A Portrait

★★★★☆

On until 24 February 2024

Pauline Boty was half pop artist, half actress, and in her mythology half pin-up it girl. The swinging ’60s would have been the perfect time for someone of Boty’s charisma to make a career of three halves. But she died young barely a decade into her practice, leaving a legacy of painting, collage, stained glass, and TV drama for speculation.

Although Boty was posthumously quite the rage in Poland’s soc-realist ’80s, it wasn’t until the again roaring ’90s that interest in her surviving oeuvre hit the UK art scene. Gazeli’s modest exhibition now brings a handful of Boty’s works – somewhat chaotic paper and gouache collages and oil paintings that could have been collages too – together with archives and tributes.

This mixes the woman and her legend, but without the air of mystery the artist enjoyed during her lifetime. Today, when a creator’s presence in their work is subject to TikTok’s terms of service, Boty’s multiple faces are challenging. She poses seductively on the cover of Men Only and in Michael Ward’s photographs, she lifts her dress for the camera. Such emancipation may have been a strategy for Pop art’s leading female founder. Today, its prompts aesthetic suspicion.


notes and notices are short and curt exhibition reviews. Read more:

Nicola Singh: Sincere Seeker at Cubitt ★★☆☆☆

Sincere Seeker

★★☆☆☆

What would it take for art to look like something, anything once more?

Poppy Jones, Solid Objects at Herald St ★★★★☆

Solid Objects

★★★★☆

The lightness of the painter’s gesture cries out for a sledgehammer that would relieve the viewer of his doubt.

Richard Hunt, Metamorphosis at White Cube ★★★★★

Metamorphosis

★★★★★

A dictionary for self-determination written in phrases as they were being invented.

Place Revisited at Modern Art ★★★★☆

Place Revisited

★★★★☆

One suspects the gallery of insider trading.

Gina Fischli, Love Love Love at Soft Opening ★★★★☆

Love Love Love

★★★★☆

What good it is to be best in show when the competition is lame, crooked, or outright fake?

Michael Simpson at Modern Art ★★★★☆

★★★★☆

In this meditation of surface disguised as a study of objects, neither is a truer likeness of the events.

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