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:

Avery Singer, Free Fall at Hauser & Wirth ★★☆☆☆

Avery Singer

Free Fall

★★☆☆☆

This show would be better without the baggage of the artist’s personal story and even better without the Twin Towers altogether.

Phung-Tien Pham, doesn’t work at Project Native Informant ★★☆☆☆

Phung-Tien Pham

doesn't work

★★☆☆☆

Fad aesthetics for fad ideas.

Shu Lea Cheang at Project Native Informant ★★☆☆☆

Shu Lea Cheang

Scifi New Queer Cinema, 1994-2023

★★☆☆☆

With material this gratuitously explicit and a curator this absent, it’s a miracle that this project wasn’t shut down by the licencing, or indeed art-historical authorities.

Pablo Bronstein, Cakehole at Herald Str ★★★☆☆

Pablo Bronstein

Cakehole

★★★☆☆

Bronstein falls into the late evening stupor of the cheese trolley, the oyster tray, and… the Mars bar.

Urs Fischer, Scratch & Sniff at Sadie Coles ★★★☆☆

Urs Fischer

Scratch & Sniff

★★★☆☆

It’s too early for a funeral, yet there’s no other reprieve in this commodity cult.

Celia Hempton, Transplant at Phillida Reid ★★★☆☆

Celia Hempton

Transplant

★★★☆☆

Sense finally returns only outside the gallery.

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