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.
Lydia Gifford Low Anchored Cloud
Lydia Gifford
Low Anchored Cloud
★★☆☆☆
On until 13 April 2024
notes and notices are short and curt exhibition reviews. Read more:
Bruno Zhu
Bruno Zhu
License to Live
★☆☆☆☆
Faced with so little, one longs for an even emptier room.
Max Boyla
Max Boyla
Crying like a fire in the sun
★★☆☆☆
Rothko’s abstractions are said to have induced tears in viewers overwhelmed by abstraction. Staring at the sun here, however, barely causes blindness.
Sin Wei Kin
Sin Wei Kin
Portraits
★★☆☆☆
This exhibition combines the most vulgar of all art school tropes: juvenile narcissism, NFT kitsch, and mindless referentialism.
Firelei Báez
Firelei Báez
A Midnight's Dream
★☆☆☆☆
Such kitsch might have been fine in a spinster auntie’s bedroom. In the gallery, it is a cruel trick.
Aria Dean
Aria Dean
Abattoir
★★★☆☆
Visuals of her own making overpower the artist.
Roe Etheridge
Roe Etheridge
Happy Birthday Louise Parker II
★★☆☆☆
Etheridge’s method finds an extreme in this tiny pass-by display.
