notes and notices are short and curt reviews of exhibitions at (mostly) London galleries.
Ryan’s bibelot installations do have a charm to them. Through the ground floor gallery’s window, the retrospective looks like a playground. Assemblages of match boxes, carpets topped with indiscernible colourful entitles, and crochet yarn nets filled with conkers are cute enough. But here the fun ends, sadly, and one gains little from entering to eye up these objects closely. Ryan, more sadly still, has gained even less by ordering them in her entirely imitable manner for over four decades.
The impulse at play — and one sees this from any one of the hundred works here — is that repetition makes up for an idea by sheer volume. It doesn’t. Ryan sews together pin cushions until they become duvets, for example, or stacks cardboard trays until they turn into totems. This strategy fails precisely in its repetition. Ryan expects that each of her collections carries a different thought. How no one spotted this juvenile error is bewildering.
Ryan’s giant bronze fruit, lesser represented in the show, are the one exception in her oeuvre, and it’d have been good to see more of them. How far they travel beyond merely “exotic” is hard to chart in this context. Ryan, it seems, prefers to hang kitchen gadgets on the walls of her studio as she did in the ’80s, having barely developed an engaging idiom. The gallery knows this and launches each little trinket with not only curatorial verbiage but also the artist’s autobiographical note. If these texts are more interesting than the works, they only indict the enterprise further.
No object exists without its double, no form without an opposite. Phillips’s dainty assemblies of ceramic, steel, and PVC tube exist only as much as something else—the artist’s body and mind, for example—took a lead in shaping them.
The resulting inanimate masks, saddles, and tongues brim with desire. Phillips carefully suspends them in balance, which negates any idle negation. Instead, the sculptures attest that their original lacked something too, itself borne from a chain of such very lack.
Philips dwells on this line’s undeniability, bringing, for example, male and female forms too close for their own comfort. Their quasi-sexual, quasi-medical shapes are hard to own up to. To deny where they came from, however, is impossible.
The Colombian González spent the 1960s studiously rephrasing European old masters into South America’s collage and print culture. She then applied the same exercise to the early Modernists and Western magazine imagery.
The results of this practice are iconic—what’s more 1970 than a Pop art Last Supper on the top of a dining table?—but they are also unremarkable as third-worldly knock-offs. Even the exhibition’s clumsy narration of González’s practice as feminist and decolonial resistance doesn’t excuse the volume of her copy-and-distort production. The Barbican’s cavernous galleries encourage such curatorial indulgence. This does González a disservice. When her work turned to closer matters in the 1990s, this retrospective has run out of steam.
Yet it is the collaged images in which Gonzáles captured Colombia’s unending guerrilla warfare, corruption, and ever-present death that are extraordinary in her oeuvre. They combine grief with eerie ideas of leisure. She stacks caskets next to monoblock chairs; the poolside is for sun-seeking and for revenge by drowning. The show’s arc misses these works’ true contradictions: cartoonishly remaking Guernica saved no one, and the Colombian state bought some of the painter’s most politically damning works.
There comes a point in a successful artist’s career when questions of legacy overshadow the past. Julien’s indulgent prose poem looks to a future so far ahead that it naively misses the filmmaker’s present.
This opulent five-screen installation bemoans our civilisation’s mistakes—unspecified climate disasters, for example—but rests easy in nature’s healing powers. It dwells in the transience of civilisations—posing two sci-fi priestesses in the West’s future ruins—yet still takes the credit for all their achievements.
Julien once seduced his viewers with stories. Here, only the images dazzle. Next to the green forests, airy Modernist pavilions, Renaissance interiors, and mirror surfaces, the film’s narration—a tiresome, not quite post-history, not quite post-species medley of twentieth-century feminists—is facile and incoherent. In the cut, this idle fancy is detached from here and now, and already shows signs of ageing.
Can a contemporary art institution dedicated to showcasing the work of ‘international’ artists credibly critique globalisation? Xiuzhen remediates commodities, turning second-hand fabrics into ‘immersive’ experiences, concrete building blocks into objects of speculation, and, as a side-effect, all mass-market goods into high-status ideas. She is, in other words, the gallery’s quintessential supply chain contractor.
Xiuzhen’s fabric installations show up the seamlessness of air travel and sameness of ‘global cities’ which render moving between them as futile as driving to the shopping mall in the next town in search of inspiration. This revelation was, sadly, lost on the artists and failed to stop the art shippers in their tracks. Xiuzhen’s chagrin is only for Beijing; London’s lot remains made in China.
The tautological title of this exhibition, paired with the gallery extolling Lima’s practice as “category-defying”, cautions the visitor of some heavy abstraction ahead. Not without reason.
The artist turned the ground floor into a life-drawing studio. How radical, truly! The twist, as if another were needed, is that both the model and punters pose on mechanised platforms. They float akin to robot vacuum cleaners. Is this perspective-taking? If so, the whining, high-pitched noise of the floats’ brushless motors does all the work.
Upstairs, a beach umbrella dances to Brazilian beats. Looks fun, but it’s inconsequential. Next door, a commercial freezer keeps liquid tray sculptures solid; a pair of gloves invites limited, soft-play interaction.
Not much of anything in particular, then. Are these sampler vignettes of some larger, untold story? Fragments that may, when augmented, form a discernible thesis? Lima’s desire to phrase questions in philosophical jargon is obvious. It’s not even stupid. Yet it is less clear that she knows how her objects answer. Consequently, she leaves far too much for the viewer.
“Not everybody can be admitted to the temple”, begins Clements’s video essay. Her heroine, clad in a robe fashioned on a hospital gown, struts around a sixteenth-century Catholic shrine. The sight of her peering into the healing waters of a holy well, as she complains of infirmity and delusion, sets up a poignant contradiction. In it, faith and health might meet. Yet the words that follow do little to resolve it, turning the piece into a shallow tirade against human irrationality.
It takes a lot to pull off an essay film, granted, and Clements is no essayist. Her self-referential audio descriptions and access bumph in place of content point only to instrumental introversion. Yet the project is dully predicable in PEER’s programme under Ellen Grieg. Her exhibitions dwell in the banal purgatory of the old hat ‘systemic disadvantage’ grift. With Clements, that system could have been otherworldly, but the critique is merely opaque.
Paper Tiger TelevisionIt’s 8:30. Do you know where your brains are?
★★☆☆☆Goldsmiths CCA, LondonOn until 19 April 2026The taboo of assessing the historical worth of political art is that we must not only question what the thing looks like but also whether the artefact did much to further its political goals. Most curating gullibly fetishises the latter, yet the domains are easily confused.
Paper Tiger Television, a four-decade collective effort in public access programming, looks retro-cute. Its hand-painted backdrops, NTSC scanlines, and cardboard prop aesthetics appeal to today’s institutional leaders who are forever stuck between tech hopes and Blue Peter nostalgia. A bunch of high-minded references (Martha Rosler, for example) invest the display with a “residual political optimism” of the 1960s, on which the original crew was also hooked.
That naïve optimism turned into stifling nostalgia. Not only did media hacking get nowhere, but its self-satisfied DIY methods also foreclosed new critical avenues. Hooked on the hack, Paper Tiger’s heirs were ill-equipped to take on successor media. Their descendants today, in turn, embarrass themselves by pasting dull politics (slogans like “Fuck ICE”, for example) over the archive.
The conceit of New Contemporaries is that each year, a fresh generation of artists ascends into the established art order. This idea is fanciful enough—not many from previous cohorts have left much behind—until one considers that this rite of passage affirms the established edifice far more than it promotes new entrants.
This year’s edition spells stasis more than most, and the selectors are to blame. Pio Abad, Louise Giovanelli, and Grace Ndiritu picked painters who hate painting, sculptors too lazy to sculpt, and video artists with subjects that say nothing. This strategy extends the old guard’s reign of mediocrity for one extra cycle.
It is one thing, however, that the institutions have run out of ideas; is a younger generation of post-Covid artists so disaffected that they refuse to engage with the matter at hand? Perversely, matter is everywhere. Macabre muralist Eliza Wagner’s, tiler Ally Fallon’s, or whitewash aficionado Deborah Lerner’s paintings are barely sketches for an idea. Brutalist wannabe William Braithwaite’s and deadpan welder Varvara Uhlik’s redundant sculptures need never have been fished, since neither these artists, nor washing machine repair man Oliver Getley, thought twice about the world they would enter.
(In this desolation, Christopher Steenson’s slide and tape poetic landscapes stand out for the fidelity they show to their form, even if they are heavily affected.)
Bethan Huws, Andrea BüttnerBirds
★★☆☆☆Tschudi at Hollybush Gardens, LondonOn until 14 February 2026For an exhibition that ostensibly concerns itself with the marvel of conceptual evolution, Birds is depressingly arid. Posing as an archaeology of signs, women, and their entanglement, it amounts to mere research notes.
Huws’s penchant for the Duchampian readymade turns her into an opportunist and a peddler of empty slogans. “We don’t need artists we need more thinkers” is as banal as it is untrue. Her challenge to Freud, wrapped in a muddle of pictorial references and sticky notes, aesthetically lands next to an undergraduate’s sketchbook effort.
Büttner’s taxonomies are subtler, her images more sumptuous. The photographic moss is, well, pretty, and free of stifling overinterpretation. Her Art History of Bending—who doesn’t like a comedy slideshow—suggests some interest in the substance of things. But Büttner blows her cover with a pair of gigantic breasts in unfired clay, a childish response to the urinal. This oozes more than necessary, illuminating little.
Inspired in form and attitude by Manhattan Art Review.
