Stuart Middleton

The Human Model

★★☆☆☆

On until 20 April 2024

A five-armed tepee made from cheap polyester bedding – barely an iteration of the artist’s 2015 installation which turned the same gallery into a tunnel – plays host to a five-dimensional audio installation. Having captured his audience, Middleton blows raspberries into the microphone. Next door, two totems made from junk furniture, woodworking tools, and grandma’s knitting basket float suspended sideways from the walls.

Spring is time for spring cleaning. But artists are already thinking of summer picnics and lazy Sundays spent in bed or the potting shed. But the mass-produced safety blankets are too on the nose next to the mass-produced retro. An interest in material is core to this practice but Middleton mistrusts his instincts. A recklessly messy prose poem which footnotes the artist’s WhatsApp inbox speaks of “authoritarianism”, “getting lost” and “exhaustion”. It thus gets from nowhere to nowhere, as regrettably does the exhibition.


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

Sibylle Ruppert, Frenzy of the Visible at Project Native Informant ★★★★☆

Sibylle Ruppert

Frenzy of the Visible

★★★★☆

This is the fodder of DeviantArt and the last year’s AI engines.

When Forms Come Alive at Hayward Gallery ★★☆☆☆

When Forms Come Alive

★★☆☆☆

This exhibition cannot decide if it’s a tourist attraction or a serious examination of sculpture’s relationship with movement.

Maja Malou Lyse: Things to Come at the Danish pavilion in Venice ★★★★★

Maja Malou Lyse

Things to Come

★★★★★

Eros is dead. Long live Eros.

Lydia Gifford, Low Anchored Cloud at Alma Pearl ★★☆☆☆

Lydia Gifford

Low Anchored Cloud

★★☆☆☆

Oil paint applied so thickly that it’s a miracle the canvases don’t bring the gallery walls down with them

Jacob Dahlgren, When Anxieties Become Form at Workplace ★★☆☆☆

Jacob Dahlgren

When Anxieties Become Form

★★☆☆☆

The works are older than the artist’s last good idea.

The Poplar Bestiary at Tondo Cosmic ★★★☆☆

Tamsin Morse, Kris Lock, Casper Scarth, et al.

The Poplar Bestiary

★★★☆☆

This menagerie comes with no humanly comprehensible challenge.

×