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.
An interest in material is core to this practice but Middleton mistrusts his instincts.
This embarrassing display indicts today’s second-fiddlers with narcissism and egomania.
Death by debris falling from building façades is an artist’s occupational hazard.
With material this gratuitously explicit and a curator this absent, it’s a miracle that this project wasn’t shut down by the licencing, or indeed art-historical authorities.
The lightness of the painter’s gesture cries out for a sledgehammer that would relieve the viewer of his doubt.
Oil paint applied so thickly that it’s a miracle the canvases don’t bring the gallery walls down with them
What good it is to be best in show when the competition is lame, crooked, or outright fake?
Rothko’s abstractions are said to have induced tears in viewers overwhelmed by abstraction. Staring at the sun here, however, barely causes blindness.
This exhibition cannot decide if it’s a tourist attraction or a serious examination of sculpture’s relationship with movement.
The eyes may be the windows of the soul. To make an aphorism of the reverse needs more than shadow-play.
Only in flights of anger does this vision come close to becoming believable.
The instincts are right, but too much makes sense to make sense together.
How can art improve the lives of communities? Wrong answers only.
Repetition and framing are photography’s greatest tricks.
Ring 1 for “Grief”, and it’s flat 7 for “Garbage”.
There will be no women when this spell breaks. And no need for magic, either.
Bodies clash with lights in front of Traoré’s Narcissus camera.
In the age of the decolonial, this is as quaint as it is outmoded
Who could have thought that these mantras would turn into rote?
Page’s tent, brain, and the cathedral take the same form for a pretty good reason.
Such work was once a mere grift. Now, it is an outright stitch-up.
What’s left of the show are stage props that feed adolescent imaginations with false memories of the long-finished party.
Such ‘80s nostalgia for meaning before history’s end is a comfort blanket.
These works are as garish as they are fun to look at.
The carpet dealer gallerist’s zeal reveals the work’s lamentable inadequacy.
Aesthetic cognition or crossword puzzles only rarely bring such perverse pleasure.
In this meditation of surface disguised as a study of objects, neither is a truer likeness of the events.
Westerik catches his figures in deep contemplation in front of the mirror, in the gynaecologist’s chair, or even mid-orgy.
This exhibition mixes the woman and her legend, but without the air of mystery she enjoyed during her lifetime.
These works could bear witness to the birth of a star or the heat death of the universe. The curators don’t know which.
Aj Tjoe’s paintings could make great scenic backdrops to a David Attenborough documentary on the life of wild rodents
This project lands in the joke section of Animal Farm and not as a prophecy of the Jan 6th insurrection.
In DiMattio’s giant ceramics kiln, everyday motifs like sneakers and knickers clash into the ornate Rococo stove and the Victorian China snuff box.
A police procedural turns into a drinking game of Foucauldian power analysis.
Forrester’s project is timely when foundational concepts like ‘mother’ and their ‘as-though’ counterparts are readily confused.
It should be within the resources of Pace and Olowska’s experience to advance her legend beyond the discretely marketable.
Who opens a space in Fitzrovia only to fill it with such drivel?
This is a poor man’s version of history or a philistine collector’s absolution.
One can only imagine that some unconscious loathing of postmen motivated this project.
Conanico’s slight structures look like they could take flight at any moment.
In this game of aesthetic cognition, the idea which survives is of the artist thinking.
There’s no dignity in paint when the arc of art history tends to “show hole”.
This invites a game of proofreading, in hope that Amer maliciously inserted a greengrocer’s apostrophe into de Beauvoir’s mind.
All this tries to be macabre and surreal like in Bosch or Miyazaki but is instead laughably twee.
This show would be better without the baggage of the artist’s personal story and even better without the Twin Towers altogether.
This is the work of a mind that, having needlessly spent years in therapy, became hooked on ennui or of an artist who wasted time misreading Lacan.
Close up, Petersen’s innocents today conjure ideas of redneck resistance. At scale, of state-marketed utopia. The middle ground is envy.
This exhibitions is trying to explain the concept of ‘crazy paving’ to a blind man. It’s impossible to tell where a work ends and the wall begins.
Cosmos wants to redefine STEM as the alliance of science, theosophy, engineering, and myth.
Idle work became indistinguishable from leisure, vegetative time-passing from family life.
There’s a room for female labour, a corner for childbirth, one for black women, and a section for lesbians. This is as close to nuance as Tate gets today.
The reward for taking part in this experiment of life is ascension to the holy orders.
The whole thing feels like a remake of Wind in the Willows directed by a garden gnome.
The clues that Glantz leaves on her surfaces are also traps. There are either too many or not quite enough to follow or fall into.
There’s an unfortunate ‘emerging artist’ vibe to this handful of readymade sculptures.
There is no answer in the work. Its cause and the object become enmeshed in a bland, exoticized mess.
Having forgotten what the ‘dramatic’ in art stands for, visual artists today too often mistake hacked theory for stage directions.
Rot overpowered this subject and came for the object next.
Less is more, as the saying goes. Nagle’s porcelain and resin maquettes are the bare minimum.
The artist must choose which ground is best ceded.
Willats orders fragments of time, matter, and space into data packets on one side of the flow chart and puts them to use on the other.
Meaning parts with the image in this exhibition, never to return. Post-structuralism triumphs.
This exhibition combines the most vulgar of all art school tropes: juvenile narcissism, NFT kitsch, and mindless referentialism.
Mad Max meets Waterworld in a crossover sequel conceived by a film studio’s marketing department.
Bronstein falls into the late evening stupor of the cheese trolley, the oyster tray, and… the Mars bar.
Abramović wants to destroy all performance and all women until she holds the monopoly over stage death.
Little separates this display from a human zoo complete with curators who occasionally kettle-prod the once noble savage into a spectacular rage.
There’s a Bosch hellscape dedicated to Trump and a whole “basket of deplorables” polishing their guns in a prepper cell.
This exhibition is a warning to would-be propagandists: trust art at your peril.
The figures appear as though in x-ray and helplessly foretell their own ends.
Too many deadpan landscape photographs turn intrigue into fatigue and into paralysis.
This is the sort of exhibition that makes a critic question the quality of their judgment.
Some forms of abstraction simply scream ‘my kid could have made that’.
An uninspired re-staging of the artist’s Camden Arts Centre show.
There’s joy in repetition. There’s joy in repetition. There’s joy in repetition. There’s joy in repetition. There’s joy in repetition. There’s joy in repetition.
To appreciate Christo’s early works against his wishes, one must forget his later stunts.
These gestures remind the gallery that it is a social space. Unfortunately, they also inadvertently point to its sorry end.
I knew that it was possible to understand art and life less after seeing an exhibition. I didn’t, however, imagine that experiencing Wielebinski’s work twice would only compound such damage.
Auer is more interested in the fate of painting than humanity and thus stands apart from the army of zealots who make eco art today.
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