notes and notices are short and curt reviews of exhibitions at (mostly) London galleries.
Dickon DruryThe Preceding Cart & POV: You are Beans
★★★☆☆Seventeen with Kendall Koppe, LondonOn until 19 April 2025It would be time to call Seventeen’s bluff on clever, well-executed painting but given that Drury – an already perfectly entertaining artist – has just sat down in a bath full of baked beans, such criticism may land one a mouthful. The painter’s insistence on amplifying what he identifies as the pictorial crisis craftily verges on the absurd. His canvases study the garden shed in the style of a Japanese mail-order brand trying to break into Europe through TikTok. Representation is only viable by preset, narratives auto-generate captions, and the hues are all but predetermined.
It’s even worse next door, where the microwave oven’s door is the very limit of objectivity. One half-resignedly scrolls through this tiresome, quotidian universality, praying the algorithm glitches out of the matrix. It does not, and it is no help that Drury is entirely right. Painting needs prophets, he still plays a jester.
Not taking the Becher’s name in vain was once the sole Düsseldorf school commandment. Welling trained elsewhere and, besides, his claim on typology is also a decades-long story. Yet this two-venue paring of the three photographers’ deadpan architectural meditations is a dead giveaway of Welling as a mere imitator.
Perhaps. The Bechers recorded industrial phenomena with such restraint that their lens critique was evident in even a single snapshot. Welling’s veneration of brutalist concrete – his lens turns to Washington’s infamous HUD building now outlawed under Trump’s classical architecture edict – borders on a fetish by contrast. But if one no longer needs to look at Bernd and Hilla’s grain silos, Welling’s quasi-opportunistic fixation leads to fresher discoveries.
Ada Bond, Rebecca Davy, Karen Densha, Sam Owen Hull, Hilary Jack, Rachel Goodyear, Evita Ziemele, et al.Medusa
★★★☆☆Union Gallery, LondonCurated by Mike Chavez-DawsonOn until 22 March 2025There is a mode of curating a group show which takes a title so literally that one suspects a hashtag search was engaged in its preparation. This one half-falls under Medusa’s spell: Ziemele’s chick-lit cover oils and Goodyear’s bedtime scare story watercolour are too straightforward as reflections from the myth and reveal little about who beheaded whom. Densham’s bijou gold ceramics are twisted-pretty but inconsequential in context. Dawson and Davy turn to AI but leave even it none the wiser.
The joke finally lands with Murray’s spaghetti painting and Jack’s sublimely ridiculous rock. Bond’s Gogron, for the love of myth, is painted on cheese, albeit disappointingly that cheese is not gorgonzola. Interpreting a tale this grotesque, this ugly, and, as in Hull’s maquette for a painting, venomous will take thousands of years.
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Suit of Lights
★★★★☆Kate MacGarry, LondonOn until 12 April 2025The challenge which the late Finn-Kelcey’s work posed to sex and gender roles in the 1970s and 80s seems quaint today. The brand of feminism archived in her studio self-portraits as a bull matador and a casino croupier has since both proclaimed total victory and continues to make a muted demand for parity. The exhibition’s sensitive display in local-art-centre retro exposes that project’s breakdown.
But making it ‘live’ again, as Finn-Kelcey’s performances once may have done is a different challenge. Snapshots and scripts of her 1976 durational gallery lock-in with a pair of magpies are simply no match for Beuys’ time with the coyote. That the art historian at whom this display is aimed cannot agree is the movement’s tragedy.
Anna Bunting-Branch, Choy Ka Fai, Damara Inglês, Katarzyna Krakowiak, Lawrence Lek, Kira XonorikaWhat Is It Like?
★★☆☆☆Arebyte, LondonCurated by Helen StarrOn until 4 May 2025For an exhibition that claims to concern itself with “embodiment”, this slick but gimmicky display of audio, video, and VR works could not be any less intelligible through the human senses. Starr turned the dimly lit gallery into an archive vault from which visitors must themselves assemble exhibits of bewildering artefacts: game world vistas, augmented reality performances, and soundscapes inflected by programmatic AI-fi.
This physical challenge might be surmountable (audiences love interactivity, right?) but it clouds the show’s crucial concerns. Can the machine know like a human? What does it feel like for an intelligence to be artificial? What do any of the artists in this show have to say about it? And what, if anything, does that have to do with a bat?
That this is moot is Starr’s very point. Yet if art is a knowledge-generating discipline, its knowledge itself needs an art that translates it into forms. In the optimism of the Enlightenment, this process was the core of aesthetics. Today, technology and art serve to mystify each other, leaving the human out of the picture.
Richard Aldrich, Prunella Clough, Masanori Tomita, Anh Trần, Terry WintersPlace Revisited
★★★★☆Modern Art, LondonOn until 5 April 2025Modern Art churns out so many good painting shows that one suspects it of insider trading. Indeed, there is a trick to this programme: each line-up drags a historical anchor that quells any hesitation of the medium’s future value. In this portfolio, the late Clough’s abstractions – straight out of the fruit bowl and the back garden as John Berger had them – underwrite the risk. One canvas, barely obscured by its subject matter, bears a pair of comedy teeth marks that leave the forensic accountant puzzled.
It’s not like the rest of the deal is sub-prime, though. One may quibble with Aldrich’s emoji-like palette but even it drinks up this context. Winter’s cloud paintings are exuberance alone, and markets love that. Trần’s abstractions of fairytales and Tomita’s rich textures are the wildcards, their paint too fresh to make a claim on the matter’s past performance.
The institution can be the best and the worst for an artist. Davis’ canvases, for example, are remarkable. The figures he captures mid-air, half-asleep, or between planes give an account of time more sensitively than the Victorian portrait photograph. These works make a justifiable claim on the market and have earned a spot in the public gallery’s canon.
Yet Davis was also the animator of some middling social art projects and a conceptual artist whose concepts hardly graduated art school. The museum venerates these, as though to make him a Basquiat for a new generation. This does the painter no favours. To celebrate, as this show does, that Davis was “creative” from a young age is trivial. To indulge a hollow reading of race in his Jerry Springer paintings is irresponsible. To fetishise his illness and death younger than Jesus gleefully opportunistic. These missteps, in turn, cast doubt on the paint’s surface.
“You just had to be there” isn’t quite the recipe for cultural reproduction. When crypto cults are the currency, October trades in old money. Its programme treats boomer avant-gardes to low-budget reenactments of their prime. The crowd, like the gallery walls, look worse for wear.
Burroughs should be sexy, right? Penguin didn’t make him a Classic for nothing and neither did, cringe, Guadagnino’s latest film. The scribbles – for that is what many of the drawings on show amount to – may be the products of the same fevered mind that birthed Naked Lunch but here, this mind misses its exalted status. The gallery’s economy frames, old-fashioned museum mounts, and lukewarm wine make the writer’s crazed daring even less obvious.
The legend muddles through, however. A few photo-collages in this collection come a step closer to the writer’s literary record. A singular cardboard portrait of a Crazy Man – a sight Burroughs caught it in a mirror? – holds the artist like a straightjacket.
Arnold’s landscapes want you to pay more attention to their interruptions than the subject itself. If you imagine the painter mounting a ladder in some field so he can reach the treetops on his large, thickly covered canvases, you would also need to notice the meteorite brutally cutting the sky in half. How the artist survived its impact, before witnessing it again the next day, is the very question of art and nature.
This trick is disarmingly simple, of course, as is the exhibition’s pairing of Arnold’s paintings with Baer’s off-hand architectural follies. One dare not ask for more.
What does an artist do when she has “nothing to say?” Admitting outright, as Southgate-Smith does in her exhibition text, that the intellectual ethos that drove her production (to say nothing of her gallery’s programme) is now sterile might have marked a turning point.
There is no trace of this in the work, alas. Austere abstractions like in the hotel lobby, found photographs pinned up with fridge magnets, an inconsequential, feint soundtrack, and an intriguing, but ultimately unyielding index-card sculpture all fall back on the very same verbiage that today unambiguously denounces them.
The old tricks don’t work, and it is stupefying to see this production and think that they ever did. Still, one might have expected the old regime to put up some fight. It is clearly too late to save it, yet too early to mourn.
Inspired in form and attitude by Manhattan Art Review.
