Klara Lidén

Square Moon

★★☆☆☆

On until 15 February 2025

The tragedy of a one-hit-wonder visual artist is that good painting or sculpture is harder to hum than a once-catchy tune. Lidén could be typecast by her 2010 billboard poster assemblies. Indeed, her practice has stayed close conceptually to their concerns since. This new show tries to repeat those works’ success quite literally, barely bothering to swap one backing track for another. Doing so, it misses that the world and Lidén have evolved in over a decade.

The billboard meditations on the city and the image are back, and this time they’re electric. But that’s not because they take from Rothko or Albers as they’d have you believe: each literally needs a plug socket. Museum benches propped up on stacks of card waste suggest that one should look at them with intent, without explaining why. A pair of mostly black videos cryptically set on a beach are the one source of true intrigue.

But this isn’t Times Square in a blackout. Lidén made so, so very many copies of these works that they overwhelmed her better judgment. Even the gallery deemed some redundant and it dismantled part of the exhibition halfway through to accommodate another artist’s show.


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

Victor Man: The Absence That We Are at David Zwirner ★★★☆☆

Victor Man

The Absence That We Are

★★★☆☆

Man’s colours are only a small nudge of the wheel from Tretchikoff’s infamous portrait of the Chinese girl.

Maso Nakahara: Floating Through Time at Pippy Houldsworth ★★★★☆

Maso Nakahara

Floating Through Time

★★★★☆

Biblical floods, the comet’s fall, and the odd tsunami mercilessly toss Nakahara’s protagonists about.

Justin Chance, Motherhood at Ginny on Frederick ★★☆☆☆

Justin Chance

Motherhood

★★☆☆☆

If only he stopped there.

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.

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.

Florian Meisenberg, What does the smoke know of the fire? at Kate MacGarry, ★★★★☆

Florian Meisenberg

What does the smoke know of the fire?

★★★★☆

Meisenberg’s paintings are either the product of a conspiracy or documents of a conspiracy theory.

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