When Forms Come Alive

★★☆☆☆

On until 6 May 2024

This exhibition cannot decide if it’s a tourist attraction or a serious examination of sculpture’s relationship with movement. A survey so loosely framed could only ever be partial. This show, however, tries hard to rewrite the canon even when it needn’t. Where a more classic version of this story would have done with a David Medalla, for example, the Hayward’s account introduces a lesser-known Michel Blazy. This is one-upmanship confused by misreading of art history’s time arrow. Perversely, this method makes some works, like Choi Jeong Hwa’s mass-market totems, look like poor cousins even when they aren’t.

The project also betrays an impulse to read any material, shape, or colour as fad politics. A layer of faux more-than-human environmentalism, for example, is crowbarred into Teresa Solar Abboud’s resin legs and tongues and serves the work no favour. The show’s at least partly Ideological selection criteria, likewise, failed to exclude Marguerite Humeau’s macabre plastic fungi. By contrast, the equally atrocious rollercoaster by EJ Hill and Eva Fàbregas’ giant vibrating dildo can at least be excused as mindless selfie fodder.


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

Machine Painting at Modern Art ★★★★☆

Machine Painting

★★★★☆

Ask DALL-E to paint an abstraction and it’ll confidently produce a museum-worthy clone

Chronoplasticity at Raven Row ★☆☆☆☆

Chronoplasticity

★☆☆☆☆

This may have been a good joke but it’s just too exhausting to look at.

Turner Prize 2024 at Tate Britain ★★☆☆☆

Pio Abad, Claudette Johnson, Jasleen Kaur, Delaine Le Bas

Turner Prize 2024

★★☆☆☆

Even the artists approach this edition with ennui.

Amilia Graham, The Crust at Scatological Rites of All Nations ★★☆☆☆

Amilia Graham

The Crust

★★☆☆☆

Each show lasts no more than three hours, and it’s bring-your-own booze.

Leonardo Drew, Ubiquity II at South London Gallery ★★☆☆☆

Leonardo Drew

Ubiquity II

★★☆☆☆

There are many ways to misunderstand entropy.

Erick Meyenberg, Nos marchábamos, regresábamos siempre, the Mexican pavilion in Venice ★☆☆☆☆

Erick Meyenberg

Nos marchábamos, regresábamos siempre

★☆☆☆☆

Whatever the purpose of this confusion, it’s not to be found in the gallery.

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