notes and notices are short and curt reviews of exhibitions at (mostly) London galleries.
Black is one of those artists whose career depends more on others not making work than her making some herself. Her activism, likewise, hinges on denial. She could, therefore, be a fitting prophet of the oncoming cultural apocalypse. She has, alas, often preferred to be among its horsemen.
This meagre exhibition, comprising half a dozen lightweight text roundels, is more rant than Revelation. The paintings spell nonsense phrases – “very oxyn in dyed tulle also shall…”, “even yearners to riot…” – corrupted from the articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Indeed, the rights regime is crumbling (even the exhibition’s title anagrammatically turns “human rights” into a joke), and Black wishes to reanimate it by painting in references to past revolutions and astral futures.
But one would guess none of it from the paint, and Black cannot have thought of her role in the collapse for more than a moment. Her blink-and-so-what aesthetic is unequal to the task; it outright embarrasses the gravity of her subject. These works’ greatest value, then, is to confirm that their intellectual primacy is truly over. What’s wrong with rights makes no right with painting.
Evacuating a two-up two-down 1970s council home seems like overkill for a weekend pop-up exhibition. A visitor who makes it past Knowlden’s steel spike sculpture – like an exhausted porcupine held together only by zip ties – that arrests would-be deniers in the property’s sunken garden, soon understands that there was no other way: the artist is an architect.
Inside, graphite and acrylic drawings, made more by erasing Knowlden’s hand than applying it, try to be subtle. This is a planner’s old trick; in art, it spared not even de Kooning. Smears, smudges, and transparencies – these images float suspended from shelf edges, sandwiched in glass panes, hung next to the kitchen island – stand out too confidently even against the house’s bright blue vinyl flooring.
The scene’s ease of means is seductive. Yet the austerity of this assembly is feigned, and it reveals that Knowlden’s is an ill-conceived war plan. Too little is at stake here: the porcupine lost its spines in vain.
Claire FontaineShow Less
★★☆☆☆Mimosa House , LondonCurated by Daria KhanOn until 6 December 2025The declaration, forced on visitors at the door, that this “exhibition contains distressing content” as good as guarantees that it doesn’t. Show Less purports to subvert the politics of visibility. Yet even its most ‘shocking’ component – the neon FATHERFUCKER, hung in the gallery’s window – upsets absolutely no one. Still more disappointingly for the emotion-seeker, a series of commercially produced copies of L’origine du monde, adulterated by the artists with bright spray paint, lack the frisson to add anything to Courbet’s 1866 original.
Are we so lost today that we need to paint over the man’s jest, twelve times, and call that an act of extra-special feminist reclamation? Claire Fontaine – the duo behind the FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE neons, which inspired last year’s Venice Biennale’s title – opt for memes in lieu of substance. Their forms are easy to ‘get’ and their comforts compelling. Why, they covered the gallery’s very floor with hundreds of sheets from the Guardian, as though to elevate viewers from the plane of even that subjective reality.
But the show bestows freedom selectively: a series of declarations made in a childish hand cuts off their maker from the past and their ancestors’ sins. “I am free”, it proclaims, staking a claim on history’s ‘right side’ and #kindness. Repeat these mantras enough, and the lie becomes art.
Theodore Ereira-Guyer, Jandyra WatersWe Lost Lots of Beautiful Things
★★★★☆Elizabeth Xi Bauer , LondonCurated by Maria do Carmo M. P. de PontesOn until 25 November 2025If mimicry is flattery, then the late Jandyra Waters’ 1980s abstractions found in Theodore Ereira-Guyer a dedicated admirer. The works share their size and palette; the painters shared a language. The two have not met, yet this four-hander tricks the viewer that Waters’ oils – in their serial form reminiscent, perhaps, of Etel Adnan – and Ereira-Guyer’s plaster and coloured glass etchings – downstream in design from Anselm Kiefer, say – were made by the same artist.
Some of Ereira-Guyer’s pigment and cement assemblies pay homage to Waters’ canvases explicitly: one glossy mess of corrosion hangs under a patchy oil pill, for example, as though in continuation of the same thought. Other pairings diverge from this pattern, only forcing the eye to draw inferences where there may be none.
Continuing consistently across the show, this game of mix-and-match throws any one-to-one mapping into doubt, only to reaffirm it. Ereira-Guyer’s tribute is, therefore, a kind of unconscious ‘abstract plagiarism’ endemic to all painting. The human mind is mimetic – all art is representation.
The phrase “vocalised gibberish”, which features in this exhibition’s introduction, is a depressing description of contemporary art’s penchant for the exotic evacuated of any aesthetics. Singh casts three toy monkeys – the see/hear/speak no evil line-up – in plaster resin, modelling them after a toy family heirloom. This somehow shows, in the curator’s words, that the artist’s heritage gives her some special relationship to this visual maxim. It doesn’t, of course, but the work’s too dull to invite the consideration of its essentialist claim.
An improvised mezzo-soprano soundtrack half-intently emanates from the sculptures, bringing, as Singh’s practice often does, more claims on cultural signifiers. Those make the fact that the room looks like a wedding cake shop at the end of a busy week more than a little incongruous. White ink prints of the plush toys on black paper, resembling the patterns a half-exhausted roller brush leaves on a bathroom wall, bring no explanation.
Where are the “esoteric rituals” and “emotional pain”? What would it take for art to look like something, anythingonce more?
How does contemporary art support the labour struggle against AI and automation? Huckfield’s question is rhetorical, surely. Her manual weaving loom, refashioned into an electronic musical instrument, adorned with Luddite hammers, offers zero insight. The verbiage in the handout – more laboured, sadly, than the artefacts – tries to intersectionalise the Industrial Revolution, proposing that Ned Ludd’s campaign against the Spinning Jenny might have been more successful had both of them come out as non-binary.
The whole thing’s a category error; art’s gender and class projections occlude matters more tightly than the cloud. Huckfield crowbars made-up heroes into past revolutions to pose as the saviour in the next one. Yet she still needed the help of eight ‘workers’ to mount her installation, not counting, that is, the machines in China which likely fabricated its substance.
Tacita DeanBlack, Green, Green and White
★☆☆☆☆Frith Street Gallery , LondonOn until 22 November 2025Phoning it in makes little sense in the age of the WhatsApp message, and film studies lost to video a long time ago. Dean was once good at this transition. This two-segment exhibition – consisting of inconsequential light paintings and film sprocket drawings in the gallery’s main space and a torturous 16mm film portrait of another film master in the basement – makes no effort on behalf of its subjects, let alone the medium.
Dean’s slate drawings and Polaroid doodles relate to Shakespeare, but one wouldn’t know it. One wouldn’t need to because such imagery is perfectly serviceable student dorm decoration. In the gallery, however, it is so quotidian that it barely distinguishes itself from the degree show.
Worse, though, is the forty-minute-long film portrait of the Ukrainian photographer Boris Mikhailov and his wife Vita. The subjects, whom Dean stages in the shadow of Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, inspire interest inherently. This could have been a tender portrait of an ageing couple’s stillness, or any number of things, really. But Dean gives the Mikhailovs both too little and too much to do in her frame. The result captivates before revealing itself to be dead boring.
To say that Man is preoccupied with death is to make a poor joke. What the artist and the gallery punter share, however, is a profound fear of an unknowable reality. Man, the painter, spent decades coming closer than many to life’s ends and its beginning; his portraits, rendered in rich emerald (or copper), capture men, women, and infants faced with their finitude. Not always, all be it, willingly.
This constellation has Man draw himself into art history’s top trumps: there’s a Vincentian self-portrait, starry night in a Gypsy girl’s hair, with a bunch of (moon?) flowers for good measure. Skulls abound, as do breasts bared for feeding, as though to complete some cycle.
But there is no end in sight, and that’s the rub; Man’s other dealer is down the road, this show’s key painting unsold since the last one. If ‘life’s death’ is what he captures, might the painter’s palette – only a small nudge of the colour wheel separates his work from Tretchikoff’s infamous portrait of the Chinese girl – be but a gimmick?
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.
Inspired in form and attitude by Manhattan Art Review.
