Acrylic and wire art installation featuring geometric sketches and a monochromatic rectangular piece, displayed on a white gallery wall with metal clamps and wires, exemplifying contemporary minimalism.

Roland Knowlden

Negations

★★★☆☆

On until 26 October 2025

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.


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

Yannis Maniatakos, Four Paintings at Sylvia Kouvali ★★★☆☆

Estate of Yiannis Maniatakos

Four Paintings

★★★☆☆

Examining the paintings in the gallery’s bright lights doesn’t lift their mystery.

Open Group, The Polish pavilion in Venice ★★★☆☆

Open Group

Repeat After Me II

★★★☆☆

The applause was rapturous. A sense of tragedy, however, was altogether missing.

Tarek Lakhrissi, Spit at Nicoletti ★★★☆☆

Tarek Lakhrissi

Spit

★★★☆☆

Writing poetry is hard enough.

Jan Gatewood, Group Relations at Rose Easton ★☆☆☆☆

Jan Gatewood

Group Relations

★☆☆☆☆

Such thin metaphors could only have come from LA.

Noah Davis at The Barbican ★★★☆☆

Noah Davis

★★★☆☆

Davis’ canvases give an account of time more sensitively than the Victorian portrait photograph

Ithaca at Herald St ★★★★☆

Christopher Aque, Alekos Fassianos, Luigi Ghirri, Jessie Stevenson, George Tourkovasilis

Ithaca

★★★★☆

This show drips with affectation that wouldn’t survive a minute tomorrow.

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