Viewing articles tagged with 'Solo'

Maureen Paley, 60 Three Colts Ln, London E2 6GQ

Lawrence Abu Hamdan: Once Removed

Abu Hamdan’s film ‘Once Removed’ (2019) suggests the experience of transgenerational memory might be employed as a method of re-processing history and gathering together fragments of the obscured past through a more empathetic lens. Presented as a split screen video where the artist and his interviewee converse as silhouettes in front of two large projections, this work exists on multiple levels. Review by Gabriella Sonabend

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Tate Britain, Millbank, Westminster, London SW1P 4RG

Chila Kumari Singh Burman: Tate Britain Winter Commission 2020

The statue of Britannia that sits atop Sidney Smith’s incomplete 1897 pediment of Tate Britain’s portico has been transformed by Chila Burman for the annual Winter Commission into an avatar of Kali, the voluptuous Indian god of death. Burman delivers some much needed jollity by converting the austere Imperial iconography of the Millbank frontage into a pantheon of her trademark warrior queens. Tate’s comparatively meagre sculptures of a lion and unicorn that flank Britannia are usurped by Burman’s neon figures of Lakshmi and Ganesh−the gods of plenitude and Diwali−who welcome us from the top of the stairs. Review by Piers Masterson

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NiCOLETTi Contemporary, 12A Vyner St, London E2 9DG

Tyler Eash: Loreum

NiCOLETTi re-opened its doors to the public in early December, continuing its programme with ‘Loreum’, an exhibition by American artist Tyler Eash. Having completed an MFA at Goldsmiths, University of London last year, Eash now lives and works in Mexico. His practice encompasses film, painting, sculpture, writing and sound art as a means to disclose thoughts on having, and holding onto, an identity. These works are unapologetically jumbled, or topsy-turvy, as if badly downloaded from the internet, becoming more encrypted as they travel through digital space and enter into the physical world. Perhaps more plausibly, these works in painting, sculpture, film and photography are a figuring of things that Eash has encountered on the internet, in his mind’s eye and in daily life. Review by Olivia Fletcher

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Korean Cultural Centre UK, Grand Buildings, 1-3 Strand, London WC2N 5BW

Jewyo Rhii: Love Your Depot_LDN

The fact that Jewyo Rhii’s exhibition has only been intermittently open to the public due to COVID restrictions seems appropriate for the Korean born artist whose show focuses on the moment of transition between the private and public spaces of the gallery. The conundrum of transposing the meaning or value of an artwork from the private spaces where it is produced to the public arena of the gallery is a main theme of Jewyo Rhii’s work. For ‘Love Your Depot_LDN’, the artist has converted the Korean Cultural Centre’s white-walled space into a functional art store, complete with modular storage racks and packing crates that mimic the interstitial space in which her work can spend so much of its time. Review by Piers Masterson

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PUBLIC Gallery, 91 Middlesex St, Spitalfields, London E1 7DA

Interview with Cathrin Hoffmann: IT STILL SMELLS OF NOTHING

German artist, Cathrin Hoffmann, makes paintings of the contemporary individual; alienated, caught up in the temporary pleasures and quick fixes of our techno-capitalist reality. The paintings in her recent exhibition 'IT STILL SMELLS OF NOTHING' at Public Gallery in London are filled with such lonesome individuals, twisting and folding into themselves. Their exposed, blemished flesh is compartmentalised into exaggerated body parts, organised into various suggestive poses. Interview by Sonja Teszler

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David Kordansky Gallery, 5130 W Edgewood Pl, Los Angeles, CA 90019, United States

Adam Pendleton: Begin Again

Adam Pendleton is a New York-based artist whose current exhibition, ‘Begin Again’, is showing at David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles, California. Pendleton’s work is significant because it highlights the politics surrounding race and identity, but also demonstrates the chaotic nature of the artistic mediums he uses. Pendleton works with a thick application of paint on canvas, a polyester film called ‘mylar’, and video. His various methods of representing words through mediums allow viewers to separate themselves from any preconceived meanings of language. Pendleton’s work is a representation of the intersections that connect art to the political and social interpretations that text can present. Review by Sheena Carrington

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Primary, 33 Seely Road, Nottingham, NG7 1NU, United Kingdom

Rebecca Lennon: LIQUID i

Installed in the generous space of the assembly hall of a former school building, the six-channel sound and three-channel video work lures the viewer into a cacophonic whirl of multiple layers and intertwining currents. The artwork induces a vertiginous split-attention effect—a poetic response to the present condition, which is often characterised by contemporary philosophers as liquid, ever changing and precarious in its instability. Review by Jaroslava Tomanova

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Chisenhale Gallery, 64 Chisenhale Rd, Bow, London E3 5QZ

Thao Nguyen Phan: Becoming Alluvium

Thao Nguyen Phan’s film ‘Becoming Alluvium’ (2019) is caught in the crosscurrents of serenity and ferocity, beauty and harsh reality. In this video work, Phan’s ongoing research surrounding the Mekong River is experienced through fictional narratives, woven together with themes of local folklore, ecological concern, South East Asian industrialisation and the fanning Mekong River itself. Alive and lively, this mineral-stained river is shot from the shoreline, from above and from the water, creating a poetic language that envelopes the audience, sweeping us away for the sixteen minutes of the film’s duration. Review by Nina Hanz

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Parafin, 18 Woodstock St, Mayfair, London W1C 2AL

Nancy Holt: Points of View

‘Points of View’ brings together rarely seen photographs, sculpture, installation and works on paper from the late 1960s and early 1970s by pioneering Land and Conceptual artist Nancy Holt, which show the formation of her visual lexicon. This compact exhibition, Holt’s second at Parafin, explores her interest in language, perception and our relationship to the environment. It signals a renewed interest in the artist’s work, ahead of two forthcoming large-scale European shows, and asks questions which feel especially prescient over four decades later, at a moment in which we are acutely aware of our surrounding landscape. Review by Grace Storey

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BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, NE8 3BA

Huma Bhabha: Against Time

There is a distortion of time in BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead; a strange anomaly in the fabric of space. Curious works are in the gallery, they could be from a bygone age, a distant future or a parallel world. In a way, each is true; they are birthed from the mind of Pakistani-American artist Huma Bhabha, whose imagination traverses time, space and genre. Review by Christopher Little

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Collezione Maramotti, RVia Fratelli Cervi, 66, 42124 Reggio Emilia RE, Italy

Svenja Deininger: Two Thoughts

At risk of stating the obvious, Svenja Deininger’s work is really something to be seen up close. The pared back minimalism of the Austrian artist’s paintings mean that subtle textural shifts take on an important nuanced role in the articulation between tessellating panels of colour and abstract forms. Noticing the fine grain of a wood panel slotted into the canvas, or the highly buffed sheen of a protrusion like nubuck leather, is one of the small rewards that come by spending more than a fleeting glance on each work. Review by Jessica Saxby

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Forma Arts and Media, Peveril House, London, SE1 4TD

Interview with Alberta Whittle: ‘RESET’

Alberta Whittle’s new moving image work ‘RESET’ (2020) was awarded the 2020 Frieze Artist Award. Filmed across the artist’s native Barbados, as well as South Africa and the United Kingdom, it charts a polyphonic journey, woven together through contributions by writers, performers, and musicians, who Whittle refers to as her accomplices. ‘RESET’ is steeped in postcolonial and queer theory, informing Whittle’s process, which is also a form of protest: the work addresses contagion, xenophobia and their colonial entanglements, while exploring healing and meditation as forms of resistance. To reset, by Whittle’s terms, is not only to wipe the slate clean, but also to create a new de-colonial language: aural and written, embodied and spiritual, made up of multiple diasporic alliances. Interview by Inês Geraldes Cardoso

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Prototype Publishing

Helen Marten: The Boiled in Between

Helen Marten was awarded the Turner Prize in 2016 for her enigmatic work in sculpture. Two years later, the artist noted a disconcerting lack in critical dialogue surrounding her work. Marten usually works across sculpture, painting, print-making, film and writing, but decided to temporarily vacate her studio for a year to solely focus on writing her first novel, ‘The Boiled in Between’, published by Prototype in 2020. Article by Olivia Fletcher

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Gagosian, 22 Anapiron Polemou Street, Athina 115 21, Greece

Brice Marden: Marbles and Drawings

Gagosian’s new space in Athens opens with work by American artist Brice Marden. The show is focused primarily on paintings made since the 1980s on pieces of salvaged marble, found on the idyllic island of Hydra, where the artist has lived and worked since the 1970s. Review by William Summerfield

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