Tim Renshaw
Tim Renshaw: Images in the Vaguest Sense
Until May 18
V22 Ashwin Street
T +44 (0)207 159 6790
The thematic thread looped casually around this extraordinary body of abstract paintings - concerning perceptual reliability - may appear vague to the point of non-existence but their effect on the senses rings clear as a bell. Tim Renshaw's flat, hard-edged grounds support a range of possibly familiar architectural and domestic forms - the chromatic siren's song of which is hard to resist. The process of unravelling the moment of seduction is equally enjoyable; making sense of the colour-delineated pictorial planes and fragmented structures that push the boundaries of what might constitute an image. Grid- and orb-like motifs repeated across each surface bring to mind the duality of everyday forms; the visually arbitrary nature of codified data, for example. It's as if elements of Modernist architectural function, memories of the way one experiences space and evidence of painting's long history with manipulating it have been reduced to a library of pictorial facets. Reorganised canvas-to-canvas they appear to communicate the many breaches along the art and design divide.
Paul P
Paul P
Until May 18
Maureen Paley
T +44 (0)20 7729 4112
Paul P's portrait subjects - beautiful boys in the first flush of youth - embody a wistful, sometimes melancholic homoerotic gaze that like the painter's magpie technique transcends the limits of art historical or social conventions. This, his first London exhibition, features a bevy of provocatively positioned chaps in various states of undress. A mix of period accessories draped hither and thither on flesh and fabric bring to mind Oscar Wilde's sensitive literary descriptions and seventies soft-porn interpretations of the male form. The title of the show 'When Ghost Meets Ghost' is taken from a distinctly Dorian Gray-infused quote by Stephen Tennant, a society gent and patron of Whistler, made on discovery of what American sculptor Jacob Epstein had made of his fine features: "When I am dead and forgotten its loveliness will live, gazing back into time - when Ghost meets Ghost". Whether classical models or contemporary rent boys, Mr P's paradoxically guileful and vulnerable troupe makes for a compelling audience with.
Angela Ferreira
Front of House
Until May 23
Parasol Unit
T + 44 (0) 207 490 7373
As the title 'Front of House' implies, this group show is underpinned by the notion of private made public: specifically here a 15 year-long discourse that has emerged out of the many collaborative projects connecting artists Angela Ferreira and Narelle Jubelin, writer/curator Andrew Renton and architect Marcos Corrales. Like discovery of any partial conversations to which one has not been party, there is a sense of playing catch-up with the tide of possible ideas facilitated here through the placement of art works and associated research material. Ferreira and Jubelin share an interest in describing the post-colonial experience through the re-framing of utopian modernist architectural sensibilities in very different media and from very different vantage points in Africa/Mozambique and Australia. Ferreira uses film footage of Seventies Mozambique and sculptural reconstructions of a Constructivist-style broadcasting tower to describe the shift between the experience and contextualising of history. Jubelin's highly desirable petit-point works reveal a range of societal hopes and failings: from the story of her parents ' Modernist house to a series of urban and pastoral landscapes that feature a variety of political monuments: from anti-Bush Spanish graffiti to a permanent Donald Judd installation. Renton's truism "there's never a singular work that comes out of nowhere" sets up an urgent sense of enquiry as a result of which an engaged viewer might bat endlessly between minimally installed elements looking for minutiae of clues that may or may not exist. One leaves feeling that it's not so much art that's on display here as the notion of artistic compromise at the heart of any collaboration - whether that between creators or the viewer and the work.
Isa Genzken
Isa Genzken: Ground Zero (2)
Until May 25
Between Bridges
Walking into this compact east end stairwell-cum-gallery you'd be forgiven for thinking that the hastily spray-painted bits of tarpaulin on display are the products of the next hot local thing. For they fit so well with the throwaway aesthetic that has dominated London art output of recent years. But this is a new series of works by celebrated German artist Isa Genzken, who is now edging into her fifties and still apparently keen to maintain an experimental presence in edgier spaces. Each laminated piece of black fabric bears the initials XXL, which Genzken has then gone over in silver spray paint; treacly drips and lid-sized circles of silver lacquer adhered to each surface. A large silver tick on one could be a Nike swoosh, while girly pony stickers and bits of disco mirror appear to bob amidst this anarchic sea of half-arsed urban symbology. Upstairs a covetable, mirrored work distorts the human face into a bat-like visage - an animal comparison that extends to the over-Botox'd faces of female celebrities. The many allusions here to excess suggest critique of contemporary consumption but the only info the artist herself gives away is the provocative title 'Ground Zero (2)': a deliberate reminder, perhaps of other less palatable glittery things?
Anne Ryan
Anne Ryan
Until May 24
Greengrassi
T +44 (0)207 840 9101
It's Anne Ryan's curious combination of technical fallibility and slick evocation of cinematic mood that keep you looking at her paintings. From one turn of the head to the next they can become quite different stylistic entities. As with previous works, featuring cowboys and other filmic protagonists, Ryan's building of human drama out of earthy layers of scrubby brushwork suggests that her latest characters have materialised from memory rather than transcribed from technological source. This exhibition of new work is characteristically focused on groups of figures, almost exclusively women. Whether gathered gossiping on a staircase or embroiled in an emotional tête-à-tête, one is drawn into each uptight frame to make sense of her changeable sleight of hand and mentally pinpoint their possible beginnings.
Juan Pablo Echeverri
Once More With Feeling
Until June 15
The Photographers Gallery
T +44 20 7831 1772
This intriguing exhibition of recent photography from Colombia intimates that contemporary life in the region is affected by but extends beyond the shifting terms of civil war. Sensational news stories of drug lords and kidnappings have long coloured the western view, but these performative works offer tender insights on the everyday personal stories and wider political actions currently driving its makers. On the surface it may appear that Juan Pablo Echeverri makes work only about himself for he is always the star. But his acutely observed theatrical embodiment of social stereotypes, evidenced here in a vast display of passport photo portraits, reveals much about our culturally endemic responses to 'other'. In chillingly beautiful photographs María Elvira Escallón has documented the bomb-damaged interiors of a nightclub in Bogatá, where she worked; evidence of human activity smudged in dust- and soot-covered surfaces. They constitute a powerful social record but her filmic framing of the site also poses questions about the influence of fictive narrative conventions on the way we record and relate to real life situations.
Tal R, 'Name, Year and Departure', 2007
Tal R
Until June 29
Camden Arts Centre
T +44 20 7472 5500
It's the month of single character surnames... Tal R's painting practice is characterised by a limited seven-colour palette, strict pictorial dimensions and collaged aesthetic. These factors effectively govern the crude figurative style he has become famous for, preventing a potential plummet into the critical pitfalls associated with all things faux naïve. And, also the fact that this childlike pictorial smokescreen disguises a dearth of serious subject matter: from the history of the Holocaust to issues of censorship and utopianism. This substantial exhibition of new work by the Israeli-born artist includes large-scale paintings, an installation of etchings and a new film in which he stars.
Shirazeh Houshiary
Shirazeh Houshiary
May 29 - July 26
Lisson Gallery
T +44 20 77242739
1994 Turner Prize nominee Shirazeh Houshiary translates ephemeral spiritual concerns into physical matter through the different strands of her practice. This solo show of new work at Lisson follows the recent unveiling of her and husband Pip Horne's inspired East Window for the newly renovated St-Martin-in-the-Fields. Other collaborative projects with Horne will also feature here - such as the monumental 'Undoing the Knot', one of a series of large-scale sculptural towers - amongst previously unseen monochromatic paintings, smaller sculptures and the artist's first film-based work 'Shroud', a painting-inspired exploration of the state between form and formlessness.
Matthew Darbyshire, Blades House 2008
Installation shot at Gasworks, London
Nought to Sixty
ICA
First season begins May 6 - June 31
T +44 (0)207 930 3647
British and Irish artists are the focus of this ambitious six-month programme of exhibitions and events, most of who are under 35. Given the limited commercial exposure of the majority the ICA have looked to artist-run spaces across the country for their selection, providing a complementary platform for this grossly under-funded but essential subdivision of the art world. Each artist or artist group has been delegated a solo slot, details of which are being announced on a monthly basis. The first month includes installation of new ICA lighting schemes designed by Matthew Darbyshire, a discussion on emerging artist networks lead by Afterall magazine and a two-screen projection by Seamus Harahan incorporating footage from the Bloody Sunday Commemoration in Derry.
Norman Parkinson
Street and Studio
May 22 until August 31
Tate Modern
This international survey show of some 350 works charts the urban history of photography out of the controlled setting of the studio and onto the chaos of the street. The focus is portraiture and this vast exhibition will bring to light the many subgenres that both link and distinguish these very different approaches to documenting people in the urban environment. Expect many famous names such as Norman Parkinson, Cecil Beaton, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Mapplethorpe. Also, American pioneer Diane Arbus whose images of socially marginalised individuals in the Sixties paved the way for an unconventional approach to portraiture, which was later developed by the likes of Cindy Sherman (with her uncanny brand of cinematic dress-up in the Eighties) and has certainly informed Dutch artist Rineke Dijkstra's pared down approach to capturing 'ordinary' subjects.
Rebecca Geldard is a freelance writer and critic living in London.
)
)
)