Gallery run 10th July

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Angela De La Cruz of Lisson Gallery with paintings and metal shutters pulled off their frames.

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Christopher Le Brun at Lisson Gallery with abstract paintings. Some have the paint applied straight from the tube which leaves pleading scratch marks from the nozzles.

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Edward Keinholz at Blain Southern with sculptures from found objects.

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Alex Hartley of Victoria Miro with two-layer paintings combining foliage and architecture.

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Pipilotti Rist at Hauser and Wirth. Trust me!

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Fischli and Weiss at Hauser Wirth with a giant vase.

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Alexander Calder at Ordovas with a black flower mobile.

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Cindy Sherman of Sprueth Magers with film star style self portraits. A hint of cleverly contrived faded glamour too.

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Lydia Okumura at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac with a retrospective. Made with painted wire mesh.

Gallery run 16th March

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 28th September

Having been invited to the lunchtime press opening at Ordovas gallery, the first stop today is at a sports shop for new trainers. A couple of invites came through in the last week and it would be nice to look smart. At the gallery an installation of cacti by luxury Italian furniture company Gufram has been set up. Around the walls is situated pop art and an Andy Warhol piece seems to fit very well into the cartoon-like space created by the cacti.

Across the street, which is Savile Row, stands the two Hauser and Wirth galleries. To the left is an installation by Marcel Broodthaers. Palms, a luxury product back in the 70’s, stand alongside some intentionally tired-looking museum display cases. This creates a pastiche of the traditional museum.

In the right hand gallery are paintings by Jack Whitten who has applied a variety of meshes and raking tools to create highly complex and varied painted surfaces. Then it is south to White Cube where America’s pop art tradition has been brought into a critical discourse by the varied artworks on display. Christoher Wool’s Riot slogan and David Hammon’s fly zippers trapped in two jars have a delightful lightness of touch. Meanwhile in this show Bruce Nauman has a neon piece depicting two people poking the other in the eye.

Further down Duke Street St. James’, Thomas Dane Gallery is playing host to Kelley Walker. This influential artist has taken branded objects, such as those by Calvin Klein, and turned them into exotic artworks. This is the first day of the show and a small group including possibly the owner are discussing the works in the gallery.

Then it is time to head south and the arrival in Kennington at Greengrassi and Corvi Mora allows me to visit the two artists being shown by these twinned galleries. The assistants at the front desk greet me and check the gallery lights are on. Juha Pekka Matias Laakkonen has developed interesting narratives from seemingly mundane objects. A tree stump has had a set of processes applied to it as though the artist were following an algorithm, but the effect is beautifully poetic and though his objects on display are small, they seem to fill the gallery with their presence. Upstairs it is the turn of Greengrassi to exhibit in the smaller space. Stefano Arienti appears to be motivated by the giants of art history spawning a set of drawings and photocopies that reference the works of Bosch and El Greco.

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Andy Warhol presented in an imaginative installation, using fabricated cacti designed in the early 70’s by Gufram. On display at Ordovas.

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Marcel Broodthaers at Hauser and Wirth with an installation based deliberately on an old-fashioned museum style.

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Jack Whitten at Hauser and Wirth with abstract paintings.

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Christopher Wool at White Cube.

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David Hammons of White Cube in a witty piece with fly zippers trapped in jars.

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Bruce Nauman at White Cube.

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Kelley Walker of Thomas Dane Gallery has turned advertising images into artworks.

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Juha Pekka Matias Laakkonen of Corvi Mora with processed objects. This tree stump was left after the tree collapsed. Then it was dug up, the roots burned and finally the stump was filled in with the resulting ashes.

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Stefano Arienti of Greengrassi with delicate drawings and a few photocopies.