notes and notices are short and curt reviews of exhibitions at (mostly) London galleries.
Jenny SavilleThe Anatomy of Painting
★★★☆☆National Portrait Gallery, LondonOn until 7 September 2025The premise of this exhibition is that to paint is to dwell in a very foreign language. “Painting” has a semiotic system, a grammar, and those are as fixed as they are changing. Artists may try to express ideas – like “the human form”, for example – in that second idiom, sometimes conforming to its turn of phrase, sometimes giving rise to altogether new concepts.
Saville tries to do both. She shapes her figures – larger than life, often female, and adorned in blemishes, fractures, sex – as the grammatical subjects in a tongue of violent morphology. But she also suggests, unwittingly but in contradiction, that the ferocity of her paint is not a given but a dialect.
Catching her work in its various states of composition (rather than decomposition, as one may imagine of, say, Bacon’s) suggests that the sexy brutality which Saville applies to her subjects is one step away from an affectation. There is no trace of the visceral in her gentle pencil studies, for example. The recent glitch paintings, likewise, are developments of a method. A translator might wonder, therefore, about the veracity of Saville’s native-tongue source story.
Fake Barn Country
★☆☆☆☆Raven Row, LondonCurated by Ruth Angel Edwards, Lawrence Leaman, Oliver WilliamsOn until 6 July 2025At its best, Raven Row delves into ideas as obscure as “the art school in 1970” or “public access television as art” that few institutions could pull off without a current-thing mandate. At its worst, it coasts on the quality of its floor finishes, a reputation for a quirky, curatorless structure, and the founder’s eccentricity.
This group exhibition of nearly thirty artists makes a pitch at both extremes, failing to reach either. A formalist sensibility unconvincingly lines up works like Samuel Jeffrey’s plaster boxes, Stuart Middleton’s mass-market assemblies, and Andrea Büttner’s dull ceiling tile paintings. This method is familiar from German Kunsthalle shows of the mid-2000s, although the three-paragraph write-up vaguely suggests that the project reflects years of conversations between artist-run spaces “in London and elsewhere”.
What a 1990 Terry Atkinson does in this contemporary art history-in-the-making project next to a 1980 Gilbert & George is not explained. Solomon Garçon’s lazy sound piece and Yuki Kamura’s unnecessary steel and glass kitchen assemblies, similarly, come without excuses. Judith Goddard’s 1983s studio video with roses is the exhibition’s standout. It has, however, enjoyed better chatter elsewhere.
Pictures of other people’s children don’t sell. Ask me how I know. Yassin half-understood this, but only after he’d collected a cache of strangers’ family albums. His dealer is eager to tell me that they came from the artist’s native and oh-so-war-scarred Lebanon. In a gesture of pictorial grief, maybe, Yassin obscured the toddlers, young women, and the odd grandma by only lightly impressing their image on brightly coloured paper.
This appeal to human universals – that girl could have been my mother! – entirely misses the specificity of a family that’s not “chosen”. Photography’s about death, we get it. The exhibition essay, however, confusingly cites Sontag rather than Barthes and fails to recognise the woman. Yassin’s memory act is a category error when videos of dying children on social media feeds either solicit donations or carry “explicit content” labels.
What, in the age of autofocus, is the point of painterly representation? White’s mundane subjects – lamps, glasses, and ladders – would have been any amateur photographer’s favourites less than twenty years ago. Once the staples of life photography, glossy, black-and-white shots of mirrors, flowers, and junk miscellany today elicit a vague, objectless nostalgia.
But that White’s images are oil paintings – so photorealistic that the eye needs a second glance to recover from a deception that’s of its own making – throws the nature of that “life” into question. Paint that does this to a pile of plastic coat hangers contends with any reality.
Milly ThompsonMy Body Temperature is Feeling Good
★★☆☆☆Goldsmiths CCA, LondonOn until 24 August 2025There is a tendency in public cultural projects to parade their “relevance” overtly. This posthumous retrospective of irreverent caricaturist of seaside female sexuality and BANK member Thompson does little but, losing sight of the work itself. The gallery goes all-in on ephemera and paraphernalia from the artist’s archive, leaving Thompson’s paintings – her declared medium of choice “in the era of the powerful female artist and her texts [and] performances” – as an afterthought.
Even away from the catalogues and posters, Thompson’s disobedient flesh is less than a riot. Granted, the sea, sand, and sun do turn every body into quasi-sexual, quasi-revolutionary subjects. But they’re far from the radical “the moon, the sea, & the matriarch” triad Thompson promises her followers. Sagging buttocks and breasts dance with crab and ice sundaes on her canvases, giving together only a passing impression of some great taboo having been overcome.
The illusion fades with the sunset, having posed its question too lightly. Thompson’s paint is thin as a layer of sunscreen, her line awkward. The rebellion of sex – oh, what is it to be a woman in a world of nothing but! – gets only to slogans.
Hunt’s sculptures of bent steel tubing and welded sheet metal are magnets for association. The slightest change to the vantage point uproots them from car plant Detroit to the top floors of Chrysler Building Manhattan. The Minotaur who ran amok in an outsider artist’s rust studio turns into a hunting trophy in the white cube’s exaggerated pristine. Futurism’s sharpest forms soften at the forest’s edge, only to rise once more after an unstoppable fire.
The confidence with which Hunt moulded European Modernist neologisms into an American vernacular is remarkable. His language evolved by rejection at first. Hunt’s early sculptures comprised wood alongside the later metallic mainstays. By the 1960s, however, such soft matter gave way to an angular, inorganic austerity. In self-referential quotation, however, chromed steel, polished bronze, and the blackest of coppers are plenty expressive. Hunt’s legacy is a dictionary for self-determination written in phrases as they were being invented: lyrics, laudations, and litanies.
Byrne has a type. Or rather, he’ll paint you into one. Juno, Jorge, and Lucian dropped into the studio straight from a Just Stop Oil fundraiser. It’s now Jasper’s and Orlando’s turn to glue themselves to the gallery floor. Leave one hand free for the bubbly, though, Quentin. Move over, Naoise, you’re blocking the light.
One must first giggle that these throwaway acrylics have the power to inspire such frivolous contempt. Byrne’s square board portraits, uniform as though on a networking app’s grid, promote each sitter in their most studied spontaneity. The painter’s hand is the flattering filter called “Tuscan villa” or maybe “Granta”, so ubiquitous that calling it out is no use.
Yet that envy gives way to desire. Who wouldn’t fall for red bookish Joe, or MFA cheekbone Gary? Has art ever not been about class distinction and sex?
If, contra received wisdom, nostalgia is still what it once was, its aesthetics today is pure cliché. Glasgow lad Trackie mixes Trainspotting, raves, and Louis Vuitton knockoffs as though they were currency in 2025’s Britain. He turns personalised reg plates, lads’ mags headlines, and the Burberry check into icons of a culture he is too young to remember. A mass billboard “partnership” blew up these charity shop trinkets. It duped McLeod into believing that a return to DVDs was, for him, imaginable.
What excuse for this naivety? “Working-class” and “queer” appear in the collateral as obligatory for every insider. What doesn’t is “white”. Yet this alone is McLeod’s distinction in the Yookay Aesthetics index. His longing for ‘90s homophobia is pale fire next to the IrnBru output of fellow Pollokshields dweller and Turner Prize winner Jasleen Kaur. Look closely, however: her multipacks bear the mark “for export”.
Judith DeanNew Builds / Bilds 2: did you mean peace?
★★★★☆South Parade, LondonOn until 14 June 2025There is a form of aesthetic enjoyment described by Gombrich that arises when the mind solves a puzzle set by an artist for the eye. Dean’s geometric trompes skew parallaxes and perspectives, forcing the process of sensing into two. Rhomboid and polygonal canvases play host to projections and mappings, each with a Euclidian logic, in which further frames, figures, and faces compete for plane primacy.
This once baffling picture-in-picture vision of ‘90s TV sets is now second nature to the third eye which evolved at the end of the phone-clutching hand. Holbein’s skull impresses no one anymore. But Dean takes her spatial trickery seriously, loading it with temporal signatures that throw the installation to the corner of the arcade’s mirror room.
There is an unstated hierarchy of forms at work in this enigmatic not-quite-solo, not-quite-collective exhibition. “Hereafter” was conceived by Simon Moretti and features works by well over a dozen “guest” others. The artist’s wall-mounted neon, Double Vortex (after Emanuel Swedenborg), 2025, is the show’s cipher. This work’s very shape—like a ram’s horns atop an Ionic column—points to the heavens.
Inspired in form and attitude by Manhattan Art Review.
