https://artangled.com/ Recent content on Artangled Hugo -- gohugo.io en-us Thu, 25 Aug 2022 21:30:04 +0800 https://artangled.com/posts/gondry-semiose/ Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/gondry-semiose/ I love an intimidating gallery entrance (I wrote a whole blog about my favourites during lockdown) and can’t think of a better one than 15 Orient in New York City. Up several floors in a dilapidated building in a particularly dodgy part of Chinatown, the gallery door is unlabeled, or it was when I was there anyway. Once you’re inside - possibly after a couple of false starts, and you’ve opened the door to one of the textile businesses elsewhere in the building by mistake - the gallery is low lit and damp. https://artangled.com/posts/seurat-courtauld/ Sun, 10 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/seurat-courtauld/ The friend I saw this exhibition with said it’d have been better titled Five Summers. Given that Georges Seurat had just five summer painting expeditions to coastal towns before he died - the cause is unknown - aged 31 in 1891. Poignantly, his seascapes represent five years of work for a young man; an artist who produced only a few dozen canvases in his working life, around a third of which are currently on show at the Courtauld. https://artangled.com/posts/franzen-uffner/ Sun, 03 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/franzen-uffner/ This exhibition was a nice surprise: upstairs in a small gallery on the lower East Side. A series of oils whose subject matter is suspended between those masters of the horizon line: Hiroshi Sugimoto and Mark Rothko. Christian Franzen calls his process “stacking”: painting in horizontal bands, building them up in thin layers until the end result suggests a dawn, a sunset, a landscape or seascape - but also something more abstracted and sublime. https://artangled.com/posts/connor-paley/ Sun, 26 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/connor-paley/ Emily Kraus’ paintings are striking and distinctive, but your appreciation of them increases once you know how they’re made. Trapped in her studio in lockdown, she came up with a large contraption on which canvases can be stretched and rotated with the artist suspended in the middle. Several examples are on show currently at Luhring Augustine’s Tribeca gallery. The works would be arresting enough by themselves, but they’re enhanced by the display. https://artangled.com/posts/connor-paley/ Sun, 19 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/connor-paley/ Doors are one of art history’s most enduring motifs. They’ve often been used as representing a portal between worlds - between the conscious and the unconscious. When closed, secrecy and restraint. When open - revelation. Either way - potentially uncanny. Marcel Duchamp’s Door: 11, rue Larrey (1927), one of his most famous Readymades, was a totally uncanny two way door that was originally built into his Paris studio. Since then it was removed and has been reconstructed in various exhibitions. https://artangled.com/posts/katz-taylor/ Sun, 12 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/katz-taylor/ I had always mentally bucketed Alex Katz as a borderline-misogynist Pop Artist. He rose to fame in the 1960s and is still best known for his offputtingly static portraits of pneumatically-endowed women. But most recently, several exhibitions of his work at the Timothy Taylor gallery in London changed my mind. Lately, he’s become a landscape artist of great sensitivity and freedom. So when I saw the title of this latest exhibition - Various Trees - I had to visit. https://artangled.com/posts/napangati-assanti/ Sun, 05 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/napangati-assanti/ Edel Assanti’s show notes, for this exhibition of three aboriginal Australian artists, state: The paintings in this exhibition use abstraction as a strategy to conceal protected knowledge, depicting sacred landscapes and associated narratives through repetition and careful obfuscation. This seems like a reach, potentially. I say potentially because the motivations of the artists remain obscure to my white, western, global north gaze. I say a reach because of the extraordinarily precious and careful language in the rest of the press release. https://artangled.com/posts/hall-annely-juda/ Sun, 29 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/hall-annely-juda/ When I visited this exhibition, the artist happened to be there too. (This has only happened a few times over the years.) I was tipped off by the gallerist on the reception desk. Nigel Hall was with two women, I think his wife and a gallerist. I was conscious of his presence as I looked at the works on show: sculptures of natural looped forms, sometimes in rusty metal, sometimes in shiny metal, sometimes in polished wood. https://artangled.com/posts/gonzalez-barbican/ Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/gonzalez-barbican/ Throughout her long career, the Colombian artist Beatriz González maintained a daily routine of clipping pictures from newspapers, flyers and other printed ephemera, and repurposing them into large-format, colourful paintings. Her line is smudgy and depersonalising. Her perspective is always in favour of the underdog and against the bully. Starting from the 1960s, her work progressively darkened as the century wore on, and the violence in her native land ebbed and flowed. https://artangled.com/posts/scully-lisson/ Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/scully-lisson/ Sean Scully uses shiny strokes of glossy oil paint on a tough, shiny aluminium backing to create works of considerable heft. Abstract Expressionism, and its presiding deity Mark Rothko, is an obvious influence. But Irish-born Scully is more down-to-earth and less mournfully spiritual than his American predecessor. I saw, and was moved by, a collection of his blue-hued works at Thaddeus Ropac in Paris last year. Then, he advised visitors to listen to Unchained Melody while they looked (lonely rivers running to the sea, to the sea). https://artangled.com/posts/turner-constable-tate/ Sun, 08 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/turner-constable-tate/ This large exhibition lightly remixes the Tate’s vast holdings of both artists’ works. But it feels churlish to complain about that, given the importance of these holdings. Everyone will have a preference between these two giants of British landscape painting, and Constable’s my favourite of the two - a view shared by both Bridget Riley and George Shaw, according to a film accompanying the show! So it was a thrill to see a couple of important Constable loans from American collections, supplementing the Tate-owned works: The White Horse from the Frick in New York and Stoke-by-Nayland, visiting from Chicago. https://artangled.com/posts/becher-spruth-magers/ Sun, 01 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/becher-spruth-magers/ Bernd and Hilla Becher, a husband-and-wife team of photographers, worked in projects, from 1959 until the early 2000s. They documented, with great meticulousness, industrial forms. Factories, cooling towers, gas holders. All in icy black and white. They then exhibited these photographs, grouped thematically. I praised Luigi Ghirri, a similarly celebrated postwar photographer, on this site a couple of weeks ago. Like Ghirri, there’s a mathematical precision with their work. Unlike Ghirri, there is no lyricism, no romanticism, simply a wish for transparent documentation. https://artangled.com/posts/kjaer-jeune/ Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/kjaer-jeune/ Blow-up art, eh. After a seven year gap between writing about inflatables in galleries, now I’m writing about it twice in a month. When I entered the Albion Jeune gallery in Fitzrovia earlier this week, just after opening time, the gallerist hit a button, and a roaring sound echoed off the walls. In a few seconds flat, an enormous velvet purple dragon sprang to life. It lolled on the floor in an oddly provocative pose, its plush skin tumescent. https://artangled.com/posts/duong-houldsworth/ Sun, 15 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/duong-houldsworth/ Where Wound Becomes Water, the titular work for this exhibition, is a five-panel painting of a bomb pond in rural Vietnam. These ponds are man-made: craters from bombs dropped in the Vietnam War of the 1960s and 70s. Duong, who has a Vietnamese background but lives and works in the UK, didn’t paint from life. He was inspired by a series of photos of the ponds from Cambodian photographer Vandy Rattana. https://artangled.com/posts/ghirri-dane/ Sun, 08 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/ghirri-dane/ A brief post this time, about an exhibition to which I’ll return. I’m a confirmed fan of the Italian photographer Luigi Ghirri, who was active from the early 1970s to his death in 1992. He’s showing in London again, across Thomas Dane Gallery’s two spaces. Ghirri combined two things in his work: steely intellectualism and quiet lyricism. He was a surveyor by trade, as well as being an extensive essayist. This lends a certain mathematical certainty and rigour to his compositions. https://artangled.com/posts/condo-coles/ Sun, 01 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/condo-coles/ January means it’s time for Condo: an annual event in which many of London’s commercial galleries partner up with a space from another country, and show… something new. My coverage of these events has been pretty sporadic over the years. But this time, I found it behind a thick, offwhite curtain in the upper floor of Sadie Coles’ gallery on Kingly Street. A giant inflatable PVC ecstasy pill, conceived by Berlin-based artist Zuzanna Czebatul. https://artangled.com/posts/weslowska-werner/ Sun, 25 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/weslowska-werner/ For some strange reason, these paintings from Poland-born, London-based Barbara Wesołowska made me think of Victor Man. They’re tonally similar but technically very different: the Romanian mystic aims for figurative precision, Wesołowska for an earthy blurriness. Her figures, currently haunting the galleries at Michael Werner in Mayfair, are barely legible beneath the layers of chalk-like oil paint and shiny shellac. But they’re there all the same, if you look for long enough, in person. https://artangled.com/posts/hambling-lucas-rossi/ Sun, 18 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/hambling-lucas-rossi/ Apparently Paula Rego used to take the bus from her home in Hampstead to her studio in Kentish Town each day. A touchingly down to earth detail for an artist who hit such heights of fame and accomplishment. She ended her days in 2022 a Dame of the British Empire, a veteran of multiple monograph museum retrospectives, and having established a beautiful foundation in her native Cascais, Portugal. I took a trip to that foundation late last year as a sort of pilgrimage. https://artangled.com/posts/hambling-lucas-rossi/ Sun, 11 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/hambling-lucas-rossi/ The jokey title sets the tone for this exhibition, organised by Frankie Rossi Art Projects and co-hosted on opposite sides of Bury Street, at Hazlitt Holland-Hiibbert and Sadie Coles HQ. These artists, who made their names in the 80s and 90s, are now well into grande dame status, though Hambling is a generation older. They’re collectively successful, which explains the self-referential nature of the art on show at both venues. https://artangled.com/posts/richter-flv/ Sun, 04 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/richter-flv/ I find it impossible to write a summary of the hours I spent at this exhibition: a whole-career survey of Gerhard Richter. Only an institution of this size - the enormous ship-like Fondation Louis Vuitton, stranded at the edge of Paris - could have attempted such a thing, considering the awesome, restless, relentless variety of his artistic output. So, I give up. Instead I present Wald (3), from 1990, in the early days of Richter’s trademark squeegee-produced abstracts. https://artangled.com/posts/top-5-2025/ Sun, 21 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/top-5-2025/ Somehow, this is the eighth annual round-up of my top art shows of the year. (See previous from 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024.) Aside from a couple of pandemic-induced pauses, I’ve blogged every week since I started this project in January 2018. Back then, I was an enthusiastic gallery-goer and note taker with a poor memory. I wanted a way of pausing and reflecting on what I’d seen, before it slipped away. https://artangled.com/posts/brander-vardaxoglou/ Sun, 14 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/brander-vardaxoglou/ Lewis Brander painted these large-scale works in his studio in Whitechapel, east London. They’re being shown to the west in a small gallery in a dark mews in Soho. The works are bright and ethereal, the oil paint thinly applied in featherlight strokes to his linen canvases. He worked on many of them over the course of years, returning to them for touchups as the seasons passed. The paintings tend to show views of clouds, probably at sunrise and twilight. https://artangled.com/posts/wool-gagosian/ Sun, 07 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/wool-gagosian/ You can test whether great art is actually great art - it’ll be great regardless of where and how it’s displayed. This is a test Christopher Wool fails, based on a tiny sample size: a pair of exhibitions and a single viewer - me. Wool shows rarely. A retrospective at the Guggenheim in 2014, and nothing following that until three new exhibitions over the past 18 months: first in New York City, now in London and Marfa, Texas. https://artangled.com/posts/ndife-holtermann/ Sun, 30 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/ndife-holtermann/ Just before lockdown, I wrote about an inspiring Sigmar Polke show I’d been to. It centred on a recreation of the German artist’s 1960s Kartoffelhaus, or, “potato house”. This was a neat, gabled, garden-shed like building, with gridded slats of wood for walls, and potatoes nailed to every crossover. The potatoes’ chaotic fecundity, shooting out tentacle-like sprouts, made it seem like they were breaking out from the gridded regularity of their wooden jailhouse. https://artangled.com/posts/thiebaud-courtauld/ Sun, 23 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/thiebaud-courtauld/ There are no sinister overtones or dark corners in Wayne Thiebaud’s work. The American artist, who died in 2021 but is best known for his 1960s oil paintings of cakes and pies, aimed for abundance, even joy. As an artistic stance, this is quite radical, especially when compared with his peers: the butch murkiness of Rauschenberg and Rothko; Warhol’s alienated cool; the Minimalists’… minimalism. Cakes (1963) I was pretty enraptured by the two previous Thiebaud shows I’d seen, one in London in 2017, one in New York last year. https://artangled.com/posts/de-burca-cristea/ Sun, 16 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/de-burca-cristea/ I came across Miriam de Búrca’s small gold-leaf-on-glass works in a group show at Cristea Roberts. The conceit of the exhibition is ecological disaster. Accordingly, de Búrca sees this series, which portray skeletal dead trees, as reflecting the “existential reckoning” of “our current state of systemic and ecological turmoil”. Each of the works on show is titled after the reason the tree died: war, drought, forest fire. The artist adds: “I am joining in the call to confront this legacy, and ultimately to prompt discussion about where we want to take things from here. https://artangled.com/posts/chong-ai/ Sun, 09 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/chong-ai/ This exhibition showcases what look like empty egg sacs and shedded skins. They’re created, by Singaporean artist Weixin Quek Chong, through clever use of silicone and mesh. Taken together, they left me feeling pleasantly horrified. The location really helps. The exhibition is staged in the gallery’s basement, inside an empty, disused swimming pool, tiled in turquoise and white. A changing room and sauna on the same level are used as side galleries. https://artangled.com/posts/barreiro-no-no/ Sun, 02 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/barreiro-no-no/ I saw a lot of really good art in Lisbon, including this exhibition, from the Spanish sculptor Pablo Barreiro. The scene seemed defiantly, even self-defeatingly local: Barreiro is from unusually far afield, next door in Spain. Most of the artists on show were Portuguese, and unfamiliar to me. I mentioned this to the (Italian) gallerist at the Barreiro show. They’re insular, they’re aloof, she said. Adding that Carlos Bunga - who has an upcoming show at a city museum and whose recent London exhibition I featured on here - was really a rare example of a contemporary artist from Portugal who’s well-known abroad. https://artangled.com/posts/welch-swarbrooke/ Sun, 26 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/welch-swarbrooke/ I’ve been writing recently about several fey inter-war-to-mid-century characters: John Craxton, Edward Burra and Keith Vaughan. Now it’s the turn of the fey-est and most obscure of the lot: the writer and artist Denton Welch, the subject of a small exhibition at John Swarbrooke’s gallery on Fitzroy Square. The show notes claim that, such is Welch’s obscurity, that this is his first “in over forty years”. To mark the occasion, the gallery has produced a smart, yellow-bound book, introduced by Alan Hollinghurst - our greatest contemporary writer-about-the-fey. https://artangled.com/posts/gursky-white-cube/ Sun, 19 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/gursky-white-cube/ I visited the exhibition on a late opening at Frieze week, so it was pretty packed and there were drinks. The disadvantage of having this fancy crowd around was that I couldn’t really get close to Andreas Gursky’s intricate but icy-cool photos. The advantage was that I overheard some gossip: that the great man hadn’t wanted to put the show on at all, but was forced into it by the gallery for commercial reasons. https://artangled.com/posts/man-zwirner/ Sun, 12 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/man-zwirner/ In his paintings, Victor Man consistently references colour-drenched early 20th century symbolism and expressionism, viewed through a filter of gothic darkness. Several of these creepily addictive paintings are currently on show at David Zwirner. Man’s portraits share impassive facial expressions, bright green skin and scary surroundings. They’re beset by skulls, ghosts and thorny plants. They’re stoically stone faced despite these apparent torments. Maternity (Curve Delle Anime) (2025) To hammer home the spooky, backward-looking nature of the art, the show’s press release quotes from a crepuscular text by Georg Trakl, an Austrian expressionist poet who died in 1914. https://artangled.com/posts/gribbon-general/ Sun, 05 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/gribbon-general/ This group show is themed loosely around the “female body as a site of tension”. The perfect topic for the American painter Jenna Gribbon, who’s featured in the exhibition. It’s a small work called Seaside Wrestlers, from 2018. But while the title suggests something playful and sunny, what’s depicted is darker. Quite literally, considering Gribbon’s wrestlers are wrestling at night, lit by the moon. The sea is a few careless green streaks. https://artangled.com/posts/mckinney-hetzler/ Sun, 28 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/mckinney-hetzler/ I’d first seen (and loved) Danielle Mckinney’s paintings when she showed in New York last year. Before I’d even heard of the buzz phrase “quiet luxury”. A phrase which her works - almost always showing a woman in a well-appointed interior in a state of repose - exemplify. Stillness and silence abound in the galleries - both at Marianne Boesky in New York last spring and at Max Hetzler in London right now. https://artangled.com/posts/tajima-pace/ Sun, 21 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/tajima-pace/ The most interesting thing about Mika Tajima’s art is the materials she uses. Though it has considerable aesthetic appeal too. In a new collection of works at PACE, these materials include marble, rose quartz and “thermoformed PETG”, whatever that is. Whatever it is, it looks great. The latter set of works I mentioned above are collectively named Art d’Ameublement (the art of furnishing), which seems to be a nod to their decorative prettiness. https://artangled.com/posts/francolino-mazzoleni/ Sun, 14 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/francolino-mazzoleni/ “Contemplation is necessary to reach inspiration.” So says Italian artist Andrea Francolino, whose experiments in concrete have been on display at Mazzoleni this summer. The exhibition’s title is a word from Classical times, translating as (in Greek) the highest intellectual faculty in the pursuit of intelligible knowledge and (in Latin, ‘cum-templum’) a consecrated space. A weighty word, then. It matches Francolino’s quite portentious art, which to me seemed inspired less by the ancients than by the 20th century. https://artangled.com/posts/davidson-bains/ Sun, 07 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/davidson-bains/ What did you think, said the gallerist, as I made to leave. I never know how performative to be on the rare occasions I get the question: do I leave it at “oh, great”? Do I reformulate something from the press release? Or do I give my actual opinion? This time around (on the final afternoon of this exhibition), I went for the latter. It reminds me of festival tents in a field, I said. https://artangled.com/posts/sparrow-ingram/ Sun, 31 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/sparrow-ingram/ Sometimes popular things are good! Speaking of which, I really enjoyed my visit to the Bourdon Street Chippy, a deeply people-pleasing summer show put on by Lyndsey Ingram in their Mayfair space. Despite it being up a quiet backstreet and having very limited opening hours - standard fare for a commercial gallery - it was still rammed with tourists and families. Understandably. The gallery rooms have been transformed into an amazingly convincing old school fish and chip shop: the kind with a glass-fronted counter, formica-topped tables and a noticeboard. https://artangled.com/posts/dmytrenko-pm-am/ Sun, 24 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/dmytrenko-pm-am/ The Ukraine-born, Venice-based painter Daria Dmytrenko mashes up spiritual influences, producing work that’s both sacral and profane. Some recent paintings are currently on show at PM/AM gallery in Fitzrovia, and one untitled work, on gold-leaf and board, stood out. Untitled (2025) Dmytrenko is influenced by Slavic mythology and childhood folk tales. She often portrays Bolotnik, spirit of the swamps and rivers, who’s covered in algae and scales. The figures are blurrily biomorphic, scaly, with eyes that also suggest cloacal holes. https://artangled.com/posts/michelotto-amati/ Sun, 17 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/michelotto-amati/ I wanted to visit this exhibition after reading an appreciative review. The artist collected some objects that, together, apparently reflect banality and ennui. (The title of the show, which is the date in which it opened, is similarly, deliberately, banal.) I’ve read that the show centres around a bus stop and bench. Onto these objects, the artist has transferred images of boarded up and derelict buildings. The reviewer who’s actually been to the show says it’s “a familiar sign of economic decline, both managed and unforeseen”. https://artangled.com/posts/michelotto-amati/ Sun, 10 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/michelotto-amati/ This week, I’m writing about a bum on a bed. This particular bed is in the basement of Alice Amati, a small gallery in Fitzrovia that is hosting a group show this summer. The bed (and the bum) was painted in oils by Inès Michelotto, an Italy-born, London-based artist who cites portraitists like Alice Neel and Paula Rego as influences. Accordingly, there’s quite some psychological intensity to these oil-painted glutes. The work is called ‘I love this side of you’. https://artangled.com/posts/burra-tate/ Sun, 03 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/burra-tate/ This new Tate show of Edward Burra - one of the artists I’ve covered most on here - is the first retrospective in London in 40 years. Although Burra as a person was elusive and publicity shy (giving one filmed interview total during his long life), he isn’t an obscure figure. He had a monograph show at the Tate prior to his death, a Hayward exhibition in 1985 and a large show at Pallant House in Chichester in 2011. https://artangled.com/posts/thek-dane/ Sun, 27 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/thek-dane/ This exhibition is a lyrical, pastel-shaded counterpart to the solid and stark Peter Hujar show that shook me up earlier this year. Meeting in the 1950s and dying within a year of each other in the late 1980s, Paul Thek and Hujar were lovers, friends and close collaborators. While Hujar went for icy formal perfection in his photos, Thek’s paintings are dreamy, almost warm. Both men found their ultimate artistic catharsis in New York City. https://artangled.com/posts/hildebrandt-rech/ Sun, 20 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/hildebrandt-rech/ This artist explores the possibilities of tape - cassette tape, VHS tape, “leader tape”, whatever that is - in his works. He’s been doing this since the late 1990s, when much of analogue media was in its early death throes. In 2025, tape is long gone - the music has stopped. The show notes for Hildebrandt’s latest collection of tape-based works, exhibited currently at Almine Rech in London, claim to see a “Warholian bent” in Hildebrandt’s art. https://artangled.com/posts/jarman-wilkinson-black/ Sun, 13 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/jarman-wilkinson-black/ I arrived at the gallery for this exhibition one sweaty lunchtime. Inside, a bored posh child and her father were on their way out. “That wasn’t too long, was it?” he asked her, hopefully. “That was 10 hours,” she replied. Silly him for bringing her! I can’t think of a less child-friendly artist than Derek Jarman, who died of AIDS in 1994 and made much of his work in the dark shadow of his diagnosis. https://artangled.com/posts/london-saatchi-yates/ Sun, 06 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/london-saatchi-yates/ On one hand, you could say this exhibition is invigoratingly ambitious. On the other, you could say it’s just an epic, empty show-off. I’m in the middle, somewhere. The dense hang could be a nod to the Summer Exhibition, just up the road at the Royal Academy. (The fact that the exhibition dates almost exactly match - with the Saatchi Yates show opening five days earlier and closing on the same day - could be a coincidence, or could be cheekiness. https://artangled.com/posts/rondinone-sadie/ Sun, 29 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/rondinone-sadie/ I visited the rainbow body the week before Pride in London. Regent Street, a few metres away from the gallery and part of the route of the parade, was festooned with rainbow flags. The Swiss-born artist’s used rainbows over the decades of his practice too, though for a different purpose. Rondinone has argued that the rainbow is a “bridge between everything and everyone” - a statement of the universal that devolves into meaninglessness. https://artangled.com/posts/hepworth-ordovas/ Sun, 22 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/hepworth-ordovas/ I visited this exhibition on a hot weekday lunchtime. It’s a typical offering from this small gallery: small and starry, with a very loose conceit. (This time around, basically, sculptures.) In between the Calder mobile and Warhol silkscreen though, I saw something beautiful. Barbara Hepworth’s Bronze Form (Patmos), conceived and cast in 1962–63, was made after a visit to the titular Greek island. A version of this work is held in the Barbara Hepworth Museum in St Ives, run by Tate. https://artangled.com/posts/zuccheri-kouvali/ Sun, 15 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/zuccheri-kouvali/ Luigi Zuccheri liked animals and disliked people. He made this preference clear in his work. From the postwar years until his death in 1974, the Venetian painter produced small landscapes in muddy egg tempera. Each composition maroons tiny, barely delineated figures among oversized animals, trees and plants. Over time, this inverted perspective grew more extreme. His blameless beasts grew bigger. The humans shrank. The Sylvia Kouvali gallery, which hosts a small Zuccheri exhibition in London this summer, calls all this a “delicate exercise of misanthropy”. https://artangled.com/posts/wright-camden/ Sun, 08 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/wright-camden/ Richard Wright’s exhibition at Camden Art Centre is beautiful and left me feeling a bit sad. Apparently working without assistants, he has painted detailed patterns in acrylic and pencil directly onto the walls of the gallery. But they’re only temporary and will be painted over when the show closes later this month. That’s part of the point. Wright has worked this way for years. His site-specific wall paintings are made to disappear - made to make the viewer regret their imminent obliteration. https://artangled.com/posts/longstreth-hetzler/ Sun, 01 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/longstreth-hetzler/ The title of Jake Longstreth’s current exhibition at Max Hetzler is as clear and descriptive as the work on show. These are California Landscapes, painted from the state the artist lives and works. Dry, open spaces filled with trees, bushes, and topped with clear blue skies. In Longstreth’s compositions, the foliage surrounds pristine-looking man-made structures: a NASA laboratory, the bright blue flank of an Amazon Prime truck, a mirrored-glass building reflecting the sky with a single car out front. https://artangled.com/posts/noori-italia/ Sun, 25 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/noori-italia/ Nazanin Noori’s THE ECHO OF PROTEST IS DISTANT TO THE PROTEST, currently on view at Auto Italia, asks us an unsettling question: who is saying sorry, and to whom? In the main gallery, the sculptural work THE PARTY OF GOD / WELL DID WE LIVE features the Farsi word معذرت (“I’m sorry”) cut in bright yellow acrylic, suspended against a garish green plastic curtain. The red carpet underfoot adds another layer of theatricality. https://artangled.com/posts/paladino-massimo/ Sun, 18 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/paladino-massimo/ “My culture has always been rooted in a certain Mediterranean spirit, but also in darkness, in folk legends,” says Mimmo Paladino. The Italian artist has brought some of this spirit to the chintzy upstairs space of Massimo de Carlo in London, with some sinister installations using bronze, wood and gold. The standout is the untitled work pictured below. It centres on a painting on board, backed by gold leaf, like an International Gothic saint’s portrait. https://artangled.com/posts/vaughan-brooke/ Sun, 11 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/vaughan-brooke/ In the years after World War II, Keith Vaughan worked at an ad agency and painted lyrical portraits of brawny but vulnerable-looking men on the side. He was well connected and successful, with E.M. Forster and Christopher Isherwood among his collectors. Prunella Clough was a close friend. Extracts from Vaughan’s extensive diaries provide some of the darkest moments in the recently-published Some Men in London anthologies, which cover the capital’s queer lives between the years 1945 and 1967. https://artangled.com/posts/catala-canal/ Sun, 04 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/catala-canal/ This show involves an impressive amount of production infrastructure: darkened galleries, humidifiers and “hydrophobic coating”, whatever that is. It’s needed, because its images are excruciatingly fragile and ephemeral: fingertip drawings, of a kind rubbed on a steamy glass shower screen. (The shower screens in the gallery are actually plexiglas boxes, which look kind of the same, especially when it’s dark.) What’s the point of the show? The artist answers with a question. https://artangled.com/posts/friedrich-met/ Sun, 27 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/friedrich-met/ I watched the recent remake of Nosferatu on the plane to New York. Even on a tiny back-of-seat screen, I was bowled over by the film’s vibe: craggy mountains, gothic ruins, the skeletal shadows of ship masts in the fog. The vibe is pinched wholesale by the film’s director from Caspar David Friedrich. Maybe I was mentally primed to notice that, given there’s an outstanding exhibition of Friedrich’s work, on at the Met. https://artangled.com/posts/patel-temple/ Sun, 20 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/patel-temple/ The works in this exhibition stand in ironic contrast to their lavish surroundings. Two Temple Place was the Astor family’s base in Victorian London, and its interior architecture is testament to some of the era’s wildest excesses. Downstairs it’s heavy mahogany and marble. Upstairs, there’s a gilded frieze and some large stained glass windows, neo-gothic style. These days, Two Temple Place is run by a charitable foundation and opens its doors for a free show every year. https://artangled.com/posts/paul-hibbert-miro/ Sun, 13 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/paul-hibbert-miro/ Celia Paul is best known for being one of Lucian Freud’s many victimised romantic partners. But she is also increasingly famous these days for the “austere beauty” of her own work. That spot-on description is from the novelist Rachel Cusk, whose recent profile of Paul also contained a gasp-inducingly cruel fact: the artist’s London flat was bought for her by Freud on an unsellably short lease. So she’s still trapped by him, physically as well as reputationally. https://artangled.com/posts/caniaris-kilchmann/ Sun, 06 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/caniaris-kilchmann/ Vlassis Caniaris was an old-fashioned, bleeding heart, artist-activist. His work is both out of step with our more cynical times and completely relevant to them. He doesn’t seem to be exhibited much. This retrospective is the first in France since the artist’s death in 2011, though he was also shown at London’s Hellenic Centre in 2023. The new Paris exhibition focuses on Caniaris’ sculptures to startling effect. Active from the 1960s, the artist was a relentless critic of capitalism, his constant focus was on those it damaged. https://artangled.com/posts/tint-upsilon/ Sun, 30 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/tint-upsilon/ By coincidence, the artist Francine Tint was in the gallery when I visited her exhibition. Supported by a walking stick and accompanied by two men called David, she was on her way to lunch. On her way out, she said that she hadn’t been to London for 52 years. Tint owes an obvious debt to Abstract Expressionism, citing Helen Frankenthaler as a major influence. Back in the day, she was also friends and associates with Clement Greenberg, the critic who helped define the movement. https://artangled.com/posts/van-son-general/ Sun, 23 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/van-son-general/ Joanna van Son’s paintings, eight of which are collected in this show, draw from a wide range of inspirations, but are distinctively her own. She leaves big stretches of her unprimed linen canvases unpainted-on, save for scattered written notes that brought to mind Cy Twombly’s word paintings. She uses thick impasto for the remainder, building up craggy mountains of oil paint, sometimes creamy-pink, sometimes with a livid orangey-red undertone that’s pure Frank Auerbach. https://artangled.com/posts/ghil-kearsey/ Sun, 16 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/ghil-kearsey/ There’s something quietly obsessive about Jessica Woo Jung Ghil’s paintings, several of which are currently on show at Kearsey & Gold. They’re not entirely abstract: each is a depopulated landscape, vaguely suggesting the sun, the moon, the sea, some hills, or some combination of these. Their calming colours drift and meld, though never randomly. Probably their obsessive vibe comes from how they’re made. Ghil builds them through endless thin layers of oil paint. https://artangled.com/posts/california-taylor/ Sun, 09 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/california-taylor/ I’ve never been to California. One day! But I can travel in my mind I suppose, helped on my way by this group show. For the exhibition, Timothy Taylor has brought together a set of artists who were born in California, or work there. Including June Edmonds, whose canvases bring together tightly-packed finger waves of solid acrylic paint (pictured below). They reminded me both of mandalas and cocktail umbrellas. Spirituality and sunshine: a shot of pure colour, hard and flat. https://artangled.com/posts/duffeleer-rosseels/ Sun, 02 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/duffeleer-rosseels/ The work pictured below is called Let them eat cake I. It was created in 2020 and retitled in 2025. Its original title was No Cookie. It was cast in porcelain and covered in fake gold leaf. It’s currently on show in a vitrine, in a gallery, in Antwerp’s gallery district. Which is quite funny, considering it’s… a cookie. Quite an iconic cookie though, if you’re Belgian. Lotus makes Biscoff: the small, dense biscuit that’s ubiquitous on supermarket shelves, airline snack trolleys and vending machines around the world. https://artangled.com/posts/ponsard-heide/ Sun, 23 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/ponsard-heide/ Just like Joseph Kosuth, whose works in neon I featured last week, Nathalie Junod Ponsard’s art is about achieving simple light effects through everyday materials. Both artists share a sense of austerity. Both would agree that to be fancy in their materials is to obscure their meaning. But where Kosuth is icily intellectual and concept-first, Ponsard’s art is more down-home, even shabby. Patrick Heide Contemporary Art, where Ponsard is currently showing, is a gallery in a slightly rundown, sticky-carpeted Georgian house off the Edgware Road. https://artangled.com/posts/kosuth-spruth-magers/ Sun, 16 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/kosuth-spruth-magers/ Joseph Kosuth is one of the most severe and strict of conceptual artists. He’s all about the idea. To him, a viewer getting aesthetic pleasure from his works would be besides the point. I hope he doesn’t mind, then, that that’s exactly what I got from his latest London exhibition, a small but career-spanning collection of prints and neons at Sprüth Magers. The neons especially. I visited on a dark winter evening, just before closing, promising the gallery assistant on the front desk that I wouldn’t be too long. https://artangled.com/posts/lorenzato-rech/ Sun, 09 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/lorenzato-rech/ This small group show features four mid-20th century Brazilian artists, three of whom aren’t included in the massive Royal Academy exhibition on the same theme over the road. I assume this was a deliberate curatorial choice on the commercial gallery’s part, to fill in some gaps in the institutional record. Lucky us, given the artists’ quality and distinctiveness. To me, the biggest RA omission is Amadeo Luciano Lorenzato, who has three of his little oil-on-board landscapes in the Almine Rech show. https://artangled.com/posts/hujar-raven/ Sun, 02 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/hujar-raven/ Andy Warhol called the photographer Peter Hujar “the boy who never blinked”. This exhibition, which focuses on Hujar’s work in the late 70s and early 80s, lends evidence to that view. The show is cacophonously hung, mixing up subjects and chronologies seemingly at random. But, taken together, these photographs form a tightly coherent body of work: linked by their medium (silver print), their format (square), and above all by their creator’s relentless, unblinking focus. https://artangled.com/posts/szakats-benington/ Sun, 26 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/szakats-benington/ Maria Szakats uses a format that is traditionally domestic, modest and feminine: small embroidery panels. The artist laboriously stitches a cotton toile backing together, then tops it off with long, fluffy strands of mohair. Sometimes, she then worries the surface of the finished work with a metal brush. The format matches the subject matter: portraits of women, trees and flowers, such as Pivoine, pictured below. So far, so traditional. But the contrast between the materials pulls focus in interesting ways. https://artangled.com/posts/kim-herald/ Sun, 19 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/kim-herald/ This exhibition is hosted by one of London’s more aloof gallery spaces, accessed via an unmarked doorway in an unpromising building in Bethnal Green. This past weekend, it was more singular still; the other galleries in the district were all in on the annual Condo festival, and were full of people as a result. This one was empty. The gallery didn’t participate in Condo. All of which seemed suitable for the work it had on show. https://artangled.com/posts/carbonell-carpenters/ Sun, 12 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/carbonell-carpenters/ The lines between fine art and really high-end product design are thoroughly blurred. At what point does an artwork for sale become a product for sale? Let’s say we can call a work a product, and its artist a designer, if it could be used for anything other than contemplation. By that definition, Nacho Carbonell is a designer. He makes lamps, tables and chairs that delightfully echo chrysalids and coccoons. https://artangled.com/posts/electric-dreams-tate/ Sun, 05 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/electric-dreams-tate/ I was taken aback by the blissed-out optimism of this exhibition, which collects tech-oriented art from (roughly) the 1950s to the 1990s. The birth of the computer age led to new artistic possibilities: kinetic sculptures, algorithmicly-driven painting, computer-generated video art. The show made me realise that it also coincided with another cultural moment: flower power - peace and love - the dawning age of Aquarius. Hippies, basically. One room around half way through summed it up: Carlos Cruz-Diez’s Chromointerferent Environment, originally shown in the early 1970s. https://artangled.com/posts/top-5-2024/ Sun, 22 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/top-5-2024/ This is the seventh annual round-up of my top art shows of the year. See previous from 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023, if you don’t believe me. I can hardly believe it myself. “If I wake up on Sunday morning and the half hour or so it will take to write and add that week’s post seems too much of a chore, then the project will end, entirely unnoticed by anyone who’s not me,” I wrote in my end-of-2023 post. https://artangled.com/posts/balliano-cardi/ Sun, 15 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/balliano-cardi/ This is the first show in the UK of this Italian painter, who specialises in “geometric abstraction”. Balliano originally studied photography, and there’s a suggestion of photo negatives in these new works: glitchily repeated loops and curves, picked out on linen canvases with a mixture of gesso, resin and plaster. Balliano’s loops suggest circuitry, pipework, something man-made, machine-like. They’re architectural and monolithic. But the loops are never perfect and nor are the surfaces of his canvases. https://artangled.com/posts/wearing-ikon/ Sun, 08 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/wearing-ikon/ Everyone at the Ikon Gallery seemed very well-meaning and eager to help, when I visited one rainy Friday afternoon in December. A school party was welcomed joyfully at the front desk as I arrived; a volunteer called after me as I tried to leave, just checking if I’d properly appreciated one of the sculptures in the entrance hall. This is all a testament to them, but also made me feel on edge: with my headphones rammed in my ears, trying to avoid eye contact with the volunteers in each gallery, ready to pounce and provide unasked-for context about this or that work. https://artangled.com/posts/chapuy-mor/ Sun, 01 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/chapuy-mor/ The young French painter and craftsman Malo Chapuy uses a clever conceit in this exhibition at mor charpentier, a standout from what I saw in my trip to Paris this week. At first glance, his works look medieval. They’re small, on panels, executed with egg tempera, with frames that look hundreds of years old and lush craquelure perforating their surfaces. In fact, they were painted this year, and contain subtle anachronisms. https://artangled.com/posts/wood-gagosian/ Sun, 24 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/wood-gagosian/ “I think it happens to be that I have a broad audience right now,” the American painter Jonas Wood has said. “Maybe that’s not always the case, but the reason I paint is not for those people. I think it’s for my own mental health and for my own sort of goals as a painter, but I’m aware of the viewer.” Well, the broad audience bit is definitely correct: Wood has been represented by mega-gallery Gagosian for several years, and has taken over its largest London space this autumn. https://artangled.com/posts/dumas-frith/ Sun, 17 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/dumas-frith/ “These works are heavy with the weight of a bad conscience, deceased lovers, past failures and present atrocities,” says Marlene Dumas, introducing this new London exhibition. “To paint is an apology for painting.” Frith Street Gallery’s show notes allude to her “grief both personal and universal”. Dumas’ partner, brother and a very close friend have all died recently. Unsurprisingly, the works on show here are pretty much unremittingly unsettling and grim. https://artangled.com/posts/pistoletto-robilant/ Sun, 10 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/pistoletto-robilant/ I last covered the Italian artist Michelangelo Pistoletto just after the beginning of the Artangled project, in early 2018. I was a bit mean to describe his use of mirrors in his art, ever since he got started as part of the arte povera movement in the 1960s, as making him a “one trick pony”. But it’s a fair comment. Then as now, all the works are mirrored. That said, the compositions are quite different. https://artangled.com/posts/walker-corrias/ Sun, 03 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/walker-corrias/ When asked in an interview which artist she’d most like to have lunch with, the London-based painter Ella Walker said… Giotto. “I would love to hear about daily life in the late middle ages,” she added. Walker’s new paintings, on show currently at Pilar Corrias, testify to this preference. With their static flatness and washed-out fresco-like colours, they give a definite early Renaissance vibe, reminding me most of all of Piero della Francesca. https://artangled.com/posts/hank-nagy/ Sun, 27 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/hank-nagy/ I have only seen this upstairs gallery open a total of twice in all the years I’ve been gallery going in Mayfair (slightly longer than the seven plus years the Artangled project has been going). But they were two good exhibitions - one on Egon Schiele in 2018, the other on Alfred Kubin’s drawings the previous year. When I used to visit Lévy Gorvy’s old space, on the same floor as this gallery, I used to peer in through the glass partitions in Richard Nagy’s front door. https://artangled.com/posts/murphy-colnaghi/ Sun, 20 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/murphy-colnaghi/ This is a seasonally appropriate exhibition, at a time when the kerbsides of Mayfair are carpeted with the mulch of fallen leaves. It was misty in London the week I went to Conaghi; the clocks went back a few days later. The works in this show ranged vastly from an ancient Egyptian sarcophagus face to a luminous 2002 memento mori portrait from Maria Lassnig. In between, there’s a number of paintings informed by the Christian tradition of vanitas: still lives and skulls, there to remind viewers, then and now, of the transience of earthly goods - earthly beauty. https://artangled.com/posts/stone-kings/ Sun, 13 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/stone-kings/ I saw this heartbreaking exhibition in the last weekend of its six-month run. I went on a recommendation from someone who’s taste I trust. I hadn’t known it was on, or that King’s College’s Maughan Library even existed, let alone contained a medieval chapel. But there were whole lives and eras contained in this row of vitrines, inside this 800 year old room. The display was put together by the British-born, US-based artist Dylan Jonas Stone, who has built up a collection of private diaries over the years, which he’s exhibited from time to time. https://artangled.com/posts/hume-hibbert-magers/ Sun, 06 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/hume-hibbert-magers/ I’m not sure why there are two Gary Hume shows open currently, one each side of Piccadilly, but I’m not complaining. His serene works on aluminium, executed with unmixed household gloss paint, are unmistakably his, standing apart from his brasher 90s YBA counterparts. As demonstrated by the two exhibitions - one, focusing on the early works at Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert; the other, of new work, at Sprüth Magers - Hume’s style has been consistent since he came to fame, though the mediums he uses have broadened out a bit. https://artangled.com/posts/davenport-cristea/ Sun, 29 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/davenport-cristea/ This artist’s made a move from stripes to splotches, and I’m pleased to see it. Recently, Ian Davenport’s works have been based around bold vertical bands of colour. He let his bright acrylic paints drip down his aluminium surfaces, and let them pool and mingle interestingly at the bottom. This latest collection of paintings and prints, on show now at Cristea Roberts, show a new direction. Set Piece (2024) This new direction is pictured above, in a three metre wide work on paper with the tongue in cheek title, Set Piece. https://artangled.com/posts/maniatakos-kouvali/ Sun, 22 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/maniatakos-kouvali/ Yiannis Maniatakos had a unique method for producing his works: symphonic landscapes of the sea beds that surrounded his home on the Greek island of Tinos. A keen diver, he painted them underwater. First, he prepped his canvases with a special water-repellent primer. Then, he went out to sea, weighted himself and his canvasses to the sea bed, and pressed his oil paints on with force. There are four works of his currently on show at Sylvia Kouvali - the pitilessly floor-lit, wall-tiled, one room gallery that was formerly known as Rodeo. https://artangled.com/posts/capper-jeune/ Sun, 15 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/capper-jeune/ James Capper used to work on farm machinery. He brings an engineer’s eye to his art, which is attention-grabbing and cheeky. Two types of works, both using industrial marine paint on paper, are on show currently at Albion Jeune. First a series of vaguely James Turrell-like disks, made up of different coloured concentric circles. Then a set of what look a lot like blood spatters, reaching back to Pollock. Perhaps it’s a weak spot that Capper’s art gains substance when you learn about their means of production. https://artangled.com/posts/alrai-william/ Sun, 08 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/alrai-william/ Emii Alrai, born in Blackpool, went somewhere glamorous and exciting last November. The artist was invited to a residency at the Villa Medici in Rome. Back in London, she’s recreated a very specific part of her trip for this show at Maximillian William. As well as being an artist, Alrai is a museum registrar. When in Rome, she visited Lake Nemi, an area rich in archaeological remains from classical times. The London exhibition merges and alchemises these strands of her experience: the gallery is recast as a fake archaeology museum, with fictional exhibits. https://artangled.com/posts/karlson-soft/ Sun, 01 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/karlson-soft/ Artists are often inspired by architectural ruins. You can view Maren Karlson’s rough, depressing oils and cast a through-line back centuries to painters like Hubert Robert and Canaletto. But while her artistic ancestors focused on the remains of classical temples and houses, bathed in pretty Mediterranean light, Karlson took inspiration from something more humdrum - colder - uglier. The eight oil and graphite pencil works on display right now at Soft Opening are reimagined versions of old photos from a German chemicals factory. https://artangled.com/posts/grey-skarstedt/ Sun, 25 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/grey-skarstedt/ I saw this group show with perfect timing: on a day in which it felt like the weather was turning, from summer to autumn. I’d awoken that day to crepscular gloom - a grey room, with a grey day ahead. The colour grey is what links the works on show here, a starry collection from KAWS to Gerhard Richter, as reflects the financial heft of the international gallery that hosts it. https://artangled.com/posts/nomata-white-cube/ Sun, 18 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/nomata-white-cube/ Minoru Nomata is a fantasist. He paints realistic-looking landscapes that feature impossible yet somehow functional-looking buildings and structures, supported by familiar-looking but equally fantastic technologies. They get more unreal the more you look at them. Continuum-6, pictured below, is an example. Transparent orbs float above a watery landscape, connected to the ground by translucent cables. We can imagine they were made for some kind of agricultural purpose, irrigating the land. But what makes them float? https://artangled.com/posts/cassigneul-pissarro/ Sun, 11 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/cassigneul-pissarro/ That Camille Pissarro lived in Croydon is one of my favourite weird art historical facts. It’s just such an odd thought! But yes, one of the fathers of Impressionism crossed the channel at the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war in the 1870s. He lived in what was then the village of Norwood for a couple of years, and recorded the bucolic scenes that surrounded him. Country landscapes as yet untouched by the suburban sprawl of future decades. https://artangled.com/posts/hughes-zakaim/ Sun, 04 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/hughes-zakaim/ I pointed out last week that galleries are beginning to shut their doors for the summer, and of course the trend is continuing as we move into August. But in among the locked doors and drawn blinds in Mayfair is this seasonally-themed group show. Alon Zakaim Fine Art represents a real grab bag of artists - I featured its excellent exhibition on Marc Chagall earlier in the year, though it’s also shown many more contemporary pieces - so is well equipped for this kind of thing. https://artangled.com/posts/szalay-arusha/ Sun, 28 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/szalay-arusha/ Galleries in London are already closing for the summer. It’s the beginning of the dog days, when a city-dwelling art lover needs to rely mainly on air-conditioned public collections rather than the often inadequately ventilated white cubes that surround them. But a few commercial galleries are sticking at it: I found this show, from the Beirut-born, UK-based painter Ilona Szalay, by chance, wandering past on a humid Saturday afternoon. I found soothing scenes inside; polite milky pinks and blues predominated. https://artangled.com/posts/auerbach-katz/ Sun, 21 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/auerbach-katz/ A small but punchy show brings teacher and pupil together. Frank Auerbach joined David Bomberg’s art class in the years following World War Two, and over the decades to come, came to be known for his lugubrious landscape paintings of London scenes, thick with layer upon layer of oil paint, built up on the canvas like accreted urban grime. He’s closely allied in my head with the similarly-gloomy Leon Kossoff, who I’ve featured separately on here before. https://artangled.com/posts/uecker-dayan/ Sun, 14 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/uecker-dayan/ This spring and summer, the very fancy Lévy Gorvy Dayan gallery has put on several shows that draw connections between two mid-century artistic giants, Yves Klein and Günther Uecker. Firstly in New York City, there were simultaneous but separate exhibitions: a wide-ranging Klein show which included a pile of IKB-coloured powder at the bottom of the gallery’s grand staircase, and a collection of Uecker’s dazzlingly bright, blue and white Lichtbogen paintings. https://artangled.com/posts/rauschenberg-ropac/ Sun, 07 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/rauschenberg-ropac/ Robert Rauschenberg’s large retrospective at Tate Modern a few years back was one of the most front-loaded in memory. The first few rooms were killer: early experiments with then-boyfriend Cy Twombly, his seminal Bed work from 1955, and a range of iconic sixties silkscreens that captured the zeitgeist as effectively as anything Warhol was doing at the same time. Rauschenberg was original and startling, picking up trash and detritus from his surroundings in New York City and making it into art. https://artangled.com/posts/correa-paley/ Sun, 30 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/correa-paley/ I need to stop writing about pretty, decorative, but ultimately unchallenging art. It’s not really what I should go to galleries for. I’m breaking my own rule, then, because after featuring Hannah Levy’s bulging glass and steel sculptures last week, this week it’s Colombia-born, Berlin-based painter Daniel Correa Mejía. I saw an impressive show of his paintings and sculptures at Mor Charpentier in Paris last year; now, he’s in London, with a set of thick red-and-ultramarine oils on jute, depicting supernatural nude figures. https://artangled.com/posts/levy-massimo-1/ Sun, 23 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/levy-massimo-1/ Hannah Levy’s glass, steel and silicone sculptures seem like pretty much the most impractical things in the world. Eight, specially designed for the space, are on show at MASSIMODECARLO right now. Levy calls them “strange, furniture-like creatures”. The orange and red glass and silicone are bulbously biomorphic, slightly constrained by the exoskeleton-like metal. And so, slight bulges appear. The sculptures are in the form of furniture: chairs and light fittings. Though in their spindly fragility they could hardly be less in line with the old modernist principle of form following function. https://artangled.com/posts/baselitz-white-cube/ Sun, 16 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/baselitz-white-cube/ “I’m brutal, naive and gothic,” Georg Baselitz famously said. It’s an unimprovable description of his work. Baselitz was part of a regeneration of figurative painting in the latter half of the 20th century. And this new London exhibition demonstrates that he’s still going, in his mid-80s, with his large canvases featuring his trademark upside-down figures. When I saw the large, chronologically-arranged Baselitz retrospective at Centre Pompidou in 2021, I was beaten into exhausted submission by the end, my notes saying only: “The final room is quite depressing - double portraits of him and wife, inverted, blurry and skeletal. https://artangled.com/posts/beryl-tom-voltaire/ Sun, 09 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/beryl-tom-voltaire/ The fact that this exhibition is made in partnership with Tom’s foundation and Beryl’s family highlights one difference between these these two artists. Tom of Finland exiled himself to the sunny west coast of the USA, found his home among men of shared tastes, and achieved a lasting posthumous reputation with this group. Beryl Cook stayed at home in less-sunny Plymouth, kept herself to herself, and found lasting popular success among the British general public. https://artangled.com/posts/cordeiro-mayor/ Sun, 02 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/cordeiro-mayor/ There are just 16 works on show in this exhibition, but they lightly cover an exceptional career. Waldemar Cordeiro was initially an important member of the Brazilian art concret movement of the 1950s - the same group featured so heavily in the midcentury Brazilian art show I featured on here a few weeks back. He produced some woozily impressionistic, tropically-coloured oil paintings in the 60s. Then, in the few years leading up to his early death in 1973, he was an early pioneer of computer generated art. https://artangled.com/posts/bevan-bains/ Sun, 26 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/bevan-bains/ As her new exhibition’s title suggests, the multi-media artist Shaan Bevan is deeply interested in flowing water. In this single-room gallery, there are C prints of crashing waterfalls and waves, and intricate pencil drawings and stained glass depicting water, too, ebbing and flowing. Bevan, who has a history of chronic illness, seems to find healing in these natural systems. But flowing water could remind us of a flood of tears, too. https://artangled.com/posts/thomsen-wheels/ Sun, 19 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/thomsen-wheels/ The grotty industrial inner suburbs of Milan have featured on here before, in my frequent effusive posts about the early 20th century Italian painter Mario Sironi. He loved the glittering train tracks, the slab-like apartment blocks, the pavements of those new parts of his adopted hometown. A century later, the Danish-born, UK-based artist Jesper List Thomsen has a very different view of the place, according to this new exhibition of his. https://artangled.com/posts/sepuya-nottingham/ Sun, 12 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/sepuya-nottingham/ I have never seen cushions depicted so lovingly. A gorgeous golden colour, picked out by sunlight, they’re piled voluptuously on Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s Los Angeles studio floor. Given that this US-based photographer only works within his studio, you can view them again and again across this exhibition, his first UK monograph show. The artist tends to frame his photos in his studio mirror, exposing his camera lens, reflected in the glass. https://artangled.com/posts/mckinney-boesky/ Sun, 05 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/mckinney-boesky/ The painting I’ll remember most from my trip to New York late last month is pictured below. It’s called ‘Hold Your Breath’, and formed part of an impressive show by the young artist Danielle McKinney, who lives and works just over the river in Jersey City. A resplendently orange robe-clad woman leans back in a moment of repose - head tilted up, eyes shut. The background is deep avocado green. Between two fingers of her raised right hand smoulders a cigarette, its burning end picked out in a livid blob of orange. https://artangled.com/posts/wool-greenwich/ Sun, 28 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/wool-greenwich/ The exhibition takes place on the entire 19th floor of an unoccupied office building in the heart of the financial district in New York City. Christopher Wool, who last exhibited on this scale 10 years ago at the Guggenheim uptown, luxuriates in the un-white-cubiness of the space. Specifically, the poetic potential of chipped and weathered plasterboard - sorry, “drywall”, as the locals would have it. “His gaze focuses on the dry, the dirt, the mess, the glitch, the repetition, not to denounce or capitalize on their abjection but to embrace them as liberating and generative tools. https://artangled.com/posts/lynch-lychee/ Sun, 21 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/lynch-lychee/ A small painting, oil on linen, stood out to me this week. It’s called Over Hillsides, and was painted by the British artist Sammi Lynch. It was on show at Lychee One, next to London Fields station; I saw it on the exhibition’s last afternoon, and was glad I did. Lynch draws her landscapes from life with pastels, then paints from that. Her trick, repeated across the handful of works on show at Lychee One, is to suggest great variations of texture through very thin layers of oil paint. https://artangled.com/posts/sedira-whitechapel/ Sun, 14 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/sedira-whitechapel/ Zineb Sedira loves going to the cinema, and watching films has been important to her throughout her life. Not exactly a jawdropping premise for a large monograph exhibition in a public gallery. But it’s been gorgeously and thought-provokingly staged all the same - at Whitechapel this spring, after making a splash at the Venice Biennale in 2022. The show is based around film sets: full-size recreations, surrounded by klieg lights, boxes of set dressing, and, on the periphery, wooden tip-up cinema seats. https://artangled.com/posts/hodgkin-hazlitt/ Sun, 07 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/hodgkin-hazlitt/ Howard Hodgkin’s always stood alone among the select few artists from postwar Britain who made it big - and whose work has lasted. Not for him the intense psychological portraits of Auerbach and Kossoff, Bacon and Freud. Or, on the other hand, the light-footed Pop of Eduardo Paolozzi and Patrick Caulfield. Hodgkin was good friends with the latter artist, calling him “the closest I ever came to a painter-colleague”, and therefore giving this new show of both men’s work a title. https://artangled.com/posts/raven-brazil/ Sun, 31 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/raven-brazil/ Two works placed next to each other sum up this museum-quality show of midcentury Brazilian art, which has mysteriously materialised in Shoreditch this spring. Both were completed in the same year (1960), in the same country. Both don’t lie flat against the wall, but emerge enticingly from it. But the two works are from different worlds. Alicena cor de fogo (Alicena colour of fire), by Genaro de Carvalho, is made of woven wool on canvas, depicting colourful semi-abstract, eye-like patterns. https://artangled.com/posts/craxton-pallant/ Sun, 24 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/craxton-pallant/ The painter John Craxton escaped postwar Britain, moving to Greece in the late 1940s. He settled in Crete, and stayed there, off and on, until his death in 2009. His specialist subjects became what he chose to see around him in his new home: light-filled landscapes, beautiful sailors and shepherds, cheeky cats and goats. Craxton’s received his first retrospective in decades in his home country, currently on at Pallent House Gallery in Chichester. https://artangled.com/posts/castellan-valentin/ Sun, 17 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/castellan-valentin/ Emanuelle Castellan, a French painter who’s based in Berlin, showed a collection of work which has stayed with me since I saw it in Paris a few days ago. If life itself is the source of art, then Castellan paints at several, deliberately imposed, removes from this source. This collection was inspired by a Marguerite Duras film, Nathalie Granger, from 1972. So, a re-enactment of a re-enactment. Art that is reconstituted, doubly. https://artangled.com/posts/mao-pace/ Sun, 10 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/mao-pace/ Mao Yan’s paintings are united by their colour palette of dusty blues and greys - as well as the formidable skill involved in their construction. The Chinese artist’s subject matter varies widely: psychologically intense portraits on one end of the spectrum, abstract works of shard-like shapes which he calls “broken teeth” at the other. In this wide-ranging show at PACE, there are a couple of anomalies too: a couple of cute painted cats, and a lone landscape of the view outside Mao’s studio (second picture, below). https://artangled.com/posts/leonard-conigsby/ Sun, 03 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/leonard-conigsby/ The painter Michael Leonard died last summer, around his 90th birthday. He was successful: in the 80s, Reader’s Digest magazine nominated him to paint a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II on her 65th birthday. Less publicly, he also drew and painted hunky men getting into and out of their underwear. This latter group is well represented in this show of Leonard’s work, put together by Henry Miller, whose eponymous gallery focuses on the “male form”. https://artangled.com/posts/kruger-serpentine/ Sun, 25 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/kruger-serpentine/ Barbara Kruger’s words form an instantly recognisable artistic motif. They’re generally in a bold white sans serif font, on a red background, making an urgent statement. She’s spelt them out for decades: working as a graphic designer on magazines in the 1960s and 70s, then hitting the artistic big time in the 80s and staying there ever since. Many, many words of this kind are on the walls of the Serpentine gallery in the middle of Hyde Park, currently, with Kruger’s first monograph show in the UK in 20 years. https://artangled.com/posts/stehli-marlborough/ Sun, 18 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/stehli-marlborough/ The title of this show says it all. It looks back to a feminist flashpoint from the 1970s, and how it reverberated down the decades. Specifically, the misogynistic bondage-themed work of artists like Helmut Newton and Allen Jones, featuring muscly naked women in sky-high heels and contorted poses - and the backlash this work caused. Newton and Jones both feature in the current Marlborough show. As does a pair of subversively referential works from the British performance artist Jemima Stehli, which contextualise and undercut all that pervy masculine energy. https://artangled.com/posts/hantai-gagosian/ Sun, 11 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/hantai-gagosian/ In 1948, a then-27-year-old Simon Hantaï walked from Ravenna to Rome. He was a pilgrim from the chillier, greyer north: born in Hungary and later settling in France. And now some of his works, deeply redolent of the warm south, are on show in his original destination city. We see the blue hues that unite the works on show here - on canvas and on paper, mostly using the folded pliage technique Hantaï’s best known for - in the frescos that decorate Rome’s churches. https://artangled.com/posts/pope-south/ Sun, 04 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/pope-south/ William Pope.L died in December 2023: after this London exhibition opened, but before it closed. Visitors to the show therefore bear witness to an artistic inflection point. Pope.L himself helped plan out what we see, but he won’t be here to put together any future exhibitions. He can’t influence his posthumous reputation. He won’t be able to capture any more moments in time. Things are particularly uncertain - beyond that one, central, terminal certainty - for Pope. https://artangled.com/posts/rathgeb-martin/ Sun, 28 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/rathgeb-martin/ The paintings in this week’s featured show form a kind of sequel to last week. Both times now, I’m writing about small paintings in egg tempera: a quick-drying paint technique that produces notably luminous and brilliant colours. But where Michele Cesarotto looked to his native Italian landscapes for his work, Heidrun Rathgeb, currently on show at John Martin Gallery, looks north. Born in Germany, she had a residency in Norway recently, and took a lot of hikes in the local area. https://artangled.com/posts/cesarotto-artist-room/ Sun, 21 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/cesarotto-artist-room/ I visited this small exhibition of young Italian painters on opening night. Only a couple of others were there with me; the curator was smoking moodily out back. The works on show differed wildly in quality. But it was Valentina, pictured below, that caught my eye. It’s a tiny, jewel-like image of a girl with a severe centre parting, in three quarter view, against a lush landscape of fruit trees and mountains. https://artangled.com/posts/boty-gazelli/ Sun, 14 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/boty-gazelli/ The list of renowned artists who have also been raving physical beauties themselves is short. Raphael, maybe. Fantin-Latour, probably, if you take his self portraits for truth. Famous and beautiful female artists? The list is even shorter: such women move through life with many massive advantages, but having their work taken seriously isn’t one of them. That’s been the fate of the original and talented British Pop artist Pauline Boty, who died in 1966, aged 28, in almost unbelievably tragic circumstances. https://artangled.com/posts/sugimoto-hayward/ Sun, 07 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/sugimoto-hayward/ Viewing this retrospective, claimed by the Hayward Gallery to be the Japanese-born photographer’s largest to date, felt like a luxurious experience. The gallery’s raw concrete walls were low-lit; the monochrome frames glowed expensively; the blacks and whites of the photographs were glossy and sumptuous. The visitors were hushed and reverent. In his roughly half-century of active artistic production, Hiroshi Sugimoto is known for his limited subject matter as well as his extreme technical excellence. https://artangled.com/posts/top-5-2023/ Sun, 24 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/top-5-2023/ It seems unbelievable to me that I’m about to begin the seventh year of the Artangled project. Can I call doing a year-end post traditional at this point? I did one in 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022, after all. Aside from a brief lockdown-induced hiatus, I’ve posted every week over this entire period. This is my 289th post. Not bad for a project I do all by myself, beginning to end. https://artangled.com/posts/eisenman-whitechapel/ Sun, 17 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/eisenman-whitechapel/ This retrospective - the American artist’s first in the UK, despite being active and famous since the 1990s - is a testament to a master. Eisenman’s specific mastery is in the handling of paint, and it’s pretty thrilling to witness what she does with it across several large rooms in the Whitechapel Gallery. Her early canvases and murals were densely populated and smoothly-textured, fun and jokey: one particularly eyecatching work on the wall at Whitechapel shows a parade of brawny women beamingly hacking off the penises of their male victims, though they seem to be taking so much pleasure in their tasks it’s hard to be annoyed at them. https://artangled.com/posts/mcfadyen-grey/ Sun, 10 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/mcfadyen-grey/ I’ve long been a fan of the painter Jock McFadyen, a self-described abstract artist whose scenes are nevertheless piercingly familiar and strange - showing as they do London’s grit, grot and light. Recently he’s been opening up temporary exhibitions in the building that houses his studio in east London, the latest of which is a joint show with musician Jem Finer. Finer, a founder member of rock group The Pogues, originally composed a soundtrack for the show that was partly recorded from the London Underground. https://artangled.com/posts/chen-perrotin/ Sun, 03 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/chen-perrotin/ I was talking to a colleague the other day, who mentioned she’d spend some time in Beijing over the Christmas break. Sounds nice, I said. It’s unbearably, unbearably cold, she responded. It was pretty cold in Paris, too, when I came across this exhibition from Beijing-based painter Chen Ke. Part of the magic of visual art is that sometimes, when viewing, you’re taken somewhere different; in this case, it was 100 years ago, around the opening of the Bauhaus school, with Fritz Lang’s Metropolis in cinemas, swooshy streamlined apartment buildings under construction, and avant garde furniture gleaming behind new plate-glass shopfronts. https://artangled.com/posts/chagall-zakaim/ Sun, 26 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/chagall-zakaim/ As its name suggests, this impressive exhibition is about light, the light created by one of the twentieth century’s most luminous artists. The thing about light though is that it also casts dark shadows, and Chagall - a jew born in, then exiled from, Russia - lived through some of the 20th century’s very darkest. It’s a testament to the artist’s skill that his paintings so unerringly balance intense light and darkness, love and hate, the colourful and the sombre. https://artangled.com/posts/friedrich-hetzler/ Sun, 19 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/friedrich-hetzler/ This exhibition is seasonally perfect. Friedrich Kunath’s landscape paintings sag with the weight of winter ennui, of damp half-light, of attenuated days. November, dark and wet, is there to be survived. Looking closer at many of the works on show at Max Hetzler, and the message is spelled out still more explicitly: I THINK I’LL STAY HOME TODAY is scraped in small black capitals in the lowering grey skies above a pine forest. https://artangled.com/posts/jarman-wilkinson/ Sun, 12 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/jarman-wilkinson/ I was very mean about the artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman’s “terrible” paintings when I last wrote about them, having visited his show at the Garden Museum in 2020. But this new exhibition of his, at Amanda Wilkinson’s upstairs gallery in Farringdon, has made me rethink my view. The thick black impasto of Jarman’s paintings, that I had nastily described as “lobotomised Auerbach”, now seems profoundly redolent of the artist’s rage and dread. https://artangled.com/posts/rego-miro/ Sun, 05 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/rego-miro/ Around a year ago, I wrote about a very affecting Victor Willing show. He was a painter of some extraordinarily claustrophobic scenes, produced in the 1970s and 1980s in a windowless East London studio, while the artist was suffering from worsening multiple sclerosis symptoms. At the time, Willing was married to Paula Rego, then and now a much better-known painter. On the evidence of this exhibition, her paintings of that time couldn’t have been more different: free, expansive and utterly confident of line, where Willing’s were constrained, tentative, introspective. https://artangled.com/posts/exchange-braham/ Sun, 29 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/exchange-braham/ This week, a different type of show than the ones I usually feature on here. The Telephone Exchange is a PhD project from the architect Lisa Kinch that I spotted on Instagram (she also has a Twitter/X account). Kinch is interested in the social impact of the telephone exchanges built in post war Britain by the then-publicly-owned General Post Office (GPO), before it split and became the now-private entity known as BT. https://artangled.com/posts/christo-gagosian/ Sun, 22 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/christo-gagosian/ This show is a survey of small works from an artist most famous for huge, attention-grabbing installations in public spaces - wrapping the Reichstag in Berlin or the Pont-Neuf in Paris in fabric, for example. By contrast, the wrapped-up tables, racks and household goods on show in London actually seem overshadowed by the gallery in which they’re exhibited. Gagosian Open is a new series of “off-site” projects from the world’s bougiest private gallery chain. https://artangled.com/posts/anderson-offer/ Sun, 15 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/anderson-offer/ This show attempts a hard-to-pull-off trick: creating a sense of whimsy and joy through vast financial muscle. Luckily, it’s curated by someone who mastered the trick long ago: Jonathan Anderson, the young fashion designer who achieved early fame with his eponymous brand, and now, as creative director of luxury brand Loewe, is backed by the full might of the world’s richest man. It’s LVMH money that brought all these stellar artworks together, on the walls of this small Mayfair gallery: the works are all British, generally from a midcentury London-based A-lister, with Freud, Auerbach, Hepworth, Hockney and Kossoff all present and correct. https://artangled.com/posts/lucas-tate/ Sun, 08 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/lucas-tate/ The most shocking thing about Sarah Lucas’ Tate Britain retrospective is the news, contained in the show notes, that she’s 60 years old. There’s something of the eternal bolshy teenager in this artist - in her eyeroll-inducing earnestness and sledgehammer literal-mindedness on one hand, but, on the other, in her vim and vigour, her sincerity and charm. My favourite of the show’s four rooms was the parade of Bunnies, which Lucas has been making since the 1990s. https://artangled.com/posts/cohen-flowers/ Sun, 01 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/cohen-flowers/ As a 19-year-old, Bernard Cohen produced a sad painting called The Wasteland. A blurry pattern of lines drip down the canvas like rain on a London bus window. It was painted in 1952, a drab, downbeat time for the city. Later in that decade though, the British painter went to Paris, and was deeply inspired by his wanderings there. Particular inspiration came from the stained glass of Sainte-Chapelle, and Monet’s Nymphéas, on show, then as now, at the Orangery of the Tuileries gardens. https://artangled.com/posts/nitsch-arte/ Sun, 24 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/nitsch-arte/ I’d been avidly touring churches in Genoa for a couple of days, before viewing this exhibition. It functioned as a kind of “waffer-theen mint” to finish off all the godly excesses: those huge, lofty, stone spaces, representing the transmutation of centuries of rich merchants’ ill-gotten gains into something supposedly spiritually improving. While I recognise that it’s basically historical money laundering, I still stuffed myself silly on all the incredible art and architecture, Mr Creosote style. https://artangled.com/posts/clough-brunette/ Sun, 17 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/clough-brunette/ I’ve long been interested in the work of post-war British painter Prunella Clough, that abstract chronicler of the grimy and the shopworn, so I jumped at the chance to see more of her in this exhibition. It’s in a new gallery space, up some stairs in a damp, shabby building next to Holborn library: a very Clough location. The painting of hers on show, Sequence, is a late work from 1992 - she died seven years later. https://artangled.com/posts/saint-tropez-hamiltons/ Sun, 10 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/saint-tropez-hamiltons/ This past week, London has sweltered under an unbearable end-of-summer heatwave. And while I’m not a bikini model myself, when I was confronted by the sweaty crotch of Elke II, La Voile Rouge, pictured below, I found myself suffused with a weird sense of fellow feeling. I was toiling through the streets of Mayfair, sweating due to the wet-towel humidity that has closed in on the city. Elke’s crotch was on a billboard outside Hamiltons gallery, advertising this show. https://artangled.com/posts/de-la-mora-taylor/ Sun, 03 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/de-la-mora-taylor/ I’ve featured the Mexican artist Gabriel de la Mora on here before, when I visited his show at Perrotin in Paris in 2019. Then as now, I was impressed by his “craft and obsession”. In Paris, I saw works in which he used shoe soles and eggshells, layered up and tesselated, to make semi-abstract patterns. The eggshells are back, here at Timothy Taylor in London, and are joined by works made from tiny blown-glass mirrors and, most arrestingly of all, butterfly wings, painted over in acrylic but not to the extent that they lose their uncanny, alien-like iridescent shimmer. https://artangled.com/posts/cunningham-lisson/ Sun, 27 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/cunningham-lisson/ The title of this small exhibition, from the young British painter Sarah Cunningham, suggests clarity and sharpness. But the layers of oil paint on her works serve to obscure rather than clarify; while they’re recognisably landscapes, they’re anything but cristalline. Crystal Forest, pictured below, is the product of long nocturnal sessions: Cunningham has trouble sleeping, it seems. It’s a dreamscape, the forest floor built up with long, gestural lines, like one of those midcentury action paintings from people like Hans Hartung and Pierre Soulages. https://artangled.com/posts/freddie-sothebys/ Sun, 20 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/freddie-sothebys/ Even if we try to be minimalist and careful in what we buy, we relentlessly accumulate stuff over time. It’s unavoidable, inevitable. Minimalism wasn’t a concept embraced by the deeply carefree Freddie Mercury, who shopped and hoarded relentlessly on a rockstar budget. That’s a message that was rammed home with the subtlety of a Queen ballad as I wandered round Sotheby’s, surrounded by fellow gawkers, peering at packed walls and into packed glass cases, at all of Freddie’s stuff. https://artangled.com/posts/summer-academy-2023/ Sun, 13 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/summer-academy-2023/ This week I’m writing about the Royal Academy’s annual summer blowout, mainly because of the dearth of other shows to talk about in London right now. Despite the comparatively cool temperatures, we are deep into summer, meaning most of Mayfair’s commercial galleries are shut - ready to return in September. So it’s time for a spin around the 1,500 or so works on display at Burlington House. Difficult as it is to summarise overall themes and impressions from such a wildly, designedly diverse show, one thing’s for sure: the atmosphere at the Summer Exhibition’s very different this year than it was in 2020, when I last wrote about it. https://artangled.com/posts/barriga-kostyal/ Sun, 06 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/barriga-kostyal/ With its gruesome monsters, day-glo colours and cavorting nudes, Hieronymous Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights looks like a riot of fun to us these days. But in fact, Bosch was a deeply religious man, and most art historians make out a stern moral warning in this 500-year-old triptych - not a party. Ana Barriga’s directly influenced by Bosch. But she prefers to party than moralise. Her version of his Garden is called Say Cheese. https://artangled.com/posts/silva-approach-new/ Sun, 30 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/silva-approach-new/ I reviewed a Mike Silva show at this gallery three years ago, and it’s not a dig to say that this new show is an almost exact retread of what I saw in 2020. This painter has a very narrow range of subject matter: empty interior views of down-at-heel rooms in London, with a window to the outside. Sometimes he paints a man inside these rooms, looking away from us. https://artangled.com/posts/portrait-frith/ Sun, 23 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/portrait-frith/ Portrait is a grab bag of a summer group show. It’s currently on at Frith Street Gallery on Golden Square. The notes claim that the exhibition was organised in celebration of the recent reopening of the National Portrait Gallery down the road. But there’s a will-this-do, end-of-term feel about this loosely-arranged showcase of famous names - the gallery represents Cornelia Parker, Fiona Tan and Daniel Silver, among others - just like there was with the show about bathers I talked about last week. https://artangled.com/posts/bathers-saatchi-yates/ Sun, 16 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/bathers-saatchi-yates/ The work below is called Skinny Dipping. It was painted in 1999 by the British-Jamaican artist Hurvin Anderson. It’s a bathing scene, a place usually reserved in art for explorations of bare flesh in pretty landscapes, for playfulness, for fun. But Anderson’s waters run deeper than that. His lush tropical background is enclosed by a drab concrete pool and dark water. His diving board teems with (white) bodies in motion, while a few, barely-outlined (black) figures look on from the background. https://artangled.com/posts/miller-national/ Sun, 09 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/miller-national/ This set of photographs are all square format seascapes, neatly bisected by the horizon line. There are 40 in all, identically sized, shot from exactly the same place by Garry Fabian Miller, exhibited together in a large room at the National Museum in Cardiff. At first, I’d assumed they were derivative of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s much-more-famous Seascapes series - which are also deliberately minimal photos of the horizon out to sea, varying only by the weather and the time of day. https://artangled.com/posts/barth-huxley-parlour/ Sun, 02 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/barth-huxley-parlour/ I’m not a very spontaneous gallery-goer, preferring instead to browse online, get a plan of attack, and then visit. But when I happened to pass by the gallery hosting Alexandra Barth’s Two Towels (2021), pictured below, I had to go in for a closer look. The painting is part of a pretentiously-named group show that “seeks to explore modern objecthood”, whatever that means. Never mind. Barth, born and based in Slovakia, recently decided to paint a corner of a bathroom, then the work ended up in London, then it caught my eye, and I’m happy it did. https://artangled.com/posts/wong-camden/ Sun, 25 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/wong-camden/ Martin Wong was a supremely gifted painter of brickwork. Close-set, dirt-ringed, orangey-brown, they’re the bricks of the tenement buildings of the Lower East Side of New York City which surrounded the apartment where he lived in the 1980s, before moving back to his native San Francisco and succumbing to HIV/AIDS in 1999. Previously unfamiliar with this artist, I saw a work of his in the Whitney’s permanent collection earlier this year and it almost took my breath away. https://artangled.com/posts/licini-estorick/ Sun, 18 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/licini-estorick/ This retrospective show provides a great example of an artist finding their groove on the home stretch of their career. Osvaldo Licini was a working artist from the 1920s to his death in 1958, living through many of the 20th century’s most influential artistic movements, which in turn made their mark on his work - until they didn’t. Across the two exhibition galleries of the Estorick Collection, we move from some ho-hum Cézanne-tribute portraits, to a couple of mock-Modiglianis, to some abstract works from the 1930s which owe a clear debt to de Stijl, though they also tend to suggest the mountainous landscape of le Marche, Licini’s home region in Italy. https://artangled.com/posts/jaouda-pacific/ Sun, 11 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/jaouda-pacific/ The objects in this exhibition highlight the damaging effects of the sun, and time, on the city. Quite appropriate to see it, then, on the hottest day of the year, with the gallery’s air conditioning fighting a losing battle with the relentless sun battering through the windows. Nour Jaouda, the artist on show, grew up in Cairo to a Libyan family, and now lives in London. It’s Cairo’s streets that inspire her work, which features shredded and inexpertly dyed cotton fabric, rusty metal and cracked concrete. https://artangled.com/posts/waddington-photorealism/ Sun, 04 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/waddington-photorealism/ As art movements go, I’d put Photorealism in my highly-populated mental category of “know it exists, don’t remember seeing any”. Not surprising I hadn’t, considering there have been only three UK exhibitions of Photorealist art in 50 years. Anyway, I’ve seen some now thanks to the third of these, which is on at Waddington Custot this summer. The Photorealist movement was Pop’s less-popular twin. It was also, in its first generation at least, profoundly American. https://artangled.com/posts/barbarella-italia/ Sun, 28 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/barbarella-italia/ I looked at 40 or so small, dog-eared photographs, in a few brightly coloured vitrines, in a gallery one sunny afternoon in Bethnal Green, and got a glimpse into a totally different land - both physical and imaginative. Isn’t getting that sense of transportation the main reason you’d look at art in the first place? Debatable. But it’s a sense I got really strongly in this show, either way. The time and place is Bolivia in 1960s and 1970s. https://artangled.com/posts/collishaw-bomb/ Sun, 21 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/collishaw-bomb/ Until seeing this show by chance yesterday, I admit that I was totally unfamiliar with Mat Collishaw’s work. I only knew him as Tracey Emin’s fellow-YBA ex. But if these delightful spectacles are representative of what he does generally, I’m well up for seeing more. All Things Fall is a people pleasing mix of paintings on raw linen, animatronic animals and a zoetrope. Despite the show notes describing Collishaw’s art as “dark”, nothing’s actually disturbing here. https://artangled.com/posts/ozzola-continua/ Sun, 14 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/ozzola-continua/ Giovanni Ozzola lives and works in the Canary Islands: a small place that’s constantly under attack from the Atlantic Ocean all around. Walking through this show of his, spread out over several rooms of the large Galleria Continua space in Paris, I could practically taste the salt water. The artist’s eye is constantly caught by the damage these huge natural forces wreak on the man made. Hence photos like the one below, staring out at the sea through the window of a concrete bunker, walls blasted by erosion, the fragile graffiti marks left by people seemingly disappearing before our eyes. https://artangled.com/posts/bosphore-sobering/ Sat, 06 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/bosphore-sobering/ Jean Bosphore likes to paint flesh and flowers, of a particular sort. His works are small: you could cover most of the paintings in this show with a piece of A4 paper. They’re all on pieces of wood with bevelled edges, the hard surface rendering his acrylic paints with almost brutal clarity. Everything seems to be encased in plastic. The flowers depicted in the paintings have screw-in parts and instruction manuals. https://artangled.com/posts/tuttle-modern/ Sun, 30 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/tuttle-modern/ Richard Tuttle’s art has consistently been defined - and derided - by the modesty of its means. Over an artistic career of almost 50 years, his wood reliefs, his single wires, his pencil marks on the wall have remained provocatively small-scale. But, taken together, I think there’s a hypnotic pull to his works. You can see for yourself with his latest collection, on show right now at Modern Art. These new works are arrayed at eye level around the walls of the gallery. https://artangled.com/posts/patterson-taylor/ Sun, 16 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/patterson-taylor/ Richard Patterson was a YBA, part of the scandalous 1990s ‘Sensation’ generation. But, like his peers Gillian Wearing and Gavin Turk, he’s matured into a painter of sensitivity and skill. Proof of this view comes in ‘Only Fans’, a show of small-format works using what the press release describes as a “carnal palette”, which closed this week at Timothy Taylor. All 13 paintings in the exhibition are dreamy swirls of flesh-toned roses and ochres, on luxurious-looking linen canvas. https://artangled.com/posts/neel-barbican/ Sun, 09 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/neel-barbican/ Alice Neel blazed her own trail for decades, painting from her home studio in New York City from the 1930s right up to her death in 1984. She lived unfashionably far uptown, ignoring the comings and goings of Precisionism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop and the rest. Even more unfashionably, she dedicated her artistic life to figuration, sticking doggedly to being an “anarchic humanist”, painting people who interested her. This impressive retrospective, featuring works from every stage of the long career, also proves that Neel’s artistic motifs got locked in early and never varied. https://artangled.com/posts/balthus-luxembourg/ Sun, 02 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/balthus-luxembourg/ The notes for this show, apparently the first Balthus exhibition in the UK since 1968, contain the following Oscar Wilde quote: “All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.” This plea not to look too closely is appropriate for this artist, considering the fact he was a snob, a vile anti-semite despite his Jewish heritage, and is most famous these days for his unabashedly erotic pictures of little girls. https://artangled.com/posts/morandi-estorick/ Sun, 26 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/morandi-estorick/ This exhibition claims to show the only work Giorgio Morandi ever painted from a commission. Still Life (Musical Instruments), from 1941 and pictured below, is definitely a break from the norm for the artist, who was and remains famous for his oddly intense small paintings of collections of bottles and cups. It isn’t surprising that this artist wasn’t receptive to commissions. Beyond his fame, Morandi stands out for the dogged narrowness of his focus, and his life. https://artangled.com/posts/pichette-hanina/ Sun, 19 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/pichette-hanina/ Everything sounds better in French. Their version of massive, heavy, dour post-war Abstract Expressionism is the lither, prettier Abstraction lyrique. While Pollock and Rothko painted with the weight of the world on their shoulders, their counterparts across the pond seemed to share a brighter, lighter outlook. Perhaps their happiness came from the large amount of government support on offer. This exhibition focuses on paintings from artists who benefitted from the “1% policy” - promoted by the novelist André Malraux, who became France’s first cultural affairs minister in the post-war years. https://artangled.com/posts/perry-miro/ Sun, 12 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/perry-miro/ Grayson Perry’s been making a multi-media attack on the idea of Englishness over recent years. In 2019, Perry had an exhibition of pots on this theme at Victoria Miro’s Mayfair space in 2019. Most recently, there’s this exhibition of textile works, and a TV show called Grayson Perry’s Full English. In both, Perry pokes at, and sometimes celebrates, English people’s sense of themselves. I said the exhibition had “textile works”, but these particular posh cloths are actually tapestries. https://artangled.com/posts/finch-hill/ Sun, 05 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/finch-hill/ “Ye cannot serve God and mammon,” claims the gospel of Matthew. But the Hill Art Foundation gives it a good go. This small gallery is owned by hedge fund billionaire J. Tomlinson Hill, and is currently hosting a beautiful bringing-together of a Renaissance stained glass window and various stained glass installations from contemporary artist Spencer Finch. The Creation and the Expulsion from Paradise was completed by Valentin Bousch in 1533, and has most recently been a prize possession of rich American collectors: it used to be installed above William Randolph Hearst’s fireplace, according to the show notes. https://artangled.com/posts/roberts-fredericks-freiser/ Sun, 26 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/roberts-fredericks-freiser/ The portraitist Danielle Roberts, who has a show right now at the Fredericks & Freiser gallery, has a lot in common with Jenna Gribbon and Shannon Cartier Lucy, who I’ve featured on here before. All three painters are young women who paint young women: dramatically lit, listless, filled with ennui. Roberts’ scenes are generally suburban, and take place at night. One woman is perched with one leg up on the back of a car in a convenience store car park. https://artangled.com/posts/noland-pace/ Sun, 19 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/noland-pace/ Kenneth Noland put himself under a lot of pressure to achieve such chilled-out art. He’s been called a “minimalist” or “colour field” painter, with his large canvases banded with simple patterns - or just stripes. In fact, Stripes/ Plaids/ Shapes, the title of this show, Noland’s first monograph exhibition in the UK for over 20 years, pretty much sums up what’s on display. So, where’s the pressure from? In the technique. https://artangled.com/posts/flavin-zwirner/ Sun, 12 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/flavin-zwirner/ The handsome townhouse’s windows were glowing with warm pink light. A warm and welcome sight as I approached the David Zwirner gallery up Hay Hill on a gloomy afternoon in early February, the dark already setting in. Warmth isn’t a feeling commonly associated with Dan Flavin, who wore his various intellectual inspirations heavily even by the standards of his fellow macho midcentury Minimals. But you can’t knock the fact that his central artistic innovation - using light as his material - was both radical and influential. https://artangled.com/posts/lerma-rech/ Sun, 05 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/lerma-rech/ José Lerma’s striking recent paintings, several of which are on show downstairs at Almine Rech at the moment, are both austere and abundant. Austere in their extreme economy of huge brushstrokes, but abundant in the sheer quantity of paint used to make them. The artist achieves this effect by using a commercial broom to apply acrylic paint directly to a rough burlap canvas. The head of each subject, most of which are captured in profile, fills each frame almost exactly. https://artangled.com/posts/van-zyl-assanti/ Sun, 29 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/van-zyl-assanti/ I love this video of Jenkin van Zyl, which I stumbled across while writing this post. In it, the young artist and filmmaker cheerfully discusses his horrifyingly time-consuming “extreme beauty regime” in his impeccably plummy Home Counties accent. The video’s intercut with footage of van Zyl striding around east London and then eating a takeaway in full kabuki makeup, facial prosthetics and blow-up latex body suit. He’s like a lither Leigh Bowery for the Instagram generation. https://artangled.com/posts/rafman-wellcome/ Sun, 22 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/rafman-wellcome/ I love the Wellcome Collection! Not only does it host the best museum shop in London hands down, its exhibitions are so entertaining - imaginative grab bags of interesting things, based loosely around a single theme. I also feel a bit defensive of it as an institution, given the silly “anti-woke” media fracas it faced recently when it announced plans to update its permanent collection display. Anyway, following recent shows on themes like electricity, games and (my favourite) teeth, it’s the turn of sight. https://artangled.com/posts/freud-national/ Sun, 15 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/freud-national/ Kindness isn’t a word that’s really associated with Lucian Freud, whose centenary retrospective is just coming to an end at the National Gallery. As befits such a big artistic beast - Freud has only become more mega-famous since his death in 2011 - the show is epic in scale. It’s loaded with the rather cruel portraits of his lovers and children he’s famous for: the early subjects bug-eyed and on the verge of tears, the later ones nude, uncomfortably contorted and rendered in thick oil paint. https://artangled.com/posts/grassie-paley/ Sun, 08 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/grassie-paley/ This exhibition is seasonally appropriate. I viewed Andrew Grassie’s monochrome paintings on the kind of dark January day where which the sun seems barely to lift from the horizon. The gallery, in an old school building, was viciously strongly lit, as if to compensate for the gloominess outside. The hard electric light made these small, grey, wintry paintings even harder to make out. This all suits the show’s mysterious subject matter. https://artangled.com/posts/top-5-2022/ Sun, 25 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/top-5-2022/ Another year, another 50 or so new posts about some art show I’d seen that week. Following the pandemic, which put a major dampener on the Artangled project, things are pretty much back to normal on here. That’s reflected by the numbers. I saw 220 exhibitions in total this past year, practically the same as 2019 (221) and well up from last year’s 141 - a drop almost entirely attributable to lockdowns. https://artangled.com/posts/farid-whitechapel/ Sun, 18 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/farid-whitechapel/ This show of video art seems like an appropriate one to feature for the last post of the year. Firstly, because it’s the festive season, and the artwork I’m going to write about features a festival. Secondly, because it means that posts on the Whitechapel Gallery, my local public art collection, will bookend this year. Alia Farid’s 15 minute movie At the Time of the Ebb could hardly be more different to the Theaster Gates ceramics I featured back in January, though. https://artangled.com/posts/dordoy-grimm/ Sun, 11 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/dordoy-grimm/ The ambiance cast by the works in this exhibition somehow matched the weather on the day I went: cold, clear and uncannily still. Alex Dordoy uses shallow collages of acrylic paint on canvas to render apparently comforting and familiar scenes. The interior of a church (Answering Machine); a seascape (A Few Careless Words); a couple camping in a forest (Kindling the March Wind). Look closer, though, and things get uncomfortable. The church’s statues are cut off at the ankles; a big wave in the middle of the sea is breaking on… apparently nothing. https://artangled.com/posts/miller-white-cube/ Sun, 04 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/miller-white-cube/ Harland Miller is a novelist as well as a painter, and his best-known works bring the two media together. I’ve seen (and loved) his large painted versions of imaginary Penguin book covers: the artist faithfully matched the typeface and colours of the classic series in his paintings, but added mordant titles of his own, with his own name always in the author’s slot. He’s now taken over the large, coldly-lit White Cube space in Bermondsey, with 45 paintings and works on paper, all produced this year. https://artangled.com/posts/mercier-conciergerie/ Sun, 27 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/mercier-conciergerie/ On a rainy November’s morning in the dead centre of Paris, I experienced a show that can only be described as dreamy. Théo Mercier is an artist I admire a lot - and have featured on here before. He works in a monumental register, in a humble way. He reflects on the ephemerality of things, the fragility of the present as we lose ourselves, inevitably, to the future. In the last show of his I saw - in this city in 2017 - Mércier cast Classical-looking amphoras, busts and pillars in thin plaster, and set them at dangerously teetering angles. https://artangled.com/posts/hazoume-october/ Sun, 20 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/hazoume-october/ Like Antoni Tàpies, featured on here last week, Romauld Hazoumè uses found objects in his work. But the two artists could hardly be more different. As this show highlights, Hazoumè is droll, down to earth and humanist where Tàpies is sober, grand and ethereal. This artist, who lives and works in Benin, uses discarded oilcans, bottles, feathers and other throwaway objects to produce what he calls masques bidons (repurposed masks). The title of the exhibition’s a clue to the kind of atmosphere Hazoumè wants to create: just like at a carnival parade, the masks shouldn’t just look good, they also provide a kind of subversive social commentary. https://artangled.com/posts/tapies-nahmad/ Sun, 13 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/tapies-nahmad/ Nahmad Projects is one of Mayfair’s shiniest white cubes, a deceptively large gallery with a nave, side chapel and benches. This allows the dozen or so large, abstract works that make up most of this exhibition to be presented like relics in a church. Antoni Tàpies, the artist on show, made a decisive turn towards abstraction early in his career, and built up a distinctive visual lexicon of signs and symbols, using everyday materials. https://artangled.com/posts/denny-outernet/ Sat, 05 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/denny-outernet/ The bombastically-named, black-and-gold clad Now Building is the West End’s newest (and brightest) art gallery. Opened a couple of weeks ago opposite Tottenham Court Road tube station, the open-plan space glows from within, thanks to the massive LED screens that blaze across its interior walls and ceiling. It’s part of a newly-opened complex called the Outernet, which also includes a new theatre and the restoration of a very useful pathway to Soho Square. https://artangled.com/posts/hernandez-victoriamiro/ Sun, 30 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/hernandez-victoriamiro/ This week, I got a lesson in the imaginative handling of paint. The classroom was the beautiful, high-ceilinged main gallery at Victoria Miro in Islington. The teacher was Madrid-based Secundino Hernández. The subject, pictured below, is Minimar (2022): an enormous canvas which, despite its title, captures something cosmically vast. There are several paintings of his on show in this exhibition, but Minimar stood out. I loved Hernández’s unmannered handling of his acrylic paints. https://artangled.com/posts/willing-taylor/ Sun, 23 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/willing-taylor/ Knight Errant (1978), pictured below and currently on show at Timothy Taylor, is a very intense painting, painted at an intensely trying time for its artist. Victor Willing had moved back to London from Portugal with his wife, Paula Rego; by all accounts, theirs was a deeply dysfunctional relationship. He’d been diagnosed with MS, a condition that would take his life a decade later. He’d been painting in a rented studio in Stepney that had no windows. https://artangled.com/posts/bassiouni-workplace/ Sun, 16 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/bassiouni-workplace/ There’s something about the low light of my homeland, depicted in a painting or a photograph, that pushes me to write about it: see previous examples from George Shaw, Mike Silva and Jock McFadyen. This time, it’s an exhibition from Marwan Bassiouni, whose impressively cosmopolitan background (Italian-Swiss-Egyptian-American) hasn’t stopped him depicting the most humdrum, low-lit British landscapes with notable sensitivity and skill. Bassiouni’s conceit is simple: he shoots landscapes, seen through the windows of mosques and Islamic prayer rooms. https://artangled.com/posts/brazelton-cell/ Sun, 09 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/brazelton-cell/ The multimedia artist Cudelice Brazelton IV was born in Dallas and studied in Germany, where he now lives. The notes for this show, Brazelton’s first in London, state he spent some time in between “working in Ohio’s industrial foundries”. That sounds like, but doesn’t quite explicitly state, that he had a job in a factory. Or maybe it was a fancy art residency. Either way, the sounds and sights of the factory floor are clearly a major inspiration. https://artangled.com/posts/craig-martin-cristea/ Sun, 02 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/craig-martin-cristea/ Pieter Saenredam’s paintings of bracingly plain church interiors helped to define the Dutch Golden Age, artistically at least. Saenredam was a master of minimalism, taking infinite care with slightly varied shades of white on his walls, rendering the play of sunlight and shadow. Michael Craig-Martin’s also known for his use of colour, though his palette is hard, flat and bold. In this exhibition of new works, Craig-Martin committed the (self-described) “sacrilege” of recreating Saenredam’s Interior of the Sint-Odulphskerk in Assendelft as a line drawing, then printing it in several different colourways, including this ultimate inversion - one in black. https://artangled.com/posts/rezende-bell/ Sun, 25 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/rezende-bell/ Taking a midweek day off always makes me feel a bit delinquent. At leisure to do fun stuff - in my case, that usually means going to galleries - while most of the people around me are at work. As it happens, the world of work is the guiding subject of this impressive exhibition, though the world of its paintings is far distant from the Mayfair gallery that hosts them. https://artangled.com/posts/cetera-reid/ Sun, 18 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/cetera-reid/ The titular work in this exhibition is fascinatingly described in the show notes. It’s a “motor-powered gyroscopic structure based on a rotocasting machine”, in which a small transparent figurine is pinned between steel frames, and periodically spun around. It’s a hypnotic work, most powerful when the growly motor stops. Contained in this (female) plastic body are red and blue liquids, that combine to form a purple goo, that mostly settles wherever the figurine is angled during the rest periods, but leaves the odd spatter in the areas above the watermark. https://artangled.com/posts/schneemann-barbican/ Sun, 11 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/schneemann-barbican/ I first heard about the Queen’s death just after seeing this exhibition, a full career retrospective of the US painter and performance artist Carolee Schneemann. On getting the notification on my phone, sat in a comfy chair on the ground floor of the Barbican Centre, I took off my headphones - maybe expecting that the large, crowded, concrete-clad room would fall into reverent monarchist silence, and that I should experience that momentous hush. https://artangled.com/posts/klein-rodeo/ Sun, 04 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/klein-rodeo/ The dog days for London’s commercial galleries come slightly after the dog days of actual summer. This weekend, I walked around Mayfair as usual, knowing not much would be open - and, sure enough, most of the galleries were in darkness, or with white paper or blinds on the windows, the early autumn exhibition in the process of being installed. Only during Christmastime is there less on offer to the dedicated gallery-goer. https://artangled.com/posts/cohen-fold/ Sun, 28 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/cohen-fold/ This show is dominated by a mini mountain range of day-glo green “eco chips” - the kind of polystyrene-like packaging that pads out Amazon boxes - in the far corner of the gallery. The artist Benjamin Cohen called it all mouth and no trousers, and studded the green chip mountains with an amp and two transparent speakers emitting droning sounds. It’s a riff on Félix González-Torres’s Portrait of Ross in LA, which was a pile of sweets stacked up in the corner of the gallery, weighing the same as the artist’s lover - before he was stricken with AIDS. https://artangled.com/posts/asawa-mao/ Sun, 21 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/asawa-mao/ I first saw work from the American artist and educator Ruth Asawa in a show at David Zwirner, just before COVID hit. I was pretty captivated by her weightless sculptures made of wire, hanging from the ceiling like shoals of jellyfish. Back in the UK a couple of years later, she’s taken over an even larger space, the upper floors of Modern Art Oxford, in an exhibition that showcases a broader variety of her work, and the ideals that informed it. https://artangled.com/posts/rosler-tate/ Sun, 14 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/rosler-tate/ Quite suitably, this mini-exhibition of works is in a place of transit: a busy connecting room within the maze of permanent collection displays at Tate Modern. Crowds of wandering friend groups, mostly tourists, march past, without much of a glance at the display. One of the few who stopped to look while I was there, a pair of young English men, were loudly derisive. I get the derision: at first glance, the collection’s impressively banal. https://artangled.com/posts/calderara-lisson/ Sun, 07 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/calderara-lisson/ Antonio Calderara, also known as Antonio da Vaciago, lived quietly next to Lake Orta in northern Italy. Born in 1903, he was active from the 1920s, right up to his death in 1978. According to this collection of works, at Lisson Gallery, he specialised in small, jewel-like figurative works on wooden panels early on, eventually moving to almost-abstraction by the end. All his work is linked by a sense of quietude and withholding: quite appropriate for an artist who’s dropped into semi-obscurity. https://artangled.com/posts/broom-grove/ Sun, 31 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/broom-grove/ Producing this collection of abstract works, made with colourful resin on canvas, must have taken a toll on the artist. Orlanda Broom can only work on works using resin for a couple of months each year - otherwise the ambient temperature isn’t right. The perfectionist artist also doesn’t allow any resin works with trapped hairs and dust out of the studio. “I’m interested in the interpretation of abstract works,” she says. https://artangled.com/posts/opie-dane/ Sun, 24 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/opie-dane/ Catherine Opie is a globally-famous photographer who’s broadened her artistic topics of interest over recent years. She hit the big time in the 90s through her confrontational self-portraits, carving words and pictures into her flesh. They’re still her best-known photos. But a set of her work from the last decade, currently on show at Thomas Dane Gallery, reveals an artist in a lyrical mood. These are photos of calm lakes, sunlit windows and dappled light, revealed in lush pigment prints. https://artangled.com/posts/ryan-lilley/ Sun, 17 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/ryan-lilley/ I chucked out a rotten half lemon the same morning I saw this show. There was nothing pretty about it, the yellow skin turned wobbly, the innards blue black: fruit spoils so quickly in the summer heat. Kathleen Ryan, on the other hand, sees beauty in this kind of organic ruin; she assembles semi precious gemstones, studded with metal, into sculptures of mouldy fruits, and produces something unique and strange. https://artangled.com/posts/skupinska-maximillian/ Sun, 10 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/skupinska-maximillian/ This exhibition, similar to the Alex Margo Arden show I covered last week, smells great. This time though, the odour wafting through the gallery isn’t synthetic, but all natural, emanating from the dried pine needles that carpets one of the works. There’s a little glass pot of pine next to the visitor’s book, too. Raw nature is an important governing concept for the Warsaw-born, London-based artist, who mixes her own paints from natural products. https://artangled.com/posts/arden-frederick/ Sun, 03 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/arden-frederick/ Inside a small, tiled room opposite Smithfield meat market, surrounded by an unplacable odour, lies a charismatic pile of wooden furniture. It’s the work of Alex Margo Arden, a performance artist with her roots in the theatre. It’s on show in a gallery that used to be an old fashioned sandwich shop, the kind made practically extinct by the rise of Pret and its bougier competitors, especially in the city centre. https://artangled.com/posts/haunted-gagosian/ Sun, 26 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/haunted-gagosian/ This is a typically epically show-offy group exhibition, in which various contemporary and 20th century A-listers face each other down in large galleries police by black-clad security men. A confluence of art celebrity, crammed together: here, a wall full of Richard Prince photos loomed over a Rachel Whiteread bed; there, a Jenny Saville bum rubbed against what looked to be a string shopping bag with a chunk of polystyrene inside (in fact it was a bronze and marble sculpture from Tatiana Trouvé). https://artangled.com/posts/nolde-bastian/ Sun, 19 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/nolde-bastian/ Emil Nolde was a supremely talented painter who made gorgeous use of colours suggesting light. He also had well-documented Nazi sympathies. That’s surely a big reason why he isn’t much seen: this small show of watercolours was the first Nolde exhibition I can recall in London in my years of gallery-going. As an older man, Nolde spent his summers in Seebüll in Northern Germany, a beach-side town. Thomas Mann country - Caspar David Friedrich country - at least in my head. https://artangled.com/posts/alftan-spruth-magers/ Sun, 12 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/alftan-spruth-magers/ The painting below is called Tinted. It really stood out to me when I visited the artist’s show at Sprüth Magers, which opened this week. The painter, Henni Alftan, is Finland-born and Paris-based. She takes her inspiration from everyday mundane human scenes, except the human beings are absent. A prevailing theme in exhibitions featured here recently, including one from Thomas Demand (at the same gallery) and another from Hwang Seontae. https://artangled.com/posts/wall-white-cube/ Sun, 05 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/wall-white-cube/ Jeff Wall’s best known for large, lush, elaborately staged photographs set in light boxes. This absorbing exhibition puts on show several of his unstaged and landscape works - all of which are blown up to a grand scale. The show’s at the large White Cube gallery in Mayfair was eerily deserted when I visited, with most other commercial galleries closed due to the Jubilee weekend. Quite appropriately, the standout exhibit depicts a party - though not one you’d want to be at. https://artangled.com/posts/joffe-whitechapel/ Sun, 29 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/joffe-whitechapel/ I’m a major train geek, but even I wasn’t ready for the opening of the Elizabeth Line, London’s biggest public transport event in decades, to be so joyous. The huge, cool, beautiful stations were filled with joyriders the first day it opened on Tuesday. By later in the week, the stations were still packed, but by now almost everybody seemed to be using the line for what it’s intended to be: a much quicker way of getting across town. https://artangled.com/posts/pollard-mk/ Sun, 22 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/pollard-mk/ “It was quite busy today, we had a queue!” said the gallerist to her colleague, as I was leaving this retrospective show of Guyana-born, London-based photographer Ingrid Pollard. I guess she meant either that this exhibition in particular isn’t drawing in massive crowds, or that this large, beautiful gallery doesn’t tend to attract crowds in general. I suspect the latter, given the uncanny, uber quiet atmosphere of Milton Keynes in general. https://artangled.com/posts/salgado-beers/ Sun, 15 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/salgado-beers/ Andrew Salgado draws inspiration from heavy folk traditions and literary sources, but his light touch renders his paintings pretty, lyrical. The collection of oil-and-pastel portraits on show at BEERS London also benefitted greatly from being viewed on a sunny day. His subjects - mainly male - are surrounded by flowers and greenery, occasionally printed words. The palette is vibrant and zingy. Some of the artistic signifiers are a bit on the nose - did his portrait of Virginia Woolf really need to be titled River Ouse? https://artangled.com/posts/vostell-cardi/ Sun, 08 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/vostell-cardi/ There are two impressive mini-retrospectives for members of the post-war Fluxus group - some of the original performance artists - on in London at the moment. Per Kirkeby’s dark landscape paintings are at Michael Werner, while Wolf Vostell, one of the movement’s leading lights, has taken over all three floors of the large Cardi Gallery. Vostell specialised in what he called décollages - mixed media collages, built through creating new things and destroying existing ones. https://artangled.com/posts/crowe-flowers/ Sun, 01 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/crowe-flowers/ A pair of unseasonal exhibitions this week, in galleries on opposite sides of Cork Street. Unseasonal in that both of the featured artists use bare, skeletal tree branches as consistent visual motifs; look around you though, and trees are bursting into leaf everywhere, as summer begins to stir. Victoria Crowe, on show at Flowers, studied under Prunella Clough, who’s shown up more than once on this site before; unlike her teacher though, Crowe’s work escapes from the city. https://artangled.com/posts/sami-modern/ Sun, 24 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/sami-modern/ The Execution Room, painted by Mohammed Sami, is one of the most impressively ugly artworks I’ve seen in a while. It’s currently on show at Modern Art, along with a collection of other new, thematically-linked work from this Iraq-born, Sweden-based artist. It shows a dining table and chair set in a style that might kindly be termed “dictator chic”. I suspect, but can’t confirm by googling, that it was a room in Saddam Hussein’s palace, captured by allied forces during the disastrous war of 2003. https://artangled.com/posts/cunningham-newport/ Sun, 17 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/cunningham-newport/ This is a deeply gloomy exhibition of densely-worked oil paintings with a repeating roster of macabre subjects. Dogs, fighting each other; animal carcasses and slabs of meat and fish; portraits surrounded by foul, foggy miasmas, in semi-silhouette. The grandeur of the paintings’ surroundings - every time I come to this Damien Hirst-owned gallery, I’m struck by its lofty luxuriousness - sets them off wonderfully. The story behind the exhibition is unusual: the works were created over half a century ago, but have been barely seen since. https://artangled.com/posts/huang-tankstation/ Sun, 10 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/huang-tankstation/ Steph Huang, who was born in Taiwan but now lives and works in London, makes sardonic, surprising, and sometimes funny use of everyday objects. A collection of works are on show at mother’s tankstation: several quite modest individual pieces pack a bigger collective punch when imaginatively displayed, together. The artist clearly misses home, but finds quirky pleasures in her new surroundings. The ironically named Forest features bamboo leaves, neatly trapped in a gridded metal mesh. https://artangled.com/posts/cardenas-rech/ Sun, 03 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/cardenas-rech/ Chilean artist Alejandro Cardenas based the works in this exhibition around a story in Homer’s Odyssey. He owes some artistic debts to Rousseau, in his frequent use of lush, verdant backdrops, and to de Chirico in the quietude of his pictorial atmospheres, as well as his perspectival clarity. Odysseus took seven years out from his… well, odyssey, by having fun with the nymph Calypso on her private island. An extremely kind host, she gave him food (and other sensual pleasures), and even provided the tools to build his boat to escape with when he missed his wife too much to stay. https://artangled.com/posts/cottagecore-sultana/ Sun, 27 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/cottagecore-sultana/ Cottagecore wasn’t a familiar term for me. I enlarged my vocabulary thanks to a group show named after the aesthetic, on at Sultana in Paris when I visited this week. The word’s unfamiliar but it describes a familiar aesthetic. One of city-dwelling young people, shut out of employment gainful enough to buy a cottage of their own, fetishising a pastoral, artisanal lifestyle. It’s characterised by floral motifs, embroidery, pastel colours and everything “cosy”. https://artangled.com/posts/penck-white-cube/ Sun, 20 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/penck-white-cube/ AR Penck has been on show pretty frequently in London over recent years: I enjoyed an intimate collection of his paintings and sculpture at Michael Werner last November, and now some large canvases are at the large White Cube gallery in Mayfair. His popularity isn’t surprising. Penck, who died in 2017, was a loveable artist, with his large canvases of hieroglyph-like figures and symbols. The large scale of the White Cube gallery gives his works some room to breathe. https://artangled.com/posts/marchand-meffre-hoare/ Sun, 13 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/marchand-meffre-hoare/ ‘Ruin porn’ is a loaded term. Viewers living in intact and tidy homes, getting a vicarious thrill from images of spectacularly derelict places. Places we don’t have to deal with in our day to day lives. Anyway, if ruin porn is a thing, Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre are some of the top pornographers in the game. They’re behind The Ruins of Detroit, a coffee table book of sumptuously shot photos of the motor city, once so prosperous and now run so completely to seed. https://artangled.com/posts/himid-tate-modern/ Sun, 06 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/himid-tate-modern/ I’ve talked about Lubaina Himid here before. During lockdown, my mind wandered towards Ankledeep, a pair portrait that’s part of a series the British-born painter completed in the 1990s. Each work in the series depicts pairs of “watchful and calm” black women, discussing important matters. That painting, from the Tate’s permanent collection, forms part of an illuminating retrospective of Himid’s work, currently on show at Tate Modern. Himid’s an artist who returns again and again to repeating, overlapping themes, mainly in paint, but also in ceramics, set designs and sound works. https://artangled.com/posts/nft-unit/ Sun, 27 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/nft-unit/ Despite their sudden and enormous impact on the art world over recent months, the ins and outs of NFTs have passed me by. This show is the first of its type I’ve been to - in which the artworks are digital files, authenticated on the blockchain. I can’t face attempting to explain what the blockchain is, because I’ve read several Wikipedia pages and I’m still not sure I understand it myself! https://artangled.com/posts/steggles-beecroft/ Sun, 20 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/steggles-beecroft/ I’ve been really interested in The East London Group’s paintings for a while - ever since I moved to Bow, slap bang in the middle of the neighbourhood depicted by these painters. This large exhibition puts over 100 paintings on show: that’s a hefty proportion of the total known surviving works from the Group. With the big majority of these in private collections, this exhibition represents a rare opportunity for an interested viewer. https://artangled.com/posts/avaf-lamb/ Sun, 13 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/avaf-lamb/ As an aficionado of Round the Horne, I was tempted into this show by its title. It’s in polari, a secret language used by gay men in the years after the Second World War, and translates into something like “nice to see you”! Polari was actually on the way out by the time (closeted) comedians Kenneth Williams and Hugh Paddick (aka Julian and Sandy) spoke the language on BBC radio, in the mid-1960s. https://artangled.com/posts/bacon-royal-academy/ Sun, 06 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/bacon-royal-academy/ I caught COVID a few days ago. Worse than the sharp, uncanny fever has been the confinement - the daily stare at the fading T line on my LFT test, the lack of human contact, exercise… and gallery trips. This means I have nothing new to write about this week. It’s possible I caught it at the last show I saw, this major Francis Bacon retrospective at the Royal Academy. I breezed around the large exhibition in around half an hour, not paying very close attention but taking in the atmosphere and getting my bearings: it’s on for a few months, so plenty of other chances to go back, I thought. https://artangled.com/posts/gribbon-massimo/ Sat, 29 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/gribbon-massimo/ I was so impressed with Jenna Gribbon’s vigorous handling of oil paint in this tight, tense exhibition. Her virile brush strokes mercilessly expose her main subject - her partner, and according to Twitter, soon-to-be wife - in full-face portraits. Heightening the tension, in many of these works, like M in Blinding Light, below, the subject has a bright clamp light directly shone in her face. That’s the light that’s being held. https://artangled.com/posts/aagaard-pacific/ Sat, 22 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/aagaard-pacific/ The weather in London this week has been grey, cold and still. Though the first daffodils are out in the parks, and there’s that extra few minutes of light in the afternoon to let us know that better times are on their way. This wintry feeling meant that Martin Aagaard Hansen’s paintings, scratchy and cold, struck a chord with me this week. Copenhagen-based Hansen clearly enjoys escaping to the countryside: the paintings on show at Union Pacific are closely thematically linked, all some variation on a forest scene with solitary wanderers. https://artangled.com/posts/odonoghue-marlborough/ Sat, 15 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/odonoghue-marlborough/ Hughie O’Donoghue is a Manchester-born painter who now lives in Ireland. I say painter, but the works on show in this exhibition are complex, layered collages that include painting, but are also built up through photographs and resin. Especially unusual are the bases: O’Donoghue paints and prints on shiny tarpaulins, sackcloths, sandbags, which must make his craft very technically difficult to pull off. Taken as a whole, the images are haunting. https://artangled.com/posts/gates-whitechapel/ Sat, 08 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/gates-whitechapel/ I caught Theaster Gates’ show at Whitechapel Gallery on its last weekend. I’d cycled there without checking the (rainy) weather forecast. Along with blurry glasses and a wet bum, I’d brought along a raft of preconceptions about Gates’ work. The main one being that his activist ceramic works were compelling due to their artistic influences and political meaning, rather than being beautiful objects in themselves. I was disabused of this dumb opinion in the final room of the show, pictured below, a spectacular collection of large pots, earthenware and stoneware, shining with different glazes, shaped with different forms, some amphora-shaped, some more organic and mysterious. https://artangled.com/posts/top-5-2021/ Sun, 26 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/top-5-2021/ I’ve surprised myself with sticking to the Artangled project for another year. Ever since lockdown eased in April, and many London galleries reopened, I’ve posted weekly. Just as I have each week since the beginning of 2018. This site, and its thousands of words, remain a personal project: I doubt I could ‘grow the brand’ even if I tried! But I should admit, it’s remained a personal pleasure to sit down each week and put together a post, and I’ll continue doing it as long as the pleasure remains. https://artangled.com/posts/archer-schubert/ Sun, 19 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/archer-schubert/ Merry Christmas one and all! Unless you want a festive spin around London’s commercial galleries - in which case you’ll find they’ve all shut due to the COVID wave that’s engulfed the city recently. Some people didn’t get the message though, and like me speculatively walked the streets of Mayfair yesterday, armed with a negative LFT test, getting repeatedly confronted by locked doors. So, this last single-show post of the year - next week as usual it’s a roundup of my five top shows of the year - is about something I saw a couple of weeks back. https://artangled.com/posts/shrigley-stephen-friedman/ Sun, 12 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/shrigley-stephen-friedman/ “I will make 100 works on paper with the intention that no more than half are any good,” the extremely popular and successful artist David Shrigley told the Guardian recently. “And there are probably four where you’re like: ‘This is basically fantastic! This is me demonstrating my area of expertise and all the other 96 are just attempts to do this.’ And do they sell? Do they fuck. You look through the inventory going: ‘Nobody bought that? https://artangled.com/posts/repin-petit-palais/ Sun, 05 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/repin-petit-palais/ It’s a fleeting moment in time, captured in oil paints some time in 1876. Ilya Repin, fresh out of art school and on a sponsored stay in Paris, spotted a moody young man, leaning on a wall in a back street of Montmartre. The painting ended up in a public collection in Saratov, labelled, simply, этюд (‘Study’). And now it’s back to its city of origin, in a vast retrospective of its painter, in the Petit Palais. https://artangled.com/posts/safa-praz-delavallade/ Sun, 28 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/safa-praz-delavallade/ Christine Safa’s sensitive oil paintings employ a repeated motif that combines landscape and portrait. Her mysterious figures merge and meld with natural features. Visiting her small exhibition at the Praz-Delevallade gallery towards the end of a long, cold winter’s day in Paris, I found myself moved both by Safa’s pictures and her words. The show notes emphasise the ephemerality of the moments she’s aiming to capture. It’s no surprise that she tends to depict the beginning or end of the day, with its changing orange-and-purple light. https://artangled.com/posts/constable-royal-academy/ Sun, 21 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/constable-royal-academy/ A few years back, I bought a print of one of my favourite works in the National Gallery, which as a native Londoner I’ve passed countless times over the years. Cenotaph to the Memory of Sir Joshua Reynolds was completed by John Constable in 1836, a year before the painter’s death. The romantic, autumnal scene, the deep browns of the mostly-bare trees melding into the vanilla-yellow, darkening sky, a ghostly stag gazing straight back at the viewer, is still on my wall. https://artangled.com/posts/hwang-pontone/ Sat, 13 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/hwang-pontone/ This exhibition shows scenes of well-appointed, but empty modernist interiors from Korean artist Hwang Seontae. They’re light boxes, with sandblasted glass fronts and cold LED lights, the cable powering each scene discreetly boxed in. In these imaginary rooms, the light comes from the windows: all of the works on show have the same title, The Space with Sunshine. It’s sunny outside, meaning that strong shadows are cast on the wooden floorboards. https://artangled.com/posts/tokyo-ashmolean/ Sun, 07 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/tokyo-ashmolean/ This is a baggy, overly stretched show with some outstanding artworks. It’s aimed at representing the “creative, dynamic and thrilling” Japanese capital, across hundreds of years of history. A tough brief, but I longed for a bit of focus: one single cabinet contained a samurai sword, a tea set, a pair of Noh masks and a lacquered screen. That cavalcade of national symbols ended up making the show look a bit provincial, ironically enough. https://artangled.com/posts/frieze-regents-park/ Sun, 31 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/frieze-regents-park/ My last trip to the Frieze tent, in 2019, ended up as a bit of a disaster, not that I admitted it on here at the time. After three hours of walking, looking intently, elbowing aside crowds and becoming increasingly unbalanced by loading more and more free merchandise into my straining tote, I ended up having a quiet panic attack in Benugo, vowing never again. If you’re not important enough to buy any of the work on show, then you’re effectively paying quite a lot to be overstimulated to the point of exhaustion - not really the best frame of mind to look at art. https://artangled.com/posts/fischl-skarstedt/ Sat, 23 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/fischl-skarstedt/ Sorry Lucian Freud, but when I think of a painter who captures the vulnerability and variety of the skin we live in, it’s Eric Fischl. The American artist, still active and showing at Skarstedt this autumn, works with loose, sparse but unerringly suggestive brushstrokes. He’s an unsentimental, relentless chronicler of skin, our skin, as it stretches, puffs and sags. This show zooms in on a particular series Fischl undertook in 2002. https://artangled.com/posts/howard-lee/ Sun, 17 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/howard-lee/ I first featured the British painter Rachel Howard on this site in 2018, when I saw a stately and sombre show of hers in Damien Hirst’s cavernous Newport Street Gallery. Back then, she showed works based around the stations of the cross. This new exhibition, Howard’s first at Simon Lee, is a more intimate affair, both spatially, in that the Mayfair gallery’s a bit pokier, and in the subject matter. https://artangled.com/posts/kossoff-annely-juda/ Sun, 10 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/kossoff-annely-juda/ Along with bigger names like Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon, Leon Kossoff was part of the School of London, painters who passed a pitiless eye on the down-at-heel postwar capital city, pre Olympics, pre Millennium Dome, pre Big Bang boom. A fine retrospective selection of Kossoff’s work - the artist died in 2019 - is on show right now at Annely Juda Fine Art. Kossoff’s subject matter is firmly rooted in the city he rarely left. https://artangled.com/posts/otero-pailos-holtermann/ Sun, 03 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/otero-pailos-holtermann/ Like many other Londoners, I first heard of Jorge Otero-Pailos with his knockout The Ethics of Dust show in 2016, in which he applied, pulled off and displayed an absorbent latex panel across an entire wall of Westminster Hall. Under that spectacular medieval hammerbeam roof, the Spanish-born, US-based artist confronted us with the layered debris of centuries of our history. An unforgettable sight! Five years later, Otero-Pailos is showing in London again, digging into some more recent history. https://artangled.com/posts/moon-durham/ Sun, 26 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/moon-durham/ This work’s simple and impressive: it’s a big blow-up model of the moon. Stencilled with detailed topographical photographs from NASA, this incredible inflatable has been touring for a couple of years, everywhere from downtown Kolkata to the Natural History Museum in London. I saw it in one of the most awesome rooms in the world, Durham Cathedral. With its pointed arch vault gesturing towards the Gothic, and its fat columns and piers grounded in the Romanesque, this thousand-year-old space is huge and dim. https://artangled.com/posts/hockney-royal-academy/ Sun, 19 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/hockney-royal-academy/ While the world went into lockdown last Spring, David Hockney, ensconced in his comfortable country house in northern France, took out his iPad and captured the passing of the seasons. Through circumstance, this Royal Academy show, containing 116 of these iPad pictures, comes at a time when lockdowns are over, and the Burlington House courtyard and the city beyond is ever more crowded. We’re having a springtime, then, even with the days getting shorter. https://artangled.com/posts/bewick-shaw-genillard/ Sun, 12 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/bewick-shaw-genillard/ I love a show that brings together two apparently totally different artists, and finds unexpected and inspiring connections! In fact, that kind of thing is what this blog is all about, as I tried to explain in my first post way back when. And I’ve showcased a couple such exhibitions since. So, on one hand, George Shaw, famous for painting scenes from the not-so-nice Coventry suburb he grew up in, using the kind of enamel paints more commonly used for model aeroplanes. https://artangled.com/posts/barlow-hauser-wirth/ Sun, 05 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/barlow-hauser-wirth/ Why am I looking at and writing about concrete so much this summer? First there was Prunella Clough’s desolate little paintings of midcentury urban corners, that caught my eye at Annely Juda Fine Art. Then there was Yu Ji’s dripping, detritus-filled installation at Chisenhale Gallery. Now, rather grander than both, is Phyllida Barlow’s ring of a hundred or so three-metre-high cement sentinels, that squeeze to the edges of Hauser & Wirth’s main gallery at the moment. https://artangled.com/posts/burley-gao/ Sun, 29 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/burley-gao/ I wonder whether Daniel Burley, the young British multimedia artist, pored over the memorably disgusting Fungus the Bogeyman when he grew up. He’d definitely have seen Shrek. And he’s clearly come of age in the noughties, the decade that fashion forgot, with its gross bootcuts and belly shorts. All that’s gone in the aesthetic mixer for this show in the small GAO Gallery, just off the Mile End Road. Three “goblins”, green figures made of epoxy and steel, finished off with oil paint, galavant across the floor: tumbling over a log, gathering flowers, and clawing at the sky with sharp talons - painted with nail polish. https://artangled.com/posts/hirst-gagosian/ Sun, 22 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/hirst-gagosian/ Again and again, on this site I’ve returned to exhibitions from the YBAs of the 90s. Damien Hirst, the most famous of them all probably, relies more on spectacle these days than the mature style of his contemporaries Gillian Wearing, Tracey Emin and Gary Hume, for example. Gagosian, with its black clad security guards and show-off cavernous spaces, is a perfect venue for Hirst, who’s come up with a variety of spectacular installations to be on display there for the next few months. https://artangled.com/posts/gibbens-zabludowicz/ Sun, 15 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/gibbens-zabludowicz/ Rosie Gibbens’ sculptures are soft, cute and semi-interactive. The artist, clad in a constraining sheath dress and high heels, has activated this room of ‘soft girls’ in performances. Visitors to her show at the Zabludowicz Collection can also unroll a giant plushy tongue, attached to the wall by a mangel-like device, and use a foot pump to inflate one of the girls’ hands (a plastic glove). The artist’s made inventive used of a combination of sex toys, clothing, office chairs and exercise equipment, plus a bunch of other found objects, to pull together her cute collection. https://artangled.com/posts/forest-parafin/ Sun, 08 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/forest-parafin/ I’ve always liked a good thematic group show, and this one at Parafin didn’t disappoint. The theme is ’the forest’, which are part of our shared consciousness, even for those of us who live in the middle of large cities. Across different cultures and times, the forest represents a quiet place to retreat to and hide. But it’s also a lonely place, where monsters may lurk. The exhibition begins with an engraving from the mystical French artist Gustave Doré to set the scene. https://artangled.com/posts/tape-hackney/ Sun, 01 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/tape-hackney/ This show isn’t a likely subject for me. It’s a photography exhibition, sure, but the photos in it aren’t fine art. Rather, they’re the legacy of the Rio Tape/Slide Newsreel Group, a local voluntary project that ran at the Rio (a cinema in Dalston, East London) from 1982 until 1988. These photos are some of the thousands of slides that were found mouldering in the cinema’s basement recently, and provide a totally fascinating slice of life in a place that’s really familiar to me, at a time that’s just in living memory. https://artangled.com/posts/lucy-soft/ Sun, 25 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/lucy-soft/ The notes for this show, from Nashville-based painter Shannon Cartier Lucy, are really excellent, and illuminated what I saw in the gallery. (Given that show notes are so often trite and obfuscatory, it’s worth shouting out.) “Any singular narrative is made obtuse,” by this artist, Philomena Epps writes, “the certainty of reality melted away through her embrace of fantasy and the uncanny. “The setting of a party can be inferred by the particular debris and signs of festivities: there is cake and strings of undulating, crimped satin ribbons, but the situation reads as ominous, toxic. https://artangled.com/posts/hicks-jacques/ Sun, 18 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/hicks-jacques/ Wandering into a side room at Alison Jacques felt like stumbling into an odd interplanetary church service. Arranged on plinths were small fabric discs, bound into shape by lengths of thread, looking like cosmic spheres, but also somehow like heads on straining necks. On the wall, a larger disc, like a godhead, radiantly pink. I’d entered into the world of Sheila Hicks, a prolific artist who works in a bunch of media but who is primarily known for textile works like these. https://artangled.com/posts/ethridge-greengrassi/ Sun, 11 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/ethridge-greengrassi/ Roe Ethridge, an American photographer, spent the early part of 2021 in Paris, as the city started to shrug off the hideous toll of COVID, and started to reopen. The French capital had a tough time of it by European standards, both in its case rate and the strictness of the restrictions faced by citizens, including a nighttime curfew. There’s something of that mood in the pose of an old lady who caught the photographer’s eye one day, and is featured in this show, on currently at Greengrassi. https://artangled.com/posts/swinging-hazlitt/ Sun, 04 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/swinging-hazlitt/ Three linked exhibitions this week, each carrying with them a whiff of patchouli oil and pot. It’s not quite (yet) a Summer of Love in London, but these shows all reach back to the 1960s, a time of Pop and Op… and some very big floppy collars. One of the biggest and floppiest is sported by legendary fashion designer Ossie Clark, sketched at home by the still more legendary (and decade-defining) David Hockney. https://artangled.com/posts/yu-chisenhale/ Sun, 27 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/yu-chisenhale/ My response to this installation in the reopened one-room Chisenhale Gallery was quite visceral. The first thing that hit me was the smell of standing water, which stood in puddles on the concrete floor, after dripping down from steel pipes. The source of those pipes is also the source of the second sensory reaction: stainless steel jugs churn loudly, a threatening hum. This is an electric water pump, the source of the drips, the puddles, the smell. https://artangled.com/posts/emin-royal-academy/ Sun, 20 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/emin-royal-academy/ There’s a bench in Berkeley Square in Mayfair with a funny plaque: On this bench in 2007, it states, the notorious artist Tracey Emin surrendered all her art rebel credibility when she decided to become a member of the Royal Academy of Arts. Times have changed: she’s not just a member these days. Instead, this self-described “notorious rebel” has aged into full blown grande dame status, and is getting a new RA exhibition, a few streets away from the square. https://artangled.com/posts/opie-lisson/ Sun, 13 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/opie-lisson/ This artist is the subject of much critical sniffiness, thanks to his works generally being so open and people pleasing. His vinyl cuts and sculptures adorn many a public square (and the odd album cover), to general acclaim. His current show at Lisson Gallery’s Mayfair outpost is typically cute and arresting. There are two main subjects, generally in painted metal: group scenes of crowds walking down the street, and brightly-coloured tower blocks. https://artangled.com/posts/clough-annely/ Sun, 06 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/clough-annely/ Prunella Clough liked to explore the train yards at Willesden Junction: quite a messy and down-at-heel place these days, but surely an absolute decrepit dump in the post-war years in which she started working. From a wealthy background, she spent much of her career teaching at the Chelsea School of Art. But her own artistic output focused on semi-abstract paintings and prints of grimy, industrial and forgotten corners of London. https://artangled.com/posts/vasconcelos-ysp/ Sun, 30 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/vasconcelos-ysp/ Joana Vasconcelos (and her workshop) makes big, brash works that make up for in spectacle what they lack in subtlety. She’s taken over an indoors gallery and an outdoor section of the fabulous Yorkshire Sculpture Park, near Wakefield. I saw this show on a lovely sunny Sunday, and ate it up like an ice cream with extra sprinkles and a flake. Or maybe a pastel de nata? A major theme of Vasconcelos’ work is Portugueseness, and she takes a typically more-is-more approach to her ancestral homeland. https://artangled.com/posts/fornieles-carlos/ Sun, 23 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/fornieles-carlos/ Ed Fornieles brings together a couple of prevailing themes I’ve been covering on Artangled these last few months. First, the technique of using found photographs in a clever way: see here for similar on Wade Guyton and Jan Hendrickse. Second, responding artistically to the weird phase of lockdown the world’s been in this past year or so: as have Gillian Wearing, Alban Laurent, Thomas Demand and likely many more to be featured in future weeks! https://artangled.com/posts/queer-46/ Sun, 16 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/queer-46/ As the trendy Carhartt-clad east London dad put it to his iPhone-toting child: “This is all old folky art, sort of British traditionalist.” We were all walking round the new show at Gallery 46, a deliberately ramshackle space, carved out of a couple of Georgian terraced houses, under the shadow of the big blue modern Royal London hospital in Whitechapel. The exhibition enveloped us in a deliberately fey world of mummers and satyrs, woodlands and flowers. https://artangled.com/posts/mckinniss-rech/ Sun, 09 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/mckinniss-rech/ It’s hard to think of a more universally loved celebrity than Dolly Parton. Not an original observation - there was a whole podcast about it a year or so back. Adulation for the country superstar has hit new heights, as if it were possible, over recent months when it emerged she’d helped fund the Moderna vaccine. The job of the artist is to mess with the narrative. So when the very talented and original painter Sam McKinniss picked up on this latest wave of adulation, he felt… fear. https://artangled.com/posts/demand-spruth-magers/ Sun, 02 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/demand-spruth-magers/ I loved Canopy, the photograph below, on show in the main gallery room at Sprüth Magers at the moment. It’s a sunny scene of some powdery blue apartment block, with a single, lemon sorbet-coloured canopy over-extended over one of the blocky white balconies. Given the work’s from 2020, the artist must have been thinking of our lockdown when he made it. The silent shadowy interiors signal the confinement of unseen occupants; I remember that for some city-dwellers, in the early days of the crisis, balconies were the only ‘safe’ outside space available to them. https://artangled.com/posts/kantarovsky-blatrix-modern/ Sun, 25 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/kantarovsky-blatrix-modern/ I’ve loved Sanya Kantarovsky’s snarky, morbid and scatological paintings since I first encountered them, in his 2018 solo show at Kunsthalle Basel. So I was really excited to see this London show of his woodblock prints, set in frames from French painter/sculptor Camille Blatrix. The thing that struck me about Kantarovsky’s work, then and now, is the balance between the serious and the silly. These prints have hideous subject matter - in one, a robed, bloodied figure kneels by the surf; in another, a child and his mother are molested by a bony hand - but are cartoonishly-drawn, in zanily bright colours. https://artangled.com/posts/laurent-vault/ Sun, 18 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/laurent-vault/ After four months of long lockdown, London’s commercial galleries reopened this week. The city’s bathed in spring sunshine, the streets are (comparatively) bustling, and it’s time to blow the dust and cobwebs off this website and get going again! I guess you could call it a staged reopening: not being able to face a busy tube and Mayfair, I chose my first show back to be at a gallery within cycling distance of my flat. https://artangled.com/posts/top-5-2020/ Sun, 20 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/top-5-2020/ This is my third year of the Artangled project, and my third end-of-year roundup. I’ll stick to the 2018 and 2019 format, listing the five art exhibitions I enjoyed most this year. Previously, I’ve also called out a couple of shows I didn’t enjoy. But for 2020, there’s only one candidate for my festive lump of coal: the global pandemic itself, one of whose side effects was to shutter London’s art galleries for months on end. https://artangled.com/posts/tallentire-hollybush/ Sun, 13 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/tallentire-hollybush/ The works in this small exhibition are grouped around the idea of scale - measurements. In the main room, Anne Tallentire shows us Area, wall-mounted, flat-coloured MDF panels corresponding to the dimensions, rather than the appearance, of objects in the communal area of a public housing complex in Graz: the work was first shown in that city in 2018. Originally shown, in other words, before the pandemic which has made us measure things in new ways. https://artangled.com/posts/mokgosi-gagosian/ Sun, 06 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/mokgosi-gagosian/ I’ve always found the amount of security guards at Gagosian galleries a bit over the top. And even more so this visit, with London fresh out of lockdown and the city’s residents more likely to catch up on their Christmas shopping than catch up on new exhibitions on a Saturday afternoon. That, coupled with the fact the gallery’s gone appointment-only, meant that I had this show all to myself. Well, more accurately, I shared each room of Gagosian’s massive space on Britannia Street with a black mask-and-suit clad guard - and nobody else. https://artangled.com/posts/verjux-genillard/ Sun, 29 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/verjux-genillard/ Nothing to do. I had some leave from work to use, and used it this week, while galleries (and so many other places) remain locked down here in London. So the days have seemed blank, featureless. I think of a plain circle of electric light, cast by a ceiling-mounted electric lamp. It’s a work by Michel Verjux, downstairs at Laure Genillard, which I viewed at an exhibition of his early last year. https://artangled.com/posts/baker-baselland/ Sun, 22 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/baker-baselland/ I can’t find much about the Zurich-based artist Brigham Baker on the internet, beyond a nice Instagram account. But when I emptied my mind and allowed some gallery memories to drift in (aka, the start of composing one of these lockdown posts), I thought about his beehives. I saw them at Kunsthaus Baselland, as part of Beehave, a group show celebrating the honeybee - which was a lot less cutesy than it sounds, considering many of the artists used the animal as a symbolic harbinger of climate change, war and so on. https://artangled.com/posts/eisenman-secession/ Sun, 15 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/eisenman-secession/ My abiding feeling on the US presidential election results is totally unoriginal: relief. As messy as the withdrawal will be, it’s likely Trump is on his way - for now. With London on lockdown and the galleries closed, I’ve been thinking today about the various anti-Trump art I’ve seen over the past four years. (I don’t recall seeing any pro-Trump art, outside of my favourite meme-based Twitter account.) Early on in his first - only! https://artangled.com/posts/mercier-bugada/ Sun, 08 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/mercier-bugada/ Back in lockdown, nowhere to go. Which is a problem for a website that’s updated weekly, with updates based on an exhibition I saw that week. During the spring 2020 lockdown here in London, I wrote a bunch of posts about works in permanent collections that I was thinking of at time of writing. This time, during this hopefully short winter interlude of closed galleries, I’m going to dig into my notes, and write each week about a standout show I saw sometime in the past, that didn’t make the website for whatever reason. https://artangled.com/posts/wearing-paley/ Sun, 01 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/wearing-paley/ This year, many of us have been given the opportunity to spend a lot more time in peaceful self-contemplation at home. Which has absolutely sucked. The artist Gillian Wearing has produced many self portraits in lockdown. Some oil on canvas, some watercolour, and all with a striking atmosphere of quiet, watchful despair. In each of the fourteen self portraits on show at Maureen Paley, plus one I saw at the the Royal Academy, Wearing’s painted image seems to be waiting for something. https://artangled.com/posts/summer-academy-2020/ Sun, 25 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/summer-academy-2020/ The Royal Academy has been pretty conservative with its COVID response, tightening capacity by 80% and making pre-booking compulsory for everyone, members included. It seems tighter than Tate (whose Bruce Nauman show, which I also visited this week, was pretty full). Or maybe it’s the nature of its Summer Exhibition, delayed by lockdown, with over 1,000 works crowding the walls of the main galleries, that makes the relative paucity of the crowds stand out still more. https://artangled.com/posts/hume-magers/ Sun, 18 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/hume-magers/ When I think of Gary Hume’s work, it’s a particular texture that comes to mind first. Glossy paint on ultra-flat aluminium, standing up in ridges. Frameless, the only sign of the human touch is the occasionally streaked paint running down the sides of the metal block. Then comes the feeling I get when I look at these paintings: serenity. Archipelago, Hume’s latest exhibition at Sprüth Magers, brings that serene approach to some troubling source material. https://artangled.com/posts/rotella-cardi/ Sun, 11 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/rotella-cardi/ While Andy Warhol’s mega-show plays across the river at Tate, a much less-heralded friend from Italy has taken up residence in a quiet street in Mayfair. Just like Warhol, Mimmo Rotella was obsessed by the mechanistic over the manual. But instead of making glitzy silk screen prints of pop icons, Rotella responded to the post-War boom with a grungy alternative: the décollage. In the 1950s, Rotella launched his artistic career by roaming the streets of Rome and tearing advertising posters from the walls, which he then distressed further at home. https://artangled.com/posts/capitan-william/ Sun, 04 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/capitan-william/ This young artist, who also pays the bills as a fashion photographer, is very obviously going places. Still a couple of years shy of 30, she has a rock-solid aesthetic across photos, paintings, (hand) writing and found objects, which are all on show at Maximillian William right now. The exhibition is based around a garment that could be militaristic, cute or camp: a sailor suit. The actual suit is draped over a schoolroom-style wooden chair, its hood carefully appliquéd with white-stitched daisies. https://artangled.com/posts/cezanne-jaray-schubert/ Sun, 27 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/cezanne-jaray-schubert/ I spent a magical half hour here, in the weakening early autumn sunlight. The viewing room at Karsten Schubert, looking out onto Lexington Street in Soho from an upper floor of an 18th century former townhouse, hosts two utterly different sets of works: Jaray’s mathematical, precise, abstracted pairs of painted roundels, and intimate preparatory sketches and doodles from Cézanne. It’s more interesting to me how each work relates to the space, rather than how the artists relate to each other. https://artangled.com/posts/mcdaniel-corrias/ Sun, 20 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/mcdaniel-corrias/ Gisela McDaniel’s women tend to wear proud smiles, adopt open and relaxed postures, and stare directly out at the viewer. They’re generally in company, too, sitting and relaxing in pairs and threes. They sit in lush landscapes, surrounded by tropical foliage. Six of this artist’s paintings are currently on show at Pilar Corrias. The oil paint is embroidered by found objects - beads and fabrics, generally - strategically stuck onto the canvas. https://artangled.com/posts/junque-massimo/ Sun, 13 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/junque-massimo/ The first time I saw US-based Jamian Juliano-Villani’s work was at Massimo de Carlo last year. I wrote about this show’s prime attraction: a cuddly tiger getting rigorously orally penetrated with a plastic-clad dildo. The fun continues in the same gallery this summer, in a group show organised around “junk”. That’s junk in both the literal and slang senses of the word: either worthless clutter, or, like… a penis. It doesn’t really matter which way you take it (hmmm), Juliano Villani’s slapdash, don’t-care aesthetic isn’t proscriptive in the least. https://artangled.com/posts/picasso-bastian/ Sun, 06 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/picasso-bastian/ Pablo Picasso moved to the south of France after the second world war, and pitched up in Cannes in 1955, living in splendour at La Californie, a sumptuous mansion in the hills above town. He remained in the area until his death in 1973. This period is the focus of a new show at Bastian - one of the few open in London at this time of year. As productive as ever, Picasso painted, sculpted, drew and cast thousands of ceramics. https://artangled.com/posts/cundale-south/ Sun, 30 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/cundale-south/ Sophie Cundale’s third major film is both visually striking and deeply ropey. South London Gallery, where this is showing again after a COVID-induced cutoff during the spring, kindly terms it a “melodrama”. It’s a story of a boxer, knocked out in one of his fights, hallucinating his way into the medieval court of a mad queen, her wicked advisor and a couple of wacky nuns. The story of disease and betrayal that unfolds over half an hour or so is bloody and silly - or, to put it another way, bloody silly. https://artangled.com/posts/shonibare-friedman/ Sat, 22 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/shonibare-friedman/ Lady justice, sword in one hand, scales in the other, gestures at us on Old Burlington Street, behind the glass windows of the gallery. It’s a show designed to be looked at from outside: unreachable, but unmissable. It’s Stephen Friedman Gallery and Yinka Shonibare’s response to the Black Lives Matter movement that’s roiled the global discourse this summer. The outdoor viewing is induced by the year’s other big global event. https://artangled.com/posts/deco-sainsbury/ Sat, 15 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/deco-sainsbury/ What a moving exhibition this proved to be. Of course, when the Sainsbury Centre was planning a show about Britons taking their holidays at the seaside in the far-off inter-war years, they can’t have known that so many people would be “staycationing” this year. That includes me: I could visit because I was housesitting in Norwich, glad of the change of scene, with a holiday in France cancelled due to the new quarantine restrictions. https://artangled.com/posts/warhol-tate/ Sat, 08 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/warhol-tate/ I’ve been waiting to see this show for ages, given Tate’s pandemic-induced shutdown just after its opening. This vast, career-spanning retrospective has been extended now until November. Following all that anticipation, it was a sad experience to visit Tate Modern post-lockdown. I could deal with the need to pre-book, the long queues and the mask wearing - all good by me. But the long queues and implied one-way system made me feel like I needed to keep moving forwards, and not linger on this or that. https://artangled.com/posts/bunga-whitechapel/ Sun, 02 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/bunga-whitechapel/ For a small sect that has never had a global membership higher than a few thousand souls, the Shakers have had an outsize cultural impact. With their dedication to beautifully modest and minimal design, their aesthetic influence has echoed down the centuries, from Modernist cereal-box architecture, to wood-n-whitewash worshipping magazines like Kinfolk. Shakerism influences the work of Carlos Bunga, a Portuguese-born, US-based artist. He’s taken inspiration not just in Shaker aesthetics in this one-room show, currently on at Whitechapel Gallery. https://artangled.com/posts/silva-approach/ Sun, 26 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/silva-approach/ Something about Mike Silva’s paintings make me feel - “that’s London”. I promise I would have said the same even if this show had been called anything else. I’ll try to explain why. Kitchen Window, pictured below, is representative of Silva’s scenes, which are worked up from photos he has taken over the years, many from his old flatsharing days. There’s something about the brownish light, filtering in from the impractical curtain covering, wanly suspended from a plastic tube across the window, giving a little privacy from the neighbours across the way, that makes me think: we’re in London. https://artangled.com/posts/dijkstra-goodman/ Sun, 19 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/dijkstra-goodman/ This portrait photographer shoots well-off, good-looking young people. Her subjects tend to pose for the camera, natural and relaxed expressions on their unlined faces. Most of the photographs at Rineka Dijkstra’s current London show keep to this formula: there’s a series of sibling portraits, brothers and sisters pictured at home. These homes are generally well-appointed, even fancy. But the photo below shakes up the formula a bit, and stands out. It was taken in Sefton Park in Liverpool, part of Dijkstra’s Park Portraits series, which includes works from between 2003 and 2006. https://artangled.com/posts/jarman-garden/ Sun, 12 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/jarman-garden/ London’s Garden Museum is a lovely, peaceful enclave on the Southwark riverfront, adjoining Lambeth Palace. A nice contrast to the subject of its latest exhibition, who’s one of the very angriest artists of the last few decades: Derek Jarman. Alongside his work as a filmmaker and painter, specialising in naked guys speaking Latin and cludgy black canvases studded with broken glass respectively, Jarman cultivated a famous garden. For the last five years of his life, he lived at Prospect Cottage, close to the nuclear power station in Dungeness. https://artangled.com/posts/velde-koenig/ Sun, 05 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/velde-koenig/ Here in the UK, smoking’s been banned in many public places for well over a decade. Which means that smoking-related objects, like the humble ashtray, are passing into obscurity. The kids are vaping these days. As a result, I wouldn’t have necessarily recognised Rinus Van de Velde’s cute yet disturbing sculptures as being ashtrays, had it not been for the title of this show. But there they are: round, shallow dishes, with notches around the rim. https://artangled.com/posts/gette-kultys/ Sun, 28 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/gette-kultys/ The first emojis were created in 1999 by Japanese designer Shigetaka Kurita for a local telecoms company. Over the two decades since, they’ve mounted a stealth takeover of the world’s written conversation, and along the way, found their way into the permanent collection at MoMA. Some more emoji art can currently be found up a staircase off the Hackney Road, with a small exhibition of paintings from Kazakhstan-born German artist, Hell Gette. https://artangled.com/posts/stoner-modern/ Sun, 21 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/stoner-modern/ At last, at last, many of London’s commercial galleries have reopened. As the country emerges from its lockdown, for better or worse, things aren’t quite back to normal. A spontaneous tour through open galleries isn’t going to be possible for a while: all of my visits have been by appointment. This extra element of necessary planning isn’t a bad thing though - it makes you more considered about what you want to see. https://artangled.com/posts/accardi-rivoli/ Sun, 14 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/accardi-rivoli/ With many of London’s galleries finally, finally reopening next week, it’s time to draw these weekly interludes to a close. I’m very excited to get back to it, those Saturday afternoon gallery trawls. Hopefully the experience of visiting won’t be too different to how it was before. I’ll be getting there by bike, wearing a mask, and thinking twice before picking up the (paper) press release from the front desk. I doubt having a limit on the number of people inside is going to be an issue. https://artangled.com/posts/taeuber-nwma/ Sun, 07 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/taeuber-nwma/ Sophie Taeuber was a brilliantly distinctive dancer, interior designer, sculptor, costume maker and painter. She blazed a singular trail from the post-World War One stirrings of Dada in her native Switzerland, to her particularly horrible death, choking on fumes from a carbon monoxide-emitting stove, in 1943. Along the way, she married Hans Arp, who’s a bit more famous these days, and moved to Paris. Some of her work’s usually on show at the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NWMA), in Washington DC, including this very fine late work from the Paris years. https://artangled.com/posts/burra-pallant/ Sun, 31 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/burra-pallant/ I’ve only ever seen one Edward Burra painting in real life. In Tate Britain, there’s 1930’s Snack Bar - a funny, slightly grotesque scene of a cloche-wearing, fur-clad woman shoving a ham sandwich in her mouth, while on the other side of the bar her server slices one of the least-appealing-looking joints of meat ever committed to canvas. It’s as disturbing as the Bacon triptych in the next room. A genuine eccentric, who gave a total of one interview during his long lifetime, Burra has oscillated between total obscurity and intermittent revivals of interest, since he first hit the big time a century ago. https://artangled.com/posts/himid-tate/ Sun, 24 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/himid-tate/ “Nobody paints our love stories, our ordinary everyday,” the British artist Lubaina Himid told an interviewer once. “How our ordinary everyday is touched by enormous trauma and tragedy but we as a whole set of women globally and historically have the capacity to keep going.” Let’s look at Ankledeep, a Himid painting from 1991 that’s part of the Tate collection, and was on show in an artist’s room at Tate Britain right up until the virus hit, and the doors closed. https://artangled.com/posts/saenraedam-rijksmuseum/ Sun, 17 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/saenraedam-rijksmuseum/ Pieter Saenraedam was famous in his lifetime - as he is now - for his paintings of church interiors, which was a whole genre by itself in the Dutch Golden Age. His work stands out for its serenity and calm, and his great skill in dealing with endless shades of white. White stands for spiritual purity. His bare, unadorned spaces are the results of violent social upheaval: Saenraedam painted Romanesque and Gothic churches, built centuries before for the then-all-powerful Catholic church. https://artangled.com/posts/schiele-thyssen/ Sun, 10 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/schiele-thyssen/ Maybe it’s bad taste, maybe it’s cliché to use this artist for a pandemic-inspired post. Egon Schiele is one of the most famous victims of the 1919 Spanish Flu outbreak, dying aged 28, three days after his pregnant wife. While he’s best-known for his tormented, electrically-hued, sinewy nudes, Schiele left a considerable legacy in landscape painting, too. How many new town scenes would he have painted, had the flu not cut him down? https://artangled.com/posts/richter-kunstmuseum/ Sun, 03 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/richter-kunstmuseum/ Gerhard Richter made a series of oil paintings based on photographs in the 1960s. They’re among his most famous works, which is quite an achievement, considering his is a career of both extreme achievement and length. One of the finest is Motorboot (Motor Boat), from 1965, in the permanent collection at the Kunstmuseum in Basel. The artist used source material ranging from popular magazines to his own family photo albums. He painted them at a time of an economic boom, with Germany (the West, at least), aiming to leave behind the dark past and enjoy a brighter life of travel, new leisure pursuits and an ever-increasing range of consumer goods to buy. https://artangled.com/posts/hopper-andover/ Sun, 26 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/hopper-andover/ Manhattan Bridge Loop (1928) is a depiction of urban alienation and loneliness by the 20th century’s master of the form. Edward Hopper is a poet of the manmade: the cornices and fire escapes, the iron scaffolds, the brick and concrete, all lividly real to the viewer. By contrast, his clumsy, solitary figures, faces turned away from us and each other, are touchingly adrift in these spaces. In this painting, the awesome scope of the bridge’s approach dominates - a great grey-black slash, cutting the lemony asphalt below off from the thin blue sky above. https://artangled.com/posts/jones-national/ Sun, 19 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/jones-national/ This fascinating and tiny painting, 16cm across and 10cm high, was usually one of my stops when I dropped in to the National Gallery. I must have visited the gallery hundreds of times over the years, and therefore must have seen this painting dozens of times, back when I had the option of doing so. The title is admirably descriptive: Jones paints, in oils on paper, a worn out wall, lit by strong sunshine. https://artangled.com/posts/buren-pompidou/ Sun, 12 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/buren-pompidou/ The art industry must be one of the hardest hit in the current pandemic. The buying and selling of works between dealers and buyers depends on personal contact, though I’m sure a lot of sales for investment can be conducted virtually. More gravely, the showing of museum collections for paying visitors is impossible now. Less importantly, travel lockdowns mean that the peripatetic lives of star artists aren’t really doable either. https://artangled.com/posts/guyton-moma/ Sun, 05 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/guyton-moma/ How unsatisfying to look at art on a computer screen, rather than in a gallery. Unsurprisingly, considering I go to 200+ shows per year, I’ve fallen in love with the whole ritual of gallery going: ringing the bell, taking the printed-out press release, writing in the artist’s book on leaving. And now, how quaint that seems in virus-induced lockdown: bell, paper and pen have all become potential vectors of disease, in my mind’s eye. https://artangled.com/posts/weyden-alte/ Sun, 29 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/weyden-alte/ The purpose of this site is for me to write about an art show I’ve seen each week. Obviously, that’s a purpose that can’t be fulfilled at the moment, with galleries - and gallery-goers - in lockdown. Time for something different then: from home, I’m going to focus each post on a work in a permanent collection, shuttered somewhere in an empty museum, that I’ve been thinking about for some reason. https://artangled.com/posts/spilliaert-royal-academy/ Sun, 22 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/spilliaert-royal-academy/ What a shame this show, like all the others in London, is now closed. If there ever was an artist who exemplified social distancing, it’s Léon Spilliaert. And, having not spoken in person to anybody for coming up to two weeks now, I can’t tell anyone about how much I loved his paintings. I already regret just taking a quick spin around the three rooms in the upper galleries of the Royal Academy when I visited the exhibition, blithely assuming that I’d be back soon enough for a proper look. https://artangled.com/posts/bartolini-frith/ Sun, 15 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/bartolini-frith/ It seems like a long time ago, now: a world where taking a trip to Italy was an indulgence, rather than an impossibility. I used some of my two days in Turin, back in late 2017, to visit the Fondazione Merz, a converted Lancia factory in a pretty suburb. Sitting on its concrete floor as the September sun slanted through its high windows, the space rebounded with metallic clanks, whizzes and hisses. https://artangled.com/posts/forrester-nottingham/ Sun, 08 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/forrester-nottingham/ When I first saw Denzil Forrester’s paintings, at an exhibition at Stephen Friedman last May, I did what I usually do when I see an artist’s work for the first time: try to think of what - or who - it reminds me of. The connection I made in my head with Forrester was with the Italian photographer Massimo Vitali. Maybe not the most obvious kinship, but both artists have a love of the crowd - party scenes packed with people looking their best. https://artangled.com/posts/bonnet-hetzler/ Sun, 01 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/bonnet-hetzler/ This exhibition, the debut UK show from Louise Bonnet, packs quite a punch. Large canvases show swollen female figures, wildly disproportionate. With their pointy boobs, big fat bums, tiny heads and odd-sized feet, they’re all uncomfortable, striking contorted poses, often constrained by ropes, shrouds and veils. The oil paints are smoothly applied to these women, giving a vaguely inflatable, inorganic sheen to their skin. Not for Bonnet the textures and discolourations of Lucian Freud or Eric Fischl, those modern masters of the epidermis. https://artangled.com/posts/tanning-jacques/ Sun, 23 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/tanning-jacques/ This American artist, who lived past 100, has a hefty reputation as a Surrealist icon of the 20th century. Over her long career, Dorothea Tanning was famous for her crafty paintings and stuffed-toy-like sculptures. Accompanied by her husband Max Ernst, she lived in an Arizona desert town and then in Paris. That’s certainly the life on show in her Tate Modern retrospective, which I enjoyed and returned to repeatedly during its run early last year. https://artangled.com/posts/polke-werner/ Sun, 16 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/polke-werner/ Sigmar Polke said, once: “Why doesn’t the public turn its attention to the potato, where ultimate fulfilment awaits?” This colossus of post war art practiced what he preached, making a variety of potato-based artworks against the bleak backdrop of post-war Germany. One of which, the 1960s Kartoffelhaus (or “potato house”) is currently, incongrugously, on show in one of London’s loveliest exhibition spaces, the winter garden at Michael Werner Gallery. Polke’s turn to the potato came after he noticed a prize tuber in the cellar of his house one day. https://artangled.com/posts/aretino-uffizi/ Sun, 09 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/aretino-uffizi/ This is an unusual visual art exhibition, in that it’s not based on the work of a visual artist. Instead, Pietro Aretino was an epic networker, a friend to the stars who worked himself up from humble beginnings to great power in early 16th century Italy. I’d first heard of him on the Bad Gays podcast - Aretino being a proud self-described “sodomite” - which termed him “the original Regina George of the Italian high Renaissance”. https://artangled.com/posts/conner-dane/ Sun, 02 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/conner-dane/ This is a pretty rare opportunity to view work by the American polymath Bruce Conner in London. Conner, who died in 2008, was a painter, sculptor and video artist who worked over a massive range of media. This time, the focus is on his mid-60s video art: on show at Thomas Dane is Breakaway, from 1966, which he shot with popstar and choreographer Toni Basil, whose similarly long career improbably peaked a decade and a half later with the stone cold novelty classic Hey Mickey! https://artangled.com/posts/mcqueen-tate/ Sun, 26 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/mcqueen-tate/ Steve McQueen was made a knight in the 2020 honours list, and this is just the kind of public-spirited artwork suitable for such a high national honour. (Though I can’t help thinking LS Lowry’s approach of turning down such Royal-approved baubles, all the way up to refusing the Companion of Honour twice, is a much cooler artistic statement.) For this exhibition, specially-trained Tate teams have photographed a total of 76,000 of London’s Year 3 schoolchildren and teachers in the traditional class photo format. https://artangled.com/posts/hofer-brown/ Sun, 19 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/hofer-brown/ Like her Düsseldorf school colleague Andreas Gursky, who I’ve written about on here before, Candida Höfer specialises in large-format photographs of big, man-made spaces. But Höfer’s subject matter has a tighter focus: very fancy, richly-coloured, and almost entirely depopulated, interiors. The nine photographs on show right now at Ben Brown Fine Arts stick rigidly to her precisely-defined parameters (Höfer has been photographing interiors since 1979). Her empty spaces are built to host crowds of strangers: libraries, in Austria, France and Mexico; and theatres, in Russia and Italy. https://artangled.com/posts/quinn-friedman/ Sun, 12 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/quinn-friedman/ The British pastoral painter Ged Quinn’s style has been described by one critic as “malevolent… sinister ”. It’s easy to see why, considering his subject matter. Quinn favours dark Romantic forests, silent pine-strewn paths and peaty skies. But in this new exhibition, Quinn showcases a sweeter edge. Consider the fluffy linden tree that dominates Bloodstream Sub Tilia (on the right of the picture below). Folk mythology suggests that inhaling its pollen leads to nothing so sinister as… pleasant dreams. https://artangled.com/posts/food-fitzwilliam/ Sun, 05 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/food-fitzwilliam/ This exhibition does not over exert itself in explaining what its various food-themed paintings, sculptures, cartoons and installations may mean. Instead, the curators sensibly concentrate on spectacle, leaving the symbolic meanings of the food on display lightly touched-on or implicit. Happily, this means the show is perfectly pitched to those viewers who feel a bit over-bloated from the festive blowout. Here’s an example of what I mean: Joris van Son’s Still-life with a lobster, which is in the museum’s permanent collection, and is the centrepiece of the exhibition. https://artangled.com/posts/top-5-2019/ Sat, 28 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/top-5-2019/ Across 2019, I saw 221 art exhibitions and collections, not counting repeats, and posted reviews of 48 of them on this website. That’s slightly down on the 256 I saw in 2018. But, on the plus side, I did a lot of travelling within the UK this year and managed to make the site a bit less London-centric, posting reviews across 10 cities, up from nine last year. As will hopefully become an annual tradition here at Artangled, I’m going to round up my five favourite shows of the year, and name and shame a couple of public gallery exhibitions I didn’t like so much. https://artangled.com/posts/goldin-goodman/ Sat, 21 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/goldin-goodman/ This is Nan Goldin’s first London solo show in almost 20 years, and it’s really drawing the crowds. The exhibition begins with one of the US photographer’s trademark digital slideshows, The Other Side, a compilation of 25 years of candid snaps of her friends on society’s margins. The next room features some of the stills from which she sourced the slideshow. Her subjects, showgirls, drag queens and groupies, have plaquey teeth, smoke a lot of cigarettes and are photogenically skinny. https://artangled.com/posts/fontana-robilant/ Sat, 14 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/fontana-robilant/ I had a cringeworthy encounter with an in-house camera crew when I visited the HangerBicocca in Milan a few years ago. On stepping into the enormous space, I was confronted with one of mid-century maestro Lucio Fontana’s neon Ambienti, hanging, glowing blue, from the ceiling. What do you think of Fontana, the crew asked me, on the lookout for some promo content. I nervously mumbled something about not seeing him often in London. https://artangled.com/posts/empreinte-malingue/ Sat, 07 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/empreinte-malingue/ It’s hard to theme an exhibition around a concept. If the concept’s too broad, the effect is absurd; too specific, and it could just be hair-splittingly academic and boring. But this very smartly-conceived and executed show finds the sweet spot, featuring works which all feature some form of imprint. A concept sufficiently rich in suggestion, and encompassing a sufficiently broad variety of artistic expression, to make this exhibition really special. https://artangled.com/posts/hartung-mam/ Sat, 30 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/hartung-mam/ This artist hasn’t had a major retrospective in years, but had a career that spanned early 20th-century experiments in Symbolism, via Surrealism. He ended up, wheelchair-bound, firing acrylic paint through a spraygun in an insane burst of productivity, with 360 works in the final year of his life, 1989, alone. Hartung found fame in the 50s and 60s, though, with his black-ink-on-paper works. These spikes and swoops found their way onto many book covers and student bedroom walls. https://artangled.com/posts/de-la-mora-perrotin/ Sat, 23 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/de-la-mora-perrotin/ An arresting example of craft and obsession is provided by this Mexican-born artist, on show at Perrotin. De la Mora loves wall-mounted works, created piecemeal with great meticulousness. Their overall effect is weirdly heartening and uplifting. From a distance, the small, monochrome works, generally layered and repeated across the wall, do not look like much. It’s only when you get closer, when you realise what they’re made from, that the involuntary intake of breath comes. https://artangled.com/posts/jaar-goodman/ Sun, 17 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/jaar-goodman/ An example, for this viewer at least, of unintended consequences between an artwork’s intention and its effect. Alfredo Jaar’s exhibition is a sober document of one of the most horrific events of the last century: the sectarian violence that swept Rwanda in 1994, leaving over a million dead. Thes events unfolded, he argues, without the blanket coverage from an outraged global media they warranted. To illustrate his point, he’s lined up a row of front covers for Newsweek, which 25 years ago was one of the most-read news weeklies in the world. https://artangled.com/posts/rembrandt-rijksmuseum/ Sun, 10 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/rembrandt-rijksmuseum/ Talk about star power! Not since Etre moderne, a “best of MoMA” show that took over the Fondation Louis Vuitton in late 2017 while the iconic New York museum was being renovated, have I experienced such concentrated artistic fame in a standalone exhibition. The concept is simple: a pair of Spanish and Dutch 17th century masterworks, thematically linked, are placed side by side on each wall, in a kind of Godzilla vs Mothra of Baroque mastery. https://artangled.com/posts/uva-180/ Sun, 03 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/uva-180/ The last exhibition I went to in this place, a Brutalist former office building next to King’s College, featured an ankle-aching 20+ video artists in a programme curated by the New Museum. This time, the edit is a lot tighter, helped as ever by 180 Strand’s creative partners The Vinyl Factory, with assistance from Paris’ Fondation Cartier. Just three immersive works are on show. My favourite was Vanishing Point, pictured above. https://artangled.com/posts/kaws-skarstedt/ Sun, 27 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/kaws-skarstedt/ I’d rocked up to Skarstedt to be confronted by an unfamiliar scene: a queue! In the crowd and confusion, I somehow made it inside despite not having an Eventbrite ticket. A ticketed show in a commercial gallery? It must be KAWS - the hugely hyped multimedia phenomenon, whose work’s everywhere from the MTV awards ‘Moonman’ statue to a line of clothes from Uniqlo. Elbowing my way through the crowds - who mostly seemed really into the paintings and sculptures on display - I could see the extreme, almost computer-generated flatness of KAWS’s acrylic colours: no drippy paint drops on the sides of his frameless canvases. https://artangled.com/posts/arena-sprovieri/ Sun, 20 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/arena-sprovieri/ Two shows from Italian artists caught my eye this week. First, this exhibition from Franceso Arena at one of the west end’s least accessible galleries, up a flight of stairs behind Regent Street. Arena makes vaguely arte povera-aligned works, using natural and found materials. The centrepiece of this show is rather grandiose: exactly as the title suggests, seawater is contained in a metal trough, 13 metres long, oriented diagonally across the largest gallery. https://artangled.com/posts/talmadge-soft/ Sun, 13 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/talmadge-soft/ I read the original New York Magazine exposé of Anna Delvey, the mysteriously-accented genius grifter, in bed one Saturday morning, phone a couple of inches from my riveted eyes, too fascinated to even reach over to my bedside table for my glasses. While that was fun for a morning read, plus a few days of Twitter hilarity, I have to say I’m surprised that Delvey’s impact on the culture means she’s now the subject of a London exhibition viewed by thousands of people a day. https://artangled.com/posts/tejada-frieze/ Sun, 06 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/tejada-frieze/ I might as well hand in my London art reviewer badge by saying so, but this year was my first Frieze. That giant white tent in Regent’s Park was even more huge and overwhelming than I thought it’d be; I staggered out after just under four hours, feet and shoulders aching, tote overloaded with magazines, press releases and lists of works. The easiest thing to do in a review with such a variety of potential subjects is to pick out a show that I particularly liked from a non-obvious source. https://artangled.com/posts/hantai-taylor/ Sun, 29 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/hantai-taylor/ International gallery Timothy Taylor has a new home on the other side of Berkeley Square as its old one, and has put on an interesting exhibition to mark the occasion. The show brings together three artists who found fame at a similar time - the years following the last world war - but via quite different methods. Pierre Soulages applied thick black paint - layers and layers of it - to his large canvases, while Antoni Tàpies went even heavier, with his bulky sculptures in bronze and fired clay. https://artangled.com/posts/gormley-royal-academy/ Sun, 22 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/gormley-royal-academy/ This is a very comprehensive show, featuring lots of Gormley’s notebooks and sketchbooks, and ranging from the early Land Art-inspired work, to new experiments. Such the final room, which I visited at night, feeling the dark chill of the entire gallery space submerged in clay-ey water. Elsewhere, there are endless variations on Gormley’s trademark rusty metal and steel. Such as the exhibition’s centrepiece: Matrix III, constructed especially for the show. A couple lay dreamily on the hard wooden floor, gazing up at the grid patterns, densely arranged around a central void. https://artangled.com/posts/takis-tate/ Sun, 15 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/takis-tate/ Despite the multi-decade career - he died just after this Tate Modern show opened - the “kinetic” artist Takis is bound into the 1960s, specifically the decade’s go-ahead technological positivity. His art, kindled by the possibilities of electromagnetism and machinery, shows an excitement and wonder similar to that of the IBM pavilion at the 1965 World’s Fair, or Vasarely’s strobing patterns. That’s not to suggest this exhibition is any fun though. https://artangled.com/posts/stoner-modern/ Sun, 08 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/stoner-modern/ This artist’s practice has similar roots to other artists I’ve featured on this site before. Like Robert Muntean, Clare Woods takes found images from newspapers and magazines and makes something new with them. Like her compatriot Gary Hume, she paints on aluminium, giving the final works an ultra-clean, shiny, textured look. Like Rachel Howard , she paints from above, letting the drips fall down the edges of the works. But Woods’ overall effects are unique. https://artangled.com/posts/stoner-modern/ Sun, 01 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/stoner-modern/ Walking around this impressive one-room exhibition , I was reminded of another artist on show in the National Gallery’s permanent collection, down the corridor. Because Bartolomé Bermejo, like the better-known Antonello da Messina, was a painter of the south that was as influenced by the Northern Renaissance as what was going on in Italy at the time. There’s an echo of van Eyck and van der Weyden in these artists: their jewel-like clarity; the comparative disinterest in anatomical correctness and the new rules of perspective; the love lavished on different surfaces and materials. https://artangled.com/posts/sherman-npg/ Sun, 25 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/sherman-npg/ This is a retrospective in the truest sense, ranging from the American master photographer’s first ever book, produced at the age of nine, to some of the most recent uber-glossy, expensively-produced photos of the artist as a range of grandes dames. (She showed a few of them at a highly enjoyable show at Sprüth Magers last year.) It’s not possible not to read meanings into the childhood Cindy Book, which features family snaps, each with the artist herself carefully circled, and a single phrase: “that’s me”. https://artangled.com/posts/nunzio-mazzoleni/ Sun, 18 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/nunzio-mazzoleni/ I found this show spectacular but a bit inscrutable. It’s summed up - though maybe not in the way the curator, Kenneth Baker, intended - by the artist’s own quote from the show notes: “When you are confronted with the work of art, either you feel that it is it, or it leaves you soulless.” On entering the Mazzoleni gallery, behind one of Mayfair’s less functional doorbells and beyond one of its less populated front desks, I was confronted by the spectacular in search of a soul: Avvoltoio, meaning ‘vulture’, a new work, free-standing and grand, made out of burnt wood. https://artangled.com/posts/wearing-spruth-magers/ Sun, 11 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/wearing-spruth-magers/ The place is quite familiar, rendered strange over the decades. We’re in a shopping centre in Peckham in 1994. Everyone’s dressed in baggy 90s style. If anyone’s carrying a shopping bag, it’s plastic. This being several decades before that multi-story car park down the road got its pink coat of paint and craft beer outlets, the crowd is solidly ungentrified. And nobody has a mobile phone, so nobody’s filming the very unusual scene - except one camera. https://artangled.com/posts/haunted-sadie/ Sun, 04 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/haunted-sadie/ It’s not quite Hallowe’en, but there are plenty of anticipation-building creepy thrills to be had at this show , curated by writer, curator and horror movie obsessive Charlie Fox. Everywhere you look, there’s work blurring the lines between scary, funny and… a bit deviant. From Sam McKinnis’ reverent paintings of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, to a pink laser show from Matt Copson, to some truly disgusting - even by his standards - Larry Clark photos. https://artangled.com/posts/iranian-parasol/ Sun, 28 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/iranian-parasol/ In the dog days of summer, there’s not so much to see in London’s art scene. But for those of us who prefer chilly air conditioned white cubes to lying in the sun, there are some real treats to be had. Among them is in an upstairs gallery in one of the chilliest cubes of all, the formidably air conditioned Parasol Unit in Islington. This show is featuring a group of Iranian artists. https://artangled.com/posts/nanxing-dane/ Sun, 21 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/nanxing-dane/ This show wasn’t exactly appealing to me as I can’t stand the volcanically spicy Sichuan dish it’s named after, but Xie Nanxing soon put my prejudices (and stomach) to rest. The reason for the name is the bright colours of kung pao chicken, and accordingly the walls of Thomas Dane are painted in greens and pinks. The similarities to the chicken dish end there. Xie’s painting technique is known as ‘canvas print’. https://artangled.com/posts/londono-ordovas/ Sun, 14 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/londono-ordovas/ This Colombian artist must be a gallerist’s dream: his tiny, ornate pen and ink drawings, arranged in this exhibition in attractive rows, are deeply pretty, crafty and uplifting. Each features a tiny stamp proving ownership, just for that little extra bit of covetability; the artist, cultivating the brand, likes to be known just as “JASL”. There are 100 drawings in all, along with 50 etchings, covering most of the smallish gallery. https://artangled.com/posts/brughera-manchester/ Sun, 07 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/brughera-manchester/ Life in the United Kingdom, otherwise known as the citizenship test, hasn’t been with us long. Introduced in 2005, it has a reputation among both natives and non-natives for its bizarre, irrelevant and difficult questions. I first got introduced to the list at the barbers, when the Turkish and Polish staff peppered me with sample questions which, in the run-up to Brexit, they were all boning up on - and I found myself flummoxed by several of them. https://artangled.com/posts/mackintosh-walker/ Sun, 30 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/mackintosh-walker/ I’m somebody whose only prior knowledge of Charles Rennie Mackintosh was a font and a fire, prior to attending this show. So, wandering the galleries, I found it all simply revelatory. While the notes claim the Scottish polymath as the “father of Modernism”, which seems steep, the works on show at the Walker Art Gallery do a great job at lining Mackintosh up in a heritage extending across the continent to Symbolism and the Secession. https://artangled.com/posts/juliano-massimo/ Sun, 23 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/juliano-massimo/ Slapdash, funny and deeply, deeply Instagrammable, New York-based Jamian Juliano-Villani has produced a sweet summer treat. Like a soft scoop ice cream special with hundreds and thousands, a flavoured cone AND a Flake, this show is an all out assault. And the generally lurid work is nicely offset by its host: one of London’s poshest and soberest private gallery spaces. My favourite - introduced via Russell Tovey’s Instagram of all places - features a cuddly tiger getting savagely orally pumped by a mechanised dildo in a plastic bag. https://artangled.com/posts/toguo-hdm/ Sun, 16 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/toguo-hdm/ Barthélémy Toguo trained in Paris but works in Cameroon - and has a foundation there. He works and shows a lot in China too, hence why this gallery, which specialises in Chinese art, has put on this exhibition. It’s quite a sight, with works on paper on the walls, and large porcelain pots strewing the floor. These imposing works - as a series they’re called Fragile Bodies - were made in China and decorated by local artists. https://artangled.com/posts/pecs-mayor/ Sun, 09 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/pecs-mayor/ This exhibition is truly lovely. To a restive, anxious London in summer comes a sweet breeze from the east, redolent of other long-distant distant summers. 50 years ago, behind the Iron Curtain, across an ideological divide, and out in the countryside, the Pécs Workshop met. They were an avant-garde group of five artists in communist Hungary, who met each summer between 1969 and 1971 in Pécs, close to the Croatian… well, Yugoslavian, border. https://artangled.com/posts/stoner-modern/ Sun, 02 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/stoner-modern/ Despite the epic title, this one is a small, lovingly-curated show over two floors in a quiet upstairs gallery off Oxford Street. I particularly loved the bigger machine-like works on the upper floor. They’re collectively a study in contrasts: the forms balanced between the rectilinear and the curvy; the material combining both reused parts and the purpose-built; the surfaces vary between the smooth and the pitted. What about Sky Passage (T0179), a very recent, three metre high work from 2015. https://artangled.com/posts/chihuly-kew/ Sun, 26 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/chihuly-kew/ There’s nothing wrong with being a people pleaser. And Dale Chihuly’s one of them. Final proof, if proof were needed, of this view is provided by In the Light of Jerusalem, a film playing in the confines of the Shirley Sherwood gallery: the small indoor section of a big outdoor show devoted to Chihuly that spreads over a good portion of Kew’s 300 acres. The film shows the artist, famous for his fantastical glassworks, in the throes of building one of his most famous outdoor sculptures: a wall of big ice blocks, stacked in front of the Citadel Tower, and under the hot Jerusalem sun, marking the turn of the millennium in 2000. https://artangled.com/posts/twombly-bastian/ Sun, 19 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/twombly-bastian/ I just can’t with him. I’ve tried. Cy Twombly on a large scale hasn’t worked. I’ve trudged through a (huge) retrospective at the Pompidou, trying to find something, anything, in his mannered scribbles, his big messy flowers, his enormous, aggressive, pompous drips. I’ve wheeled around the Lepanto series in its purpose-built room at the top of the Brandhorst Museum in Munich: appreciating the lovely colours and ultra-luxe surroundings, but just, somehow, failing to connect with what was on the wall. https://artangled.com/posts/sironi-brun/ Sun, 12 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/sironi-brun/ This exhibition begins with a surprising painting, considering its painter: a smiling self-portrait. Surprising, as Mario Sironi’s reputation is based his unremittingly grim work, spanning the early 1920s to the 50s. This general bleakness, coupled with his enthusiastic embrace of the Mussolini regime pre-war, and his post-war withdrawal from the public sphere, has made him a pretty obscure name - especially in the UK, where this is the first Sironi show in memory. https://artangled.com/posts/mccullin-tate/ Sun, 05 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/mccullin-tate/ It’s those little flecks of light, reflected in the shiny metal of minecart tracks, criss-crossing the ground in front of a mine in County Durham, and depicted in sumptuous black and white, that drew me in. Standing astride these tracks is a well-dressed couple, looking back at their photographer with a mixture of wariness and pride. Their (very famous) photographer, Don McCullin, is best known for his images of war - from Vietnam to Biafra. https://artangled.com/posts/arbus-hayward/ Sun, 28 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/arbus-hayward/ After the weirdly-curated Lee Bul show here last year, I was wondering what funny treatment the renovated Hayward Gallery would give this iconic photographer. But it’s very well put together, with the small black and white work arranged, seemingly randomly, against white posts in strict grid formation; based, apparently, on the New York streets on which Diane Arbus found some of her most memorable scenes. The exhibition concentrates on the early career, being mainly made up of photos shot on 35mm between 1956 and 1962. https://artangled.com/posts/salle-skarstedt/ Sun, 21 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/salle-skarstedt/ What a lovely palete cleanser this exhibition is! David Salle’s cartoony collage paintings shift and swirl, mixing black-and-white and colour. In this new show, he focuses on repetitive depictions of mops, coffee cups, pork chops and other ephemeral, day-to-day objects. He peppers his canvases with slogans and word marks. They’re generally repainted elements from 1940s cartoons and ad imagery. Salle himself has said he’s aiming for a kind of “free jazz” effect: a pleasant cacophony, with enough underlying structure to hold the attention. https://artangled.com/posts/hammick-flowers/ Sun, 07 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/hammick-flowers/ Spooky as a Sargent Nocturne, Tom Hammick’s oil paintings are here awash with blue, depicting campsites, cabins and ships. He’s deeply influenced by the Romantic movement, with the figure of the solitary striver explains why none of his figures seem to look at or talk to each other. That’s not to say they’re entirely rejecting material culture: in Walden Pond, partygoers cluster around a shiny camper van. And there’s something lovely and regular about the sailboat that appears in many of the paintings. https://artangled.com/posts/anderson-waddington/ Sun, 31 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/anderson-waddington/ Alice Anderson is known as a performance artist as well as a visual artist, but this show is definitely big on the visual wow factor. Dominating the larger gallery at Waddington Custot are a series of copper-wire-covered monoliths. Anderson calls them Body Disruptions, and they’re built by wrapping the wire around a rectilinear wooden structure so that it forms repetitive motifs and patterns. As an artist, Anderson’s very interested in digital connectivity, and of course copper wire’s a transfer medium for online information. https://artangled.com/posts/ghirri-paume/ Sun, 24 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/ghirri-paume/ This intoxicating exhibition gives us a panoramic view of a photographer who specialised in narrow, close-cropped scenes. Luigi Ghirri’s photographs showcase his background as a surveyor, his daily dealings with charts and maps. The exhibition concentrates on his work during the 70s, a time of comparative peace and stability in Italy, his native land, following lean postwar years. Gardens and houses are neat, the roads are smooth, the skies are (usually) blue. https://artangled.com/posts/apostol-mor/ Sun, 17 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/apostol-mor/ What horrible news, with more coming every day, from Venezuela! Alexander Apóstol, Venezuelan-born and Madrid-based, has a take on his country’s descent into madness in Dramatis Personae, a photo work, showing in Paris right now. The visitor is confronted with a grid of black and white portraits, each showing a Venezuelan archetype: some timeless, some, very unfortunately, stuck in the here and now. There’s Simon Bolívar, a beauty queen, a rioting student, and a journalist with a shiny black eye. https://artangled.com/posts/forg-hetzler/ Sun, 10 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/forg-hetzler/ Günther Förg was a German painter with quite a forbidding aesthetic - grainy architectural photographs, often of buildings built for a Fascist government - and monochrome acrylic paintings on a lead backing. He’s also selling well, if the three commercial gallery shows of his work in London alone over the past few months are any guide. Two of them are running at the moment, one at Max Hetzler and one at Luxembourg & Dayan, and offer a good guide to both types. https://artangled.com/posts/calder-nahmad/ Sun, 03 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/calder-nahmad/ Alexander Calder and Joan Miró were good friends, with a lot in common. The same goes for the work, too, and this dreamy little exhibition proves it. Working in Paris, both took the most crowd-pleasing bits of the Surrealist movement they were surrounded with, and expressed it in antic, zany, colourful form. Calder made mobiles, Miró paintings. They’re both still really popular: the last couple of years having brought major retrospectives for Calder at the Whitney, and Miró at the Grand Palais. https://artangled.com/posts/buildings-wellcome/ Sun, 24 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/buildings-wellcome/ What an interesting series of free exhibitions at this totally unique institution on the Euston Road. This latest one is probably my favourite so far - even beating the show last year about teeth. It’s a rag-bag of architectural plans, paintings, maquettes, pages from books - all organised around the theme of buildings that promote health. To give a couple of examples that stood out to me: a beautiful 70s plan of Milton Keynes (that was the future, once), a Pissarro landscape of Bedford Park in Chiswick - the first garden suburb of all, where the artist lived for a time - and Andreas Gursky’s Montparnasse tower block photo, that I first encountered at the Hayward last year. https://artangled.com/posts/sodi-blain/ Sun, 17 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/sodi-blain/ There are two parts of this exhibition. First the heavens: big black and white paintings, made of ultra-thick paint, cracked in interesting ways, depicting mysterious swirls and bubbles. It’s as if you’re staring at a mountain range from the sky. Then the earth, brick towers in Jenga-style patterns. They look about as stable as Jenga towers, too: the bricks wonky and uneven. The bricks and the paint were both formed by chance as well as craft. https://artangled.com/posts/contingencia-odeon/ Sun, 10 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/contingencia-odeon/ One unusual feature of Bogotá, to these European eyes anyway, is its many tiny, privately run car parks. Tucked into vacant lots between buildings, even in the centre of downtown, they’re either an interesting example of urban ingenuity, or a sad sign of the heaving city’s deep car dependency, despite its luxuriously wide boulevards. I mistook the entrance to this exhibition for yet another parqueadero, so convincing is the illusion. But in fact, Estudio Altiplano and Alejandro Martín Maldonado have reimagined the Espacio Odeón - a fascinating multi-level building that was once a theatre, but is now stripped back to its concrete skeleton - as a playful recreation of different spaces well known to any Bogotá resident. https://artangled.com/posts/consuegra-mamm/ Sun, 03 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/consuegra-mamm/ Shining out from this group show in Medellín’s very impressive modern art museum was Nicolás Consuegra’s series of square-format found photos. They depict a show of their own: ordinary families proudly displaying their Renault 4 or R4, the most popular Colombian car of the 70s and 80s. What do I see, as a foreigner, in these photos? Certainly something different to the typical Colombian, who’d be deeply familiar with the shape of this low-cost family hatchback, which became as ubiquitous as the Volkswagen Beetle over in Mexico. https://artangled.com/posts/muntean-rosenfeld/ Sun, 27 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/muntean-rosenfeld/ Austria-born, Berlin-based painter Robert Muntean says he’s inspired by Richard Gerstl, and there’s definitely something of the Secession-era artist’s taste for the obliterative in his new paintings, which often depicts figures only in outline, slashed by colours, large stretches of canvas left raw. They’re on show at Rosenfeld Porcini in Fitzrovia at the moment. I’m thinking of Gerstl’s portrait of the family of Arnold Schoenberg, painted while having an affair with the mother of the house, just before discovery, and the painter’s descent into madness and suicide. https://artangled.com/posts/immendorff-werner/ Sun, 20 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/immendorff-werner/ This is an artist who was a really big deal in his native land. I first heard of Jörg Immendorff when I visited his enormous retrospective at the Haus der Kunst in Munich last year, spanning his early political paintings of to his complex, gloomy, finely-wrought late works, painted as the artist was dying of ALS. A hideous way to go - and he went in 2007. Now, Michael Werner is showing a cycle of huge paintings from the final year in its lovely winter garden, with some other examples of another Immendorff period - his fervent and optimistic 70s paintings of heroic workers and artists, working together to trash capitalism in some impressive wing collars and flares. https://artangled.com/posts/leonard-hauser-wirth/ Sun, 13 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/leonard-hauser-wirth/ Zoe Leonard is an American conceptual artist who took aerial photos of New York City over several years in the late 80s. Gelatin silver prints of these are on show as Hauser & Wirth right now, and when I went to see them, I basically wanted to buy them all, in an alternative fantasy universe where I actually have the funds to do that. The artist’s eye gets caught on urban infrastructure; the densely gridded street pattern of the city; worn summer baseball fields, packed back to back and encroached on by houses from all sides; and, most lovingly shot of all, a gleaming rail interchange, the iron and wood of the parallel tracks caught by low light, rendered mysterious by the silver print’s blur. https://artangled.com/posts/burne-jones-tate/ Sun, 06 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/burne-jones-tate/ I went into this large exhibition ready to write off Edward Burne-Jones as total kitsch. But he resists being dismissed. The show is full of annoying reminders of the artist’s great popularity - from the start - and the fact that he was an epic do-gooder. Rising to world fame from humble origins, unlike some of his fellow pre-Raphaelites, Burne-Jones went into business with Socialist paragon of virtue William Morris to produce mass-market wall-hangings, to go along with his paintings for rich patrons and collectors; he saw no distinction between fine and decorative art. https://artangled.com/posts/top-5-2018/ Sun, 23 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/top-5-2018/ It’s been a pretty big first year of art watching for this little side project. In all, I saw 256 shows and collections in 2018 - not counting repeated visits to some old favourite permanent collections in London. Over that time, I featured a fifth of that total on the site, posting each week. While I give my eyes a rest over the festive period, here’s a round-up post, listing my top five of the year. https://artangled.com/posts/elmgreen-dragset-whitechapel/ Sun, 16 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/elmgreen-dragset-whitechapel/ Whitechapel Gallery has been transformed into a derelict swimming pool with an imaginary backstory. Built by a Victorian philanthropist (the story goes), the Whitechapel Pool played host to Tesco founder Jack Cohen and David Hockney over its decades as a public utility. Then it got shut down in the privatisation-happy Thatcher era, before being renovated as part of a “design hotel” opening in 2019. Unfortunately for future Cohens and Hockneys, it’ll be accessible only through membership. https://artangled.com/posts/oehlen-hetzler/ Sun, 09 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/oehlen-hetzler/ Albert Oehlen is a difficult artist to love, but an easy artist to admire. This is due to his tendency to treat his painting as an intellectual exercise within strict self-imposed boundaries, rather than a vehicle of sensual pleasure. This tendency is on show in a pair of identically- titled exhibitions in two of Paris’ most prestigious private galleries: Max Hetzler and Gagosian. Each exhibition features works with a near-identical yellow hue: clearly another deliberately-imposed restriction from Oehlen. https://artangled.com/posts/basquiat-flv/ Sun, 02 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/basquiat-flv/ This enormous exhibition stretches across four floors and umpteen galleries at Fondation Louis Vuitton. I toured them at the end of a long day, feet aching. Oh god, there’s more, I muttered, turning into yet another lavishly appointed room crammed with huge, violently-coloured paintings. Then again, maybe this feeling wasn’t entirely down to my aching feet: I felt similarly overwhelmed in Basquiat’s last retrospective, on at the Barbican earlier this year. https://artangled.com/posts/dhollander-victoriamiro/ Sun, 25 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/dhollander-victoriamiro/ Ilse d’Hollander worked in Flanders, and had just one gallery show, in a local café, before her death in 1997. She painted alone, in a studio in the countryside. And now, she has a UK solo show, on at Victoria Miro right now. You could call all of the paintings on show “landscapes” of one kind or another. Houses, trees, grass and sky are mainly legible, though sometimes unusually cropped and zoomed in - and therefore abstracted. https://artangled.com/posts/kubin-lenbachhaus/ Sun, 18 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/kubin-lenbachhaus/ Alfred Kubin had a pretty standard upbringing, when you consider his predilection for the grotesque. Bouncing between mental health problems, a sexual encounter with a pregnant woman when he was 11, and a (failed) suicide-by-shotgun attempt on his mother’s grave, he found lasting fame just after graduating with sickly macabre little pen-and-ink drawings, depicting torture, devils, and death. There’s a great selection on show at Phantastisch! Alfred Kubin und Der Blaue Reiter, an exhibition currently running at the Lenbachhaus in Munich. https://artangled.com/posts/murdoch-marlborough/ Sun, 11 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/murdoch-marlborough/ Nina Murdoch paints with egg tempera on gesso. Her works main show abstracted scenes of buildings and pathways. Some of the paintings in this show, with their endless layerings and scrapings, take years to produce. To me, they had the irresistably evocative atmosphere of a rainy London evening - evocative maybe because that was exactly the atmosphere outside of the gallery, when I wandered in ten minutes before closing. Path, pictured below, which took three years, drew me in, with its lights banding as if they were seen from a slow-moving car. https://artangled.com/posts/hiro-hamiltons/ Sun, 04 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/hiro-hamiltons/ So often when looking at large-scale work, it’s a single detail that catches your eye. With Modern Masters, a group photographic show currently on at Hamilton’s, it’s a young woman commuter in a light raincoat, glaring out from a train. She’s the emotional centre of Shinjuku Station, Tokyo, Japan, taken by photographer Hiro in 1962. Across the breadth of this seven metre wide work, made up of seven gelatin silver prints, faces and hands of Tokyo commuters are pressed against the steamy glass of the subway car’s window. https://artangled.com/posts/marshall-zwirner/ Sun, 28 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/marshall-zwirner/ Kerry James Marshall is uber-influential these days, with his works selling for seven figure sums - to P Diddy, no less. He’s also an incredible and sensitive portraitist. Sometimes beloved, successful work is great work, as his new exhibition at David Zwirner proves. But the show also has interesting things to say about the nature of that success. This is an exhibition about the ways in which paintings can be made, and the contexts in which they are received. https://artangled.com/posts/henderikse-cortesi/ Sun, 21 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/henderikse-cortesi/ One man’s trash is another’s treasure. That’s a message taken on board by so many artists over the past century, with everyone from Duchamp to Jannis Kounellis to Michael Landy using everyday detritus in new ways. Jan Henderikse, currently showing at Cortesi, takes things to new, daffy heights. Most of the works are framed, wall mounted, and neatly unified by theme. There are collections of coins, number plates, toilet soap, corks and plastic caps. https://artangled.com/posts/turk-stolper/ Sun, 14 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/turk-stolper/ I saw this exhibition, subtitled ‘A Brexit portfolio and other Transit Disasters’ at a time when the thoroughly depressing Brexit negotiations were reaching something of a climax. The central motif of the various silkscreen prints is a burnt out Ford Transit. Any British observer would recognise the cultural signifier of a white van - home to “White Van Man”, a highly Brexity demographic. The prints themselves owe an obvious debt to Warhol’s gloomy 60s prints of car crashes. https://artangled.com/posts/sorolla-niemeyer/ Sun, 07 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/sorolla-niemeyer/ This large(ish) show is made up of work’s from the entirety of Joaquín Sorolla’s career, amassed by the titular collector. There are 45 paintings in all on show, presented in strict chronological order in transparent frames, as though they are floating in the middle of the domed gallery. (There’s a whole separate post I could have written about the utter weirdness of this empty and echoing Jetsons-style, Oscar Niemeyer designed, cultural centre, stranded in an estury, next to a train track and a main road, in a sleepy Asturian coastal town. https://artangled.com/posts/nash-fernet/ Sun, 30 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/nash-fernet/ Loosely associated with the Chelsea school when young, David Nash now works in darkest Wales. And he works with wood. Wood, in all its forms - burnt into charcoal, cut into columns, melded into stacks - is the basis of all the works in this show, taking up most of this former distillery in Alsace, near the Swiss border. It’s the sculptures that stand out here, in which Nash imposes a regularity and elegance onto what’s organic and wild. https://artangled.com/posts/kantarovsky-kunsthalle/ Sun, 23 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/kantarovsky-kunsthalle/ This Russia-born, New York based artist likes to do his work prone on the ground, with people around to talk to. Stray brush strokes and other little mistakes are usually left in the final painting, to better build up its texture. He mixes oil paint and water, which don’t really mix properly. But, despite these quite zany and antic working methods, the subjects of Sanya Kantarovsky’s paintings and prints are relentlessly despairing. https://artangled.com/posts/delmar-soft/ Sun, 16 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/delmar-soft/ I’m a Londoner who writes regularly about exhibitions at commercial galleries. This means I spend a lot of my time, in lunch hours and at weekends, walking around the tangle of streets behind the Royal Academy, where designer clothes and jewellery shops and white cubes jostle for space. Mexican artist Débora Delmar is also familiar with these Mayfair streets, as they’re the subject of this mini show in the mini gallery at Picadilly Circus underground station. https://artangled.com/posts/osodi-openeye/ Sun, 09 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/osodi-openeye/ Long before the first British colonist set foot on the land, Nigeria was a country of Kingdoms. Kings (and Queens) managed diplomacy between their small fiefdoms. They were stripped of their diplomatic function by colonial rule: a function that was not reinstated post-independence in the 1960s. But many local monarchs still survive, with not much more than fine clothes, accoutrements and a handful of subjects to show for their rank. https://artangled.com/posts/woodman-tate/ Sun, 02 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/woodman-tate/ During her short and very prolific working life, Francesca Woodman left an indelible impression. As an art photographer, she made around 10,000 negatives and 800 prints, and defined an entire aesthetic as she found posthumous fame during the 1980s. She favoured black and white, long exposures which distorted and elongated her body; dishevelled, empty rooms with bare floorboards; props that emphasised her usually naked body. She’s paired with Egon Schiele in this exhibition at Tate Liverpool. https://artangled.com/posts/vo-capc/ Sun, 26 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/vo-capc/ Sometimes an artist meets a space and both sides lift their game a little. That was the case, for me at least, when looking at Viethamese-born, German-trained artist Danh Vo’s takeover of the main hall of CAPC in Bordeaux. This former storage warehouse, in previous decades filled with the spoils of empire, now hosts a site-specific installation from the descendents of an imperial subject. The huge space is dominated by big blocks of Ferrara marble: the very raw material beloved by Pope-impressing Renaissance sculptors (can you think of one in particular? https://artangled.com/posts/ruscha-louisiana/ Sun, 19 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/ruscha-louisiana/ I can’t shake the sneaking suspicion that Ed Ruscha’s partly to blame for the inspirational quote pictures that are a solid building block of so many Instagram accounts these days. Which is maybe a bit unfair, but at least pays tribute to the range of his influence. It’s his works on paper, including sketches and a variety of books he’s published over the decades, that are the focus of this show. https://artangled.com/posts/gaignard-lilley/ Sun, 12 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/gaignard-lilley/ This is definitely the first gallery exhibition I’ve been to that’s named after a 90s kid’s TV show. (If you don’t remember the essential after-school viewing for now-thirtysomethings ‘Fun House’ with Pat Sharp, this video should help you out.) But there’s not much to tie that “messy technicolour treat for kids”, as the show notes have it, to this rather sober collection. It’s a group show, and the artist in it that most stood out for me is American photographer Genevieve Gaignard, who I’d spotted at a previous exhibition at Stephen Friedman, and read about in this (excellent) New Yorker profile. https://artangled.com/posts/weisz-sadie-coles/ Sun, 05 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/weisz-sadie-coles/ Being a woodcarver in Bavaria seems an unlikely apprenticeship for a fine artist, but looking around this show, currently on at Sadie Coles, it all sort of makes sense. Paloma Varga Weisz started woodcarving in a tiny town in the mountains after being rejected from art school the first time round. After getting in at the second try, she began a more formal education in Düsseldorf, home of a crop of sober, straightforwardly honest artists and photographers of the late 20th century. https://artangled.com/posts/bul-hayward/ Sat, 28 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/bul-hayward/ What a weird show this is! Following their stellar Gursky retrospective earlier in the year, and some bad juju prior to opening when one of the works caught fire, what remains is a majorly varied grab-bag of paintings, installations, costume, architectural maquettes, a light show and a big-ass zeppelin. It’s less of a sensory assault than a really expensive jumble sale. The show definitely highlights that Lee Bul is epically productive. https://artangled.com/posts/eggysrub-gloucester/ Sat, 21 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/eggysrub-gloucester/ This endless hot summer hasn’t led to many art discoveries. Instead, I’ve been spending too much time cowering under the blessed cool air of my desk fan: that £20 at John Lewis is the best money I’ve spent all decade. But one work that’s been on my mind a lot, thanks to my daily commute on the District Line, is ‘my name is lettie eggsyrub’, a silly yet also somehow haunting installation that runs the length of the unused platform at Gloucester Road tube station. https://artangled.com/posts/castoro-ropac/ Sat, 14 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/castoro-ropac/ This group show in Thaddeus Ropac’s very grand London space centres on three women Minimalist artists who worked in the 1970s. The one who stood out to me was Rosemarie Castoro, whose work gave the show its title. Land of Lads, Land of Lashes refers to two sculptures in the big room on the upper floor. They’re made of epoxy, a type of polymer. They’re coloured deep black. And they have vaguely organic, even anthropomorphic, form. https://artangled.com/posts/letain-pace/ Sat, 07 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/letain-pace/ Beth Letain’s influences range from Giorgio Morandi to Agnes Martin, though her deliberately ultra-simple forms are more abstract than either, and with a far bolder use of colour. The colours of these big paintings, currently on show at PACE, are deep, bold and matte. Their surfaces, prepared by layers of homemade gesso, have a luxurious sheen. My favourite was ‘Strong Winds’, its bold horizontality and almost hallucinatory depth was the most directly evocative of the exhibition’s title: ‘Signal Hill’ is the hill from which the first morse code was received. https://artangled.com/posts/ault-ashmolean/ Sat, 30 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/ault-ashmolean/ I just love Edward Hopper - and I’m not sorry about that, sometimes popular things are also really good. More generally, I love the various early 20th century movements of artists reacting to machinery, industry and the burgeoning suburbs (see earlier posts on Sironi and Kupka.) The ‘America after the Fall’ exhibition at the Royal Academy was hands down my favourite show of last year. So I was gagging to see this exhibition from the moment I first read about it. https://artangled.com/posts/sander-hauser-wirth/ Fri, 22 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/sander-hauser-wirth/ Nazi Germany wasn’t exactly an ideal environment for any artist, and that’s particularly true for an artist with a vision as profoundly kind, non-judgmental and humanistic as August Sander. His life’s work was a photographic project called “People of the 20th Century”, in which he chose as diverse a range of subjects as possible, and took their portraits. This impressive show at Hauser & Wirth showcases examples from between 1910 and 1931, a year before Hitler’s (elected) rise to power. https://artangled.com/posts/sherman-spruth-magers/ Sun, 17 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/sherman-spruth-magers/ “Get away from me dear, I don’t need you anymore!” So said silent screen queen Norma Talmadge to a hopeful autograph seeker, just after she made it to the A-list. Well, according to Hollywood apochrypa anyway. The 20s movie grande dame is the latest visual inspiration from iconic shape-shifting photographer Cindy Sherman, whose new work in this show at Sprüth Magers is just as funny, off-kilter and subversive as ever. https://artangled.com/posts/parfit-narrative/ Sun, 10 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/parfit-narrative/ Derek Parfit travelled to Venice and St Petersburg on holiday each year for decades. He took many obsessively-composed, haunting photographs of the architecture there, always in low winter light. They’re the subject of this small but smart show, on right now at Narrative Projects. He wasn’t a pro photographer, though: his day job was… philosophy. It’s hard to think of a philosopher who left behind a visual archive, and it’s equally hard to decipher Parfit’s philosophical views from these moody, misty photos. https://artangled.com/posts/kupka-grand-palais/ Sun, 03 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/kupka-grand-palais/ The Grand Palais’ impressive František Kupka retrospective was pretty much empty when I visited late last month. It was probably due to the show being free after 8pm to celebrate some European Union-sponsored “night of museums”. But, also, František Kupka isn’t really an A-lister for either impressionist portraiture or abstraction. Which is a shame, as his is a seriously impressive career, with all its twists and turns, not just from the figurative to the abstract, but from painting into drawings and woodblock prints - and back again. https://artangled.com/posts/ababri-praz/ Sun, 27 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/ababri-praz/ This spring, the big show in Paris is a vast Delacroix retrospective at the Louvre, a fittingly lush and lavish tribute to the great Romantic painter. Of course the exhibition includes Delacroix’s sexy genre paintings from his stay in North Africa - those shadowy oil paintings of exotic, inscrutable, yet clearly sexually available women. But there’s a funny (and much sexier) riposte to all that across town, in a debut exhibition from Tangiers-born Sofiane Ababri. https://artangled.com/posts/leavitt-elbaz/ Sun, 20 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/leavitt-elbaz/ Obviously this little website is more of a personal project than an actual news source, but I’ve tried not to talk about shows that are actually closed at time of writing! I’ll make an exception for this one, though, as it surprised (and haunted) me so much. It’s from US artist William Leavitt, who exhibited several small paintings and one video installation at Frank Elbaz in Paris. I went in the late afternoon yesterday, the final couple of hours of the show. https://artangled.com/posts/bisky-konig/ Sun, 13 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/bisky-konig/ Anomie is a social state of disintegration: where the norms imposed by religion and the state fall away, and all we are left with is our own, never-satisfied desires. It’s a word born from the turn of the 20th century and the first rumblings of modernism, popularised by French sociologist Émile Durkheim, who detected in his changing world a mismatch between personal ideals and social standards. Which, naturally, led to unfulfilled desires - and depression. https://artangled.com/posts/nitsch-massimo/ Sun, 06 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/nitsch-massimo/ I didn’t realise how Catholic a country Austria is until I arrived in the centre of Vienna on All Saint’s Day last year and couldn’t find a single supermarket open. Wandering past wedding-cake Baroque churches, with their over-ornate interiors, I finally found a tiny Turkish corner shop – packed, of course. Anyway, that’s a memory triggered by wandering around a very different type of Austrian Catholic dysfunction, currently on show at Massimo de Carlo. https://artangled.com/posts/chen-corrias/ Sun, 29 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/chen-corrias/ China’s home to one in four people, and many of the world’s fastest growing cities. Four different Chinese artists’ responses to the city are currently on show at Pilar Corrias. Chen Wei, now resident in Beijing, stood out to me. One lovely photo in particular, New Buildings, (2016), a rainy window, dappled with condensation, lit up with multiple colours, suggesting windows and signage in a street behind. This weirdly wistful image is a bit of a trick, though. https://artangled.com/posts/skroder-lund-belmacz/ Sun, 22 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/skroder-lund-belmacz/ Philip Larkin, in a rare fit of lyricism, wrote a lovely poem called ‘The Trees’. The trees are bursting into leaf / Like something almost being said, it begins. His words come to my mind a lot at this time of year: when winter turns to spring, the weather warms and moistens, the future beckons. It’s also mentioned in the accompanying notes to this small show, written by art historian Ben Street. https://artangled.com/posts/serra-gagosian/ Sun, 15 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/serra-gagosian/ There’s a funny bit in the recent New Yorker hatchet job on Thomas Heatherwick, covering the design superstar’s mission to build a centrepiece for the renovation of Hudson Yards, New York City. Richard Serra was also asked to contribute too, but said no. “You know what I do — you know that it’s going to be structural steel, you know it’s going to be monumental. What do I need to show you? https://artangled.com/posts/picasso-tate/ Sun, 08 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/picasso-tate/ Even though I went in a churlish mood, on a relentlessly rainy Saturday, surrounded by wheelie-suitcase wielding crowds, I can’t pretend that this show is anything else than a megawatt, full-bore, ocean-going triumph. Picasso in 1932 was 50, world-famous, trapped in a love triangle and, according to the evidence currently on the walls at Tate Modern, at the apex of his inventive powers. This blitz of beauty and innovation, from one of the 20th century’s foundational geniuses, overwhelmed my critical faculties. https://artangled.com/posts/laing-levy-gorvy/ Sun, 01 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/laing-levy-gorvy/ This pocket blockbuster of an exhibition is devoted to the ‘Ben-day dot’: those little dots on printed paper that make up images, if you look closely enough. Visible printed dots making up images on low-grade paper are, of course, a relic of the 20th century. The advent of Pop Art in the 1960s was all about artists getting into commercial culture, and its mass-produced physical relics. This meant, for Sigmar Polke, Roy Lichtenstein and Gerald Laing, painstakingly painting reproductions of Ben-day dots to render iconic reproductions of pictures they saw in magazines, ads and pulp fiction books. https://artangled.com/posts/wilson-pace/ Sun, 25 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/wilson-pace/ There is an awful lot to see in the big main gallery at PACE, all of which is work from Wilson’s showing at last year’s Istanbul Biennial. As the name, ‘Afro Kismet’, suggests, the influences come both from the Middle East and Africa. The wow factor comes from the centre of the room, dominated by two walls clad in Isnik tiles, and two large Murano glass, black chandeliers. Both gaudy and excessive. https://artangled.com/posts/pichlkostner-josh-lilley/ Sun, 18 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/pichlkostner-josh-lilley/ What an impressive last few months at Josh Lilley! Tucked away on a quiet corner in Fitzrovia, just next to the old Middlesex Hospital site - and its bonkers neo-Byzantine chapel, that I’m tempted to write a whole separate post about - this little gallery is on a tear. Late last year came a knockout show from Philadelphia-based Alex Da Corte. And now, it’s a group show of sculpture, using mainly found objects, with the descriptive title ‘I Had the Landscape in My Arms’. https://artangled.com/posts/pistoletto-simon-lee/ Sun, 11 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/pistoletto-simon-lee/ It’s OK to be a one-trick pony, if the trick’s good enough. Michelangelo Pistoletto is associated with the arte povera movement of Italy in the 1960s, and is famous for his ‘mirror paintings’, large wall-mounted mirrors with painted or printed images on them. The first mirror painting dates from the early 60s. And Pistoletto is still at it, judging by this show, currently at Simon Lee Gallery. The dimensions of the mirrors haven’t changed much over the decades. https://artangled.com/posts/howard-newport/ Sun, 04 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/howard-newport/ When making this series of works, based on the 14 stations of the cross, the artist first allowed gloss paint to separate. Then, she poured the pigment onto large canvases from above. Then, she added the laminate to the canvas. This has led to the works’ shiny surface of vertical stripes and drips. Their reflectiveness make them hard to photograph, if not to look at. The series is on show currently at the Newport Street Gallery. https://artangled.com/posts/gursky-hayward/ Sun, 25 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/gursky-hayward/ An early high point in Andreas Gursky’s wonderful show, currently on at the Hayward Gallery, is a photo called ‘Schiphol’. This early-ish (1994) work, looking out onto the runways of the titular airport, was taken at a time of transition for the artist. Gursky was increasingly turning to digital photography, and to the “aggregate states” for which he’s most famous today: complex, heavily retouched depictions of late capitalist workplaces, landscapes and cityscapes. https://artangled.com/posts/sironi-estorick/ Sun, 18 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/sironi-estorick/ Mario Sironi was a poet of the grimy and growing suburbs of Milan. In the inter-war years, he made a series of small, thickly worked ‘Urban Landscapes’, close-cropped, bleak city scenes of factories, smokestacks and apartment blocks. There are two really fine examples in the Estorick’s latest show, subtitled ‘Modern Works from the Pinacoteca di Brera’. This is the first time many of these paintings and sculptures, donated by collectors Emilio and Maria Jesi, have been shown outside of Italy. https://artangled.com/posts/von-calhau-kunstraum/ Sun, 11 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/von-calhau-kunstraum/ Von Calhau! is a collective project of two artists from Porto, who mainly work with sound and video. This show was inspired by a 1980s-era Lisbon graffiti tag: in English, “Black Blob Back to Attack”. The tag, in turn, was inspired by a Disney character, the Phantom Blot, one of Mickey Mouse’s many enemies. Anyway, that character, which originally appeared in a 1930s comic strip, doesn’t really resemble the strange black vinyl inflatable, literally a black blob, filling most of a dingy room off Old Street, pulsing slowly, its seams gaffa-taped and its ends stuck to vents in the floor. https://artangled.com/posts/dorazio-tornabuoni/ Sun, 04 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/dorazio-tornabuoni/ Showing in the depths of an interminable winter, this blast of colour, at Tornabuoni until springtime, comes as a welcome relief – even a joy. Dorazio isn’t exactly a heavy hitter in the pantheon of post war Italian painting. In fact, this is billed as his “first London show in a generation” (though he was a big part of a group show up the road at Mazzoleni last year). He gave the Futurist tropes of bustle and movement a new spin in the 50s, after a formative meeting with the then-elderly Giacomo Balla. https://artangled.com/posts/riley-zwirner/ Fri, 26 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/riley-zwirner/ New year, new blockbuster at Zwirner. This time, it’s Op Art queen Bridget Riley, in a mini-retrospective of (mainly) work from the past four years. It’s based around two themes: her return to the black and white patterns that made her name in the 60s, and her more recent disc paintings. What the two styles have in common is formal rigour, the impression of movement and disorientation. You could say her work, taken as a whole, form an inquiry into the constituent elements of painting. https://artangled.com/posts/introducing-artangled/ Fri, 19 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://artangled.com/posts/introducing-artangled/ Artangled is a bare-bones blog about art shows that lead to connections. It’s written by Joseph Clift. Which connections? As an untrained but enthusiastic observer, I try to connect what I’m looking at to what I’ve seen, experienced or felt at another time. (Sometimes, I’ll get tangled.)