LONDON: FRIEZE ART FAIR #2 - BEST OF THE REST

From the top: Image 1-3: installation by Nicole Eisenman, courtesy the artist and Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin; Leo Koenig Inc., New York and Susanne Vielmetter, Los Angeles; Image 4-5: Peter Doig “Riding in Water (Red)”, 2012 and “Fall in New York (Central Park)”, 2002-2012, Courtesy Michael Werner Gallery, New York and London

So the big tops have come down and the Frieze circus is over for another year. However, lasts week’s dizzying programme included many openings, private views and events at more permanent spaces, which remain open and are highly recommended. 

As well as having put on a lovely spread for Friday’s brunch view, Clapham’s Studio Voltaire bring together two female artists exploring the erotic charge of the human body through very different media in their current double show. Created during a month-long residency at the gallery, Nicole Eisenman’s large-scale plaster sculptures are the long, liquid-limbed cousins of the bulbous faces that inhabit her most recent paintings and prints. Limber and expressive, they hunch, fold, bend and slump against the gallery’s walls and floor, which are splattered with chalky smudges of dried plaster. Next door, a looped YouTube clip in which a pair of trainered feet scuff and scrape in a stylised game of footsie with the flinty ground plays on one of two screens. A separate voiceover narration intersperses a description of the artist’s experience of watching an internet video of a man carving a hand axe with the semi-erotic comments left online beneath the trainer clip. Perverse but somehow seductive, Charlotte Prodger’s installation uses the trappings of 21st century consumer culture to tap into a potent sensibility of the properly ‘digital’ - hands and feet – and a primitive intermingling of violence and sexuality.

On the other side of town Peter Doig’s hazily tropical latest offerings at Michael Werner outshine their muted counterparts in Luc Tuymans on show at David Zwirner’s new Mayfair space, just up the road. Heavingly, muggily romantic, they share the sunlit pallete of Chris Ofili’s recent paintings, whilst still retaining the brooding, otherworldy atmopshere of Tuyman’s dark frames.

At Alan Cristea, lightness is all. In ceramicist Edmund de Waal’s installation, a thousand hours (2012), two glass vitrines are filled with an accumulation of 1000 hand-thrown porcelain vessels. The dry, ashy hues of unglazed clay, these slender tubes have mute, pale and timeless beauty.

LONDON: FRIEZE ART FAIR #1

from the top: Valeska Soares, Galeria Fortes Vilaça, Sao Paulo; Frieze London; Anish Kapoor, Untitled (2012) Lisson Gallery, London; Vitamin Creative Space - winner of the 2012 Frieze London Stand Prize; Thomas Bayrle 'Sloping Loafers : Smooth' (2012) Courtesy of Polly Braden; Henrik Hakansson, The Y Swarm (Sturnus Vulgaris) #2 (2011) Meyer Riegger Berlin; all images Courtesy of Linda Nylind and © Frieze London

Frieze week started in earnest on Wednesday, with the vernissage of the 10th edition of the London fair opening its doors to the well-heeled of the world. In spite of the attendant peacockry and pageantry - the old refrain, ‘I don’t know what is more interesting to look at, the people or the art,’ got a good airing last night - the fair felt fresh and slick, and, as ever, it gives a decent overview of the notoriously slippery terrain of the contemporary art world. Or, at least, of what is being sold there, which is never quite the whole story. For example, it was interesting to note the relatively subdued presence of screen-based art. Especially since it feels as though film and video artists are currently running riot in London’s young art scene (witness ringleader Ed Atkin’s show at Chisenhale, the cavernous space dedicated to screen-based works in the V22 Young London exhibition and Hannah Sawtell’s just opened installation at the ICA, to take three very current examples). The installation of Ryan Trecartin’s sprawling and chaotic sculptural and multi-screen works at Andrea Rosen felt notably flattened by the tightly regimented, white-walled set-up of the fair booth. 

The exception to prove this particular rule was Elizabeth Price, shown as part of a three-artist presentation at MOT International. Her film, which appropriates the fetishistic and slightly sinister imagery and language of car advertising, shows why she is a hot tip for this year’s Turner prize.

There was far too much to take in on an evening largely concerned with shepherding wayward friends/awkwardly greeting vague acquaintances/procuring moderately but not outrageously expensive wine. For me, early stand-outs included two sets of painting of domestic interiors - both by male Americans; both very different. At David Kordansky, Jonas Wood’s large canvases were bright, flat and angular, whilst at the other end of the tent, Algus Greenspon’s stand was given over to the rippling, smoothly-folded pastels of Mathew Cerletty’s small-scale bedrooms. Elsewhere, at Salon 94, the accumulation of Matthias Merkel Hess’s glossily ceramic buckets, baskets and petrol cans impressed, as did Paul Kasmin’s solo presentation of works by William N. Copely. In these pieces, shown in a stand painted the bawdy stripes of the big-top, Copley’s trademark female figures, curvy and scandalously naked, are all the more titillating for having been cut out of mirrored Perspex.

More to come…

AMY'S LONDON: GOLD MEDAL ART

 

From the top: Installation by Anthea Hamilton and Nicholas Byrne, Fountain by Klaus Weber, Sculpture park by Gary Webb, billboard illustrations by Sanarth Banerjee, photos: Amy Sherlock

With all eyes currently on London, it is worth drawing their attention to some of the events that are happening alongside the games as part of the London 2012 festival, the grande finale of a four-year long, publicly funded Cultural Olympiad. From a line-up featuring boats, puppets, film on bus shelters and an inflatable Stonehenge, a podium position should be reserved for Frieze Projects East. Commissioned by the not-for-profit arm of the ever-growing commercial-critical complex that bought you the art fair(s) and the magazine, these six artists’ projects are spread across the Olympic boroughs of East London. In a dialogue with the crowded Olympic venues, each explores art as a collective event by playing with the different kind of public or communal spaces that art can occupy.

A stone’s throw away from the stadium in an otherwise empty storehouse, Klaus Weber’s Sandfountain flows almost-but-not-quite silently. In a brilliant inversion of the babbling levity of cascading water, the sand streaming from the top of this grandiose, three-tier fountain collects lumpily, forming uneven banks that collapse in erratic, unpredictable landslides. Divorced from the monumental grandeur of the public spaces to which is normally an accessory, the fountain’s decorative frivolity evokes a sense of futility and pathos. Elsewhere, Anthea Hamilton and Nicholas Byrne’s LOVE has repopulated an abandoned public bath house with giant inflatable sculptures which iconoclastically reference well known art works and imagery from the popular cultural imagination. And Sanarth Banerjee’s graphic illustrations, the Gallery of Losers (Non-Performers, Almost-Winners, Under-Achievers, Almost-Made-Its) dedicate billboards, public screens and local newspaper columns to that very British anti-hero – the also-ran. A timely tonic to the success fever currently sweeping the nation, Banarjee’s deadpan works reclaim the advertising billboard – a space from which dreams and ideals are sold to the masses – for the humdrum, banal and quotidian.

INCURABLE DREAMS AT TATTON PARK BIENNIAL

Photo credits: Thierry Bal commissioned by Tatton Park Biennial.

Whoever said that the proliferation of the Biennale system need always be a bad thing? Maligned from Sao Paolo to Dakar as the transient playgrounds of an imported, global cultural elite, the rise of the biennial has nevertheless had a trickle-down effect that has lead to more modest manifestations of the format appearing in some interesting and unlikely places. Rather than overwhelm and overrun their locations these smaller biennials are often able to interact with them in a more intimate and nuanced way. Such is the case at the third Tatton Park Biennial, which I visited on a trip away from the capital last weekend.

AMY'S LONDON: LIMONCELLO, WE LOVE YOU

   

all images: Installation Views 'We Love You', Courtesy Limoncello Gallery, London

Last Wednesday saw the opening of East London gallery Limoncello’s new space in the Russian Club’s studios, Dalston. Taking a big step up (in terms of floor space if not geography) from their former shoe-box premises, directors Rebecca May Marston and Rosa Tyhurst have expanded with gusto into their bright, beautiful new space with a raucous group show – ‘We Love You’ – for which gallery artists have been invited to show one piece alongside a piece that has served as inspiration and another from a ‘hot tip’ emerging artist. Unsurprisingly, given the breadth of the Limoncello roster, the result is a pleasingly motley affair with several large sculptural work such as John Frankland’s precarious and gently comic tower of stacked pink balloons (2012) or James Torbles’ ‘Folded Concrete’ slab (2012) vying for immediate attention amongst the assembled video, photographic, painted and printed works.

Although a sense that the show was crowded doubtless owed much to the spectacularly busy opening night where the crowds of young ‘creatives’ managed to make even the commodious premises seem claustophobic. Given space to breathe, the ‘We Love You’ concept allows for revelatory moments of clarity and coherence. Yonatan Vinitsky’s series of photographs, ‘T-R-A-P’ (2011), articulates a strong preoccupation with solid form and colours, repetition and re-configuration, echoed in the double-sided Anatal Biro composition (1950) and beautiful ‘Morgen Rot’ and ‘Abend Rot’ (2000) screenprints by Rupprecht Geiger that bookend it. Deceptively simple, Jack Strange’s levitating tower of stacked CDs  (‘Blank Maxwell’ 2012) is shimmeringly, liquidly beautiful – a magpie reminder of the over-looked glamour of the banal and quotidian.

‘We love you’ is an appropriately upbeat declaration from this East End upstart whose expanded new space is indicative of its (deservedly) growing and increasingly established status on the London art scene. And good luck to them. Limoncello, we love you too!

AMY'S LONDON: MEANS WITHOUT ENDS

   

from top: Daniel Sturgis 'The Social Question', Ian Davenport 'Puddle Painting (Yellow Lime Green Study)', Mark Francis 'Duality', installation view (sculpture to the right by DJ Simpson 'Isovist')

In a small but elegant gallery space, in a small but elegant courtyard behind Regent’s Street is a exhibition which demonstrates, in an equally restrained way, why abstract painting – after the clamour of Pollock and the silence of Minimalism - still has big things to say. Means Without Ends (at Pippy Houldsworth Gallery until February 18th) brings together four contemporary painters, Mark Francis, Ian Davenport, DJ Simpson and Daniel Sturgis, all working within the archetypal abstract tradition which privileges line – as both form and gesture – as the expression of a vital dynamism.

AMY'S LONDON: DONALD JUDD DRAWINGS AT SPRÜTH MAGERS

   

Donald Judd Drawings: © Judd Foundation. Licensed by VAGA, New York/DACS, London 2012 Installation Views: Working Papers: Donald Judd Drawings, 1963 - 93, installation view, Sprüth Magers London, January 2012. © Photography Stephen White.

The exhibition of Donald Judd’s workings drawing that opened at Sprüth-Magers on Thursday continues something of a theme in the gallery’s programming of late. In a turn that has not gone unremarked, almost half of Sprüth’s London shows since last February’s (quite literally) illuminating exhibition of Anthony McCall’s ‘Works on Paper’ have featured the sketches, working drawings and documentation various of big-name artists including Joseph Kosuth, George Condo and of course Judd himself.
Whilst this current emphasis on the ephemeral might summon such metaphors as ‘scraping the barrel’ to the mind of the more cynical observer, the interest of these shows should not be dismissed outright. Working Papers brings together 33 preliminary sketches outlining the sculptural works for which Judd is best known. The most interesting of these are on headed order forms submitted by Judd to his contractors, the steel companies and metal-works that produced the objects with which he made his name.
The old question rears its head: what’s in a name? At what point does object become sculpture, producer become artist? Casual in their execution but meticulous in their conception, these order forms occupy a position paradoxically closest to the artist – bearing the unique traces of Judd’s hand and therefore an originality that is without equivalent in the finished sculptures – even as they symbolise the contractual displacement of artistic productivity away from him. Some even include a price alongside Judd’s rigorous instructions. As such, there is a certain boldness in Sprüth’s decision to shine a spotlight on those brute (and therefore troubling) technical and economic factors that underpin the creative process but are all too often concealed by it. One need only to consult David Hockney’s recent, thinly-veiled critique of Damien Hirst to know that this is a question that remains as incendiary within the artistic community as outside it.

AMY'S LONDON: PERFORMANCE ‘IN YOUR FACE’

   

all images Courtesy ShowStudio     

Aggressive; exhibitionistic; self-flagellatory. Three words vividly evoked by the performances, sculptures and images on display at "In Your Face", a new exhibition which opened last Thursday at London’s ShowStudio. The space itself is the physical component of fashion uber-photographer Nick Knight’s slick web-platform of the same name. Dedicated to the slippery genre of fashion film, showstudio.com celebrates the pageantry and peacockry of fashion at it’s performative best. Aggressive, exhibitionistic, self-flagellatory. Three words that could equally be applied to the primal drives of the fashion industry itself, and its often brutal excesses.
Centred on a contextually apt if overly facile preoccupation with the corporeal, the show’s star-studded ranks include Mapplethorpe’s heroic, photographic rendering of the male body as structural form, Leigh Bowery-esque bondage gear from fashion’s enfant terrible, Gareth Pugh, and painter Anj Smith’s darkly surreal portrait, R.F. This is a show about fetishisation, about the overwhelming objectness of the body and its perverse, almost excessive presence.