A Platonic hierarchy of forms rules this enigmatic exhibition.
This menagerie comes with no humanly comprehensible challenge.
Welling’s veneration of brutalist concrete borders on fetish.
Interpreting a tale this grotesque, ugly, and venomous will take thousands of years
Local-art-centre retro exposes the breakdown of the feminist art project.
Davis’ canvases give an account of time more sensitively than the Victorian portrait photograph
It is too late to save the regime, yet too early to mourn it.
Linder’s second-wave feminist propositions were ruthlessly superseded.
Gillick’s practice lacks obviously consistent character, save for it is sparseness of means and the ungraspability of its referents.
Faced with so little, one longs for an even emptier room.
Hot metal is that, like water, it spills away from the mould.
Muenzer’s messy show bedroom actually is someone’s messy bedroom most nights of the week.
Kar’s insight a fly’s life – or, to have it his way, the whole universe – is fleeting.
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 art school experiments would find home in the museum. Kelley’s 1970s high conceptualism does set…
No narrative emerges from the tonnes of steel and plastic his work consumed
This may have been a good joke but it’s just too exhausting to look at.
How does a curator tell an unfamiliar history yet evade the museum’ didacticism and the audience’s dulled expectations? Jhaveri’s ambitious review of India’s testing decades at the end of the 20th century could easily have been a torturous sermon: the period’s Wikipedia entry is full of social tension, abuses of power, even civil unrest. The…
Gabaldón reinvents the pastoral for the Instagram generation.
Ask DALL-E to paint an abstraction and it’ll confidently produce a museum-worthy clone
Chong was probably reading some epic while painting his Equator pictures.
Prinos’ frames are precise, tight, and formal, as though the street were his studio.
Lack of care for the artefact is a strange USP for a gallery.
The Mavericks wanted a weapon, Igwe leaves them a toy.
When an artist thinks he’s understood quantum mechanics, he doesn’t. How will he know if he knows god?
There’s no conversation, no challenge, no win.
The circus is in town, its acts are the infrastructure of contentment.
It’s too early for a funeral, yet there’s no other reprieve in this commodity cult.
This tech-optimism might have entertained gallery-goers twenty years ago.
Rhis show is the kompromat in an art generation’s archive.
The commercial imperative is understandable. The art historical intent, less clear.
Etheridge’s method finds an extreme in this tiny pass-by display.
If only they were smaller, Piñera Ballo’s paintings would be a great hit in the shopping centre gallery your ex-army uncle just opened in Surrey. He’s gambling with the family’s savings, you condescend, but so is Pace with their show. The market for “young” artists is crashing. Who in London, precisely, would buy 6-meter-wide Cuban…
McGurn has created the visual equivalent of elevator music.
With the right lighting, this story could be a mid-century colonial classic.
Examining the paintings in the gallery’s bright lights doesn’t lift their mystery.
The illusion is as good as complete.
The works are older than the artist’s last good idea.
Each show lasts no more than three hours, and it’s bring-your-own booze.
The night, finally, recognises despair and witnesses infanticide.”
There is no “too much” in this fantasy meme game.
For all this bravado, Rooney’s compositions offer only a very surface experience of abstraction.
These sculptures are too clean, too ordered, and too clever for no good reason.
This project relies on layers of gimmicks and, sadly, they show through Awuah-Darko’s thick palette knife impasto.
When truth and artifice are so bluntly opposed, what use is aesthetics?
Such kitsch might have been fine in a spinster auntie’s bedroom. In the gallery, it is a cruel trick.
Rahman’s zine hand makes this make-believe explicit but not plausible.
Secondary turns the gallery into an American Football stadium. But all the seats in the house are the cheap seats and the game lacks a cheerleader.
Derrien has his audience discussing the nature of paint drying out loud.
Borremans toys with his subjects, his audience, and with art history.
This project outs Rauschenberg as a propagandist if not an outright Fed.
The garish colours which may have carried the story in cinema here are unfitting of their new medium.
But either the curator or the artist should have known better.
Singh’s pictures cold have been made by at least three other Frith Street artists.
This project has no room for breath and even less for context.
These ideas can’t last beyond the pop-up show’s closing date.
This dissonance might be intentional. If it isn’t, so much for the better.
Denić took the Biennale’s theme literally, as though he was not in on the art world joke.
One of the novelties in Venice is the artwork that looks good but on reflection isn’t.
Ababri’s paintings for the Grindr generation are more cartoonish than they are from life.
It’s Sunday in the village. And the main square is deserted.
Art history can catch modernity in splitting from the past and thus from itself.
Czwartos’ painting proves little and his sign-writer’s hand loses art history’s bet.
This Elysium is part panel house block, half Roman ruin
This attempt at building pan-Arabic film aesthetics falls prey to the art technician’s trickery.
This closed circulation project speaks to and agrees with only itself.
Ntjam’s Biennale presentation has all the hallmarks of world-building ambition. For one, it boasts two separate locations, one dedicated solely to the work’s public programme. The main feature is housed in a giant purpose-made structure which occupies a third of an exceptionally spacious courtyard. The shiny blue surface of this installation plays here the part…
Urgessa’s figures are contorted in love, death, or merely life.
The applause was rapturous. A sense of tragedy, however, was altogether missing.
The giraffe’s taxidermied corpse is host to an ideological stunt.
Stage fright is real. Cowardice is another thing altogether.
Whatever the purpose of this confusion, it’s not to be found in the gallery.
The exhibition’s user experience rivals that of the Apple Store.
The contemporary is of no interest to a nation whose future is yet to be dug out from the ground.
This fishbowl universe is easy sea comfort but ultimately no sushi.
This is the fodder of DeviantArt and the last year’s AI engines.