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Never mind whatever we said last time, that was then, this, once again is about this week and next and cake and yes you are right, we haven’t done this for a week, here we go with five more art things. five art things, 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 Five Things thing 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…
And we should add, that entry to these recommended exhibitions and events, unless otherwise stated, is free.
1: Morten Lassen, Unspoken at Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery – Opening on Spetember 2nd and running until 30th Spetember with an opening night on Saturday September 2nd, 6pm until 8pm – ‘Unspoken’ is a new exhibition of works on canvas and paper by Danish abstract painter Morten Lassen.
“Unspoken exemplifies Lassen’s unique, process-driven approach to painting. In a conscious effort to untether from the whir of the digital age, the artist works slowly, over time, allowing the effects of colour, texture, line and form to coalesce organically in the creation of his subtle grid-like abstract images.
Whilst avoiding formal associations, the paintings in ‘Unspoken’ invite engagement. The geometric structures suggested by the artist’s vertical and horizontal brushstrokes and allusive pencil markings lend a sense of balance within the chaos. Rich swaths of red and turquoise dominate, with ladder-like formations climbing and dissolving into pools of white. There is, perhaps, an unspoken sense of tension between opposing forces, that reflects the varying pressures and consolations of the modern world, capturing Lassen’s desire to go off grid, and escape through his methodical process of creation.
Working in series on multiple pieces concurrently, Lassen constructs each composition over a period of up to a year. Exploring tonal variations, he builds (and scrapes back) layer upon layer of paint through a spontaneous and expressive practice. Forgoing preparatory sketches, the works grow naturally. Each layer informs and alters the next. As Lassen explains, ‘The process of creating art is a metaphor for life itself – fluid, dynamic, and rooted in the present moment.’
Morten Lassen, who lives and works in Copenhagen, has exhibited extensively across the UK, Scandinavia, Germany and Australia.
Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery is at 2a Conway Street, Fitzroy Square, London, W1T 6BA. The gallery is open Monday through to Saturday, 10am until 6pm
2: Charlotte Fox, Reflection In A Dark Room at Moosey Hoxton – 31st August until 24th September 2023 – Things have been floweing rather well as Moosey’s new space at the Hoxton end of the Hackney Road, – “Moosey Hoxton is delighted to announce a solo exhibition by Charlotte Fox. The exhibition will launch Thursday 31st August, 6-8 pm”
Charlotte Fox (b.1994) received her BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2016). She currently lives and works in New York. Her artwork has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Working predominantly with oil, Charlotte’s work playfully explores experiences of repulsion and desire through the lens of fantasy and fragmented or fictionalised self-narrative. Her process uses several visual references such as personal photography, vintage porn and old films and cartoons, which are later digitally collaged together before being painted in oil.
“Taking a voyeuristic approach to understanding one’s own internal fantasy world and history of what compels or repels them- the paintings are pieces of storytelling but not the full story, and perhaps not even a true story. Through hiding or concealing the ‘rest’ of the story there is a transference or even an avoidance in investigating what attracts and what repulses.
The subjects of these works often take the forms of warped or bent bodies; pieces of the human form, often in moments of vulnerability or engaging in sexual exploration, as well as semi-anthropomorphised animals and scenes of interior spaces. The subjects reveal themselves as glimpses detached from any anchored setting or substantial landscape. I like to think of them as pockets of lost memories or false dreams that can’t or won’t be fully remembered.”
“A little too romantic… maybe you are remembering wrong or maybe you are taking a revisionist approach… maybe you are trying to control the narrative of a dream while on the brink of sleep. Staring at yourself for so long you become someone else. Doubled, inverted, self-obsession or self-exploration, and muddled truths. Looking outward sometimes is only in.
Removing the first layer of skin below the surface, just underneath, you are stuck between the surface and the core. A lingering distortion, yet no light to illuminate, so can you even really see? This current body of work plays with the idea of the ‘afterimage’ or negative mirror image; attempting to distil the good (the desirable) from the bad (that which repulses), and finding they may be reflections of each other and perpetually enmeshed.”
Moosey Hoxton is at The Shoreditch Exchange, Hackney Road, London E2 8GY, The gallery is open Thursday through to Sunday, 11am until 5pm. The show runs until September 23rd.
Previously on these pages – ORGAN THING: Damien Cifielli’s slightly strange, rather painterly tales of Tarogramma at Moosey Hoxton…
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3: Ra Tack and Florence Peake, and as always, the end is everything at IMT – Running from 1st September until 1st October with an opening on August 31st, 7pm until 10pm – “IMT is thrilled to present a new display of works by Ra Tack and Florence Peake in a duo show about tension and dialogue, and how we make sense of the world” so we’re told.
“Body, landscape, narrative. We are prone to see ourselves reflected in the world. There is a fragile and precarious dance between internal and external landscapes; each side inflicting pressures on the other. Through windows and screens, seasonality, flux, and renewal are mirrored in the sweeping and sometimes inexplicable and indefensible shifts of our emotional weather charts. These two landscapes are predicated on balance, both within themselves and with each other. There is a reconciliation to be made, a bargain to be struck, whether through force, inaction or dumb luck.
Both Tack and Peake’s works deal in the bodily, the embodied, the material. Stretching how these terms are interpreted, both Tack and Peake approach issues of placement and rootedness in different ways – they allow us to question where we are and how we interact with the world. They are not explicitly or dogmatically ecological, or even environmental or naturalistic. Their works are formal but not figurative, they don’t show the world as it is, or will be, they show a feeling, an interaction – chemical, emotional, personal or social processes. And in this way, they are poetic – as viewers they challenge us to think beyond or between the strictly material relations between our bodies and where they are placed. Not quite idealist and never approaching reduction.
Peake has spoken about how she “investigate[s] the ontology of objects, beings, humans, and encounters in the world” and these words could encompass the entire presentation.
Tack’s canvases are constellations of marks formed from hours of looking outward across Iceland’s dramatic landscapes and inward to trace the emotional journeys one goes on. Steeped in the atmosphere of the fjords, Tack’s paint seems to rise out of the earth. Stem- like streaks dance on an oversaturated cadmium yellow horizon while punches of optimistic floral reds exhale across the canvas, elsewhere dense mycorrhizal nests fester.
Many canvases hold these conflicting states within them, as we all do, making them like characters, Tack avatars, that take on the atmosphere of the room they are in.
On floor, laid prostrate on a clinical white sheet, like a shrunken topographic model or hardened shallow grave is Peake’s seminal ceramic STAGE (2017). Composed of 28 ceramic titles, STAGE is a rhapsody of reference and collaboration. Formed through a choreographed performance, when the dancer Rosemary Lee wildly thrashed in tons of raw clay and was buried into the sticky stage. The work was glazed with community groups and fired in CASS Sculpture’s ‘functional sculpture’ wood-fired kiln. The work is painfully tense, presenting itself as a lease of life that conceals a body’s energy yet that is almost alchemically held in a suspended state of transformation. It is a field, a grave, a stage, a world, and a body all at once.
Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring and Peake’s body of work is built around a simple but effective folk tale: a virgin dances herself to exhaustion and sacrifices herself to bring about the changing of the seasons, from winter to spring. Wrapped up in this one line are myriad themes – the bodily, the land, seasonality, change, age. As with many folk histories, what it also does is open up a space for the most human way of making sense of what we struggle to understand: telling stories.
Tack’s works, often produced in series, are narratives all of themselves. Reading the landscape, the colours, reflected in the intensity of layering of paint are imprinted onto the works but don’t depict them. To look into the paintings, to look slowly, is to notice how they swell, staccato marks erasing past pleasures, paint redefining emotional journeys. For Tack, painting is an act of survival and these paintings are personal testimony to that. Their titles, I Took Back Your Hand and Crawling on the Floor to Be Near You could be read at either end of a relationship’s pendulum.
In all these elements: landscape, earth, emergency, biography, embodiment, relationships, there is a sense of the tragic. In Peake’s work there is trade off, the compromise and synthesis from pity and fear as the death gives way to renewal, and in Tack’s work it is the excruciating honesty that these relationships, forged in oil, were never destined to last. We tell stories to make sense of the world, to align the interior and exterior landscapes, if only for a second.
and as always, the end is everything. is accompanied by a soundscape running throughout the exhibition and an essay by the curator further exploring the exhibition’s themes, available in print at the gallery and online.
IMT is at Unit 2, 210 Cambridge Heath Road, Bethnal Green, London, E2 9NQ. The space is open Thursdays through to Sundays, Midday until 6pm. The gallery is next door to the Chemist, don’t let te strange numbering system on the road fool you into walking past on the other side.
And let us interrupt this page to remind you that the Fair is getting closer……
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We are now only a couple of weeks away from this year’s Art Car Boot Fair here in London , here comes the link and most of what you need to know
This year’s Fairfeatures a cast of over a hundred invited artists happens on Saturday September 16th, it will once again happen in London at Lewis Cubitt Square, Kings Cross. There’s an Organ preview and somebackground in terms of the rather unique rather special event and how it is a genuinely artist-friendly event here –
4: Alvaro Barrington, Grandma’s Land at Sadie Coles HQ | Kingly Street – 2nd Sept until 21st October with an opening night on 2nd September, 6pm until 8pm – “This September, Alvaro Barrington will present They Got Time – Grandma’s Land, a major new body of work in which the artist returns to his early experience of life growing up in the Caribbean. For his third solo exhibition at the gallery, Barrington will take over the entirety of the Kingly Street space in Soho, creating a total environment described by the artist as a ‘universe’. Centred on three monumental, hand built architectural structures each installation draws on aspects of family life lived in the region, celebrating its diverse culture and landscape. Both in scale and subject, the project represents an ambitious expansion of themes that have endured since the beginning of Barrington’s career, of interwoven personal and cultural narratives and at their intersection: family, community, love, music and its vibrant materiality, as well as wider inspirations drawn from art history.
Opening immediately following Notting Hill Carnival (27-28 August 2023) – during which Barrington will present a number of collaborative projects (see notes) – They Got Time – Grandma’s Land will bring together new works conceived for the project that expand on the region’s traditions, alongside several made for this year’s Carnival. These encompass a range of media, including painting, drawing, wallpaper, installation and for the first time video. Throughout, Barrington uses traditional and non-traditional materials, such as timber and burlap, that speak to the ubiquitous materials used for housing structures in the Caribbean region; mirroring his enduring concern for how different medias can function as a visual tool and exist as a richly layered signifier of cultural and political histories.
As part of the exhibition, Barrington has invited his peer artists whose own diverse practices likewise pay homage to the Caribbean, its diaspora and Carnival culture to participate in the show. Two of the three structures will host works by artists Sonia Gomes and Paul Anthony Smith, creating a richly textured environment; reflecting the essence of collaboration at the centre of his practice”
Sadie Cole HQ is found at 62 Kingly Street, Soho, London, W1B 5QN. The gallery is open 11am until 6pm, Tuesday through to Saturday .
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5: Vesna Parchet, Under The Surface at Fitzrovia Gallery – “My solo show ‘Under the Surface’ is coming up at Fitzrovia Gallery (London). Super excited to show my recent paintings, and some brand new works both on canvas and on paper. Hope to see you there!” so says painter Vesna Parchet.
Vesna’s show opens with a so called private view on Wednesday, 6th. September 6-9pm and is then open daily from 7th until 10th September – midday until 6pm each day, until 4pm on the Sunday. Fitzrovia Gallery is at 139 Whitfield street, London, W1T 5EN
London based painter Ves has been a regular at Cultivate shows for quite a few eyars now, here’s a selection of her previous work… do click on an image to see the whole thing or to run the slide show…
THE ORGAN 
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