Larry Achiampong
UNnecessary Homework
Until 14 September
198 Gallery
198 Railton Road
Herne Hill
London SE24 0JT
The compassionate yet caustic narrative running through Larry Achiampong’s sensory assault on the way Britain is failing its Black youth will repeat on the conscience long after the first velvet-gloved punch of his powerful prose has been felt. Through a combination of wall texts, video, customised photos, school equipment and sports goods, Achiampong reveals a part-autobiographical, part-fictional account of growing up in ’90s London with few role models, educational opportunities and the ever present perils of gang culture. As ‘one that got away’ the upcoming artist’s potential relationship to his heritage throws another theoretical cog into the wheels of this complex and cyclical debate.
Sarah Sze
Until 22 September
Victoria Miro
16 Wharf Road
London N1 7RW
T: +44 (0)20 7336 8109
Sarah Sze’s eclectic brand of miniaturisation works the shift in scale between individually placed and mass collections of objects to vertiginous effect. From everyday domestic and construction clutter Sze builds precipitous architectural structures and geological-looking forms that work in tandem to simultaneously describe the world from the microcosmic perspective of the obsessive compulsive and the imperialist view of the topographer. Coloured lines of wool and string divide implied conceptual and spatial territories, glued and trussed elements combined to create flimsy environments and kinetic sculptures that oscillate between functional and decorative intention. Each of these staggeringly complex works appears to grow and spread before the eyes as if the impressive container of the gallery itself has been infected with a rampant systemic virus.
Clunie Reid: Life As You Like It
Until 29 September
MOT International
Unit 54/5th floor Regents Studios
8 Andrews Road
London E8 4QN
T: +44(0)20 7923 9561
This particular group of appropriated photographs by Clunie Reid are the blueprints for a previously shown body of larger scale wall collages that were never intended to leave the studio. This, perhaps then, might explain the unbridled sense of play they exude despite the retro formality of their frames. Torn from source and often re-photographed, Reid adds commentary in marker pen or biro to these curiously cropped works, sometimes to allude to personal philosophical territory, other times to puncture the artificial veneer of media and institutional imagery. One image, for example, of a magazine shoot, literally describes the different aesthetic elements of the composition as if to remind us of the everyday banality of the making process as a means of redressing the power balance between viewer and image purveyor.
Simon Periton
Until 4 October
Sadie Coles
35 Heddon Street
London W1B 4BP
T: +44 (0)207 434 2227
The paper cut-outs of previous works appear to have been relegated in terms of function to that of template in Periton’s new works. Seductive layers of spray painted forms under glass highlight the absurd crossover between global and personal politics and the separate classifications of common and iconographic imagery. Skulls, a post-punk scalpel-blade delineated silhouette of the queen and mutant floralised figures allude to graffiti and portraiture’s politically loaded past, while images of a lone camel rider and an astronaut-cum-welder might have been cut from yesterday’s paper. Periton has moved from monochrome into colour with ease to create a cocky collection of works that reflect back more than their shiny surfaces might initially imply.
‘Civil War,’ 2007
spray paint on glass, 188.5 x 133.6 x 6.2 cm
Astrid Nippoldt
Until 6 October
Mummery + Schnelle
83 Great Titchfield Street
London W1W 6RH
T: +44 (0)7710 062 967
The new partnership opens their West End gallery space with a three-part video and watercolours by the German artist who fuses old Hollywood sound effects and amateur film-making techniques with documentary authority in a work that investigates the telling of history. The whiff of newly applied paint adds a curious sensory dimension to this multi-screen experience charting public negotiation of Grutas Park in Lithuania. The site, cluttered with Soviet-era sculpture, in purpose, sits uncomfortably between historical theme park and memorial to the Gulag. Bathed in sunshine, a tourist visitor has her photo taken in Lenin’s monumental lap, while a lakeside surveillance box emits eerie institutional sounds and a woman jumps in front of the camera at repetitive intervals to swat an insect away from her face. Fact, fiction and filmic licence fight for priority in Nippoldt’s odd situationist drama.
Hannah Wilke
Until 6 October
Alison Jacques
16-18 Berners Street
London W1T 3LN
The materials and sentiments running through this solo show of works by the late feminist and body art pioneer Hannah Wilke feel of a past era. Not that they could possibly be described as out of date (for gender politics have hardly followed an uphill trajectory) just the sense that they have been telling this very pertinent story for some time. Vaginal forms, which have been reduced to a spare sculptural shorthand reminiscent of an unopened fortune cookie, dominate the first gallery like myriad apertures from which the works of other noted female artists have emerged (Chadwick, Sherman, Day, to name a few). Whether described in miniature, having colonised famous man-built postcard places, or as a large-scale ceramic group sprouting from the floor, they wink back us as if knowing of the secrets revealed in the adjacent room. Here, video and photographic works expose evidence of the diseases that killed the artist and her mother and the societal ills and rites of passage Wilke as a woman and artist felt, and likely still would, feel compelled to talk about.
Thoralf Knobloch
Until 7 October
Wilkinson
50-58 Vyner Street
London E2 9DQ
T: +44 (0)208 980 2662
Rarely do the slick aesthetic promises whispered by Thoralf Knobloch’s paintings come to fruition. Like the second-class citizens of a Facebook’d society, we are afforded limited views of their varying profiles. As much as it is possible to marvel at the technical skill with which he can describe a group of upturned boats or construct a geometric composition from a suburban window, it is the limited painterly details only just in view that speak to the imagination. Behind a prosaic, if ‘look at me’, trapezoid of hazard tape a bunch of city lights twinkle suggestively like sirens calling from somewhere possibly so much better; the man in the aforementioned window is probably just washing up, but the fact that one half of his face appears to be melting into the interior shadows promotes a more sinister interpretation. There is something annoying but utterly compelling about the way Knobloch denies us narrative ‘proof’.
Matt Calderwood: Projections
Until 11 October
David Risley Gallery
45 Vyner Street
London, E2 9DQ
T: +44 (0)208 980 2202
The balance between the everyday purpose and formally pleasing qualities of Matt Calderwood’s chosen materials for these uncharacteristic sculptures is sublimely played out in a seesaw game of weight and tension. But these works are not totally out of the realms of his practice for they bear resemblance to a few of the aesthetically clean props created during Calderwood’s process-based performances on video. Water-filled plastic containers counterbalance monumental pedestrian forms. Were these to be lifted, each cantilever structure would roll or tumble into one another like lumbering ninepins. Wandering through the wraith grey exhibition space (the shift in tonality between the walls, floor and the objects themselves is minimal) is a bit like experiencing a factory floor recreation of the Communist statues in the Moscow Sculpture Park.
Matthew Barney
20 September – 11 November
Serpentine Gallery
Kensington Gardens
London W2 3XA
T: +44 (0)207 402 6075
The extraordinary imagination of Matthew Barney looms large over London once again as the Serpentine prepares to play host to film and related works from the American artist’s ‘Drawing Restraint’ series. More creative philosophy than body of work, the ninth strand of this multimedia offering was completed in 2005 and appears to stem from Barney’s fascination with the phases of the life/making cycle. The main film (a trailer of which is available to view on the Drawing Restraint website) follows the evolution of a petroleum jelly sculpture incubated on a Japanese cargo ship and the simultaneous story of an onboard couple (an elaborately pelted Barney and wife Björk) falling in love to the choreographic tune of a tea ceremony. But as with most of Barney’s projects, a basic synopsis of the plot will do little to prepare one for the performative reality.
Tacita Dean: Wandermüde
21 September – 26 October
Frith Street
17-18 Golden Square
London W1F 9JJ UK
T: +44 (0)207 494 1550
British and Germanic sensibilities collide within Tacita Dean’s ‘Wandermüde’: a complex sounding collection of films and painted photographic imagery (the title of which refers to the notion of travelling but is the very antithesis of wanderlust). A character from a W. G. Sebald novel provides the central point of reference in the film ‘Michael Hamburger’. The work explores the idiosyncrasies of the translator and poet, as described in the author’s novel ‘Rings of Saturn’, through the way in which he tends to his environment – an apple orchard. A second film records the mediaeval architectural facets of Darmstadt’s Hessisches Landesmuseum – home to Joseph Beuys’s installation ‘Block Beuys’ – soon to be renovated into extinction, while white-gouache doctored images of ancient trees bring the exhibition suggestively back to its arboreal start.
