notes and notices are short and curt reviews of exhibitions at (mostly) London galleries.
Bam’s clay forms project a whimsical freedom that one may well envy. Her ceramic tubes, their girth inviting a warm embrace, stand defiantly, yet comically tall, even though they only barely resist collapse under their own weight. The weaker they are, too, the more their maker expects of them. Bam charges a set of these overgrown pot plants, unglazed and only partly fired, with the weight of the world. With pulley and rope, she promises them reprieve form gravity.
But all this is woo. Rope only adds weight to the assembly, and it’s Bam who takes the illusory liberties for granted. Her experiments with pigment and granularity lack intent; she falls prey to their babble. An installation of soil and a riverscape video, aesthetically so juvenile it’s embarrassing, betrays the motivated, faux naïveté of the lot.
Until not long ago, our view of the cosmos hinged on the indivisibility of the atom. Overnight, this certainty crumbled to account for this atom’s now inexhaustible changeability. Winters’ canvases, made up in the manner of the petri dish and the planetary system, attest to both, turning time’s axis into a measure of distance.
Oblate cross sections take shape as the painter slices through matter. His images dwell in extreme microscopy, their primary colours artefacts of extreme artifice. They capture life on chromosomal scale on one surface and in interference patterns on the next. Winters’ project is not, therefore, mere description. A creationist science, if such a thing were possible, is born out of oil.
It might be amusing to suggest that the line between abstraction and affectation is fine, but that’s quite literally the case in Rouy’s quasi-figurative paintings. His group oil portraits, or, more accurately, mid-mortems of living bodies being exploded together, look for reprieve in sketchy overlays intended to confuse the viewer and the nature of things themselves.
Torsoso, buttocks, and limbs pile up together, but not too indiscernibly, one drawing too closely on the next. A lone charcoal gave rise to all this, we’re told, but it ran out of its representational payload before it reached the next canvas. Rouy’s figures are too studiously removed, their correspondence to a false original too neat. Even the works’ surface finishes — afterthoughts borrowed from Twombly and Richter — betray timidity when faced with their own image.
Elena Njoabuzia Onwochei-GarciaGrown: The Altering of Innocence and Experience
★★★★☆William Hine, LondonOn until 25 July 2026Onwechi-Garcia’s hangings turn the gallery into a night-in-the-museum dream sequence. Her teal pastels and watercolours animate centuries of myth, mixing chronology and provenance. There’s a lifted Blake and maybe a Hogarth, and a paraphrased Goya. A broken Greek vase could be a source here, and that medieval illumination must have taken reverie to copy. These large, floating drawings, having refused their customary framings, break out in storied, fragile opulence.
Such fables are pure pleasure to narrate, yet their wealth of references overwhelms. Does the artist care for the history she dwells in, or does her maze confirm civilisation’s loss inside it? It’s hard to discern this from Onwechi-Garcia’s hand alone. Some of her characters take on a life of their own, others are stilted and composed a little too tightly. A set of Freudian slips —steel snakes, get it? — confuse transmission and fantasy emission.
It’s staggering that we ever believed galleries might be effective loci for social campaigning. The production of art lags so far behind theory, which, in turn, only slowly distorts political need, that by the time an exhibition speaks to the “poetics and aesthetics of illness”, its only language is cliché.
Whom does it help to find a secondary Felix Gonzalez-Torres (poetic, check) and hang it next to a tertiary Derek Jarman (crassly aesthetic, thumbs down)? These narratives were once productive but gave way to self-sabotage and self-pity. Avril Corron’s IV-bag water chandelier blames her landlord for something, while Bella Milroy’s welfare letters are no Daniel Blake when health claims have sunk the economy.
The social model of disability is that to be unwell is other people’s problem. In projects like this one, it takes on the Romantic notion that consumption makes the artist a truth-seer. A few works resist this: Angela de la Cruz’s sofa and wooden box assembly is art before it is anything else and even Christine Sun Kim has earned her place in the inaudible canon.
But to mix such work with the pseudo therapeutic, pseudo activist babble of the Freestylers is a put-on. The striking academics next door also ask for sympathy because their future “NHS therapists are training here”.
It takes hutzpah to put a row of steel shelves in a fifteenth-century Venetian library, stack them with a bunch of decommissioned library books, and call the job complete. It is another thing altogether that more than half a dozen institutions over a dozen years have joined in Favaretto’s antiquarian act.
The art world art sees its preservation and reproduction in these “Momentary Monuments”. With literacy itself in ostensible crisis, Favareretto’s second-hand salesmanship exposes the museum’s anxiety that the image might soon go the way of the word. Imagine the Louvre a charity shop, then, with Rembrandt and Rothko in the bargain bin, Warhol the stock boy, and Duchamp in the toilet where he always belonged.
Whose expense is this joke at? On redundant paper, Favaretto’s concerns are loftier yet more trite. The pamphlet speaks of “the book as an epistemic infrastructure” and “a critical space for verification and transmission”. Burning the art student’s undergraduate essays won’t solve the problem, alas. Neither will the conceptualist’s iconoclasm.
Alexander Kluge et al.The Ear is the Eye of the Soul
★★★☆☆Holy See pavilion, VeniceCurated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Ben VickersOn until 22 November 2026Don’t too many priests spoil the soup? The Vatican’s two-curator, two-site, countless-artist pavilion tries to please crowds in the garden and confuses them in the sacristy. The sonic walk installation, with works by Obristian sidekicks cued up to the heavens, is outright trivial. It’s pleasant, granted, to stroll through Venice’s one patch of secluded greenery, but that’d be the case even without wireless headphones. This installation could happen (and has) anywhere; the holy soundtrack’s transcendental pathos is, in this end, entirely generic.
Across the city, Kluge’s dying confession to Hildegard of Bingen is spectacular but by contrast too heavenly to dwell in. Architectural reconstruction hardware, drapery, and sickly yellow lighting turn the church complex into a site of renewal. In it, twelve filmic stations bear the sound of nuns singing, musicological trivia, and interruptions in… Comic Sans. What they narrate God only knows, though. In vain, one waits for this Medieval sonic payload to trump its contemporary counterpart.
Nina Wakeford, et al.The Unfinished Business of Living Together
★★★☆☆Swiss pavilion, VeniceCurated by Gianmaria Andreetta, Luca BeelerOn until 22 November 2026This year’s Swiss artistic committee — their project billed unusually as a curatorial device delegated to adjunct research artists — immersed itself in the late-1970s public image politics of homosexuality to draw out its social repercussions on today. Projections taken from television magazine programmes, brought into the twenty-first century with jaggy CGI, narrate the tension and tenderness of civic rights and aesthetic emancipation. Alarmist activist statements serve as the show’s wayfinding. News cuttings point to a sense of peril, while a gay predator shark has triumphantly devoured the patriarchy.
Mission accomplished? Not quite, the wall text suggests. Yet the forms on show do not attest to the project’s cyclical necessity; they merely foreground once vital art’s descent into dry sociology. They please the eye as they do so, granted, but that only makes their demand more pernicious. This call for liberation is bogus! If the Swiss don’t think they’re free, who is?
Nomenclature for the Time Being
★★☆☆☆Raven Row, LondonCurated by Imani Mason JordanOn until 6 September 2026Raven Row’s ‘impenetrability as a service’ is becoming tiresome. After Christine Kozlov’s conceptualism left audiences rudderless in a history that’s accounted for with clarity elsewhere, this new salvo proposes that ‘making art while black’ needs theory beyond, but somehow still rooted in the racial strife of the past decade.
This isn’t untrue, perhaps, but nothing on show is this theory or capable of giving rise to it even together. Kellard-Jones’s hanging mattress with heirloom medallion is tender, as are Kilfa’s photographs of the blackness of coffee becoming the blackness of the world. But Kirubo’s multimedia hangings are chaos, obscured further by her Vaseline-smeared windows. Sudipo’s ritual-fetishist leather and Holman’s pulled teeth spread geographic confusion. Hassinger’s Duchampian “love” hanging is full of hot air, while Muholi’s outsize retro telephone is no more than a bad joke. What stories might one need to hear down this line to make sense of these pairings?
Only silence answers. Too often, curating in these galleries foregoes the artefact only to fall back on glossy printed verbiage and high install specs. That is not, however, how good ideas spread.
Maja Malou LyseThings to Come
★★★★★Danish pavilion, VeniceCurated by Chus MartínezOn until 22 November 2026Does representation have the power to shape its object? The answer was once obvious, but in today’s image-saturated culture, as the hackneyed phrase goes, to deal with the icon takes conviction. Lyse throws caution to the wind, confronting the image’s epigenetic consequences.
In clinically pornographic surround, the installation takes the classic female nude to its inevitable conclusion. If titillation was once the stuff of oil paint and the top-shelf magazine, the gallery now delivers it in OnlyFans perfection. Lyse’s barely clad women flex for the cameras, their poses optimised for maximum NSFW spell-bind. Ciccolina, the icon’s icon, performed at the show’s opening. No man’s desire has not been shaped by these apparitions.
In this barely fictional post-sex world, intercourse is a game of image veneration, its object divorced from old biological imperatives. Lips, tits, and cunts are the world, but men “race” their sperm under the microscope for kicks. IVF is GDP, and love is in surplus. In a Biennale under the spell of a dead woman, Lyse’s contribution is as morbid as it is vital. Eros is dead. Long live Eros.
Inspired in form and attitude by Manhattan Art Review.
