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:

Rheim Alkadhi, Templates for Liberation at ICA ★★☆☆☆

Rheim Alkadhi

Templates for Liberation

★★☆☆☆

When truth and artifice are so bluntly opposed, what use is aesthetics?

Yi To, Terminal Lucidity at Project Native Informant ★★★★☆

Yi To

Terminal Lucidity

★★★★☆

All evidence erodes eventually.

Stephen Willats, Time Tumbler at Victoria Miro

Stephen Willats

Time Tumbler

★★★★☆

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.

Manfred Pernice, Megan Plunknett, >anticorpo< at Galerie Neu and Emalin ★★★★☆

Manfred Pernice, Megan Plunknett

>anticorpo<

★★★★☆

Such ‘80s nostalgia for meaning before history’s end is a comfort blanket.

Saccharine Symbols at Rose Easton ★★★☆☆

Marisa Krangwiwat Holmes, Shamiran Istifan, Tasneem Sarkez

Saccharine Symbols

★★★☆☆

Meaning parts with the image in this exhibition, never to return. Post-structuralism triumphs.

Armando D. Cosmos, Nothing New Under the Sun at Phillida Reid ★★★☆☆

Armando D. Cosmos

Nothing New Under the Sun

★★★☆☆

Cosmos wants to redefine STEM as the alliance of science, theosophy, engineering, and myth.

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