Photo by Ben Westoby. Courtesy of White Cube

 White Cube Mason’s Yard and Hoxton Square

Opening Hours: 10 – 6pm Tuesday – Saturday

15 July – 17 September 2011

In homage to the gimmickry of separating the artistic pair and leaving the audience guessing, this is a review of either Jake or Dinos Chapman at either Mason’s Yard or Hoxton Square.

The best thing about Jake or Dinos Chapman, exhibiting simultaneously at both White Cube galleries is, on the face of it, the most boring. Forty-seven corrugated cardboard sculptures on the ground floor at Mason’s Yard (or Hoxton Square) tread somewhere between a naïve pastiche school project by a genius child and a deliberate lazy spoof by an adult buffoon.

Fortunately, they balance delightfully on a tightrope in the middle. The aged painted sculptures would indeed fall by the wayside were it not for the simple addition of white typewritten labels using language not unfamiliar to anyone versed in Chapman Brother mythology; “Potlatch”, “Stump”, “Smear”, “9/11¹/₂”, “The curse of common sense” and “Runt”.  Adding these words has a modernising effect on the sculptures and coupled with the implicit simplicity of painted cardboard, lifts them from being unnotable props to subtly engaging artworks.

The real action of the exhibition takes place on the lower-ground floor as it is called at Mason’s Yard (or Hox…). A handful of similar looking sculptures, this time made of black-painted steel and towering around three metres in height, provide perches for taxidermied pigeons and crows, as well as, focal points for gatherings of menacing flayed mannequins dressed in Nazi uniforms.

The four walls are hung with grey painted etchings (Human Rainbow 1 – 38), pencil drawings on dot-to-dot printed pages (various titles quoting ‘weird fiction’ pioneer HP Lovecraft), photogravures of artworks shoehorned via collage into home collections (Living with dead art 1- 10) and eighty messily blackened Goya etchings (From the blackened beyond).

On the same floor in the dimly lit lift lobby stands a Ku Klux Klan mannequin whose lower half is marked out by colourful tie-dye, rainbow socks with sandals and an erection pointing at an intricately defaced Pieter Brueghel painting. This confusion of loaded provocative symbolism draws little more than a visitor’s curious peek up the aroused mannequin’s gown.

So we have a lower level that includes Nazis, Goya, Ku Klux Klan, stuffed crows, naughty drawings, casual buggery and an erection. All the excitement of what could pass for the ‘niche’ viewing interests of many semi-educated middle-class males with a subscription to satellite television and broadband internet. All I’m missing is Sky TV and yet, I find this basement of outlandish subjects to be surprisingly boring; a roll of the eyes inadvertently greets the periodical squirts of shit (white paint) from a dead pigeon’s arse.

If you are familiar with the work of the oft-called enfants terribles of British Art, this exhibition (along with its sister exhibition across town) seems much the same as usual. It traces, dot-to-dot, previously visited shock imagery and if not quite Chapman-by-numbers, it is certainly as clichéd as using such a line at the end of a review.

Candid Arts Trust: 3 Torrens Street, London, EC1V 1NQ

Opening Hours: Daily 12 – 6pm

19 – 28 August 2011

The divide between art and architecture is the theme of Candid Arts’ latest group exhibition, which promotes dialogue between the two disciplines in order to attempt to bridge the gap between them. One of the major triumphs of this show is that it seamlessly achieves the fusion of the divide, leading the viewer to question whether there is such a division after all.

 Art and architecture are fused here by a blurring of the boundary which allows us to step back and see them as siblings who are genetically related but orphaned by practicalities. Michelle-Marie Letelier’s A Machine Too Big to Operate betrays an architectural concern to represent space at such a level of detail that one gains a sense of what it could be like to live with it. Catrina Stewart’s endlessly fascinating models invite contemplation of the possibility of radical urban space through a blaze of colour and intricate detail. Gabriela Fabrowska presents photographs of roofs with the series It is Hard to be Down When You are Up, giving a glimpse of an often unseen dimension of the city in which discreet exterior spaces are created without apparent purpose beyond their relation to the buildings’ interiors. In these works, space is represented as the contingent possibility of something occurring within formalised parameters.

 There is, however, much more to the works than the mere formality of space; an architectural language is articulated with an artistic concern for conveying a certain emotional or psychological depth. The unsettling of perspective and stark metallic finish in J Collingridge’s Empty Underground prints, makes the everyday banality of the Tube a site of fearful reflection. The grim reality of living and working in Dubai as part of the relentless machine of capitalism is shown in Technicolor by Alessandro Costa’s photographs. Here places are represented as more than technical abstractions that began life on a drawing board; they are revealed as the theatre in which the everyday lives of people are played out, revealing an existentially troubling disparity between the aesthetic values of the design of space and the crushing dissatisfaction it produces in the people who inhabit it.

 A profound insight into the apparent divide between art and architecture is provided by two works in particular. The site-specific installation, Unsettled Territory by David Tannian, ambles through the middle of the gallery with a seeming precariousness. Its timbers undulate in a fractured line, creating a journey between two points that defines the space without enclosing it, leading one to question the permanence, solidity and clarity to which both art and architecture are supposed to aspire. There is a deceptive simplicity in Maria Lander’s Mirror, which is just a mirror with a rectangle painted on part of its surface. At first sight, it might appear to be obscure or lazy, but once you see the reflection of the living world from multiple angles you begin to realise how the work conveys the fluidity of space. It acts as a TV screen which shows the organic unfolding of human life within the confines of the room, opening up the possibility of events occurring in real time but observed from a removed perspective. Both of these works sit at the intersection of art and architecture by dramatising the interaction between the designed world and its inhabitants.

 There is a worry that whilst art produces artefacts that are self-justifying ends in themselves, architecture – in the context of an exhibition – can only fall short by producing things that are a means to an end, such as a master-plan for a city or a drawing of a building. This concern, however, dissolves once you accept that the distinction between art and architecture is largely an artificial one that exists for purely economic purposes. In essence, both are creative exercises which need not be constrained by the notions of means and ends. This is particularly well demonstrated by Omar Ghazal’s meticulous drawings, which present a world so brutal and baffling that the enchanting possibility of it constitutes a work of art in itself, which can also be said for Steven Baumann’s The New London Necropolis. These are more than just drawings of proposals – they are invitations to reconsider reality.

 The curators have selected the works in such a way as to suggest a neat answer to the question of how or where architecture and art meet. They both lead the viewer to imagine something – a place, a world, a people, a feeling – that exists beyond the scope of the artefact itself. Whether it is through figuration or abstraction, the works here take the viewer beyond the obvious to demonstrate that whatever pragmatic preoccupations may separate art and architecture, they are both centrally concerned with proposing alternate worlds and ways of living.

Monochrome stripes, pixels and retro hues trace the curved forms in The Arch Window at Southwark. Spring combines the sense of colour, pattern and shape that is typical of Mark Croxford’s rhythmic sculptures. His interest in contemporary art and design seemed a perfect match with Adeline Guy when they worked together on the show Acid Drops earlier this year. As well as being Registrar for White Cube, Adeline runs the art programme for Libertine and is embarking on a journey as a curator with a particular interest in commercial spaces. I caught up with both of them to talk about past, current and future projects.

You first worked together on the show Acid Drops- where did the name come from?

Adeline: I did my PHD on Colour Theory in artists and I just looked at those colours. I kept thinking, because I’m French, “Bonbon acidulé”, and how can I say that in English; it came out as Acid Drops.

Your works are often colourful and incorporate pattern.

Mark: I think it is a lot to do with the actual shape side as to what is going to happen to them later. I just like the patina of cities and the way that patterns can actually change the shape of an object and they give it a different resonance. I think that if you are using colours and patterns with shapes then it is an interesting angle to use. It gives off a kind of frequency that brings different tones to them.

You started out as a graphic designer and on your website you say you are inspired by architecture. Do you consider design a very important part of your work?

Mark: My work is influenced by my journey in a way. Certainly, the beginnings of that were that I started off as a graphic designer in the days of Paste up and in my practise as I’ve progressed, I’ve used graphic design and references to architecture as a way of making work. I’m really interested in Brutalist architecture like Corbrusier and Ernö Goldfinger. That really extreme design really appeals to me. Many of my shapes are the isolated and quieter moments of those strong building.

As the curator for Acid Drops, did you feel that Mark’s pieces worked well in what is more of a commercial gallery space because of the  combination of his design and artistic background?

Adeline: It worked really well because you understood the space so well.

Mark: The space is very giving. That particular venue is extremely easy to work in because it does have a very hard city edge to it but at the same time you can hang things at gallery height, or maybe slightly higher, the works directly referenced their industry and they referenced the space well.

Adeline: Yes, it’s not the White Cube but it is a creative and advertising office space and the walls are asking for work to be hung. There is such a lot of reference between the advertising world and the art world in Marks works, as well as, the relationship between some prior works like pop art and the 70’s. That just sings.

How did you find viewers reacted to the work?

Adeline: They really liked it but the types of viewers were different. They weren’t all arty orientated or art lovers. You had the advertising types; you had the journalists and you had the photographers with all different reactions. It was really nice to see the whole body of Mark’s works together. I think everyone took their own background and would say “that reminds me of that” and maybe not trying to put in the contemporary art context was quite nice. As you know, working in a gallery you are always trying to put in a fresh view.

Mark: I think also there is something really healthy about showing contemporary work in different venues. Be it a business context or an educational context or obvious a gallery space. It does change the intention of your work and it does make you look at it in different ways.

You are currently exhibiting Spring at GPstudio’s The Arch Window. How do you find such an architectural space relates to your work?

Mark: Certainly with that space, because it’s a railway arch with large windows, you get a lot of passing people. It was really enjoyable for me when I first installed it to stand across the road for half an hour and watch people’s reactions as they walked past. It was quite a refreshing thing because my shapes relate to references points and in my visual language,  I really explore not only the objects but the space they pull as well.

In Spring, there are seven free-standing objects that relate to each other. They are based on drawings and photographs that I have been doing recently which reference landscape and the city.

Is it a London experience of the landscape you are referring to?

Mark: A lot of my work relates to the urban landscape, a lot of it relates to living in the city. I live in Hackney, my studio is in Hackney. I think your environment really informs your work and it is a very strong part of my language. I think the shapes I use are recognisable, well they certainly are to me but in their own way they reference some of my favourite buildings and some of my favourite elements of those buildings. My sculptural language is something that has taken an awful long time to find and it is extremely personal in that way.

You have travelled and exhibited in Switzerland, Finland, Estonia as well as in the UK. Is travel integral to the ideas in your art?

Mark: I started out doing snow carving events and I was invited to a wood-carving symposium many years ago, the first one I went to was around ’96 and it really opened my eyes to what you can do with wood and how you can use very traditional materials in contemporary ways. In terms of object making, it was a great experience for me. I don’t really agree with competitive art-making at all, it’s a hindrance but as an event they are quite good fun.

You can get an awful lot from travelling. It is interesting to see the way other people work; the way other people think about making work and how they approach their subject matter. The term symposium, which people feel very strong about mentioning at these events means the coming together of minds so that’s really what was going on there.

Your works are often wall-based and others are free-standing, do you consider them to be sculpture?

Mark: I actually think of it all as 2 ½ dimensional. I make sculpture but I think when you are working with deep relief, the way that you use colour and form can really change the shape of the work. It is something that I am quite conscious of now, making a number of different images fit together, like with triptychs and they really resonate the space between them together. That is really something that I am going to pursue.

Finally, what are you working on at the moment?

Adeline: I’m doing an exhibition that will probably take me two years on pop culture but mainly concentrating on The Cure, partly because my partner is one of their biggest fans on the planet. Now, I’m trying to find funding through advertising and trying to find a space to accommodate that type of work. With Mark, it is on going so I would like to do something in the next couple of months once we’ve found another space.

Mark: At the moment I am designing neon pieces for a project which will coincide with Frieze week. I’m really interested to know how I can get neon colours to work with the colours of my present sculptures and having them fabricated will be a new journey for me as well. I’m using neon and Perspex and I’m trying to find interplay between those two and see how it all works whilst using very similar forms in my other works.

Visit Spring at The Arch Window, 74 Great Suffolk Street,
London SE1 0BL, http://archwindow.wordpress.com/2011/05/23/spring/

20 May – 9 July

It is not difficult to see why Georg Baselitz is one of the world’s best-selling living artists. Here is a man who obviously enjoys painting, who delights in the very physicality of paint and its manifold expressive qualities. This unfettered joy emanates from the canvases like an infectious laugh, giving a palpable exuberance to the entire room. In his latest show at the White Cube, Baselitz effortlessly demonstrates the talent for making paint speak from the depths of the soul that has sustained his position in the artworld for nearly fifty years.

‘Between Eagles and Pioneers’ is a collection of new works that explore German history through the lens of cultural symbolism and personal memory. The exhibition is comprised of two series of large-scale canvases: on the ground floor, Be Prepared, Always Prepared, which is characterised by a warm yellow glow, and on the lower ground floor, Eagles’ and ‘Dogs goes for a cooling blue juxtaposed with arresting black. Together, they make a show of contrasts and even conflicts between emotions and ideas.

Those who are encountering Baselitz for the first time will be immediately struck by the deliberate mistake. The paintings seem to be hung upside down, which gives the whole show an intriguing element of surprise from the outset. In fact, as far as Baselitz is concerned, they are hung the right way up, which happens to be upside down. If, then, you are already familiar with Baselitz’s work, this is a comfortingly familiar technique which promises great things.

The upside down orientation of the paintings is important because it helps to enforce – in a literal, non-painterly way – a central tenet of Baselitz’s method. This is that whilst the paintings are, by his own admission, content-heavy and geared towards unravelling a complex history and cultural identity, it is crucial to understand that the message is only communicated through the medium itself. That is, through the very matter of the colours, lines, shapes, brushstrokes, drips and textures of the paint. Therefore, the paintings are hung upside down in order to subvert our attempts to read the paintings primarily or solely through the depiction of imagery.

The series, Be Prepared, Always Prepared, engages with Baselitz’s childhood experience of the Young Pioneer movement in Communist East Germany. The movement was similar to the Scouts in its emphasis on outdoor activities and readiness, but was designed by the Communist party to indoctrinate the young with its ideology. The paintings are portraits of two figures posing in the position of the Pioneers’ greeting. The yellow backgrounds make them glow with optimism, while the black drips and splashes that form the outlines speak of childish abandon. These pictures pay homage to fond memories at the same time as asking searching questions about past errors. This nostalgia, tinged with self-reflection, leads the pictures to falter somewhere between optimism and doubt, which is communicated by the careful layering of pigment and the delicate control of chaos in composition.

The Eagles series is altogether darker in the way that it scrutinises German cultural identity through the national symbol of the eagle, whose rhetorical force shifted dramatically for the worse after the second world war. Deepest black paint drips from the top of each canvas, all the way down to the bottom, partially obscuring the image of the eagle, as if trying to hide the shame or to symbolise blood spilt in its name. In contrast to the other series, these pictures fill one with a lingering disquiet, which is only mitigated by the fact that their sheer scale and Baselitz’s mastery of paint nonetheless make them easy and certainly pleasurable to look at.

There are also some smallish watercolours in this exhibition, exploring the same themes as the paintings. They are technically accomplished, of course, but do not add much to the show, either conceptually or aesthetically. The vigour, vibrancy and emotional energy of Baselitz’s work is in the way that he applies paint to the canvas in layers, subtly mixing colours, allowing the paint to drip freely and the globules to remain protruding. This effect is absent in the watercolours, which, encased behind glass, are too sedate to convey the vivacity of their subjects.

Very often, one has to find exactly the right angle and distance from which to view a painting in order to read it as a coherent composition. The real secret of these paintings is in the fact that they can be – and should be – viewed from all angles and distances. No matter where you stand in the gallery, they impart a moral of their story, whether it is in the surprising levels of detail close up or the lumps and bumps of pigment when viewed from the side across the plane of the canvas. This, again, is a result of the fact that Baselitz is not about depiction so much as he is about expression through physicality.

The major triumph of this show is that Baselitz treads the fine line between complexity and simplicity. The complexity of the subject, saturated in history and memory, is offset by the apparent simplicity of the paintings; and the simplicity of the paintings merely glosses over the complexity of the technique that produces them. The simple delight in the physicality of paint is pitted against the more complex delight in memory, which mirrors the emotionally confused messages of hope and doubt. Whether you choose to frame this as rampant expressionism or postmodern tomfoolery, it is the reason why these paintings are so endlessly fascinating and could realistically detain you in the gallery for hours on end.

Peter Kennard, Original photomontages, 1972–96

Raven Row, 56 Artillery Lane, E1 7LS

2 May – 22 May

Shortly after he declared war on Iraq, a picture of Tony Blair began to circulate on the internet. It showed Mr Blair, smiling toothily as he took his own photograph against a backdrop of fiery explosions. A clever piece of Photoshop trickery, the image was a striking elicitation of public opinion of the then prime minister and the war itself.

It was conceived by Peter Kennard – the man behind some of the most iconic anti-war imagery of the past 40 years – and although it doesn’t feature in At Earth, the London-based artist’s latest retrospective currently being held at Raven Row, its characteristically dark satirical rhetoric is present throughout the works in show; from an image of a fully-armed soldier taking the field in a floodlit and packed out football stadium, to one depicting a group of well-dressed and no doubt well-off gamblers crowding around a blackjack table, placing bets using nuclear warheads rather than chips.

Working mainly in the medium of photomontage, Kennard uses canny juxtapositions to highlight the moral wrongs of the world. By manipulating existing and often familiar imagery, he creates disturbing dystopian visions, which subjugate the viewer into agreement with his persuasive polemic.

In his earliest works – which he used to bolster support for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament – this involved quite crudely cutting and pasting images of nuclear arms into the most unlikely of places; into the hands of the glamorous and the rich, into the mouthpiece of a gas mask and even on top of the cart in a reproduction of John Constable’s The Hay Wain.

Following this, other motifs began appearing in his work as his political agenda began to grow, encompassing issues and themes including environmentalism, poverty and war. The artist also extended his practice beyond the handmade photomontage, flexing his painterly muscles in a series of anti-war prints in which he painted red targets over grainy and enlarged photographs of civilians, and experimenting in digital media in a large number of works, including one that gradiates a greyscale image of the Earth into that of a pollution emitting power station, and another that transposes an aerial view of a shanty town onto that of a sky scraper- filled city.

Much like the stark messages behind them, many of his works are in black and white: they are executed with varying degrees of subtlety, and so with varying degrees of success. The overall effect of his oeuvre, however, cannot be denied or indeed ignored. Kennard has achieved a rare sort of notoriety for his work, which is celebrated by art institutions (his work appears in the Tate and the V&A collections), the national press (he has featured in every one of the UK’s national broadsheets) and the general public alike.

This exhibition, which expounds the full length and breadth of the artist’s career and staunch left wing ideology, will make you laugh, ponder and indeed re-think your own moral and political agenda, and will leave you in no doubt as to why he has enjoyed the success that he has.

Gabriel Orozco, My Hands Are My Heart 1991

Tate Modern:

Opening Hours: Sunday to Thursday, 10am – 6pm; Friday and Saturday, 10am – 10pm

19 January – 25 April 2011

Tate Modern’s latest exhibition reminded me of a personal truth.  When I think back, Gabriel Orozco was the artist that sparked my interest in contemporary art.  The first time I encountered that black and white chequered skull, White Kites 1997 was whilst researching for my final essay on an Art Foundation. The next thing I knew, I was enrolling on a History of Art degree. The painstakingly applied graphite on bone still captures every last piece of my attention.  Perfectly summing up the dualisms of life; work and recreation, pain and pleasure, science and art, as well as, the inevitability of death. And years before Damien Hirst’s obnoxious diamond encrusted bling.

Orozco has a way that makes the otherwise municipal objects of everyday life always seem personal.  Although often the titles of his works may read like a list from a construction site (Elevator, Ventilator, Four Bicycles, Yielding Stone); every time, Orozco brings a human-touched element to the works.  There is a car made for one in LA DS 1993; an abandoned lift that has been shrunk to fit the artist’s own dimensions in Elevator 1994. We also find his visible finger marks in My Hands Are My Heart 1991 created by tenderly kneading clay within the form of his palms.

Inanimate objects even take on human characteristics.  We witness the story of a yellow Schwalbe through photographs across the walls of the central gallery.  The iconic East German vehicle has become a character as we are taken on a journey through Berlin and it encounters alike models.  Somehow we recognise body language, physical conversation and sentient traits in the way the scooters have been captured together.

More often then not this playful tone is evident in the works.  From re-appropriating the chess board on a skull to reinventing the rules of the game itself in Horses Running Endlessly 1995, Orozco takes the familiar and shakes it up into something fresh and fun.  With Ventilator 1994, bringing a wry smile to your face as you become mesmerised by swirling toilet paper attached to a ceiling fan.  The modified electronic device suddenly appears like a metaphor for our daily rituals.

The Tate presents a faithful retrospective that demonstrates the entirety of the artist’s scope from photography, installations, drawings and sculpture.  There is a lot to be said about an artist that can effortlessly skip between medium and continent.  Permanently in a state of movement he lives and works across the world from Mexico City, Paris and New York.  He takes the traces of urban culture from all these places and translates them into something we can all recognise but in a new light.  Orozco’s blurring of art and objects speak of an era of transit, immigration and multiculturalism.

Yet, at the end of this tale between man and machine we are reminded of the ultimate price that must be paid. In the final room, you walk through the leftover particles of fabric and hair that have been collected from tumble driers.  Stretched over washing lines, the fuzzy remnants hover like ghosts opposite the dark clay works Pelvis, Torso, Head and Arms that lie like rotting fossils.   The artist is confronting us with a head-on collision of the consequences of society’s pollution.

Orozco has made a lifetimes body of work transforming the banal and discarded traces of modern life. He turns spat out toothpaste into delicate drawings and makes a soggy old deflated ball look like a water feature.  In Chicotes 2010, he personally arranges years of gathered burst tires and scrap vehicle parts from Mexican highways into something that emanates Beuys’s socio-political sculptural installations.  The result is a show that feels full on energy.  He is an artist that almost miraculously recreates from the seemingly futile and in doing so constantly challenges the viewer’s perspective.

But with his junk poetry comes the tragedy of the modern world.  At the end of the day, what do we have to show for ourselves?  A collection of bones, a couple of lines in an obituary and the devastating remains from our consumerism. Orozco sums this up most eloquently with Breath on Piano 1993, a vestige of the simplest and most beautiful moments of life.  Gone before you know it, nothing lasts forever.

Angela de la Cruz, Compressed (Blue), 2011

Lisson Gallery: 52-54 Bell Street, London, NW1 5DA

Opening Hours: Monday to Friday 10am – 6pm; Saturday 11am – 5pm

March 30th – April 30th

Delicate is a not a word often used to describe Angela de la Cruz’s art; her crumpled, creased and crushed forms typically implore a much more violent vocabulary, one that suggests the artist’s methods have more in common with wanton vandalism or an illegal skirmish, than sensitive creation.  Yet what is striking about the new works in this exhibition is the delicacy with which the artist has handled her materials.

There is an element of aggression that must have gone into the making of these pieces – canvases forced over disproportionate frames or ripped from their stretchers, metal boxes bent out of shape – but this aggression is calculated, controlled.

Compressed, a series of four aluminum boxes, aren’t as their titles suggest entirely crushed but rather caught in various states of compression: the entire length of the box Compressed (White) appears buckled and skewed, while Compressed (Blue) is more intact, only it’s lower half warped and distorted.

In the show’s title pieces Transfer (White) and Transfer (Ivory), the artist’s subjugation is once again more subtle; a rusting steel leg is the only mar on these assemblages of furniture, a far cry from the splintered wardrobes and legless chairs that won her a Turner Prize nomination last year.

That said there are a number of signature-style works to assure us that there is still an aggression and vigor to the artist’s practice. Deflated, a flaccid sheet of canvas hangs limply on a wall upstairs, while the artist’s experiments with canvases and stretchers continue in the form of Hung 16 and Extension.

Ironically de la Cruz’s quite unique concept of roughing up her work was one that she stumbled upon quite by accident a number of years ago, after snapping the wooden frame of a painting she was working on. Now that destruction has become her craft, however, there is nothing accidental or fated about the violations of her works.

Ida Appleboorg, Monalisa, 2009

17 March – 30 April 2011

Hauser & Wirth: 23 Savile Row, London, W1S 2ET

Opening Hours: Tuesday to Saturday, 10am – 6pm.

www.hauserwirth.com

When asked to write a review of an exhibition, the critic is asked to look into their pool of knowledge on a particular subject and, taking an impartial view (if this is ever possible), write an informative text. They are asked to examine the works on show and decide whether objectively the show or the artist have accomplished the difficult task of making us want to visit the exhibition.

Whether the critic enjoyed themselves or not, liked the work or not (on a personal, non-rational level) should not take too much weight when they finally sit down to write. Otherwise the review becomes an expression of a personal opinion – and since we are all entitled to one, completely useless in terms of its objectivity.

It is for this reason, that I find it difficult to write this review, for I did not enjoy the show one bit.

Apparently, Ida Appleboorg likes to call herself a “generic” artist, but what does this mean when you show up at a gallery full of paintings? Is she trying to disassociate herself with painters or painting? Does she have an un-painterly body of work that is not on display here? Does it matter?

I think what matters is the work rather than the name, and in this case the work doesn’t do it for me.

There is a piece entitled Monalisa – a wooden structure resembling a room, in which the walls are covered with drawings of vaginas, which conceal a painting of what looks like a woman with the body of a deformed child. This piece is, in my opinion, more disturbing than interesting.

The same method of concealment is used to slightly better effect in Trintiy Towers and Mercy Hospital, two dyptichs that rather cleverly conceal the subjects of the paintings and, with an almost humorous approach, remind us that the things that happen “behind closed doors” no longer remain such, in this contemporary society of vigilance and the voyeur.

The show itself is very well curated – the museography invites you to walk around the paintings, more like going around gravestones in a cemetery than two-dimensional objects in a gallery, however, the works are as hermetic as their titles suggest. And so perhaps I can conclude that it is Appleboorg work that can be called generic – in the sense that when you have seen one painting, you have seen them all.

Mona Hatoum, Suspended

25th February – 2nd April

White Cube: 25-26 Mason’s Yard, St. James’s, London SW1Y 6BU

Opening Hours: Tuesday to Saturday, 10am–6pm; Friday, open all night.

www.whitecube.com

The map has become something of a motif in the artwork of Mona Hatoum. Her experiments in cartography have seen her trace the territorial divisions of Jerusalem using beads and blocks of olive soap, create a world map from the missing piles in an ornamental rug, and construct a giant metal globe that glows to highlight areas of conflict and high pollution. In Bunker, the artist continues to extend her practice along this topographical tangent with three new installations that plot the physical, geographical and social characteristics of real and imaged cities.

Ironically, it’s not always clear quite where you stand with these works. The first, the site-specific installation Suspended, features 35 swings hung from the ceiling, each with the street map of a different capital city carved into the seat. Walking between these floating cities, you can’t help but notice the similarity between the pattern of roads, rivers and railways in each map. Reduced to their geometries, these cities – picked at random from six of the world’s seven continents and no doubt extremely different looking at street level – look surprisingly alike.

In the basement of the gallery the viewer is presented with another nameless city in the shape of Bunker, a ghost-like model town made up of 23 metal edifices. These buildings, constructed from steel tubing stacked horizontally and vertically, are victim to some quite brutal lacerations: the pock marks and fissures that scar the walls, floors and ceilings, suggestive of heavy artillery damage.

The generic nature of these architectural structures suggests that Bunker could be based upon any modestly developed but war-torn city. It could be a city in the state of Israel, the country that Hatoum’s parents were forced to flee two years before her birth due to religious tensions; it could be Beirut, the city the artist herself was forced into exile from when civil war broke out in the seventies; or equally it could be London or Berlin – the cities she currently divides her time between – both of which have, in the past, been ravaged by war.

The blank facades of these skeletal structures make it impossible to determine which, if any, of these conjectures are true. The only evidence we are given, indeed the only work in the exhibition with any geographical signage, comes in the shape of 3D Cities, three table-mounted maps, one of Beirut, one of Bagdad and one of Kabul.

Regular ordinance survey maps, these two-dimension pieces have been modified by a number of convex depressions and erections carved into the plain of the map. What they signify is unclear, we can only guess, informed by the artist’s past works, that these are areas of high pollution, over population or violent conflict.

Ultimately, like the rest of the show the interpretation of this piece is left open to the viewer. Like a good book, Hatoum’s works in this exhibition don’t draw too pointed a conclusion.

17th March – 30th April

Hauser & Wirth: 23 Savile Row, London, W1S 2ET

Opening Hours: Tuesday to Saturday, 10am – 6pm.

www.hauserwirth.com

Talk about an Archival Impulse. Although Hal Foster didn’t write about this contemporary obsession with archives until 2004, Dieter Roth has been creating archives in all shapes and forms since the late 60s, Every View of a City being perhaps his most comprehensive to date.

The Swiss-born artist is probably best known for his artist’s books and ephemeral sculptures (often made of cheese, chocolate and other organic matter prone to decomposition). He was part of the Fluxus movement, however the dark and political undertones of his practice distinguished him from the more light-hearted approach of the group.

This posthumous exhibition at Hauser & Wirth was put together with the help of his two sons, who together with artist friend Pal Magnusson helped Roth to conduct his recording of the city. When you visit the show, your first impression is that in a rather conventional way, it presents a set of slides of Reykjavik projected on the walls of the gallery. Nothing new so far. However, in what can only be described as an obsessive-compulsive twist, there are 31,035 slides – in other words, every view of the city, each one meticulously labelled and stored in projector rods.

Roth first moved to the Icelandic capital from the 70’s and started this work in 1973, from what I can only see as a slightly obsessive fascination with the place. According to the gallery, the work spanned from 1973-1975 / 1990-1998, though one can only imagine, from the monumentality of the task, how long it must have taken. It is interesting that not one of the images shows the slightest sign of any living beings inhabiting the city except for plants, thus effectively ridding the images of the associations that we make when we view photographs of people. Instead we see four different views of a wooden house, deserted street views, an empty dockyard and many more snaps of what looks like a ghost-city.

Generally, Roth places his work outside of the linguistic approach used by Fluxus artists and seeks to question the formalities of art. Like Joseph Beuys (but with a very different methodology) he views life itself as art, where objects and experiences are not hierarchically prioritised. You could effectively say that Every View of A City is the perfect example – by “indistinctively” photographing as many views as possible of Reykjavik, he has created a new visual dictionary of the city.

There is something fascinating by the obscene amount of images (the gallery has strategically placed the slides not in use on display next to the projectors) and I highly recommend visiting with at least an hour to spare – there are strategically placed chairs next to the projectors, for such visits.

My only criticism perhaps, is the lonely desk in the corner – an object, transposed form Roth’s studio, which shows part of the process of making this piece. However, like an archival shrine, it lies in the corner, unapproachable (you are not allowed to touch it) and unexplored. I’m not sure what Mr Roth would make of this.

Uwe Wittwer, Interior negative (2009)

16th February – 2nd April

Haunch of Venison: 6 Burlington Gardens, London W1S 3ET

Opening Hours: Monday to Friday, 10am – 6pm; Saturday, 10am – 5pm

www.haunchofvenison.com

There is something quite ironic about the title New Paintings, given that the works in this exhibition both feel and look extremely old.

This impression may owe itself to the fact that these exquisitely composed interiors, still lifes and portraits are based upon source material that is exactly that. From works by Flemish, Dutch, and Spanish Old Masters, to black and white pre-war snapshots passed down through his family, much of Wittwer’s subject matter is rooted in the past.

It may also be attributed to the heavy palette of sepia hues employed by the artist; mottled ecrus and umbers that weigh, not just on the canvases themselves, but on the room and the impression of the viewer.

Whatever the reason, this sense of agedness pervades Wittwer’s subjects – be them people, animals, landscapes or interiors – making them seem tired, wrinkled, old.

In Interieur (2007) the artist paints his sitters with such ghost-like pallor that almost absents them from the scene, while in Portrait (2011) a young girl stands, teddy bear in one hand and walking cane in the other, wearing a disconsolate expression that pulls not just at the corners of her mouth but on her entire being: her slumped shoulders, tired eyes and lifeless complexion.

With the same vagueness of hand, the artist depicts his interiors with a blurred abstraction that causes the walls, floors and ceilings all slump into one as in Interior negative (2009), or else people to become indeterminable from their surroundings, such as the man in Interior (2008) whose figure is difficult to distinguish from the bed on which he lies.

As a medium, oil paintings are traditionally concerned with depicting the real, as John Berger said “the colour, the texture, the tangibility of an object”. But in these works Wittwer chooses to forfeit detail, in order to instead communicate something much more striking: a sense of moment.

What really impresses upon the viewer looking at these pieces is not the masterful handing of the paint or consummate composition, but the forlorn beauty and powerful ability of these paintings to arouse an overwhelming sense of nostalgia.

Jack Strange, Zip And Zing (installation view), performance, duration: five minutes, intermittently, 2011

When I met up with curator Sarah Williams at Jerwood Space she had a rather bizarre list of tasks to be completed before her new exhibition SHOW opened at the gallery the following week. Lobster suits needed to be delivered, a cave needed to be built, and a temporary wall, with two thigh-sized holes at either end, needed to be installed. These aren’t the usual sorts of tasks occupying a curator in the lead up to an opening, but then SHOW is no ordinary exhibition.

Featuring newly conceived works by three artists – Edwina Ashton, Jack Strange and Bedwyr Williams – SHOW is a 37 day exhibition of live and documented performance pieces. It is a rare example of an exhibition dedicated to the medium, because despite the fact that performance art has enjoyed something of resurgence over the past few years, its presence in the gallery is still overwhelmingly fleeting, with one-off performances often tagged onto an exhibition rather than serving as the main focus.

But for Williams it was important that SHOW included works that were set within a much longer timeframe.  “There could have been 20 artists and a different performance every night, but I wanted to explore issues of duration, and for people to come in and view it as an exhibition, as they would come and see a painting,” she says.

In order to do this Jerwood Visual Arts has commissioned three very different live pieces: a one-off piece, an ongoing performance and a developing performance. So there will be what Williams describes as “a nice balance of activity”.

Bedwyr Williams, Urbane Hick (installation view), performance, installation and limited edition book, duration: 30 minutes, 2011

Bedwyr Williams, an artist known for his satirical and often autobiographical works, will perform the one-off live piece on the opening night of the exhibition. This will comprise material from his past performances – from art school to the present day – and will document the history of his practice, as well as the role and representation of performance art in a gallery context. “Bedwyr is a very experienced performance artist, having performed in various places, and has a brilliant insight into the practicalities of it.” Williams explains. “He is interested in the ways curators deal with it as a medium and is fascinated by the need to commodify it.”

For those unable to make the live performance, a video of the piece will be shown for the remainder of the exhibition, and other live performances – a Rocky Horror Show-esque wall of legs by Jack Strange, and an anthropomorphic exploration by Edwina Ashton – will ensure that there is always something for visitors to the gallery to see.

Ashton’s piece, like many of her previous works, will explore the crossovers between human and animal behaviour the idea for her performance revolving around the little known fact that lobsters, unlike many other creatures, rearrange their habitat. Williams describes how they “are going to build a cave on wheels, that the artist can move around the gallery and inhabit, which she will do wearing a specially made lobster suit.”

Ashton has even enrolled other artists to don the crustacean suit and take up residence in the cave, with a series of practitioners, including sound artists, performance artists and a painter, having agreed to participate in the performance. She has set a series of instructions that each of them must follow, but it likely that in spite of this quite prescriptive approach, each residency will be different, with participants responding to the task in quite unique and unexpected ways.

“It will be interesting to see how lots of different brains react” Williams says, “Edwina has invited a wide range of artists including Alex Baker, Aaron Williamson, Julia MacKinlay, Jordan McKenzie and Kit Poulson, and even her mother to take part.”

Edwina Ashton, Peaceful serious creatures (lobster arranging), (installation view), performance, duration: three hours intermittently, 2011

Also relying on the participation of others will be Jack Strange’s work, which will be performed for the duration of the exhibition, and which also relates in many ways to his previous works. “It is a piece that Jack has had in the back of his mind and wanted to realise for some time” Williams explains, “But he hasn’t found a way of achieving it. It’s quite a big undertaking to build the construction needed to house this performance, especially if it were only to exist for one night.”

The construction in question is a false wall, with a hole cut at either end through which two performers will dangle one of their legs. Each participant will be required to “shake their leg gently” for five minutes in every quarter of an hour. “It’s about the endurance of the participants and this idea of the repeated action.” Williams explains. “There is lot of repeated action within Jack’s other works, which I see as a sort of frustration of wanting to show the live thing.”

From the recruitment of participants for Strange’s piece, to the writing of the accompanying essay (which Williams is still in the throes of writing when I meet her), realising this exhibition, in the curator’s own words, is “a massive task”. But, if anyone is up to it then it is Williams, whose experience – as both a curator of extraordinarily experimental live shows and artist – has enabled her to successfully undertake this quite ambitious venture.

Of course there are still plenty of things to be done, and as she points out during our conversation, most of these pieces won’t become properly formed until they are realised. “Performance is of the moment and can be adapted or changed. This is all still an idea, there is always an uncertainty – anything can happen.” But this is exactly what is so exciting about SHOW.

“Normally in the process of developing the proposal for an exhibition you discover and uncover what that exhibition is going to be” Shonagh Manson, Director of Jerwood Visual Arts, concludes “but with SHOW it only just began at that point. At the moment we are still talking about ideas, but it will all become a reality on the 15^th.”

SHOW opens Wednesday 16th March and runs at Jerwood Space until Thursday 21st April. For more information see the Jerwood Visual Arts website.

Jerwood Visual Arts (JVA) is a contemporary gallery programme of awards, exhibitions and events at Jerwood Space. Jerwood Visual Arts promotes and celebrates the work of talented emerging artists and curators across the disciplines of drawing, painting, sculpture, applied arts, photography and moving image. It also aims to make connections and provoke conversations within and across the different disciplines. JVA is a major initiative of the Jerwood Charitable Foundation.

Gemma Nelson, Blanc And The Neighbours Of Zero, Indian ink, enamel, gold thread and sequins, 2011

Driven by a myriad of influences, from Raqib Shaw to Helen Chadwick and from literature to French plaits, artist Gemma Nelson creates mesmerizing canvases of hyperactive patterns and vivid colour. These works have won her much praise and attention over the past few years, and seen her exhibit in shows at the likes of the Departure Gallery and Laure Genillard Gallery (in a collaboration with Matt Franks), be shortlisted for Saatchi Gallery’s Four New Sensations, selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries and nominated as a finalist for the Nationwide Mercury Art Prize.

We catch up with the artist, a week before her latest work will be unveiled at Vegas Gallery as part of their inaugural show at their newly built space on Poyser Street.

Can you tell us a bit about the work you will be showing at Roulette?

The title of my piece in the exhibition is Blanc And The Neighbours Of Zero, a painting based loosely on the theme and mythology of the roulette wheel. It is a palimpsest; consisting of many layers of Indian ink and enamel, obsessively painted and sewn into with gold threads and sequins.

I was intrigued by the cryptographic nature of the Roulette, its mysterious history involving the occult and the systematic codes and mathematical probabilities. In 1843 François and Louis Blanc introduced the single 0 style wheel, competing with other casinos offering the traditional wheel with single and double zero house pockets. Louis Blanc was said to have made a bargain with the devil in order to obtain the secrets of the wheel based on the phenomenon that all the numbers on the roulette wheel (1-36) add up to the ‘number of the beast’, 666.

My work is made up of tiny fragments of colour and pattern, although not mathematically formulaic, there are sequences and processes that intrinsically make up the painting. There is also hidden imagery within the painting, the patterns forming buds of information, organic mythological creatures and landscapes and always an element of glamour.

On your website you refer to your paintings as tapestries that you weave like cells. They seem to toe the boundaries between traditional craft and contemporary art. Which would you say your work was more rooted in, art or craft?

Often the word ‘craft’ within the contemporary art world is talked about in a derogatory way; a taboo almost conserved to be dished out to hobbyists and amateurs along with the word ‘decoration’. I remember once at art school Luc Tuymans hosting a guest seminar and suggesting a student’s work was this, much to the horror and dismay of the rest of the painting department!

This question also catechizes what ‘ fine art’ is, an issue many, many people have difficulty labeling and one that is very subjective. I do however think there has been a shift in recent times to the attitude of ‘craft’; art can incorporate elements of it and not have to stand exclusive from it. Art can be conceptual and also incorporate elements of craft, it is not just reserved for the realm of the ‘outsider artist’.

I do see my works as tapestries, not probably in a conventional sense as much a metaphorical one. The marks I make in my work do weave and look like pattern, and I do often sew into my work but I treat the thread as though it was paint. There isn’t a hierarchy in my mark making. I like to think that my paintings despite being seductively decorative can also be conceptual.

You mentioned in an interview that you connect with principles of conceptualist Helen Chadwick, have these informed your art work in any way?

Chadwick’s work involves beauty and repulsion, and questions how we view them. Chadwick’s piece, Loop My Loop combining a pig’s intestine and a lock of golden hair plated together was probably the most important piece of art for me in my development as an artist. I saw it when I was 16 and it changed everything, it was probably the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I had grown up around hair, my Mum is a hair stylist and I was a guinea pig for backwards French plaits, and rather extravagantly embarrassing hairstyles for school. Hair was also scattered around our garden bedding plants in order to ‘choke slugs’ and sellotaped into valentine’s day card’s as a ‘guess who’. Hair is hugely symbolic in many religions and mythology; it is prized and is seductive, yet once cut off it disgusts people.

My early works were massively influenced by beauty and repulsion, weaving hair and human teeth into my works. I mixed paint with decayed fruit letting brightly coloured spores grow over my paintings, letting them collapse and deteriorate, almost like they were conducting their own time based performance. My current work sometimes involves hair or tightly constructed cells. It is like looking at virus’ under a microscope, very colourful yet sickly. Clusters of little circles, decorative yet obsessive.

Are there any other artists inspire or influence you?

I am like a sponge, I am influenced by many things but some things make me bubble more than other things. I read a lot so many of my influences come from literature and strange folklore. The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a short story that massively influences me. The protagonist locked in a room with insalubrious and sickly yellow wallpaper and began to see creatures and worlds in the walls through the patterning. As a child I would make friends with the creatures in the patterns in my curtains and wallpaper, I would see faces in abstract objects. I try to incorporate this into my own work through my painting.

I can completely relate to Yayoi Kusama’s work and the obsessive nature of Raqib Shaw’s paintings.

Some of the psychedelic patterns in your work are reminiscent of the sixties, and many of the themes your works explore – female sexuality, feminism – were a lot more prominent back then. Would you have preferred to have lived and worked in the sixties?

No. Although some themes in my work were more prominent then, it was also a political and social struggle for equality that activated it. Although these themes are still very poignant today, women are still battling for equality, I quite like the notion of hindsight and how much has been achieved since then. The early c20th was a hard time for women, especially in the art world, it was difficult to be taken seriously. Although I love the aesthetic of the sixties, the furniture in particular, people attribute my work to it because of my use of pattern which was very fashionable then.

My paintings refer to the patterning and psychedelia, but they aren’t directly influenced. I am more influenced by the texts written, especially by Mary Daly in Gyn/ecology about the origin of the word ‘Glamour’, a spell ‘witches’ would use to make men into eunuchs.

What do you hope people take away from your work – an idea, a feeling or just an appreciation on an aesthetic level?

If people engage anything from my work, whether it be an aesthetic appreciation or a deeper conceptual level I am happy. The paintings are so loaded anyway as there is such a long history of mark making, using Indian inks, sewing, people are going to project their own subjective opinions on the piece. I plant ideas in the paintings that allow people to try to interpret their own meaning in the painting as well as my own.

Roulette, is on at Vegas Gallery from 10 March – 17 April 2011.

Visit Gemma Nelson’s website for more information about the artist and her works.

Robert Mapplethorpe, Phillip Prioleau, 1979

19 January – 19 March

Alison Jacques Gallery: 16-18 Berners Street, London W1T 3LN and 41-42 Berners Street, London W1T 3NB

Opening Hours: Tuesday to Saturday, 10am–6pm

www.alisonjacquesgallery.com

Since his premature death in 1989, there have been countless exhibitions of Robert Mapplethorpe’s work held in galleries across the world; his photographs, of nudes, celebrities and flowers, gracing gallery walls from Berlin to New York, and from to Tokyo to Eastbourne. It is difficult to measure artistic success, but the longevity and widespread nature of his appeal is one indication of the breadth of Mapplethorpe’s accomplishments.

Another indicator has been the number of other artists that his work has inspired. In this exhibition curated by New York pop band the Scissor Sisters, some 38 of Mapplethorpe’s works are shown alongside pieces by practitioners influenced by the artist; names such as Matthew Barney, Dan Fischer and Gillian Wearing.

The diversity of Mapplethorpe’s practice means that these responding works come in many shapes and forms. Marc Swanson’s Untitled (Vertical T-Shirt and Chains), a ravaged t-shirt suspended by gold chains, speaks of celebrity and bondage, while Paul Lee’s playful assemblages of everyday items are like intellectualized sexual innuendos, their child-like forms reminiscent of the juvenile sniggering that follows Mapplethorpe’s more explicit works around even the most high-brow of galleries.

Other works such as Oswaldo Macia’s Equilibrium, in which an acrobat is twists, climbs and wraps his limber limbs around two curtain-like ropes, appear like a continuation of Mapplethorpe’s practice, an ode to his highly stylized form.

As good as many of these pieces are the highlight of the show is Mapplethorpe’s own work. There are a handful of his floral works, as well as of course his nudes – photographs of Philip Prioleau, Lisa Lyon and Derrick Cross, models that reappear throughout Mapplethorpe’s extensive oeuvre – the carefully choreographed articulations of desire that both made and defamed the artist.

Interestingly, there are also several of his lesser-known sculptural pieces, such as the series Arrow, included in the show. These works – coloured glass cut into pentangles, triangles and arrows – are hung at eye level, their reflective surfaces acting like mirrors, which invert the viewer’s gaze. They offer the sort of introspection rarely propounded by art, especially portraiture, and also provide an interesting trajectory on which to consider the more serious aspect of the artist’s work.

Because Robert Mapplethorpe has done more than caused unprecedented scandal, his images of clenched buttocks, pert breasts and erect penis’ have also played an important role in forcing more liberal notions of sexuality and gender to the forefront of popular culture. The artist has helped to alter common perceptions of race, sexuality and gender and for this reason his influence transcends visual culture, something evidenced by the very fact that this, quite significant survey of his work has been curated by a pop band.

Ali Waggie, First Footing

The number 24 holds significance in a surprising number of fields. There are 24 hours in the day,24 ribs in the body, 24 letters in both the modern and classical Greek alphabet, 24 Carats needed to make 100% pure gold and 24 frames per second in your average motion picture. But, for a group of postgraduate students from Central Saint Martins, the number has taken on a whole new significance.

24 photography is the title of a documentary photography project that the group have been engaged in since 2004, and which they plan to continue for another 16 years (until it is 24 years old), for which each photographer (24 in total) takes photographs that record an allotted hour of the day during each New Years day.

It doesn’t matter where they are or what the photographers are doing on New Years, the idea is that they will dictate the direction of the project, rather than the other way round. “The idea was to gather a diverse view of the world and passage of time through the lenses of 24 artists.” Explains Ali Waggie, one of the founding members of 24 photography.

The concept began life as a one-off exhibition, with the group using this format to record New Years day in 2004 and exhibiting their work at Mezzo Gallery, but as Ali Waggie explains “The success of the original exhibition meant that we then decided to continue the project for 24 years. We have since collaborated with Westminster Council, The Royal Parks and various galleries across London.”

Each year since its inception, the group have exhibited work from that NYE in a different location around the capital, which has generated a lot of interest both from photographers and the general public alike. “It’s a very unique approach to documentary photography – mainly as it involves so many individual interpretations.” Explains Waggie.

One of the primary interests for the group is seeing how the individuals involved in the project, the group as a whole and the wider world would change over the course of the 24 years. Now, one-third of the way through, Waggie comments on the changes that she has noticed. “As we are now in our eighth year of exhibiting, stories of each photographer’s life are unfolding, and their images reflect this. As a founding artist I suppose I’ve been most sensitive to the life changes we’re all passing through- particularly that we’re growing up. Christmas 2007 (going into NYE 2008) saw a great many of the artists loose a parent to illness. Whilst it was horrible for each to go through that loss it was reflected really beautifully in some of the images. Although we are each presenting images that outwardly have an intention as artists, I think there’s an unconscious story that comes through the images – a reflection of ourselves as time goes on.”

The project is made up of a diverse mix of people, from practising fine artists to commercial photographers, something which Ali Waggie says “reflects well in the group.” The majority of them shoot digitally but a couple still use film. “It’s all about personal choice and we would never dictate choice of medium. All we ask is that the images reach us in time to be printed!”

24:2011, the result of this year’s work, is on view at Berkeley Square from 24 February 2011 until 19 March 2011. For more information see the 24 photography website .

Justina Burnett, Looking Out Looking In

Samantha Donnelly, Sketch 4, 2008, Collage, card, clip, silver bangles, plastic float, found metal, wood, wax. Image courtesy of the Ceri Hand Gallery

In the lead up to the hotly anticipated opening of the Zabludowicz Collection’s survey of contemporary sculpture, The Shape We’re In, we talk to Samantha Donnelly, one of the artist’s commissioned to produce new work for the show.

Can you tell us a bit about the piece you are working on for The Zabludowicz Collection’s The Shape We’re In exhibition?

Having previously acquired several pieces of my work, The Zabludowicz Collection invited me along with a number of other artists to make a new commission for the exhibition. They invited me to work in the space alongside two other artists, Peggy Franck and George Young, for a month prior to the show opening, in order to hopefully expand and develop my practice. The work I produced Suppleluxe Plaza, (2011) is a large scale site-specific sculptural piece that uses the Sketch (2009) works already in the Zabludowicz Collection. It comprises of different zones or aspects which lyrically interweave throughout the space oscillating between framing and collapsing other figures caught within the work.

The Zabludowicz Collection, housed in a former Methodist Church, offers a very interesting and unique space in which to set your work…

Yes. 176 is a unique space that informed and shaped the work hugely. The cavernous rear space I worked in continually challenged me to think about the work in different ways and to solve problems within the work.

Your sculptures consist of a lot of found objects. As modes of production and consumption change – things become digitalized, mass produced products saturate the market and hand crafted objects become less and less common – do you see your works changing, or will it simply be a case of looking harder to find interesting and original objects?

The work that I am showing has a large proportion of made components: it uses the casting of wax and plaster, mould-making and memories of the mould-making process, such as latex and wood. This is contrasted with largely found imagery, like clippings from postcards picked up in Florence or magazine pages. This is laid against marble, albeit marble floor tiles, echoing traditional sculpture but also modern ’boutique’ living. I think the more mass produced or even ‘common’ something is the more opportunity there is to think differently about it – take the jay cloth which can be transformed from something on the side of a sink to something very different.

On your website you say that your work takes its starting point from everyday life and experience. Is this your own personal life and experience, or that of a wider society?

I feel it has a truth to a wider society, sure there are specific things, but most reference points someone the same age who grew up in the same culture or location or liked the same music will get.

You cite both Modernist and Baroque art as an influence, are you more excited and inspired by contemporary or traditional art?

I like all types of work, I don’t have a preference. I saw the Watercolour show at Tate Britain the other day which blew me away, particularly the saturation of colours from 15th / 16th century paintings. But peeling paint on a garage or how light falls through window also really excites me.

Samantha Donnelly is represented by Ceri Hand Gallery, Liverpool.

The Shape We’re In opens at The Zabludowicz Collection on Thursday 10th March, and will run until Sunday 12th June.

Sarah Pager, Hole

The French novelist Marcel Proust once wrote that it is “only through art [that we can] emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees.”

The problem is that what another person sees and how they present it on paper (or on canvas, foam, steel etc) is intrinsically linked to their history, it having been unconsciously shaped by their experiences. So how does an artist make this unique perspective appeal and relate to a wider audience?

Last night I went to the opening of a new group show I Am Solitary, curated by Beers.Lambert, in which all the works investigate this very problem, albeit in very different ways.

From the abstract to the figurative to the conceptual, there are a number of quite different and intriguing pieces worth seeing. Andrew Friend’s Device for Disappearing at Sea, is a wonderfully inventive and enigmatic work, which as an accompanying photograph demonstrates, also doubles up as a vehicle for a unique experience. Whereas Joshua Bilton and Tom Lovelace’s anonymous photographic portraits explore relating themes, both artists’ purposefully absenting or obscuring their subjects from the gaze of the lens, by tricks of disguise or cropping. There are also two of Adam Ball’s intricate and wonderful cut outs, including one from a new body of work he discussed with us in an interview .

For a full list of contributing artist’s and more information about the exhibition see the Beers.Lambert website.

The Soho Film Lab, the last commercial 16mm lab in the UK, has called an end to its printing of the film, after being taken over by new owners Deluxe.

As a result artists, including Tacita Dean who is currently working on a 16mm-based installation work for the Tate’s Turbine Hall, will have to go abroad to develop their films. In response to this, Frith Street Gallery, who represent Dean and a number of other artist’s working in the medium, have set up a petition to convince the Lab to reverse its decision.

“As you may know Soho Film Lab is ceasing to print 16mm film. We feel passionately about this because we work with a number of artists whose practice is being jeopardised by this issue. An online petition has been set up aimed at persuading the lab’s new owners Deluxe to reverse the decision.”

We want to show our support for this cause, and urge our readers to sign the petition.

Morgan Fisher, Standard Gauge, 1984. 16mm Colour, sound; 35 minutes.

Raven Row, 56 Artillery Lane, E1 7LS

24 February – 24 April

Google “Morgan Fisher” and you’ll find a jewellery designer and an English keyboard player before you stumble across the underrated video artist that features in Raven Row’s latest show. Although less well known in the UK, the artist from Los Angeles has been making works for over 40 years, including exhibiting at The Whitney Museum in New York and our very own Tate Modern. The artist’s first solo show in London is accompanied with a new specially written essay by Stuart Comer (Curator of Film at Tate Modern), so the sights were set high.

Morgan Fisher became known in the late sixties for his films and these are undoubtedly the best works in the exhibition – the blue print drawings have something about them, but the paintings don’t come close.

The filmstrips used in seminal video works like Standard Gauge and the medium itself allow Fisher to successfully explore the means of production in film, something that is not replicated in his paintings. Fisher’s films are usually classified as part of the structuralist movement, for the way he “transparently” uses the medium itself to demystify the film process. But don’t be put off by the terminology, the video works on show need little previous knowledge of film theory and with an almost humorous and ironic touch open our eyes to the things that happen “behind” the film – such as the discarded subtitle frames, the film crew taking a break, etc.

Two-dimensional works like French Toast Painting and Protective Coloration are a failed exploration of the act of painting and the medium itself, while Back and Forth Paintings falls short of an expressionist exercise. There isn’t even a comparison with the short videos like The Wilkinson Household Fire Alarm – a great “readymade” where the viewer stops to look at the alarm knowing that it will go off at any second, a moment of tension before the unnerving noise makes you want to run for the door.

You have to give it to the Curator, Alex Sainsbury’s– the space feels unlike any other in the East End. Perhaps it is the history of the space and the architecture, but Raven Row feels less like the sterile white cubes that you find spread out across East London and more like a unique exhibiting body – or like visiting a friend’s house. Fisher has used the space cleverly, if not entirely, and has created two site-specific works for the landing in the staircase.

One of the two new works for TV monitors, Protective Coloration, is a humorous exercise with an underlying critical tone for the “cyborgs” we’ve all become, where Fisher “dresses” himself with his personal collection of brightly coloured plastic objects.

Audiences are generally apathetic to video. Most people, especially non-regular gallery goers, find it inaccessible and boring – most times baffled by the unusual narratives or lack of them – a sign of what Hollywood has done to our understanding of the moving image. Fisher’s work however is an excellent starting point to enjoying video, with visually accomplished works that have the nostalgic feel of those made in the 70’s, and a narrative that explores the making of film itself without leaving the spectator with a feeling that he’s out of his depth. There is no point in trying to describe one of my favourite works (Red Boxing Gloves/Orange Kitchen Gloves), as I would take all the fun out of it but I highly recommend you visit the gallery and experience it for yourself.

Originally from Mexico, she has been living in London for 3 years and previously studied BA Fine Art at the Universidad de las Americas, UDLA in Mexico, graduating as a Magna Cum Laude with a thesis entitled: Hypermodern aesthetics, advertising and consumption.

Her work, both practical and written, explores notions of identity, its construction and consumption, and the use of the archive in contemporary art. A committed artist and writer, she aims to combine her studies and interest in text-based work with her role as a freelance Art Facilitator.

Maru Rojas is a beneficiary of the FONCA (Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes), Mexico under the programme of Scholarships for Studies Abroad.