Siobhan Liddell

Been and Gone

★★☆☆☆

On until 21 October 2023

A green mountainside, the white cliffs of Dover, an enchanted forest at night, a cat hiding behind the curtains. A small canvas with a dramatic seascape seen through a sash window has little fabric drapes pinned on it. A ceramic rendering of a human ear dangles over an oil stamped with a brick pattern as though to make a rebus. Teacups, shoe laces, and (of course) mushrooms stick out from other paintings. 

Liddel mixes perspectives and scales and she tries to measure the permanence of mountains with the length of a cigarette. Her subjects want to be at once grand and mundane. But they aren’t. Add to this some abstractions with titles like Between Worlds and these are very mixed messages. When Liddel applies her material tricks to them indiscriminately, the result is the twee aesthetics native to a grandmother’s mantlepiece collection of tourist souvenirs and devotional figurines. That’s not a bad perspective, but the works neither elevate, nor challenge it.


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

Cui Jie, Thermal Currents at Pilar Corrias ★☆☆☆☆

Cui Jie

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The exhibition feels like a lecture on climate change sponsored by the designers of The Line, Saudi Arabia’s dystopian plan for a 110-mile linear city in the desert.

John Tweddle, Michael Landy: Market Day at The Mayor Gallery ★★★☆☆

John Tweddle, Michael Landy

Market Day

★★★☆☆

Nothing here disrupts the market, freeing the eye from the wallet.

RM, A Story Backwards at Auto Italia ★★☆☆☆

RM

A Story Backwards

★★☆☆☆

Having forgotten what the ‘dramatic’ in art stands for, visual artists today too often mistake hacked theory for stage directions.

Abbas Akhavan: Entre chien et loup at the Canadian pavilion in Venice ★★★☆☆

Abbas Akhavan

Entre chien et loup

★★★☆☆

Some water lily species are invasive.

Machine Painting at Modern Art ★★★★☆

Machine Painting

★★★★☆

Ask DALL-E to paint an abstraction and it’ll confidently produce a museum-worthy clone

The Studio of Felicity Powell at Richard Saltoun ★★☆☆☆

Felicity Powell

The Studio of Felicity Powell

★★☆☆☆

Powell was a medallist, yet not a medal recipient.

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