Anastasia Pavlou

Reader, Part 2; The Reader Reads Words in Sentences

★★☆☆☆

On until 16 December 2023

A reading list accompanies this exhibition, and it includes names like Merleau-Ponty, Woolf, Hawking, and Berger. Pavlou explains in the handout that these are important to her thinking about painting, as are her own essays (not provided) and bullet point “Notes and Thoughts Around Things” on “the morphology of peripheral vision” and the meaning manifest outside of things. 

This sounds silly but such a project is core to all art and Pavlou’s inquiry has a consistent internal logic. But what it has to do with the paintings – abstractions whose palettes and brushstrokes are so out of scale that they may as well be military camouflage – is left unexplained. Some clues come from the show’s odd elements: a shaky pencil drawing of a spider, black-and-white photographs of people in a museum, and one canvas that in contrast with the others is nearly monochrome. 

But this is at once not enough and far too much. In this game of aesthetic cognition, the idea which survives is of the artist thinking. That’s no bad thing but it’s a pity that Pavlou’s viewers are not afforded the same pleasure.


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

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

TJ Wilcox

Hiding in Plain Sight

★★☆☆☆

Vanity proceeds in circles.

Lydia Gifford, Low Anchored Cloud at Alma Pearl ★★☆☆☆

Lydia Gifford

Low Anchored Cloud

★★☆☆☆

Oil paint applied so thickly that it’s a miracle the canvases don’t bring the gallery walls down with them

Soufiane Ababri, Their mouths at Barbican ★★☆☆☆

Soufiane Ababri

Their mouths were full of bumblebees

★★☆☆☆

Ababri’s paintings for the Grindr generation are more cartoonish than they are from life.

Jenkin van Zyl, Dance of the Sleepwalkers at Edel Assanti ★★★☆☆

Jenkin van Zyl

Dance of the Sleepwalkers

★★★☆☆

Ring 1 for “Grief”, and it’s flat 7 for “Garbage”.

David Muenzer, Teen at Final Hot Desert ★★★☆☆

David Muenzer

Teen

★★★☆☆

Muenzer’s messy show bedroom actually is someone’s messy bedroom most nights of the week.

Machine Painting at Modern Art ★★★★☆

Machine Painting

★★★★☆

Ask DALL-E to paint an abstraction and it’ll confidently produce a museum-worthy clone

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