Beautiful exhibitions
A selection of art from London Gallery Weekend
Hello.
My London Gallery Weekend (LGW) began in a violent rainstorm on Southwark Bridge, breaking a sweat on a Lime bike with only one working (front) brake and wiping the water from my sunglasses with outgrown acrylic nails. The low-lying hangover I’d mysteriously managed to accrue from two ‘interactive’ cocktails (see below) at the Serpentine reception the night before wasn’t helping my general feeling of panic at the prospect of cycling another thirty minutes to the ends of the earth… South London.
Now – Sunday – I write to you sitting fragile upon a throne of lemsip and Tiger Balm and tissues in my sickbed, thinking: this is what happens when I leave Hackney. But that’s the beauty of LGW: it takes you to untrodden realms to see unfamiliar – and sometimes good – art.
Here are some of my favourite things!!!!
Prunella Clough, Thomas Dane Gallery
One of my favourite shows. I have always been drawn to beauty of industry (bc I am from the NORTH, if I didn’t mention), which is distilled into Clough’s postwar ‘urbscapes’: scenes of factories; wastelands; warehouses. Their abstraction of an urban essence – at once so unnatural and inextricable from nature – is delicious. I first saw Clough’s work in a shopfront at my friend Leon Scott-Engel’s gallery Flexitron. The modest setting felt quite suited for an artist known for selling her work disproportionately cheaply in studio clear-outs… god, I wish I’d been there. This show of works from the 80s and 90s is predictably beautiful, I really think that I could live with any and all of it.
Jemila Isa, Maureen Paley Studio M
This show is a joint first with Prunella – Emily and I loooooooved this exhibition. The works unfold like a fairytale: of womanhood, spirituality, selfhood and the church. This series was inspired by a dream and the film Black Orpheus (1959) and evoked an intensely magical atmosphere through spare brushstrokes: red skies and a young bride’s powdery dresses and the cool shadows of a chapel.
There were lots of beautiful postcard-sized works on paper for sale in the office (£800 each) that would be perfect for a first-time/young buyer/my bedroom wall.
Candace Hill-Montgomery, Hollybush Gardens
I made a quick trip to Hollybush Gardens after glimpsing Candace Hill-Montgomery’s stunning weaves on Talia Pockhai’s Instagram story. I love the way these works thread so many references and moments and movements – Black Arts groups, feminism, the Black Panther Party, Hill-Montgomery’s career as a model – so seamlessly into mohair; silk; the cache-sexes of the Cameroonian Kirdi groups. They’re gorgeous three-dimensional poems, whose cherry on top is their rhythmic, riddle-ish titles: like Pope L’s T Raining Day or A Thousand Hours Reasoning Troth With Sword Swallowers’ or How is Loves Distance Approximated.
Ted Le Swer, Soup Gallery
Back in South Emily and I saw wonderful Ted speak eloquently about his technically quite complex show, featuring UK weather surveillance cameras/Bambi/a Friesian cow in Lewes (the lying down sort, able to detect changes in atmospheric pressure) captured by visual effects software/a pinhole camera/16mm film. What does Bambi have to do with ecological mediation? we wondered, and were duly informed that Disney remakes the film’s trailer periodically to reflect its present year’s major sociopolitical issues. I could not verify this online, but during the course of my research I did come across this other interesting fact, courtesy wikipedia:
“On December 17, 2018, a prison sentence passed against a man, in what is considered the biggest deer poaching case in Missouri history, contained the stipulation that the prisoner must view the film at least once each month during his one-year prison sentence”.
Honourable Mention: Caspar Heinemann, CABINET
If you didn’t know, I’m obsessed with aliens, so I dragged Emily through wastelands (Elephant & Castle) to reach Vauxhall in the pouring rain and stare at a fake alien autopsy for fifteen minutes. Honestly, there were lots of things I found funny about this show, like the ridiculousness of the grey man’s three-toed feet in the pretentiously silent gallery space, or the final line of the exhibition text, which read:
“My paintings on cork board are remarkably inaccurate and demonstrate a low level of astronomical understanding.”
I like someone who doesn’t take themselves too seriously. I, for one, just couldn’t take any of it seriously (in the most wonderful way), because of the strange little guy just lying there in the middle of the huge, echoey room.
Other (actual) honourable mentions: Alvaro Barrington at Emalin, Helen Marten at Sadie Coles, Eileen Agar at Alison Jacques, Steven Shearer at David Zwirner.
Byeeee xx