Calla Henkel & Max Pitegoff, I.W. Payne

Downtown

★★★★☆

On until 22 June 2024

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. 


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

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Gestures of Resistance

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

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★★★☆☆

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

Mike Kelley, Ghost and Sprit at Tate Modern ★★★☆☆

Mike Kelley

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★★★☆☆

The challenge of curating a retrospective of a career as rich as Kelley’s is to build a narrative that both lay audiences and art historians can believe. Wood packs the show and pleases neither fully.  It’s remarkable that any artist’s…

Özgür Kar, Heavy Ground at Emalin ★★★☆☆

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★★★☆☆

Kar’s insight a fly’s life – or, to have it his way, the whole universe – is fleeting.

Medusa at Union Gallery ★★★☆☆

Ada Bond, Rebecca Davy, Karen Densha, Sam Owen Hull, Hilary Jack, Rachel Goodyear, Evita Ziemele, et al.

Medusa

★★★☆☆

Interpreting a tale this grotesque, ugly, and venomous will take thousands of years

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