How does a curator tell an unfamiliar history yet evade the museum’ didacticism and the audience’s dulled expectations? Jhaveri’s ambitious review of India’s testing decades at the end of the 20th century could easily have been a torturous sermon: the period’s Wikipedia entry is full of social tension, abuses of power, even civil unrest. The…
Gabaldón reinvents the pastoral for the Instagram generation.
Ask DALL-E to paint an abstraction and it’ll confidently produce a museum-worthy clone
Lack of care for the artefact is a strange USP for a gallery.
The circus is in town, its acts are the infrastructure of contentment.
It’s too early for a funeral, yet there’s no other reprieve in this commodity cult.
Rhis show is the kompromat in an art generation’s archive.
The commercial imperative is understandable. The art historical intent, less clear.
If only they were smaller, Piñera Ballo’s paintings would be a great hit in the shopping centre gallery your ex-army uncle just opened in Surrey. He’s gambling with the family’s savings, you condescend, but so is Pace with their show. The market for “young” artists is crashing. Who in London, precisely, would buy 6-meter-wide Cuban…
McGurn has created the visual equivalent of elevator music.
With the right lighting, this story could be a mid-century colonial classic.
Examining the paintings in the gallery’s bright lights doesn’t lift their mystery.
The night, finally, recognises despair and witnesses infanticide.”
There is no “too much” in this fantasy meme game.
For all this bravado, Rooney’s compositions offer only a very surface experience of abstraction.
This project relies on layers of gimmicks and, sadly, they show through Awuah-Darko’s thick palette knife impasto.
Such kitsch might have been fine in a spinster auntie’s bedroom. In the gallery, it is a cruel trick.
Rahman’s zine hand makes this make-believe explicit but not plausible.
Derrien has his audience discussing the nature of paint drying out loud.
Borremans toys with his subjects, his audience, and with art history.
This project outs Rauschenberg as a propagandist if not an outright Fed.
The garish colours which may have carried the story in cinema here are unfitting of their new medium.
But either the curator or the artist should have known better.
One of the novelties in Venice is the artwork that looks good but on reflection isn’t.
Ababri’s paintings for the Grindr generation are more cartoonish than they are from life.
Art history can catch modernity in splitting from the past and thus from itself.
Czwartos’ painting proves little and his sign-writer’s hand loses art history’s bet.
Urgessa’s figures are contorted in love, death, or merely life.
This is the fodder of DeviantArt and the last year’s AI engines.
Death by debris falling from building façades is an artist’s occupational hazard.
The lightness of the painter’s gesture cries out for a sledgehammer that would relieve the viewer of his doubt.
Oil paint applied so thickly that it’s a miracle the canvases don’t bring the gallery walls down with them
Rothko’s abstractions are said to have induced tears in viewers overwhelmed by abstraction. Staring at the sun here, however, barely causes blindness.
Only in flights of anger does this vision come close to becoming believable.
There will be no women when this spell breaks. And no need for magic, either.
Who could have thought that these mantras would turn into rote?
Page’s tent, brain, and the cathedral take the same form for a pretty good reason.
What’s left of the show are stage props that feed adolescent imaginations with false memories of the long-finished party.
These works are as garish as they are fun to look at.
The carpet dealer gallerist’s zeal reveals the work’s lamentable inadequacy.
In this meditation of surface disguised as a study of objects, neither is a truer likeness of the events.
Westerik catches his figures in deep contemplation in front of the mirror, in the gynaecologist’s chair, or even mid-orgy.
This exhibition mixes the woman and her legend, but without the air of mystery she enjoyed during her lifetime.
Aj Tjoe’s paintings could make great scenic backdrops to a David Attenborough documentary on the life of wild rodents
Forrester’s project is timely when foundational concepts like ‘mother’ and their ‘as-though’ counterparts are readily confused.
It should be within the resources of Pace and Olowska’s experience to advance her legend beyond the discretely marketable.
Who opens a space in Fitzrovia only to fill it with such drivel?
One can only imagine that some unconscious loathing of postmen motivated this project.
In this game of aesthetic cognition, the idea which survives is of the artist thinking.
There’s no dignity in paint when the arc of art history tends to “show hole”.
All this tries to be macabre and surreal like in Bosch or Miyazaki but is instead laughably twee.
This show would be better without the baggage of the artist’s personal story and even better without the Twin Towers altogether.
This is the work of a mind that, having needlessly spent years in therapy, became hooked on ennui or of an artist who wasted time misreading Lacan.
This exhibitions is trying to explain the concept of ‘crazy paving’ to a blind man. It’s impossible to tell where a work ends and the wall begins.
The reward for taking part in this experiment of life is ascension to the holy orders.
The whole thing feels like a remake of Wind in the Willows directed by a garden gnome.
The clues that Glantz leaves on her surfaces are also traps. There are either too many or not quite enough to follow or fall into.
The artist must choose which ground is best ceded.
Willats orders fragments of time, matter, and space into data packets on one side of the flow chart and puts them to use on the other.
Meaning parts with the image in this exhibition, never to return. Post-structuralism triumphs.
Bronstein falls into the late evening stupor of the cheese trolley, the oyster tray, and… the Mars bar.
There’s a Bosch hellscape dedicated to Trump and a whole “basket of deplorables” polishing their guns in a prepper cell.
This exhibition is a warning to would-be propagandists: trust art at your peril.
The figures appear as though in x-ray and helplessly foretell their own ends.
This is the sort of exhibition that makes a critic question the quality of their judgment.
Some forms of abstraction simply scream ‘my kid could have made that’.
Auer is more interested in the fate of painting than humanity and thus stands apart from the army of zealots who make eco art today.
The failed magic tricks in Lyndon Barrois Jr.’s canvases would hang in the final scene of Chinese Roulette in which everyone turns against everyone.
I didn’t get to see this show. Perhaps for the best.
Meisenberg’s paintings are either the product of a conspiracy or documents of a conspiracy theory.
The party slumps into a half-voiced political complaint and never recovers. This is what happens when instead of living culture, we ‘celebrate’ it.
Tilson’s styled self-portraits are an affectation that will take many years of practice to pay off.
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.
There’s a group, but they’re as indistinct as the faces of Jesus that regularly appear to people on slices of toast.
Looking at Xie’s portraits is a little like wearing a virtual reality headset over only one eye.
There’s little for the eye to hang on and none of the punk culture of Relph’s earlier practice emerges from the works.
A twee aesthetics native to a grandmother’s mantlepiece collection of tourist souvenirs and devotional figurines.
These images are perfectly charming even to a viewer possessed of a cold anthropological eye. The troubling part is in realising just how far ‘outside’ the ideas are.
For the abundance of material, there simply aren’t enough ideas in the exhibition to go around these Mayfair interiors.
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