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!

Mandy Ure at Matt’s Gallery with small abstracts.

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

Michael Dean of Herald Street.

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

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.

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

Leon Kossoff at Ordovas.

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

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