notes and notices are short and curt reviews of exhibitions at (mostly) London galleries.
Houldsworth’s programme doesn’t get the recognition it may deserve, perhaps because so much of it looks ‘outsider’ as a matter of branding. Nakahara’s mix of studied naïveté and accidental surrealism is a case in point. Biblical floods, the comet’s fall, and the odd tsunami mercilessly toss his protagonists about before the painter makes for them a life raft of cherry blossom. The canvases, small enough to protest innocence, are disarming enough. Their sculptural companions, like the pair of child lovers in a birdcage, turn sickly ‘cute’ like a Labubu. They speak over the wind’s rush with childlike ennui of an artist making work solely for himself.
Cynthia HawkinsMaps Necessary for a Walk in 4D: Chapter 4
★★★☆☆Hollybush Gardens, LondonOn until 1 November 2025Context is everything, as a judge once proclaimed. That context might need contexts, too, and Hawkins says her canvases throw back to some others, which, in turn, root their ideas in an event now too distant to recall. The verdict? Nice story, but it’s nonsense. Hawkins’s wet paint abstractions – colour washes straight out of the tube, unmixed – transparently overplay reference and recall. Painter’s tape and oil bars – what is being tied to what here? – make for barely circumstantial evidence. Left to her own devices, Hawkins (whose work, in company, was a highlight in the Condo jumble programme) reveals that her studio was no crime scene.
Grant Falardeau, Rimantė Mikulovičiūtė, Benjamin Sasserson, Bu Shi, Dylan WilliamsA light here required a shadow
★★★☆☆Maximillian William, LondonOn until 2 October 2025If the conceit of this show is that darkness reveals, then its obscure palette is unevenly mixed. Mikulovičiūtė’s nostalgias, measured by pigments fading, are masterly: grandma’s linens, fruit from the orchard, and the Madonna construct an interiority hard to convey with light. Falardeau’s busts – a golden Alice and a clay Pan – turn highlights and shadows into erotic charge with a clumsy contrast of human glow and predatory grit.
But the gallery is overexposed; Sasseron’s and Williams’s oils – despite themselves – reveal too much, while Shi’s icon paintings – try as they might – find no still corner for meditation in this company. This is what it is to live a life of full transparency: catch the wrong end of the spectrum and forever remain in the dark.
Kate Burling, Anna Choutova, Douglas Cantor, Nettle Grellier, Gosia Kołdraszewska, Lydia Pettit, Olivia Sterling, Sophie Vallance CantorCherry Bomb!
★★☆☆☆Miłość, LondonOn until 4 October 2025To hang a group exhibition on the idea that “the cherry throughout the history of art and literature has symbolised dualities” is to risk confusing Chekhov with Nabokov. Cantor’s handsome canvases – white of hearts, red of fruit, black of horses, and so on – show up Pettit’s oily board roundel – red of lips, red of tongue, red of OnlyFans. It, in turn, embarrasses the former. Sterling’s red nipple as the icing-topper does the same to flesh. Grellier, whose simple, faded pencils articulate past summer’s longing as both innocence and the eros, are granted too little stage time to save the assembled company from surplus, such as Kołdraszewska’s graphite cherry-poppers.
Curating to a scheme (and a sales target) hinges on covert abstraction. This exhibition – not for the first time in the gallery’s short history – could have done better if the task were left to a single artist.
The problem for a culture built on iconoclasm is that eventually, it will need to create images of its own. Guthrie is yet to consider this because his image war is still virtual. The subject of his static video installation, as well as of the animated statue-scrapping sequence, is the infamous Blackboy Clock in Stroud. The artist fantasises that the offensive figure has vanished but that he alone might still control its afterlife.
But artists have not been the sole purveyors of aesthetic meaning since the Reformation. In Strud, the statue’s mooted removal has stalled in bureaucracy. Lacking the conviction to climb a ladder and destroy the object himself, Guthrie’s posturing smacks of desperation. The project’s subsidiary poems, press cuttings, and morality tales told as quasi-art history are barren adjuncts to the vilified “retain and explain” strategy. Next to the object itself, they give rise to nothing.
Kyle Mithell’s image archive would make Adam Curtis’ heart sing. Contextless, charged views of people and systems, toned with that pale hue of ‘archive’ give the impression that something profound is extracted from the reels, tapes, and screen-grabs the artists set to Luke Fowler’s ominous soundtrack.
But her hour-long meditation on health, care, and disability – wrapped in musings on the nature of film – feels more like a PhD-by-practice submission than BBC iPlayer fodder, let alone the contents of an art exhibition. The video’s plot is so dense that it takes six pages of writing to explain what connects Zoom movement workshops and the fact that urine, apparently, makes for a decent film developer solution.
There is some tenderness to the edit, but it hides under poorly articulated complaints and a cliché warning against eugenics. When even Curtis has stopped narrating his ‘documentaries’, some stories are wasted breath.
Everything turns to dust: there are many ways to misunderstand entropy. Drew piles up charred and stained wood boards as though to assemble a mountain. Then he does it some more, all the while claiming that this toil finds its own meaning.
That it would is a contradiction in terms. If it does, it’s not in the gallery and not for the viewer. The stack-it-high excess of Drew’s installation aims for spectacle, but its matter is too predetermined to spark revelation. Its smells and textures, likewise, are too obvious and too done already to deceive the senses into oblivion.
The whole get-up’s a ruse, anyhow: a parallel show in the artist’s commercial gallery revealed that the disorder of Drew’s installation work is a side-hustle to cutesy colour-coord grids. It’d take some grand physics to turn the two projects into a before-and-after cartoon strip.
“Sky”, “roof”, “31”, a mantra turns into paint. There is a poverty to the language confronting a practice like Bartlett’s – either methodical and repetitious, or verging on the clinically obsessive – that dwells in the personal. Bartlett spent decades assembling triangles and squares on the canvas, painting her childlike structures by numbers, before, in turn, arranging those in a sequence. The exaggerated relevance of “house” to someone who (aside from living in one, duh) was a painter becomes a method of madness, stripping the artist of calculation and sheer bloody-mindedness. Would another dictionary – think in Hanne Darboven’s Plattendeutsch, for example – have turned this house into Babel?
“Reskilling” has the same ring in art as “reindustrialisation” does in geopolitics. After decades of jettison and outsourcing of expertise and craft, a new fad for the ornate and “made in X” now drives the art market as well as industrial policy. The CNC machine replaced the lathe, the hand, if not the eye, in the artist’s studio, and in so doing laid ground for a performance of nostalgia.
What was Trump’s “clean coal”, then, and who’ll forge all this steel? Steven Claydon’s Decline and Fall, an aluminium and bronze eagle hanged off its own rope, is right on the nose. Apollinaria Broche’s ceramic flower and silver-plated cobwebs speak to a pastoral aesthetics now only available on Etsy. But a quaint wood, wax, and mirror room panel from Mathilde Albouy stakes a claim on a decorative tradition rejected long ago for more than a single reason. These “relics” must be as reactionary as they are futuristic.
Freudian TypoCondensed Word, Displaced Flesh
★★☆☆☆Delfina Foundation, LondonOn until 31 August 2025The problem of artists who confuse graphic design with art is that they also mistake sloganeering for critique. The Iran-born duo Freudian Typo do both as they mount an immersive yet dour infomercial on the history of credit.
They dub debt the key idea of Western Christendom: a 16th-century Hebrew manuscript is fodder for a goat trading video. “Render unto Revenue what is Revenue’s”, “Go in peace and keep your receipts”, preach posters set in UK PLC’s corporate typeface. Wordy charts dot the gallery that’s half vet’s surgery, half Stansted arrivals.
Discharge from this debt prison comes with a reading list. Yet it is hard to believe that the artists themselves read Graeber, Lacan, or Freud other than in search of a catchphrase. It takes them hundreds of words in the show’s pamphlet to name-check The Merchant of Venice, for example, only to fall into the sixth-grader’s trap.
Inspired in form and attitude by Manhattan Art Review.
