Jacob Dahlgren

When Anxieties Become Form

★★☆☆☆

On until 27 September 2024

“Choose one idea and stick with it no matter what” was decent advice for an artist until a couple of decades ago. Dahlgren took this to heart and spent his career rearranging stripes of colour with a dedication that would put Daniel Buren to shame. He has produced stripy prints, sculptures, videos, and photographs. He has even staged a series of colour protests filled with placards designed to his colour scheme. He probably makes his own t-shirts which, of course, are always striped.

I met Dahlgren in his studio over a decade ago and even then wondered how and if his practice might develop. It seems that it hasn’t. But should it? In this anxiously posed show, the works are older than the artist’s last good idea, and nothing strives for novelty not already synonymous with modernity. If only Dahlgren’s proposition was any more daring, disordered, or simply counterintuitive, the gallery might be spared waiting for his stripe to enter the canon.


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

Raed Yassin: Eternal Ghost at Cedric Bardawill ★★☆☆☆

Raed Yassin

Eternal Ghost

★★☆☆☆

Pictures of other people’s children don’t sell.

Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting at National Portrait Gallery ★★★☆☆

Jenny Saville

The Anatomy of Painting

★★★☆☆

There is no trace of the visceral in Saville’s gentle pencil studies, for example.

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.

Mohammed Z. Rahman, A Flame is a Petal at Phillida Reid ★★★☆☆

Mohammed Z. Rahman

A Flame is a Petal

★★★☆☆

Rahman’s zine hand makes this make-believe explicit but not plausible.

Yuki Nakayama, After the Rain at A.I. Gallery ★☆☆☆☆

Yuki Nakayama

After the Rain

★☆☆☆☆

Can an installation be too site-specific?

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.

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