HelenA Pritchard
The Homeless Mind

★★★☆☆

On until 13 April 2024

Pritchard’s practice, once happily confined to the surface of a ready-made canvas, has found a new scale in this exhibition. The gallery’s basement sinks under the weight of three concrete assemblies. Their twisted shapes, textures, and menacing dimensions would make a great backdrop for a reality TV programme on Brutalist architecture and earthquakes. 

Death by debris falling from building façades is an artist’s occupational hazard. A couple of collages that accompany Pritchard’s future rubble suggest that collapse was not far from the painter’s mind.

It is a matter of course that one end puts another in perspective. By unavoidable contrast, Pritchard’s smaller maquette sculptures lack either the menace or the lightness commanded by her concrete extrusions. Their number, excessive given the showroom’s subterranean lack of a skyline, leaves the exhibition unbalanced and lacking a guiding principle.


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

When Forms Come Alive at Hayward Gallery ★★☆☆☆

When Forms Come Alive

★★☆☆☆

This exhibition cannot decide if it’s a tourist attraction or a serious examination of sculpture’s relationship with movement.

things fall apart; the centre cannot hold at Tabula Rasa ★★★★☆

Elli Antoniou, Ali Glover, Richard Dean Hughes

things fall apart; the centre cannot hold

★★★★☆

These works could bear witness to the birth of a star or the heat death of the universe. The curators don’t know which.

Bhenji Ra, Biraddali Dancing on the Horizon at Auto Italia ★☆☆☆☆

Bhenji Ra

Biraddali Dancing on the Horizon

★☆☆☆☆

Such work was once a mere grift. Now, it is an outright stitch-up.

RM, A Story Backwards at Auto Italia ★★☆☆☆

RM

A Story Backwards

★★☆☆☆

Having forgotten what the ‘dramatic’ in art stands for, visual artists today too often mistake hacked theory for stage directions.

Diego Marcon, Dolle at Sadie Coles HQ ★★★☆☆

Diego Marcon

Dolle

★★★☆☆

Idle work became indistinguishable from leisure, vegetative time-passing from family life.

Soufiane Ababri, Their mouths at Barbican ★★☆☆☆

Soufiane Ababri

Their mouths were full of bumblebees

★★☆☆☆

Ababri’s paintings for the Grindr generation are more cartoonish than they are from life.

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