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David's review blog

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Borondo ‘Animal’ at Londonnewcastle Project Space presented by Rexromae Gallery

05-26 Feb 2015

I love everything about Shoreditch. Not only is it filled with awesome pubs and bars and pop-up food spots and being right next to Brick Lane, it’s also packed with hipster shops that sells trendy things, little trendy bookshops, graffiti wall art at every corner and there's a Damien Hirst formaldehyde cow in a restaurant.

I discovered a massive gallery space with an incredible pop-up exhibition. ‘Animal’ is a solo show of Spanish street artist Borondo in collaboration with Carmen Maín (Spain), Edoardo Tresoldi (Italy) and Despina Charitonidi (Greece). I loved how he curated a storyline for the space like a Tate retrospective show:

Prologos

The Passage

Entrañas

The Order (Fear, Control, Captivity)

La Carne

Eternal

Albeare

Epilogos

'Animal' is a journey that explores our relationship with nature and the attempts to control it. It’s dark; gruesome at parts like the piece ‘Fear’- an image of a mother protecting her children is sprayed onto hay bales, it’s about how she projects her own fear onto her children- it’s interesting how unpretentious the press release is, it’s not like the well-worded major gallery writings. Borondo is an artist curating for the everyday people. In La Carne (Spanish for Meat), a naked girl is painted crawling around an illusionary box that reminded of Francis Bacon paintings (See also his depictions of meat). It’s about a struggle with the mundane and routine that she became domesticated like an animal. You also get to sit on hay bales like a farm animal.

The last space is a great show of Borondo’s paintings. I was surprised because they are very good paintings for someone they described as a street artist. I’m no painting historian but there’s a gestural similarity to superstar painter Jenny Saville that is not easy to achieve. I can see these paintings in any major gallery. Hard to believe the man is 25. Big things coming from Borondo, watch out for him.

Photos © My Iphone

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Tony Oursler, Haroon Mirza and more at the Lisson Gallery

30 Jan - 7 March

I was trying to find a gallery that opens on a Monday and there were only a select few. It’s a thing; Monday is like a sleeping day for most galleries. If you want a day job where you don’t work Mondays, work in a gallery.

Lisson Gallery is very established and has long been representatives of famous artists such as Anish Kapoor, Tony Cragg and Richard Long. Like the show at Hauser&Wirth I did earlier, Lisson also have two shows simultaneously going on in the two spaces they have occupying the inconspicuous Bell Street near Edgware Road station. There is a primary school opposite one of the galleries and it’s a quiet neighborhood, unlike the central London vibes with most galleries of this reputation.

New York artist Tony Oursler has a solo show at 27 Bell Street. ‘template/vibrant/friend/stranger’ is a conveniently but well selected show of Oursler’s work, there’s the impressive huge installation at the main room, a video projection piece, a room of his drawings and the rest of the show are aluminium wall pieces the size of a painting. These are probably the ones they aim to sell.

The giant faces in the main room are odd, but amazing. Human eyes blink and lips move on these colorful two-dimensional giant face that seemed like a higher intelligence species is communicating with each other through facial telepathy and mumbling. Communication and identity is the core of Oursler’s exploration, and the eyes and lips are perhaps the parts of our body closest to our identity. The heads also bear a network of marks or nodes that are associated with facial recognition systems, a subject Oursler himself has studied and written on. The show is a comment on the potential dangers of technology and surveillance.

In the other gallery a group show is happening. ‘Cross Section of a Revolution’ is the name of Haroon Mirza’s installation piece but is used for the whole show, and it’s very aptly curated. All the pieces in the show made either a prevalent or underlying statement about the struggles of humanity, trauma and religious systems.

Haroon Mirza’s piece is given its own room upstairs. On the tinted windows, three projections of men drumming at a Muslim wedding on the East Coast of Africa created a strange ritualistic percussion rhythm that served as an interesting backdrop to the footage of a student competing in a speech competition in Lahore, Pakistan, who actually sounded more like a working politician. It’s a remix of cultures, the juxtaposition of mentalities and a very successful piece visually.

There’s also a film piece downstairs by Allora & Calzadilla called ‘The Bell, the Digger, and the Tropical Pharmacy’ and it’s hilarious in the least hilarious way possible. Basically they tried to demolish a Puerto Rican drug plant but instead of using a wrecking ball they used a cast iron church bell. So you get to hear the church bell ring as it violently destroyed everything for 20 minutes. It’s kind of awesome.

Photos © My Iphone

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Rebecca Birch at the Institute of Contemporary Arts for curating project Fig-2

2-8 Feb 2015

I walked out my front door today and was greeted by two holy missionaries. And even though I told them I was an atheist they were still trying to introduce me to God and gave me a ‘Is there a God?’ leaflet. Which was not unusual, as I’ve seen them multiple times here around new cross from my time at Goldsmiths. It reminded me of the saying that art is an alternative religion as I headed down to the ICA.

There were multiple shows happening simultaneously at the ICA galleries. Photographs by Viviane Sassen, which were slick photography work that tricked me into thinking they were paintings; Dor Guez’s archival project about the Middle East and a painting show of artist and musician Paul Simonon. I was figuring out which one I could write about as I walked up the oddly unfurnished stairs to the ICA project space for Fig-2.

A woman and a man sat on the floor; she was talking and going on about something and kept drawing on a piece of paper which was projected on the walls around. I thought I was interrupting something but she invited me to sit down and I realised it’s a performance.

‘Lichen Hunting on the West Coast’ is the piece and it involves Rebecca, her drawing skills, standing plaster pieces, projectors and the occasional playing of Feist’s 1234. It made me smile when she turned on the music player and created, by hand the memory of a lichen-covered stick casting a shadow on her car’s dashboard on her artist-collaboration trip to Scotland, which was visually a moving shadow on a drawing. I’m from Goldsmiths (So is Birch). I get this kind of stuff.

The piece seemingly erases the barrier between the artist and the viewer. I wasn’t very inquisitive during her story since I knew it’s a performance but she said the first few days there were people who interrupted her all the time, and the story was told slightly differently depending on the perspective of the viewer. I heard the story twice and they’re slightly different. The first she mentioned going to a wedding with little kids and the second she said about going on a cable car up a mountaintop but the main story ‘narrative’ stayed the same where she talked about her lichen-covered stick which have been with her for 4 years. ‘Yeah I love trees.’ She confirmed.

And it turned out the man she was talking to was Robin Klassnik OBE who runs Matt’s Gallery, as she revealed to me later on. The Art world name-dropping continues.

Photos from http://www.fig2.co.uk/

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Mira Schendel/Rashid Johnson at Hauser & Wirth London

28 January 2015 – 7 March 2015

 So I stumbled upon Hauser & Wirth London after meeting the two girls at Workplace London after I applied for an Internship there. (I also applied to Hauser because, well who wouldn’t, if you’re set on interning at a gallery.) Anyway I was blown away by the stark contrast of the two artists they have on show at the two spaces they have.

 Mira Schendel is an artist from South America who passed away in 1988. She had a show at Tate Modern late 2013 and is famous for her rice paper drawings. The show is minimal, and from outside you can only see two rice paper installations. Knowing this is Hauser & Wirth I knew this wouldn’t be as simple as it looks.

 There is a long exhibition table around the gallery showing simple line drawings on rice paper and it relates to the installations. It’s a rice paper show; only that rice paper itself is very pale and looks just like the walls. I had a chat with the invigilator about art life(He’s from art school and wants to be a ‘prof.’ artist) and took some press releases, which is helping me write this.

 The Rashid Johnson show next door was the one that knocked it out of the park for me. It’s got a very materialistic emphasis and a focus on the primal qualities of materials. The first room had a massive sculpture called ‘Fatherhood’, and was surrounded by bronze panel wall pieces hung on top of wallpaper with the replicated image of a famous photo by Elliot Erwitt of a black kid smiling pointing a gun to his head.

 ‘Fatherhood’, the show’s centrepiece, is a metal ‘cupboard’ with plants, shea butter sculptures (A new material I’ve never heard of introduced to me by this girl invigilator who explained shea butter is like a beauty product), grow lights and stacks of the same copy of a book by Bill Cosby called Fatherhood. The book is a parenting memoir by Cosby, a figure Johnson is intrigued by. The sculpture is bold and it stood proudly in the middle of the room with the soothing presence of its plants. Probably my favourite contemporary sculpture I’ve seen recently.

 The possible problem was that it stood out so much the bronze pieces around it seemed somewhat less significant. But I did loved how they required the back wall to show what they’re about (They have holes made appropriately for each piece).

 The next room there were his ‘Anxious Men’ series featuring huge abstract heads on ceramic tiles made with black soap and wax. Not sure if the pieces were made for the space or the space is made for the pieces because it seemed so perfect, that room. The last room on the left there was a sculpture piece filled with shea butter and a mirror piece with wax painted on top like his usual style.

 This show is a great example of how to show contemporary art. It’s hard to describe curating other than to ‘put art together and make them relevant to each other and everyone’ but to me this is a great work of curation, almost like set design, it helped build an atmosphere appropriate to the artwork and what it stands for. Now I know who Rashid Johnson is, cheers curator.

Photos from http://www.hauserwirth.com/