notes and notices are short and curt reviews of exhibitions at (mostly) London galleries.
To stage covert exhibitions in the City of London is an act of opportunistic resistance, or so declares the curator of this illegal pop-up in a bus drivers’ toilet. The respite from capitalism is temporary, however: each show lasts no more than three hours, and it’s bring-your-own booze. In the long lineage of galleries located in toilets, this one is more a hipster happening than an artistic challenge to anything.
Graham’s poor image photographic installation, composed of scuffed stock images of breakfast foods in cheap clip frames, is so unspectacular that it would be overlooked by a driver using the facilities in a hurry. It follows some more intrusive projects that in their Insta documentation brim with toilet humour that might get TfL’s cleaning crew the sack. The practice has earned the project an invitation to a boutique art fair all the same.
To do things without the institutions’ blessing is, by principle, better than doing nothing. By paying no attention to art, however, this project replicates the problem it wants to avoid.
Sosa JosephPennungal: Lives of women and girls
★★★★★David Zwirner, LondonOn until 28 September 2024Joseph’s portrayals of village rites have a touch of the supernatural about them. The pictures follow the order of things, however. In one, a group of women prepare food. Some girls make music while others play with yard animals. Next door, a couple have sex awkwardly so as to not wake their baby. In the most striking image, women attend to the lifeless pale body of a girl retrieved from the cold river on another canvas. The night, finally, recognises despair and witnesses infanticide.
The troubling quality of these paintings could have something to do with the colour palette of vivid yet washed-out greens, oranges, and purples which Joseph broadly deploys to make up her scenes of invasive shadow. An even greater discomfort, however, arises with the viewer understanding that the devastation which Joseph recorded in her native Kerala is merely obscured by the gallery’s modernity. The latter offers us villagers no comforts.
Keresztesi’s ornate paintings are taxing on the imagination. In one, mechanical horses meet crying cyborgs. In another, emotional factory robots wistfully look over a horizon on fire. That could be enough but there is no “too much” in this fantasy meme game. Next, gilded clowns laugh at the weather. Crystal castles crumble in the wind. Oh, and the gallery’s walls are turned into clouds.
Ironic Art Nouveau is Seventeen’s premium brand of opulence. Keresztesi doesn’t hold back when mixing it with early Deviantart forum sci-fi and traces of late Surrealism for good measure. He speaks of alchemy as he does so, albeit more obliquely than the gallery would have him. It is not easy to discern from the canvases alone whether this practice is borne of biological dystopia or a blind breed of techno-optimism. There is not quite enough paint on their surface to split this final difference.
Megan RooneyEchoes & Hours
★★☆☆☆Kettle's Yard, CambridgeCurated by Andrew Nairne, Amy TobinOn until 6 October 2024Can an exhibition be at once hubristic and timid? Rooney’s broad-stroke, bold colour abstract oils claim their space in the galleries without hesitation. A “family” of canvases on which the artist is said to have worked for a year makes a run for the prime spots under the skylights. They bear the crusty traces of a painterly battle: long lines applied at right angles as though in a feat of angry desperation. A mostly blue mural wraps another space from floor to ceiling, leaving the eye no respite. It merely magnifies the gestures from the smaller tableaux, as though the same artist now suffered from gigantism.
For all this bravado, Rooney’s compositions offer only a very surface experience of abstraction. Seen through a tight squint, her images pay lip service to Water Lilies or the Starry Night. But the artist knew that every abstract image ever made does the same just as well. Not even the gratuitous dance performance commissioned for the mural and shown in the exhibition as a video “activated” these paintings the way Rooney says in another film they deserve.
A wall built from Harlequin-patterned concrete blocks serves as the backdrop for a pile of black aluminium cans. They look like an out-of-scale González-Torres candy pile but lack any source of tension. Elsewhere, a structure that could make for a children’s climbing frame smoothly blends steel rebar with concrete. It is endearingly crude but somehow too easy to look at. One might want to touch or mount it, but the materials’ soft, steady surfaces dissuade. Even the traces of rust on the grid appear self-conscious and uninviting.
Rothschild has made assemblies of such material perfection, blended pastel gradients, and blemishless extrusions for many years. Her high-spec fabrication inspires desire. But without points of contrast, these sculptures are too clean, too ordered, and too clever for no good reason. This work is “resolved” far past the point of an ideal, saturating the senses and leaving nothing to the imagination.
A small board smeared with a single stripe of dirty blue oil paint marks the beginning of Awuah-Darko’s diaristic series of geometric abstractions. The painter must have been experiencing despair on June 3, P.M. to start his show with such a singularly drab mark. His mood picked up a week later, however. June 17, P.M.’s tableau is one shade short of a rainbow, while July 4, P.M. is an outright firework display.
This project relies on layers of gimmicks and, sadly, they show through Awuah-Darko’s thick palette knife impasto. Despite the gallery’s promise, there is no trace of the artist’s moods in these images, nor his thoughts on the world around him. Instead, the oils celebrate the paint-by-numbers Excel spreadsheet that brought them into existence. Given that these works make a claim on Josef Albers’ coloured fields with which they share form and colour, this artifice is barely forgivable.
All art relies on a degree of narcissism. Even a classical landscape is an argument for one artist’s vision over another’s. Awuah-Darko, however, skips the painter’s travail altogether and demands the viewer’s attention for some already mediated ‘me’.
The ICA’s boxy gallery is a drab setting for Alkadhi’s sculptures formed from vast sheets of shipping tarps and covers. Tarred polyester canvases stretched on the horizon serve as heroic history paintings. Crumpled rolls of PVC oilcloth adorned with scrap steel and consumed by flame-red wounds occupy much of the floor space. They serve as 1:1 geological models of a land that bore them. A single fabric hanging conceals the invigilator’s seat. This petrochemical artefact betrays a sign of life as it moves with the fan’s oscillation. On closer inspection, however, the green leaves sprouting from it turn out to be plastic too.
The adjacent reading room gathers archival and fictional knowledge artefacts. Yellowed scientific journals, photographs, and documents from Iraq – the artist’s birthplace – hide their content in locked vitrines. They are implicitly discredited by their imperialist provenance. A parallel display, meanwhile, invites visitors to freely explore made-up stories of the Iraqi nation that had been heroically rebellious and succeeded against the colonial British force.
The thing is, it hadn’t. This archive’s insurgent life force is once again no more than a scrap of dummy plastic. Its shape more closely matches the institution’s explicit political aspirations than Alkadhi’s more sincere sculpture. When truth and artifice are so bluntly opposed, what use is aesthetics?
It’s hard to treat an exhibition this banal at anything other than face value. Báez paints semi-abstract, vaguely figurative objects inspired by the garden and the seashore. The products of such “inspiration” often end up at street stalls in tourist hotspots. Inexplicably, her oeuvre commanded the confidence of nearly a dozen of SLG’s work-experience curators.
A female figure reads Ben Okri in one of Báez’s tableaux. What hell, it’s warm outside! Other cutout personas blend into the topiary in kaleidoscopic, carnivalesque poses. They assault the senses with all the rainbow’s colours at once. The gallery’s main hall, meanwhile, became a fishing village. It is deserted save for a light ornament, as though in anticipation of some festivity. A blue cloth dropped from the ceiling is punctured with holes more densely than the Caribbean sky is with stars.
Judging by the prominently displayed promotional video, peddling tat to unsuspecting punters is what SLG trains its “fellows” in. Even the contextual references to decoloniality or claims of the installation’s immersive nature are as half-hearted as the work itself. Such kitsch might have been fine in a spinster auntie’s bedroom. In the gallery, it is a cruel trick to play on Londoners stuck in the city all summer.
Mohammed Z. RahmanA Flame is a Petal
★★★☆☆Phillida Reid, LondonOn until 13 July 2024Groups of young people gather in social rituals in Rahman’s cartoon paintings. Boys drink beers at a backyard barbecue. Others smoke cigarettes by a bonfire. The girls, elsewhere, eat dinner. Their overconfident adventures with fireworks make the quintessence of childhood.
The settings of their get-togethers, however, are only the figments of the painter’s imagination. So is their youthful cheer. Rahman finds his friends in deserts and war zones. To offer them reprieve from their horrors, he builds for them a series of stage sets that simulate the comforts of home.
Rahman’s zine hand makes this make-believe explicit but not plausible. Neither do the structures which frame his works in the gallery. His subjects’ stories – the most intriguing takes place in Mostar a decade after the city was besieged in the Bosnian war – are confused by the artist’s overstated, adolescent politics.
Matthew Barney’s work has few parallels in the contemporary art world. His films double down on Jodorowsky and his performances would put the young Abramović to shame. His bizarre installations challenge Beuys. A decade he spent working with Björk put his work in front of millions.
Secondary carries on with the artist’s trademark monumentality. It turns the gallery into an American Football stadium. Video screens hang from the ceiling to magnify the action for fans in the cheap seats. Barney’s game takes place only on those. Spectators shuffle around the Astroturf pitch, bumping into pillars and scaffold-like sculptures.
The hour-long video opera follows the athlete’s body in motion. The image mixes grace with industrial grit in a tone familiar from Barney’s River of Fundament cycle. The sport and stage costumes expand the artist’s study of physical restraint, the subject of his experiments already in the 1980s. The piece climaxes with the infamous 1978 pitch injury of the wide receiver Darryl Stingley which left the player paralysed.
The drawings and objects which accompany the film make Barney’s obsession with strength, elasticity, and brittleness of the human corpus explicit. The video’s installation enhances it, forcing all necks to crane uncomfortably. But it misjudges this warehouse gallery space. The objects’ proportions are at odds with the body’s grace to which they refer. All the seats in the house are the cheap seats, granted, but their discomfort is distracting, and the game lacks a cheerleader. This would be a trivial complaint in any other artist’s work, but for Barney, muscular fatigue must count for more.
Inspired in form and attitude by Manhattan Art Review.
