Well Frieze Week came and went, was it all a bit underwhelming this year? Not the fair, the actual week itself? Never mind that, that was then, this is about this week. Five more art things then. five art things, almost posted ahead of time this week (so don’t be phoning up to complain again). Five more art things happening somewhere around right now or any moment now. Five art shows to check out in the coming days. An (almost) weekly round up of recommended art events. Five shows, exhibitions or things we rather think might be worth checking out. Mostly London things for that is where we currently operate and explore, and like we said last time, these five recommendations come with no claims that they are “the best five” or the “Top Five”, we’re not one of those annoying art websites that ignore most things whilst claiming to be covering everything and proclaiming this or that to be the “top seven things” or the “best things this weekend”. This is simply a regular list of five or so recommended art things happening now or coming up very soon that we think you might find as interesting as we think we will.

1: Caitlin Keogh, Running Doggerelat The Approach – 28th Oct  until 17th Dec 2022, which seems rather a long to us, hey, what do we know, we liked tO change shows most weeks in our space. “To reframe is to represent that which I have seen… to represent the process by which vision projects and transforms itself, to engage in the struggle to discover that which is absent, obscured from our vision, through an encounter with that which is manifest, given”.

The Approach say they are “pleased to present Running Doggerel, the second solo exhibition by Caitlin Keogh at the gallery. This group of twelve new paintings interpret a long, frieze-like collage. Keogh’s source material consists of thousands of art museum postcards, online search results, phone photos, and monograph reproductions. The collage is composed intuitively, with things loosely adhered and continuously moved during the process of translating into paint. Overall, the emphasis is on the studio as the site of reflection and production, rather than the materials’ narrative or historical importance. The paintings can be viewed as one large composition, discrete units, or smaller series.

The title Running Doggerel plays on a flexible mode of poetry made of uneven rhyming schemes, often associated with nursery rhymes and simple, common words. Keogh’s visual composition often loosely rhymes (a hand of a broken roman statue shadowed nearby with the waving hand in a Picabia illustration, for example) and the works’ cadence is established by things clustering together and drifting apart. Much of the imagery comes from familiar sources in the artist’s oeuvre, such as medieval marginalia, the 19th century aesthetic movement, fragmented classical statuary, Surrealist illustration, and 20th century anatomical diagrams; some motifs have appeared in Keogh’s previous paintings. The group of Correspondence Paintings feature postcards purchased at art museums or mailed to her from her friend and former art history teacher, M. Dorsch, tethered with passementerie into a thematic but modular painting object.

Keogh cites the proto-pop collages of Joe Brainard as an influence. As both artist and writer, he side-stepped distinctions of high and low, formal and casual, to make art objects that commemorated friendships, and he wrote diaristically of the associations between personal experience and material relics. Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas is another influence. In The Surviving Image:, Phantoms of Time and Time of Phantoms, Georges Didi-Huberman describes Warburg’s project as “an attempt to ‘pass through walls’: to ‘decompartmentalize’ the image and the time that it bears within itself or that bears it.” Similarly, the need to unsettle a historical narrative or ideology of a received image is central to Keogh’s practice. The visual patterns and disruptions of Running Doggerel are emphatically intuitive, playful, and predicated on the artist’s desire to encounter images as they seem to speak across time, reframed for new stories and meanings”.

The Approach is found on the first floor above the pub, 47 Approach Road, Bethnal Green, London E2 9LY, Access to the gallery via The Approach Tavern pub, there’s a brown door at the end of the left side of the bar that the staff may or may not feel like pointing out to you. Gallery open: Tuesday to Saturday: 12–6pm or by appointment,

2: Dale Grimshaw, Mask of Many Faces at Well Hung Gallery, well actually, and pay attention here, it is a Well Hung show but this one happens at Brick Lane Gallery, which is, of course, on Brick Lane.

Well Hung say “We are thrilled to invite you to Dale Grimshaw’s much anticipated solo exhibition, ‘Mask of Many Faces,’ taking place from Wednesday 26th October to Sunday 30th October at 216 Brick Lane. Grimshaw recently featured in the BBC’s Extraordinary Portraits, where his powerful, dramatic and emotive portrait captured the nation’s heart. The portrait of Patrick Hutchinson, which is currently showing at The Turner Gallery, will also feature in the ‘Mask of Many Faces’. With more than a decade of capturing the essence of indigenous people from Papua New Guinea in his passionate and emotive portraits, Dale Grimshaw has integrated this imagery with a wellspring of cultural references in his most significant solo show to date.

Grimshaw has created a technically brilliant body of portraits, where he has let his imagination flow freely with a sense of spontaneity and virtuso brushwork in every one of these darkly beautiful paintings. The richness of his vision has been achieved with complex imagery that grows out of his portraits to create a visual mindscape of thoughts and feelings. At times they seem to threaten to engulf the sitter, but at other times, they appear to be nothing more than exquisite flights of fancy.  Grimshaw includes a plethora of cultural and visual references from abstract marks, graffiti, and Rubenesque cascades of mythological figures, to ancient Greek and Roman statuary. The inclusion of these diverse images seem incongruous, however, because of the care with which they have been chosen, this combination feels coherent and beguiling”.

Conversations with Dale: On Saturday 29th October Dale will do a short speech on his retrospective wall of murals from 12-1pm “it is one not to miss for all street art lovers”

Dale has shown his work in many successful solo and group exhibitions in the UK, Europe and the USA. In recent years he has become renowned for his impressive Street Art and is in demand across the world. He employs the same intensity of expression that he has developed in his studio, with powerful effect and universal appeal. He is at his strongest whe nhe’s working on the street –  “There’s so much love gone into this work. I still never tire of painting – I still get excited about going into a store and buying new paint, like I did when I was a teenager!  It’s powerful, it’s beautiful, it’s fresh, it’s new (yet timeless). It shows a true passion for paint… but with my usual blend of emotion, culture, people & style & energy. Organised as usual by my lovely gallery people, Well Hung Gallery”.

Well Hung for this show are at Brick Lane Gallery, 216 Brick Lane, London, E1 6SA. There’s an opening on Wednesday 26th October (6 until 9pm), The space is open, Thursday through to Sunday, 10am until 6pm (Midday on Sunday). The show goes on until October 30th

3: Hiroshima Shinkichi, Sign! at Moosey London –  The show runs from 27th Oct until 20th Nov 2022 with an opening on Thursday 27th (6pm until 8pm – “We are delighted to announce our first solo exhibition by Japanese artist Hiroshima Shinkichi. The exhibition will launch on Thursday 27th October, 6-8pm. Drinks on us!” so say the now firmly established in London Moosey team.

Born 1994 in Japan, Hiroshima Shinkichi currently lives and works in Saitama Prefecture. Hiroshima uses acrylic paints and airbrushes to create his pieces, with the use of pop colours and patterns to produce  lively atmospheres, and thus creating a juxtaposition with some of his darker themes.  “I create works by enlarging an image of a single action, taken by a human being. I wanted to create an exhibition that would allow people to enjoy a bird’s-eye view of human behaviour. I imagine a “realistic fiction” that is likely to happen but in reality does not. I don’t just want to draw fun pictures, but I would be happy if the viewer could imagine the story before and after. My daily life is drawing characters whose emotions are somewhat unreadable and distorted. There is always a story behind their amusing actions that unfold in ordinary everyday life”.

Moosey is at 22-24 Camden Passage, Islington, London, N1 8ED. The gallery is open Wednesday to Sunday, 11am until 5pm

4: Malcolm Liepke, Do You See Me? at Pontone Gallery – over in W1 from October 28th until November 20th – “Malcolm Liepke’s new paintings pulse with life, full of coruscating colour, dramatic composition and seductive evocations of the body. The entire focus and centre of attention is the figure. His subjects are graphically expressed in confident, gestural brushwork that describes form in clots, smears and slicks of sticky, glutinous oil paint.

Liepke works with a cast of characters, young models who act out world weary and self- absorbed scenarios. On occasion they challenge the viewers’ gaze, staring back as if to say “well…and?”. There is an erotic charge to much of this provocation. Some pictures are frank explorations of sensuous male and female appeal. Liepke’s deft handling roils and wallows in his rich colour palette. Exploiting contrast, he throws dense charcoal blacks against pale and livid flesh tones. He deploys a vocabulary of playful and knowing tropes: liquid eyes glisten, mobile fingers touch and cradle, glossy hair coils and tumbles, full lips are moist. Liepke crops his views close, the subject fills the frame, the object is unambiguous.

The artist’s method and content brings Manet to mind. Facility goes hand in hand with gaucheness. Liepke presents contemporary types, playing with the surface appearances of ‘modernity’, who tease with their outward indifference and ostensible blankness. This appears a superficial ‘floating world’ of people doing not very much at all. Nevertheless, it is real, as much as Manet’s ‘demi monde’.

There are some new developments in this set of paintings. A couple of pictures investigate some overtly expressed emotion. ‘Inner Voices’ shows a man on a bed rocking back and forth, his head painted in several positions, angst-ridden and contorted. ‘Hard Times’ documents a troubled state, where another figure, head slumped in hands, is an intimate portrait of despair. Whatever the public face presented, Liepke reaches behind the mask and reveals the question “do you see me”.”

Pontone Gallery is at 74 Newman St, London, W1T 3DB. Open Monday through to Saturday, 10am until 6pm

5: Eleanor Green and Usva Inei, Enough is Enough at hARTslane – Opening on November 1st and running until the 6th and with an opening night on November 2nd (so not really an opening night, more a later evening on the second night and some kind of social thing if the fixture list allows you), the opening celebration on the second night is from 6pm until 9pm. “hARTslane – an experimental art project space in South East London – will present ‘Enough is Enough’, an exhibition featuring emerging artists Eleanor Green and Usva Inei to explore the relationship between authority and the individual”.

Enough is Enough’ presents immersive installations, film, experimental print-making, sculpture and performance, fusing the disciplines of art making in ways that break down long-established boundaries, and challenging the audience to pause and reconsider their relationship to the normative structures that guide our everyday lives. Both artists approach difficult topics through combining them with unexpectedly light, fragile, and humorous elements.

Featured works in ‘Enough is Enough’ bring a radical new set of references and experiences to open up conversations around whether authority can allow for different and marginalised identities to flourish, and when it can stomp their development out with its force. Collectively, the works serve as a form of visual activism, asking questions including: who am I in the face of overwhelming authority? How can I remain myself? How can I create change? What might a better world look like?

Usva is a queer visual and performance artist, who works with themes of lived experiences of queerness and immigration. As a Finnish-born Russian immigrant, they are currently questioning their cultural heritage and identity in the face of the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war. Their installation pieces combine the personal and the political to speak to the mixed feelings of being a queer Russian in London today: being shunned by one’s culture, yet wanting to belong to it; being a part of a society that is acting as an aggressor in war, yet also victimising its own people.

Eleanor is a performance artist and filmmaker interested in the distribution of power, and the individual’s behaviour in the face of authority, stemming from her experience growing up feeling often only able to smile politely in the face of relentless misogyny. The off-kilter, elaborately mundane worlds Eleanor creates act as a backdrop to examine inherited power structures presented as nature, as sacred, as just the way it is. For Eleanor comedy is a political tool, and laughter a serious act of resistance.

As part of the exhibition the artists will hold interactive workshops for all ages on Saturday 5 November – ‘Jiggling up Structures’ from 10am-1pm, and ‘Make Cape, Wear Cape, Fly’ from 2-4pm. No booking required, but places are limited and will be allocated on a first come, first serve basis.

hARTslane is at 17 Harts Lane, London, SE14 5UP. They say the Gallery is open Tuesday to Saturday, midday until 6pm, 10am opening on a Saturday, we do note the 6th is a Sunday, so maybe they forgot to say they were open Sundays as well or maybe it ends on the 5th?  

And while we’re here….

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Cultivate presents Three x Three (Part Six) – an online art exhibition featuring Lisa Denyer, Liz Griffiths and Madeleine Strindberg… And the latest online Three x Three exhibition, Three x Three (Part Six) is now open ready to be viewed on our sister Organ website via this link. The show features around eighty pieces of art from three artists