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:

Entangled Pasts at The Royal Academy ★★☆☆☆

Entangled Pasts, 1768–now

★★☆☆☆

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

Oh, the Storm at Rodeo ★☆☆☆☆

Oh, the Storm

★☆☆☆☆

This exhibitions is trying to explain the concept of ‘crazy paving’ to a blind man. It’s impossible to tell where a work ends and the wall begins.

Slawn at Saatchi Yates ★★☆☆☆

Slawn

★★☆☆☆

Do you like KAWS but find him too expensive?

Jacob Dahlgren, When Anxieties Become Form at Workplace ★★☆☆☆

Jacob Dahlgren

When Anxieties Become Form

★★☆☆☆

The works are older than the artist’s last good idea.

transfeminisms Chapter IV at Mimosa House ★☆☆☆☆

transfeminisms Chapter IV: Care and Kinship

★☆☆☆☆

Lack of care for the artefact is a strange USP for a gallery.

Karrabing Film Collective, Night Fishing with Ancestors at Goldsmiths CCA ★☆☆☆☆

Karrabing Film Collective

Night Fishing with Ancestors

★☆☆☆☆

Little separates this display from a human zoo complete with curators who occasionally kettle-prod the once noble savage into a spectacular rage.

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