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:

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

Jan Gatewood

Group Relations

★☆☆☆☆

Such thin metaphors could only have come from LA.

Xie Nanxing, Hello, Portrait! at Thomas Dane ★★★★☆

Xie Nanxing

Hello, Portrait!

★★★★☆

Looking at Xie’s portraits is a little like wearing a virtual reality headset over only one eye.

Jennifer Bartlett, In the House at Pippy Houldsworth ★★★★☆

Jennifer Bartlett

In the House

★★★★☆

“Sky”, “roof”, “31”, a mantra turns into paint.

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

Pavel Brăila

On the Thousand and Second Night

★★★★☆

Temporal collapse manifests in magic.

The Otolith Group, I See Infinite Distance Between Any Point and Another at greengrassi ★★☆☆☆

The Otolith Group

I See Infinite Distance Between Any Point and Another

★★☆☆☆

The exhibition is a private memorial for Etel Adnan accessible only to members of the art world’s inner circle. And that’s a pity.

Matthew Barney, SECONDARY at Sadie Coles HQ ★★★☆☆

Matthew Barney

SECONDARY: light lens parallax

★★★☆☆

Secondary turns the gallery into an American Football stadium. But all the seats in the house are the cheap seats and the game lacks a cheerleader.

×