’ is at Madder 139 (to 28 Jan). I’m not sure the selection at Purdy Hicks is any more radical than those, but it has some great stuff in it: Keith Tyson’s huge and amazing 1,193-room plan of a university from 1993; five brand new, typically kooky, Marcel Dzarma drawings; Gavin Turk’s tea ring stains arranged like dirty takes on Bridget Riley’s circle drawings; Jonathan Delafield Cook’s detailing of a barnacle, made mountainous by scale; a beautiful Wangechi Mutu watercolour collage, and a suite of lively drawings in matching register by the new-to-me Australian Sally Smart.

Georg Herold: Untitled

Gesamtkunstwerk: New Art from Germany @ The Saatchi Gallery - Chelsea

This very broadly premised survey (art made in Germany by anyone or by Germans anywhere) is well worth seeing, especially for Georg Herold's canvas-covered painting-sculptures - as above - plus Thomas Helbig, André Butzer and Max Frisinger. But it’s part of the point of such shows to provoke, and even accepting the exclusion of moving images and the decision not to revisit Richter and his generation or those (Rauch and Skreber in particular) previously shown to good effect by Saatchi, I could happily have lost several of the artists featured. Perhaps Magnus Plessen, Susanne Kühn, Michael Sailstorfer, Sofia Hultén, Rosa Loy, Sabine Hornig, Daniel Sinsel, Florian Slotawa, Haegue Yang and Cyprien Gaillard could have filled in the gaps...

Leo Fitzmaurice: Misarray

Chain Chain Chain @ Bischoff/Weiss, 14a Hay Hill – Mayfair

To 28 Jan: http://www.bischoffweiss.com/

This is something of a coming of age for Raphaëlle Bischoff and Paola Weiss as west end girls, for ‘Chain Chain Chain’ plays off the surrounding jewelry shops in considering art and value. The interlinking angles explored are well set out in an accompanying leaflet by curator Glenn Adamson, half the team behind the V&A’s big show ‘Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990’ (itself open to 15 Jan). There is, though, a nod to the gallery’s East End origins: Sue Collis, who’s represented by Hoxton’s Seventeen, formerly near to Bischoff/Weiss, has exchanged a section of wall between the two spaces. Oh yes, and the other works - from Leo Fitzmaurice’s re-modernising edit of packaging, to Nicole Cherubini’s clay that never leaves its box, via several rather blingier works – are themselves rather interesting.

Ditty Ketting: Untitled (346)

Ongoing minimalism @ Rocket, Tea Building, 56 Shoreditch High St – Shoreditch

To 5 Feb: http://www.rocketgallery.com/

Is there no end (qv Newman, Stella, Cruz Diez , Riley, Buren, Rondinone, Davenport, Lambie, Phelps…) to the lure of the stripe? Well, I didn’t feel its pull pall in Dutch painter Ditty Ketting’s complex constructions. She uses a traditional colour wheel system, spiced by random spinning, to lay her colours over and under cage-like structures of black, white and grey. That imprisonment of sorts palpably fails to prevent the bursting forth of her 16 colours. She’s the most maximal of the minimalists in this bright survey, but all five (Ketting, Michelle Grabner, Will Taylar, Lars Wolter, Stefan Eberstadt) have their complexities – would ‘Intricate Minimalism’ have caught the vibe more accurately? But that’s enough stripes…

Damien Hirst: The Complete Spot Paintings @ Gagosian London x 2 (and New York x 3, Beverly Hills, Paris, Rome, Geneva, Athens, Hong Kong)

12 Jan - 18 Feb (London): http://www.gagosian.com/

In what must be the logical antithesis of a group show, here’s a chance to join the dots internationally as all 11 Gagosian galleries are turned over to some 300 of Damien Hirst’s estimated 1,400 spot paintings (including, he says, five he made himself). Along with the spins, they make up a persuasive - if overblown - reducio ad absurdum of abstract painting as a means of expression. They’re also Hirst’s most Warholian play on the market, and one he hasn't given up despite declaring several streams finished at his 2008 Sothebys auction (come to that, what has he actually stopped doing?). As usual this millennium, it’s the performance not the work which takes centre stage with Hirst – a pity in a way, but he is good at that.

Mille Fiori

Dale Chihuly @ the Halcyon Gallery, 144-146 New Bond St – Central

To 29 Feb: http://www.halcyongallery.com/

It's not easy to take a gallery seriously when (as on the top floor here) it hangs Picasso next to Lorenzo Quinn without apparent irony; and, supreme glass-blower though he may be, I’d put Dale Chihuly's paintings on the Quinn side of that equation. Get past those reservations, though, and there's some spectacular and luminous Chihuly spread around the lower floors of Halcyon's new, fourth (!) and biggest London gallery. The forty-odd glassworks – such as fantasy shell forms, cascading chandeliers, multi-horned vases and a garden of people-sized plants complete with pool - reveal the force of a medium pushed to its limits.

Offshore - installation shot

Magali Reus: ON @ The approach, 1st floor, 47 Approach Rd – Cambridge Heath

To 22 Jan: http://www.theapproach.co.uk/

It’s not quite a Halcyon expansion, but The approach has started to use a second room above its host pub. Young Anglo-Dutch artist Magali Reus uses it to screen fit young men straining to shift big blue bobbing barrels in a colour-matched sea. That acts as a literal and macho counterpoint to the main space’s pared-back installation of sculptural surrogates which suggest transport and displacement: sleek riffs on airport security trays, luggage racks, camping mats, cameras and emergency ladders for train tunnels – the last two hauntingly combined to suggest a cinematic tracking device. What would its film show? Perhaps, for all our huffing and puffing, that we’re getting nowhere…

Unknown (I/H4)

David Walker: Brides on Fire @ Rook & Raven, 7-8 Rathbone Place - Fitzrovia

To 19 Jan: http://www.rookandraven.co.uk/

And now for something somewhat different… I’m not sure I’ve previously featured an artist normally classified as ‘urban’ or ‘street’ in my choices, but David Walker’s surprisingly brush-free spray paintings at the new Rook & Raven Gallery have a distinctive panache which takes them beyond their impressive spray technique and the graffiti origins referenced in the many scrawled and decayed marks which irritate the details. It’s obsessive work: Walker only does female portraits, which he sees as ‘’the historic measure of painting and beauty’; and you can still see the effects of the three years in which he used only black, white and pink.

Images courtesy of the relevant galleries and artists

HOW LONG DOES YOUR PROJECT LAST?

2011-11-29T22:00:00.000-08:00

London is painting central at the moment (Leonardo, Degas, Richter, Sasnal, Condo, Saatchi’s Germans, Dulwich’s Canadians…) but that’s not my theme. Rembrandt’s self-portraits in stimulating interaction with Bacon’s (at Ordovas to 16 Dec) could be seen as a lifelong project. After seven years, Charles Avery is halfway through creating his own world through ‘The Islanders’ (at Pilar Corrias to 16 Dec). That makes its eventual timespan likely to rival Nobson Newtown, for which Paul Noble has reached his 26th and penultimate main drawing after 15 years (at Gagosian to 17 Dec). In which context I start with three shows spanning 7, 15 and 35 years respectively. And my other choices feature artists whose individual works feel very much as if they are part of one long undeclared project: no strategies of inconsistency from Georg Karl Pfahler, Daniel Buren, Anne Craven, Neil Farber, Nathalie Djurberg, Tomma Abts or Alastair Mackie. A prize, though, to Bruce McLean, whose contribution to the fascinating show ‘Your Garden is Looking a mess Could You Please Tidy it up’ (at Payne Shurvell to 17 Dec) has been 40 years in the making...

Train, Mechanical, 2003-09

Paul McCarthy: The King, The Island, The Train, The House, The Ship @ Hauser & Wirth Piccadilly, Savile Row & St James’ Square – Central

To 14 Jan (outdoor sculpture ‘Ship Adrift, Ship of Fools’ to 15 Feb at St James’s Square): http://www.hauserwirth.com/

It’s not for the squeamish, but Paul McCarthy’s sprawling three-site takeover of Hauser & Wirth has the swagger of a show which must be seen. The seven year ‘Pig Island’ project grew so big in the veteran provocateur’s LA studio that ladders are provided to aid viewing of the orchestrated version. It contains as many deviants, butt plugs, body parts and KFC buckets as one would expect – but seems mild alongside ‘Train, Mechanical’: two animatronic George Bush caricatures sodomise two big pigs, the ears of which are fucked by smaller pigs. The mechanism whinnies and whines, the Bush heads spin, eyes popping, and follow you round the room. And there’s much, much more … enough to set McCarthy up as the romantic artist hero he’s debunking at Piccadilly in ‘The King’?

Sarakiniko Meltemi

Massimo Vitali: New Work @ Brancolini Grimaldi, 43-44 Albemarle Street - Central

To 28 Jan: http://www.brancolinigrimaldi.com/

The Italian photographer Massimo Vitali is known for the washed out effect he achieves through slight under-exposure, and his concentration over the last fifteen years on large colour prints of Mediterranean beach panoramas as a means of exploring the human interface with nature. This handsome show sees landscape features increasingly dominate the tourists who formerly took centre stage. These – far from being casual snaps – require detailed research and route planning ahead of a team of four with a truckload of equipment in what has become Vitali’s summer routine ever since Berlusconi first came to power. Perhaps, he hinted at the opening, a more radical change of tack may come now Berlusconi’s gone.

John Smith: Unusual Red Cardigan at Peer, 97-99 Hoxton St – Hoxton
To 10 Dec: http://www.peeruk.org/

The increasingly acclaimed but anonymously named John Smith wryly acknowledges his 1976 student film ‘The Girl Chewing Gum’ (in which a director’s voice seems to control the action in a street scene) remains his best-known – indeed, you can see the original at Tate Britain now. He has repeated this film shoot at the same street corner 35 years on and superimposed this over the earlier version,making for a commentary on social transformation. He also presents nine internet plagiarisms / homages of the film, and tracks the identity of an online advertiser of its VHS edition: Smith has bought and now exhibits some of the seller’s eBay offering, including the eponymous ‘Unusual Red Cardigan’. A typically eccentric tale of identity, value, change and the vagaries of fame…

Georg Karl Pfahler: Paintings @ Maria Stenfors, Unit 4, 21 Wren St – Kings Cross

To 17 Dec: http://www.mariastenfors.com/

This is a rare but welcome British showing from the estate of Georg Karl Pfahler (1926-2002), a versatile Nuremberg-born ceramicist, painter, sculptor and architect. He arrived at a hard-edged style of abstraction in the early sixties, which was closer to emerging American models than to any other German work at the time - though he reminds me most of the Swiss Max Bill and his Danish contemporane, Ib Geertsen. Here six large, crisply unfussy canvases suit the gallery perfectly. Several feature a rounded framing device which implies they are extracted from a wider circle, and that contributes to a satisfying interplay between the paintings and also an overall sense of openness.

Daniel Buren: One Thing To Another, Situated Works @ Lisson Gallery,
29 Bell Street – Edgware Rd

To 14 Jan: http://www.lissongallery.com/

Since 1965 the influential French artist Daniel Buren has always worked with the tool of 8.7cm wide stripes – he says for him to turn to something else would be like a similarly established pianist switching to the trumpet. If that sounds narrow, the point of the stripes is to make you see not themselves but other things – here the gallery space, of course, but also perhaps a spiritual dimension: there’s a room of woven fibre optics which come and go with the current, and another of coloured shadows. Add an outdoor installation and Buren’s upcoming commission for the remodelled Tottenham Court Road tube station, and the idea that stripes can keep you busy for nigh on fifty years seems plausible enough.

Ann Craven: Summer @ Southard Reid, 2nd floor, 67 Dean St – Soho

To 28 Jan: http://www.southardreid.com/

Southard Reid, above Black’s club, has something of a coup with the first British solo show from American painter Ann Craven. For two decades she’s spoken to the sense in which you can’t capture the present before it becomes the past, by obsessively repainting similar scenes with a rapidity which sets out to challenge that logic. Here she tries to arrest flowers, portraits and the archetypal always-changing-yet-always-the-same moon. What’s more, the moments are sealed in triplicate: through the image itself, stripe paintings made with the left-over paint, and the palette which held the paint, itself completed with the ‘tag’ of a bird, Craven’s best-known motif. The whole amounts to a vibrant anamnesis of the fleeting nature of summer 2011.

Untitled (Criminals)

Neil Farber: Ursa Major @ Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, 1st Floor, 6 Heddon St – Central

To 14 Jan: http://www.houldsworth.co.uk/

The second show in Pippy Houldsworth’s welcome return to a central location focuses on the phantasmal crowdscapes of Neil Farber, a mordantly witty painter who came to attention as part of the Winnipeg collective The Royal Art Lodge. Hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people emerge from acrylic and poured media, often with pools of gel for heads. They range from criminals to pigheads to the Fraternal Order of Peasants. I particularly like ‘Untitled (Better Than)’, which exploits the ghostliness of white gel to set up a dialogue between living people below and an ethereal cloud-crowd above, all of whom are murmuring words in which their heads are the ‘O’s, like vOices frOm beyOnd.

Nathalie Djurberg with music by Hans Berg: A World of Glass at Camden Arts Centre, Arkwright Rd – Finchley & Frognal

To 8 Jan: http://www.camdenartscentre.org/

This is a substantial first UK solo exhibition for Nathalie Djurberg, the Swedish ‘claymation’ animator who explores taboos with charmingly crude and macabre relish: five older films in a 35 minute sequence (including the wonderfully direct birth reversal ‘it’s the Mother’) plus four new five minute tales running in convenient parallel to the same music. Berg’s score chimes with the striking glass-like sculptures which stand before the screens. They also act as props in the films, in which Djurberg’s archetypes show their own fragilities: all find that desire is stronger than sense, as when a woman made of butter incites a bull to lick her out of shape.

Hepe

Tomma Abts @ Greengrassi, 1a Kempsford Rd – Kennington

To 22 Dec: http://www.greengrassi.com/

The 2006 Tuner Prize winner isn’t one to hurry: this, her first subsequent London solo, features eight new drawings and eight smaller (Abts’ standard 48 x 38cm) new paintings quietly at one with their objecthood. The drawings share a linear red and yellow language which hints at architectural structures. The paintings emerge from the application of successive layers which generate ambiguities between painted shadows, built-up elements, apparent perspectives and the way colours advance or recede. It would be good to see these anyway, but there’s also an innovation in the form of channels cut fully through the canvas to divide them in two: the same, perhaps, but rather more so.

Alistair Mackie: Copse @ All Visual Arts, Omega Place – King’s Cross

To 16 Dec: http://www.allvisualarts.org/

Alistair Mackie characteristically uses natural materials to conceptual ends. Here he shows just one large installation, of severely pruned trees the bases of which have been carved into table legs. This witty conjunction of actuality and potential neatly reverses Giuseppe Penone’s well-known series revealing the tree within a block of timber: Mackie show the furniture ‘hidden’ in a tree, mixing inside and outside, nature and culture, not without a dark side in the copse’s violent combination of lopped limbs and wooden legs. Ask, and you can also see quite a cache of Mackie’s other work in the back room, made from wasp nests, mosquitoes, mouse skulls, rhea eggs…

Images courtesy the relevant artists and galleries + Alex Delfanne (Hauser & Wirth)

EXTRA EXTRAS

2011-11-10T09:19:00.000-08:00

This collection of incidentals comprises an interview with Helen Carmel Benigson, a reasonably substantial review of Charlotte Posenenske (for ArtUS), briefer reviews of Henk Peeters, Jacques Villegle, Terry Rodgers and Marie Amar (for ARTnews), and essays for the current / recent shows of David Rickard, Nika Neelova and Richard Moon.

Queen of the Screen (A4 Lightbox), 2011

Helen Carmel Benigson: The Future Queen of the Screen

Paul Carey-Kent talks to young multimedia artist and performer Helen Carmel Benigson ahead of her new London solo show at Rollo Contemporary, which runs from 11 November – 13 January. You can also get a taste of her distinctive world at Helen TV: http://www.helenbenigson.com/

Benigson’s new solo show, to be followed soon by a retrospective at the James Hockey Gallery in Farnham, is a multi-media case of excess all areas: performance, video, photographs, monotypes, prints, videos on top of video, video on the pavement outside, stickers in the window, a tie-in to Helen’s TV... Themes and identities weave their way between the works, and it all builds towards one increasingly complex – and assertively pink, young and female – view of the world. With all the layering, immersion and sexualisation going on, it’s not surprising that Benigson has been called the Pipilotti Rist for a media-savvy generation: there’s naturalness to her use of digital media, social networking and video sharing sites which suggests a sense in which the screen might take over from the body. And yet she’s in the current issue of Vogue…

You’ve just finished an MA at the Slade. What next?

I’ve just got onto the one year Lux Associate Artist programme, which provides mentoring and support for eight artists to make films, and sponsors a concluding show.

There seem to be a lot of you. How many identities have you got?

Versions of me include my cousin, girl hip hop dancers, an avatar princess, Princess Belsize Dollar, my online profile

Is all the work here by Helen?

Yes, Princess is only for performance, though she does feed in to Helen’s work, and sometimes Helen features Princess as a subject. The rapper is part a different person who is a character I play but who is part of me…

You’re rapping as Princess Belsize Dollar at your opening, but there will also be a game of poker. Why?

I’m interested in both performance and games. I examine the screen as a virtual space which is also an architectural space which can stimulate image and performance – and poker is the ultimate game which uses performance as a device, through tells, bluffing and concealment. I’m not looking to control the poker in the way I’ve previously controlled male rappers by making them use my words to seduce me. This is purely about performance. Poker is also one of those things I love – along with roses, sushi, rappers, palm trees, the beach, soldiers, footballers and boys who play Fantasy Football – all of which appear in my work. My friends say looking at my work is like seeing inside my brain.

The film ‘The Future Queen of the Screen’ features avatars. Where are they from?

They’re dueling dancers from a video game. I played it so as to make the characters do what I wanted them to, and then intervened in the film as well. They stand in for the real hip hop dancers, who also appear in the film. I’ve performed with them and so they stand in for me.

What’s the story of the film?

There are two narratives: one is an imaginary space set in the Dead Sea, exploring the subconscious - it is a space of thought and reflection, it is a much slower space, using the idea of the landscape as a metaphor for body. I was also thinking of the girl as a metaphor for Israel. In the other narrative two dancers upload their video to YouTube and have a dance battle with another girl online. They start a relationship with fantasy footballers who persuade them to upload the videos to YouPorn. They then have to escape YouPorn, so they escape to a different universe, to an imaginary dry space represented by the Dead Sea. I might have called it ‘Duels and Dualities’ if David Blandy hadn’t got there first!

The longest film, ‘Clara’ (9 minutes) collages and revisits footage from previous films. There’s hyper-saturated colour and sexual fireworks in-cell-like interjections. The explosions mutate into darkly violent patterns. There are recurring images of you in a swimming pool and a woman disappearing down a waterslide like a plug-hole. What pulls all that together for you?

Immersion, infection and infestation are important. My various selves are multiplied. And I’m obsessed with manipulating and challenging borderlines: much of the content does that, and there’s also a literal border on the video, made from more doubled images. I’m breaking down any borders between my works.

‘Cellular’ seems to move in a new direction, as it looks like one straight unedited 6 minute shot which moves around the women’s section of a maximum security prison in Cape Town…

It is one continuous shot from a car, all taken within the prison complex. But we did have to get security clearance, and then drive round taking that one shot several times!

So it’s the sound, rather than the images, which is layered here?

Yes, the women, inside their cells, call out to me and as I travel deeper in, and their voices become more visceral as I layer and intensify their calls.

And this becomes another way to build cells into the work?

Yes, the prison cell works as both a political container and a biological space. I can identify with the prisoners on a corporeal level, occupying a cell, negotiating power, sexuality, identity.

Pink Beach (Lightbox), 2011

‘Cellular’ is the first in another duality: of women-only spaces, the second being the women’s beach in Tel Aviv, which appears in several works including the films ‘Fireworks on a Blue Beach’ and ‘Superwet’. It turns out be a surprisingly pink place, though perhaps not so surprisingly so among your works…

For all of these spaces it’s about viscerally which is manifest via colour, sound and performance.

The superficial beauty and rather sexual-style of consumption of sushi by your cousin in an overlaid close-up draws us in to contrasts…

Yes, there are explosions, made even more sinister by its being Israel. And my cousin seems to be eating the people on the beach. Then the beach, spread across her face, becomes a veil. You can interpret that as political. The people are green, becoming viral in the pink sea, and suggesting the avatars in other works.

Why is wet and dry one of your favourite contrasts?

There’s an analogy for me with my use of the macro – micro, between the excitement of the screen being switched on, turned on – wet. And yet the disappointment if you zoom in on an image until it’s just a single pixel – because when this happens, you’ve reached the inside of the image and it becomes just a code. That’s dry.

Are you aiming at a young person’s sensibility, and asserting a young person’s identity?

That’s more a by-product of its being centered round my world. My practice is exploring identity, and being young is just part of that.

So what kind of artist are you? One of your monotypes says, ‘This is my life, not a soap opera’.

I don’t consider myself an artist, just a girl. But I am addicted to making art.

Charlotte Posenenske @ the Hansard Gallery, Southampton: 25 Jan – 9 March, 2011 (for ArtUS)

The gallery linked to Southampton University presented the fullest account yet seen in Britain of Charlotte Posenenske (1930 -85), a German artist who has become widely known only since she featured in Documenta four years ago. The show consisted of works on paper from the 1950's, showing restrained expressive tendencies; and remakes of her pared-back sculpture of the mid-sixties, concentrating on the influential work she made in 1967 before giving up art for a career in sociology. Her widower, Burkhard Brunn, was closely involved: he manages the estate in accordance with Posenenske's own principles, selling the occasional original prototype to subsidise making unlimited editions available.

Superficially, Posenenske's mature work looks like variations on Donald Judd, from whom she may seem be diverge mainly in abandoning art in frustration at its inability to deliver social change. Yet Brunn himself says that though Posenenske was aware of the American trends of the time, she came from a different place: her movement from the subjectivity of painted illusion to the objectivity of geometric regularity may echo the minimalists, but Posenenske's primary interest was in participation.

That is most obvious in those works which viewers are able to physically rearrange, but it’s also present in her collaboration with others in manufacture and installation; her acceptance - in contrast to the finish fetish typical of minimalism - of finger marks and graffiti as signs of the work being used; and in her desire to make art an industrial consumable available to everyone. Her unlimited editions at cost price sought to avoid any complicity with the market, and she used corrugated pasteboard as a light, cheap and disposable material. Accordingly, Brunn sees Posenenske's switch to the field of industrial relations as a way to pursue the same interest in participation through different means – ‘she had had two hearts in her breast' as he puts it: one for art and one for social studies.

But does Posenenske’s art do more than predate the fashion for ‘relational aesthetics’? Two further aspects interest me.

First, Posenenske makes subtly explicit many of the issues which are implicitly faced by all art: how one work fits within a wider practice; the individual’s participative role not just in perceiving the work but in constructing the conditions of its production and reception; the place of that production within the market; and the definitional boundaries of what can count as art.

To illustrate: the open-ended seriality of Posenenske’s potentially endlessly reproducible pieces sets out to be part of a system, any one piece taking its place within a community of existing or potential works, chiming with how society is full of systems which cannot be comprehended from individual transactions within them. The art market is one such. In the manifesto which Posenenske published in Art Forum in February 1968, she says that she ‘makes series because I do not want to make single pieces for individuals’. That forms part of an anti-market stance which challenges the status of factory products as art in sharp contrast to what Warhol made of that model of production.

Second, there’s some sort of dissonance between Posenenske's objects – which are gentle and a little conservative – and the ideas behind them, which are fierce and idealistic. That contrast gives Posenenske's sculpture a curiously plangent effect. Thus when she disrupts the surface in the elegant ‘Diagonal Fold’ (1966), it’s through angles which make the planes ambiguous, rather than by puncturing or attacking the canvas in the manner of Fontana or Parreno. If there’s potential for conflict in interacting with her work, it’s through two visitors attempting to set the doors of her ‘Revolving Vanes’ in different positions, which feels like arguing about who goes into the dining room first.

Perhaps we can go further by reframing Posenenske’s withdrawal from art as a logical end to its reductive trajectory, and so as an art act in itself. What, then, could be quieter – and yet more intense – than silence?

Nika Neelova: Memories of Now

The obvious point of entry to Nika Neelova’s world is through its atmosphere. ‘Monuments’ consists of three brooding installations: stairs, with spear-like railings, which threaten to fall onto us in the process of going nowhere; what looks like an elevated and useless section of railway acting as a burnt gallows, from which coils of charred rope descend; and the ash from that burnt timber spread across four flags, to deny them their usual function of symbolizing power. We’re in a series of fragmented places, linked by darkly evocative materials and by the sense that they could soon tip into an end.

But there’s beauty here in the romantic sublime, which nineteenth century artists found in ruins, and in the detailing of the distress: the understructure of geometrical forms covered by baroque flourishes, the painstaking fabrication - those ropes are cast from twists of paper, the stairs waxed to the max, that ash is sewn into patterns... All this gives a sense of glories passed, for sure, but a feeling too that there’s something subtler to be engaged with here than a theatre of loss. So what is that other way in?

Artists are often inspired by their childhood experiences and seek to revisit them in some way. Proust provides the great literary example, while one of the purest parallels in contemporary art is the hyper-realised tableaux of Martin Honert. Both seek, however hopelessly, to capture things as they were. Nika Neelova may start from a related desire, but her strategy differs fundamentally: she seeks to capture – from memory alone – how those scenes from the past might look now, years later: to catch, if you will, the memory of now.

It’s a difficult task. Not only – as in Proust and Honert – might the fallibility and subjectivity of memory distort that past reality, it’s also a speculative matter to guess to what extent time will have affected the remembered places, and how that might have manifested itself. Add the constraints posed by Neelova’s method, which is to construct these imagined contemporary ruins by collaging together degraded elements from other places, and it is apparent that she is making a point of the impossibility of being ‘right’ in any objective sense. Her desire to remake the track from past to present is balanced by her building into the very nature of her work the practical impossibility of going back.

At 24, Neelova may seem a little young to be driven by such concerns, but they make sense in the context of her itinerant life to date: born in Russia, she lived in France from five to ten years old, returned to Russia until she was 15, then studied in the Netherlands before moving to London in 2008. No wonder all homes strike her as provisional, and she hankers to recapture some sense of the places she has lost.

All of which may sound likely to lead to internally-directed and potentially impenetrable work. Neelova avoids that, though, by two means. First, she constructs those past spaces of hers out of items from other places and other pasts. Second, she’s fascinated by public processes of commemoration. In essence, her works are private monuments which take on a public aspect through standing in for the anonymous mass, generating a circular movement between the public and the private.

In both respects the individual is rooted in the social, and that’s what prevents Neelova slipping into self-indulgence. She shows how our collective and public pasts feed into and out of our individual and private pasts, and in that sense her spaces stand reciprocally for ours.

What’s more, for all that it’s time, not life, which has been lost in them, Neelova’s places remain literally and metaphorically dark. Partly that’s because one kind of loss inevitably bleeds into another. Partly it’s because there’s only way to move on from the frozen state her spaces have reached. And partly it’s because they physically enact the closing off of possibilities. The staircase doesn’t just reach towards space, it’s blocked by the ceiling. The pseudo-railway runs into the walls of the room. The flags of ash jut out on banister poles to impede our natural path through the gallery.

A Freudian might jump on that combination of childhood, memory and blockage. The blockages could be the ego’s defence mechanism, its way of resolving the conflict between the impulses of the id (who knows what the young Neelova wanted to do deep down?) and the more socially-determined beliefs of the superego (how did she think she ought to act?). Yet I don’t think you have to be a Freudian to pick up the sense that darker subconscious forces may lie behind the conscious scenes…

That, perhaps, returns us to atmosphere after all, albeit one enriched by the geometry and gravity, public combinations and private elisions, degradations and blockages which go to make up Nika Neelova’s memories of now.

Paul Carey-Kent: March 2011

Nika Neelova talks to Paul Carey-Kent

Your installations resemble architectural ruins. What draws you in that direction?

The evocation of architectural ruins is indeed very important in my work, as ruins signal simultaneously an absence and a presence. As fragmented and decayed structures they point to a lost and invisible whole, whilst their still visible presence also points to durability and survival. I’m interested in representing spaces which capture the transience of time and contain a sense of lost experiences.

Is that a reference to death or destruction?

No, I don’t see that as representing death. The work is not driven by the tragedy of human loss of the mere brutality of destruction. There is however strong allusion to the fear of mortality, a certain fear of the end, which is so inherent to human nature and perhaps in other metaphorical ways to objects and spaces... That way the sculptures are often shown in the very state before fully collapsing, at the moment when the end is predictable but isn’t there yet.

Though black is the dominant colour…

In this show black mainly refers to the ‘last state’ of materials, wood is charred and burnt, becoming ash and charcoal dust.

These aren’t ruins as found, are they, or as ruined by you, but are constructed out of separately discovered elements?

Yes, I attempt to shift histories using objects that belong to one history and putting them into another context. I like the idea that those other lives bring along a cultural or historical displacement. And though I work with things which are likely to fall apart, I wouldn’t make something broken. It’s always natural decay – due to gravity or age – I don’t force things. I see the decay as something beautiful, but from which you cannot retrieve the original state. It all obeys the law of entropy, which is so persistent in life: you cannot turn back.

Do you have strong visual memories of places?

Most of the works are based on visual memories. I relate to how memories are preserved through places, and how memories preserve corners of places, like floorboards of a once inhabited house or a particular light in the window. I have memories of rooms which I want to recreate – albeit in an exaggerated manner – because articulating the past does not necessarily mean recognizing it the way it really was. Past is the concern of history, and to relive a situation belonging to this history it is necessary to forget everything about the later course of events.

So they are collages of various histories but also make up your own history?

Well, yes, my work incorporates much of my personal history, but I don’t want it to be purely personal – that’s why I try to find objects which belong to a larger history, so it becomes a combination of personal and collective and adopted histories. That is why I often use objects that belong to other histories, that are the real traces of the past. They are the true material witnesses or evidence of the events that have happened. They are the residues of certain histories that are then woven into scenarios which come from my past that I have lived or imagined.

That said, how has your specific personal history informed the work?

I’ve moved around a lot: I was born in the Soviet Union then lived in France, Russia again and the Netherlands before coming to London. That’s why many of my works are inspired by places I have lived in and lost – in the sense of missing something which you can’t get back to, which lives in your memory and is exaggerated or distorted by the years which have passed. That’s how I’ve lived my whole life – raised for a while in a particular place, but knowing I must move on to a completely different beginning. You create or adopt a history which you’re going to have to give up, and that failure to get attached and be grounded somewhere originates this idea in my work.

Are you directly influenced by Russia?

I feel the very different Russian culture is still strong in me, though I have adapted to the West. I find I have both roughness and polish in the work, both the overwhelming baroque exuberance of Russia together with the more minimal, condensed and refined culture here. Both are somewhat distorted in my interpretations, but nevertheless very present and important.

Is London also a particular influence?

I was influenced by the extent to which London commemorates its history. The idea of how people replace memories of people with stones, creating rituals around it. I think this invocation of ritual and heritage creates an interesting meshing of the present and the past. The flag came first from wanting to use the ash which comes from the burning in making previous installations: that tries to preserve a line of continuity in my work. I’m very attracted to the coats of arms and heraldry and dissolving the idea that it should carry an emblem – it carries nothing but decayed material from previous works. The rubber is there just to hold the ash – I would have wanted it to just be ash! Maybe I’m commemorating my work, maybe something else. I was inspired by similar flags in stone at Westminster Cathedral, of which these are fragile versions…

You used performance in some of your earlier work, for example covering a floor with thousands of eggshells to be walked on. Does that remain an aspect of your sculpture now?

I prefer to leave the performance element to be implied now. My work has become more permanent – it is caught in the moment before collapse but can be frozen. It can collapse easily but there is a tension – it has a potential to survive, though it might not. But the relation between the human and the architectural remains important. I keep the scale to natural proportions so the viewer inhabits the work as they would the architecture, so it does have a physical conversation with the viewer, and is also a fragment which refers to being part of something bigger.

This isn’t the first time a staircase has featured in your work…

That’s true… I relate strongly to the gestures of going up and down. The staircases always go nowhere and have some inaccessibility, but they are still reminiscent of the attempt to make the movements. It’s not only about hopelessness, though: the spiral in the staircase is something which never comes back to where it started.

Richard Moon: Plastic time
At Madder 139, 4 Feb - 20 March, 2011

The British artist Richard Moon makes paintings which, without being photorealist, set out to exploit their origins in found photography. He does so through two main streams of work: portraits and fantastical conjunctions. So what distinguishes Moon’s work from the evidently related work of Richter, Polke, Tuymans, Borremans or Currin – all artists whom he admires? I think there are two particularly interesting differentiating characteristics in Moon’s work: first, his treatment of time; second, the way in which he uses ‘plastic rhyme’.

Combinations of Time

Moon is a painter who is equally inspired by history and photography. That is apparent in the diversity and historical precision of his photographic sources: nineteenth century daguerreotype portraits with the artificiality born of long poses; post-mortem images of Victorian children; 1920’s film stills; 1950’s photographs to illustrate knitting patterns. It can also be seen in the unorthodox way in which he mixes methods within a painting – such as flat photo-style areas with expressive backgrounds – as if styles are like colours waiting to be used.
Even his relatively straightforward portrait paintings use two or more different sources, contributing to an unsettling atmosphere which Moon emphasises by introducing his own distortions such as bizarre hairstyles, odd noses and blank eyes. The emotional register is hard to pin down, and Moon’s teasing titles are not designed to help. But there is a feeling that the portraits are staged, as if in front of a photographic backdrop, with a touch of music hall and caricature. We are drawn into speculating on their characters at the same time as we are reminded that they are not real people. It’s almost as if, says Moon, these people know that they don’t exist.

The more fantastical works combine their sources by shape and rhythm, leaving the viewer to puzzle out the possible underlying narratives. They often flirt with the corny and clichéd, only to step uncomfortably beyond. Again, ambiguity abounds: is the boy in ‘Icarus’ having fun with his bizarre aeroplane hat and curious instrument? Or is he the subject of some disturbing medical treatment?
Moon’s use of colour worlds is particularly original. He can date photographs by their colours, from the various tones of black and white, to the earliest hand-tinted methods, to the intensely artificial colours of the 1950s. His paintings follow those choices, ranging from straight black and white, to black and white images which are then colour-tinted, to full colour paintings using whatever colour range may suit – sometimes from the same date as the image’s source, sometimes not.
Thus Moon’s paintings use time to drive their subjects, colour and emotional tone. And their overall effects result from combining different times in complex ways: perhaps the dead eyes of a nineteenth century post-mortem photograph with a pose from the 1930’s and the colour of a 1970’s advert, all through the prism of 2010. In a digital age in which we have routinely come to query the claims of the photograph to give us reality direct, we do still trust old photographs to make an immediate connection with the past, with how a particular person was there and then. Moon colludes with that and captures the sense of an arrested moment with its implications of loss and nostalgia – but just as we start to go along with him, he pulls the rug from under and we realise just how slippery all those pasts can be.

The Uses of Plastic Rhyme

Picasso used the term ‘plastic rhyme’ to refer to the way in which some forms chime with and summon up others in a parallel to the way aural rhyme links words. Richard Moon finds that such rhymes lie behind many of the combinations made in his paintings, even if he discovers them only when analysing afterwards what he has done. Interestingly, this can apply – for the form of its letters as much as their meaning – to the text which has recently reappeared in his paintings, as well as to images. Moon himself gives a fascinating account of how ‘A / X’ developed:
‘For a long time I had been thinking about making a painting that related to Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. I wasn’t sure why but had a feeling that it had something to do with wanting to paint a cliché, to purposely make a painting that was already flawed through overuse and popularity. And to make it even kitschier, I had intended to replace the flower heads with children’s heads. A truly awful idea, but that was why I wanted to do it. Nevertheless, anxiety over how such a picture would be received resulted in the idea being shelved indefinitely. But without my truly being aware of it the idea still tormented me, as I discovered when I made a drawing of a skyscraper that I wanted to make a painting of with huge megaphone horns coming out of the top of the building. The painting itself never materialized, but after having made the drawing I was fascinated to discover that I had in fact made a visual pun on the sunflowers idea. The shapes all corresponded so perfectly that I was in no doubt that this was what I had in fact created. Finally a painting did emerge called A/X that again mirrored the shapes of the original idea, yet at the time of making it I was in ignorance to its relationship to the previous two images. So in fact, though it might not immediately seem apparent, the painting A/X has a direct reference to Van Gogh’s Sunflowers.

I suppose this is why when I was initially working on the idea I was driven by instinct to include the letters A and X on either side of the windmill. Again I wasn’t aware of it at the time (as at that stage I wasn’t aware that I was working from the sunflowers idea), but after having discovered it’s relationship to the previous concept the additional letters corresponded to the flowers that would have appeared on either side of the stem. This much was clear, but then why especially did I want to use the letters A and X? There was some reason why it had to be those letters and not any others, and when I began to think about it the answer to that question became clear. Just as the overall composition rhymed plastically with the sunflowers idea and the skyscraper, the letters A and X contain shapes that themselves are mirrored in the rest of the image. The letter A can clearly be seen in the shape of the windmill on stilts, and X’s are seen all over the image, from the obvious X in the sails of the windmill to the many X’s seen underneath the platform on which the windmill rests’.

Where whole words are used, there is the potential for both visual rhyme between the letter forms and the image (in ‘Kink’ the letters imitate the boy’s clothing) and associations between a word’s meanings and what the painting depicts. Moon himself provides a full account of how that works in ‘Kink’, saying that all its definitions ‘could be valid in some way or another with connection to the image’. He lists those as (1) A slight twist or coil in an otherwise straight section of something such as a rope. (2) A slight difficulty or hold up in the progress of something. (3) A sudden spasm in a muscle, especially a crick in the neck. (4) Something that is eccentric or peculiar in somebody’s personality or behaviour. (5) A quirky, odd idea or impulse. (6) An unusual sexual practice, especially one that might be considered deviant. Moon goes on to say:

‘The fact that we don’t know exactly what is occurring in the image leads one to any number of different readings of the work. The tube in the painting might draw one to the conclusion that something is wrong with the apparatus – that there is a kink in the tube, which in turn leads one to the second dictionary definition of the word. Ambiguity as to whether the boy is being forcibly held down or whether it is an experiment that he himself is conducting adheres to the third, fourth and fifth definitions, and yet it is the sixth definition, that of kink as in ‘kinky’ that I believe the largest proportion of the audience would read from the image and word together. This was certainly not intentional, and I believe that it says more about society’s obsession with sex than it does about the image itself, which was sourced from a magazine article on medical practice in the 1950’s, and contained no reference to sexual practice whatsoever’.

Overall, then, the repetition of shapes and suggestions of meanings – both visual and semantic - changes the meanings of what Moon depicts, and heightens the ambiguity of the images.

Someone coming fresh to one of Moon’s paintings is unlikely to pick up on all the combinations of time nor all the plastic rhymes which Moon himself locates in them. However, their presence does help to explain what creates the peculiar atmosphere of his work, and also give viewers ample scope to bring their own associations to bear. Those two aspects of Moon’s paintings, moreover, work effectively together within individual paintings, setting off complementary associations which might be characterised as chronological and formal. They amount, to invent a term, to Moon’s particular vision of plastic time.

Jacques Villeglé: Trajectoire Urbaine @ Alexia Goethe Gallery, London

11 Feb – 25 March 2011

Since 1949, the veteran French artist Jacques Villeglé has made ‘décollages’ (‘un-stickings’) in which he takes layered street posters, already partly torn away and sometimes defaced by passers by, and rips off further pieces before re-presenting them as art. He has outlived fellow practioners Raymond Hains, Mimmo Rotella and Francois Dufrene, and this lively show featured a dozen relatively recent examples. That meant all were new to London, where Villeglé has shown rarely, but there was little sense of the variety his work has generated by reflecting its times: language fragmented into abstraction in the 1950’s; more figurative deconstruction of adverts in proto-pop style in the early 60’s; an increasingly political edge in the late 60’s to 70’s; and a ‘decentralisation’ away from Paris from the 1990’s onwards, as tough regulation of poster advertising restricted his opportunities in the capital.

This then, was essentially a non-Parisian show, and – political media having largely left the world’s streets – adverts for rock concerts loomed large. They suit the sense of voices vying for attention in the cacophony of different layers. Villeglé has spoken of his excitement as he tears away strips to see what lies beneath, and that sense of discovery keeps the work fresh. Its conceptual richness derives from two main sources: first, the scope for surreal conjunctions, puns and visual echoes between posters; second, the way in which the community of the city takes part in the production. Those underpinnings have enabled the work to remain open to contemporary interpretation: thus the décollages may now be seen to prefigure both the entry of graffiti painting into gallery systems and the trend towards building social interaction into works of art.

The show also included spry profiles of the artist made out of the posters which have defined him; and graphical work drawn from modifications of graffiti lettering. Villeglé began these ‘socio-political alphabets’ in the 1970’s, and turned to them more fully as his age made it too physically demanding to handle stacks of posters – but they remained subsidiary in the presence of the ‘lacerated anonymous’.

Henk Peeters: Work from the 1960’s @ Mayor Gallery, London: 12 Jan – 25 Feb 2011

This attractive and historically interesting show presented a dozen works on canvas by Henk Peeters. He was – and remains – the most active member of the Dutch group Nul (formally constituted only from1962-65), the name of which signaled an affiliation with the Düsseldorf-based Zero group, which in turn shared approaches with the Nouveau Realists in France and minimalists in the USA. The exhibited works were simple abstracts and nearly all white, which brought Manzoni’s ‘Achromes’ to mind. All of that may make Nul sound like a backwater, but the exhibition felt far from stagnant or insignificant.

Peeters, like those peers, reacted against the expressionist and existentialist trends of the 1950’s by aiming to show reality as art, using everyday and typically modern materials in such a way that the viewer related to their particular qualities, with the prevalence of white emphasising the effects of light and shadow. That said, Peeters doesn’t present his materials wholly straight: they may be distanced, semi-hidden, orchestrated, or altered. His take on pyrography for example, sees him scorch plastic in grid patterns which feel more aesthetically measured than Burri, Piene and Klein’s contemporaneous burnings; while in the surprisingly beautiful ‘Two Strips of Cotton Wool’, that humble material is presented behind mesh and bleeds at the edges in a manner reminiscent, a little ironically, of Rothko.

Such materials don’t necessarily age well, but this selection was in pristine condition. That arises from Peeters’ decision to restore his work on an ongoing basis: he always wanted his materials to look as if they had just been bought from a shop, and evidently sees that as more important then the mere physical continuity of original substances. Here three delicate feather works, one moving mechanically, two just trembling courtesy of a well-placed ventilation unit, benefitted particularly from that philosophy.

Peeters is not especially well-known outside continental Europe, but this show suggested that his combination of sensitivity and rigour will continue to find new followers.

Terry Rodgers: The Fluid Geometries of Illusion @ Torch, Amsterdam: April-May 2011

This fourth Amsterdam solo show for the American artist Terry Rodgers included five of his big, lush trademark paintings of theatrically hedonistic groups in dishabille alongside drawings and a wide range of works in recently adopted media including videos, light-box constructions, digital collages, and photography.

Rodgers’s paintings have changed little in the last decade: complex groupings of attractive young people, more decorated than dressed, in nightclub settings luxurious beyond cliché. As viewer-voyeurs we’re drawn in but kept at a distance. The figures are united by detailed yet curvaceously rhythmic paintwork and by intricately intersecting compositions, yet avoid eye contact with one another. They seem bored, possibly arrogant, and isolated. Indeed, the models are unaware of each other, as they are drawn and photographed separately by Rodgers before being digitally combined to form the basis for the paintings.

Perhaps, then, it’s natural that the artist’s videos portray solitary subjects smoking, drinking, and lounging around, emphasizing the continuity between the vacancy of their individual and communal modes of being. His drawings are loose dances around the poses of his models, far removed from the surface realism of the paintings. Consequently, there’s a sharp contrast when such drawings are digitally superimposed onto photographs of typical Rodgers content, as in the collages and light-box constructions, so that the freedom of the line emphasizes that the freedom of the subjects may be an illusion.

Rodgers project as a whole still stands or falls by his paintings. Are they voyeuristic titillation in the guise of art or a cunning exploitation of kitsch and fantasy to expose the emptiness of excess? Rodgers has said he aims “to touch the most essential problem of our society: the inability to get in touch with each other." Yet the engaging provocation remains: should he be linked to Hefner and Guccione; or to Picabia and Koons?

NEW IN NOVEMBER

2011-10-29T23:48:00.000-07:00

The best shows in November are the obvious ones: Richter (Tate Modern), Sasnal (Whitechapel) and Sala (Serpentine - 50 minute cycle with live saxaphone). So the big institutions are on the up, and – whatever the uncertainties of the economy may be – more galleries are opening than closing. That’s partly down to the trend for foreign galleries to operate a London hub (there are recent Russian, Italian and American examples), partly due to the move towards multiple spaces. So it is that I can include several new galleries below. Two of my chosen shows, incidentally, explore the monochrome: it’s worth mentioning, then, that Annely Juda’s impressively-conceived Morellet and Malevich exhibition includes perhaps the originating monochrome – one of Malevich’s black squares.

Emma Hart: To Do @ Matt’s Gallery, 42-44 Copperfield Rd – Mile End

To 20 Nov: http://www.mattsgalleryorg/

Feel-good show of the moment is Emma Hart’s chirpily hypnotic cacophony of 27 ‘assistants’ - which is to say tripod-based sculptures with avian features, each showing a short film on a pocket camera in which Hart herself makes jokes and calls out instructions. Hart explains that the bird-cameras sprung from their visual similarities as small things with beady eyes, and their shared ability to influence our behaviour, eg we try to spot both. And ‘somehow you can make birds with just one feather, or a pointy shape, and I got interested in stretching our ability to ‘pigeon-hole’ everything into a type’. Fun aside, this picks up on her ongoing concern for the camera as an active creator of events, and also sneaks in surveillance as a darker theme by way of twitching.

Bulldozer

Wim Delvoye (& Morandi) @ Robilant + Voena, 38 Dover St

To 16 Dec (Morandi to 29 Nov): http://www.robilantvoena.com/

Robilant + Voena’s first show with both first and second floors available is a must-see not just for 15 superb Morandi still life oils from the 40-60’s, but also a rare London outing for the provocative yet substantial Ghent-based Wim Delvoye. A big bronze twisting Jesus rather startlingly shares the Morandi room, while Delvoye’s own main space has four sculptures in the Gothic mode through which he adds history and religion to his more visceral concerns. They intricately combine contrasting elements – as in this bulldozer/cathedral – to metaphorical effect. And don’t miss the office, where a tattooed stuffed pig, three pigskin ‘paintings’ and preparatory drawings for the well-known Cloaca machines (which mimic the human digestive system) make the show a fair sample, x-rays aside, of Delvoye’s main strands.

Augenbilder (Eye Picture) White

Thomas Grünfeld: Young Steerer @ Hidde van Seggelen Gallery, 2 Michael Road – Fulham Broadway

To 3 Dec: www.hiddevanseggelen.com

Cologne-based Thomas Grünfeld is best known for his ongoing series of ‘Misfits’, which comment on human interference with nature by joining taxidermied animals together. But there’s just the one bulldog/goat here: rather, Hidde van Seggelen’s spacious new gallery just off the Kings Road shows Grünfeld’s resonant breadth from a surprising early trio of sparrows on cricket balls to two streams of ‘paintings’: several using various cuts of felt in punchy style, and the playfully macabre ‘Augenbilder’, which use a mixture of glass eyes as the speckles on egg shapes so that the paintings seem to look at the viewer.

Tistol in his studio with the Food series

Oleg Tistol: The Mythology of Happiness @ Salon Vert, 21 Park Square East - Regent's Park

3 Nov – 3 Dec: http://www.salon-vert.com/

This is a substantial first solo show in Britain for the Ukraine’s most-feted painter. Having emerged as part of the underground scene in the Communist era, Tistol set out to transform Soviet and Ukrainian national stereotypes into positive archetypes. In so doing, he works at themes which combine issues of nationhood with the development of his own identity: here through rooms concentrating on palm trees in Crimean seaside resorts; mountains taken from a cigarette packet; and his own meals respectively. Taken together, they make for an energetic exploration of post-pop painting and a satisfyingly complex take on the possibilities for happiness.

Night, The Great Bear

Rinat Voligamsi: The Conditions of Winter @ Erarta, 8 Berkeley Street – Central

To 19 Nov: http://www.erartagalleries.com/

Despite the curious name (shurely shome mistake? No, it's actually a play on a new era of art, not erroneous errata) the new Erarta gallery looks set to present an interesting Russian programme. Here Rinat Voligamsi mocks the Red Army in which he served in the last year of the Soviet system. A wintry video, viewable from outside, introduces monochrome paintings which freeze and subtly subvert 1940’s-50’s photographs of soldiers in cold settings: some are reduced to marching legs; some parade upside-down, heads stuck in the snow. Other images look more realistic, but then you notice that soldiers are lit as if for an interrogation, or the pattern of their burning cigarettes makes up the constellation which signals the mother country.

Leonardo Drew: Number 14i

Leonardo Drew @ Vigo, 1st Floor, 22 Old Bond Street - Central & Memory @ Rosenfeld Porcini, 37 Rathbone St – Fitzrovia

To 13 Nov (http://www.vigogallery.com/) / 3 Dec (http://www.rosenfeldporcini.com/)

Two new galleries, with directors who were formerly director and assistant at the Fine Art Society’s contemporary space, are showing the sculptor Leonardo Drew - whose last London show was indeed with FAS. Drew, who's just won the annual Joyce Alexander Wein Prize for an African-American artist, grew up amongst the poverty of the Bridgeport projects in an apartment overlooking the municipal rubbish dump, and has internalized the emotional recycling of the discarded. Vigo has a solo show of relatively restrained wood pieces which resonate more deeply in the context of Drew’s work as a whole. Rosenfeld Porcini, who have an impressive two floor space, include him in a nine artist show of sculpture concerned with memory in which Kaarina Kaikkonen’s complex use of discarded clothing, Roberto Almagno’s forms out of forest branches and Mar Arza’s multiple sand clocks also make a strong impression.

Scott Lyall: ~~nudes~~ 3 @ Campoli Presti, 23 Cambridge Heath Rd – Bethnal Green

To 17 Dec: http://www.campolipresti.com/

Campoli Presti is Sutton Lane as was, rebranded on a much larger scale in what is now a very handy gallery block incorporating the relocated Hotel, as well as Between Bridges, Herald St and Maureen Paley. Scott Lyall teases with some photographic flesh in a flyer in the foyer, but his works are ‘nudes’ only in that his canvases wears nothing but a hint of pale skin colour, which comes not from paint but the combination of many inks and their erasure in multiple passes through a UV-based printer. You could call it the ultimate reduction of ‘painting’ to naked colour - no hand, no image, no design – were it not that little colour remains, either.

Jacob Kassay @ ICA , The Mall – Central

To 13 Nov: http://www.ica.org.uk/

Against the odds, you might have thought, comes another artist finding a novel way to reach the monochrome. Jacob Kassay has become decidedly trendy for his silver ones, which have sold at auction for £200,000. They’re made by applying paint then chemically silver-plating over it to generate a slightly unpredictable effect with definite presence: they're somewhere between a painting and a mirror, but also reference photographic processes. Here Kassay shows them downstairs on a sculptural wall construction, along shaped white abstracts which converse with the upstairs space much as the semi-reflective silver works converse with the viewer. Like them or not, this feels like what the ICA should be doing: giving the wider British public a first chance to pick up on what’s hot.

Stem II

Richard Galpin: Let Us Build Us a City and a Tower @ Hales Gallery, The Tea Building, 7 Bethnal Green Rd – Shoreditch

To 19 Nov: http://www.halesgallery.com/

Richard Galpin's tool of choice is the scalpel, which he uses to cut away large prints of his photographs of buildings to reveal an alternate set of architectural geometries. Here the original buildings are recent additions to the London skyline, emerging (due to the planning and building time taken) as if in defiance of the economic cycle. Timescales collapse as the scalpel reduces them to ruins of a sort, while at the same time incorporating the past utopian plans of Chernikov and Nieuwenhuy. Galpin's most radical applications of the method peel so much of the image away, the results look at first more like drawings than photographs.

Untitled

Nabil Nahas @ Ben Brown Fine Arts, 12 Brook’s Mews - Central

To Dec 3: http://www.benbrownfinearts.com/

The New York based Lebanese painter Nabil Nahas (born 1949: say ‘nerBIL nerHASS’) follows a museum retrospective in Beirut with his most substantial British showing: recent work from ongoing streams of abstracts which might be termed ‘organic geometry’. They make reference to natural and Islamic forms, some by the literal incorporation of starfish; others by mixing acrylic with pumice to build up intensely-coloured coral-like formations which project from the canvas. They’re certainly seductive, but also create a dialogue between nature and culture which puts me in mind of Philip Taaffe.

Images courtesy the relevant artists and galleries.

TEN CONTEMPORARY PUBLIC WORKS

2011-10-19T10:32:00.000-07:00

Need an art fix out of gallery hours? To celebrate the recent appearance of striking new works by James Hopkins and (for three months) Pipilotti Rist, I’ve added eight more recent public sculptures / paintings below to make a top ten of 21st century art available all day in London, several of them by artists who also have gallery shows at the moment. Come the Olympics, there’ll be even more...

James Hopkins: Angled Ball, 2011 near Wembley Stadium

Sport can make an awkward subject, but James Hopkins scores with a new four metre high ball at Wembley. Its hexagons and pentagons make up a convincing black and white football from some angles, but transmute into a prototypical modernist abstraction from other viewpoints. That’s consistent with Hopkins’ established interest in how points of view change what we see, and so suggest that there is no objective ‘true perception’ - as in his equally cunning sculptures of words reflected in mirrors such that, for example,'rear' becomes 'view'.

Pipilotti Rist: Hiplights or Enlighted Hips, 2011 – outside the Hayward Gallery, South Bank, to 8 Jan 2012

Just a few weeks ago the South Bank was decked in bunting to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Festival of Britain. Now Pipilotti Rist has subverted the form by extending her immersive new exhibition beyond the gallery in the form of 300 pairs of underpants lit from within. Rist, mind you, has a genuine regard for pants as ‘the temple of our abdomen’ and what they cover as ‘the site of our entrance into the world, the centre of sexual pleasure’ and ‘the proof that our internal cleaning machine is miraculously working’.

Clem Crosby: 180 Monochrome Paintings, 2004-06 at the Young Vic, The Cut - Southwark

Were can you find 180 paintings on permanent outdoor display? You may have walked past and not noticed, but the panels which might seem to be merely cladding the Young Vic Theatre are indeed manifold individual yellow-tending abstracts by Clem Crosby, held in place and semi-hidden by a mesh screen. The paintings look best at night, when their variation and expressiveness emerges fully: add that the bar’s pretty good, and you don’t even need a play to justify a visit. I also recommend a trip to Pippy Houldsworth's beautiful new space in Heddon Street to see more of Crosby's work (to 12 Nov).

Rebecca Warren: William, 2010 at Central St Giles, St Giles High Street

Central Saint Giles, the mixed use development near Tottenham Court tube which last year became the first project to be realised in Britain by Italian starchitect Renzo Piano, contains Rebecca Warren’s ‘William’. Its a small work scaled up to become a bronze public sculpture, and refers to the memorialising of powerful men whilst betraying its origins as a lumpy clay amalgam of body parts – not even all male – scaled up to that pretence. Can be paired with Warren’s new show at Maureen Paley (to 20 Nov).

John Frankland: Boulder, 2008 (Shoreditch Park) & Boulder (Mabley Green)- Hackney

Two Hackney green spaces each feature a 100 tonne chunk of solid granite, over four metres high. John Frankland is the sculptor and keen rock climber whose rugged modern monoliths Boulder (Shoreditch Park) and Boulder (Mabley Green) are not just readymades-come-land art-come- landmarks, but are also designed to be climbed. That’s helped by the holes remaining from the preparations for the explosions which blasted the rocks from their cliff face. Like Rebecca Warren's work, they deflate the monumental.

Shirazeh Houshiary: East Window,2007 in St Martin-in-the-Fields, Trafalgar Square

London-based Iranian Shirazeh Houshiary typically explores the interface between modernism and spirituality. That fitted ideally with a commission - together with her architect husband Pip Horne - for the East Window in Nash's classic interior. Houshiary warps the stained-glass-style leaded grid into an abstraction which makes the most of the light while elegantly picking up on both the cross and the bomb damage which destroyed the historic window. The full range of Houshiary’s work can currently be seen at the Lisson Gallery (to 12 Nov).

Ian Davenport: Poured Lines, 2006 at Southwark Street, Bankside

Ian Davenport – showing through October at both Waddington Custot (to 29 Oct) and Alan Cristea (to 12 Nov) in Cork Street - often uses a syringe to drip the paint down canvases or gallery walls: the resulting stripes are on the borders of control. The massive (10 feet x 100 feet 3 metres high x 28 metres long) version beneath a railway bridge near Tate Modern used a special syringe to apply 300 colours of fluid enamel on steel panels, which were fired at 825 °C in a factory near Dresden.

Richard Wilson: Square the Block, 2009 at LSE, Kingsway

Richard Wilson is the contemporary master of radical public artworks. For the LSE he provides a particularly effective ‘what on earth is that?’ on the corner of their Kingsway site. Where it looks as if the corner of the building has been sliced away to facilitate the movement of passers by, Wilson has added a new corner section made from vertical slices of the rest of the building, the lower section of which appears compressed and twisted as if shunted upwards to free up the pavement. That’s a new kind of pedestrian power!

Christiaan Nagel: giant mushrooms 2009-11 – various points in Hackney

Street art is not readily associated with sculpture, but since 2009 South African Christiaan Nagel has – illegally – placed over a hundred giant mushrooms on derelict rooftops around the East End. Being made from polyurethane, they’re not good to eat but are light enough for him carry as he climbs. Most are colourful enough to feel more psychedelic than atomic, and somehow seem friendlier than graffiti.

Michael Bleyenberg: Burlington Flare, 2006 @ Burlington Place - Central

The Crown Estate – as is only logical, given the name – owns all of Regent’s Street, and commissioned German public sculpture specialist Michael Bleyenberg to make this tower. It contains Holographic Optical Elements which, embedded between glass and mirrors, make for a prism-like colour play which catches the sun by day and is lit up at night. Bleyenberg trained as a painter before switching to lasers and computers, and describes his work as ‘light architecture’. An interesting piece, even though the nearby Sadie Coles Gallery tends to outpunch it.

LATE TO VENICE

2011-10-11T22:05:00.000-07:00

Ascension

I’ve just returned from a weekend in Venice, which is a good idea when it's not too hot or crowded. I don’t have time for detail – it’s Frieze week! – but for those planning a late sally, my top Biennale-related items still open in Oct-Nov are as follows:

Bice Curiger’s 83-artists ILLUMInations – obvious, but true.

The national pavilions of Switzerland (Thomas Hirschhorn’s gloriously and rigorously excessive ‘Crystal of Resistance’ ), the Czech / Slovak combination (an installation re-presenting the sculptures made by artist Domink Lang’s father), Austria (Markus Schinwald’s Freudian tweaks and leg obsessions) and Denmark (an un-nationalist group show starring Tala Madani and Hans Hoogerbrugge) - all in the Giardini.

Anish Kapoor’s apparitional ‘Ascension’ in Palladio’s church on the island of St Giorgio, the best thing he’s done in years (though be careful it’s not lunchtime).

Gigi Scaria’s virtual experience for India; and David Perez Karmadavis’ blind man carrying a legless guide in the excellent multi-nation Latin American Show, both in the far Arsenale.

The collateral event which is effectively national pavilion of Scotland (Karla Black), the best of those out and about in the city.

Hans Op de Beeck’s ‘Location 7’, a walk-in grey concrete room overlooking a fountain in the Alexander Ponomarev-curated project ‘One of a Thousand Ways to Defeat Entropy’ (a free boat transfer from the Arsenale - but go last: you can’t come back!)

The Pinault Collection at the Palazzo Grassi, rather than the Punta della Dogana.

Museo Fortuny’s dramatic excess (and ask the assistant to turn on the kinetic work ‘Magnetic Surfaces’ by Davide Boriani, which generates odd creatures and addictive transformations from iron filings).

OCTOBER’S MULTITUDE

2011-09-30T04:33:00.000-07:00

No doubt about it: October is an almost embarrassingly rich month with Frieze itself plus other fairs, and the accompanying shows put on by major public institutions and the galleries in Frieze – such as Aaron Young at Carlson; Nathalie Djurberg at Camden; Mike Kelley at Gagosian; Anne Truitt at Stephen Friedman; Pipilotti Rist at the Hayward; Cory Arcangel at Lisson; Richard Tuttle at Modern Art; Rebecca Warren at Maureen Paley; Degas at the Royal Academy; Georg Herold and Andreas Slominski at Sadie Coles; Anri Sala at the Serpentine; Gabriel Kuri at the South London Gallery; Gerhardt Richter, Barry Flanagan and Tacita Dean’s Turbine Hall commission at the Tates; Post-Modernism at the V&A; Wilhelm Sasnal at the Whitechapel; and Grayson Perry at (where else?) the British Museum, to name only however many that is. And my favourite September shows carry on: Phyllida Barlow at Hauser & Wirth and Jemima Brown at Standpoint. Then there are three (!) Artangel commissions, various pop-ups and auctions and several new galleries due to open, including Pippy Houldsworth, Pace, Thomas Dane’s second space, White Cube’s third… Enough? Not quite! Here are ten shows separate from those categories above, but which are also well worth seeing…

Untitled from the Star Portrait series

Laurel Nakadate @ the Zabludowicz Collection, 176 Prince of Wales Rd – Chalk Farm

To 11 Dec: http://www.zabludowiczcollection.com/

Anita Zabludowicz’s multi-room project space works well for an impressively broad survey of video and photographic work by the young American Laurel Nakadate. The individual works cover established tropes of video art with a winningly light touch: personal diaries, for one of which she cries every day for a year; unorthodox casting calls; dancing in odd places; and interaction with strangers – including an edgy yet empathetic way of luring lonely middle-aged men into her schemes, and photos taken by means of just a night flash to reveal by camera someone unmet. The cumulative effect goes further, though, collapsing the distinctions between self, friends and strangers to make us wonder who we really know…

Zoe Paul: Thalasseum @ Cole, 3 – 4a Little Portland Street - Fitzrovia

8 Oct - 5 Nov: http://www.colelondon.com/

Anita Zabludowicz sponsors the alternative Sunday Art Fair, which includes Tom Cole’s gallery. When asked to nominate promising eighties-born London-based sculptors, I tend to reply ‘Nika Neelova (who'll be in 'The Future Can Wait' during Frieze), Steve Bishop (up shortly at Christopher Crescent), Magali Reus (showing at The Approach in November) and Zoe Paul’. So this is a welcome chance to see the latest from the only British-born artist on that list – though Paul did grow up partly in Greece, consistent with which she’s previously used marble-effect tiles to box in the shapes of classical fragments, as if returning them to the stone from which they were carved. That sardonic dialogue between past, present and future is set to continue here with sculptures using clay from an ancient Minoan site to hide and fragment the figurative forms within….

Lettre sur Aveugles II, 1974

Frank Stella: Connections @ Haunch of Venison, Burlington House – Central

To 19 Nov: http://www.haunchofvenison.com/

Banned from Frieze for being owned by an auction house, Haunch of Venison could be seen as the ne plus ultra of non-fair galleries. The last show in Burlington House, operating in brief parallel with its newly refurbished eponymous space, is the fullest Frank Stella retrospective seen in Britain. It runs from his initial late 50’s explorations of the painting as an object in space (rather than as window onto the world) to such 60’s geometry as a big ‘protractor painting’, through the more complex constructions of the 70’s and on to the baroque turn those objects began to take in the 80’s and – some tastes may feel – proceeded to take too far in the years beyond… Like it all or not, though, this is a must-see.

Portrait 42

Mona Kuhn: Bordeaux Series @ Flowers, 21 Cork St

5 - 29 Oct: http://www.flowersgalleries.com/

If Frieze had been around 30 years ago, Angela Flowers would surely have been central to it; yet though it may no longer be seen as cutting edge, the gallery still represents some interesting artists. One such is the Brazilian-born, US-based, internationally-inclined photographer Mona Kuhn. She spends her summers in a naturist community in France, and that has fed into a style which deals with the nude in domestic and landscape settings in a relaxed, intimate and non-prurient manner. Kuhn became known through her projects ‘France’ (2002-2008),’Brazil’ (2009) and ‘Venezia’ (2010), and now returns to her second home for .the 74 photos of the ‘Bordeaux Series’.

Spiral (Square Argyle)

Daisuke Ohba: The Light Field @ the DAIWA Anglo-Japanese Foundation, 13/14 Cornwall Terrace – Baker Street

To 20 Oct: http://www.dajf.org.uk/

The young Japanese artist, Daisuke Ohba, makes shiftingly mysterious abstract and landscape paintings which stand in for flux in the world. He layers iridescent pearl paint over other colours so that from some angles and in some lights, all is grey; whereas from other angles or in other lights, manifold colours shimmer into view – sort of Cruz-Diez done naturally. The mystery, to me at least, is why exactly the effect occurs: as neither Ohba’s gallerist nor the show’s curator could enlighten me at the opening, I don’t feel too ignorant, but trying to work that out provides another reason to attend… Answers welcome!

Frances Richardson: ‘Ideas in the Making: Drawing Structure’ @ Trinity Contemporary, 2nd floor, 29 Bruton St - Central

11–28 Oct: http://www.trinitycontemporary.com/

Both Trinity Contemporary and Frances Richardson are best known for drawing – the latter uses just the signs ‘+’ and ‘-‘, and her recent colour versions, in a kind of meditative parallel to Ohba’s practice, build in optical transformation effects. Yet this show of MDF structures with a participative dimension looks like sculpture. Not so: Richardson, a classmate of Leeds schoolboy Damien Hirst who later trained in the Yoruba tradition of carving, sees them as drawings in three dimensions. One gives you the chance to measure up to the artist – as I do in her studio above – in a Richardson-sized riff on Robert Morris’ 1961 ‘Box for Standing’.

Rudyard Kipling, perhaps

Liane Lang: House Guests @ WW Gallery, 30 Queensdown Rd - Hackney

6 - 22 Oct: http://www.wilsonwilliamsgallery.com/

Rudyard Kipling is a rare bird in contemporary art, and I tend to think of him as strongly English and colonial - so it comes as a jolt to be reminded that from 1892-96 he lived in Vermont. Liane Lang’s mixture of film and installation will enable us to enter the atmosphere of Naulakha, Kipling’s isolated house in the Connecticut River Valley, and to consider Kipling in light of the shifting historical boundaries of what constitute racism, imperialism and condescension. And this is showing in an appropriately Victorian house. My own engagement may be enhanced by the face from which Lang cast her Kipling – mine!

The Fountain

Fiona MacDonald: Works from the mirrored series 2009-2011 @ 10 Gresham St – St Paul’s

To 22 Jan: http://www.fionamacdonald.co.uk/

Fiona MacDonald is on a scholarship in Rome, but usually manages the artist-run Standpoint Gallery. Here she shows her own work in the contrasting space of a corporate lobby: Lloyds TSB staff will have three months to walk by her characteristic hybrids of classical beauty and visceral entropy. The titular mirroring refers to how the works all reflect historic art, but in a different, distorted form, as if each practice were trying to destroy the other: thus sculptures (Bernini, Easter Island…) are turned into paintings and paintings (Titian, Tintoretto…) into sculptures. The painted sculptures seem menacingly organic (that’s the Tivoli Fountain above), while the paintings become clay sculptures trapped in baroque swirls of lurid silicone. In City terms, I suppose, they’re derivatives gone out of control.

Hamra Abbas: Cities @ Green Cardamom, 5a Portchester Place - Marble Arch

To 21 Oct (not weekends): http://www.greencardamom.net/

Boston-based Hamra Abbas, best known for her ‘Lessons on Love’ sculptures of lovers with weapons, finds this small space big enough to show her remarkable diversity in media and location: sculpture, video, text animation, photography, collage and performance made in – and reflecting – Berlin, New York, Sharjah, Istanbul, Thessaloniki and her native Lahore. The common elements are a playful way of combining sacred with secular and innocence with experience – whether through portraits of children as attributes of God, the artist ritually cleansing another woman in a Turkish bath, or toy missiles mutating into vibrators (see www.hamraabbas.com for an overview).

Rapunzel

Wen Wu: A Re-interpretation of the Fairytale @ the Hua Gallery, Unit 7B, Albion Riverside, Hester Rd – Battersea

To 25 Oct: http://www.hua-gallery.com/

‘Hua’ is Chinese for ‘painting’, which gives you a clue about this new gallery in the same Norman Foster building as once housed the larger Albion Gallery. Aiming to showcase artists well-known in China but little-seen internationally, it opened with predominantly abstract Zen Buddhist painter Yi Xuan, and now shows Wen Wu’s comparably serene meditations on beauty and the relativity of myth. Chinese women – herself in the case of the fantasy platter seemingly trapped in a vase – either enact western fairytales or, in subtly inflected portraits, seem to be thinking about their role in them. Levi-Strauss may come to mind…

Even that isn’t all. I was tempted to list Michiel Ceulers at Rod Barton, David Rickard at The Nunnery, John Finneran at Arcade, John Smith at Peer, Emma Hart at Matt’s Galley, LA painters at Josh Lilley, Richard Galpin at Hales, Morandi @ Robilant & Voena, Alex Hoda at Project 20, Michael Stubbs at Laurent Delaye, Nabil Nahas at Ben Brown, Robert Motherwell at Bernard Jacobson, Lucien Smith at Ritter/Zamet and Artists Anonymous at Riflemaker, Monika Grzymala at Sumarria Lunn and Leonardo Drew at the new Vigo - still without touching on the 37 galleries in Frieze which have a London space.

Images courtesy the relevant artists and galleries.

BASEL 2011

2011-09-23T22:13:00.000-07:00

Here - somewhat belatedly - as a selection of quirky works to be seen at Art Basel 2011, as written for The Art Newspaper. But who knows, it may be that several similar pieces turn up at Frieze...

Mark Bradford: Soccer Ball Bag 3, 2011, Sikkema Jenkins & Co (New York)

Those who suspect that contemporary art is a load of balls could seek confirmation in Mark Bradford's 'Soccer Ball Bag 3'. But there was more to the work than playing on how it might accurately be described. The balls were covered with paper, so connecting them to the collage style of the LA artist’s paintings, which incorporate remnants of found posters from inner city walls. Bradford also picks up on social change: the basketball-playing Negroes outside his studio have given way to soccer-playing Hispanics as the neighbourhood evolves.

Jamie Isenstein: Rug Woogie 4 @ Meyer Riegger (Karlsruhe / Berlin)

The most assiduous artist was emerging American Jamie Isenstein, who spent the whole six days of the Fair 'playing the harp silently', as she put it, by weaving a rug around its strings - and that followed a solid week spent the same way in Karlsruhe. She said it was hard to block out all the flash photography and other distractions, the more so as she’d never performed openly before, only while hidden inside her sculptures. Isenstein’s labour-intensive way of turning sound into colour fitted with a wider trend towards exploring how art relates to craft.

Yutaka Sone: Little Manhattan, 2007-09, David Zwirner Gallery (New York)

Among the works which consistently attracted a crowd for more than a passing glance were Pierre Huyghe’s aminatronic penguin; Douglas Gordon’s close-ups (one video screen per eye) of singer Rufus Wainwright’s heavily made-up eyes; and Yutaka Sone's marble version of Manhattan Island. New Yorkers and beyond were drawn in by its dream-like whiteness, iceberg-worthy height, and a level of recognisable detail which made it no surprise to learn that the Japanese-American sculptor was informed by research flights in a helicopter. The 2.5 ton marble edition was carved at Sone’s own longstanding Chinese studio in Chongwu.

Vija Celmins: Blackboard Tableau #7, 2011, McKee Gallery (New York)

Latvian-born New Yorker Vija Celmins provided the longest gap: it's 30 years since she made ‘To Fix the Image in Memory’, a constellation of eleven pebbles together with duplicates of painted bronze, rendered so alike the viewer was drawn into ever-closes scrutiny trying to tell which was which. Celmins has since become highly regarded for her elemental images of deserts, seas and stars. Now she's returned to the contrast of real and imitation by faithfully copying a found school slate, along with the writing which stands in for – and in the copy it literally is - a painting.

Heimo Zobernig: Untitled, 1995 @ Galerie Christian Nagel (Berlin)

Contrasting with marble, entrants in the always-competitive field of cheapskate materials included Sarah Ramo’s mountain of bags, Liam Gillick’s pile of newspapers – and Heimo Zobernig's use of the inner tubes from toilet rolls. There were also plenty of the Austrian’s better-known paintings on view: they, too, parody the language of minimalism by using apparently unsuitable materials and perverse approaches. ‘Untitled’ stood out for the art logic of its sly connection to the scatological traditions of Viennese actionism, and the ironically substantial wooden transport box-come-plinth on which it stood. Oh yes, yours for a slightly less cheapskate £25,000.

Mikhael Subotsky: Assault GBH & Robbery, Business Burglary & Theft, Theft From Vegetable Shop, Malicious Damage to Property & Theft, Theft of TV Set, Theft of Cable, Robbery of Motorists (Smash & Grab), Murder By Students, Robbery & Assault GBH, Theft of Manhole Cover, Possession of Stolen Property, Attempted Theft of Manhole Cover, 2011, Goodman Gallery (Johannesburg)

Perhaps the most controversial (and longest-titled!) work on view was South African Mikhael Subotzky's quarter hour compilation of police CCTV footage of crimes taking place in central Johannesburg. Some of this was sickeningly violent, but there was a happy ending in that all twelve films concluded simultaneously with the police making an arrest. Subotzky says he used to be interested in crime through the prisms of art, anthropology, sociology and psychology – but all he could think about here was his own two eyes ‘looking out and looking in’.

Pablo Picasso’s palette, c 1973, Galerie Krugier & Cie (Geneva)

In some ways the cheekiest sales pitch was to ask £150,000 for something which wasn’t an artwork at all – one of the palettes which were left in Picasso’s studio when he died. On the other hand, you could say that’s cheap for a Picasso. Certainly it was interesting to see it, and to wonder which painting had received the mixture of blue, green, pink and grey. Consistent with that offer, there was no sign of any change in the top order among the less contemporary artists at the Fair, with Picasso, Warhol and Bacon remaining pre-eminent.

TROIS LIEUX EN PROVENCE

2011-09-13T10:41:00.000-07:00

My wife and I went to Provence for the sun and wine, Roman monuments, wild Camargue and Festival of the Horse - but there did also turn out to be some art in three main places we visited - Arles, Avignon and Les Baux - much of which was themed around the interface between past and present…

Van Gogh: The Railway Wagons, 1888

Arles is of course closely associated with Van Gogh, and one can walk between the sites of the yellow house, night café, bridges and hospital courtyard which he painted: though he lived there for little more than a year (February 1888 - May 1889) the majority of his mature work was painted in the area. Yet there wasn’t a single Van Gogh work on view in Arles: the only one I saw was in Avignon, where Van Gogh changed trains on his way, and painted the spatially interesting but not-especially-iconic ‘The Railway Wagons’, which is now at the Angladon Museum.

From Sol Le Witt: Autobiography

Le temps retrouvé: Cy Twombly photographer and guest artists

The French mega-dealer Yvon Lambert’s personal collection is based at a foundation in Avignon. That currently has a fascinating show on the theme of lost time in photographs, jointly curated with the late Cy Twombly and starring such as Brancusi’s photographic records of his sculpture, Sol LeWitt’s regimented 1056+ images of his house, Ruscha’s parking lots and Sugimoto’s seas…. culminating a tad under-climactically, however, with several rooms of Twombly’s own blurred still life photographs.

Louise Lawler, Bird Call (text with audio recording), 1972.

Louise Lawler also featured with her photographic critiques of how art works are presented by ruling elites, but the most fun was her seven minute audio piece ‘Bird Calls’ (1972-81), a more direct mockery of phallocentrism in the art world. Lawler is the ‘bird’ who derisively chirps, twitters, warbles and squawks – though she stops short of a cock crow - the names of 28 male artists of the time, as if they are calling to each other in their well-established territory. You can hear its gloriously silly pointedness here: marjanzahedkindersley.posterous.com/louise-lawler-birdcalls.

Honey locust beans at the Musee Réattu

The Musee Réattu in Arles is highly eccentric: you get a mix of the traditional paintings of local artist Jaques Réattu (1760-1833) interspersed with a large clutch of Picasso drawings, lots of less than sparking recent minor French art and intrusive carpets designed by Christian Lacroix – all overlooking the Rhône in the former Grand Priory in which Réattu lived, and which he left to the city. But with all due deference to the star piece - Picasso’s portrait of Lee Miller in tradtional Arles dress - the outstanding feature is the tree in the courtyard. It’s a honey locust (Gleditsia triacanthos), a US native, with impressive spikes and six inch seed pods which looked as if they were splashed with paint.

Darkest Night, 1994

Another mixture of old and new was provided by a four-site display of Nice-born Arman (128-2005) in a trail around around the medieval fortress village of Les Baux de Provence, which boasts an imposing castle and the original mines from which bauxite was named. Recreations of his sculpture, painting and collaging practices in studio environments complemented a thorough retrospective of Arman’s characteristic accumulation, stamping, slicing, incarceration, burning and smashing of whatever he could get his hands on. ‘La Chute des Courses’ – stacked supermarket trolleys – looked differently odd against 16th century stonework. And an iconic Van Gogh image was provided at last by one of Arman’s versions of ‘Starry Night’, which generates a whirling obsessiveness parallel to the original by the sheer number of brushes caught up in the production.

The Arles photo festival claims 47 exhibitions in and around the ancient city. The three main themes could be simply categorised as Mexico, the ‘traditional’ art of contemporary photography, and photography in the new media age.

Graciela Iturbide: Paradoros 1

The Mexican presence was the most powerful. It included a comprehensive view of the Mexican revolution; the first European showing of Robert Capa’s legendary suitcase of 4500 negatives from the Spanish Civil War, recently rediscovered in Mexico City; powerful solo shows by Enrique Metinides (disasters and accidents), Dulce Pinzon (emigrant workers as superheroes), Maya Goded (the red light district on the US border) and Daniella Rossell (behind the tasteless facades of the rich). The stand-out, though, was the retrospective of Graciela Iturbide, a student of Manuel Alvarez Bravo who came to photography only in her 40’s. Her black and white pictures fuse documentary records of such subjects as desert communities, goat sacrifice and Frida Kahlo’s house with a mythic undercurrent which often focuses on humans with wild animals. That’s seen at its most direct in her snail and snake-covered self-portraits and her use of flocks of birds.

Mark Ruwedel: Four Palms Spring

The rest of the festival included a range of what one might call ‘conventional’ photography, ie made with the artist’s camera – notably in the choice of three photographers each by five curators shortlisted for the ‘Discovery Award’ won by South African Michael Subotzky for his study of Ponte City in Johannesburg. Rut Blees Luxemburg and Raphel Dallaporta were interesting, too, along with Mark RuwedelRuwedel also gestures at the limits of man’s control over nature..

Visitors examining Frank Schmallmaier's 'Compare'

Some of the Discovery Award shortlist and all of the main curated show ‘From Here On’ concentrated on the use of found images, mostly from the internet. These were dealt with anthropologically (what the masses get up to) or organisationally (classifying images in such bizarre ways as ‘those with a bird’s tail feathers hanging over the lens’), and often both. Much of this was fairly facile, if amusing. The most arresting wall showed some 250 penises, one of them apparently the Dutch artist Frank Schallmaier’s own, being lined up alongside a wide and sometimes bizarre range of size demonstrators. Is it depressing or reassuring to be reminded how alike supposedly differentiating patterns of behaviour can be? Claudia Sola achieved a more poetic narrative rhythm over a dizzying seven minute slide show, for most of which one saw four images simultaneously every second: they amount to a path through life from weddings to rainbows to religion to brain scans to scars to tattoos. And an ingenuity prize to hard-up would-be rock stars The Get Out Clause who played in front of various security cameras and then requested the footage under the Freedom of Information Act: voila! – they had a free video with a difference.

THE SCALE OF AUTUMN

2011-08-25T22:24:00.000-07:00

As the galleries begin to put up their biggest hitters ready for the frenzy of Frieze, I start with five shows in which the scale of the work plays a pivotal role...

Jemima Brown: Mark Tanner Sculpture Award @ Standpoint Gallery, 45 Coronet St - Hoxton

16 Sept – 22 Oct: http://www.standpointlondon.co.uk/

So keen has Jemima Brown been to present façades as apparent realities, she has often seduced us into praising the similitude of her life-size, hand-painted wax figures before we realise just how much of them is missing. Now the lively artist-run space Standpoint shows Brown’s explorations of identity formation, with many of the figures reduced to 1/3 size. That change of scale allows a new intimacy and quite different effects, one of which is the chance to imply bodies out of such unlikely but cunningly lifestyle-revealing items as a thermos flask in a group of Greenham Common women. In this context, a slideshow of 80 drawings from Facebook profiles suggests that, like her tabletop would-be ‘starlets’, Brown’s online ‘friends’ may be looking to create new selves.

James Casebere: Credit, Faith, Trust @ Lisson Gallery, 52-54 Bell St - Edgeware Rd

6 Sept – 1 Oct: http://www.lissongallery.com/

The American 'Pictures Generation' James Casebere hasn’t had the same British exposure as Thomas Demand, but for many years he, too, has been using photography to document scenes which prove on closer examination to be persuasively-constructed models, even when – as several have been – flooded. Typically, he makes monumental prints of small originals, so enhancing the atmosphere of staged unreality into which viewers are invited to project themselves The Landscape with Houses series shown here is a pastiche of the ideal suburban neighborhood, its reconfigured and rescaled elements deriving from upstate New York.

Matt Calderwood: Full Scale @ Wilkinson Gallery, 50-58 Vyner St - Cambridge Heath

2 Sept – 9 Oct: http://www.wilkinsongallery.com/

Wilkinson’s spacious main hall should be well-suited to Matt Calderwood’s tense explorations of natural forces at work in sculpture. Calderwood has previously shown videos of dangerous-looking actions with a sculptural aspect and made apparently unstable work stand up by means of water-filled elements. Here he uses a single shape to make complex meta-shapes of rubber and plywood, held in place by gravity alone. Those same shapes then become the printing blocks for works on paper which forcibly match the scale of the sculptures. Meanwhile, the upper room will house Thoralf Knobloch's painterly meditations on the most mundane of subjects.

Installation view of 'Street' at BAWAG Contemporary, Vienna 2010

Phyllida Barlow: Rig @ Hauser & Wirth, 196A Piccadilly – Central

2 Sept – 22 Oct: http://www.hauserwirth.com/

Phyllida Barlow has a chance to work on a large scale in her first solo show for Hauser & Wirth as she continues to make an increasing impact after retiring from teaching in 2009. The space will allow her to make the most of her way of undermining the would-be-monumental through an unruly combination of builder’s materials, hot pastel colours and imagininatively ramshackle construction. Here, say Barlow, she aims to capture urban congestion ‘like something wild or feral’: expect her to take over and obstruct the former bank from basement to attic, getting in the way of our normal routes and thinking.

The Cow Palace, 2008

Tom Dale: Memorial Drag Strip @ Poppy Sebire, 6 Copperfield Street - Southwark

2 Sept – 1 Oct: http://www.poppysebire.com/

Tom Dale’s varied work seems to derive from asking himself ‘what if?’ questions to which he gives the most extreme answers: see http://www.daletom.com/tom-dale-films/shotthrough.html for how to maximise percussive logic. Here he pushes up to the high ceiling of Poppy Sebire’s former church hall by recreating the rough-wood aesthetic of the motorcycle stunt ramps built by the likes of Evel Knievel’s crews. Dale’s preposterously unusable sculptural versions stand in resonantly for vaulting political ambition and ludicrously overblown nationalism (no, there isn’t a performance!). A side-room explores the surprisingly parallel extent of post-communist modifications to houses near Warsaw…

Paul (I thought I had to choose this, even if it isn't in the show...)

Francis Upritchard: Echo @ Kate MacGarry, 27 Old Nichol St - Shoreditch

7 Sept – 8 Oct: http://www.katemacgarry.com/

The second show in Kate MacGarry’s airy new space off Redchurch Street sees London-based New Zealander Francis Upritchard (‘it’s super-cute’, she’s said, ‘when people say Ou-pritchard’) become the first artist to show in all three of her gallerist’s locations. Upritchard has a winning way of mixing the anthropological, the hippy and the hip to make her own archetypal figures, ranging from the misanthrope to the fool. They seem, as if aware that these fragmented times are the wrong ones for their ilk, to compensate for that lack of centrality through humour, colour and a nostalgia too kooky not to be cool.

Hugh Mendes: 9/10/11 @ Kenny Schachter / Rove Gallery, 33-34 Hoxton Sq – Hoxton

9 Sept – 1 Oct: http://www.rovetv.net/

I like a good obsessive, and though Hugh Mendes seems a balanced-enough bloke, he’s been abnormally dogged this century in painting only 1:1 scale copies from newspaper clippings. Now Angelica Sule and Richard Gallagher, two thirds of the just-closed artist-run space Primo Alonso, pop up to make the most of Mendes’ long-running freezing of the fleeting by staging his tenth anniversary commemoration of 9.11. As well as paintings of newspapers, with obituaries to the fore, Mendes’ epitaph of a decade will include the names of all 3,000 Twin Towers victims laboriously written out, and Mendes’ own newspaper, returning his media gaze to its source.

Stills from 'Tango'

Watch Me Move: The Animation Show @ The Barbican Gallery

To 11 Sept: www.barbican.org.uk/artgallery

There are plenty of reasons to catch the last fortnight of this fascinating history of animation, but the one which struck me most strongly was ‘Tango’, Polish director Zbigniew Rybczynski’s tour-de-force of thirty six obsessively looping and somehow non-interacting characters in a room. It won an Oscar in 1983 (even if Rybczynski did spend the award night in a police cell after security judged him too unlikely-looking to let back in after he popped out for a fag). In those technologically cruder times, its eight minutes required the artist ‘to draw and paint about 16.000 cell-mattes, and make several hundred thousand exposures on an optical printer’. Go to http://vimeo.com/14953710 to get the idea.

Luiz Zerbini: Every Jetson Has A Flintstone Inside @ Max Wigram Gallery, 106 New Bond St - Central

9 Sept - 1 Oct 2011: http://www.maxwigram.com/

One of last summer’s highlights was an agreeably eccentric installation of activated plastic bags by the Brazilian sound installation trio Chelpa Ferro. Now a third of that team has a first British solo show: a diverse practice centered on immersive paintings, with a tendency to seep into the gallery itself to incorporate real objects and sculptures. Rio-based Luiz Zerbini’s rich mix of real and depicted, geometric and organic, inside and outside sets up an alluring enquiry into the second-hand nature of much of modern experience.

Ryan Gander: Locked Room Scenario - for Artangel @ 2-4 Wenlock Rd – Hoxton

To 23 Oct: http://www.artangel.org.uk/ (pre-booking required)

Over the past year the trickery-full Ryan Gander seems to have pulled off ubiquity, adding to his first solo show with the Lisson Gallery by cropping up regularly in biennales and art fair projects while still showing in his foreign galleries, various small spaces (eg The Russian Club), running an Anglo-Italian collaborative side project (Mr Rossi) and making a curatorial splash at his wife’s Limoncello Gallery. It’s no surprise, then, to find him next in line for the impressive Artangel series, nor to hear that he will tease us with an exhibition which features seven artists who are all him, but which appears to be closed…

Images courtesy the relevant galleries and artists + Oliver Ottenschlager (Barlow)

ANTHOLOGY

2011-07-28T11:19:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

FIVE FINALISTS

Vestigial

Andy Harper

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

Beauty Is in the Eyes of the Collective

Steve Morgana

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

Suncatcher II

Tom Ormond

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

Elevator II

Alex Hudson

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

Athne

Suzanne Moxhay

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

FIVE OTHERS I LIKED

Garter Order

Christina Niederberger

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

I Felt the Plastic Bag Begin to Give Way

Stuart Hartley

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

Pool

Dieter Mammel

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

Vom Shit Dog 6

Jock Mooney

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

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

EA Byrne

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

TWO BY TWO IN AUGUST

2011-07-28T04:12:00.000-07:00

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

Jake or Dinos Chapman @ White Cube East & West

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

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

Nicolas Poussin: Apollo and the Muses on Parnassus

Twombly and Poussin: Arcadian Painters @ Dulwich Picture Gallery

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

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

Giuseppe Penone: Skin of Graphite

Richard Long & Giusepe Penone @ Haunch of Venison

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

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

Paul Etienne Lincoln: installation view of 'Aurelian Labyrinth'

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

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

Still from 'Golden Underground'

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

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

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

My Sun's Holiday

Patrick Hughes at Flowers & Flowers East

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michelle Sank: Bye Bye Baby III

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

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

Flowing in Black

Marta Marcé @ Riflemaker, 79 Beak St - Soho

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

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

Image credits: relevant artists and galleries.

REASONS TO VISIT PARIS

2011-07-01T21:35:00.000-07:00

Edouard Manet: Gipsy with a Cigarette, 1862

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

Shari Boyle: King Cobra

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

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

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

Joe Bradley: Big Indian

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

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

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

Contemporary Grotesque: Walking

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

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

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

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

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

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

Untitled (Walt)

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

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

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

Jean-Michel Othoniel

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

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

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

SOMEWHAT HIDDEN IN JULY

2011-06-27T02:21:00.000-07:00

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

Piccadilly Community Centre, 196A Piccadilly - Central

To 30 July: piccadillycommunitycentre.org

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

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

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

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

Joby Williamson: Geraldo's Mirage

Tonic @ Skylon, South Bank Centre – Waterloo

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

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

Marguerite Horner: In Between

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

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

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

Jane Harris: Sixes and Sevens

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

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

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

Ronald Hickman

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mortgage

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

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

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

Total, 1991

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

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

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

Tom Friedman: Circle Dance

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

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

Also recommended:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SCULPTURE-FEST

2011-05-29T04:39:00.000-07:00

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

2011-05-18T04:27:00.000-07:00

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

2011-04-28T23:06:00.000-07:00

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

2011-04-20T21:59:00.000-07:00

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

2011-03-24T22:50:00.000-07:00

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)

MOTHER OF ALL CONNECTIONS

2011-03-12T04:06:00.000-08:00

From mothers to heights to dirt to soap to portraits to light to sexual leanings, here are some of the many connections to be made between current or recent works of interest...

Martin Creed: ‘Mothers’ @ Hauser & Wirth to March 5

I wasn’t knocked out by the whole of Martin Creed’s latest show, but ‘Mothers’ is a high impact piece, a word sculpture which swings around at an alarmingly accelerating pace If you’re more than 6’8” tall, it might literally knock you out. It’s more than spectacle, though: an (almost!) touching assertion of the importance of mothers and the most distinctive new example of Creed building his reluctance to make decisions into his work: here, he avoids having to choose which way the word should point. And cleverly / coincidentally, it follows Louise Bourgeois’ maternally-fixated spider into H&W’s big new space…

Gabriel Orozco: ‘Lintels’ in his retrospective at Tate Modern to April 25

Gabriel Orozco, vividly present though hardly ever visible in the action of his work, provides a sparky retrospective at Tate Modern. It includes another work set just above head height. ‘Lintels’ consists of the lint (formed from skin, hair and fabric) collected from the washing machines in a New York laundromat, hung up in the style of washing on a line. Orozco emphasises the aesthetic aspect by making nuanced prints from the material, though the timing of its first showing - November 2001 – naturally made more of its evocation of the fragility of human life.

Karla Black: ‘Brains Are Really Everything’ in The British Art Show 7 @ the Hayward Gallery to 17 April

Karla Black’s latest mode, cake-like structures made of soil, is consistent with her predeliction for loose and potentially unstable materials. She says she works with them ‘not because they easily change and decay but because I want the energy, life, and movement that they give.’ But if brains really are everything, is that in making or interpreting the piece? And, either way, is that meant straight, or in ironic recognition of the work’s instinctual nature? Or is the title just a red herring of a sentiment, arbitrarily attached?

Matt Golden: ‘Six Years in the Bath (re-enactment) V’ in ‘More Bit Parts in Little Theatres’ @ Bischoff / Weiss to 2 April

Where there’s dirt, should there not be washing? Actually there is soap on top of Karla lack's soil, but more conretely Matt Golden was – rather impressively – reading Lucy Lippard’s theoretical tome ‘Six Years – Dematerialization of the Art Object’ in the bath. Then he dropped it. Liking the accidental Rorschach blotting which resulted, he restaged the ‘performance’ five times with other copies (I’d have liked it if the sequence took six years, but Matt claims to bathe more often than that). The set is on show along with a dozen delightfully maverick chairs – sitting prohibited: they’re made out of picture frames.

Meekyoung Shin: ‘Ghost Series’ in her show ‘Translation’ at Haunch of Venison to April 2

Soap is the obsessive material of choice for Korean artist Meekyoung Shin, who uses it make less permanent versions of Chinese porcelain and Western classical sculpture. I’m not sure why soap – is she attempting to cleanse the past? Is contemporary art a mere soap opera? - but there’s no doubting the wow factor of the biggest room. It’s filled with more than 200 translucent vases, imitating glass, and grouped into colours which shine dramatically out of the gloom.

Sam Jackson : 'Night's Black Agents' in 'The Fearful Joy' @ CHARLIE SMITH London to 2 April

Sam Jackson offers a different kind of dirt: well - two kinds, and rather less amenable to soap. His intimately-scaled, historically grounded yet intensely unacademic painting practice seems to be ricocheting between pseudo-traditional portraits eked out of muddy browns; and pornographic close-ups of sex acts which seek to trump the blatant content by extending the traditional reach of the painterly. His new show moves back to portraits, though mostly imagined. He's also, by the way, one of the most-represented artists in the interesting private Kabin collection (which you can arrange to visit, else see online at www.kabin.org.uk).

Jorma Puranen: Shadows, reflections and all that kind of thing 64 @ Purdy Hicks to 28 March

Finnish photographer Jorma Puranen provides another angle on the historical portrait by emphasising the reflections and shadows on paintings as much as their primary content, helped by the lack of recognition factor in little-known Scandinavian works. The results foreground the painted object - especially the use of wood panel - and the photographic process, while adding a mysterious aura to the faces. They complement the landscapes he has previously made (which he photographed indirectly through their reflections in panels of painted wood); and, like them, bring to mind Plato’s cave: apt, then, that the exhibition’s title 'Shadows, reflections and all that kind of thing' is from Plato.

Aidan McNeill: ‘Revolve VI’ in CAST @ Payne Shurvell to 2 April

Aidan McNeill also takes photographs which downplay the main event, in this case the west end musical for which - in her day job - she is a lighting technician. That’s given her the access to take what look at first glance like romantically sublime skyscapes, but prove to be close-ups of the stage effects which provide musicals with their backdrops. Add a video in which an orchestra’s view of the conductor is matched to the sound of the Deputy Stage Manager calling up the lights required according to the cues given by his movements, and you have a dismantling of theatrical illusion which generates a little replacement magic of its own.

Rita Nowak: ‘ex libris’ in ‘The Dandie’s Ball’ @ Ritter / Zamet to 26 Feb

This self-portrait came with a nice story of the role it played in the development of its exhibition. Gallerist Marcus Ritter says he was most taken by the Oscar Wilde tattoo on the arm of a fellow party-goer, and asked her to send him an image of it. She turned out to be Austrian photographer Rita Nowak, and Ritter was surprised to receive not a quick snapshot but this beautifully day-lit tribute to Wilde. That led him to make a fascinating exhibition to feature it, along with classical and modern works and books, picking up on his previous interest in the figure of the dandy.

Daniel Sinsel: ‘Untitled’ in his solo show at the Chisenhale Gallery to 13 March

London-based German Daniel Sinsel came to prominence with paintings which frame elements from gay porn with tight elegance. Now his work is abstract, but the sexual symbols are but lightly buried and flash good-naturedly between the fifteen works ringing the Chisenhale Gallery. Thus there is plenty of play with columns, sticks and a golden flute lodged in a cleft of linen; or again between terra cotta cymbals which drip into testicular forms and the secretion of hazelnut shells into bags attached to the canvas.

Balthasar Burkhard: 'L'escargot' in 'A Homage to Balthasar Burkhardat' @ Ladiray Gallery, 74 Wells St to 19 March

French gallerist Jerome Ladiray recently opened a lively gallery just off Eastcastle Street, with the aim of correcting the overly low London profile of artists working in France. Having said which, he's currently showing the Swiss photographer Balthasar Burkhard (1944-2010), whose substantial continental reputation comes from how he zooms in with great deliberation on loaded symbols such as springs, birds' wings and snails - which seemed edibly sexual in the Gallic context...

Photo credits: courtesy of relevant galleries and artists

MARCH BACK A BIT

2011-02-26T23:14:00.000-08:00

There's some interesting but rarely-seen older work around at the moment: we start in the 1960’s, edge forward to the 80’s and carry on with a dose of vinyl before we hit the fully contemporary - only to find they're in the form of TV, well past its heyday, are constructed out of previous times, or hark back indirectly to the past. And that's not to mention Erica Eyres' take on the 80's soap 'Dallas' at Rokeby or the Barbican's return to New York in the 70's...

La Vedova Blu

‘…a multitude of soap bubbles which explode from time to time….’
Pino Pascali’s Final Works, 1967 – 1968 @ Camden Arts Centre

4 March – 1 May: www.camdenartscentre.org
The way in which the Italian arte povera artists used everyday materials remains highly influential in current practice, but Pino Pascali (1936-68) has hardly been seen in Britain despite his prominent role at the start of the movement, and despite – or is it because of? – his glamorous lifestyle and potentially myth-making early death in a motorcycle crash. His work was wildly various, and often not all that povera, but this show includes his most consistent set of sculptures: those which made up – though for a mere two days before he withdrew them in protest at police responses to student unrest – Pascali’s presentation at the Venice Biennale in 1968. It's a startlingly fresh show, conceptually and materially (even though it uses lots of steel wool, which should by rights have disintegrated by now). There's something right, for example, about the wrongness of a six-legged spider...

Installation view

Larry Clark: What Do You Do For Fun? @ Simon Lee Gallery, 12 Berkeley St - Central

To 2 April: www.simonleegallery.com

Former Vietnam veteran, junkie, convict… and photographer of babies for the family business, Larry Clark found notoriety forty years ago by photographing the casual gun, drug and sex culture of Oklahoma teenagers. His motivation was to show what wouldn’t otherwise have been seen, and if he inspired ‘heroin chic’, then, he says, that was merely because he wanted to make his friends look good. Simon Lee is showing an hour of previously unseen sixties film footage plus a wide range of Clark’s collages – from photos by his mother to his name tattooed on his lover’s pubis, from magazine clippings to 209 vintage prints in a wall-wide bank. The earliest are readable now as staging posts between straight photography and Clark maintaining his interests by making films featuring subsequent generations’ adolescents.

‘T1982-H15’, 1982 - actually in the store, not the show, but you can ask to see it...

Hans Hartung: The Final Years 1980-89 @ Timothy Taylor Gallery, 15 Carlos Place - Mayfair

10 March – 9 April: www.timothytaylorgallery.com

The Franco-German abstractionist Hans Hartung (1980-89) found fame for paintings which magnified small drawings into monumentality, then turned to direct large scale expressionism. By the 1980s, when this show starts, he was using a pebble-dashing tool, garden rakes and olive branches as brushes. Following a stroke in 1986 he turned, weak and wheelchair-bound, wholly to spraying machines, with which he developed an energetic language of mist, clouds, drips and doodles. With the help of several assistants, he made a remarkable number of large canvases (360 in 1989). Are they a mechanistic coda in which Hartung’s own role was limited, or ultramodern contrasts between the infinite sublime and inner torment? Here’s a chance to decide.

Book installation at 10 Woburn Walk

Gerard Williams: The Collected Works @ Handel Street Projects, 19-21 Sicilian Avenue - Holborn

To 31 March: www.handelstreetprojects.com

Handel Street Projects features the somewhat under-the-radar Gerard Williams. Onsite, he has embedded three windows into the gallery interior, one of them a hundred years old and looking it. Behind them lie various items, triggering our imagination / prejudices to construct an account of the putative inhabitant. Offsite, Williams has turned three empty shops into monuments to outdated consumer aspiration through window displays of recessionary excess (proving, perhaps, the zeitgeist, Anita Zabludovic also has an empty shop project at present; and an interesting comparison is with Barnaby Furnas’ paintings at Stuart Shave: multi-armed characters simultaneously smoking scores of cigarettes).

Gustavo Murillo: Blue

Jessica Herrington: 'Cave' & Gustavo Murillo: 'MacroTelevision' @ WW Gallery, 30 Queensdown Rd, Hackney

3-6 March (Herrington) & 11-27 March (Murillo): www.wilsonwilliamsgallery.com

The WW Gallery’s ‘art supermarket’ made a good impression at the London Art Fair, and the positive vibe should continue in March. Australian artist Jessica Herrington’s ‘Cave’ of crystalline growth conjured from ephemera will be something of a woman-made rapid-result antipode to Roger Hiorns’ room-filling copper sulphate growth ‘Seizure’ (2009-10). It’s followed by Spanish photographer Gustavo Murillo's series using a macro lens to magnify parts of television pictures, reducing them to op/pop/ phosphor dot abstractions which stand as ciphers of the underlying image while reflecting gallery-goers as if the screen were turned off.

Study for Caerleon I

Alan Rankle @ Pertwee Anderson & Gold, 15 Bateman St – Soho

To 24 March: www.pertweeandersongold.com
The new Soho gallery Pertwee Anderson & Gold adopts the theatrically-lit style of presentation associated with All Visual Arts, and kicks off its ground level space by hosting AVA artist Kate MccGwire’s intricate constructions out of bird feathers. Downstairs, albeit less suited to the spotlighting, is a welcome London showing for Alan Rankle’s intoxicatingly painterly manipulations of landscapes tradition. Rankle, better-known internationally than in his native England, fuses old master and abstract styles and techniques in the interests of cutting across our viewing habits and exploring changing attitudes to the environment.

Relocation

Susanne Kühn: Garden Eden @ Haunch of Venison,6 Burlington Gardens - Central

To 2 April: www.haunchofvenison.com

Leipzig-trained Susanne Kühn spent seven years in America before returning to her native Germany, which may help explain the complexities of pattern and space in her large and multiply-styled paintings. My favourites here set figures and a plethora of other elements, often with sly art historical references, amid architectural spaces borrowed from renaissance masterpieces. They somehow end up feeling organized rather than overcrowded, and also enact a movement from abstraction up close to realism at a middle distance to abstraction again when you’re far enough away in Haunch’s big spaces for their allover rhythms to take control.

Crash 4

Emma Hart: JAM @ Cell Project Space, 258 Cambridge Heath Rd – Cambridge Heath

10 March – 17 April (Fri-Sun): www.cellprojects.org

Video and performance artist Emma Hart attempted to predict the future – i.e. where she would be standing next – in ‘Arrows’. Her own future prospects are improving: having featured in ‘Bloomberg New Contemporaries’, this show at Cell precedes a new project at Matt’s Gallery in the autumn. Hart combines a consciously intrusive camera – which pokes inside a sofa in search of the hidden in ‘Lost’ – with a winning style of voice-over commentary. She relays the ups and downs of her battle against the sea in ‘Dice’ (will the tide’s arrival trump her throw?) while ‘Car Crash’ co-opts table tops to explain how traffic accidents happen.

Tales from the Estuary

Emma Talbot in 'Told' @ Hales Gallery to 2 April, & in 'Me and My Shadow' @ Kate MacGarry, 11 March - 17 April

Perhaps this is the time to be an Emma, as Talbot has two shows running in March, both with two other women. Her half-doll, half-cartoon figures look as if they’ve stepped out of the 1950’s or 60’s rather than her own coming of age in the 1980’s. They transmit emotion without the need for faces – especially once you know that they often present scenes from her life before the premature death of her husband. Her recent work develops fragmented narratives, strip style, on her biggest scale yet.

Uncomposed

Phillip Allen: Capital P @ The approach, 47 Approach Road – Cambridge Heath

To 13 March: www.theapproach.co.uk

The invite for Phillip Allen’s fifth show with The approach grabs attention with a found photo of a terribly over-burdened donkey. What gloomily times-matching new direction is this? But it turns out you still know where you are with Phil: the abstracted contrasts of geometric, organic and cartoonish; the colours multiple and free if a shade more muted; the border territories of multi-layered paint swirls built up like flowers; the sense of something nearly being said, to quote another Phil… all are present and correct along with the elegant - if slightly perverse - departure of oil paint drawings on watercolour paper. But do I need unfamiliarity to enjoy this? No, I don’t…

Photo credits: courtesy of relevant galleries and artists and Benjamin Beker (Handel Street).

USEFUL ARTISTS' ALL-OVER TOUR OF THE VIP ART FAIR

2011-02-02T07:47:00.001-08:00

139 galleries took part in the first online VIP art fair – for Viewing In Private with a hint of browsers being Very Important People – which took place on 22-30 January. There were technical problems on the opening weekend due to weight of traffic, and interactive chatting with gallerists had to be disabled. That may have been a good sign for numbers logging on (dealers reported that images commonly received over 1,000 clicks) but the word was that sales weren’t high, and for all its starry slickness – once the glitches had been overcome – it felt more like browsing the web than attending a real fair. Still, that’s what one might expect of a launch year. Inevitably, there was talk of purchase at a distance being unduly speculative, yet given that people bid from auction catalogues, and that buyers can take account of what they have physically seen previously by the same artist, I don’t see why the concept shouldn’t have legs. And there were plenty of interesting works on show. Collectively, they amount to useful artists’ all-over surprising tours...

Useful

Consumer goods have a longer history of serious online sales than art does, and the art-design interface is a fashionable place to be, so perhaps there was a logic to selling such items as furniture….

Matt Johnson: Reclining Nude, 2008 @ Taxter & Spengemann, New York

This chair made from steam-bent and laminated red oak shows off upcoming LA artist Matt Johnson’s charming ingenuity to advantage by neatly combining the sitter and the sat upon. At the same time, as is typical of Johnson, it riffs wittily on a classic sculptural subject and its styles. This, surely, was what to sit on to view the Fair.

Valeska Soares: Untitled from After (Mattress II), 2008 @ Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo

This apparent resting place would be less than comfortable for real, being carved from marble by the Brazilian sculptor, video artist and mattress specialist Valeska Soares. It makes for a three-way dialogue between the monumental, the minimal and the intimately ornamental – or, if you prefer, between Rauschenberg, Gonzalez-Torres and Whiteread.

Artists

Galleries put varying effort into their presentations. Some just listed the basics and bunged in a link to the artist’s cv. The best provided several high res views of a given work, instantly available information on the particular piece on view and on the artist’s oeuvre as a whole, and a photograph of the artist. Some of those portraits were most engaging:

Greg Bogin at Leo Koenig, New York

It’s not often you see a painter standing in his painting, but Bogin’s work provides that chance: his wackily-shaped, semi-sculptural, jestingly-titled canvases are inspired by truck logos, neon, supermarket signage, IKEA catalogues and highway markers. Once finished, they set off white space against bands of colour.

Thomas Houseago at Xavier Hufkens, Brussels

The LA-based sculptor Thomas Houseago has such a fine Wild West beard in this photo I struggled to remind myself that he’s English (born Leeds, 1972, studied at the St. Martin’s College of Art and De Ateliers in Amsterdam). His knowingly awkward, imposingly provisional jumblings of classical and primitive into monumental figures are very much in demand.

Allover

I could run with the theory that allover patterning in wallpaper style is particularly suited to browser display: whether or not, two such caught my eye…

Philip Taaffe: Algeciras, 2010 @ Gagosian, various

Philip Taafe’s ‘Andalusian’ series, begun in 2008, superimposes the architectonic arabesque motif on explosions of color that are based on traditional Japanese fold and dye paper techniques. Thus ‘Algeciras’ merges abstractions old and new and sets frame against background in a push and pull which generates a spiritually-tinged feel-good vibe. ‘The point of the psychedelic’, Taaffe has said, ‘is to connect us with our ancestors’.

Shane Hope: ribbon_nucleic_acid_mode, 2011@ Winkleman, New York

Californian artist Shane Hope manipulates open source software to make what he calls Molecular Modeling prints (or more catchily ‘Mol Mods’), informed by his belief that ‘the molecule is the brushstroke of the future’ – that nanotechnology, the manipulation of matter on a molecular scale, ‘will transform industry sometime soon’. I’m not sure how serious the science is, but its visualisation drew me in.

Surprising

It is hard to be surprised by the post-war artists whose influence has been most pervasive over the last half-century, and yet…

Jackson Pollock: Untitled,c. 1949-50 @ Washburn Gallery, New York

You don’t often see Pollock’s sculpture, and when you do it tends to be earlier than this painted terracotta from his peak period as Jack the Dripper. He made a series of these, in the studio of East Hampton neighbour Roseanne Larkin. Although it's only eight inches across, as indicated online by the optional presence of scale-setting figures, I find it closer to the totemic than the ceramic.

Andy Warhol: Sunsets, 1972 @ Brooke Alexander Gallery, New York

The sun seems to take on the colours of sky and sunsets directly for itself in a suite of eight prints too cheerful to associate naturally with the later Warhol’s death-centered imagery – though that link can be made … Maybe it’s just me, but I’d never seen these sunsets before. Perhaps my next artist was more familiar with them…

Tours

Rather than navigate by gallery or artist – the second of which worked seamlessly through solo presentations or setting up sequences of all the works across galleries by a given artist – you could also tour a choice of works. Visitors were able to post their selections in the general public area, while well-known critics and the odd celebrity set out paths in or the VIP lounge (entry to which cost $100 on the first weekend and $20 thereafter to those not invited as known collectors etc).

Peter Coffin: Untitled (Clouds), 2011 @ Herald St, London

Vasili Kaliman is an Australian gallerist and compulsive tweeter who will on request also forward press releases from selected shows worldwide to your inbox. His wide-ranging ‘visitor’s tour’ included these winsomely-coloured and meteorologically impossible combinations of clouds. They're taken from nineteenth century photographs, giving a lead yet still unassertive role to the stock clouds used to cover for the blank whiteness of the skies caused by the photographic exposure times then required.

Gregory Crewdson: Untitled (Ophelia), 2001 @ Luhring Augustine, New York

John McEnroe’s dramatically-inclined 30 work ‘VIP tour’ included one of Crewdson’s most iconic filmically-staged photographs, a modern take on Shakespeare which seemed freshly relevant given the amount of recent flooding worldwide. It also stands in for the type of photographic and video work one would expect to suit the online environment best, but which actually featured no more in this Fair than in Frieze or Art Basel.

EXTRAS

2011-01-29T04:21:00.000-08:00

Here's another round-up of recently commissioned writings additional to the main column: two profiles of favourites, a catalogue essay and three reviews.

Artist Overviews

Beheading of the Cockerel

Online Artist of the Week: Tereza Buskova (written for Saatchi Online magazine - Oct 10)

For a straightforwardly-presented film to work in a gallery context – rather than just turning the gallery into a cinema – it needs to have an immediate impact which draws the passing viewer in, whenever they arrive. The London-based Czech Tereza Buskova has made three films of a few minutes each – with a fourth in production – which achieve that with intoxicatingly effect.

The films present living tableaux, more like a linked succession of moving paintings than a story, in which traditional Bohemian rituals are seamlessly merged with artistic reinterpretations and interventions. They are wordless, their heady atmosphere heightened by haunting, cello-heavy soundtracks. Buskova makes the costumes and props, directs the actor-dancers and edits the film. She also makes screenprints from the action: the colour coordination and heraldic flatness of the scenes are well-suited to the still image.

Buskova’s first three films have given us her take on ‘Wedding Rituals’ (2007), which seem more foreboding than celebratory; the logical follow-up of a ‘Forgotten Marriage’ (2008); and ‘Spring Equinox’ (2009), her version of Easter rituals in the oldest village in Moravia. Slow-moving white-painted near-naked women, cardboard cut-out animals to represent fertility, and bizarre headwear recur. There are narrative strands of sorts but they’re mysterious: the men in Spring Equinox, for example, start out joyfully whipping maidens’ buttocks but end up blindfolded and stranded in a lake, at which they now lash out.

The effect is a kind of invisibly unified collage of the old and the new which freshens up the decadence of the past. But what lies beyond the mesmerising folk surrealism? The films assert the resilience of local cultures – these rituals have seen off communism – and also ask two interesting questions. First, what role should traditions play in the modern world? Best, Buskova implies, not to let them ossify in conservation, but to change them to suit the present. Second, what is the boundary between life and art? The melding of the two shows that the division is not such a simple one, and speaks for the art of living.

Next up will be the results of Buskova’s February filming of the carnival of Masopust, in which, she says, Bohemian villagers deal with their cold winter with a combination of drink, meat, processions, brass bands and grotesque behaviour. Sounds like just the thing for our economically tough times … Let the carnival begin!

Subtraction 9

Online Artist of the Week: Sebastian Lemm (written for Saatchi Online magazine - Feb 11)

Over the past decade, New York-based German Sebastian Lemm has been a persuasive digital manipulator of the photographic image. His recent projects have used trees to combine the conceptual with the romantic in an unusual way; triggering associations with Caspar David Friedrich and the fairytale psychological parallels of forests, whilst at the same time playing off the modernist grid and questioning both the nature of representation and the representation of nature.

His ‘Schattenseite’ (‘Dark Side’) series show intensely flashlit scenes of tangled branches and leaves by night. But just as we wonder what to read in to the patterning so achieved, how to project the human onto nature in the romantic manner, we are tripped up by the realisation that the patterns contain unnatural contradictions, achieved through the combination of several photographic sources. The natural becomes the man-made, and we are reminded of how every aspect of the world is infused by our perceptual framework: we cannot, after all, pretend to a separated interpretative overlay.

The digital intervention is more obvious in the ‘Subtraction’ series, in which photographs of trees in summer are stripped of leaves, grass and sky so that only the trunk and branch superstructure remain. The effect is paradoxically wintery, while also suggesting both a minimalist concentration on essential form, and the possibility of an environmental disaster born of our interventions.
Lemm’s most recent set of images, ‘Strata’, makes the network of branches even more elaborate in all-over patterns built up through multiple exposures and layering. In a neat paradox, ‘Strata’ suggests the accumulation of memories whilst the means of production denies photography its usual straightforward link to the past: these are representations of what could never have been.

Lemm says he is interested in how the structures, patterns, repetitions and voids (both black and white) in his pictures make for interactions ‘which parallel human nature and relationships’. It turns out, then, that the escape from the memory built into a single photographic event triggers our pasts in a different way.

Catalogue Essay

Interior with Couple and Photographs

Andrew Hollis: Realities and Otherwise (written for show at ROLLO Contemporary, Feb-April 11)

It must be some time since it was any kind of news that photographs aren’t automatic carriers of truth – so much so that the natural tendency to assume that they are, which was probably general thirty years ago, has been largely unlearned. It’s the rise of digital technology which has altered popular instinct, but the case for scepticism doesn’t depend on such developments.

True, photographs have an indexical aspect which links them directly to some kind of origin in a way which cannot be said of painting. But the possible challenges to that kernel of truth are manifold. The growth of popular skepticism is probably linked to how the world might be distorted to the photographic purpose (take Alison Jackson’s photographs of celebrity look-alikes), or the image may be manipulated by airbrushing or Photoshopping. But the connotation of a photograph is also affected – in all innocence, as it were – by the ideological assumptions built in to how and why it is taken; by the time and physical conditions in which it is seen; by what the viewer brings to the experience; by a title, or a context within a wider body of work, both of which may point to particular meanings.

That much we know, then: there is plenty of space for subjectivity in the apparent objectivity of the photograph. Nor is it news that a painting derived from a photograph can point up all those issues by being explicit about a further transformation: that required to represent the image in the language of paint. We see that in the conceptual trick of photorealism, which feints as if to paint the world, but doesn’t: it paints a photograph instead, and by the sheer effort required to do so with the technical exactitude of Franz Gertsch, Richard Estes or John Salt, invests a greater sense of worth in the objects photographed than could the photograph itself. It’s a variant on Duchamp’s exploration of the found object, applied indirectly. We see a different effect in the paintings of Gerhard Richter, Michael Borremans or Luc Tuymans: they concentrate on the aura of the photograph rather than its indexicality; on its connections with memory and its own imperfections; with its rootedness in one time, but relationship to other times.

So, if all of that is given – not perhaps fully played out, but well established – and one comes across a new artist who paints from photographs, one is bound to ask: what’s different here? How has an artist who exploits all that – as Andrew Hollis does – built on the history of engagement with the nature of photography and the limitations of its truth?

Partly, I think, by the clarity of the conceptual framework Hollis brings to his work, neatly summarized in his statement that his paintings can be understood as ‘images of historical non-realities and images of non-historical realities’ . Partly through a diverting mixture of painting styles: sometimes informational, sometimes more gestural; sometimes like photographs as source, sometimes emphasizing the photograph as object, witness the curious cropping of the figures in Landscape with Women and Figure and Interior with Couple and Photographs (in which the couple are more photographic than the photographs). Partly through a distinctive colour world which tends towards a range of greys, consistent with black and white photographs; and a liking for pinks, hinting at the rosy viewpoints of nostalgia.

And partly – quite a large part, I think - by the surrealist-tinged edginess of unexpected actions or juxtapositions. Why are the women in Landscape with Women and Figure carrying a sort-of cut-out relief of a figure? Why are swans in Oil Barrels with Swans and Columns swimming along what looks like a river of oil? What is the role of the sinister structure in Children with Frame? One can imagine answers to do with female empowerment, environmental concerns and the nature of constraint in childhood, but the images escape such reductions. There are also striking mismatches between the main goings-on and their backgrounds. Why – as an extreme case – is a boat being rowed indoors in Pool with Rowers? Why is the wall in Interior with Couple and Photographs so obviously not the one on which such a couple would display their photographs? Sometimes the apparent mismatches exploit nods to art history: the ‘Children with Frame’ are set against what could be rusted Richard Serra sculptures, and there’s a suspicion of Richard Diebenkorn in the Exterior with Rowers.

But those, I think, are subsidiary aspects in this particular set of paintings. For me, the main event is how Hollis’s latest images gain their own peculiar resonance through his use of encyclopedias and yearbooks from the 1960’s, 1970’s and early 1980’s. ‘What interests me’, says Hollis, ‘about images like these is that they were originally used to describe something of significance of a specific time. In doing that, moreover, the sources doubly echo the modern reception of photography.

Firstly, because printed encyclopedias have, like photographs, a claim to authority, but one which has much less ready acceptance than it once did. The internet has largely taken over their reference function. And Wikipedia – a major factor in that usurpation – is well-known for its subjectivity and the occasional jocular or malevolent inclusion of rogue information. That’s part of the territory of user-generated content, but it also increases the popular awareness of how all knowledge is mediated and constructed in subjective ways. What never quite reached the man in the street through the writings of Foucault and Baudrillard has been picked up through Photoshop and Wikipedia.

Secondly, such encyclopedias have a more specific presence in time than literature does as a whole. Just as the indexical aspect of a photograph shows what things were like at a particular moment, a time which cannot be regained and - as Barthes suggested - imports an element of death to its photographic record, so the encyclopedia sets out what is judged to be important and true at a particular time. The information has its own kind of death – its future uselessness – built in.

The combination of two or three elements in each painting amplifies these effects. We don’t know how old the different elements are, and so how far out of date they have beome, and whether there are ‘mis-matches’ within a painting . That brings in the potential for more contrasts to add to the visibly curious conjunctions, but these contrasts in the degree of ongoing validity of the sources are not so much mysterious as impenetrable. We know they might be there, but we can’t distinguish them.

That resonant double parallel, heightened by conjunctions, is, I think, what gives Hollis’s work its distinctiveness and potency. To illustrate that, it’s worth tracking through the sheer number of different times depicted in a painting such as Water Flowers with Boat. Starting from the here and now of the viewer, we go back to the still-recent antecedent of Hollis producing the image, back further to the publication times of the encyclopedias used as sources, back a little further to the taking of the photograph reproduced in the encyclopedia, and then back again to the time in the nineteenth century when painting itself was emerging from its primary function of mimicking appearances – for there must be a reference to Monet’s waterlillies, supported by the peculiar purple coloration which echoes the cataract-induced colour distortions in Monet’s late work.

Hollis’s paintings, then, aren’t just theoretical ways to examine the legacy of the painted image, nor just provokingly mysterious conjunctions of images – though they are both – they’re surprisingly complex voyages in time across the history of how images are constructed and perceived.

Reviews

Mike Nelson (written for ArtUS - Nov 10)
Tate Britain | London

It’s a decade since Mike Nelson built his seminal work, 'The Coral Reef', at Matt’s Gallery in London’s East End. It has now been acquired by the Tate and put on display through the end of 2011, a welcome adjunct to Nelson’s selection as Britain’s representative at next year’s Venice Biennale.

'The Coral Reef' is a labyrinthine, 15-room installation in the style of William Burroughs’s “interzones”- hallucinatory spaces between worlds or ideas. Here they take the form of waiting rooms, which Nelson first had perfectly replicated and then scuffed back to a seedy, dilapidated state-–originally inspired, he says, by a South London minicab office. Various, potentially conflicting, ideologies are symbolized by the contents of these ostensibly just-abandoned rooms. The occupants seem to be what Nelson terms “modern primitives,” or figures at the margins of capitalist society, such as revolutionaries, hoodlums, evangelists, and drug users. Even when you know roughly what to expect, it’s easy to get disoriented here, an experience exacerbated by finding a room duplicated or having to leave via a fake fire exit that would normally set off an alarm.

Since 'The Coral Reef' was made in 2000, Nelson has been frequently approached to make similar places to get lost in. Projects in Venice, New York, Istanbul, Sydney, San Francisco, and Copenhagen have enhanced his reputation while responding more directly to their geographic and institutional surroundings than perhaps did this prototype, which could then be seen as the originating myth or global template for more locally grounded projects of this kind.

As Nelson says, “a work such as this relies on the spaces in between what is actually there. It acts like a catalyst, coercing you into imaginative space. These residues of suggested narratives pull you into several spheres--psychological, sociopolitical, and anthropological.” To achieve this effect, the artist employs a wide range of influences--most obviously, fantastic fiction (Borges, Ballard, Lem), outsider subcultures (Nelson’s early works were presented as made by a biker gang), current political concerns, and the history of installation art (clearly Nauman and the Kabakovs). Consequently, Nelson’s work can be experienced both on a visceral, immediate level, and by tracking down his intellectual sources and attempting a more elaborate reading.

Crime, the black economy, the growing underclass, and antisocial aspects of the Internet are all up for grabs in the teeming ecology of 'The Coral Reef', which, as its name suggests, accommodates multiple, if often fragile, life forms and strategies. Much of what seems to be going on in these rooms deserves our sympathy, and there is a sense that, as Nelson puts it, all of us are “lost in a world of lost people.” The work’s vacant atmosphere, augmented by such props as a gun and a mask, or, in the heroin user’s room, drugs and pictures of horses hanging on the wall, suggests a yearning for escape - but the boxed-in arrangement does more to entrap than to liberate.

Various narratives can be constructed around 'The Coral Reef', but it is ultimately open-ended, in that there is no single cause from which Nelson’s scenarios are derived or by means of which they can be forensically “solved.” In that respect, the original work was remarkably prescient of the atmosphere of abandonment, foreboding, and paranoia that rapidly followed the events of 9/11. I found myself playing an undercover cop when visiting Tate Britain: these are surely the very places one would need to infiltrate to find out what plots are being hatched. As powerful as it ever was, this is the return of a masterpiece.

Urs Fischer (written for ArtUS - Jan 11)
Sadie Coles | New Burlington Place, London

Sadie Coles opened her new, additional space in London’s West End with an Urs Fischer installation named “Douglas Sirk” (through December 11), a collection of mirrored cubes silk-screened with images of miscellaneous objects and sundry wall items. The multifaceted Swiss artist is best known for blowing holes in white cubes, gibes or digs that reveal unforeseen perspectives and a kind of hidden beauty. Fischer’s work is the typical late-century meld of influences, combining an interest in letting object and material interact to see what happens and a somewhat childish ambition to get away with murder. It all adds up to a certain amount of biting the hand that feeds him.

Far from mocking the new space, however, “Douglas Sirk” seemed set on a flattering imitation of life. Over 30 large, variously sized mirrored cubes and rectangular forms reflected the surroundings and each other, expanding everything to infinity. Most have photographic transfers on all four sides and top, resulting in a dizzying to-and-fro between object and image. The larger-than-life depictions fill their containers, mostly grouped in double pairs, to the brim, affording such odd conjunctions as fox masks and chairs, playing cards and nuts or bolts, shopping carts and ducklings (which from certain angles threatened to spill over into a gaggle of them). If there were links between the cubed subjects, either within the groupings or overall, these were matters for serendipitous discovery in transit. They certainly didn’t feel purposely imposed.

Plenty of recent installation work plays with scale or space, the ambiguities between two and three dimensions, and doubling or seriality. “Douglas Sirk” ticked all of these off the list, whilst also orchestrating a collision between kitsch sensibilities and geometric minimalism. You indeed could identify many of the same games in Fischer’s numerous references to other artists: most obviously, Koons’s high-finish fetishes, Oldenburg’s scaling up of the everyday, Robert Morris’s mirrored cubes, and Pistoletto’s distorting mirror images. Or else, you could think in terms of genre: still life painting, loaded fruit in _vanitas_ mode, or fashion photography. The sheer pileup of themes and insinuations was impressive.

Less obvious perhaps is the possible reference to another artist, one who used still life elements to create paintings to be read as cityscapes, but whose work is more about the spaces and relations between objects than the objects themselves. Could it be that Giorgio Morandi, who once said of his arrangements of bottles that “nothing is more abstract than reality,” finds a fitting home in Fischer’s remark, apropos a comparable installation of his, that “the mirror surface is irrelevant. What’s interesting to me is the absence of the object.”

Absent presence aside, there was still plenty of room on the walls to show six large paintings from two recent series, four from “Monsters,” which combine digitally screwed up faces of men with fruit, and two from “Star Lights,” which engineer encounters between archetypal 1950s screen sirens and a giant fork or spoon. In lots of ways these wall works are the most Sirkian of the bunch, superficially testifying to the filmmaker’s sentimental Technicolor melodramas, underscoring the repressions and psychological traumas of 1950s America. Yet Fischer’s cubes equally hint at Sirk’s love of mirrors, wherein only the vanity and deception of life shines through. The Sadie Coles show certainly captured the right nuance of Sirkian melodrama: but did it contain the titular critique of social conformity, or just its denial in idle reflection?

Oleg Tselkov: Work, 2006

'Squaring the Circle' at the Aktis Gallery, London - through 31 March (review for ARTnews, Feb 11)

The Aktis Gallery, specializing in Russina nonconformists and Soviet artists working in exile, recently joined a growing Russian presence in London’s art scene. This show provides a fascinating overview of four painters, tagged “non-conformist,” who were subterranean presences in Moscow in the 1960s: Dmitry Krasnopevtsev (1925–95), Oscar Rabin, Oleg Tselkov, and Vladimir Yankilevsky. The last three were allowed to leave the USSR in the ’70s and ’80s, and now live in Paris. Yet this exhibition, featuring a mix of their Soviet and subsequent paintings, shows the recent work is very much of a piece with the earlier output.

The nonconformity of Krasnopevtsev, Rabin, and Tselkov was relatively modest: it lay in their refusal to follow the official path of Socialist Realism in the service of the state. That meant that they were not publicly exhibited, but there’s little sign of political subversion here, nor any pushing of esthetic boundaries. Krasnopevtsev gives us gloomily lit and broodily atmospheric still lifes. Rabin makes equally dark landscapes, often incorporating a still life element, such as a vase of flowers. Tselkov depicts implausibly lumpish men—perhaps representing the monsters which communism has made of men, but more likely part of a personal language the artist evolved.

Only Yankilevsky, who was associated with Bulatov and Kabakov, could be described as unorthodox in his art. He’s best known for the collages he made from street-scavengings, in the ’60s, but is represented here by some rather inert still life paintings from the late ’50s that scarcely hint at what was to follow. Two quirkily sexualized series from this decade, ceramics with designs that reference the pubic triangle and energetic paintings that combine cartoonishly contorted nudes with a range of personal symbols, better convey this artist’s restlessness and confrontational stance, which opposes social constraints and officialdom in all forms.

COMBINATIONAL

2011-01-21T04:53:00.000-08:00

Collage techniques seem more relevant than ever given today’s teeming overload of information. Film collages have been prominent of late: Oliver Pietsch runs to the end of January at Nettie Horn, and Christian Marclay’s 24 hour ‘Clock’ reappears shortly at the Hayward. There are several other collage methods in my choices for February: straight photo collage, neon collaged onto postcards, paintings made after collages, the effect of ‘decollage’ on layered posters, even the collaging of thirty exhibitions into one...

Love X

John Stezaker @ Whitechapel Gallery - Aldgate East

29 Jan - 18 March: www.whitechapelgallery.org

John Stezaker has moved from marginal cult figure to recipient of his first public gallery retrospective in the five years since he retired from full-time teaching: not so much by changing what he does in his series of collages, many of which have years of pedigree, so much as by being able to show more. His primary, and influential, thrust is to make us look differently at old images by changing their combinations or contexts. Thus film publicity stills gain a fresh yet troubling allure through the imposition of surprisingly face-mimicking postcards of caves, or two characters are 'married' in freakish combinations, while others eerily duplicate themselves.

Autoportrait, 2007

Jacques Villéglé: Trajectoire Urbaine @ Alexia Goethe Gallery, 7 Dover Street - Central
11 Feb - 25 March: www.alexiagoethegallery.com
The veteran (born 1926) but still active French affichiste flaneur of the lacéré anonyme is known for his exploitation of the poetics – and politics – of urban decay and unknown intervention through the medium of ripped posters. One advantage, as he says, is that ‘the whole world makes work for me — I only have to collect it’. Actually, as I found in his 2008 Pompidou retrospective, his work is more varied than might be expected, and this selection across thirty years is a welcome chance to see that demonstrated this side of the channel.

Katja Strunz: Untitled, 2009

Never The Same River (Possible Futures, Probable Pasts) @ Camden Arts Centre – Finchley Road

To 20 Feb: www.camdenartscentre.org

This group show is perhaps best seen as a new work by Simon Starling, who has selected 27 artists who have previously shown at Camden with the forbidding constraints that their works themselves deal with our understanding of time, and that they be installed exactly where they were previously displayed (not that my memory was up to checking much). To these he has added the ‘possible futures’ of three artists new to the venue. The resulting temporal cacophony may - inevitably but intentionally - look rather odd, but aside from the time collage aspect, there are some interesting works and dialogues here.

Figure with Indoor Pool

Andrew Hollis: Im(possibilities)@ ROLLO Contemporary, 51 Cleveland St - Fitzrovia

17 Feb - 28 April: www.rolloart.com

Andrew Hollis’ latest paintings are derived from photographs taken from 1960’s –
70’s encyclopedias. They work through a surrealist-tinged edginess of unexpected juxtapositions, and by echoing the modern – sceptical – reception of photography: they set up parallels with both the diminishing claims to authority of printed encyclopedias, increasingly less-used in the internet age; and with how their information becomes marooned in time, with its own future uselessness built in. The results are complex voyages through the history of how images are constructed and perceived.

Topless

Rob & Nick Carter: Postcards from Vegas @ FAS Contemporary,148 New Bond St - Central

To 15 Feb: www.fascontemporary.com

There’s a zingy feel-good factor to the Carters’ fourteen conjunctions of reduced-size recreations of vintage neon signs (found on casinos, diners, motels etc) on top of quaintly kitsch 60’s-70’s postcards blown up to six feet wide. This meeting in the middle of scales and places also gains from the contrasts between flat and sculptural and between types of artificial colour. Add a double dose of nostalgia and some wit in combining the paired elements in ways which elude exact logic but tend towards the cheerfully sexual and it’s possible to see why this show shines where Gilbert & George’s extensive sex ‘n’ postcard combo at nearby White Cube fall rather glumly flat.

Most Wanted

Richard Phillips: Most Wanted @ White Cube, 48 Hoxton Square - Hoxton

to 5 March: www.whitecube.com

American Richard Phillips' big, lush, hyper yet unreal oils bring traditional Venetian techniques to pop cultural icons who seem to teeter between on the one hand embodying the desires teased at by their self-publicity, and on the other hand being exposed as dead ends in a morally vacuous society. Where pop art celebrated consumerism, Phillips’ take is more ambiguous. He shows ten celebrities deemed 'the most wanted' in contemporary US society, and captured in maximum commodity mode, ie in front of logo-covered posing backdrops. Small pastels upstairs, squared up for trasnfer to the big paintigs below.For those as unhip as me, it may also lead to such questions as ‘Who is Taylor Momsen? Or Zac Efron?’ - though even I can recognise Leonardo DiCaprio.

Disportrait 1

Matthias Schaller: Disportraits @ Ben Brown Fine Arts, 12 Brook’s Mews – central

To 4 March: www.benbrownfinearts.com

German photographer Matthias Schaller is known for sequences of indirect portraits. Here gives us a deadpan gag with a bonus punchline. He’s sourced an impressively wide range of spacesuits and photographed them from various angles. This proposes that we take seriously the profile and frontal views of occupants (should there be any) who remain uniformly invisible, thus frustrating any use as identification or any urge to compare cosmo- with astro-nauts. Neat: but, neater still, the reflections of each set also describe a lunar cycle, conflating the explorative goals of the 60’s with the minimalist sequencing of much of its art...

The Library (1)

Raphaël Zarka: Rhombus Sectus @ Bischoff / Weiss, 14A Hay Hill – Central

To 19 Feb: www.bischoffweiss.com

This year marks the tenth anniversary of the French artist Raphaël Zarka’s discovery of abandoned concrete breakwaters in rhombicuboctahedron form (since you ask, a semi-regular polyhedron with 26 sides, 18 of them square and 8 triangular). Whatever the concealed, perhaps mystical, properties of the shape may or may not be - and therein lies some of the tease - Zarka has tracked down many such since, as if seeking to flesh out an ideal. Talking of idealism, this show reprises past rhombicuboctahedral finds along with his latest discovery: the regime-spanning National Library in Minsk, Belarus, which was designed in the communist 80’s but not built until 2006. Mind you, President Lukashenko’s methods tend towards the old-school, too.

Rectangles (Green to Blue), 1976

Peter Hedegaard: Paintings & Screenprints @ Rocket gallery, Tea Building, 56 Shoreditch High St – Shoreditch

To 19 Feb: www.rocketgallery.com

On the one hand this is a vibrant show of intensely-coloured hard-edged abstraction from the 1970’s by an almost-forgotten Danish-born Londoner who runs through variations in scale, tone and hue within a painting to punchy effect, and has a persuasive way with oddly-shaped canvasses. On the other hand it conceals a sad tale. Hedegaard (1929-2008) gave up painting completely in 1976 following unfavourable reviews. Those missing decades seem a shame in the bright light of this selection.

Manhattan Transfer

Christiane Baumgartner: Reel Time @ Alan Cristea, 31 & 34 Cork St - Central

17 Feb - 19 March: www.alancristea.com

Both Alan Cristea spaces will be devoted to Christiane Baumgartner, a German artist who combines the oldest and slowest means of reproducing images with the newest and fastest in the form of woodcuts made with paradoxical labour from video images, and sometimes on a monumental scale. Baumgartner arrived at this combination as a means of returning to her traditional training in communist Leipzig after working in digital media for some years. Her subjects are often linked to movement and communication, subjects emphasised by showing the same scene at slightly different times. Baumgartner will be speaking the opening (6 pm, 16 Feb, all welcome).

Also recommended:

Lynn Chadwick: The Couple @ Pangolin to 26 Feb – a more varied progress through the theme than you might expect, and just right for a Valentine’s visit.

Christian Hidaka: Waterfall at the Top of the River @ Max Wigram to 19 Feb – New! Improved! Christian Ward rebrands himself successfully in the Japanese context of his mother’s maiden name.

Cindy Sherman @ Spruth Magers to 19 Feb: fascinating larger-than-life latest from – to totally triviliase her identity games – David Byrne’s ex.

Adam Ross: The Eternal Space Between @ Hales Gallery to 19 Feb – spatial ambiguities and muitilayered seduction through what look like abstract versions of flights over California.

Peter Coffin: Cosmolology + 1 @ Herald St to 20 Feb – coloured clouds and vertical neons as the imaginative American ponders those who study the studiers of the universe.

Jennifer Rubell: Engagement @ Stephen Friedman Gallery: 8 Feb to 5 March - Britisg debut for food artist from mega-collector family, here teasing our Royal Wedding and providing paintings you can drink.

Myriam Mechita @ Bloomberg Space to 12 Feb: her installation of glittering headless excess, 31st in the long-running ‘Comma’ series, is one of the most striking.

Phoebe Unwin: Man made @ Wilkinson to 6 March – plays the game (and maybe more) of guess-the-image out of near abstraction with painterly assurance.

Please Write @ Posted – second part of the 67 Wilton Way project in an ex- Post Office includes Emin, Noble & Webster, Kim Rugg’s stamp deconstructions and some diverting bleaching.

Keren Cytter: Avalanche @ Pilar Corrias and the David Robert's Art Foundation: four linked films fragment and cross-stitch a narrative across two galleries. Makes most sense, I think, if you start at David Roberts.

Philip King @ Flowers East to 19 Feb – an interesting 50 year survey of the still lively sculptor who represented Britain in the 1968 Venice Bienalle, though I did feel that the show peaks early with 'Drift' from 1962.

Photo credits: relevant artists and galleries