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:

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Joshua Leon, The Missing O and E at Chisenhale Gallery ★☆☆☆☆

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Stephen Willats, Time Tumbler at Victoria Miro

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Julia Maiuri, Yesterday & The End at Workplace ★☆☆☆☆

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One can only imagine that some unconscious loathing of postmen motivated this project.

Christo, Early Works at Gagosian Open ★★★★☆

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★★★★☆

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Nicole Eisenman, What Happened at Whitechapel Gallery ★★★☆☆

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★★★☆☆

There’s a Bosch hellscape dedicated to Trump and a whole “basket of deplorables” polishing their guns in a prepper cell.

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