To call this a great little show does it a massive disservice and really it doesn’t deserve that, really though a great little show is exactly what Open Return is in the most positive of un-patronising ways (which of course sounds very patronising). This is another very painterly artist-led show in the East London throwback that is Terrace Gallery, a modest space down an almost secret side street by Haggerston Railway station here in East London. You have to like that this space is so focussed on painting when so many aren’t these days, it is refreshing, we always need paintings and painters and places to show those paintings that (we) painters make, we need to be able to walk into shows like this and just spend time with paint and paintings. I do like that most of the recent shows at this space have been put together by proactive engaged committed painters.
There’s probably some clever comment about open returns and Haggerston station and journeys to be inserted as the trains go by up above. We’re told Open Return brings together 16 artists whose work connects with ideas of repetition and “just as we can never return to exactly the same place and natural repetition leads to evolution, so repetition inevitably produces difference or change. Repeated forms or actions generate innovation, upend predictability and reshape meaning…”
You don’t really clue in to the (rather subtle) repetitive nature of each piece straight away, at first you’re kind of just walking into a cake shop of colour and texture, it isn’t that the individual pieces are competing for attention, it isn’t that there’s a noisy demand or that paintings and pieces are elbowing each other, it is that you’re not quite sure which piece demands you engage with it first (this once again is a really well hung show and once again it really works as one whole thing – group show hangs can be awful at times, there is an art to it). it is that you’re simply not sure where you want to focus first, it takes a couple of minutes to pick up on the unity of the work, the thread(s) running through it all, the positive repetitive rhythms of the show that pull you in to the individual pieces…
“The paintings collected here use various kinds of repetition – playful formal exploration, attitude of obsessive return, a means of operating in the space of not-knowing, a response to digital reiteration – to create and destabilise pictorial logic, to play with ideas of space and time, echo and return, the space between geometry and gesture, constraint and expression, and object and image. This show sees iterative making as resisting predictability rather than reinforcing it, making it a dynamic and generative force in contemporary painting”
And yes, nothing here is predictable, it very easy could have been, it could have been way too obvious, it could have been many things that thankfully it isn’t. Things here are considered, things are positively challenging (without ever needing to challenge in that confrontational way art sometimes needs to). This in an enjoyable exhibition, and expressive one, nothing is throwaway and once again I really don’t want to pick out pieces although I am going to and that Dilwyn Smith piece and the way it is hung with the light from behind coming through is as delicious as his work always is and that is a particularly good Lindsay Mapes piece, her use of thread as paint is always intriguing, that is a stand out example of Lindsay’s ongoing practice and that Lucy Jagger piece is a very powerful slice of art. I really don’t want to be picking out things though, there’s sixteen artists in here, nothing feels like filler, the worst piece in here is a strong piece and a show is only as good as the worst piece in it. Open Return is a strong group show, there’s a number of artists who have figured on these pages,, there’s a number who should figure in the future… Just a really well curated, well put together, well presented exhibition, just really good show, nothing little about it… (sw)
Terrace Gallery is open on Saturdays and Sundays, 12-6pm or by appointment, Open Return runs until Sunday 15th November. Terrace Gallery is hidden down the alley beneath the train line by the railway bridge at 4 Frederick Terrace, Haggerston, Hackney, London E8 4EW. Find it just a short walk through the park from Haggerston Overground station.
Open Return is curated by Christina Niederberger / Emma lilly / Lucy Jagger
Recently at Terrace…
As always, do click on an image to see the whole thing or to run the slide show…
