Grayson Perry

THE BRITISH MUSEUM
Great Russell Street
October 6–February 26

Grayson Perry, Pilgrimage to the British Museum, 2011, ink and graphite, 23 5/8 x 23 5/8".

Priceless artifacts from the British Museum’s vast collection come into dialogue with Grayson Perry’s sardonic wit in “The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman.” Perry explores his lineage as a textile artist and ceramicist, and places himself in a long line of international craftsmen. He has spent the past two years carefully selecting his favorite pieces by unknown artisans from the British Museum, and then creating his own works in response to them. By locating parallels and discordance alike between his own ideas and those of his artistic predecessors, he is able to address contemporary culture in a manner that is by turns humbling and amusingly poignant. By pairing a gold hoop earring, attached to a shriveled human earlobe, with his Coffin Containing Artist’s Ponytail, 1985, for instance, he venerates these anonymous artists of the past while simultaneously satirizing the contemporary art industry.

The show explores in depth several motifs, including shrines, flags, and sexual imagery; yet a main focus of the show is undoubtedly, in Perry’s own words, “the god of [his] imaginary world”: his fifty-year-old teddy bear, Alan Measles. If much of the show is a documentation of Perry’s pilgrimage into the past as explored through his interaction with pieces from the museum, a large part of the preparation for this artistic journey was an actual trip that Perry and Alan Measles took to Germany, during which Perry also sought to come to terms with the anti-German war games played during the artist’s childhood. Photographs and memorabilia from this trip are displayed at the entrance to the show, as is the bubblegum-pink motorcycle that Perry had built especially for the journey, now converted into a shrine to Alan Measles—who is nonetheless absent; a stunt-double teddy is there in his place. For Perry, Alan Measles is too precious for the British Museum.

— Ashitha Nagesh

“Surface to Surface”

JONATHAN VINER
17A Adam's Row
March 14–April 14

View of “Surface to Surface,” 2012.

A fixation with processes, clearly indebted to post-Minimalism, links the paintings and sculptures in this group show. The connection is most explicit in Oscar Tuazon’s large-scale welded steel and glass frame Cloud, 2012, and Eddie Peake’s The Bass Resonating in My Body Makes Me Feel Female, 2012, a plasterboard wall punched with holes, presumably from a sledgehammer. Here, Tuazon and Peake perform the phases of a structure’s reduction and demonstrate the somatic interaction of materials that takes place across the show.

Nearby, Dan Rees, having applied acrylic to a canvas sheet and then pressed the still-wet sheet to a wall, has hung the sheet alongside the print it made, thus exposing the print’s own production. In a similar vein, Josh Smith has positioned one 2009 painting, with familiar inscription of his name, on a wall in the lower level of the gallery and has situated another (a painting of a leaf) on one flight up. The pair operates along a vertical, if staggered, plumb line.

Generating a three-way dialogue back on the ground floor, an untitled 2011 painting by Joe Bradley is positioned directly across from Smith, and the bright compositions of these works interact with Rees’s vibrant piece on the adjoining wall. Indeed throughout the show, conversations between works are at times so congruent they begin to fuse. As a result, these discursive pairs serve to undermine any stable recognition of their individual gestures, which are otherwise distinctive.

— Mary Rinebold

Karin Ruggaber

GREENGRASSI
1a Kempsford Road
March 2–April 21

Karin Ruggaber, Relief #106, 2012, concrete, pigments, 34 x 51 1/2 x 1 1/8".

Given the jigsawlike components of Karin Ruggaber’s wall reliefs, it would be easy to describe her merely as a bricoleur of the fragment, but in actuality her work is far more enigmatic. In this exhibition, five groups of reliefs hang from the walls, while several flat sculptures occupy the floor. The wall works consist of interconnected biomorphic shapes that recall tiles or Jurassic fossils. With the darker, brown-gray fragments mostly on the bottom and the blue-white-gray elements nearer the top, the overall effect is pictorial. These pieces hint at landscapes while also suggesting geological strata.

Except for one floor piece, a handmade baglike object—a recurring form for Ruggaber—all the components of this show are created by casting concrete with pigments. Occasionally they include other detritus—leaves, in one case. In general her work prioritizes the experimental nature of the craft, allowing the medium itself to suggest its purpose. The casts exude an earthy quality and also bring to mind architectural surfaces.

The German sculptor has spoken about her interest in facades and, recently, of her travels around southern Turkey to observe traditional houses. While she has noted this specific source of inspiration, another tradition suggested by these very tactile objects is that of cave painting, but not necessarily the Paleolithic imagery per se; rather, the haptic nature of Ruggaber’s sculpture suggests a sense of touch and surface that brings to mind early man’s eerie hand. Despite their evocations of more modern dwellings, they seem to make manifest a memory of something long lost.

— Sherman Sam

Katie Paterson

HAUNCH OF VENISON
103 New Bond Street
March 9–April 28

Katie Paterson, 100 Billion Suns, 2011, confetti cannon, 3,261 pieces of paper, dimensions variable.

A small sound, almost a middle C, is emitted into Haunch of Venison’s new space in Fitzrovia via a sensor on the door and a speaker on the far wall. Brief and almost undetectable, it mimics the noise made by a dying star and is part of Katie Paterson’s latest show, which showcases a selection of her recent projects, all poetic meditations on mind-blowing cosmological happenings.

Consider 100 Billion Suns, 2011, which was originally developed for the 2011 Venice Biennale and gives this show its title. During the vernissage in Venice, tiny pieces of paper confetti color-matched to gamma ray bursts—the brightest explosions known to the universe, which burn one hundred billion times brighter than our sun—were fired into the air at regular intervals using handheld cannons. At Haunch of Venison, six digital photographic prints document the cannons’ detonations at various Venetian locations, capturing the paper pieces fluttering onto still waters and though quiet streets. Additionally, a confetti cannon is fired daily inside the gallery here, producing thousands of small representations of the celestial blasts to which the piece refers. The artist has also written a series of short formal letters, each regretfully informing the gallery of a different star’s death. Displayed in a long cabinet against the wall, the letters seem to still be arriving, with the first one dated December 16, 2011, and the most recent letters forming a pile at the end. Nearby, As the World Turns, 2010, features a record player adjusted to revolve once every twenty-four hours. Corresponding with earth’s rotation, it turns so slowly, playing Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, that the record appears motionless. What’s more, the music is virtually silent; nothing can be heard but a distant crackle—as if the sound were traveling from a far-off place. By applying inconceivable ideas to the familiar and everyday, Paterson’s work brings remote truths into our own reality.

— Grace Beaumont

“Casting Glances in All Directions”

SUPPLEMENT
31 Temple St
April 7–May 6

View of “Casting Glances in All Directions,” 2012.

The first work one encounters upon entering this group exhibition, by literally stepping on it just inside the door, is Philomene Pirecki’s Untitled (The belated fulfillment of a dream about which I should by then have ceased to care), 2011. Stenciled on the floor with transparent aerosol glue, the title quote from Proust’s Within a Budding Grove (1919) gradually becomes legible by the dirt tracked in by viewers. At once droll and elegiac, this piece introduces the oneiric and elliptical mood of this carefully curated show, which revolves around ideas of centerlessness, accumulation, and a countervailing fugacity.

There is something strangely liminal, for instance, to Gwenneth Boelens’s video Hand Wall, 2007. This simple piece depicts a looped close-up of the artist’s hand as it steadily passes along the windows and white walls of a room. Meanwhile, Rob Lye’s small sculpture Peter Madonie interview 12 minutes 45 seconds (Interview no. 1), 2010, consisting of a humble cinder block with a couple of cigarette butts stubbed out on it, assumes, thanks in part to its company, a no less evocative air. But it is Camilla Wills’s Dictated from the Bed, 2011, which most directly suggests the refreshing illogic of dreams. Skipping back and forth from images of the artist in bed to shots of two different buildings—one glassy and reflective, the other squat and opaque—the video outlines in a disjunctive voice-over the alleged difference between cats and pigs: The former, it seems, are bloodless, while the latter are fat and have “thick edges,” like the buildings. The cogency of this work is difficult to account for—perhaps it can be attributed to the conviction with which it is narrated—but, much like this exhibition as a whole, one walks away from it as if from a dream, feeling pleasantly oblique and convinced.

— Chris Sharp

Alice Channer

SOUTH LONDON GALLERY
65 - 67 Peckham Road
March 2–May 13

View of “Out of Body,” 2012.

For the duration of this exhibition, the interior of South London Gallery will perform as the sculptor’s body double: Along various walls in this graceful, thirty-foot-tall prism, Alice Channer has designated clusters of objects as her own disembodied Eyes, Lungs, and Thighs (all works cited, 2012). These groupings are noted on a small plan displayed under the glass hood of a vitrine in the foyer, which also contains a pair of plasticized snakeskin tights (one leg drifting out of the archive to softly skim the floor) and texts including Simone Weil’s “Metaxu”: “Every separation is a link.” The key to Channer’s spare solo presentation lies in the collection of not entirely random accessories: sketches of YSL’s Le Smoking, a lone Virginia Slim, Xeroxes of the Erechtheion caryatids, plaster-cast bottles of Pantene Pro-V. Her savoir faire is in line with classical sculpture’s conditioning: beauty, decoration, ideal form.

Channer’s keen understanding of shape and proportion implies a particular aesthetic sensibility. She’s described the process of installing as an act of “dressing the gallery,” though her sculptures embody a subdued (postindustrial) physicality beyond mere ornament. Suspended from the ceiling, Cold Metal Body, Large Metal Body, and Warm Metal Body are warped images of the stone-carved draping that defines the skirts of the Three Nereids of fourth century BC Xanthos, enlarged and digitally printed onto reams of crepe de chine weighted down by marble prosthetic limbs. The effect is disorientation in three dimensions; heavy drapery floats on faux silk and dissolves into pixels at eye level. Freestanding Reptiles and Amphibians, dramatically curved sections of mirror-polished stainless steel, expand along the floor––throwing convex reflections of the crown molding and creating their own sense of space via surface. Wide elastic bands in aquamarine and purple periodically embrace these arcs, which are reinforced by glittery aluminum casts of Topshop jersey separates. Channer’s work is structured and flexible, handmade and mass-produced, but always conceptually contiguous and purposely misleading.

— Kari Rittenbach

David Shrigley

HAYWARD GALLERY
Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road
February 1–May 13

View of “David Shrigley: Brain Activity,” 2012.

It is impossible to maintain airs when confronted with a work captioned MUSEUMS ARE FULL OF CRAP in one of the most prestigious museums in the UK––and that is the beauty of David Shrigley’s art. In his first major survey in his home country––comprising sculpture, illustration, and his renowned animations––Shrigley forces you to laugh alongside his work’s self-conscious irony. This particular piece is just one of a series of similar illustrations, collectively titled “Untitled (This Is Nothing),” 2011. Other drawings feature wry takes on British stereotypes, such as A CUP OF TEA WILL RESTORE YOUR MENTAL HEALTH, or on fashion culture coupled with audience suggestibility: I AM A CAT-WALK MODEL. I AM VERY UGLY BUT NO ONE SEEMS TO NOTICE.

Shrigley’s exploration of death and decay runs particularly strongly through his sculptural works. He often uses taxidermy in a way that is humorous in its self-consciousness: I’m Dead, 2010, for instance, is a puppy holding a picket sign that bears the titular declaration, and Nutless, 2002, is a decapitated squirrel holding its own head. There are also several works using the motif of tooth decay. What Decay Looks Like, 2001, is perhaps the most dark, showing a rotting tooth looking at itself in a full-length mirror that you, consequently, are forced to look into, so that you also consider your own decay. An oversize ceramic teacup, Very Large Cup of Tea, 2012, filled with actual tea and milk (but no sugar), festers and grays from mold, evoking an idea of comfortable domesticity that is, itself, in a constant state of decomposition. Throughout this show, Shrigley displays his particular talent of making you laugh while also making you acutely aware of your own mortality.

— Ashitha Nagesh

Martin Westwood

THE APPROACH
1st Floor, 47 Approach Road
March 22–May 13

Martin Westwood, Supermen Have Bound You but Only Superfluity Will Release You, 2012, polyester resin casts, 24 1/2 x 42 x 3".

Given the references to offices and office workers in his earlier kaleidoscopic output, it seems appropriate that a discourse of value and labor surrounds Martin Westwood’s latest work. His new, pared-down sculptures, however, utilize different points of reference to address human existence. What is particular about these works is that the objects he depicts––travel pillows, donation boxes––are things so deeply familiar to us that they appear inconspicuous. One relief sculpture, for example, consists of a cast of a hatchback cargo cover––how often does one even realize that thing has a real name?––hanging flat on a wall with a pastry twist dangling from it. Two versions are on display: One is entirely gray, while in the other the pastry twist is verisimilarly colored.

While artists like Haim Steinbach and Jeff Koons engage with the consumer object and, on occasion, elevate it, Westwood’s choices and sense of color create a feeling of estrangement. A gray vinyl floor has been added for the show, to enhance this affect, however subtly. Somewhat like the Minimalist object, these works create a sense of hollow presence that suggest man by metonymy; yet they are primary structures only in their reference to the basic transactions of human life. In its absurdity, this is Westwood’s wittiest work yet. It would be more apt to describe these sculptures as objects of thought, and in that spirit, he now seems closer to artists like Duchamp and Broodthaers.

— Sherman Sam

Eileen MacDonagh

VISUAL CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART
Old Dublin Road
February 5–May 7

View of "Lithosphere," 2012.

There is a paradoxically ethereal quality to Cathedral, 2011, the centerpiece of Eileen MacDonagh’s exhibition “Lithosphere”: paradoxical, because the installation consists of a forest of massive, twenty-six-foot-tall trees. These stylized silvery-gray trees are nevertheless constructed from lightweight materials: Styrofoam and papier-mâché. Their uppermost branches resemble arms, outstretched to meet the ceiling lights. According to the artist, the title refers specifically to the cathedral-like nature of forests; references to the sacred recur throughout the exhibition. Outside the gallery, Stone Circle, 2011, consists of six black granite slabs, forming a contemporary reworking of the prehistoric sites scattered across Europe.

The sacred geometry of From Another Constellation, 2005–11, is that of granite pieces carved into stellated dodecahedra, their twelve points symbolizing 2012. In the two pieces titled Ogham Sculpture, both 2011, two large granite shards are punctuated with parallel lines. The title of these refers to a secret Druidic language from pre-Christian Ireland. Never spoken aloud, the language consisted of letters that were named for Irish trees and written using a system of dashes. The letters can still be found inscribed on stones around Ireland.

The exhibition’s title refers to the geologic term for the Earth’s crust, which is itself a paradox in that it appears solid in the here and now, but is elastic over thousands of years. The artist plays with this and other apparent contradictions in the upper galleries, with the series “Truss,” 1992, which consists of pieces of rock poised on light wooden poles in different configurations, demonstrating the balance of forces that hold our planet together. MacDonagh’s sensitivity to material, and skill in working with it, make this a visually stunning and highly memorable exhibition.

— Gemma Tipton

Josef Albers

LEWIS GLUCKSMAN GALLERY
University College Cork
April 5–July 8

Josef Albers, Homage to the Square, 1967, oil on Masonite, 28 x 28".

The simplicity of the one thousand–plus works in Josef Albers’s “Homage to the Square” series, 1949–76, is utterly deceptive. Layering colored square upon colored square, though never mixing the colors themselves, Albers proved that color is relative, that it plays on the optic nerve, and that proximity alters perception. These spare, subtly sophisticated works are so incorporated into the visual language of abstraction that it is a wrench to realize how influential and groundbreaking they originally were.

“The Sacred Modernist” gives a rare opportunity for Irish audiences to see a selection of Albers’s best work, drawn primarily from the collection of the Albers Foundation. The exhibition also goes further back, to show some of his first works, including the earliest known: an ink drawing of a church, Stadtlohn, 1911. Drawings of churches, cathedrals, and cruciform shapes recur, leading to the conclusion posited in the exhibition title—that Albers was not only an artist who happened to be Catholic, but also a Catholic artist. A reconstruction of his stained glass window Rosa Mystica Ora Pr[o] Nobis, 1918–2011, made for the Church of St. Michael in Bottrop, Germany, and destroyed in the Second World War, has been re-created here, and it appears to present a central clinching argument to this exhibition’s thesis that Albers’s work was not only informed by, but evangelized by, his Catholic faith. That said, sketches including the undated Strasborg Münster show a concern with sacred geometries as much as ecclesiastical architecture itself. And the “Homage to the Square” paintings; “Structural Constellation” series, 1948–54; and paintings like Related 1 (red), 1938, and Tautonym (B), 1944, reveal Albers to have been concerned more with the transcendent and spiritual than with a specific religious ethos. So ignore the title, and instead revel in this wonderful work.

— Gemma Tipton

Margaret Corcoran

KEVIN KAVANAGH GALLERY
Chancery Lane
February 16–March 17

Margaret Corcoran, Burst of the Waterfall, 2002, charcoal on paper, 31 1/2 x 39 3/8".

Revising our perspective on images of art history that have participated in shaping received cultural iconographies, this exhibition presents something of a miniretrospective, featuring Margaret Corcoran’s concerns as a painter over the past three decades, as she dips in and out of mythologies, religious belief, and the changing representations of women in art. Corcoran came to prominence with “An Enquiry,” 2002, a series depicting a young girl progressing through the National Gallery of Ireland’s collection of romantic and sublime paintings. The sublime in this exhibition is addressed in the charcoal on paper drawings Barret’s Crossing and Burst of the Waterfall (both 2002), as the monumental nature of the genre is undercut by the ephemerality of her materials.

Interesting confluences emerge. For example, the hardness of diamonds is set against the soft yet inexorably persistent nature of water in Diamond Pair I and Diamond Pair II, both 2012. The juxtaposition of the deceptively insubstantial (water) with the durable (diamond) is adumbrated in Tortoise Shell I and II, both 1997, which focus on the translucent delicacy of these tough carapaces. Everything in Corcoran’s world either communicates a sense of revisionism or expresses some sort of duality. Even the exhibition’s title—“How to Spend It—Love, Time, and the Universe”—refers both to the glossy lifestyle supplement that appears with the weekend edition of the Financial Times, and to a more philosophical question about how to live.

The show’s triumphant centerpiece is Persian Adam and Eve, 2012, a bright oil painting depicting a prelapsarian Eden. In the Islamic thought alluded to in the work’s title, blame for the Fall was attributed equally to Adam and Eve. The painting’s foreground is washed in ominous red, perhaps standing for the bloodshed that has ensued in the clash between said religion’s beliefs and their counterparts in Christianity.

— Gemma Tipton

“The Indiscipline of Painting”

MEAD GALLERY AT WARWICK ARTS CENTRE
The University of Warwick, Coventry
January 14–March 10

View of “The Indiscipline of Painting,” 2012.

This ambitious group show, a collaboration between the Mead Gallery and the Tate St Ives, proposes an alternative vision to our most commonly held ideas about abstract painting from the past fifty years. In doing so, it posits abstraction as a method of continuous critical reflection. By juxtaposing the diverse ideological and conceptual viewpoints of forty-nine international artists––from Myron Stout to Katharina Grosse––curator Daniel Sturgis opens our eyes to the key role of abstraction in contemporary artistic practice.

Sturgis states in the catalogue that his perspective as a curator and as a painter is both “partial and partisan.” This is evident in that the show is neither a historical survey nor an attempt to examine all of the strands of abstraction since 1950. Indeed, its layout is simply based on connections and questions, some explicit but many not. If several artists use the history of painting as a resource to imagine how to locate themselves within the field of abstraction, others think about how to deconstruct this narrative. Sherrie Levine, for example, uses the monochrome to critique the apex of modernism. For Melt Down (After Yves Klein), 1991, she analyses Yves Klein’s patented shade of blue in a series of monochrome canvases that break down the color into its various constituent hues.

Keith Coventry’s England 1938, 1994–2011, made specifically for this occasion, brings together an evocation of modernist color studies with a critique of history and architecture. Here, a gridlike scheme conveys a color chart representing the British Standard lead paints that were used to decorate homes in the mid-1930s. Coventry’s response to the legacy of abstraction is to transform color from intangible scientific entity through the lens of historic housing in the UK into a conceptual project and back into an abstraction once again.

— Filipa Oliveria

Richard Simpkin and Simone Lueck

OPEN EYE GALLERY
19 Mann Island, Liverpool Waterfront
January 13–March 18

View of “Richard Simpkin and Simone Lueck: Richard & Famous,” 2012.

Given photographer Martin Parr’s penchant for brashness and kitsch, his current curatorial project––a two-person show of work by Richard Simpkin and Simone Lueck––may at first seem lighthearted, but it actually peers into the human condition. At age fifteen, Simpkin began to collect pictures of himself with celebrities, a hobby that has become his artistic endeavor. Some thousand snaps later, individuals as varied as Nelson Mandela, Gilbert & George, and Mr. T have all participated. The Australian photographer is now, of course, no longer the jolly teen first pictured but a middle-aged paparazzo. Unlike those celebrity-chasing pariahs, however, Simpkin feels driven to appear next to his subjects, and this human desire is at the heart of his work, consciously or not. Hung in a grid and arranged chronologically, the images recall aspects of Minimalist repetition and the documentary nature of much early Conceptual art. Yet these small snapshots are not just a record of an action but also self-portraiture.

In the adjoining space, the Los Angeles–based photographer Simone Lueck offers the opposite approach in her series “The Once and Future Queens,” 2009–10. Lueck found her models through an ad on Craigslist, which read: “Seeking fabulous, striking, interesting older woman to pose as a glamorous movie star for photo series.” The resulting eleven large-scale images on view here, culled from photo shoots with twenty-five women, are ultimately a collaborative effort. Unlike the subjects of Simpkin’s pictures, these swanky ladies exude a missed splendor in Hollywood’s shadow. There is a hint of Cindy Sherman’s 2008 images depicting bored well-to-do women, and, as with some of Sherman’s characters and Simpkin’s celebs, there is also a sense of sadness and ennui. Yet each of Lueck’s models also radiates a cheeky defiance, one akin to the spirit of Parr’s subjects.

— Sherman Sam

“Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art”

GLASGOW INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL OF VISUAL ART
20 Trongate Glasgow
April 20–May 7

View of “Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art,” 2012. From top: Karla Black, Will Attach, 2012; Karla Black, Empty Now, 2012.

Glasgow’s art scene has evolved on its own terms—always mingling the gutsy and the experimental. Showcasing work by over 130 artists in diverse sites across of the city, this year’s festival encapsulates the city’s energy with a thoughtful range of new installations. Take, for instance, Karla Black’s Empty Now (all works 2012), which is made of seventeen tons of meticulously layered sawdust. Periodically, the Glaswegian artist alters this delicate work with tiny beads of color from cosmetic products. Hanging clouds above, Will Attach spans the Gallery of Modern Art’s neoclassical ceiling with a network of golden cellophane garlands. Within this grandiose setting, the two installations appear visceral and defiant.

Another standout work is by Mexican artist Teresa Margolles. For Diamond, she gathered refuse from the violent 2011 riots in South London and sent it to a company that creates diamonds from the remains of human cremation ashes. Exhibited at Glasgow Sculpture Studios in the Whiskey Bond, the manufactured jewel is mounted in a simple vitrine. Across the cavernous space, the phrase A DIAMOND FOR THE CROWN is carved into the wall—an astute comment on the imminent Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II. Margolles has also mounted a slide presentation of Luis Alvarado’s photographs from the 1970s through ’80s of daily life in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.

Folkert de Jong has installed life-size Styrofoam and plywood figures in the Mackintosh Museum at Glasgow School of Art. These portray artists Charles Rennie Mackintosh (designer of the school) and his wife, Margaret. Titled The Immortals, after Mackintosh’s circle of friends, de Jong’s installation is theatrical and witty. The Mackintoshs sit atop makeshift scaffolding, their faces streaked with bright paints. Originally a drawing studio, the gallery is transformed back into an artist haunt.

— Lauren Dyer Amazeen