We left Part One, halfway through exploring the gallery known as Soft Opening, we were about to make that very short walk from that rather rewarding Sam Lipp exhibition to the smaller second hardly-ever-used room in the East London space just off the Hackney Road. For Condo 2026, and if you don’t know what Condo 2026 is maybe read Part One of this feature first – Condo 2026 Pt.1 – Exploring East London’s part in Condo, that and Sam Lipp at Soft Opening, Hana Miletić at The Approach alongside New York’s Margot Samel Gallery presenting the work of Leroy Johnson and Olivia Jia… – for Condo 2026 Soft Opening is hosting New York’s Company Gallery and their presentation of Needle Trades, the first solo exhibition in London by Women’s History Museum. The entry is guarded intriguingly or maybe enticingly by a pair of high heel shoes sitting quietly in a small pile of Autumn leaves on the gallery floor. Apparently the slightly strangely named artist duo came together in 2015; two artists, Mattie Barringer and Amanda McGowan, a self declared fashion-art duo who came together out of “the desire to create novel and previously unseen images of beauty”. Not sure if we’re seeing anything previously unseen or indeed that novel, it is rather intriguing though, it does make for an instant sugar hit in terms of the eye candy and the art rush although what’s left once the hit wares off I’m not really sure?
According to Company, “the duo engages with fashion as a medium that has the potential to exist beyond regurgitate spectacle and the ability to change the fabric of reality. In this exhibition, Barringer and McGowan utilise imagery and aesthetics from fetish photography spanning from the 1800s to the present. These references are explored through a series of new mannequin sculptures, drawings, video and faux advertorial works, reflecting on commodity fetishism, their own position within this social phenomenon, and the dehumanisation of women as a by-product” and yes, I suppose so but are they doing or saying anything that hasn’t been said before, or indeed are they saying it in a way that it hasn’t been said before? Isn’t it all rather obvious? Here’s another #43SecondFilm
Next? Well the next Condo-hosting art space is Rose Easton Gallery further into Bethnal Green and halfway to Whitechapel but there are one or two non-Condo galleries to check before we arrive at the destination. The street art and graff along the arches under the railway on Clare Street seems to have slowed down in the last year, not so evolving as it once was, there’s no sign of life at IMT Gallery on the Cambridge Heath Road, website says the space is open, reality says something different.
On towards Whitechapel, hang on, what’s that over there on the other side of the street? A new gallery? Could be?! Indeed it is, no sign to say it is, no open door, no hint, if we hadn’t been on the other side of the road we’d have just walked past. A quick conversation with the polite enough host of the space and apparently it has been there almost two years now! I point out I’ve never seen it in any listings, nothing on sites like the oh so vital Ar Rabbit, apparently she doesn’t bother, apparently Art Rabbit isn’t cool, when pushed she says she’s just posts information on her Instagram account and doesn’t bother with listings or anything much else, another one of the too-cool-to-want-to-engage galleries and anyway the people at Art Rabbit don’t pick or chose, there’s is no editorial policy, you’re just able to list your show on there like most decent galleries do and then people like me see it and come to the shows, the platform isn’t perfect, it is an excellent place to list your show and for people to find out about shows, simple. But hey, she screws up her faces and tells Art Rabbit isn’t cool and she doesn’t like the kind of shows they list, I guess she doesn’t want the kind of people who use the site to vome ot er gallery either. Why is art in London so aloof? Hey, even if people follow a gallery on Instabloodygram they’re probably not going to see the posts, what is wrong with engaging with people? Do you just want your art school mates at your opening night and then to sit in an empty gallery for the rest of the month? Would you rather the rest of us not soil your floor. The gallery is called Naven for what anything is worth, find it hiding behind a shut door and no sign to tell you it is at 353 Cambridge Heath Road. I mean, a look at the Gallery not-heavily-followed Instagram feed suggests there just might have been an interesting show or two in the space but hey, if you don’t want to tell anyone then what the hell is the point? For the record the current show in the space is something called Object Permanence, a just opened solo show by New Zealand born London-based artist Nayan Patel that runs until the end of February, something to do the gentrification, urbanisation and the erosion of New Zealand’s culture. I guess the big silver ferns hint at it, not sure I would have got it without reading the text though, not sure if the art backs up the points well made in the text? And as polite as the conversation has been I’m kind of feeling a touch unwelcome in here and well, I hope the gallery survives, we need as many art galleries as we can get in this part of town. The fading East London gallery scene can be annoyingly frustrating these days…
On we go then, on past the Salmon and Bat, now that’s a pub with a chequered past, on towards Rose Easton Gallery, on past the rather plush Proposition Gallery where they’re currently hosting a rather good group show called After Nature (until February 14th). Yeah, I know, coverage of that one is a little overdue, it is well worth your time, caught the extensive exhibition last week just after catching Beatriz Olabarrieta’s exhibition at the aforementioned Rose Easton Gallery. Banging out a few words about After Nature is on my long (long) list of things to do, you’ll find coverage of Beatriz Olabarrieta’s just opened show at Rose Easton via that link you just passed, that one opened last weekend and is currently running alongside the opened-today Condo show in the other side of the now much expanded Rose Easton Gallery that you find upstairs on that corner of Three Colts Lane and the Cambridge Heath Road.
For Condo this year Rose Easton is hosting Zaza’, a gallery from both Milan and Naples so we’re told. A gallery who we’re told focus on experimental practices and who, for Condo London 2026 are presenting a two-person encounter by Arlette & Sylvano Bussotti. The violin player stopped playing as I walked in, the work on the walls was kind of interesting, not sure how experimental any of it was? Here’s another #43SecondFilm, I’ll maybe go and have another look next week, Condo and East London’s galleries in general are starting to annoy a little too much, this one feels like it deserves a second visit and not after the annoyance of some of the spaces already visited today still pecking away. We need to go back without going anywhere else first, here’s the film…
Around the corner from Rose Easton Gallery on Herald Street, Herald Street Gallery aren’t answering their door, who knows if they’re open or not? You never can tell, they’re not part of Condo and it always a case of ringing the bell on their always locked door and if you’re lucky someone will come and answer it, Herald Street are another East London Gallery who don’t do signs. And none of the Three Colt Lane galleries are part of Condo this year either, well Maureen Paley‘s other space, Studio M, over at Rochelle School is but that space is always such a faff and quite honestly the door of her Three Colt Lane space is so uninviting and most of the time when I do go in I come out feeling rather underwhelmed and frankly I can’t really be bothered today. Both Mother’s Tankstation and Project Native Informant have been rewarding since they opened next door to each other at the foot of that new build on Three Colt Lane, alas, Project Native Informant is no more, what a shame, there’s been one or two rather decent shows in there. Matt Bollinger is back with another show at Mother’s Tankstation, feels like he only just had one in the space. Once again not part of Condo, but this freshly opened today Matt Bollinger exhibition really can’t be ignored.
This time the centre point of this latest rather engaging Matt Bollinger exhibition is a rather fine hand-painted piece of animation, a piece that took the artist the best part of four years to complete so we’re told. Hand painted frames, not sure if he’s gone for the full-on old school proper twenty-four frames per second? It is an impressive piece; “In Bollinger’s novelistic reality there are sufficient plot variations, randomly sequenced to the projector, so that the viewer should never experience a repeat narrative. Dawn, an ordinary young American woman, has been sleeping in her car for some time. In an attempt to carry on life as normally as possible under pressing circumstances, she has not told anyone, but wakes, and intends to head to work at an ubiquitous CVS pharmacy, sometimes she makes it, in various different ways, and sometimes she does not. Projected at scale (also viewable from the street) – in a manner whereby time seems to suspend in a CVS store, the unending tale is suspended in a sociological quagmire that not only speaks to and of middle-America, but a hypothetical, middle-everywhere. In a changing world of hard realities, Bollinger’s tone is never caustic, sardonic or judgemental, yet tender, thoughtful and sensitive to the mirrored realities of the fiction he draws, paints, animates…”
Dawn, also includes a collection of classic Bollinger graphics and his “exquisitely sensitive paintings of urban weeds – nature unfortunately in the wrong place but surviving moment to moment with outrageous optimism” – an idea and a statement as something you surely have to like as much as you surely will like the paintings themselves. Yes they are as exquisite as Matt Bollinger’s paintings so often are, yes we’ll need to come back and give both the film and the weeds proper attention. And it does always make me smile to see that classic piece of Cept pop art flavoured street art on the wall of the building over the road from inside Mother’s Tankstation, pleased to say that piece has survived for rather a long time now…
On we go once more, on past that Joe Cruz This is Love billboard from Build Hollywood – those Build Hollywood pieces really do need to stay on actual billboards like this one has and not impose themselves on the wild feral street art that doesn’t need the hand of a corporate advertising agency lording it like they have elsewhere in East London. Really not sure what I think or indeed what I want to think about Build Hollywood, do rather prefer it when the corporate street art stays on on those advertising billboards and doesn’t infringe of the real street art. We’re heading for the Mile End Road now and that yard behind the Chinese supermarket where Carlos/Ishikawa hide. Let’s hope they’re actually open this time, they didn’t bother for Frieze London’s East End Day even though they were loudly listed as being part of it on the Frieze website, annoyingly they weren’t open a couple of weeks later when their own website said they would be, haven’t bothered making the effort again until today. The gallery seems to have quite a few fingers in the Condo pie though, surely they’re not going to let us down again today? Carlos/Ishikawa are another of those galleries who don’t like to tell you where they are, no sign besides the “no parking” sign on the door, I thought No Parking was out in the wilds of Walthamstow or was it Leytonstone. It is getting rather cold and wet now, if we are to commit to walking up the Mile End Road they damn well better be open! They are.
Lloyd Corporation are in the Carlos/Ishikawa main space with a giant piece of installation and a show calledVital Difference that certainly looks impressive as you walk in, as does the glossy black and white A6 booklet that comes with the exhibition. Lloyd Corporation is a collaborative project from artists Ali Eisa and Sebastian Lloyd Rees, an evolving collaboration that takes various forms of co-produced sculptural objects as well as a “less well-defined relationship between two individual practices – of assembling, reshaping, re-contextualising and translating each other’s ideas and forms. Typically manifesting in the format of site-specific installation, it also includes the production of short texts, sculpture, prints and appropriated objects” so we’re told. Here, rather intriguingly we find a wall of, well, see-through post boxes all with some kind of reference to something or someone who does make that vital difference on the front of each box, which in turn begs the question about any of this art making any kind of vital difference, especially if only those in the know and part of the small art bubble know the piece and indeed the gallery is actually here, a sign out of there on the Mile End Road might well make a vital difference don’t you think? Why does East London art appear to never want to actually engage with the people of the East End? The people not part of their cosy little (and it really is rather little) art bubble? Vital? Certainly different, certainly powerful, powerfully filling the big back wall of the big space like that. Although most people in here on this opening afternoon seem more interested in talking to each other than reading what’s on the boxes; there’s a rather over-loud conversation about the merits of the Oasis comeback (of all things) going on over there, while someone else it telling someone else (and everyone else within earshot) about his Christmas mishaps and no one seems that concerned that someone needs $400 by Friday or that someone wants their country back or that failure doesn’t sell. What is actually going on here? What is the art or indeed what is art itself asking of us as we walk in here? Why have we walked up the Mile End Road on a cold wet Saturday afternoon to see this? I mean I like it, I like that I have, then again it is rather annoying me almost as much as I am liking it and no one ever helped me when I wanted to be an astronaut (or for that matter an artist). Bit up itself isn’t it? But then isn’t everything dear, what is art anyway? What is the point?
Meanwhile over in the little glass fronted space tacked on the the end of Carlos/Ishikawa‘s main space, Los Angeles gallery Castle are the Condo guests and there’s a handful of modestly sized James Iveson paintings waiting to be explored if only the coffee-drinking curator or whoever he is would get out of the damn way. Don’t stand in the way with your back to the paintings having a chat with your mate in this tiny space, take it outside and let us see what’s on the wall. James Iveson is a British artist living and working in Los Angeles so I guess it make sense for an LA Gallery to be showing these pieces here in London, or does it? You know what, I’m really not sure I want to debate any of it, coffee drinking man not getting out of the way of these small portrait pieces or studies of people that kind of move between figuration and abstraction when I was clearly trying to get to see the painting behind him has annoyed me too much and I’m starting to think about catching the second half of the Spurs v West Ham match in the rather inviting pub I passed walking up to the gallery. Yes, there is a sensitivity here, yes they are rather nice little paintings, albeit dare I say a touch mundane. Yes, there is a rather expressive way with colour here, looks like Mr Iverson is enjoying the LA light as we try and look at his paintings in the January gloom and the fading light of East London. Yes there is something about these paintings and yes, if you get a chance it is rather worth checking his work out in the flesh rather than on line. Yes this show feels like a small taste, an appetiser, a prelude, just a little feel of what he might have to offer when the canvas gets bigger..
So what is it to be? Walking all the way down to the other end of Whitechapel and Union Pacific Gallery and whatever they’ve got at Public or shall we call it a day and head for the pub? London’s art scene and especially East London’s art scene can be annoying at times, frustrating, why have a gallery and be too cool to tell people about your show? Why put on a show and then just stand in the way of the art and bloody-mindedly refuse to move? The Pub? More Condo? Nah, enough of it all, well for today anyway, Union Pacific and Public can wait until tomorrow. There’s a bus stop on the way home that’s evolved and become another piece of corporate art, there’s people looking at it, photographing it, I bet they’d like to know about Condo or some of the galleries they’re almost certainly not aware of… Part Three in a moment?
Previously
More Condo coverage on these pages
As always do please click in an image to see the whole thing or to run the slide show
THE ORGAN 