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:

Will Gabaldón, Flicker at Union Pacific ★★★☆☆

Will Gabaldón

Flicker

★★★☆☆

Gabaldón reinvents the pastoral for the Instagram generation.

Ed Webb-Ingall, A Bedroom for Everyone at PEER ★☆☆☆☆

Ed Webb-Ingall

A Bedroom for Everyone

★☆☆☆☆

How can art improve the lives of communities? Wrong answers only.

Özgür Kar, Heavy Ground at Emalin ★★★☆☆

Özgür Kar

Heavy Ground

★★★☆☆

Kar’s insight a fly’s life – or, to have it his way, the whole universe – is fleeting.

Liam Gillick, The Sleepwalkers at Maureen Paley ★★★☆☆

Liam Gillick

The Sleepwalkers

★★★☆☆

Gillick’s practice lacks obviously consistent character, save for it is sparseness of means and the ungraspability of its referents.

Christine Ay Tjoe, Lesser Numerator at White Cube ★★☆☆☆

Christine Ay Tjoe

Lesser Numerator

★★☆☆☆

Aj Tjoe’s paintings could make great scenic backdrops to a David Attenborough documentary on the life of wild rodents

A light here required a shadow at Maximillian William ★★★☆☆

Grant Falardeau, Rimantė Mikulovičiūtė, Benjamin Sasserson, Bu Shi, Dylan Williams

A light here required a shadow

★★★☆☆

Catch the wrong end of the spectrum and forever remain obscured.

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