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:

Ain Bailey: The Jamaica Project at Camden Art Centre ★☆☆☆☆

Ain Bailey

The Jamaica Project

★☆☆☆☆

Without the gallery’s lush sofas, no one would stop to hear this.

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.

Mike Kelley, Ghost and Sprit at Tate Modern ★★★☆☆

Mike Kelley

Ghost and Spirit

★★★☆☆

The challenge of curating a retrospective of a career as rich as Kelley’s is to build a narrative that both lay audiences and art historians can believe. Wood packs the show and pleases neither fully.  It’s remarkable that any artist’s…

Roe Etheridge, Happy Birthday Louise Parker II at Gagosian ★★☆☆☆

Roe Etheridge

Happy Birthday Louise Parker II

★★☆☆☆

Etheridge’s method finds an extreme in this tiny pass-by display.

Your Ghosts Are Mine at Palazzo Franchetti ★★★☆☆

Your Ghosts Are Mine: Expanded Cinemas, Amplified Voices

★★★☆☆

This attempt at building pan-Arabic film aesthetics falls prey to the art technician’s trickery.

Divine Southgate-Smith, Navigator at Nicoletti ★☆☆☆☆

Divine Southgate-Smith

Navigator

★☆☆☆☆

It is too late to save the regime, yet too early to mourn it.

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