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.
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
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