Carla Åhlander, Aaron Amar Bhamr

Holding Places

★★★☆☆

On until 27 September 2024

Despite their formal simplicity, Åhlander’s photographs can build an atmosphere. It’s late summer at the family’s lake holiday cottage. The sun shines through the curtains, the building creaks in the breeze, and lunch will be ready soon. Together with the gallery’s fit-out – of brass trimmings, dark carpet, mirrors – the illusion is as good as complete. 

Then Amar Bhamr’s art handler’s readymade breaks it, hard, revealing the whole scene to be make-believe. But not before this artist, too, litters the floor with traces of the season’s turn, thus showing himself to be as sentimental as the rest of us. 


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

Jan Gatewood, Group Relations at Rose Easton ★☆☆☆☆

Jan Gatewood

Group Relations

★☆☆☆☆

Such thin metaphors could only have come from LA.

Open Group, The Polish pavilion in Venice ★★★☆☆

Open Group

Repeat After Me II

★★★☆☆

The applause was rapturous. A sense of tragedy, however, was altogether missing.

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.

Riar Rizaldi, Mirage at Gasworks ★★★☆☆

Riar Rizaldi

Mirage

★★★☆☆

When an artist thinks he’s understood quantum mechanics, he doesn’t. How will he know if he knows god?

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”.

Wilhelm Sasnal at Sadie Coles ★★★☆☆

Wilhelm Sasnal

★★★☆☆

Only in flights of anger does this vision come close to becoming believable.

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