Megan Rooney

Echoes & Hours

★★☆☆☆

Curated by Andrew Nairne, Amy Tobin
On until 6 October 2024

Can an exhibition be at once hubristic and timid? Rooney’s broad-stroke, bold colour abstract oils claim their space in the galleries without hesitation. A “family” of canvases on which the artist is said to have worked for a year makes a run for the prime spots under the skylights. They bear the crusty traces of a painterly battle: long lines applied at right angles as though in a feat of angry desperation. A mostly blue mural wraps another space from floor to ceiling, leaving the eye no respite. It merely magnifies the gestures from the smaller tableaux, as though the same artist now suffered from gigantism.

For all this bravado, Rooney’s compositions offer only a very surface experience of abstraction. Seen through a tight squint, her images pay lip service to Water Lilies or the Starry Night. But the artist knew that every abstract image ever made does the same just as well. Not even the gratuitous dance performance commissioned for the mural and shown in the exhibition as a video “activated” these paintings the way Rooney says in another film they deserve.


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

James White: Every Corner Abandoned Too Soon at Anthony Wilkinson ★★★★☆

James White

Every Corner Abandoned Too Soon

★★★★☆

Paint that does this to a pile of plastic coat hangers contends with any reality.

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.

Anastasia Pavlou, Reader at Hot Wheels ★★☆☆☆

Anastasia Pavlou

Reader, Part 2; The Reader Reads Words in Sentences

★★☆☆☆

In this game of aesthetic cognition, the idea which survives is of the artist thinking.

Richard Hunt, Metamorphosis at White Cube ★★★★★

Richard Hunt

Metamorphosis

★★★★★

A dictionary for self-determination written in phrases as they were being invented.

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.

looking to the futurepast, we are treading forward, the Bolivian pavilion in Venice ★☆☆☆☆

looking to the futurepast, we are treading forward

★☆☆☆☆

The contemporary is of no interest to a nation whose future is yet to be dug out from the ground.

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