Gallery run 13th January

Saatchi Gallery to London Bridge along Thames.

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David Salle of Maureen Paley Gallery showing at Saatchi Gallery.

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Josef Albers at David Zwirner with works on theme of both this shape and the famous layered squares.

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John Baldessari at Marian Goodman Gallery with images from Hollywood and Miro plus text.

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Dexter Dalwood of Simon Lee Gallery showing at Saatchi Gallery.

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Austin Emery led this participatory stone carving project with residents of the estate.

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Annette Messager at Marian Goodman Gallery in a group show upstairs.

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Bjarne Melgaard at Saatchi Gallery.

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Sigmar Polke at Michael Werner with a series of pour paintings.

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Ansel Krut of Stuart Shave Modern Art showing at Saatchi Gallery.

Gallery run 8th December

Battersea Park, Hyde Park.

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Magnus Plessen at White Cube with painted portraits of him and pregnant wife.

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Zaha Hadid at the Winton Gallery of the Science Museum.

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Richard Oelze at Michael Werner with slightly surreal landscapes.

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Zaha Hadid early paintings at Serpentine Gallery. This is London with a skewed viewpoint in the artist’s customary (as we discover) style.

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Gavin Turk with his famous blue plaque given pride of place in Newport Street Gallery. There is plenty more and a great show.

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Huma Bhabha at Stephen Friedman with carved polystyrene figures.

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Lee Friedlander at Pace Gallery with an ironic take on the subject object relationship in photography. It’s his shadow not mine!

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Peter Peri at Almine Rech with circular heads on the bronzes made of cast tape rolls and loo rolls.

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David Shrigley of Stephen Friedman Gallery exhibiting on the 4th plinth.

Gallery run 30th September

Art Povera with Marisa Merz and Jannis Kounellis and global trade, politics and migration with Yinka Shonibare, Akram Zaatari and Mike Kelley.

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Yinka Shonibare at Stephen Friedman with cosmic statues and a move away from his fabric motifs.

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Marisa Merz at Thomas Dane Gallery with images on basic materials and was part of the Art Povera grouping also with her husband Mario Merz.

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Peter Saul at Michael Werner with superheroes and angst ridden figures.

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Akram Zaatari at Thomas Dane Gallery celebrating the story of an Israeli pilot who refused to drop his bombs on a school in Lebanon and offloaded them into the sea instead.

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Mike Kelley at Hauser and Wirth London with a recreation from China Town.

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Jannis Kounellis at White Cube with constructions from wax, lead and metal.

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On the Regent’s Canal.

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Sol Calero at Laura Bartlett Gallery with bright imagery inspired by Venezuela.

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Lygia Pape at Hauser and Wirth London with installation made of fine wires.

Gallery run 14th July

Peckham to The Sunday Painter for the first time. North over Lambeth Bridge. St Jame’s, Green and Hyde Parks to Michael Werner. East to Timothy Taylor then south to Simon Lee gallery. East along the Thames to White Cube, then south.

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Leo Fitzmaurice at The Sunday Painter has created a double room where a polythene sheet divides two of various random objects.

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Don Van Vliet aka Captain Beefheart at Michael Werner with human and animal imagery.

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David Hammons showing at Simon Lee Gallery. Light hearted show described as being about abject existence.

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Great traffic lights on Whitehall.

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Wacky benches on the Southbank by Jeppe Hein.

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Raqib Shaw at White Cube with self portraits. Intricate images rendered with a porcupine quill using enamel paint.

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Markus Lupertz at Michael Werner in a group show with many of the gallery artists. It’s food!

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Mike Kelley at Simon Lee Gallery.

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Armen Eloyan at Timothy Taylor showing paintings and also bronzes for the first time.

Parkland Walk, 23rd June

As usual this run is a loop, but unlike the Regent’s Canal circuit described elsewhere, it extends further north to take in Parkland walk. Parkland Walk is a nature reserve created from an old railway used until 1970. Amongst its trees and wildlife, graffiti and nature have rounded off the sharp angular forms of station platforms and decorated the arched bridges that carry criss-crossing roads overhead. Meanwhile, walkers and cyclists barely notice the gentle gradient of this green corridor that rises slowly up to Highgate from Finsbury Park.

From here, the beautiful green space of Hampstead Heath provides the next section of the loop before I arrive at Camden Arts Centre which despite its name is well north of Camden on the Finchley Road. It is hosting Anya Gallaccio and as I wasn’t allowed to get a photo of another group-show inside, am relieved to see her artwork stretched out across the garden, where no photography restriction could possibly apply. As an object it looks like a long, woven, rope structure and even has some similarities to a hammock. This impression is reinforced further by it being draped across the trees in the garden, having extended from the roof terrace space above the garden cafe. With its clear structure of frayed, brown rope that has been joined with knots and cross-links, the real subject of the artwork seems to switch back towards the trees on which it is resting. Somehow the artwork serves as a reminder that the living material over which it is currently draped has an intricacy and strength all of its own.

Whilst Parkland Walk and Anya Gallaccio’s artwork have united to create a theme of nature and its regeneration into cultural artefacts, the next piece at Michael Werner Gallery remains obstinately removed from nature. Jorg Immendorf has painted two figures of children in a cartoon-like idiom that oppose nature through their puffed out cheeks and inflated torsos. They represent a sort of distorted or lost innocence. As the artwork was painted during the Vietnam war, the theme of lost innocence is also historically relevant, though the precise meaning of the image still remains hard to pin down. Formally, the painting is a cut-out round two figures and a pool of water they are sitting in.

Soap suds cascade down these yellow cartoonish torsos and collect on the surface of water, still buoyed by the vigour of a sponge that created them, and then a marvellous little piece of logic unites the yellow of the skin with the blue of the water to determine that the submerged body should necessarily be tinted green. This green and yellow colour palette sets up a system based on the false initial premise of the bright yellow human flesh and lends a sense of disquietude to the image but also a beauty. Then with false premises of my very own it is necessary to make all haste through the busy metropolis and visit the next stop which shall be the RA Schools show in Piccadilly.

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Parkland Walk between Finsbury Park and Highgate. On the way to the Camden Arts Centre.

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Guillermo Kuitca at Hauser and Wirth. The fragmentation cubism-lines become a floor plan.

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Anya Gallaccio of Thomas Dane Gallery showing at Camden Arts Centre. Part of Making and Unmaking show.

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Victoria Morton at Sadie Coles HQ. Colourful images with beautiful recurring motifs.

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Jorg Immendorff at Michael Werner. The babies are iconic symbols of innocence amidst his fierce campaigning against the Vietnam war.

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Nairy Baghramian at Marian Goodman Gallery. The pole structures hold the elements together

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Anna Paterson at RA Schools Show 2016. Oil, pastel and print on aluminium. Another interesting artist at the RA schools show.

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Joseph Grigely shows The Gregory Battcock Archive at Marian Goodman Gallery. Gregory himself is photographed in front of the first plane painted by Alexander Calder for Braniff Airlines in 1972.

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Rafal Topolewski at RA Schools Show 2016. Yellow, Orange and Black and Turn. Great paintings.

Gallery run 14th April

Pink and lilac colour coordination in this week’s randomly chosen shows.

15aEver wondered what colour a Martian sunrise is? Spencer Finch at Lisson Gallery has produced this simulacrum of it. Rosy pink!

15bAllen Jones at Michael Werner exploring the dominatrix motif.

15cBlair Thurman at Almine Rech Gallery

15d

15eSarah Lucas at Sadie Coles HQ with more stuffed tights and fab metaphors.

15fJohn Korner at Victoria Miro with falling apples, copious honey and vivid skies as motifs.

15gJohn Latham Spray Paintings at Lisson Gallery.

15hGabriel de la Mora at Timothy Taylor using materials that have a past life in a grid format. The CMYK ink is still visible on these metal printing plate fragments.

15iR. Crumb at David Zwirner with more heroic figures.

Gallery Run 5th February

71Claire Hooper at Hollybush Gardens has made a watercolour, life-sized, copy of frescoes from a temple briefly unearthed in the 1800’s and which date back to BC 2094.

72Came across some stacked up ducting in Bell Street.

73Ceal Floyer at Lisson Gallery taking a line for a walk up the gallery staircase.

74Jorinde Voigt at Lisson Gallery in a group show about drawing. Her trademark parallel lines have been rendered in a new material.

75A R Penck at Michael Werner Gallery.

76A R Penck at Michael Werener Gallery did some great early works.