Urs Fischer

Scratch & Sniff

★★★☆☆

On until 26 October 2024

If a painting could scream “excess”, Fischer would turn it into a series. A dozen large mixed-media panels collect the detritus of a post-Baudrillardian age: supermarket wares, car adverts, Amazon book listings, and newspaper headlines. These objects obscure pastures of abstract pastels laid in well-defined colours. 

A vinyl photo print which covers the gallery’s not-inconsiderable footprint reproduces the painter’s Californian studio. He has an atelier on each coast, and this isn’t even his first show this year with his London gallery. There’s market demand, but this barrage of signs is of the artist’s own making. 

Fischer does not admit responsibility. In the pictures, however, a lone male figure drowns in all this clutter. His body lies in absurd submission to the surplus that suffocates him. It’s too early for a funeral, yet there’s no other reprieve in this commodity cult.


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

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

Abbas Akhavan

Entre chien et loup

★★★☆☆

Some water lily species are invasive.

Calla Henkel & Max Pitegoff, I.W. Payne, Downtown at 243 Luz ★★★★☆

Calla Henkel & Max Pitegoff, I.W. Payne

Downtown

★★★★☆

This project has no room for breath and even less for context.

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.

Pauline Boty at Gazelli Art House ★★★★☆

Pauline Boty

A Portrait

★★★★☆

This exhibition mixes the woman and her legend, but without the air of mystery she enjoyed during her lifetime.

Jack O’Brien, The Reward at Camden Art Centre ★★☆☆☆

Jack O'Brien

The Reward

★★☆☆☆

No narrative emerges from the tonnes of steel and plastic his work consumed

Siobhan Liddell, Been and Gone at Hollybush Gardens ★★☆☆☆

Siobhan Liddell

Been and Gone

★★☆☆☆

A twee aesthetics native to a grandmother’s mantlepiece collection of tourist souvenirs and devotional figurines.

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