Vivid contemporary art exhibition featuring provocative photographic works displayed on white gallery walls with newspaper-covered floor.

Claire Fontaine

Show Less

★★☆☆☆

Curated by Daria Khan
On until 6 December 2025

The declaration, forced on visitors at the door, that this “exhibition contains distressing content” as good as guarantees that it doesn’t. Show Less purports to subvert the politics of visibility. Yet even its most ‘shocking’ component – the neon FATHERFUCKER, hung in the gallery’s window – upsets absolutely no one. Still more disappointingly for the emotion-seeker, a series of commercially produced copies of L’origine du monde, adulterated by the artists with bright spray paint, lack the frisson to add anything to Courbet’s 1866 original.

Are we so lost today that we need to paint over the man’s jest, twelve times, and call that an act of extra-special feminist reclamation? Claire Fontaine – the duo behind the FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE neons, which inspired last year’s Venice Biennale’s title – opt for memes in lieu of substance. Their forms are easy to ‘get’ and their comforts compelling. Why, they covered the gallery’s very floor with hundreds of sheets from the Guardian, as though to elevate viewers from the plane of even that subjective reality. 

But the show bestows freedom selectively: a series of declarations made in a childish hand cuts off their maker from the past and their ancestors’ sins. “I am free”, it proclaims, staking a claim on history’s ‘right side’ and #kindness. Repeat these mantras enough, and the lie becomes art.


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

Cullinan Richards, Retrospective at Alma Pearl ★★★★☆

Cullinan Richards

Retrospective

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Rhis show is the kompromat in an art generation’s archive.

Paper Tiger Television at Goldsmiths CCA ★★☆☆☆

Paper Tiger Television

It’s 8:30. Do you know where your brains are?

★★☆☆☆

Hand-painted backdrops and cardboard props appeal to institutional leaders stuck in Blue Peter nostalgia.

Entangled Pasts at The Royal Academy ★★☆☆☆

Entangled Pasts, 1768–now

★★☆☆☆

Who could have thought that these mantras would turn into rote?

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

Rheim Alkadhi

Templates for Liberation

★★☆☆☆

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

Poppy Jones, Solid Objects at Herald St ★★★★☆

Poppy Jones

Solid Objects

★★★★☆

The lightness of the painter’s gesture cries out for a sledgehammer that would relieve the viewer of his doubt.

Tacita Dean: Black, Green, Green and White at Frith Street Gallery ★☆☆☆☆

Tacita Dean

Black, Green, Green and White

★☆☆☆☆

Film studies lost to mobile video; Dean phones it in.

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