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:

Place Revisited at Modern Art ★★★★☆

Richard Aldrich, Prunella Clough, Masanori Tomita, Anh Trần, Terry Winters

Place Revisited

★★★★☆

One suspects the gallery of insider trading.

Haegue Yang, Leap Year at Hayward Gallery ★★☆☆☆

Haegue Yang

Leap Year

★★☆☆☆

The funfair is shuttered, long live the fair.

Ron Nagle, Conniption at Modern Art ★★★★★

Ron Nagle

Conniption

★★★★★

Less is more, as the saying goes. Nagle’s porcelain and resin maquettes are the bare minimum.

Tarek Lakhrissi, Spit at Nicoletti ★★★☆☆

Tarek Lakhrissi

Spit

★★★☆☆

Writing poetry is hard enough.

Robert Rauschenberg, ROCI at Thaddeus Ropac ★★★☆☆

Robert Rauschenberg

ROCI

★★★☆☆

This project outs Rauschenberg as a propagandist if not an outright Fed.

Aziza Kadyri, the Uzbekistan pavilion in Venice ★★★★☆

Aziza Kadyri

Don't Miss the Cue

★★★★☆

This dissonance might be intentional. If it isn’t, so much for the better.

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