Amanda Wall

Femcel

★★★☆☆

On until 22 December 2023

In Wall’s femcel portraits, despair is sexy. Larger than life and rendered in Insta colours that could have been the choice of an image AI, her women perch at the bed’s end, squat by the wardrobe, and rest at the kitchen table. They’re bent out of proportion, showing off their skinny asses to the collector’s delight. Their boob tubes are tight, their shorts short. They play tired, scared, and helpless, just like you like them. They pulled these faces for you before. You will come back for more again.

The self-taught and presumably terminally online Wall may have experienced the faux emancipation of an e-girl first-hand. But her paintings are too brash and denatured to win in the battle over the 21st-century female body. Maybe sex work is the only work left in a world with no sex and universal online income. But there’s no dignity in paint when the arc of art history tends to “show hole”.


notes and notices are short and curt exhibition reviews. Read more:

Linder, Danger Came Smiling at Hayward Gallery ★★★★☆

Linder

Danger Came Smiling

★★★★☆

Linder’s second-wave feminist propositions were ruthlessly superseded.

Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting at National Portrait Gallery ★★★☆☆

Jenny Saville

The Anatomy of Painting

★★★☆☆

There is no trace of the visceral in Saville’s gentle pencil studies, for example.

TJ Wilcox, Hiding in Plain Sight at Sadie Coles HQ ★★☆☆☆

TJ Wilcox

Hiding in Plain Sight

★★☆☆☆

Vanity proceeds in circles.

James White: Every Corner Abandoned Too Soon at Anthony Wilkinson ★★★★☆

James White

Every Corner Abandoned Too Soon

★★★★☆

Paint that does this to a pile of plastic coat hangers contends with any reality.

Tommy Camerno, Delirious at Filet ★★☆☆☆

Tommy Camerno

Delirious

★★☆☆☆

What’s left of the show are stage props that feed adolescent imaginations with false memories of the long-finished party.

Tacita Dean: Black, Green, Green and White at Frith Street Gallery ★☆☆☆☆

Tacita Dean

Black, Green, Green and White

★☆☆☆☆

Film studies lost to mobile video; Dean phones it in.

×