Nicola Turner, Edward Bekkerman

The Song of Psyche: Corners of a Soul's Otherworlds

★★☆☆☆

Curated by Marina Shtager
On until 12 January 2024

Turner’s Medusa-like sculptures fashioned from tights stuffed with horse hair and wool fill the gallery with an earthy aroma that distinguishes these forms from similar made by Lucas or Bourgeois. Their tentacles want to envelop the studio, having already consumed the artist and possessed a dancer to prance among them at the show’s opening.

For all their bravado, these works are mere props, as befalls the weekend output of an otherwise accomplished scenic designer. But as dressing, they only accentuate Bekkerman’s hideously colourful oils, their counterparts in this exhibition, which hang off the canvases so thickly that they might drip onto the floor. Assaulted by these viscous ejaculations, the eye reads into them what could be figures assembled at a rally before retreating to safety and dismissing these works as shopping mall abstractions.

This project – not only the show’s cringeworthy title and the gallery’s unpronounceable name and unstated mission – is difficult to fathom. Who opens a space in Fitzrovia only to fill it with such drivel? What is the market, of buyers or admirers, for ideas so pedestrian and so poorly executed? The answer is a Google search away. To link to it, however, would be uncharitable.


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

Herman Chong, The Book of Equators at Amanda Wilkinson ★★☆☆☆

Herman Chong

The Book of Equators

★★☆☆☆

Chong was probably reading some epic while painting his Equator pictures.

Some May Work as Symbols at Raven Row ★★★★☆

Some May Work as Symbols: Art Made in Brazil, 1950s–70s

★★★★☆

Art history can catch modernity in splitting from the past and thus from itself.

Klara Lidén, Square Moon at Sadie Coles ★★☆☆☆

Klara Lidén

Square Moon

★★☆☆☆

This isn’t Times Square in a blackout.

Xie Nanxing, Hello, Portrait! at Thomas Dane ★★★★☆

Xie Nanxing

Hello, Portrait!

★★★★☆

Looking at Xie’s portraits is a little like wearing a virtual reality headset over only one eye.

Anna Barriball at Frith Street Gallery ★★☆☆☆

Anna Barriball

New Drawings

★★☆☆☆

The eyes may be the windows of the soul. To make an aphorism of the reverse needs more than shadow-play.

Dominique Fung, (Up)Rooted, at Massimo de Carlo ★★☆☆☆

Dominique Fung

(Up)Rooted

★★☆☆☆

All this tries to be macabre and surreal like in Bosch or Miyazaki but is instead laughably twee.

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