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:

Oh, the Storm at Rodeo ★☆☆☆☆

Oh, the Storm

★☆☆☆☆

This exhibitions is trying to explain the concept of ‘crazy paving’ to a blind man. It’s impossible to tell where a work ends and the wall begins.

Manfred Pernice, Megan Plunknett, >anticorpo< at Galerie Neu and Emalin ★★★★☆

Manfred Pernice, Megan Plunknett

>anticorpo<

★★★★☆

Such ‘80s nostalgia for meaning before history’s end is a comfort blanket.

Merike Estna: The House of Leaking Sky at the Estonian pavilion, Venice ★★☆☆☆

Merike Estna

The House of Leaking Sky

★★☆☆☆

A racket not useful for sport.

Freudian Typo at Delfina Foundation ★★☆☆☆

Freudian Typo

Condensed Word, Displaced Flesh

★★☆☆☆

The problem of artists who confuse graphic design with art is that they also mistake sloganeering for critique.

Eddie Ruscha, Seeing Frequencies at Cedric Bardawil ★☆☆☆☆

Eddie Ruscha

Seeing Frequencies

★☆☆☆☆

But either the curator or the artist should have known better.

Trevor Yeung, Hong Kong in Venice ★★★☆☆

Trevor Yeung

Courtyard of Attachments

★★★☆☆

This fishbowl universe is easy sea comfort but ultimately no sushi.

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