notes and notices are short and curt reviews of exhibitions at (mostly) London galleries.
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.
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.
Inspired in form and attitude by Manhattan Art Review.
