The Kingly Street cupboard which hosts this Margate outfit’s pop-up barely has room for three artists. With two gallerists on site, it leaves little space for breath and even less for context.
For once, that’s for the better. Henke and Pitegoff’s black-and-white photographs of leather handbags do for the vaginal labia what Mapplethorpe’s vegetables did for the penis. Seeing them this close up – there is no other way – invokes a violence that’s far from the gentle joke of an O’Keeffe desert flower.
Next to this macabre gynaecological luxury product line-up, Payne’s near human-size cardboard silhouette jokingly riffs on a Roy Lichtenstein cartoon. Move too close and its spikes will poke your eyes. Move one step back and you’ll hit a steel column.
This little assembly would make the perfect décor for a court waiting room, unsettling any might-be villain. It may also be a great way to air yet keep close art’s most captivating defects.
