Adam Dix / Tim Phillips: Programming Myth, Sumarria Lunn

until 30 Jun 12



In all the houses we knew when I was growing up a piece of furniture would always be present that nowadays would look peculiar. Like the one below.




Most would have this characteristic cushion and would be made out of wood. I hated the telephone tables. They always meant no privacy. They would be mathematically placed in the most accessible and open space in each house. Sometimes whole romances, secret calls in the middle of the night, whole dramas would be played out around them. The constant fear of being caught, the constant fear of a ring in public from a stalker or the torturing silence of a lover. Over time, my hatred for this wooden furniture turns into nostalgia.

Then there was the dentist’s. A waiting room wall covered top to bottom in an autumnal forest scene. Oppressive. Or there would be pictures of mountains. Closing down on you. Why were there always mountains?

And then, there were the visits to relatives or vague family acquaintances, formal, always on cold nights, dressed in Sunday best for people we couldn’t care less for. They would always have plastic flowers or foliage, inside crystal, next to the chocolates.

When I started descending into Sumarria Lunn, the long stairway, confined, with some extra steps, made me excitingly nervous. I would soon realise what a perfect intro the gallery stairway itself was for what I found inside. There they were, all of them: the telephone tables, the Alps, the plastic foliage. Interlocked into sectarian and alien funereal constructs with my childhood fears, TV sci-fi programmes, folkloric masks and rituals. As if suddenly stumbling into a Cult, or a forgotten civilisation, I realised these paintings and sculptures were so authentic that were it not for being in a gallery, I would, yes, be scared.

Ethno-rituals, Rudolf Steiner, Lost, The Freemasons, Quatermass, The Midwich Cuckoos, Maydays, Carnivals, childhood memories and childhood furniture, all sculpted into one document of an otherworldly time.

A compulsory visit for any sci-fi sensibility. Bizarre love triangles.


more info:
http://www.sumarrialunn.com/ http://www.ameliasmagazine.com/listings/e705/programming-myth-with-adam-dix-and-tim-phillips-at-sumarria-lunn-gallery#.T-h-YpH4LIg http://www.ameliasmagazine.com/listings/e705/programming-myth-with-adam-dix-and-tim-phillips-at-sumarria-lunn-gallery#.T-h-YpH4LIg

Gao Brothers, Nick Knight, Claire Morgan: Death, Show Studio Shop

until 31 Aug 2012



In Dublin once, there was an exhibition of three, only three, paintings by Dutch masters. I had thought, how bizarre, yet afterwards I realised that three is the exact perfect number of exhibits.

So, I was extremely pleased when now, years after, I entered the ShowStudio. Tucked away in a quiet laneway, hidden from the loud kitsch of Mayfair, a dead angel, a symmetrical cube and a firing squad are waiting in triptych.

Kate 2011, by Nick Knight, engulfed my heart immediately. I have always had a primeval fixation with wax statuettes. At 16, my friend had travelled with her parents to Bulgaria, she came back with the most beautiful gift, three vampyrettes, standing back to back in a column, dark, grey, waxy, I thought they'd be eternal. They melt ungracefully for 15 years.

Kate 2011 is their sister, an angel, woman, naked but not sexualised, dead. Her white waxy colour the most beautiful of whites. She is a Crucifix and she is hovering in a tiny tilt. How magnificent a little detail, I smiled.

Next to her, a perfect geometry of concentric cubes expands from a singularity. The imaginary lines of The Heart of Darkness, by Claire Morgan, are defined by spots, and those spots are dead flies. I would naturally tut at similar endeavours, but these flies are not just smirky material but they are a deadly, intelligent, exquisite and scary swarm.

The next room is occupied by a life-sized death squad and their prey: an almost stereotypical Jesus, dignified, inviting and wondering. You are welcomed to walk around them, and each angle makes this a different sculpture, making you observer from the sides or above, or both the victim and the executioner. The squad are all replicas of Mao. They are fat, overdressed, rigid and passé. They are old. They are the killers but they are the ones that are dead. Their Jesus is not the religious one. He is young, thin, and with a stature that is timeless and also contemporary, his hair is thick and untreated, not of an icon but of an eco warrior, a dissident, the one we will, probably, never dare be. They are all bronze, like all the statues of conquerors and butchers on horses. The squad are all alike. Bar one. One hesitates. Will we at least be him?
(Gao Brothers, The Execution of Christ)


more info:
http://showstudio.com/shop/exhibition/death
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gao_Brothers
http://nickknight.com/main.html
http://www.claire-morgan.co.uk/

Portal Painters: Heather Nevay, Whyn Lewis, Peter Thomson et al., Coningsby Gallery

until 23 Jun 12



Heather Nevay’s grotesque, ageless children, in boxes or with boxes stand still in transparent clothes on mythical landscapes. They also stand facing the exquisite elegance of Whyn Lewis’s harts and hounds that hover timelessly on monochromes. While Peter Thomson’s families - as nightmares - are forever self-absorbed, and noisy, in the next room.

This refreshing collection of new-surreal high-finish paintings has temporarily cast its net on a side street off Tottenham Court Road. Most of the busy lunchtime queuing and stressed of life passers by will continue their daily cycle undisturbed. The lucky few will fall gladly into this Venus Flytrap; this magical place that puts all work troubles into perspective, as these birds of paradise, though trapped, like us, stare back, for once, acknowledging us.

more info: http://www.portalpainters.co.uk/artists.aspx
http://www.coningsbygallery.com/
http://www.nevayburke.freeserve.co.uk/hnevay142.htm
http://whynlewis.com/whynlewis.com/Whyn_Lewis.html
http://www.peterthomsonart.com/

Bauhaus: Art as Life, Barbican

£10-£12
until 12 Aug 12



This is one of my very few negative posts, for which I apologise in advance. Since the exhibition though is a paid one, I thought that a balancing view might be of benefit to some.

So there it is..I was utterly dissapointed by the lack of narrative. The curation was tiringly safe and unchallenging, consciously avoiding the political and design context the Bauhaus challenged and the implications that this challenge caused. For a movement/school that had to close down and migrate by the then authorities, this exhibition seems like a desperate effort to institutionalise a thoroughly lowbreaking past.

more info: http://www.barbican.org.uk/artgallery/event-detail.asp?ID=12409
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2012/may/02/bauhaus-art-as-life-review

Laura Kuch, The Doppelgangers, Vincula, UCL Art Museum

until 08 Jun 12

The UCL Art Museum opens its doors patiently and punctually every weekday at 1pm. Like a curiosity shop, it doesn’t shout about its treasures to the passing trade but waits, quietly, occupying another unappreciated world.

Their recent collaboration with the Slade ends today. Most of Vincula’s pieces are uneventful but still, beautifully serene. Apart from two: the Doppelgangers by Laura Kuch look so natural in the room that, at first, I thought they were part of it. And they might as well be. They are two oil paintings from 1913 by two female Slade students, sitting next to each other while working on a life drawing of a female nude. Insignificant on their own, though not without talent, the paintings now also stand, next to each other, in stereoscopic devotion. The one is framed, the other is bare (it won 2nd prize after all). The model has her head and body turned away from us, she is as obscure and lost in 1913 as Dora Karrington and Fanny Fletcher, who painted her, are. The Doppelgangers stand a breath away from each other, quietly producing this ectoplasm of a 1913 Slade Studio Classroom: the subject, the students, the easels, the brushes, the slow wind from Gower St, all materialise in the small space between them. I was drunk with the view. Then, I played ‘spot the difference’ as the Doppelgangers look identical, but not quite so. And then a bundle of words and analyses started flooding my head, of art theories and gender theories and la la la which I silenced and expelled as they were doing the Doppelgangers no justice. For this is art in its purest form: an over-conscious eye, an opportunity, a simple idea, and one of the most complete, clever and honest pieces of found object art, that I have seen, was born. All out of a simple, single act: moving one object gently next to another.

After that, 1+1 can equal almost anything.

more info:
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/museums/uclart