notes and notices are short and curt reviews of exhibitions at (mostly) London galleries.
Manfred Pernice, Megan Plunknett>anticorpo<
★★★★☆Galerie Neu and Emalin, Condo LondonOn until 17 February 2024The brand of formal inquiry exercised by Pernice and Plunkett rarely makes the news today. In the age of the skeuomorph, the lost meaning of signs and the human detachment from them should alarm philosophers. For artists, it is a rare opportunity.
Pernice’s accidental sculptures, assembled from plinths, crates, and podiums, forego any trace of joy or celebration. The flag poles, once bearers of pride and excess, stand naked as if to mark a period of mourning. Their Eastern European colours and forms, like the detritus on an abandoned building site, speak of an opportunity missed and self-induced amnesia.
Plunkett’s semiotic photographs continue along time’s arrow. The image archaeologist’s wheel stopped on Coke cans and sun gods just now, but many more objects deserve a place on Wikipedia’s ‘top things’ list. They’ll miss out on the click-through traffic, however, because Plunkett’s signs, like Pernice’s, revel in detachment.
There’s nothing new under the sun here, quite literally. Such ‘80s nostalgia for meaning before history’s end is a comfort blanket. It would take a demagogue to remember that even the Bechers’ water tower pictures were a call to action.
Teewon Ahn and Ibrahim Meïté Sikely★★★☆☆Gianni Manhattan and P21 at Project Native Informant, Condo LondonOn until 17 February 2024Forcing a Seoul gallery to share space with a Viennese one seems a little ungenerous of this London venue when the two artists’ projects are so idiosyncratic. Meïté Sikely’s acrylic canvases mix fantasy daemons with everyday slogans in the manner of DC Comics and sub-Saharan advertising murals. It’s half William Blake, bit strip-mall, part superhero film set. Ahn’s menacing cat pictures in which the artist’s pet plots his revenge against the human race are peak YouTube cuteness restaged for the CSI morgue. But when the same mutt jumps from the canvas and assumes distorted sculptural forms, the threat of his claw is but a lame joke.
These works are as garish as they are fun to look at. But experienced without the mediation of a phone screen, their exuberance is jarring. Such overstimulation is the host gallery’s brand as post-internet art’s dealer of choice. It would have been more rewarding to pursue only one of these plots.
Talar AghbashianSolace of the Afterimage
★★☆☆☆Marfa' at The Approach, Condo LondonOn until 17 February 2024There was a time, that of Greenberg or Berger, when art would transport a viewer to a land far away. In front of a picture, a mind could shed its mundane concerns and experience realities alien to the gallery. Post the art world’s political turn, however, such thoughts are pure nostalgia.
Aghbashian’s project, crowding four canvases into a room the size of an art fair booth, may have been an attempt to return to this space of pure imagination. Indeed, her allegorical abstractions contrasting horizons and figures hark to a glorious tradition.
They stand no chance, however. Aghbashian’s gallerist, claiming the exhibition space entirely for herself, directs all minds straight to a market stall with her uninterruptable recitation of the artist’s life story and the work’s pedigree. These tedious details lock the wandering mind on the hollow nodes of identity production and market value.
The carpet dealer’s zeal overpowers all paint. In so doing, however, it does the viewer the ultimate favour of highlighting the artist’s full complicity with the sales patter and thus the work’s lamentable inadequacy.
Christopher Aque, Alexandre Khondji★★★★★Sweetwater at Studio M, Condo LondonOn until 18 February 2024Despite consisting of only three works, this exhibition is the gallery equivalent of a cryptic crossword. Aque’s photographic diptychs marry views of sea waves at the shore with candid street photographs of men. The colours have faded, as though in cheap holiday snapshots from the 1970s. But that clue is a decoy: the men wear this decade’s casual summer attire. The knee-to-breast close-ups which centre on the men’s groins invite closer inspection and thus lay a false trail of desire in the puzzler’s mind. More hints appear in a sideways glance because while one of the men comfortably sports a wedding ring, the other precariously fidgets with his.
Khondji’s flood barrier installation, the type of steel and rubber construction familiar from Venice, cuts the room in half. The scale and material of this object contrast so starkly with the street scenes and scents of Aque’s portraits that it cues an escape to the beach, paradoxically the origin of the peril, earlier overlooked by the clue-hunter. Finally, the eye finds the solution in the weight of the water and the destructive forces of sex. Aesthetic cognition or crossword puzzles only rarely bring such perverse pleasure.
By pursuing ideologically unassuming programming, Modern Art has had quite a run of excellent shows this past year. It would be unfair, however, to question the method on Simpson’s canvasses because his habit of rendering life’s dimensional interstices – doors, ladders, and chimneys – as perspectival projections developed decades before he joined Stuart Shave’s stable.
The images, some nearly as expansive as the gallery’s walls, set out simple scenes. Fragments of architecture – like a quaint library console that could have come from Arne Jacobsen’s Brutalist design for Oxford’s St Catherine’s College – appear in technical detail in some. In others, they resonate with the graphic character of advertising or agit-prop and become scenes of sin, confession, and reparation. In this meditation of surface disguised as a study of objects, however, neither is a truer likeness of the events which Simpson deftly omits from his canvases.
Since the 2020 US racial reckoning, curators and critics in the UK have unthinkingly imported American tensions only to confound England’s already fragile interplay of class and ethnicity. The political value of such activism is still to be seen. Its aesthetic effects, however, have been devastating on both sides of the Atlantic.
The London exhibition of the New Orleans painter Auudi Dorsey’s portraits of his black, working-class neighbours could signal the turning in this morose trend. His works show a female parking attendant who chews gum as she writes a ticket, two restaurant chefs on break from the kitchen, an off-duty construction worker, and a middle-aged angler with his implausibly large catch.
Dorsey’s acrylics brim with dignity. The subjects’ faces betray signs of daily fatigue, but their stance is secure. That the canvases are rendered in sombre blue and green hues, as in a dark cop drama, is the one clue that other narratives could fit in these lives. Even the curator’s essay barely points to the reductive race-first reading of what is already evident by the artist’s hand. This leaves Dorsey to record the human experience with the true universalism of paint.
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.
Inspired in form and attitude by Manhattan Art Review.
