Paul's Art World

EXPANDING INTO JULY

2012-06-30T21:54:00.000-07:00

Existing galleries continue to expand and new ones to open. Among the heavyweights Sadie Coles has four shows at the moment, and Pace moves into Burlington House and David Zwirner into Grafton Street in October. And almost all of this month's ten are recent expansions or creations - including a whole clutch in Deptford ...

Lello // Arnell: Echo Chamber @ Beers Lambert, 1 Baldwin Street - Hoxton

5 July – 12 August: www.beerslambert.com

Beers Lambert hasn’t moved so far west as some, but – like everyone except Wilkinson – has left Vyner Steet. Cool and sardonic Scandinavian pair Jørgen Craig Lello & Tobias Arnell open the new space with what looks like an elegant set of modernist-styled works, but is actually full of conflict and deception. A grey canvas proves more of a fight than a collaboration between black and white; Richard Dawkins’ evolutionary message is distorted by Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling; a Charles Eames chair becomes an atavistic mask… The well-considered focus is on how we understand – or misunderstand - the past, and how those versions of the past live on in the present.

Peter Callesen

The End @ Jacob’s Island Gallery, 56 Butler’s & Colonial Wharf, 10-11 Shad Thames – Bermondsey

To 28 July: www.jacobsisland.co.uk

There are times when I groan ‘enough skulls!’, but this modern reworking of black humoured momento mori motifs isn’t one of them. The highlights include artist-curator-gallerist James Hopkins’ sculptural mirror anamorphosis, which turns a jaw-bone-like shape into a full skull when seen reflected in a beer can; Darren Coffield’s upside-down skull paintings; and mordant Dane Peter Callesen’s intricate paper cut-out of a skeleton looking back at the man he used to be, presented alongside a film of the artist in a cemetery, reading out his own drily absurd eulogy (‘how many nights we sat up late talking…’). Mat Collishaw, Hugh Mendes and John Stark are among those adding to the gloomy entertainment.

Kaari Upson: Baby Please Come Home @ Massimo De carlo, 55 South Audley St – Mayfair

To 30 July: www.carlsongalery.co.uk

After lying low a while in Heddon Street, Milan’s biggest contemporary gallery has expanded into what looks an impressive two room space at street level even before you find the six subterranean rooms. They contain the first substantial British showing of work from on-trend LA artist Kaari Upson’s ‘Larry Project’, in which she picks over the personal papers and largely burnt-out remains of a house inhabited my a seedy man she never knew, but whose identity she seeks to hijack. Ritualised drawings, durational video performances and dramatic installations rendered from the house in charred wood, latex, mud and silicone all pile on the intense analysis of herself through him.

porn star eyes

Sadie Hennessy: Strange Hungers @ WW Gallery, 34/5 Hatton Garden – Farringdon

To 14 July: www.wilsonwilliamsgallery.com
The ‘elephant in the room’ at WW’s new space is tackled head on in the collage of that name, in which a 50s housewife gets to grips with a phallus almost as outrageously-sized as those which do duty as lighthouses elsewhere. The brazen invention continues as we find ourselves looking up a skirt made of hair while swimming goggles bat their eyelashes and a zimmer frame prepares to party. More subtly, the acting modes of wholesome advertising and pornography collapse into each other as we struggle to read a lack of innocence into stuck-on porn star eyes. Laugh as we might, Hennessy hits the target of how sexual commodification gets in everywhere.

Installation View with 'Stripped Biographies' and 'Press Release'

James Brooks: The Information Exchange @ Domo Baal (co-presented by Man & Eve), 3 John St – Holborn

To 14 July then by appointment, performance evening of Thurs 19 July
Lucy Newman Cleeve’s excellent notes do more justice than I can to the subversive conceptual play behind James Brooks’ formally elegant work, a sort of imageless and textless critique of how we use images and text. Thus are newspapers obliterated by their own ink as if in a surfeit of news, stories layered into geometries which emphasise the trammeling formats they must follow; and disparate lives unified by the stripping of 26 biographies’ dust jackets, and the show's press release turned into a work. There’s sound too, and Phil Spector’s becomes a wall of discord when 21 of his tracks are played at once…

Angel Vergara: Berlusconi Pasolini @ news of the world, Enclave 3, Resolution Way - Deptford

To 29 July: www.thecentreofattention.org

Deptford has reached critical mass as an art destination just six minutes from London Bridge with the opening of several new project spaces a few flicks of paint from the railway station. Excellent artists feature in Lubomirov-Easton and Enclave Projects’ group shows, and, at news of the world, Angel Vergara, Belgium’s representative at the last Venice Biennale, has an impactful first

exhibition: his unique way of painting onto video footage matches the excess of the contemporary image stream with equally arbitrary brushstrokes trying to follow the movement. Here the method is applied to Pasolini’s denunciation of the Italian media just as we see Berlusconi (before his fall from what was hardly grace) attacked with the bizarrely appropriate weapon of a statuette of the Milano Dome.

Nadine Fecht: 3 by 4

Pencil and Paper @ Poppy Sebire, 6 Copperfield St – Southwark

To 4 Aug: www.poppysebire.com

Danny Rolph has exploited two rich seams to bring together 14 works which make telling use of basic means, pencil and paper. First, access to Spruth Magers’s collection, yielding for example a feisty George Condo and an angry Marcel van Eeden; second, commissions from artists he admires, such as a delicately sensuous Chris Ofili and a poetically conceptual Anna Barribal. And I loved the exacting instabilities of Nadine Fecht, who made me feel that her intricate geometries were still in process: no sooner did I get a grip on one area than a neighbouring zone swam away… her being German, my mind then leaped absurdly to the Euro crisis…

Russlan Daskalov: on the beach at the sunsetsunrise

La Düsseldorf @ Hidde van Seggelen Gallery, 2 Michael Rd – World’s End, Chelsea

To 28 July: www.hiddevanseggelen.com

Professor Thomas Grunfeld of the famous Künstakademie Düsseldorf, who showed his own work at the gallery last year, makes a selection of eight former pupils. His influence can be witnessed especially in Russlan Daskalov’s punchily comical use of computerised ellipses. ‘Why all nude women?’: I asked –‘So that I enjoy making them’, came the attractively straightforward reply. Others seem to resist their master’s influence pretty successfully, including Anna Mirbach: her frescos, heavier than her, fuse industrial abstraction with crystalline and organic semi-figuration which emerges through a process of carving into polystyrene to make the negative from which their pigmented concrete forms are cast.

Anthony Hall: Continual Slow Drip

On the Move @ The Gazelli Arthouse, 39 Dover St - Central

To 16 Aug: www.gazelliarthouse.com

There’s dark life at the heart of Gazelli’s four-artist third show following its move to a permanent space. Charlotte Becket makes angular crushes of discarded black plastic which turn out on closer engagement to be expanding somewhat creepily into your space, with a sound whihc could be of crystalline growth. Science serves artistic flow in Anthony Hall’s liquid sculptures: a ‘Perpetual Puddle Vortex’ makes oil disappear into the middle of a plinth, only to reappear thanks to interior motor and marbles; and ‘Continual Slow Drip’ effects a globular take on Charles Ray’s 1987 ‘Ink Line’ by having a mixture of olive oil and black paint blink its way down a fishing line. Hyo Myoung Kim and Giovanni Ozzola also make their moves.

Donelle Wooldford(s)

A Trusted Friend @ Carlos/Ishikawa, Unit 4, 88 Mile End Rd - Whitechapel

To 4 Aug: www.carlosishikawa.com

This is a slippery show to get hold of, but that’s au point, as all the artists show under alter egos. Joe Scanlan, for example, lures you into the suspiciously attractive cubist wood collages of Donelle Woolford, only to pull the rug out with the absurdly inflated claims she makes for them (including, at the opening, in answering the questions of a similar-looking woman with whom she’d swapped roles by the end of the interview). The gallery also gets disguised: a version of it is being painted onto it, and the controls for the lift – to imaginary floors – turn out to alter the lighting unpredictably. In the dark? You may be… but it’s fun.

Images courtesy of the relevant artists and galleries + Andy Keate (Brooks)

EURO MADNESS INCLUDING WHAT TO SEE AT DOCUMENTA

2012-06-23T23:21:00.000-07:00

In which, armed only with a European Rail Pass, a shamefully underused German phrase book and an extravagant six days off work, I tackled Frankfurt, Zurich, Basel, Kassel, Hanover and Hamburg in a city spree which encompassed the major events of Art Basel and the thirteenth in the quinquennial Documenta - or, as curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev would have it, dOCUMENTA (13) . Here’s a small pick from the excess…

Omer Fast

Frankfurt has wonderful banking-backed institutions, and several were involved in a thorough overview of lens-based work, ‘Making History’, on how historical happenings are reflected in the images of today. This also proved to be the first part of an impressive Omer Fast survey: ‘Take a Deep Breath’, builds dizzying layers of reality and unreality on the back of the making of a film inspired by an incident in which someone found they had called first aid for a suicide bomber. It was to be followed by ‘Continuity’ in Kassel, ‘Game Show’ in Hannover and ‘Nostalgia’ in Hamburg, all highlighting the Berlin-based Israeli’s ability to show differently repeating iterations of material in compelling way which expose the artificiality of ‘the truth’.. .

Jorge Macchi

Zurich has special openings of all its galleries on the Sunday prior to each Art Basel, and this was also the reopening after two years of the refurbished Lowenbrau building. There Hauser & Wirth now have one of Europe’s biggest galleries, spread over three floors. Roni Horn’s drawing retrospective was good, as was a sharp and funny selection of Ger van Elk’s 70’s work at Bob van Osouw; Silvie Defraoui’s videos (especially ‘Aphrodite Ping Pong’), cunningly linked to a neat painting show at Susanna Kulli; young British painter Benjamin Senior at Bolte Lang; and Jorge Macchi’s ‘Light & Weight’ at Peter Klichmann, in which the ingenious ‘Illumination’ made the show’s title literal by casting the beams from torches in concrete so that they formed a star of heavy light.

Koons' 'Split Rocker' in the Beyeler gardens

Basel’s too-much-to-see in its busiest week included many interlocking shows, talks and events in addition to the central concept of 250 world class galleries selling their best work: I also got to Art Edition, Art Features, Art Unlimited and Art Statements on the main site; Art Parcours in the city; the separate Liste, Volta and Solo Projects fairs; and concurrent shows around Basel, of which the highlight – as everyone I spoke to agreed – was a stunning presentation of Jeff Koons at the Foundation Beyeler.

Horoshi Sugimoto

There must be 10,000 works to choose from, but one comparatively unassertive one which surprised and drew me was a set of five sculptures by Hiroshi Sugimoto. They relate to his much better-known photographs of the sea, which he depicts in patiently-awaited periods of meditative calm. Here, the images of five seas were set inside glass pagoda-come globes, placed on tall plinths to integrate the world, its seas and man.

Mike Nelson

The biggest hall houses ‘Art Unlimited’, projects sponsored by participating galleries, with a tendency towards the spectacular. In Mike Nelson’s ‘After Kerouac’ the oddly non-Turner-winning Nelson turns literature into a space as usual, but not through a warren of atmospheric rooms, but single architecturally striking form: a spiralling white corridor covered in black tyre marks stands in for the single continuous scroll on which On the Road was famously typed, leading one into a central zone suddenly piled with tyres.

Alicja Kwade

Alicja Kwade’s ‘In Circles’ brings us from spiral to circles: an installation of particularly richly textured found objects which the artist has somehow bent to her will, citing the definition of a circle as ‘a special ellipse in which the two foci are coincident and the eccentricity is zero’ only to make a most eccentric world out of it.

Gitte Schäfer: 'Flower Wall'

28 young galleries are invited to produce single artist projects in the ‘Art Statements’ section. Zurich’s Lullin + Ferrari had the highest-maintenance stand, made by upcoming German artist Gitte Schäfer. Like many, she collects items to turn into sculptural combinations, but like Kwade she brings a rare flair to the process: 288 whimsically distinctive vases were installed on a mirror wall, and a Rorschach-shape’s worth of them were filled with locally-sourced blooms to make a vanitas regularly freshened from a veritable florist at the back of the stand. Cue intricate rhythms and references to the vanitas tradition and religious triptychs’ grisaille outer wings (here left flowerless).

Rosemary Trockel

By no means everything in the Fair is new, and Rosemary Trockel’s prints of found images of spider webs at Klosterfelde is a classic from 1993. The eight spiders in question had been given various drugs, so altering the natural web pattern shown in the centre to versions which would struggle to operate in fly-catching practice. They provide a different spin on the artist’s own creativity, the advantages of getting outside oneself, as flagged by the title 'What it is like to be what you are not'; and on Trockel’s own best-known method, the weaving of ‘paintings’.

Levi van Veluw

Four artists new to me who particularly impressed in the subsidiary fairs were kinetic sculptor Pa Lang; process abstractionist Andy Boot, whose latest paintings use gymnastic ribbons fixed in a wax ground; Dutch painter Greet van Autgaerden, who bases abstracted landscapes on communally-collected childhood memories of summer camps; and - staying with childhood memories - Levi van Veluw’s amazing reconstruction (at the Ron Mandos Gallery in Volta) of his boyhood bedroom by means of a life size room made out of wooden blocks suitable for young builders at play.

Of course, many familiar artists showed well: I could mention Neo Rauch, Walead Beshty, Doug Aitken, Los Carpinteros, Alexis Harding, Peter Funch, Daniel Lergon, Sarah Barker and Boo Ritson or I could desist...

Matias Faldbakken

On to Kassel, where there’s more work than one person could see fully and more themes than one person could assess - though you can buy a vast ‘Book of Books’ in which a hundred people do so between them. The trends include:

· lots of material which wasn’t created as art, but is now presented as such, making the curatorial team the artists

· myriad excavations of the past – both historically and in terms of how work was produced

· a whole pile of accumulation pieces, some rigorously orderly (Korbinian Aigner’s apple paintings, Geoffrey Farmer’s vast shadow puppet collage, Sanya Ivekovic’s stuffed donkeys), some far from it (Song Dong’s ‘zero effort’ garden hills, Lara Favaretto’s scrapyard, Matias Faldbakken’s book-spill in the city library)

· a thoroughgoing – if sometimes slightly wearying – use of ‘unexpected’ locations around the city

· plenty of paintings, but not by famous painters: they’re almost all either by-products of people who mainly do other things, or attempts to revive interest in long-unfashionable artists, most of them dead. That was part of a strenuous effort to foreground the overlooked... despite which, the work I liked best was almost all by artists already well-known to me

What you really want to concentrate on if visiting Documenta is ambitious, knock-out work which is unlikely to be as good anywhere else. As it happens, much of that is in two areas somewhat away from the main Friderichsplatz centre:

The old railway station has compelling work by many artists, including Clemens von Wedemeyer, Tejal Shah, Willie Doherty, Haris Epaminonda & Gustav Cramer and also:

· a half hour personal video tour by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, which is spookily effective in placing you between your present, her present when recording it, and the pasts she talks about.

· William Kentridge’s tour de force installation ‘The Refusal of Time’, with five large walls projections across three walls, plus sculptural and kinetic elements

Haegue Yang

· Haegue Yang’s stately dance of blinds along an abandoned platform

· Rabih Mroué’s account of the self-documentation of the deaths of Syrian protesters

And the zone around the Huguenot House, newly converted to artists’ studios as artworks by Theaster Gates, has:

· Tino Sehgal’s remarkably effective ‘This Variation’. I entered a pitch black room which felt crowded with other visitors. Soon, I realised it was just me and a dozen performers, who dance around you making noises, calling out words and singing – a stunning a Capella version of ‘Good Vibrations’ is mixed in with statements about the value of art. After five minutes your eyes adjust, and the visual interest of the movement comes into play. Then some other visitors did come in, adding a comic element as they stumbled around in their turn for initial confusion. After fifteen minutes of what seemed to be a forty minute basic cycle, I was sufficiently in vibe to pretend to be a performer when the next newcomers arrived…

· A gently resonant installation of paintings by Francis Alys

· Paul Chan’s ‘Volumes Incompleteset’ – six hundred book covers on which the artist has painted in grisaille

· Gerard Byrne’s multi-screen re-enactment of collaged conversations from writing set up to answer questions about male sexual attitudes. ‘Can you tell if a woman has an orgasm?’ - ‘What do you think of onanism?’ - ‘Must love be reciprocal?’. How much of our speech is an act?

So there you have a handily compact eight of my personal top dozen from Documenta. The others being largely accumulations in line with the trend:

Kader Attia

· Kader Attia’s ‘The Repair’ at the top of the main Fridericianum venue is a teeming installation which makes a stunning full and disturbing backwards historical comparison between African wooden heads and the faces of those injured in World War I

Anna Maria Maiolino

· Anna Maria Maiolino’s obsessive accumulation of clay items ‘Here & There’, which fills an entire gardener’s cottage in Karlsaue Park, where you’ll also find…

Sam Durant

· Sam Durant’s ‘Scaffold’, which looks innocuous but proves to be a mash-up of the gallows on which famous executions took place.

Tacita Dean

· Tacita Dean’s blackboard drawing project ‘Fatigues’ linked Kassel to Afghanistan – a set theme for this Documenta – and was ideally placed in the unlikely site of a former tax office.

Sven Johne

As luck would have it, I arrived in Hannover just in time for the annual ‘Museum Night’, with 19 spaces open till midnight and served by a fleet of specially laid-on buses. The perfect way to take in the three venue ‘Made in Germany Zwei’, surveying the work of 45 up and coming artists working in Germany – whether German or not – and a good mixture of those new to me and those already well-known internationally (Cyprian Gallaird, Rosa Barba, Saadane Afif, Keren Cytter, Ulla von Brandenburg, Simon Fujiwara, Bernd Ribeck, Shannon Bool, Mike Bouchet…). I like a good reason to look at the perversely nondescript, and conceptual photographer Sven Johne - another who seemed to crop up in every city – provided that with a large series of somewhat muddied, semi-urban fields. They resulted from him following the circus he remembered from his East German boyhood, and documenting the sites just after the tent had been dismantled.

Louise Bourgeois

The Kunsthalle in Hamburg is Germany’s biggest and, indeed, with only three hours in the city I got no further. The pick of its current special exhibitions is of late work – ie after age 85! – by Louise Bourgeois. It includes several cycles of the textile works made from her own old clothes, which Bourgeois saw as an exercise in the memory of ‘how did I feel when I wore that?’. Many of them turn on the spiral, which fascinated her for its ambiguity: was it winding down into a compressed point of disappearance or radiating out into a trusting acceptance of the world? The spiral appears in the sky in the cycle The Waiting Hours, which makes for a visual match with the Jorge Macchi above…

That’s enough Euro madness.

NEW PLACES IN JUNE

2012-05-27T13:00:00.002-07:00

This month’s selection features some shows you might not have found, including several spaces which I have not previously featured, such is the number of new galleries opening despite all economic trends… there are also, more coincidentally, three Australian artists…

Juan Munoz: An Inaccessible Moment @ Frith Street Gallery, Golden Square – Central

To 20 June: www.frithstreetgallery.com

It’s hard not to feel that Ron Muecks’s recent use of altered scale and Yue Minjun’s focus on a fixed expression are combined to better effect than either in the work of Juan Munoz, as seen in the matte grey 2/3-sized versions of his brother installed in his 2001 Turbine Hall otherworld. A decade on from Munoz’s untimely death, this show brings us up close to figures made in preparation for the Tate’s ‘Double Bind’, plus works on paper covering several of the Spanish trickster’s main themes. ‘My work is about a man in a room, waiting for nothing’, said Munoz, out of which he brings an uncanny presence to the theatre of what cannot be said.

Still from 'Night Street Touch'

Graham Gussin @ Siobhan Davies Studios, 85 St George’s Road, London SE1 6ER

To 1 July (talk 25 June): www.siobhandavies.com

Artist-curator Charles Danby has put together a retrospective of Graham Gussin’s painting, photography, video and installation with plenty of implied and actual sound and movement in tune with the function of the architectural award-winning dance studios. They include a list of possible films, such as ‘Film things that are hard to explain’, ‘Film prevention’ and ‘Film text works’ – which is what happens to the list. I particularly liked the short videos of rapid touching of objects, one of the ways in which Gussin intervenes to call attention to spaces or things: his use of illumination rigs and dry ice (as in the well-known ‘Spill’, currently on show at Tate Britain) work similarly.

My Wife, custom photo throw

Katie Steciw: Live Laugh Love @ The Green Room, Lower Level, Rich Mix, 35-47 Bethnal Green Rd – Shoreditch

To 17 June: www.thecomposingrooms.com

The Green Room, hidden under the cinema near Shoreditch High Street station, is only open on Sundays and by appointment with its energetic curator, Ché Zara Blomfield. New Yorker Kate Steciw’s European debut is well worth catching though, as she takes cloying sentimentality, hackneyed subject matter and kitschy means of reproducing photographs (on tiles, canvas and blankets) and undermines all that by turning their combinations into something quite other. The eponymous keywork distorts several copies of the commercially available metal wall text ‘Live Laugh Love’ into near-abstract sculptures which summarise the sardonic approach.

Installation view with 'The Magick Door (Kissing Gate)'

Alison Gill: ‘Legend Trip’ @ Charlie Dutton Gallery, 1a Princeton St - Clerkenwell

To 16 June: www.charleduttongallery.com

A legend trip – for example to the site of a notorious murder – is a rite of passage which stands here for the inner and outer journeys triggered by sculptures and sculpturally-constructed drawings and collages – all of which exchange forms seamlessly with the black-beamed patterns of Charlie Dutton’s distinctive Tudor space. The centrepiece is a circular Kissing Gate: it turns to suit, and is draped with enough patched-up bicycle inner tubes to tell of considerable travel. Add Klein Bottles, folklore and an imaginative programme of events, and there’s good reason to make the trip to Alison Gill’s first home city solo show in nearly a decade.

Modern Paintings EW492(Medusa)

Pavel Büchler: No New Work @ Max Wigram, 106 New Bond St – Central

To 16 June: www.maxwigram.com

This wittily-titled exhibition consists of erotic-tending paintings by late amateur Anglo-German artist Eddie Wolfram... only Manchester-based Czech Pavel Büchler, who delights in the deconstruction of meanings, bought them from his local Oxfam shop, stripped the paint off in patches, put the canvas through a washing machine, and recombined the pieces of paint back-to-front on the restretched canvas to make abstracts with a suitably washed-out look. The six ‘Modern Paintings’ which result are not only clean, but compelling in their nothing-newness. That said, you can see a wholly new work in the back room, a text piece which says ‘No New Work’ – but, logically enough, it’s not part of the official show.

Steven Morgana: ‘The Future Feels Like a Phantom Limb’ @ La Scatola Gallery, I Snowden St (off Worship St) – Liverpool St

To 15 June: www.lascatolagallery.com

It makes sense that Franco-Australian artist Steven Morgana should show in the corporate lobby-like La Scatola Gallery, for he proceeds to lure the viewer by transformation and beauty, only to lambast the energy-hungry nature of capitalism. A neon rainbow turns out to be fed by a petrol generator; a geosodic dome is built from boxes, the triangular basis of which generates the wasteful volume of off-cuts used as a counter-balance to keep the structure hovering above the gallery floor; and photographs of petrol in water bottles are titled to point out that the original water was the more expensive content.

A Place to Cry

Hany Armanious: The Plagiarist of my Subconscious @ Southard Reid, 67 Dean St – Soho

To 30 June: www.southardreid.com

Australia

’s Egyptian-born 2010 Venice Biennale representative Hany Armanious is a master of achieving ‘possession without ownership’ by casting objects into other – surprising – materials, notably pewter and resin. That’s been done often enough that more is needed, and Armanious delivers that in two ways: through evocative combinations of elements within and between sculptures; and by presenting his casts on tables and frame-come-shelving devices which are themselves cast in resin. Thus, ‘A Place to Cry’ might be seen as four sculptures: a found element reminiscent of a modernism such as Brancusi’s; another (related) tradition’s totem head; its container; and the whole.

The Exquisite Pirate (Pink North Sea)

Sally Smart: The Exquisite Pirate @ Purdy Hicks Gallery, 65 Hopton St - Bankside

To 18 June: www.purdyhicks.com

Sticking with Australians, Sally Smart tweaks the politically-charged history of collage to give a very lively account of one possible answer to her Treasure Island question ‘Were there any women pirates?’ Here they are, formed like shadow puppets out of images and fabric cut to echo the seagoing tradition of tattoos, fizzing with rebelliousness and yet complex enough to be termed ‘exquisite’. The dark side of piracy remains current, whether on line or off

Somalia

, but these renegades have an upbeat feel: they’ve escaped conventional sex roles on the stateless non-space represented by their spectacular wall-wide boat, and it looks like a pretty smart move.

Resolution

Clare Price: New Paintings @ Studio 1.1, 57a Redchurch St – Shoreditch

To 10 June: www.studio1-1.co.uk

Here window meets computer screen meets wall on the spatially ambiguous ground of the canvas: what seem to be the romantic landscapes underlying Clare Price’s work have previously struggled to escape creeping pixellisation and chemical fluorescence. Her latest set of large paintings ease back the colour register, but now the scenic views must also contend with a good deal of veiling as well as a wide range of urban-tinged marks including a notably varied way with the drip. Not to mention the battle between four types of paint: oil, acrylic, household and spray. It all makes for productive tension, not least with the push and pull of old-fashioned beauty.

Garments of the Dominators 1

Vicky Wright: The Garments of the Dominators @ Josh Lilley Gallery, 44-46 Riding House St – Fitzrovia

1 June – 6 July: www.joshlillygallery.com

Bolton-born painter Vicky Wright is interested in the other, unofficial, side of stories: here, conspiracy theories behind the London riots. That suits her use of highly-grained wood (which looks like it might belong on the back of the painting) and crates (in which art is normally moved) as the surfaces for her melding of genres. Portrait, industrial landscape and still life elements emerge as essences discovered in the sweeps and stains, drips and bleeds which make up what could initially pass as abstraction. Wright is also a notably effective user of earthy browns, suggesting other origins and helping to generate a satisfyingly distinct aesthetic.

Dryland Farming #21

Edward Burtynsky and Julie Cockburn @ Flowers, 21 Cork St and The

Photographers’ Gallery, 16-18 Ramilles St – Central

To 23 June (Flowers) / 1 July (Photographers)

No, that’s not a typo… both Flowers and the newly-reopened Photographers Gallery currently feature Julie Cockburn’s sassy reworkings of found images and Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky’s magisterially broad depictions of landscapes shaped by

human activity: the biggest, mostest and baddest of all things oil in Ramilles Street, Spanish dryland farming in Cork Street. The latter are part of Burtynsky’s recent switch in thematic focus from oil to water. They catch abstract earth and crop patterns with such an eerily painterly effect such that – in a neat reversal of the double-take provoked by photorealist painting – I couldn’t believe they were just photographs. They're achieved, it seems, by no more than shooting from a helicopter 2,000 feet up in dim light, and controlling the contrast.

Man Made Monstrous (Noesis)

Michael Joo: Exit from the House of Being @ Blain|Southern, 21 Dering St - Central

To 30 June: www.blainsouthern.com

Blain|Southern will no doubt put on more spectacular displays when they move to their permanent premises in Hanover Square, but meantime Buddhist-influenced Korean-American Michael Joo’s exploration of the territorial impulse makes a focused impression. A philosophical backdrop feeds into the works’ complex titles, but at a simple level three means of asserting spatial supremacy are subverted: the velvet ropes which limit the encroachment of non-VIPs become dysfunctionally horizontal wall sculptures; riot shields act as reflective screens through which the viewer is drawn into the results of paint-bombing; and deer antlers, a signature motif of Joo’s, are defused as weapons by being covered in liquid rubber before being cast in polyurethane resin of a suitably aqueous blue.

Images courtesy of the relevant artist and galleries + Raymond Chueng (Morgana) + Peter Mallet (Joo)

MODELS IN MAY

2012-04-30T14:32:00.004-07:00

Nouemie Goudal: Les Amants (Cascade)

The Saatchi gallery's stimulating 38-strong survey of photographers provides a chance to assess trends. It illustrates the switch away from photography’s being largely about seeking out and recording what's in the world. Probably only a third of the selection could be described in that way: most follow other models such as searching out pre-existing images to reuse (eg John Stezaker, Marlo Pascual); creating scenarios (eg Ryan McGinley, Laurel Nakadate) or constructing objects (Matt Lipps, Nouemie Goudal) specifically to be photographed; or manipulating the photographic process itself (Jennifer West, David Benjamin Sherry). Much the same can be said of the other most interesting current photography shows such as those of Dan Holdsworth at Brancolini Grimaldi, Alex Prager at Michael Hoppen, Shari Hatt at Space Station Sixty-Five, Sarah Hardacre at Paul Stolper, Hans-Peter Feldmann at the Serpentine and Zoe Leonard at Camden as well as the five shows with which I kick off with below…

Demobilisation Suit - 1945

Stan Douglas: Midcentury Studio @ Victoria Miro, 16 Wharf Rd – Hoxton

To 6 May: www.victoria-miro.com

Confused by the Rodney Graham - Douglas Gordon – Donald Rodney - Dan Graham – Stan Douglas nexus of names? Well, all you need to know for now is that the last of those has this broodingly powerful show of 16 large format black and white photographs. They’re created in the alter ego of a 1940’s photojournalist: some reconstruct actual images of the time, others are newly imagined versions of such images – such as ‘Demobilisation Suit’, which adds a cold war overtone to the isolation of a shirt for advertising purposes. The twists come from neat narrative links (eg between different types of grip), those telling details – such as of race – which differ from the sources, and the knowledge we now bring of where the fifties led.

Walead Beshty: Travel Pictures @ Thomas Dane Gallery, 11 & 3 Duke Street St James’s – Central

To 26 May: www.thomasdane.com

LA-based Walead Beshty provides plenty of themes to unravel as he becomes the first to make strategic use of the separated nature of Thomas Dane’s spaces. No. 11 shows one of his well-known FedEx boxes, cracked by its successive transits; several of his Travel Pictures, which exploit the chance effects of an airport’s X-ray security machines on his unexposed film of an abandoned Iraqi diplomatic mission; and a 24 hour reel of ‘cold war apocalypse films’. No. 3 has a FedEx box which finally collapsed, and has been shored up by an internal armature; Travel Pictures which have been negated by a hole-punching process; and the 24 hour reel run backwards, which is, I suppose, part of how we see the cold war now.

Steven Pippin: Cannon 35mm shot in the back with .25 calibre

Resistance: Subverting the Camera @ The Fine Art Society Contemporary, 148 New Bond St – Central

To 26 May: www.faslondon.com

Janet Laurence’s Sumatran animals caught in a ‘camera trap’ are one highlight of this stimulating eight artist collection of cameraless photographs and other unconventional approaches. The other is a too-rare sighting of new work by 1999 Turner Prize shortlistee Steven Pippin (he’s the rigorous type, and has just spent ten years working out how to balance a pencil on a skyscraper). Pippin’s ‘End of Photography’ project required a firearm license and hair-trigger electronics: we see the death of analogue means made literal as cameras are shot, documented by an external photographic record, by the shattered cameras themselves, and last – violently beautiful - images extracted from the victim equipment’s moment of impact.

Daily No. 2 (Asher)

Thomas Demand: The Dailies @ Spruth Magers, 7a Grafton St – Central

To 31 May: www.spruethmagers.com

German star Thomas Demand is known for photographing his cardboard models of politically charged scenes so that our slow-burn detection of their constructed nature parallels the journalistic process of uncovering awkward truths. Here he applies the same process of recording an absent reality to his own rather Wentworthian phone snaps of incidental items, elevating their status through the labour he gives them in a move somewhat parallel to hyper-realist painting. That may sound a bit duller than his main stream, but the gloriously dye-transfer printed results work brilliantly. Look out for the mirror made by such mundane means...

Damien Meade - Untitled

The Smallest Composite Number @ Standpoint, 45 Coronet St – Hoxton

To 19 May: www.standpointgallery

Curator Peter Ashton Jones has brought together four painters who start with aspects of still life and arrive at variously abstract takes on the ambiguities around object, painted object, painting as object and the organic development of the object into something else entirely. The interplay is good between Clive Hodgson, Vicky Wright, Brian Sayers and Damien Meade - who takes up an aspect of Thomas Demand’s approach to photography, as the subject of his paintings are his own objects made out of modelling clay and wire. They’re a peculiar and compelling mix of abject, assertive and grotesque.

Otto lettere dall'Afghanistan, 1972

Alighiero Boetti @ Tate Modern (to 27 May), Sprovieri (23 Heddon St to 16 June) & Carlson (6 Heddon St to 1 June)

It’s a tough choice at Tate Modern: whether to queue up to queue further inside a crowded run-through of mostly too-familiar work; or to walk straight in to a beautiful yet unpeopled curation of thoughtful innovation? And if you do choose Boetti, then his current festival continues with two shows in Heddon Street. Sprovieri’s extensive selection of work on paper includes particularly fine late drawings and stamp works: the crescents make for extra visual and political echoes in this one’s typical combination of order (repetition, the postal system, the logic of placement) and disorder (inversions, surplus value, aesthetically arbitrary cancellations). Carlson has a vast and magnificent range of embroidered works.

Painting, 1939

Ben Nicholson @ Bernard Jacobson Gallery, 6 Cork St

To 30 June: www.jacobsongallery.com

Ben Nicholson is also having something of a moment: doing pretty well up against Mondrian at the Courtauld and Picasso at Tate Britain, and now getting all three of Bernard Jacobson’s showrooms. That allows for a 39 work survey which includes top-notch examples of everything you’d want (except a white relief, which is where the Courtauld scores). Jacobson has early landscapes, early abstracts; carved and scumbled reliefs; late landscape-come-abstracts; natural wood constructions; townscape, treescape and still life drawings… After Bacon, Nash and Lewis, our most important C20th painter? Of related note: the often quite Nicholsonian drawings of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham at Art First.

Jamie Shovlin: Various Arrangements @ Haunch of Venison, 103 New Bond St - Central

To 26 May: www.haunchofvenison.com

Back in 2005, Jamie Shovlin showed imagined covers for planned-but-unpublished extensions to the Fontana Modern Masters books on great thinkers, subverting the postmodern credentials of the series’ design and asserting their status as paintings through casually artful dripping. Now they’ve returned bigger and yet subtler: the drips are confined to the sides of the canvas and the barely visible layers behind the front image of 17 acrylic paintings, each bigger than you, which contain 80 possible cover designs between them. Each is a dance between theory (the application of a complex set of criteria to determine the successive colour options) and intuition (Shovlin deciding if he likes the result or will change it) - which may well chime with how the insights of Merleau-Ponty, Benjamin and Derrida et al came about…

Alice Walton: In The Pleasing @ Tintype, 18 St Cross St - Farringdon

To 26 May: www.tintypegallery.com

Alice Walton takes a turn towards the geometric at Tintype, now well settled in their permanent space near Hatton Garden. She has previously hidden and selectively revealed images by maskings of tape: here that role is played by constructions built from a variety of sliver surfaces and placed on the images, which they cover, distort and reflect in turn. Add that this all takes place on a chunky table made from silver-covered insulation material, and that most of the found images masked have a nineteenth century aspect, and you get a sense of the range of dialogues quietly set up. Do: ask to see the collages, too. Don’t: confuse the artist with the Wallmart heiress.

Snowglobe

Sean Landers @ Greengrassi, 1a Kempsford Rd – Kennington

To 6 June: www.greengrassi.com

This show looks like a scholarly library in which Landers, who's been sending himself up for so long he must mean it seriously, links Melville, Beckett and Dickinson to his own entertaining screeds on his futile compulsion to make art. The words form the titles of the books depicted in five paintings of loaded bookshelves: ‘I AM NOT A MASOCHIST ALTHOUGH THIS IS WHAT IT IS HAS COME TO’ gives a flavour. The writers come courtesy of eight steel busts of greats who have lived on through their work. Their presence implies the question: will Landers? A devilish Pan stands in the courtyard, ready, perhaps, to comment….

GLASGOW INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL OF VISUAL ART 2012

2012-04-23T23:26:00.001-07:00

The Glasgow Festival’s opening weekend (20-22 April) made for maximum stimulation: the 45 participating locations become an excuse to explore the city throughout which they are spread in such various locations as a railway waiting room to a university roof to Ruth Ewan’s history of Socialist Sunday Schools, perfectly placed at the Scotland Street School Museum. Then there were the talks, the performances, the openings, the alternative spaces, the parties… The balance between Scots and others was good, reflected in the artists I focus on below: six Celts, two Sassenachs, six from beyond these shores. There was a theme – ‘Real Time’ – but what couldn’t be made to relate to something so broad? Yet there did seem to be plenty of reference to or interaction with times past...

Karla Black at the Gallery of Modern Art

Recent Turner Prize shortlistee Karla Black uses uses fragile and potentially ephemeral materials. That made for an immediate source of productive contrast from giving her the run of GoMA’s imposing classically-columned main hall, historically the focus of Glasgow’s financial trading business. Cue the ravishing combination of ‘Empty Now’ – 17 tons of variously woods’ sawdusts, layered like the mother of all tiramsus – and ‘Will Attach’, 170 cellophane twists hung from the ceiling in a gradually descending formation so that they started well overhead but the viewer was in among them by the other end of the hall. Here bigger, pointing up the originality of Black’s sculptural forms, was definitely better.

Jeremy Deller: ‘Sacrilege’ on Glasgow Green

Even before the waiting classes of children streamed onto it, this was obviously a public art coup, up there with Olafur Eliasson’s Sun and Carsten Höller’s slides. Jeremy Deller, the art world’s arch-combiner of popular tastes with audience involvement, has made what must be the world’s biggest bouncy castle in the form of a full size inflatable version of Stonehenge. ‘No shoes, no sharp objects, no human sacrifice’ warned the notice alongside. It’s a homage, says Deller, ‘not only to Stonehenge itself but to the anarchic freak-out culture of Hawkwind, Bruce Lacey and Ken Russell’. It travels to London for the Olympics, and, of course, the kids loved it more than they would the fenced-off original…

Ian Giles: ‘Listen Harder’ in ‘Arrives in Starting’ at The Lighthouse

Fiona Mackay and Rachel Adams showed well in the Duchy Gallery’s mixed selection of work by recent Glasgow graduates, but the attention grabber was London-based video and performance artist Ian Giles’ pair of sculptures posing the immediate question: what would you hear if you listen to a rock? Not some sort of musical pun, the headphones revealed, but the ancient sound of the naturally occurring phenomenon of Acoustic Emission, whereby external stimuli such as earthquakes generate sources of elastic waves inside rocks. The work contains 44,000 sound clips of Acoustic Emissions collected by the Rock and Ice Physics Laboratory at University College London, lowered to an audible frequency. Groovy...

Sea-snail Camera

Niall Macdonald in ‘Petrosphere’ at Skypark

The basement of a shinily-clad office block (in which o2 employs thousands) hosted the second half of a lively Greco-Caledonian exchange, the Scots in it having already shown in Athens. I was struck by how Niall Macdonald combined timeless natural forms from his Hebridian home with the more temporary contemporary in violently contrasting scales: a neon ring plus whale vertebrae either side of a column the size of a small cetacean; and a delicate combination of camera and snails, for which he had found an unusually smooth means of casting items in pure white plaster.

Richard Wright: ‘Works on Paper’ at Kelvingrove

In 2009 Glasgow-based Richard Wright won the Turner Prize – as Scots often do – for his site-specific and necessarily temporary practise of drawing on gallery walls. This first ever show dedicated to his work on paper covered a dozen years through 30 varied drawings: realistic depictions of castle architecture; a giant silver hand; geometric abstraction; pulsing cloud-like patterns applied with gold leaf; and complex symmetrical eastern-flavoured drawings of great delicacy. Most of these related directly to site-specific projects, making them, perhaps, an exploration of the opposite effect of decontextualisation. They were attractive, but I was still more excited by some fantastic Vuillard taking pattern to the max in the adjoining room…

Charlotte Prodger: ':-*' at the Centre for Contemporary Arts Intermedia Gallery

Charlotte Prodger presents a complex but compelling installation which draws analogies between structural film and themes of obsession and obsolescence in popular/gay culture using four elements: on-line footage of the fetishisation of black and white Nike trainers, including cutting and pulling them apart in what seems a rather sexual desire to see and understand all of an adored object; a double 8mm film splitter standing in for how mid-sixties artists deconstructed film into its constituent elements; a Sharp GF 777 boombox, now more for display than for use on the street; and a fragmentary narrative playing on it which links all that to the opening and closing of the blinds in a sex club in Berlin… ‘Phew!’ you might say, and yes, it was a bit amazing that it worked…

David Korty at Mary Mary project space

Los Angeles painter David Korty has produced a new stream of work in the past few months while living in Vancouver – but with this Glasgow show in mind. They’re modest works on paper which take the organisation of a newspaper as their template, thus connecting to Korty’s established interest in communication and design in everyday living. The text is reduced to patterns without letters, so that information is represented but not transmitted. There are Dada, Constructivist, Bauhaus and Minimalist echoes. Puns emerge between ‘pages’ such as collaged-on paper from a hole-puncher and equally-sized circles made on the surface and – by way of Scots tribute perhaps – they all smuggle in a version of St Andrew’s Cross. I found myself liking them more the more I looked.

Moyra Davey: still from 'The Goddesses'

Erica Eyres: ‘Inside the Minds’ at Southside Studios and Moyra Davey: ‘Les Goddesses’ at Tramway

The Festival is fairly light on films, but two of the few are outstanding – and both made by Canadians. Erica Eyres’ elliptical yet stark tale of apparent abuse, ‘Inside the Minds’, is well hidden at the back of the Southside artists’ studios near Queens Park (but you can see it here: http://vimeo.com/40407725). It travels a long way in five minutes, even though most of it shows a whitewashed wall. Moyra Davey’s far more expansive ‘Les Goddesses’ takes an indirect and multi-stranded hour to relate the artist’s own family history through the project of describing Mary Wollstonecraft’s. This is told through Davey pacing her flat repeating into a Dictaphone the apparently pre-recorded words feeding into one ear. That amplifies the contrast between the diaristic and the measured which is one of the many themes – Goethe, muses, Rome, Freud, adolescence, siblinghood, Benjamin, laudanum and writing in public – woven into Davey’s intimately hesitant meditation.

Wolfgang Tillmans: ‘Works from the Arts Council Collection, ‘Onion’ and ‘Headlights’’ at The Common Guild

A clumsy, if descriptive, heading for a wide representation of Tillmans’ subjects through 32 photographs presented in a typically diverse manner all around a Victorian townhouse. Plenty of known favourites are included, and an apparent match-up between the organic patterning in waterfall and trees worked beautifully. The highlights, though, consistent with Tillmans’ ability to refocus the banal, were the new subject of car headlights: as you climbed the stairs you saw a small non-matching pair directly, then a much bigger-than-life-size single headlight first in a mirror, car rear-view style; and only later directly, on the stairwell wall above you.

Folkert de Jong: ‘The Immortals’ at the Mackintosh Gallery, Glasgow School of Art

The Dutch artist makes his groups of figures by recasting elements using the ‘unethical’ industrial material of Styrofoam, which is both environmentally contaminating (as it won’t beak down) and dangerous in itself – so much so that de Jong has to wear a gas mask when working, and the process degrades the cast, so causing each repetition to vary. He clearly relishes his material, though, and it’s suited such sardonic takes on corruption and imperialism as his masterful groups of pirate traders. Applying it to Mackintosh’s circle played neatly off their self-given name (‘The Immortals’) and the role of more perfect plaster casts (included in the installation) as drawing models in the School – but it didn’t feel comparably urgent.

Clive Hodgson: ‘Untitled’ in ‘Ever Since I Put Your Picture in a Frame’ at 42 Carlton Place

Painter couple Carol Rhodes and Merlin James have converted the ground floor of their elegant Clydeside house into a project space. The first show, curated by the latter, is a comparably elegant selection of paintings. Clive Hodgson will have the first solo show here, and can currently be seen at London’s Standpoint Gallery. Here his feathery, delicately- hued ‘Untitled’, pointing only towards its own absence of a dominant direction, seemed to tremor with the freshness of having just tipped into abstraction.

Kilian Rüthemann & Kate V Robertson at David Dale Gallery

This Swiss-Scottish dual show makes beautifully poised use of a newly available East End industrial unit, which the work serves to dissolve. Rüthemann has leaned pseudo-ill-fitting steel sheets against the internal girders to exaggerate how they already divide the room. Robertson co-opts the space into how her works change state: they include a wax plinth-come-candle big enough to burn through the entire six week run; crumpled paper cast in concrete; and the projection of a screen saver with a bouncing sun motif onto a screen of ice which melts away in the course of each day.

Images courtsey of the relevant artists and galleries + Ruth Clark / Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne (Black),
Gagosian (Wright), Maureen Paley (Tillmans) and Janet Wilson (de Jong)

EASTER EXTRA

2012-04-06T12:40:00.011-07:00

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

Molly

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sweethearts @ Pippy Houldsworth, 6 Heddon St - Central

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

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

Large Dark Line Vertical Grid

Winston Roeth @ Bartha Contemporary, 25 Margaret St – Fitzrovia

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

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

The Ideal is Unattainable

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NO PAINTING IN APRIL

2012-03-31T23:15:00.002-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RA1884

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

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

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

Salame

Santo Tolone: Three Times Once @ Limoncello

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

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

From 'Dust of Stars', 2007/09

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

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

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

Bag

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

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

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

nudes dr02

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

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

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

Foothills

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

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

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

International Lawns (Regional Aesthetics 1)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2012-03-18T14:51:00.002-07:00

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

Lot 12281 (the double extension)

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Hot Winds That Blow From The West

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

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

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

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

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

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

Task Chair

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

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

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

Divine Ricochet, 1991

John Chamberlain: Choices @ the Guggenheim, 1071 Fifth Avenue

To May 13: http://www.guggenheim.org/

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

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

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

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

Odalisque, 1980

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sails, 1986

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

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

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

Jean-Luc Moulène: La Vigie @ Dia Beacon

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

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

Images courtesy of the relevant artists and galleries.

TWO FOR ONE IN MARCH

2012-02-25T04:18:00.006-08:00

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

'Der Bienenkorb' (The Straw Hive)

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

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

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

Expedition Interior

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

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

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

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

To 5 April

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

Rasha Kahil: from the series 'In Your Home'

Photo Opportunity @ Maddox Arts, 52 Brooks Mews – Mayfair

To 31 March: www.maddoxarts.com

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

Christine 10 Hollywood

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

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

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

Plant Life of the Pacific World Uncatalogued Species 8

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

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

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

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

To 7 April: www.estorickcollection.com

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

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

Mondrian║Nicholson: In Parallel @ The Courtald Gallery,

To 20 May: www.courtauld.ac.uk

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

Video still from 'Night and Day'

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

To 30 March: www.carrollfletcher.com

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

Cardinal SE SE

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

To 24 March: www.poppysebire.com

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

Images courtesy of the relevant artists and galleries

TWELVE CHOICES: SEX IN TIME

2012-02-19T00:39:00.005-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bernhard Martin: Docks, 2012 at Union to 17 March

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

Yayoi Kusama: Accumulation Room at Tate Modern to 5 June

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

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

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

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

Paradise Painting 3

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

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

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

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

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

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

Installation view of 'The Curator's Egg'

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

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

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

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

All images courtesy of the relevant artists and galleries

FEBRUARY UNCENTRAL

2012-01-29T08:54:00.000-08:00

The highest concentration of galleries may be in Mayfair, Fitzrovia and the West End, but art is well-dispersed in London with good shows to be found in all directions… so it is that the following ten recommendation don’t include any galleries with a W1 postcode. I start in Ealing and traverse Bermondsey, Hoxton, Hackney, Wimbledon, Cambridge Heath, Finsbury, Kensington, Whitechapel and Shoreditch in the following - and I was also tempted by Camden, Islington, Lambeth and Peckham…

Edgar Martins - 'Untitled (Atlanta, Georgia)' from the series 'This is not a House'

The Near and the Elsewhere / Marguerite Horner @ PM Gallery, Walpole Park, Mattock Lane – Ealing Broadway

To 17 March: www.ealing.gov.uk/pmgalleryandhouse

Sir John Soane’s Pitzhanger Manor-House hosts an impressively curated photo-centred survey of urban development, displacement and desertion round the world. Highlights include Francis Alys’ slide show of street sleepers in Mexico; Sara Ramo’s menacing irruption into a Brazilian interior; Peter Pillar’s documentation of the German equivalent of the M25, Edgar Martins’s shots of abandoned houses in America; and Thomas Demand’s photos of his recreation of a Hong Kong bar moved twice to accommodate redevelopments. Plus, in a neatly complementary painting show, Marguerite Horner’s grisaille evocations of townscape anomie.

Il mistero delle cattedrali

Anselm Kiefer: Il Mistero delle Cattedrali @ White Cube, 144 – 152 Bermondsey Street - Bermondsey

To 26 Feb: http://www.whitecube.com/

The word ‘portentous’ may never be far away with Anselm Kiefer, but his literally heavy symbolism proves well-suited to White Cube’s monumental new Bermondsey space: alchemy and history weave through twenty works including paintings weighing more than a ton due to the boulders, lead wings, metal sunflowers etc hanging off them. Their dark and salty silveriness is resonantly aged by exposure to the elements; and the recently closed Tempelhof Airport in Berlin, which Speer envisaged as Hitler’s gateway to Europe, proves a fertile source of apocalyptic mysticism. True, Kiefer seems doomed to re-enact the same obsessions, but isn’t that part of his point? And has he ever done so this powerfully in Britain?

Three Trees

David Hepher: Lace, Concrete and Glass, an Elegy for the Aylesbury Estate @ Flowers, 82 Kingsland Rd – Hoxton

To 25 Feb: http://www.flowersgalleries.com/ (talk 2 Feb 6.30pm)

Want an English artist with some of Kiefer’s majesty, albeit to quite different ends? I suggest the latest of David Hepher’s long-running landscapes of blocks of flats, here the huge Aylesbury Estate in Walworth. Aside from a rhyming name and similar scale (like Kiefer, he has a painting more than 10 metres wide) Hepher also skewers romanticism and mixes the pictorial and the real - here are not just paintings of buildings, some on photographs of buildings, but irruptive paintings of other scenes, images in grafitti on the buildings, and building materials forming part of the pictures. ‘Three Trees’, for example, plays a game reminiscent of Joseph Kosuth’s famous comparison of a chair with its representations.

Jarek Piotrowski: Soft Machine @ GALERIE8, 203 Richmond Rd – Hackney Central

To 11 March: http://www.galerie8.co.uk/

The newly-expanded London Overground makes Hackney easy to reach, and Jarek Piotrowski’s impressively-scaled (actually on the site of the old Flowers East) is a good reason to go there. The German-based Polish-born Canadian isn’t one to get stuck in a style any more than in a country. Ink drawings, pastels overworked to considerable effect, and atmospherically sylvan watercolours complement the dominant work here: Piotrowski uses a surgeon’s scalpel to excise intricate patterns, many of them found in medical textbooks, from large PVC mats of a type common in hospitals and playgrounds. The bodily, then, is cut into the industrial - and hung so that the shadows, which make intimately ghostly positives of the negative removals, are integral.

Phillip Allen: Shop-soiled Nude

The Perfect Nude @ Wimbledon Space, Merton Hall Rd – Wimbledon

To 10 Feb (weekdays only): wimbledonspace@wimbledon.arts.ac.uk

A healthy, if preferably clothed, ten minute walk from Wimbledon station you’ll find a hundred nudes – made by fellow artists at the request of Dan Coombs and Philip Allen. That’s some way from the day job for most, and a contrast develops between those who make characteristic-looking work at something of a kilter from the tradition (Danny Rolph, Alexis Harding…) while others are less recognisably their usual selves (Mali Morris, Allen himself). Lee Maeltzer, Andy Harper and Sam Windett land rather effectively on the middle of that continuum, and Damien Meade stood out among those new to me. The diversity makes it hard to draw conclusions about nude today, but my impression was that the artists enjoyed the freedom enforced by this constraint.

Brian Griffiths: The Invisible Show @ Vilma Gold,

To 19 Feb: www.vilmagold

In the kind of show you’ll remember even if you don’t like it, Brian Griffiths riffs on the empty gallery as exhibit and the possibility that the show isn’t yet ready to open by seeming to cloak large sculptural works in beige tarpaulin. Of course, this ‘cosmic latte’, as Griffiths terms it, becomes the work it purports to cover, the more so as its shades of would-be-camouflage are lovingly hand-painted. That brought to mind Richard Tuttle, which also fits with how the minimalist cube is made provisional. But you could equally see the installation as frustrating the urge to see inside – to the action in tents at a fair, perhaps, or into the artist’s own process…

Panto

Caroline Achaintre: Trip-Dip @ Arcade, 87 Lever St – Finsbury

To 18 Feb: http://www.arcadefinearts.com/

The London-based French artist Caroline Achaintre is perhaps best-known for her mask-like wall rugs which combine ancient and modern as they ‘paint in wool’. Here, though, ceramics predominate with three neat twists: first, they too exploit our natural tendency to find faces in what at first seems abstract; second, several appear to be melting, as if the soft-to-hard process of the clay has gone into reverse; and third, some make punchy use of other materials, such as black leather as in the fetishitic carnivality of ‘Panto’, (which ties a bulbous ceramic nose onto a leather ball) and ‘Tie Man’ (in which the leather neckwear seems to double as an anti-gravitational noose).

'Book of Time' (detail)

Lygia Pape: Magnetised Space @ the Serpentine Gallery - Kensington

To 19 Feb: http://www.serpentinegallery.org/

Of the three biggest names in Brazilian neo-concretism, Hélio Oiticica has had a Tate retrospective; and Lygia Clark has been well-shown here by Alison Jacques – yet this is London’s first broad view of Lygia Pape (1927-2004: say ‘Par-pay’), whose multi-media work often focuses on aesthetic experiences which are available for relationships in collective terms. Two works stand out: the 365 tempera-on-wood contractions of the ‘Book of Time’ (1961-63), which activate a year’s-worth of geometries through the implied movement in a process of cutting out shapes which are re-presented on a different plane; and the golden threads of the late ‘Web’, cloistered in their own dark, which shimmer tremulously as you circle round them.

Mary Hurrell: Call @ Carlos / Ishikawa, Unit 4, 88 Mile End Rd – Whitechapel / Stepney Green

To 3 March: http://www.carlosishikawa.com/

South African Mary Hurrell is a recent RCA graduate who grabbed headlines with naked figures on a shelf in her degree show. She’s installed a beautifully measured dance of space, sound and light in the gallery recently opened by Vanessa Carlos (formerly at The Approach) and fellow-Brazilian Nara Ishikawa. The viewer is lured onto a floor painted to resemble a white dance mat, and into movement around ambiguously-volumed constructions of jesmonite, Perspex and steel to a soundtrack made by a genuine dancer, elegantly filmed manipulating a metal sheet as wobble-board. The whole coheres to form a curious combination of antiseptic, industrial and poetic.

Daniel Rapley: 'Sic' (2010-12)

Daniel Rapley: Covenant @ PayneShurvell, 16 Hewett St & Olek: ‘I do not expect to be a mother, but I do expect to die alone’ @ Tony’s Gallery, 68 Sclater St – Shoreditch

To 3 March (Rapley) & 23 March (Olek): http://www.payneshurvell.com/ & http://www.tonysgallery.com/

These two convincingly obsessive artists can be found within a couple of hundred Shoreditch yards. Daniel Rapley has transcribed the Bible by hand – though you have to take that on faith from the first of the 750-or-so double-covered sheets of neat writing. He muses entertainingly on his activities in astonishingly print-like pencil drawings, and is literally with us his own blood text ‘Praesentia’. New York-based Pole Olek spent two months living and crocheting in Tony Taglianetti’s gallery, covering people, furniture and any objects within her ambit - with added self-revelatory sexual twists which fit in with her Emin-quote title. How to shape the world to your own ends, or just cover the cracks?

Images courtesy relevant galleries and artists + Charles Duprat (Kiefer)

2011 IN REVIEW

2011-12-29T01:25:00.002-08:00

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… hence its a blue negative she lays behind the straight image taken 5 seconds later. 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

2011-11-10T09:19:00.001-08:00

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?

Rupert Goldsworthy & Mark Stewart: ‘I AM THE LAW’ at Ritter/Zamet, London: 18 Jan – 31 March 2012

This show brings together two naturally collaborative counter-cultural figures with records of provocation in London, Berlin and New York: painter, writer and curator Rupert Goldsworthy and sound artist Mark Stewart, known as a collagist and pioneer of industrial hip hop.

‘I AM THE LAW’ is a total installation in two rooms: Stewart’s scrawled texts, some of them seeming to annotate various symbols which Goldsworthy monoprinted onto wallpaper-like hangings; a cuboid structure painted in Islamic-style patterning; two wall paintings, one of which Goldsworthy made at the opening; several grids of found images and texts linked by such themes as devil-worship, bathhouse logos and sub-cultures; and some items of Stewart’s which looked to have been left scattered after a ritual rather than arranged - from signs promoting ‘GOD’ as a trademark to records and personal items. At first the look of the show seems mainly down to Goldsworthy, but Stewart is more than a catalyst and means of adding another layer to the pile-up of references, as the words are all his and he helped pick the two images that Goldsworthy then rendered as large murals.

So what does it all mean? If one theme holds things together, it’s probably Goldsworthy’s interest in the way symbols operate to represent what might be called ‘radical brands’ in a broad sense – from the Hells Angels to Islam to the National Front. It’s obvious that both men are fascinated by a wide range of objects, expressions and designs, not excluding the criminal, fascist and otherwise unsavoury, and some of the show’s energy comes from their investigation into how these signs and logos clash together. That leads Goldsworthy to collect labels and stickers and take photographs of signs and monuments, combining them to emphasise the co-existence of opposing cultures in the same space: Prussian military history with new Moslem designs from Berlin, for example... Similarly, Stewart's dystopian texts, hacked collages and ritual objects juxtapose charged subject matter: pentagrams and prison gates.

Such matters are explored more fully in Goldsworthy’s recently published “CONSUMING//TERROR: Images of the Baader-Meinhof”, a book on which he worked closely with Stewart, and which traces the visual history of the Red Army Faction (the West German terror group) and their logo. One of the main themes of the book is, Goldsworthy says, to ask how ‘outlaw’ or terrorist signs ‘establish themselves and operate as a heretical category amid a closely administered, legitimated, forest of signs’. This was the focus of his solo show at Ritter/Zamet last year, which featured large paintings combining incongruous categories – Nazi, gay and Chinese, for example.

Goldsworthy, then, focuses on the associative power of representation and how identities of "the forbidden" are constructed. Indeed, the symbols of seventies radicalism have much the same look as their racist counterparts, and the crude agitprop style of many of the underlying designs was emphasised by Stewart leaving behind a rudimentary hand-made printing block which was used to make the wallpaper works. One effect of this is to play on the semiotic point that word and object are not linked by logic but by convention, posing the question: are the linkages just as arbitrary in the world of visual signs? Here’s where I feel a connection to Stewart’s words, which give the impression of being plucked at random for their sound and emotional effect, rather than for any conventional narrative purpose: thus do ‘frozen angels’, ‘cluster fuck of visions’, and ‘institutional deviance’ swim out the dense melange of his sheets of lyrics.

Elsewhere, two slogan-like phrases are particularly prominent: Stewart’s song title ‘As the Veneer of Democracy Starts to Fade’, as written across a painting of two menacingly carnivalesque figures appropriated by Goldsworthy; and ‘Obedience to the Law is Freedom’ on a sign across the top of a fenced-in prison on one of the wall paintings. That brings to mind both the Auschwitz slogan ‘Work Sets You Free’ and the use of language in Orwell’s ‘1984’. It’s power, not reality, which decides what words and images mean – though on the other hand, if ‘I am the Law’, as the show’s title would have it, then the obedience could be rendered benign through being founded on such subjectivity. The show turns around language's role in the construction of power.

Visually, the most effective work was the second wall painting. It shows a rioting crowd, sourced from a photograph taken during the Irish civil war: another context in which belief may be thought to have trumped truth in the construction of meaning, and also drawing ambivalent associations with recent events in London and the Arab world. Goldsworthy combines a peculiar dark–green-over-lemon palette with astutely vague brushwork so that what is depicted seems out of register in the manner of a 3D photograph viewed with the naked eye. This makes the dense rear section of the crowd look like a dappled landscape until one reads back to it from the individual figures in the foreground, who’ve broken free. They feel like reasonable stand-ins for Goldsworthy and Stewart themselves, separating out long enough to provide a sense of how we’re manipulated before being reabsorbed into the protesting mass.

The exhibition ‘I AM THE LAW’ runs until March 31st, when a closing party will double as a release event for Stewart's forthcoming album ‘The Politics of Envy.’

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

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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

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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…