notes and notices are short and curt reviews of exhibitions at (mostly) London galleries.
“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.
Sophie Giraux, Albert DietrichCondo: The Ambassadors
★☆☆☆☆On until 14 February 2026Everything about this show, beginning with its banal title—since when is shipping art from Vienna some radical emissarial act?—feels lazy. Giraux’s large wall-hung cast rubber sheets mimic abstract silver-sprayed canvases. If the technique deployed in their production is unusual, their framing—literally and figuratively—strips them down to bare-bone decorative panel. Dietrich’s found cabinets, encased in painted MDF plinths, are a weak riff on Modernity’s collapse into white-cubism. The artist’s gestures are sterile, lacking even the slightest curiosity about his material. The gallery’s affected refusal to serve as the works’ context, finally, aborts this misguided mission.
Paride Maria Calcia, Hubert Duprat, Irene FenaraCondo
★★★★☆Zero… at Brunette Coleman , LondonOn until 14 February 2026The word ‘organic’ once encompassed forms of matter that were anything but. A decade or so ago, synthetic building materials, such as Paride Maria Calvia’s stained, greenish fibreboard, could claim this adjective on account of their propensity to decay. Today, his wall hanging would go unnoticed in a waste skip. In the gallery, an acrylic frame conceals that it was the artist who caused the deterioration.
Hubert Duprat’s insect exoskeletons of gold and precious stones turn ‘organic’ inside-out again, the artist delegating the miniature objects’ assembly to the caddisflies themselves. This process is so close to being ‘natural’ that to read nature into the trinkets it gives rise to would be reckless ostentation.
Next to these gestures, Irene Fenara’s video, taken from a public webcam feed, is outright eerie because it extends this discredited ‘organic’ to surveillance and the internet. If the rest of this modest display—modest because each work is overtly unassuming—inspires nostalgia, their assembly is outright horror.
Karimah AshaduTendered
★★☆☆☆Camden Art Centre , LondonCurated by Alessandro Rabottini, Leonardo BigazziOn until 22 March 2026Ashadu’s films are as banal as they are overwrought with glib signifiers. Take King of Boys, a five-minute survey of butchery in a meat market in the slums of Lagos. The document is trivial on the face of it: knives hack through meat in the open-air stalls, yet not even their unsanitary conditions are worthy of note. Ashadu captured this scene through a piece of translucent red plastic, as though that somehow bestowed it with significance. She is aware of the filmic tradition borne out of such images yet is unable to advance it.
Next, MUSCLE, a glossy skin flick with men working out in makeshift Nigerian gyms, links vitalism and liberation. But even its message – half Riefenstahl’s Nuba, half Denis’s Beau Travail – is convoluted by a redundant sculptural installation which glibly adds capitalism to the semantic mix. Cowboy fetishises a stable boy with a scripted confession. But even its elaborate two-screen projection, which contrasts the mare’s trot with lazily composed images of the sea shore, fails to bring this non-story to a satisfactory end. All this takes too much room (five months in the institution’s programme) but offers precious little.
Means of Reproduction
★★☆☆☆Emalin , LondonCurated by Stanislava Kovalcikova, Jeppe UgelvigOn until 19 February 2026Turning the gallery into a gift shop – of arty t-shirts, tote bags, and homeware – is the dealer’s gimmick of last resort. It turns critique itself into a commodity, revealing, to anyone still somehow unaware of it, the art object’s elusive claim on value.
The same art pop-up, perversely, denies the artefact the aesthetic efficiencies of mass, non-curated markets. The temporary stall thus gives artists the illusion of a safe space in the global supply chain. So long as they stay off the balance sheet, they risk losing track of their wares’ aesthetic merit.
These non-trading artists did, and their works are dully indistinguishable from the stock of the fashion concept store next door. The ‘meta’ of this trade, then, might well be that consumption is the greatest form of anticapitalism. What it looks like – and what it sells – is as good as irrelevant.
Wool’s convoluted lines – in bent copper-plated steel, scrawled enamel, oil, or silkscreen – encourage the belief that, despite life’s difficulties, what starts at A will make it to B and, eventually, somehow back to A again. These trajectories resemble Brownian molecular motion, as unpredictable as they are vital. Wool’s gestural compositions intrigue with their promise of inevitability, despite, alas, lacking pictorial originality qua works of art.
To name the frustration of this oeuvre is thus to make an embarrassing admission. Wool’s 2D projections are too many and reveal that their topographic trajectory is wholly predetermined. In three dimensions, the sculptural jumbles are too solid as they pass C and D to pretend that they have been part of some great discovery. There’s no room for the eye, then, no way to follow the line.
Lijn’s kinetic sculptures are prone to typecasting, except that their type depends entirely on content. Through Lijn’s long career, her trademark rotating cones and columns have borne text, abstract marks, and light projections; those have had little in common besides their spin. The two totems now doing their rounds spin yarns of enamelled wire. Elsewhere – in Tate’s Electric Dreams, say – they could have inducted currents to stop a pacemaker. Yet paired with Lijn’s abstract canvases, they turn easy to miss for the cobbled mews gallery’s architectural columns.
Which is to speak deliberately around the paintings, extracted from a series made in the early 1990s. If Lijn’s oils lack finesse, they far surpass the sculptures’ dynamism even as they are static. Are these dreams, floral fields, or psychedelic visions? No matter; how loudly they revolt against the cyclicality of their studio siblings! How spectacularly they burn!
Inspired in form and attitude by Manhattan Art Review.
