Lydia Gifford

Low Anchored Cloud

★★☆☆☆

On until 13 April 2024

Gifford’s lazy assemblages of textiles and oil paint – applied so thickly that it’s a miracle the canvases don’t bring the gallery walls down with them – are interested in little but their own form. A handful, as if to expose the artist’s obsessive yet underdeveloped idea of a masterstroke, incorporate domestic objects like the detritus of the laundry room or scraps of the bedroom curtain. Whatever stories these compositions bore in the artist’s studio, in the collector’s home they’ll only gather dust.


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

Karimah Ashadu: Tendered at Camden Art Centre ★★☆☆☆

Karimah Ashadu

Tendered

★★☆☆☆

Ashadu’s films are as banal as they are overbought with glib signifiers.

Tacita Dean: Black, Green, Green and White at Frith Street Gallery ★☆☆☆☆

Tacita Dean

Black, Green, Green and White

★☆☆☆☆

Film studies lost to mobile video; Dean phones it in.

Miranda Forrester, Arrival at Tiwani Contemporary ★★★☆☆

Miranda Forrester

Arrival

★★★☆☆

Forrester’s project is timely when foundational concepts like ‘mother’ and their ‘as-though’ counterparts are readily confused.

Cullinan Richards, Retrospective at Alma Pearl ★★★★☆

Cullinan Richards

Retrospective

★★★★☆

Rhis show is the kompromat in an art generation’s archive.

Bitch Magic at Alma Pearl ★★★☆☆

Renate Bertlmann, Cullinan Richards, Ayla Dmyterko, Permindar Kaur, Rebecca Parkin, Tai Shani, Penny Slinger, Georgina Starr, Unyimeabasi Udoh

Bitch Magic

★★★☆☆

There will be no women when this spell breaks. And no need for magic, either.

Machine Painting at Modern Art ★★★★☆

Machine Painting

★★★★☆

Ask DALL-E to paint an abstraction and it’ll confidently produce a museum-worthy clone

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