Dickon Drury

The Preceding Cart & POV: You are Beans

★★★☆☆

On until 19 April 2025

It would be time to call Seventeen’s bluff on clever, well-executed painting but given that Drury – an already perfectly entertaining artist – has just sat down in a bath full of baked beans, such criticism may land one a mouthful. The painter’s insistence on amplifying what he identifies as the pictorial crisis craftily verges on the absurd. His canvases study the garden shed in the style of a Japanese mail-order brand trying to break into Europe through TikTok. Representation is only viable by preset, narratives auto-generate captions, and the hues are all but predetermined.

It’s even worse next door, where the microwave oven’s door is the very limit of objectivity. One half-resignedly scrolls through this tiresome, quotidian universality, praying the algorithm glitches out of the matrix. It does not, and it is no help that Drury is entirely right. Painting needs prophets, he still plays a jester.


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

Anna Glantz, Lichens at Approach ★★★☆☆

Anna Glantz

Lichens

★★★☆☆

The clues that Glantz leaves on her surfaces are also traps. There are either too many or not quite enough to follow or fall into. 

Richard Hunt, Metamorphosis at White Cube ★★★★★

Richard Hunt

Metamorphosis

★★★★★

A dictionary for self-determination written in phrases as they were being invented.

Julia Maiuri, Yesterday & The End at Workplace ★☆☆☆☆

Julia Maiuri

Yesterday & The End

★☆☆☆☆

One can only imagine that some unconscious loathing of postmen motivated this project.

Pavel Brăila: On the Thousand and Second Night, Moldova in Venice ★★★★☆

Pavel Brăila

On the Thousand and Second Night

★★★★☆

Temporal collapse manifests in magic.

Yin Xiuzhen: Heart to Heart at Hayward Gallery ★★☆☆☆

Yin Xiuzhen

Heart to Heart

★★☆☆☆

Xiuzhen remediates commodities, turning second-hand fabrics into ‘immersive’ experiences.

The Stars Fell on Alabama at Edel Assanti ★★★☆☆

Mary L. Bennett, Richard Dial, Thornton Dial, Lonnie Holley, Ronald Lockett, Joe Minter, Mose Tolliver

The Stars Fell on Alabama: Southern Black Renaissance

★★★☆☆

The commercial imperative is understandable. The art historical intent, less clear.

×