notes and notices are short and curt reviews of exhibitions at (mostly) London galleries.
Anyone intrigued by Philip Guston’s oeuvre but deterred by Tate’s £20 tickets could do worse than Co Westerik as a consolation prize. Many of this Dutch Realist painter’s canvases made between the 1970s and his death in 2018 share the American’s fondness for wrinkled lines, heavenly interventions, and a pallet of social unease.
Westerik catches his figures in deep contemplation in front of the mirror, in the gynaecologist’s chair, or even mid-orgy. They look innocent but each has much to answer for. The show thus builds an industry of judgment and guilt and, unlike Guston’s whose redemption narrative was crowbarred in by circumstance, damns the viewer along with the painter.
If the hospital played host to an artist-in-residence programme, Pae’s paintings would be of great use in the staff training room and the consultant’s office. But her arrangements of arteries, glands, and other bodily organs that fill half a dozen intensely crimson canvases have no respect for anatomy. Bloodstreams become spaceports, the large intestine the site of a battle.
Oil paint can cause cancer. A surgery of galactic scale sliced through these forms, leaving their tendrils hanging in mucous-filled cavities. Despite this, a boundless life force orients these pictures. What they suffer in eek-factor, they overcome with sheer metabolic desire.
Ryman’s delicate drawings are tentative attempts to settle in a lasting frame of reference. With the methodical zeal of a search and rescue pilot, the artist scored sheets of paper, coffee filters, and aluminium panels with girds and orientation marks in the hope that he may eventually understand the territory. Some of these nearly monochromatic frames, each barely a square foot, are maps of the forest, others of fog, others still of time past.
But when Ryman’s gestures grow in confidence, switching from pencil to black marker ink, for example, they inadvertently reveal their mounting desperation. The artist’s signature becomes a distress call and not even the horizon line helps the escape.
Pauline Boty was half pop artist, half actress, and in her mythology half pin-up it girl. The swinging ’60s would have been the perfect time for someone of Boty’s charisma to make a career of three halves. But she died young barely a decade into her practice, leaving a legacy of painting, collage, stained glass, and TV drama for speculation.
Although Boty was posthumously quite the rage in Poland’s soc-realist ’80s, it wasn’t until the again roaring ’90s that interest in her surviving oeuvre hit the UK art scene. Gazeli’s modest exhibition now brings a handful of Boty’s works – somewhat chaotic paper and gouache collages and oil paintings that could have been collages too – together with archives and tributes.
This mixes the woman and her legend, but without the air of mystery the artist enjoyed during her lifetime. Today, when a creator’s presence in their work is subject to TikTok’s terms of service, Boty’s multiple faces are challenging. She poses seductively on the cover of Men Only and in Michael Ward’s photographs, she lifts her dress for the camera. Such emancipation may have been a strategy for Pop art’s leading female founder. Today, its prompts aesthetic suspicion.
Elli Antoniou, Ali Glover, Richard Dean Hughesthings fall apart; the centre cannot hold
★★★★☆Tabula Rasa, LondonCurated by Kollektiv CollectiveOn until 26 January 2024Despite this gallery’s modest size, it takes more than a moment to note that one is in an exhibition. This is only partly because the space is also a bookshop: Ali Glover turned the showroom interior walls inside out. This gesture makes for a peculiarly sterile building site and an adventure playground for two others.
Elli Antoniou’s drawings in metal rendered on steel panels with the aid of an angle grinder are thrillingly disorientating. The internal reflections of these slivery surfaces defy the picture plane. One blink of the eye reveals barbed wire and a planetary system. A second gives way to a whole new cosmos.
Echoing this doubt, Richard Dean Hughes’ resin cast bedding is half NHS waiting room, half luxury Egyptian cotton. Beads of glass strewn across these forms point to some dramatic fracture while sheets of newspaper suggest that it is long in the past.
These works could bear witness to the birth of a star or the heat death of the universe. The curators, sadly, don’t want to know which. This sends Glover to Sisyphean toil while letting Antoniou and Hughes chase myths of their own making.
Aj Tjoe’s paintings could make great scenic backdrops to a David Attenborough documentary on the life of wild rodents or an episode of The Human Body. Each of the canvases, only lightly primed and rendered in a restricted palette, looks inside what could be a rat’s warren in winter or the cavity between the human heart and the lungs.
The show hopes to run multiple seasons and the painter made nearly a dozen of these images, one only slightly different from the last. But these paintings show no story and no evolution. Such pseudo-anatomical sketches can only hope to make set dressing for the tense psychological drama that Aj Tjoe would rather have us watch.
Pope.L’s fanciful etymology of ‘hospital’ as ‘stranger’ is only one of this show’s missed metaphors. The centrepiece is a crumbling scaffold on which the nearly naked artist ate the Wall Street Journal in 2000. Reading the Journal is said to increase a person’s wealth. It didn’t for Pope.L and there was no budget to test this thesis again today.
This monumental detritus confuses correlation with causation and forces accord with the now naïve staging of Wall Street as the main enemy. To make matters plainer still, the artist invites visitors to sprinkle “white stuff” onto his crumbling edifice, only to laugh behind their backs later.
The replication crisis continues in a 2008 video performance in which chickens and goats graze on and then topple the US Capitol building. This confounds the sources and forms of power and lands in the joke section of Animal Farm and not as a prophecy of the Jan 6th insurrection as the show guide would have it.
All this is as though the artist didn’t trust the audience to make meaning in his absence. The less performative parts of the exhibition – installations of wine bottles and hospital paraphernalia stained by decay – are free from this anxiety.
If more were more, DiMattio gets close to the limit. In her giant ceramics kiln, everyday motifs like sneakers and knickers clash into the ornate Rococo stove and the Victorian China snuff box. Bucolic scenes adorn wedding cakes, teapots and cake tins turn into totems. Cutesy flowers and seashells spread over floors, walls, and ceilings to near asphyxiation.
No wonder that each item leaves the oven crooked, as though assembled in a distorting brass mirror. This is the artist’s joke which she applies indiscriminately to the Greek orgy (literally) in one corner of the gallery and to the Amazon warehouse (yes) in the next. When she runs out of life’s surfaces to glaze, she lands safely in the one-liner of the Wedgwood mail-order collection.
This opulence has no reason other than DiMattio’s craft which, granted, isn’t nothing. But the elaborately decorative environment of wallpapers and floor mosaics into which the sculptures disappear is a gallery’s reminder that DiMattio’s commodity is available to order in any shape, colour, or size. Add mistletoe and tinsel and the lot would be at home in a department store’s Christmas display.
Shortly after they met, Fischli and Weiss adopted a Bear and a Rat as their alter egos. Suspended from the ceiling on a giant mobile cradle, these figures greet visitors even outside the gallery. Indoors, a satirical film reminiscent of a Fassbinder working-class drama follows the animals slacking about in a collector’s villa and in the gallery where they discover the dealer’s dead body. In Fischli and Weiss’ trademark slapstick humour, this nearly turns the show into an art world whodunit.
Nearly, because bears and rats are always sock puppets. A wall’s worth of diagrams in which they half-seriously attempt to solve this murder mystery and overcome once and for all the art world’s internal contradictions do nothing of the sort because the artists are themselves the perps. What could be a police procedural turns into a drinking game of mock-Foucauldian, mock-Marxist power analysis. Questions become slogans, evidence commodity.
Forty years have passed since these events and it is easy to forget that artists, quite literally, already know where the bodies are buried. Fischli and Weiss’ animal intrigue, like all art, lets them admit this and still walk off into the sunset without facing the consequences.
The arrival in Forrester’s title is a child’s and the artist the mother. Sparingly applied oils record her caring for the newborn. On the hospital ward, the sofa, and out in the garden, she cradles the child close to her naked skin. The figures appear only in outline, as though yet uncommitted to this project. The portraits of other, established families that hang in Forrester’s interiors, in contrast, are fully rendered.
What these paintings lack in development, they compensate with universal ideas. But the scene changes when another woman emerges in gloss paint on Forrester’s transparent polycarbonate panels. Separating the picture planes from their shadows in these works is taxing. The women’s relationship must be intimate but the other nude gazes on indifferently. The gallery text finally reveals that she is, in fact, the infant’s birth mother. Forrester’s postnatal anxiety, therefore, is that of being the child’s second, non-gestational parent.
This project is timely when foundational concepts like ‘mother’ and their ‘as-though’ counterparts are readily confused. But these paintings are too tentative to add to the already overheated debate. This may be their strength but one is left hoping that Forrester’s poise as a parent grows along with her confidence with paint.
Inspired in form and attitude by Manhattan Art Review.
