Five art things, on we go then and never mind the bliss or whatever we said last time, I guess this is Frieze week now, are we feeling the buzz that’s usually in the air? Will we find things a little less conservative than Frieze week was last year? Will there be any genuine alternatives or is that a thing of the past now? We’ll be out searching the galleries but then we always are….
On with the five art things thing, once again this is about this week and next and needing more (just more, nothing less) and yes you are right, I guess, for that is what we do now, guess, I guess we need to post another five. Here, for what any of this is worth are 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 as we repeat ourselves. We do aim to make this 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: Ken Currie, The Crossing at Flowers Cork Street – 9th Oct until 16th Nov 2024 – “We are delighted to announce a solo exhibition, The Crossing, by the acclaimed Scottish artist Ken Currie”. now we don’t usually put these things in any particular order, but Ken Currie did rather “win” Frieze Week back in 2022, we’re rather excited about this one and surely art should excite.
“The Crossing transports viewers to an unknown archipelago, characterised by its desolate and barren islands and towering sea stacks. The landscapes, reminiscent of the westernmost islands of the Outer Hebrides, feature eroded rock towers that emerge from a deep, black sea, foaming and spraying at their bases. In this stark and unforgiving environment, an unidentified community endures a precarious existence without shelter”.
Ken Currie shared the following words about this new body of work from his studio journal: People of the Sea. People on the Edge. People at Extremes. Contested Land. Crossing the Sea. Eviction. Evasion. Evacuation. Displacement. Dispossession. Destitution.
Flowers Cork Street is found at 21 Cork Street, London, W1S 3LZ. The Gallery is open Monday to Saturday, 10am until 6pm
2: Collapse at Safehouse, Peckham, London SE15 – 3rd until 6th October 2024, back to the dust of Safehouse for yet another group show, but it is such a good place for an artist-led group show, not so much in the bad lighting of an opening night, more one for your daytime exploring, especially at this time of the year – “Being is a state of porosity. Just as our breath is also the air. Just as the redness we see when facing the Sun with our eyes closed is our body collapsing with a star. The artworks presented in this show contemplate the merging of the inner and outer worlds of the body, framing the idea that separation is an illusion and that nothing exists in isolation. Inviting viewers into an intersubjective, rather than object-based, perspective of the world, these seven artists challenge the illusion of difference, separation, and value. Together they celebrate experience as a web of relationships and connections — as profound and radical entanglement. If we are inherently undifferentiated, if our connections are irrevocable, then our bodies and selves inevitably collapse out to the social, political, and ecological dimensions of our world”.
Artists featured: Anna Arbiter, Beverley Hood, Benedict Johnson, Nagasiddhi, Miranda Pissarides, Kika Sroka-Miller, Peter Sullivan and Yuhong Wang
There are two spaces, Peckham Safehouse 1 and 2 are both found at 137 Copeland Road, Peckham, London SE15 3SN. No idea if anything is happening in Safehouse two this weekend, hopefully there is, two birds with one slice of break and all that There’s a Private View for Colapse at Safehouse One on Thursday 3rd October 6pm – 9pm, the show runs from 3rd until 6th October, just something for the weekend again then, no mention of times with the press release, I’m guessing the space is open midday until at least 5pm each day?
Previously at Safehouse
3: Bloom Song at Vivienne Roberts Projects – 3rd October until 7th November 2024 – “Bloom Song (épanouissement) is the change of season, the subtle shift from monochrome to colour, a shaping of poetry from history and a lucid becoming”.
Three Black British artists working in different veins, take up poet Robin Coste Lewis’ provocation to ‘step forth into beauty without political shame.’
“The loveliness of Des Haughton’s trees, branches snowed with bloom, disguise for a moment historical horror within. Speaking directly to these, Eugene Palmer’s portraits, executed in a graduated grisaille, subtly transform and remake the act of looking. While Amanda Holiday’s drawing of ghostly face jugs and towering sunflowers brings the conversation full circle.
For all three artists, blackness is a given, a perfusion of subject rather than subject itself. Thus, Haughton’s desire to ‘depict history through the eyes of trees’, is both carefree in its intentionality, yet imbued with a history that once saw trees shadowed by lynchings, where branch, beam and wood became material for containment, confinement and geographic dispersal. In fact, Haughton discovered a surprising connection between botanical artists and the slave trade routes – since British naturalists of the 1800s travelled on slave ships in order to collect specimens from West Africa and beyond. Haughton says, ‘botanical drawing is part of the DNA of slave history and some early collectors were slaves.’ Haughton intentionally eschews traditional interpretation of the subject in favour of layered, foliaged and heady beauty.
Forms of familial and ancestral memory unite the trio of artists. Over the years, Palmer has documented in paint, his extended and blended family in an array of bold portraits that interrogate and challenge the viewer. The unwavering gaze of Palmer’s immaculately rendered, mixed-race daughter in this set of four paintings, might at first suggest ‘Instagram lookism’ and selfie re-mix culture. Yet it is the very act of looking (again) at Palmer’s work which uncovers ideas about categorisation, race and colourism. Minute colour gradations in the four otherwise identical portraits prompt the viewer to cycle and recycle their own notions of how blackness and beauty are portrayed. Here, Palmer’s work comes into conversation with that of other black artists notably Gavin Jantjes, an early peer, whose ‘South African Colouring Book’ touches on similar themes. By activating a deeper viewer involvement – to look and look again, Palmer’s work also speaks to that of US artist Amy Sherald who shifts the focus away from skin colour with her own use of grisaille.
Holiday’s large painted charcoal drawing ‘Face Jugs and Sunflowers’ emerged from her research into black poetics and in particular, Robin Coste Lewis’ poetic response to an 1882 photograph by J A Palmer titled ‘Wilde Woman of Aiken’. Holiday became fascinated by the many forms of face jugs, reported to have been created by slaves working around Edgefield in South Carolina and perhaps used as grave markers, since some have been found along the routes of the Underground Railroad. In this drawing, one of a series that depict face jugs, Holiday’s intention is to convey a sense of a living past and deathly aliveness replete with ancestral memory. In doing so, she speaks to print works by Anselm Kiefer and also Virginia Chihota. In other drawings, Holiday places a figure from the present in communion with the past. The face jugs are containers for a history, that insists on sprouting outwards and upward, taking the form of elongated sunflowers.
Like Palmer, Holiday’s portrayals include members of her own blended and extended family – often conveying a sense of one particular moment in time. Like Haughton too, Holiday’s depiction of uncanny beauty wrestles with the pervasiveness of history’s unsettled and unsettling legacy.
In Bloom Song, Haughton, Holiday and Palmer show, that beyond violences of the past and present, it is art that insists on telling. And it is the telling that insists on beauty.” – Amanda B Holiday, 2024
Vivienne Roberts Projects is at The Bindery, 51-53 Hatton Garden, London, EC1N 8HN. The space is open Tuesday to Friday, 11am until 5pm
4: Helene Appel – Background at The Approach, London E2 – 5th October until 9th November 2024 – “The Approach is pleased to present Background, an exhibition of new paintings by Helene Appel”. You know what, there might be an unfriendly aloofness but I do have a soft spot for The Approach and the polite peace of their space above the East London pub of the same name, we have seen some rather strong shows in there over the last dozen (and probably quite a bit longer) years.
“Background suggests the periphery of vision, objects and landscape deemed secondary to our primary focus. The figure/background hierarchy is one which informs the fundamentals of painting. In Helene Appel’s paintings, however, it is the overlooked and everyday background objects which are given precedence over the (human) figure. Whether a pavement, a kitchen grater or a blanket, each of Appel’s subjects are bestowed with a striking sense of autonomy, painted with the attention and care usually associated with portraits.
Appel’s choice of subject matter is characterised by a perceived lack of sentimentality. Their abundance in our day-to-day activity relegates these objects to the background of our consciousness. Yet our attention to these objects is abruptly demanded by Appel’s decision to depict each on a 1:1 scale. In doing so, the works take on an almost sculptural quality, participating in the ‘real’ space they share with the viewer.
Her painting process is dictated by her subject matter, such that Sandpit, 2021 is rendered with single painted dots similar in size to actual grains of sand which, in turn, interweave with the natural grain of the exposed canvas. In Car Light, 2024 the shiny oil paint is precisely constructed like a technical drawing, while thinned watercolour paint is used to soak the canvas of her fabric works.
Through her distinctive application of paint, Appel captures the inherent beauty of these otherwise ordinary objects. Light reflects off the inner workings of the car light, bearing an architectural resemblance with its segmented and mirrored construction. Pavement (cobble stones), 2024 is almost abstract in its monumentality, recalling minimalist painters such as Agnes Martin with its muted colours and grid-like formation.
The meticulous detail Appel affords her subject matters is not simply illusionistic in the tradition of trompe l’oeil. Rather, Appel revels in the unfamiliarity of the familiar, decontextualising objects and denying the viewer narrative. It is a realism that compels the viewer to look and to contemplate, to question the importance we place on certain objects and yet deny to others, both in art as in life”.
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. The gallery is open Wednesday to Saturday (although some places say Tuesday) 12–6pm or by appointment. Background is on from 5th October until 9th November 2024
Recent coverage, there is rather a lot of it –
5: Elizabeth Magill – Sometimes a Landscape at Anthony Wilkinson Gallery – 5th Oct until 2 Nov 2024 – Seems like an age since we last saw an Elizabeth Magill show, all her fine layers, probably back when the beautiful Wilkinson Gallery at the foot of Vyner Street was still a thing, gawd, he was so unfriendly back there, he’d walk past our (Cultivate) gallery door with his nose in the air doing his best to avoid eye contact, we called it the Wilkinson smile. Did love his space and those Elizabeth Magill exhibitions stood out. Her landscapes, her layers and leaves have always been beautifully powerful when seen in the flesh, they don’t work on a computer screen so much, you need to see them, stand in front of them, drink them in…
These days Anthony Wilkinson is found at 44 Lexington Street (Room 2), London, W1F OLW. The gallery is open Wednesday until Saturday, 11am until 5pm
THE ORGAN 