Dan Guthrie

Empty Alcove / Rotting Figure

★★☆☆☆

On until 17 August 2025

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. The artist fantasises that the offensive figure has vanished but that he alone might still control its afterlife.

But artists have not been the sole purveyors of aesthetic meaning since the Reformation. In Strud, the statue’s mooted removal has stalled in bureaucracy. Lacking the conviction to climb a ladder and destroy the object himself, Guthrie’s posturing smacks of desperation. The project’s subsidiary poems, press cuttings, and morality tales told as quasi-art history are barren adjuncts to the vilified “retain and explain” strategy. Next to the object itself, they give rise to nothing.


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

I’m so gay for you at Miłość ★★☆☆☆

I'm so gay for you

★★☆☆☆

This “celebration of queerness” is no orgy

Wilhelm Sasnal at Sadie Coles ★★★☆☆

Wilhelm Sasnal

★★★☆☆

Only in flights of anger does this vision come close to becoming believable.

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.

Helen Johnson, Opening at Pilar Corrias ★☆☆☆☆

Helen Johnson

Opening

★☆☆☆☆

This is the work of a mind that, having needlessly spent years in therapy, became hooked on ennui or of an artist who wasted time misreading Lacan.

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.…

Jan Gatewood, Group Relations at Rose Easton ★☆☆☆☆

Jan Gatewood

Group Relations

★☆☆☆☆

Such thin metaphors could only have come from LA.

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