Amilia Graham

The Crust

★★☆☆☆

On until 17 September 2024

To stage covert exhibitions in the City of London is an act of opportunistic resistance, or so declares the curator of this illegal pop-up in a bus drivers’ toilet. The respite from capitalism is temporary, however: each show lasts no more than three hours, and it’s bring-your-own booze. In the long lineage of galleries located in toilets, this one is more a hipster happening than an artistic challenge to anything. 

Graham’s poor image photographic installation, composed of scuffed stock images of breakfast foods in cheap clip frames, is so unspectacular that it would be overlooked by a driver using the facilities in a hurry. It follows some more intrusive projects that in their Insta documentation brim with toilet humour that might get TfL’s cleaning crew the sack. The practice has earned the project an invitation to a boutique art fair all the same.

To do things without the institutions’ blessing is, by principle, better than doing nothing. By paying no attention to art, however, this project replicates the problem it wants to avoid.


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

Eddie Ruscha, Seeing Frequencies at Cedric Bardawil ★☆☆☆☆

Eddie Ruscha

Seeing Frequencies

★☆☆☆☆

But either the curator or the artist should have known better.

Turner Prize 2024 at Tate Britain ★★☆☆☆

Pio Abad, Claudette Johnson, Jasleen Kaur, Delaine Le Bas

Turner Prize 2024

★★☆☆☆

Even the artists approach this edition with ennui.

looking to the futurepast, we are treading forward, the Bolivian pavilion in Venice ★☆☆☆☆

looking to the futurepast, we are treading forward

★☆☆☆☆

The contemporary is of no interest to a nation whose future is yet to be dug out from the ground.

Diego Marcon, Dolle at Sadie Coles HQ ★★★☆☆

Diego Marcon

Dolle

★★★☆☆

Idle work became indistinguishable from leisure, vegetative time-passing from family life.

Pauline Boty at Gazelli Art House ★★★★☆

Pauline Boty

A Portrait

★★★★☆

This exhibition mixes the woman and her legend, but without the air of mystery she enjoyed during her lifetime.

Sophie Huckfield: Lady Ludd at Outpost, Norwich ★★☆☆☆

Sophie Huckfield

Lady Ludd

★★☆☆☆

Huckfield crowbars made-up heroes into past revolutions to pose as the saviour in the next one.

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