Celia Hempton

Transplant

★★★☆☆

On until 30 November 2024

This exhibition’s three shows in one. Surveillance, reconstruction, demolition: the canvases trace a dystopian life cycle. It’s not immediately clear where one ends and the next begins, however, because Hempton’s thick brushstrokes hit the surfaces with a studied, low-information impasto. Building sites, traffic webcams, and a surgeon’s POV live-stream (!) mix in a mess of severed arteries.

Confusion is Hempton’s favourite trick. The panels play scale, time, and location but even the odd landscape in this show of odd-ones-out brings no conclusion to this winding storyline. Sense finally returns only outside the gallery, as does longing for the unruly canvasses’ promise.


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

Jack O’Brien, The Reward at Camden Art Centre ★★☆☆☆

Jack O'Brien

The Reward

★★☆☆☆

No narrative emerges from the tonnes of steel and plastic his work consumed

Alejandro Piñeiro Bello, Entre El Día Y La Noche at Pace ★☆☆☆☆

Alejandro Piñeiro Bello

Entre El Día Y La Noche

★☆☆☆☆

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.…

James Welling and Bernd & Hilla Becher at Maureen Paley ★★★☆☆

James Welling and Bernd & Hilla Becher

★★★☆☆

Welling’s veneration of brutalist concrete borders on fetish.

Michael Simpson at Modern Art ★★★★☆

Michael Simpson

★★★★☆

In this meditation of surface disguised as a study of objects, neither is a truer likeness of the events.

Anastasia Pavlou, Reader at Hot Wheels ★★☆☆☆

Anastasia Pavlou

Reader, Part 2; The Reader Reads Words in Sentences

★★☆☆☆

In this game of aesthetic cognition, the idea which survives is of the artist thinking.

Alexandre Canonico, Still at Ab Anbar ★★★☆☆

Alexandre Canonico

Still

★★★☆☆

Conanico’s slight structures look like they could take flight at any moment.

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