notes and notices are short and curt reviews of exhibitions at (mostly) London galleries.
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.
Christopher Aque, Alekos Fassianos, Luigi Ghirri, Jessie Stevenson, George TourkovasilisIthaca
★★★★☆Herald St, LondonOn until 17 February 2024Ithaca encapsulates the art world’s current seasonal nostalgia and ritual displays of homesickness. Fittingly, this project takes its name from 1911 verse by modern Greece’s national poet C. P. Cavafy and not Homer’s blueprint. George Tourkovasilis’ candid snapshots of Hellenic youths arrest the anxious onset of adulthood. Alekos Fassianos’ oil portraits show mythical man-gods locked in a battle with time as if this were their lot forever.
What’s new becomes old. Christopher Aque’s photographs bleached out by the scorching sun call for a bygone innocence even though their subject knows death. Luigi Ghirri’s postcard images mix signposts and signifiers and where is home next is yet to be found. Only Jessie Stevenson’s abstracted oil views of North Norfolk marshlands turn to the natural entirely and thus leave Odysseus with no landmark to set his sail by.
Such escapism, typical of Herald St’s programme, becomes increasingly difficult to pull off. This show drips with affectation that wouldn’t survive a minute tomorrow. But all is forgiven in this land of other people’s memories. Some artists, we fantasize, may yet reach their land.
In this season’s fad for staging mythical woodland scenes in the gallery, Olowska’s project stands out for using the human form unadulterated. In outsized oil paintings, paper collages, and even on mannequins, Olowska models the forest adventures of a cast of five stereotypically Slavic children. They climb trees, sail down the mountain river on log rafts, and forage about in late winter landscapes. A series of quirky video objects set in hand-carved frames typical of Tatra mountain handicraft has them prostrated for the camera and provides a wild soundtrack to the exhibition.
Olowska is known for her investment in the mountain mythos and the 1930s artist villa in Poland which she renovated has inspired such interest in numerous others, including some of Europe’s best-known art collectors. But that the folk rituals – the springtime drowning of Marzanna, the straw effigy of winter and death, for example – flagged up by the gallery text check out does not compensate for the exhibition’s lacklustre curation. It should be within the resources of Pace and Olowska’s experience to advance her legend beyond the discretely marketable. Presented without context, the work enchants little.
Nicola Turner, Edward BekkermanThe Song of Psyche: Corners of a Soul's Otherworlds
★★☆☆☆Shtager&Shch, LondonCurated by Marina ShtagerOn until 12 January 2024Turner’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.
Bermúdez-Silverman’s tabletop sculptures cast in Uranium glass glow under UV light. Their forms resemble items from an architectural salvage catalogue. Stucco flourishes fallen from a Neoclassical cathedral spire are conjoined with a lion’s claw feet broken off a Queen Anne wardrobe. A Rococo window becomes the picture plane. These assemblies repeat in the exhibition with only minor variations in order and colour, as though they were customised for a mass consumer market. Each would be at home in the museum gift shop.
Even without the artist’s explanation, this work is both blunt and lazy. Its references are too vague to place in the history of Western design and their contrasts are unchallenging. But the gallery text – itself a prime artefact of Art-Ideolo-GPT – suggests that Bermúdez-Silverman’s is a decolonial project intended to catch out the “pathological systems of power” hard-wired into her design trinkets. The European forms for her become weapons to bludgeon the conquistadors and to uncover the abusive history of extraction of Uranium glass’ raw materials. This is all talk, however, and brings nothing to the work which remains a poor man’s version of history or, more appropriately, a philistine collector’s absolution.
Maiuri’s oil copies of found film stills and promotional photographs from Hollywood’s golden age make a perfect show for the postage stamp collector. Not only will her bijou paintings fit through the letterbox, they also come in a choice of bright colours that would readily set the first class stamp apart even in a busy collection. Women’s faces and objects lifted from black and white thrillers fill the frames to bursting. Stylised retro typography signals timeless nostalgia. These scenes are at once familiar and unplaceable, as though designed to appeal to all, yet grant the illusion of depth to the would-be connoisseur. For the philatelist on a budget, Maiuri even reprised her first day covers in miniature on unprimed and presumably cheaper canvas, effectively painting each image twice.
But seeing them once would be plenty. One can only imagine that some unconscious loathing of postmen or Hollywood motivated this project. Maiuri’s hatred of paint, on the other hand, is evident.
Conanico’s assemblages of shapes cut out of card and MDF board are so simple and playful that it would be easy to overlook them. Spray-painted rectangles connect to other rectangles like in a Blue Peter project. Curved shapes bear loads of miniature skyscrapers. Screws and washers hold a school science project together. These illustrations are each diagrams for something but to ask what is to miss the joke.
Such work could claim a place in the tradition of geometric abstraction but because Conanico doesn’t confine his paper cuttings to a canvas, or any plain for that matter, he overcomes it. His slight structures look like they could take flight at any moment and, in so doing, alter the fundamental laws of the universe. The sinister afterimage of such action, only barely implied by the work, would complete the show.
Anastasia PavlouReader, Part 2; The Reader Reads Words in Sentences
★★☆☆☆Hot Wheels, LondonOn until 16 December 2023A reading list accompanies this exhibition, and it includes names like Merleau-Ponty, Woolf, Hawking, and Berger. Pavlou explains in the handout that these are important to her thinking about painting, as are her own essays (not provided) and bullet point “Notes and Thoughts Around Things” on “the morphology of peripheral vision” and the meaning manifest outside of things.
This sounds silly but such a project is core to all art and Pavlou’s inquiry has a consistent internal logic. But what it has to do with the paintings – abstractions whose palettes and brushstrokes are so out of scale that they may as well be military camouflage – is left unexplained. Some clues come from the show’s odd elements: a shaky pencil drawing of a spider, black-and-white photographs of people in a museum, and one canvas that in contrast with the others is nearly monochrome.
But this is at once not enough and far too much. In this game of aesthetic cognition, the idea which survives is of the artist thinking. That’s no bad thing but it’s a pity that Pavlou’s viewers are not afforded the same pleasure.
In Wall’s femcel portraits, despair is sexy. Larger than life and rendered in Insta colours that could have been the choice of an image AI, her women perch at the bed’s end, squat by the wardrobe, and rest at the kitchen table. They’re bent out of proportion, showing off their skinny asses to the collector’s delight. Their boob tubes are tight, their shorts short. They play tired, scared, and helpless, just like you like them. They pulled these faces for you before. You will come back for more again.
The self-taught and presumably terminally online Wall may have experienced the faux emancipation of an e-girl first-hand. But her paintings are too brash and denatured to win in the battle over the 21st-century female body. Maybe sex work is the only work left in a world with no sex and universal online income. But there’s no dignity in paint when the arc of art history tends to “show hole”.
In The Rules of Art, Pierre Bourdieu scathingly described artists as sign-writers for hire willing to tailor their messages and beliefs to the highest bidder’s wishes. Thirty years on, this critique is outmoded because all art sloganeers the same thing and nobody pays artists anyhow.
Amer’s textile works weave and print a litany of clichés (“one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”, for example) in unreadable cursive thread trace and overconfidently bold appliqué type. These snippets are so dull to the eye that the gallery reproduced the captions (“my body belongs to me and it does not represent the honour of anyone”) on the wall next to them. This invites a game of proofreading, in hope that Amer maliciously inserted a greengrocer’s apostrophe into de Beauvoir’s mind. But Bourdieu was right, after all: the signs stick to platitudes.
Inspired in form and attitude by Manhattan Art Review.
