Gallery run 29th January

Posted on February 8, 2020 by julessharples

Leake Street, love the different fonts.

Joe Bradley at Gagosian London with vivid abstract piece in a group show.

Edward Ruscha at Gagosian London with a painting of a blown out truck tyre on an open road.

Edward Hopper at Gagosian London in a group show.

Duan Hanson sculpture at Gagosian London. It really does make you do a double-take even with the expectation of seeing such a piece.

Josh Blackwell at Kate MacGarry with artworks made from bags that have been joined together into single artworks, perhaps using a hot press.

Katy Moran at Stuart Shave Modern Art showing abstracts that have used repurposed old paintings as a source of paintable surface and perhaps also of inspiration and context.

Rubem Valentim at Approach Gallery with sculpture and paintings that develop a Brazilian symbolism.

Josh Brand with quirky photographs at Herald Street.

Gallery run 22nd November

Posted on November 23, 2019 by julessharples

Michael E Smith of Stuart Shave Modern Art with daily objects in unusual juxtapositions plus an unexpected theremin.

This week’s run has an extension panel to the map. It is via a lovely stretch of grassland called Parkland Walk. You enter at Highgate and exit at Finsbury Park with the illusion of having crossed from north west London to north east London in a matter of minutes. (In reality Highgate is not that far west, Finsbury Park is not that far East whilst the duration is nearer half an hour. This is the route of a disused tube line.

Incidental mobile homes on a Peckham Street.

Anselm Kiefer at White Cube with interesting vitrines that use cables to create the vegetal forms plus there are a few complicated looking equations written on the glass.

Trix and Robert Haussmann at Herald Street with colourful remakes of an iconic furniture design. There is also some mirror effect on the bases.

Patricia Tribe at Kate MacGarry with about twenty perfect brush strokes, and many rubbings out.

Christodoulos Panayiotou of Rodeo Gallery at Camden Arts Centre. These electricity poles had a few attachments on still and smelt pleasantly of creosote.

Leake Street.

Gallery run 17th September

Posted on October 8, 2019 by julessharples

Harmony Hammond at White Cube Official with great abstract works based partly on the materiality of canvas and other fabrics.

Dora Maurer at White Cube Official with colourful shaped canvases.

Mona Hartoum at White Cube Official . When by chance a woman was leading a tour of this show, I did a quick google search and her characteristic curly hair revealed it was in fact the artist. Fascinating tour I had tagged onto and here is something the artist described as being almost a self portrait… any guesses?

Goshka Macuga at Kate Macgarry with works that on first sight seem based on the theme of weaving. However, the deeper reference is computing and the artist explains that there are many connections between the information needed to weave fabrics mechanically and that of the old computer punch cards. Surprisingly the pioneer of such technology was a not a male we have heard about, such as Charles Babbage, but rather a woman living in the early 1800’s.

Cui Jie of Pilar Corrias with paintings of Chinese viewing platforms and architecture.

Yoshimoto Nara and David Shrigley of #StephenFriedman with cartoon-like drawings that depict clever or witty ideas.

Jasmine Thomas Girvan at David Zwirner with intricate figurative sculptures shown alongside the paintings of Chris Ofili.

Chris Ofili at David Zwirner with figurative paintings including this great piece.

A wheel of sorts and it’s a big one.

Gallery run 15th September

Posted on September 16, 2018 by julessharples

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J B Blunk at Kate MacGarry with oriental ceramics.

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Kim Dorland at Beers London with images of forests, some figures aware of their impending death and a light-hearted egg motif.

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Richard Aldrich at Herald Street with a loose abstract piece.

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Christina Quarles at Pilar Corrias with abstracted figures in bright patterned landscapes.

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Moshekwa Langa at Blain Southern with great abstract works.

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Conrad Shawcross of Victoria Miro with developments on his tetrahedral motif.

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Urs Fischer at Gagosian. The candle is burning.

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Don Van Vliet (aka Captain Beefheart) of Michael Werner Gallery with familiar animals that have become symbols.

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Keith Farquhar at Cabinet Gallery with familiar objects transformed for our viewing pleasure.

Gallery run 31st May

Posted on June 3, 2018 by julessharples

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Jonathan Trayte at Kate MacGarry using cement and vinyl sticker to make striking high-art.

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Jordan Kasey at Kate MacGarry with an unusual close-up of familiar subject matter. The two pairs of lights look, to me at least, like pairs of cartoon eyes staring up from the dark background. They are in fact the windows of the house behind.

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Luke Rudolf of Kate MacGarry with carefully composed paintings.

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Zofia Rydet showing at Calvert 22 with examples of photos from documentation of over 20,000 families.

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Weronika Gesicka at Calvert 22 with interesting photos of partially missing figures. In this particular image the jigsaw make this theme of absence part of a visual pun.

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St.Paul’s Cathedral as it’s never been seen before, by artist Abigail Reynolds at Peer UK.

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Gastone Medin at Estorick Collection with a modernist film set design. The show features such designers who were influenced by architecture and Hollywood.

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Giorgio Morandi at Estorick Collection in a great show that also has the original drawings of some well known paintings.

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Emilio Greco at the Estorick Collection.

Gallery run 10th May

Posted on May 12, 2018 by julessharples

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Beatriz Milhazes at White Cube with a 15m long tapestry in her characteristic style.

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JeffKeen at Kate MacGarry with an early example of spliced 8mm film intercut with animation.

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Birgit Jurgenssen of Alison Jacques Gallery with delicately presented photographs using gauze fabrics to give a soft focus and welded metal frames which she made herself.

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Wilhelm Sasnal at Sadie Coles HQ with paintings in his distinctive style.

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Christian Boltanski at Marian Goodman with films of interventions and installations in deserted landscapes.

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Juan Usle of Frith Street Gallery with delicate brushwork.

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Rose Wylie at David Zwirner with evocative paintings made from the artist’s memory and images she finds in her studio.

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Alvaro Barrington at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac with paintings and sketches.

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Joseph Beuys at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac with a big retrospective and here a transformer and felt installation.

Gallery run 16th March

Posted on March 17, 2018 by julessharples

The day starts with a jog to Matt’s Gallery. The gallery is doing a sequence of short one week shows and with this fast turnover has quite an itinerary lined up. This week it is Mandy Ure, who I remember well from Goldsmiths. She had a great way of mixing random marks, from paint pouring and dripping, into purposeful compositions through subsequent blowing up and careful finishing with a paint brush. Her work today is reminiscent of the shapes under a microscope and her own purposeful action has become here a metaphor for the careful order maintained in the blob-like structures of cells.

A few hours later after seeing the works shown below I come to the last gallery of the day, Victoria Miro and see Jules de Balincourt. His paintings are from the imagination and a rather sublime one at that. Figures are dwarfed by a spectacular multi-coloured boulder. Though the image is physically small, it extends into the abyss of the viewer’s own imagination and stirs up a host of resident memories!

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Mandy Ure at Matt’s Gallery with small abstracts.

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Laura Gannon at Kate MacGarry with cut canvases painted with metallic pigments.

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Michael Dean of Herald Street.

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Amalia Pica of Herald Street showing a small cluster of castings of shell-like objects.

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Francesco Arena of Sprovieri Gallery with a performance stool. It can only be sat on by someone whose age is 33, the difference in age between artist and father. A death will cause this interval to change and that will impede on the required age for the stool-performer.

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Matthew Day Jackson of Hauser and Wirth with recreations of Dutch still life paintings made with DIY materials.

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Leon Kossoff at Ordovas.

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Lorna Simpson at Hauser and Wirth with delicate washes on screenprinted and newspaper images.

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Jules de Balincourt of Victoria Miro with vividly coloured landscapes populated by crowds of small figures.

Gallery run 15th December

Posted on December 16, 2017 by julessharples

Trinity Buoy Wharf lies in the crook of land between The Thames and the River Lee. Because of the two converging rivers, this area feels fairly isolated from nearby Canary Wharf and the Millenium Dome across the water to the south. It accommodates an artist community, as evidenced by the strange and beautiful sculptures that are scattered around, but it also enjoys a strong connection to the surrounding waters. A lightship is moored at one end of an open yard whilst opposite stands an assembly of crisscrossing shipping crates, populated by creative types who can observe their environment through circular porthole windows. After a bacon roll in Fatboy Diner the time has come to make an arching detour round the loops of the River Lee and across the top right of London’s map into Hackney.

The Approach gallery has drawings and paintings by Bill Lynch, who as we understand from the press release led a free-living existence, taking on decorating jobs to make ends meet, all the while exploring the intricacies of fluid mark-making, prevalent in the tradition of Japanese landscape drawing and calligraphy. A tree appears in one of the artist’s paintings and it is opening up its foliage with the energy of small coiled springs, a state of affairs depicted with tight, circular brush marks amongst the living network of dark twigs and branches.

At Maureen Paley, a neighbouring gallery in this East London cluster, Andrew Grassie has made paintings that rival even Vermeer in their precision and use of colour. They are barely bigger than postcards yet carry a wealth of detail. The white beams of an open roof space recede towards a vanishing point, whilst objects associated with a functioning studio, since this is the chosen subject matter of the series of seven paintings, appear as if by magic with minute flecks of coloured paint, all the while being contained within a flawless, photographic-like surface. A few doors away in Herald Street Gallery, a dinner plate sits on a plinth. Oliver Payne seems more interested in the various distractions that might divert us away from art rather than the many objects catalogued in the previous show that are intended to make us think of art-making itself. Indeed, it is a testament to the left-field nature of the present show that none of its objects conform to the canon outlined in the previous show, neither the plate of cold chicken and pasta sitting on the plinth nor the array of eight I-pads that, despite all their powerful processing capacity, have been requisitioned purely for the purpose of displaying a single image, something of course, which could have been done with a piece of back-lit cellophane, were the artist not interested in turning his critical eye on digital technology itself.

Finally, back south of the river, Gilbert and George have been having a giggle thinking up how the F-word can be inserted into short pithy slogans. As the eye scans across the alternate red and black fonts of F-word wallpaper a kind of rhythm emerges. The two artists switch between being the randy agents of various described acts outlined in block capitals on the one hand, to being puppeteers of the English language on the other. Familiar slogans become wilfully distorted as the artists introduce the necessary four letter insert. A game is being played, for which we know the rules, and which all the while is being powered by the free-flowing imaginations of G and G, revealing in the process a sort of inner portrait of the two artists.

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Ilya and Emilia Kabakov at Tate Modern with layered images.

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Trinity Buoy Wharf.

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Bill Lynch of The Approach Gallery with paintings on wood that appear to be inspired by the Japanese tradition of prints and calligraphy.

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Jack Lavender of Approach Gallery with assembled rocks and taxi cards.

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David Noonan of Stuart Shave Modern Art. The artist was there talking to friends about his work and it was great being able to eavesdrop!

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Andrew Grassie of Maureen Paley with photorealistic paintings.

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Oliver Payne of Herald Street with a new display format of wall-mounted iPads carrying a single image.

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Florian Meisenberg of Kate MacGarry.

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Gilbert and George at White Cube with rude words wall paper.

Frieze week 5th October

Posted on October 6, 2017 by julessharples

It is Frieze week and the galleries are all together under the Regent’s Park awning. Consequently there is little opportunity for a run. However, earlier this week I am given the opportunity to run up to Alan Cristea Gallery and review the new Michael Craig Martin exhibition of prints. Prints are the speciality of this gallery. To one side of the gallery, the newest work uses an altogether new method of duplication using a laser cutting process to remove a thin black surface and reveal portions of the white under-layer. The bonus of this process is the durability of the surface and these works look striking without even needing a sheet of protecting glass.

Two days later it is my chance to visit Frieze. The stand out works include some great ones by Ivan Seal, Mary Reid Kelley, Djordje Ozbolt, Patricia Treib, Sheila Hicks and Daniel Richter. A recent addition to Michael Werner Gallery called Peter Saul catches my eye in particular. It seems popular too on the Instagram feed with the most likes and as I look at the image it leaves this intense desire to produce a work of my own in a similar style. This of course will never happen. The work is great though, being a sort of dismantled figure with recognisable foot and hand emerging from some central tank-like container.

Lastly, a neon piece by Andrea Bowers is flashing away at Andrew Kreps Gallery, and since this is Frieze week, New York lies only a few seconds from London. The concourse between the neighbouring cubicles replaces the expanse of the Atlantic Ocean. A cardboard cowling surrounds the neon letters and frames their pithy slogan, but also lends to their slick form an impromptu feeling, due in part to bits of random image left on the cardboard surface. This is almost the end of Frieze experience for me, but the same evening there is a bonus of seeing a talk by the Slade professor Andrew Stahl. A mutual friend has invited us to a rather exotic venue in Mayfair, home of the Woman’s University Club, and the evening assumes a slower and more relaxed rhythm.

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Michael Craig Martin at Alan Cristea Gallery with laser cut plastic as a medium for his new drawings.

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Sheila Hicks of Alison Jacques Gallery at Frieze 2017.

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Mary Reid Kelley of Pilar Corrias at Frieze 2017. Images and props from a recent film are artworks in themselves.

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Ivan Seal of Carl Freedman Gallery at Frieze 2017.

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Djordje Ozbolt with Herald Street at Frieze 2017.

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Patricia Treib of Kate Macgarry at Frieze 2017.

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Peter Saul of Michael Werner at Frieze 2017.

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Daniel Richter with Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac at Frieze 2017.

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Andrea Bowers at Andrew Kreps Gallery.

Gallery run 14th July

Posted on July 15, 2017 by julessharples

The annual Goldsmiths MA show is the first stop on today’s run. Spread across the old swimming baths and the stunning Ben Pimlott building with views across London, the show has a variety of interesting architectural back drops. These are matched in no small part by a great painting from Daniel Arcand displayed on the top floor of the Ben Pimlott building. The artwork has a Manga-like quality to it with excellent mark-making and a great economy of design.

From here, the quickest route to Victoria Park is through the Greenwich foot tunnel and then north along the Regent’s canal. The Approach Gallery is showing a retrospective of its artists as well as previous exhibitions spanning twenty years. Works by Rezi Van Lankveld and Gary Webb stand out in the group show, whilst in a side room there is a film of speeded-up highlights from the previous shows here from which I recognise in their younger years some of my former Goldsmiths colleagues.

Then after a stop at Wilkinson Gallery with some evocative work by the late Derek Jarman, Herald Street plays host to the next three shows. At Maureen Paley there are abstract sculptures depicting cubic volumes of mainly empty space, adorned with a few intriguing objects including books and carpet tiles. Tom Burr is a thought provoking artist and writer who is new to this gallery having transferred from Stuart Shave Modern Art. A few doors down at Laura Bartlett, a group show has lovely small pieces by Koak who depicts female figures in slightly unusual ways. The images seem to fulfil their remit of challenging the viewer’s gaze by showing the figures engaging only with each other and without any additional acknowledgement of the viewer.

At Herald Street Gallery there is a great installation by Klaus Weber. The gallery assistant warns me of the hazards of a temporary rickety floor and protruding cactuses. The planks spring up slightly across the joists, whilst the cactuses penetrate these planks through round holes. Meanwhile a policeman-figure is kneeling down, with head below floor level accessed through yet another circular hole. There is also a stack of coloured glass spheres raised up on a plinth that, we are told, represent a type of humanoid figure. This perhaps needs more explanation and comes from a story told in Plato’s symposium. Essentially these figures were described by the Greek philosopher as mythological beings that Zeus callously cut into two halves, bisecting them from top to bottom. As these half-beings entered into ancient history they then matched up to the anthropomorphic form we currently reside in. The truth of this myth seems to lie in its ability to articulate our constant psychological need to find our other missing halves.

After a quick lunch at Bagel bake, which seems to have had a cash injection as there is now a new air conditioning system and workmen replacing tiles, I stroll down to Kate MacGarry Gallery finishing off a last few bits of apple strudel. Inside there are works by four artists including Francis Uprichard. She has presented two gothic figures that resemble harlequins. They are smaller than life size, but have a powerful presence due partly to their positioning on plinths but also because of their excellently rendered faces imparting, not for the first time today, a challenge to the gaze of the viewer. With that now recorded and the Hackney galleries fully explored, there just remains a return back South to complete this week’s run.

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Daniel Arcand at Goldsmiths MA Degree Show with a great fluent painting with drawn outlines.