The whimsical freedom of Bam’s overgrown pot plants is an illusion.
Rouy’s mid-mortem group portraits betray timidity when faced with their own image.
These fables are pure pleasure to narrate, yet their references overwhelm.
The social model of disability meets the Romantic notion that consumption makes the artist a truth-seer.
Burning the art student’s undergraduate essays won’t solve the problem.
Nuns singing, musicological trivia, and Comic Sans.
If the Swiss don’t think they’re free, who is?
Characters lose themselves in screens-within-screens.
Temporal collapse manifests in magic.
What would it take for an artist to take control of the means of aesthetic production?
What if appropriation and regurgitation led to domination?
Liquid Tongues is a collaboration between two artists and a community choir of deaf and hearing people. Despite drawing on many ideas, the film lands a generic, corporate look. Were Burska and Kotowski not aware of the rich history of linguistic experiment (in the Biennale’s last edition, for example) or social practice (Althamer’s Nowolipie) in Polish art? Anyone…
A racket not useful for sport.
Some water lily species are invasive.
The dance of constellations that make up the Western civilisation inspires awe.
Can there be a “black British music” without Britain or blackness?
Without the gallery’s lush sofas, no one would stop to hear this.
The impulse at play is that repetition makes up for an idea by sheer volume. It doesn’t.
No object exists without its double, no form without an opposite. Phillips’s dainty assemblies of ceramic, steel, and PVC tube exist only as much as something else—the artist’s body and mind, for example—took a lead in shaping them. The resulting inanimate masks, saddles, and tongues brim with desire. Phillips carefully suspends them in balance, which…
What’s more 1970 than a Pop art Last Supper on the top of a dining table?
An idle fancy is detached from here and now, which already shows signs of ageing.
Xiuzhen remediates commodities, turning second-hand fabrics into ‘immersive’ experiences.
It takes a lot to pull off an essay film, and Clements is no essayist.
Hand-painted backdrops and cardboard props appeal to institutional leaders stuck in Blue Peter nostalgia.
This edition spells ‘stasis’ more than most, and the selectors are to blame.
Posing as an archaeology of signs, women, and their entanglement, this show is mere research notes.
The word ‘organic’ once encompassed forms of matter that were anything but.
Ashadu’s films are as banal as they are overbought with glib signifiers.
Are these dreams, floral fields, or psychedelic visions?
What’s wrong with rights makes no right with painting.
An exhausted porcupine and an architectural war plan.
Repeat these mantras enough, and the lie becomes art.
The human mind is mimetic – all art is representation.
What would it take for art to look like something, anything once more?
Huckfield crowbars made-up heroes into past revolutions to pose as the saviour in the next one.
Film studies lost to mobile video; Dean phones it in.
Man’s colours are only a small nudge of the wheel from Tretchikoff’s infamous portrait of the Chinese girl.
Biblical floods, the comet’s fall, and the odd tsunami mercilessly toss Nakahara’s protagonists about.
Hawkins’s paint reveals that her studio was no crime scene.
Catch the wrong end of the spectrum and forever remain obscured.
The problem for a culture built on iconoclasm is that eventually, it will need to create images of its own. Guthrie is yet to consider this because his image war is still virtual. The subject of his static video installation, as well as of the animated statue-scrapping sequence, is the infamous Blackboy Clock in Stroud.…
When Adam Curtis stopped narrating his ‘documentaries’, some stories are wasted breath.
There are many ways to misunderstand entropy.
“Sky”, “roof”, “31”, a mantra turns into paint.
“Reskilling” has the same ring in art as “reindustrialisation” does in geopolitics.
The problem of artists who confuse graphic design with art is that they also mistake sloganeering for critique.
There is no trace of the visceral in Saville’s gentle pencil studies, for example.
This show of nearly thirty artists makes a pitch at many extremes, failing to reach any.
Paint that does this to a pile of plastic coat hangers contends with any reality.
Oh, what is it to be a woman in a world of nothing but!
A dictionary for self-determination written in phrases as they were being invented.
Byrne has a type. Or rather, he’ll paint you into one.
“Working-class” and “queer” appear in the collateral as obligatory. What doesn’t is “white”.
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.
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