Tyler Eash

All the World's Horses

★★☆☆☆

On until 13 January 2024

I saw this show mid-install and the gallerist’s talk of identity politics hardly served the work’s best interests. But even under ideal conditions, the photo tableaux documenting this Goldsmiths-trained artist’s journey to his Native American roots would have likely annoyed me. The aura of these works doesn’t bridge continents. If they serve the artist’s project of “reindigenization”, it’s only as a grift. 

But Eash’s sculptures – assemblages of bull horn, shotgun cartridges, and wicker – jarred somewhat less. His painterly abstraction on cowhide – halfway between a tie-dye and a Rorschach ink blot – finally broke from his ideological bounds, as only an animal might. But for this world to be worth rebuilding, the artist must choose which ground is best ceded.


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

Pavel Brăila: On the Thousand and Second Night, Moldova in Venice ★★★★☆

Pavel Brăila

On the Thousand and Second Night

★★★★☆

Temporal collapse manifests in magic.

Victor Man: The Absence That We Are at David Zwirner ★★★☆☆

Victor Man

The Absence That We Are

★★★☆☆

Man’s colours are only a small nudge of the wheel from Tretchikoff’s infamous portrait of the Chinese girl.

Slawn at Saatchi Yates ★★☆☆☆

Slawn

★★☆☆☆

Do you like KAWS but find him too expensive?

Matthew Barney, SECONDARY at Sadie Coles HQ ★★★☆☆

Matthew Barney

SECONDARY: light lens parallax

★★★☆☆

Secondary turns the gallery into an American Football stadium. But all the seats in the house are the cheap seats and the game lacks a cheerleader.

Vinca Petersen, Me, Us and Dogs at Edel Assanti ★★★☆☆

Vinca Petersen

Me, Us and Dogs

★★★☆☆

Close up, Petersen’s innocents today conjure ideas of redneck resistance. At scale, of state-marketed utopia. The middle ground is envy.

Dickon Drury at Seventeen ★★★☆☆

Dickon Drury

The Preceding Cart & POV: You are Beans

★★★☆☆

Painting needs prophets, Drury plays a jester.

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