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:

Botond Keresztesi, NPC (No-one Paints Chrysopoeia) at Seventeen ★★★☆☆

Botond Keresztesi

NPC (No-one Paints Chrysopoeia)

★★★☆☆

There is no “too much” in this fantasy meme game.

Dryland, the Greek pavilion in Venice ★★★★☆

Thanasis Deligiannis, Yannis Michalopoulos

Xirómero/Dryland

★★★★☆

It’s Sunday in the village. And the main square is deserted.

Gray Wielebinski, The Red Sun is High, the Blue Low at ICA ★☆☆☆☆

Gray Wielebinski

The Red Sun is High, the Blue Low

★☆☆☆☆

I knew that it was possible to understand art and life less after seeing an exhibition. I didn’t, however, imagine that experiencing Wielebinski’s work twice would only compound such damage.

Willie Doherty, Remnant at Matt’s Gallery ★★★☆☆

Willie Doherty

Remnant

★★★☆☆

Doherty’s tragipoetic timing can be masterly.

The Otolith Group, I See Infinite Distance Between Any Point and Another at greengrassi ★★☆☆☆

The Otolith Group

I See Infinite Distance Between Any Point and Another

★★☆☆☆

The exhibition is a private memorial for Etel Adnan accessible only to members of the art world’s inner circle. And that’s a pity.

RE/SISTERS at Barbican ★★☆☆☆

RE/SISTERS

★★☆☆☆

Too many deadpan landscape photographs turn intrigue into fatigue and into paralysis.

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