notes and notices are short and curt reviews of exhibitions at (mostly) London galleries.
The nonagenarian Katz is an acquired taste. His bold colouring and reduced forms are perfect for sore American eyes trained on advertising and pop art. To them, such habitual simplicity might look like an unpretentious virtue.
Should flower arrangements need such an initiation? Katz’s pictures of willow and daffodils are pleasant but trivial. The man’s a legend, granted – think Hockney and his later landscapes – but this emperor’s clothes have moth holes.
If a painting could scream “excess”, Fischer would turn it into a series. A dozen large mixed-media panels collect the detritus of a post-Baudrillardian age: supermarket wares, car adverts, Amazon book listings, and newspaper headlines. These objects obscure pastures of abstract pastels laid in well-defined colours.
A vinyl photo print which covers the gallery’s not-inconsiderable footprint reproduces the painter’s Californian studio. He has an atelier on each coast, and this isn’t even his first show this year with his London gallery. There’s market demand, but this barrage of signs is of the artist’s own making.
Fischer does not admit responsibility. In the pictures, however, a lone male figure drowns in all this clutter. His body lies in absurd submission to the surplus that suffocates him. It’s too early for a funeral, yet there’s no other reprieve in this commodity cult.
- Geumhyung Jeong
Under Construction
★☆☆☆☆ICA, LondonCurated by Andrea Nitsche-KruppOn until 15 December 2024A senseless transhumanism has become so ingrained in contemporary art that it no longer bothers to articulate it. At the centre of Jeong’s installation is an exploded human-and-machine skeleton. Were this assembly less pristine, one could have looked for traces of a pager that led to this apparent disaster. Nearby, neatly arranged tools point to some geeky joy in DIY body modification. Rows of widgets share table space with 3D-printed vertebrae. A CCTV room next door beams in images from the artist’s studio, where these skeletons are said to have found “life” in their exo-existence.
This tech-optimism might have entertained gallery-goers twenty years ago when technologists didn’t dare call themselves artists. After Björk’s robot love and Boston Dynamics, however, there is nothing novel, graceful, or left to discover in Jeong’s unstated proposal. To wonder if we are machines, or if machines could be human is as fruitless as considering this work as accomplished sculpture.
It takes some courage to name things. Turning “retrospective” into a proper noun, Cullinan and Richards open this fragmentary account to a third-party translator. A singular narrative doesn’t emerge lightly, however. Lights, mirrors, and cryptic geometries are part of the vocabulary. The works’ elaborate titles imply that they once made up a complex grammar. Sixteen-year-old text paintings hang close to current witchy triangular abstractions. Traces of the artists’ day jobs prop up archival productions. Material arrangements break formal conventions, then break other artists’ even earlier breaches.
Read in one way, this show is the kompromat in an art generation’s archive. With less context, it takes an irreverent gallop through the establishment’s self-regarding fringes. For that reason, this review is partial. The oeuvre’s charming humour, however, is incontestable.
Vanity proceeds in circles. In the 1920s, the Irish designer Gray built herself a villa on the French Riviera. She and the structure would have become icons, but a more famous architect initially took the spotlight. It thus took a hundred years for a trust to turn the building into a tourist attraction.
Why we might care is not obvious. Heritage projects often commission artists to “research” and twist complex narratives into marketing collateral. The history revisionist Wilcox made a two-projector film for Gray’s tiny home cinema. A docu-fiction track meets Baudelaire in his frame, laying the ground for some greater legend.
This trivia is too tiresome to fact-check and should have stayed on the French coast. Only vanity can explain the film’s London outing. The garishly blue, metallic still prints don’t even make for good postcards.
- Mary L. Bennett, Richard Dial, Thornton Dial, Lonnie Holley, Ronald Lockett, Joe Minter, Mose Tolliver
The Stars Fell on Alabama: Southern Black Renaissance
★★★☆☆Edel Assanti, LondonOn until 26 October 2024Commercial galleries rarely lean this deeply into art history for validation. This fast stroll through the Southern Renaissance scene of Alabama of the 1980s follows the gallery artist Holley’s Camden Art Centre show and takes part of its outlook from the Royal Academy’s suitably fuller exhibition of 2023.
Unlike the other propositions, this one is not forthcoming with context. The handout waxes about the titular 1833 meteor shower and MLK’s 1986 assassination. How these events gave rise to the unlabelled works is unclear, and one is left looking for traces of Jim Crow on Thornton Dial’s canvases and in the rust of Minter’s yard sculptures alone.
Some patterns emerge, but they are not as advertised. Bizarrely, Bennet’s duotone quilt and Tolliver’s childlike diagrams of vehicles are easier to parse than Lockett’s more emotive paintings of hurt forest animals. The commercial imperative is understandable. The art historical intent, less clear.
For nearly thirty years, Etheridge has shot fashion, editorial, and what Gagosian calls “studio” photography, as though to avoid the association with “art”. Etheridge was a latecomer to the game of image semiotics. He nonetheless carved out a practice by mashing up symbols and registers. Meticulously styled product shots appear in his viewfinder as readily as candid pin-up girls. Coke bottles share colour spaces with touching family portraits. His folio is so eclectic that when a duck finds its way onto the studio’s infinity curve, nobody flaps a feather.
The success of these images relies on the active disavowal of context beyond their frames. But in this tiny pass-by display, Etheridge’s method finds an extreme. There isn’t enough information in the assembly for the mind to notice what it is not being given. The prints’ glossy richness reigns.
If only they were smaller, Piñera Ballo’s paintings would be a great hit in the shopping centre gallery your ex-army uncle just opened in Surrey. He’s gambling with the family’s savings, you condescend, but so is Pace with their show. The market for “young” artists is crashing. Who in London, precisely, would buy 6-meter-wide Cuban beach souvenirs? Surrey, at least, knows its own taste.
A palpably stubborn nature unites Huddleston’s women. Looking at one of her subjects’ stern faces, one might believe that she is possessed of an “attitude” associated with ill manners in one of lesser breeding. The paintings’ formal framing doesn’t lift the mood. Under Huddleston’s brush, a monochrome background of one canvas has as much nerve as the marble and French topiary in another.
These women come from disparate stories. One is an aristo housewife, another a mountain explorer, while one strayed into the 21st century from a troupe of Tudor lute players. Their copycat features, however, suggest that they are each the painter’s alter ego. It is, therefore, poignant that as one loses her focus in laughter, an image of stern determination shows up in the frame nearby.
“Preferring to work quickly and intuitively”, as the gallery handout informs us, McGurn has created the visual equivalent of elevator music. Indeed, to paint these figures of young, often naked women cannot have demanded more than a weekend. The formula which McGurn follows, however, is exacting. Her template was perfected by scores of commercial illustrators and street caricaturists through years of market research.
The pastels are twee. The baby deer outline which shows up on two canvases isn’t bizarre enough to put the rest in some contrast. Against this gallery interior’s opulence, these paintings aren’t even a plausible study of kitsch.
Inspired in form and attitude by Manhattan Art Review.