Trackie McLeod

FRUIT II

★★☆☆☆

On until 11 June 2025

If, contra received wisdom, nostalgia is still what it once was, its aesthetics today is pure cliché. Glasgow lad Trackie mixes Trainspotting, raves, and Louis Vuitton knockoffs as though they were currency in 2025’s Britain. He turns personalised reg plates, lads’ mags headlines, and the Burberry check into icons of a culture he is too young to remember. A mass billboard “partnership” blew up these charity shop trinkets. It duped McLeod into believing that a return to DVDs was, for him, imaginable.

What excuse for this naivety? “Working-class” and “queer” appear in the collateral as obligatory for every insider. What doesn’t is “white”. Yet this alone is McLeod’s distinction in the Yookay Aesthetics index. His longing for ‘90s homophobia is pale fire next to the IrnBru output of fellow Pollokshields dweller and Turner Prize winner Jasleen Kaur. Look closely, however: her multipacks bear the mark “for export”.


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

Justin Chance, Motherhood at Ginny on Frederick ★★☆☆☆

Justin Chance

Motherhood

★★☆☆☆

If only he stopped there.

Yoko Ono at Tate ★★★☆☆

Yoko Ono

Music of the Mind

★★★☆☆

This show will sell tickets. But it won’t change the weather.

Yorgos Prinos, Prologue to a Prayer at Hot Wheels ★★★★☆

Yorgos Prinos

Prologue to a Prayer

★★★★☆

Prinos’ frames are precise, tight, and formal, as though the street were his studio.

Paulina Olowska at Pace ★★★★☆

Paulina Olowska

Squelchy Garden Mules and Mamunas

★★★★☆

It should be within the resources of Pace and Olowska’s experience to advance her legend beyond the discretely marketable.

Rheim Alkadhi, Templates for Liberation at ICA ★★☆☆☆

Rheim Alkadhi

Templates for Liberation

★★☆☆☆

When truth and artifice are so bluntly opposed, what use is aesthetics?

Adriano Costa, ax-d. us. t at Emalin ★★★☆☆

Adriano Costa

ax-d. us. t

★★★☆☆

Form triumphs over detritus.

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