notes and notices are short and curt reviews of exhibitions at (mostly) London galleries.
Despite indications to the contrary, it brings this critic little pleasure to disparage the aspirations of a young gallery. But either the curator or the quinquagenarian artist should have known better than to show off this nonsense.
Ruscha’s paintings are a cross between a cartoonist’s representation of an LSD trip and an AI’s “artful” arrangement of twee California colours. They barely make up for their design with their thankfully modest size and number.
The gallery’s invitation promises Oskar Fischinger, Scott Bartlett, and even David Hockney. It is a blessing that it stopped short of citing Stella. Ruscha’s geometric repetitions, waves, and colour fields might be the thing in California’s forever hippie junkyard. In London, they are not Bardawil’s first investment into egregiously mediocre painting. This critic hopes they are the last.
One must admire Frith Street. This gallery loves its artists forever, as though it were oblivious to the contemporary’s ever-changing favours. Its static roster ages with the building and with the money that funds the endeavour.
But one may also sigh at the same gallery’s run of dull, barely distinguishable exhibitions. It’s Singh’s turn this summer, though her expensively framed pictures could have been the work of at least three other Frith Street Gallery artists. None of them would have made this work any better, or any worse. None would have made it new, either.
Calla Henkel & Max Pitegoff, I.W. PayneDowntown
★★★★☆243 Luz at Sadie Coles HQ, LondonOn until 22 June 2024The Kingly Street cupboard which hosts this Margate outfit’s pop-up barely has room for three artists. With two gallerists on site, it leaves little space for breath and even less for context.
For once, that’s for the better. Henke and Pitegoff’s black-and-white photographs of leather handbags do for the vaginal labia what Mapplethorpe’s vegetables did for the penis. Seeing them this close up – there is no other way – invokes a violence that’s far from the gentle joke of an O’Keeffe desert flower.
Next to this macabre gynaecological luxury product line-up, Payne’s near human-size cardboard silhouette jokingly riffs on a Roy Lichtenstein cartoon. Move too close and its spikes will poke your eyes. Move one step back and you’ll hit a steel column.
This little assembly would make the perfect décor for a court waiting room, unsettling any might-be villain. It may also be a great way to air yet keep close art’s most captivating defects.
Form triumphs over detritus. Items bought at flea markets, found under the sofa cushion, or rescued from the back of a white van landed in Costa’s studio where they assumed new shapes with the help of a glue gun, some duct tape, and the odd rivet. These tabletop curios with titles like Public vendetta and Slum mania dominate the exhibition. The slight contrasts between their scales, colours, and textures invite questions of their provenance but offer no useful answers, save for the recognition that such junkyard aesthetics has been a contemporary art trope forever.
A different origin story comes with a series of bronze objects that break the exhibition’s rhythm. The bronze casting process calls for materials like plaster or silicone to pour negative voids of the final, positive sculpture. Costa splinters this and rescues the moulds from his workshop’s waste pile. This time, however, doesn’t merely upcycle them for the gallery but casts the voids into bronze positives. This iteration elevates this form of ‘art workshop’ detritus over the other, truly ‘found’ matter.
The gallery text plays up the work’s site specificity. It’s wrong to. Costa’s found objects are specific to only themselves, and even more so when they are the mirrors of their bronze process siblings. This treatment earns their reprieve from the waste compactor’s claw. Why some are more worthy than others is left unexplained.
Thibault Aedy, Dilara KozCaressed and Polished and Drained and Washed
★★★☆☆Filet, LondonOn until 26 May 2024What does it mean to put on an exhibition? In a culture where AI can fake installation shots of any object in any interior faster than one can scroll the feed, to bring material substance and human minds together is to enter a competition for permanence.
Koz’s miniature sticker snapshot records of life, though, and other detritus are printed on unstable thermal transfer paper. The artist shows them off, however, in frames and folders reminiscent of the once powerful institutions of memory such as the archive, the court, or maybe the temple. But these structures are long forgotten. Koz’s images too will fade without further notice.
Aedy’s bodily manifestations place equal faith in technology but hope to avoid such decay. A delicate crystal resin skeleton and a hefty rubber wedge allude to human sex and the messy stuff of reproduction. These objects will outlast the flesh, the tale of Oedipus, and any sepia family portrait. But their synthetic structure forecloses the possibility of life beyond the pop-up show’s closing date.
Aziza KadyriDon't Miss the Cue
★★★★☆The Uzbekistan pavilion, VeniceCurated by Centre for Contemporary Art TashkentOn until 24 November 2024This exhibition whose Venice-wide marketing barely mentions the artist is inexplicably seductive despite the studied amateurishness of the cultural diplomacy that gave rise to it. The whole thing is backwards. The theatre designer Kadyri turned a cavernous Arsenale warehouse into the backstage area of some unspecified celebratory event. She prepped stacks of embroidered cloth and craft wares for a folklore display dance like those put on when a dignitary visits town.
But everyone’s a VIP at the world’s largest drop-in cultural centre. Even Kadyri’s independent young artists’ collective boasts an “executive director”. The whole project thus reads like a self-referential press release maliciously corrupted by the AI which the artist used to design some of her nostalgia-trap patterns. This dissonance might be intentional. If it isn’t, so much for the better.
Aleksandar DenićExposition Coloniale
★★★☆☆The Serbian pavilion, VeniceCurated by Ksenija SamadržijaOn until 24 November 2024The theatre scenographer Denić took the Biennale’s theme literally, as though he was not in on the art world joke. Yet his Colonial Exhibition makes a joke of its own by conceptually reprising the 1931 event that infamously included a human zoo. The pavilion’s spacious interior houses a reconstruction of the commercial arteries of an Eastern European border town of the 1990s, a time when Yugoslavia which once again brands the building’s façade was choosing its economic and geopolitical future.
Denić’s 2024 cast, however, fled over the border in search of better lives. There’s an abandoned fast-food joint to cater for the absent masses where the equally unabundant grub is as garish as the interior décor. Another corner hides a spa sauna for the nouveau-riche merchant class but fails miserably in its attempt at luxury. Elsewhere, an empty bedsit room decked out in ‘70s patterns plays a Coke ad ad nausem until it is hard not to wonder why anyone would – or did – choose this aesthetic life over any other.
The European West’s betrayal of the Eastern imaginary remains an unexplored sore point. Denić’s theatrical gestures could thus be welcome or even poignant. But the artist worked with a poor script that called for cheap props and far too many visual clichés. A start or two for daring, sure, but this show won’t last more than one season.
Pakui Hardware, Maria Terese RožanskaitéInflammation
★★★☆☆The Lithuanian pavilion, VeniceCurated by Valentinas Klimašauskas, João LaiaOn until 31 October 2024Despite its bizarre anticontemporary ethos, Venice did see some novelty this year. One is the confidence of the marketing object to claim the attention of a well-made artwork. Saudi Arabia’s desert art project Wadi AlFan, for example, filled a palazzo with seductive landscapes in immersive video and a list of distinguished artists to boot. The purpose of this trade expo popup would be easy to miss were it not for Iwona Blazwick’s sales pitch voiceover.
A more worrying trope is the artwork that looks good but on reflection isn’t. Pakui Hardware’s sculptures of bodily organs and strands of the nervous system deploy a familiar, if not clichéd language or red glass and metal. Suspended on a polished steel scaffold which fills the interior of a centuries-old church, these structures overplay their strength yet fail to correspond with the chapel’s native iconography.
The same architect’s folly encases the late Rožanskaité’s paintings in more glass and steel, turning them into tributaries to the show’s vague transhumanism. The painter’s ability to abstract from the human body but remain specifically close to it far exceeds these confines. The heart-of-glass trinkets are a deceptive distraction. Seeing the exhibition at the pace of a Venice day tourist, however, might leave one believing the opposite.
Soufiane AbabriTheir mouths were full of bumblebees
★★☆☆☆The Barbican, LondonCurated by Raúl Muñoz de la VegaOn until 30 June 2024The Barbican’s architecture is an awkward setting for an exhibition. Ababri’s installation shows that part of the estate could easily be turned into an upscale gay cruise club. The space is lit dimly, plush red, and hidden by a suggestive chain link curtain hanging. Behind it, a series of homoerotic paintings marks the Curve’s walls like gloryholes at a truck stop. There is no maze and no foam party, either, but the show’s half-finished scenography and a one-off scheduled performance make an alluring promise.
One leaves this club unfulfilled. Ababri’s paintings of and for the Grindr generation are more cartoonish than they are from life. The men who occupy his frames engage in acts of narcissistic hedonism explained by phrases such as ‘bareback’ or ‘high and horny’ that litter the forms. These are the norms of Western sexual liberation that conquered this Moroccan artist’s world, too.
The gallery text suggests that Abarbi wants to resist Eurocentric queer theory, presumably to make room for some more true, local, or even Islam-friendly gay liberation. His paintings, however, do nothing of the sort. They barely offer a description of his subject’s condition that would root them in anything other than the international gay party circuit. These works are thus incapable of insight or critique and only serve as cheap titillation for the Western audiences, the sort of which the artist and his lovers hopelessly want to experience too.
Thanasis Deligiannis, Yannis MichalopoulosXirómero/Dryland
★★★★☆The Greek pavilion, VeniceCurated by Panos GiannikopoulosOn until 24 November 2024It’s Sunday in the village. Every week, the Greek state broadcaster sends a camera crew to record the harvest festivals, crochet-making displays, and wedding rituals of a rural locality. The programme has been running for decades. The nation’s hamlets anxiously wait their turn in the spotlight, knowing that the camera can turn milk maids and grocers into celebrities. Each wants to showcase their custom, more ‘diverse’ than in a contemporary art curator’s wet dream.
But it is wet and dark in Xirómero. Arriving on location in this Western Greek region, the crew found the pavilion deserted. A sound and light show synced with the movement of agricultural equipment makes for an eerie trace of past revelries which still play out on screen installations, posters, and stacks of plastic garden chairs. The famous Greek hospitality has turned into dystopia, sustained only by tricks of technology.
This display is aesthetically rich and pleasurably hard to parse. Recent Greek pavilions lamented the nation’s financial and political woes, which were in part caused by the very ideologies that now try to ‘diversity’ the OG city-state. If the Hellenic Republic tried to find the ‘foreign’ in Wester’s civilisation’s cradle as per this Biennale’s dictum, it drew a blank and missed even itself.
Inspired in form and attitude by Manhattan Art Review.
