Francesca DiMattio

Wedgwood

★★★☆☆

On until 23 December 2023

If more were more, DiMattio gets close to the limit. In her giant ceramics kiln, everyday motifs like sneakers and knickers clash into the ornate Rococo stove and the Victorian China snuff box. Bucolic scenes adorn wedding cakes, teapots and cake tins turn into totems. Cutesy flowers and seashells spread over floors, walls, and ceilings to near asphyxiation.

No wonder that each item leaves the oven crooked, as though assembled in a distorting brass mirror. This is the artist’s joke which she applies indiscriminately to the Greek orgy (literally) in one corner of the gallery and to the Amazon warehouse (yes) in the next. When she runs out of life’s surfaces to glaze, she lands safely in the one-liner of the Wedgwood mail-order collection.

This opulence has no reason other than DiMattio’s craft which, granted, isn’t nothing. But the elaborately decorative environment of wallpapers and floor mosaics into which the sculptures disappear is a gallery’s reminder that DiMattio’s commodity is available to order in any shape, colour, or size. Add mistletoe and tinsel and the lot would be at home in a department store’s Christmas display.


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

Choon Mi Kim, ACID—FREEEE at Ginny on Frederick ★☆☆☆☆

Choon Mi Kim

ACID—FREEEE

★☆☆☆☆

Some forms of abstraction simply scream ‘my kid could have made that’.

Sylvie Fleury, S.F. at Sprüth Magers ★★★☆☆

Sylvie Fleury

S.F.

★★★☆☆

In Fleury’s car workshop cum womenswear boutique, everything is ready-made and ready-to-wear. But you can’t touch any of it and you certainly can’t afford it.

Yannis Maniatakos, Four Paintings at Sylvia Kouvali ★★★☆☆

Estate of Yiannis Maniatakos

Four Paintings

★★★☆☆

Examining the paintings in the gallery’s bright lights doesn’t lift their mystery.

James Welling and Bernd & Hilla Becher at Maureen Paley ★★★☆☆

James Welling and Bernd & Hilla Becher

★★★☆☆

Welling’s veneration of brutalist concrete borders on fetish.

Megan Rooney, Echoes & Hours at Kettle’s Yard ★★☆☆☆

Megan Rooney

Echoes & Hours

Advanced Views (view_65875b3a6405b) template: Can't write template file

For all this bravado, Rooney’s compositions offer only a very surface experience of abstraction.

Alvaro Barrington, Grandma’s Land at Sadie Coles ★★★☆☆

Alvaro Barrington

Grandma’s Land

★★★☆☆

The party slumps into a half-voiced political complaint and never recovers. This is what happens when instead of living culture, we ‘celebrate’ it.

×