notes and notices are short and curt reviews of exhibitions at (mostly) London galleries.
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.
Tamsin Morse, Kris Lock, Casper Scarth, et al.The Poplar Bestiary
★★★☆☆TondoCosmic , LondonCurated by Tamsin Morse and Jennifer ThatcherOn until 12 April 2025If the gallery, like the internet, is the battleground of pornography and cat videos, the zone-three project space plays home to the two’s beastly offspring. Tamsin Morse’s pitifully contorted horse – flopped across a sizable canvas as though between the knackers’ yard and a bougie pet parlour – is this evolutionary line’s apex exponent. His human companions might weep, had they understood that his lot is their very bidding.
Kris Lock’s oil pigments are all over the conservatory, the koi pond, but also the office hot-desking station. Which species is invasive is not obvious in these eerie mistaken-identity film set backdrops. Casper Scarth’s balloon ape, scratched into paper like a Studio Ghibli ghost, deftly predates this apparition’s recent AI meme takeover. Is it too late for the animal, or even the artist to cash in on their first-mover advantage?
This menagerie comes with no humanly comprehensible challenge. How could it? The project casts a barely visible shadow on the suburban new-builds which envelop it. Stuck between the cloud and the pastoral, each painting’s edge becomes a kennel.
The success of Sudipo’s block colour and found image collages relies on hardly anyone looking at them closely. The shimmering reflections from their crumpled aluminium foil backgrounds dazzle the dimly lit gallery. The effect is seductive, certainly, even within the white cube’s commercial austerity.
But look, and it’s all on the surface. Sheets of translucent filters barely conceal borrowed, if not stolen motives. Each layer contributes even less to the history Sudipo is building than last year’s memes.
The dealer, the gallery cleaner, maybe even the artist had a chance to intervene in these objects in bright light. That they did not is, indeed, ominous.
Inspired in form and attitude by Manhattan Art Review.
