London Art Exhibitions For August 2015 Chosen By Paul Carey Kent

Dancing with a teapot, 2015 – oil on paper

It says something for Alex Cecchetti’s charisma that the audience stuck with him during the two hour tour of the building which kicked off this show, and which you can now sample on video. The Franco-Italian artist runs the gamut of performative approaches: he draws clouds (without looking, so as to surprise himself) then has the viewer fly among them by following his lines while playing a birdcaller; dances round teapots, outlining their phallus and womb spouts and interiors as he goes; pays homage to the movement required for female masturbation in a wall drawing made with blackberries; and requires that the gallerist leaf through fifty drawings of lovers entwined just once for each visitor, so that they become unrepeatable actions. Then there’s a Blakean backstory, and sculptures…. quite a quantity of diversions for a small space. 


Alex Cecchetti showing his erotic Memoires, 2014 at the opening

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Object Painting – Painting Object @ Jonathan Viner,

Charles Harlan’s Tree, 2014 and Michael Rey’s Fromes, 2015 either side of Elias Hansen’s strikingly titled glass on self work If fucking would’ve fixed this, I’d have fucked the shit out of you a long fucking time ago, 2015 Here come – how many can there be? – yet another dozen ways to deal with the language of painting without doing anything as obvious as picking up a paintbrush. Thing is, though, most of these 15 young Americans bring a zingy freshness and imagination to the trope: Charles Harlan just cuts out a section of chain link fencing with a tree entwined; Michael Rey makes industrial objects masquerading as monochrome paintings which turn out to be ceramics masquerading as both; Sam Mayer makes a painting of textural contrasts and a face of sorts by abutting canvas and marble shapes; Aaron Bobrow allow blue tarpaulin to fade and break down outside until he considers it ready. What sounds like a serious investigation into boundaries and forms turns out to be a feel-good summer show.

Aaron Bobrow: Untitled, 2015

Dominic Beattie: Untitled, 2014 – ink, spray paint, enamel and varnish on board, 47 x 30 cm

Imi Knoebel @ White Cube, Bermondsey and Lars Wolter: Framed @ Rocket, 4-6 Sheep Lane – Cambridge Heath

To 13 Sept (White Cube) / 3 Oct (Rocket)

Imi Knoebel: Installation view with ‘Molani’, 2001

Oddly, White Cube has the first solo London by the seminal German abstractionist Imi Knoebel, who has had any number of such shows elsewhere,  and it’s well worth seeing.  There’s also a table by Knoebel at the beautifully appointed new premises of Jonathan Stephens’ Rocket gallery, together with new work by another German minimalist with a wider crossover with furniture. Lars Wolter makes all his own superbly crafted painting-objects. Here he has four separate streams of work,  much of it – like Knoebel’s – exploring colour, but I also like the more chromatically restrained series which can be read as a sleep-scape punctuated by dream events.

 

 Lars Wolter: ‘Dream A’, 2014, veneer & paint on wood, 196 x 139 cm

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Thomas Eggerer: Ozone @ Maureen Paley, 21 Herald St – Bethnal Green

To 23 Aug:  www.maureenpaley.com

Untitled, 2013 – collage, 63 x 50 cm Thomas Eggerer’s show isn’t called ‘Ozone’ because it has an environmental message, but because the  aerially viewed characters, often glimpsed partially, seem to be in a zone of their own – the O–Zone, it’s implied – and inhabit abstract areas of  areas of misty colour as if it were their world. I like them, but was especially struck by the New York based German’s less often seen collages.  The first two in a group of five fold and reflect repeated  images of  sculptures by Anthony Caro into more quotidian scenes, the next repeats the trick with a Calder, and the other two use modernist architectural details to a parallel effect.  Not only is the  splicing of form and content elegantly persuasive, it’s topical ahead of this year’s major restrospectives of Caro in Yorkshire and Calder at Tate Modern.  

Mint Ozone, 2015 – oil on canvas, 130 x 112 cm

 

e-studio Luanda: African Industrial Revolution @ Tiwani Contemporary, 16 Little Portland Street To 15 Aug: www.tiwani.co.uk The show’s curator, Rita GT, has designed her clothes from Francisco Vidal’s paintings

We’re getting some African weather, so why not check out this feelgood slice of Angola, actually a version of the national pavilion currently at Venice. That in itself reflects transportable nature of the concept: it’s an open studio set up by artists collective e-studio Luanda. The means of production are unpacked from the U.topia Machine, aka a plywood box on the floor. Painter Fancisco Vidal is holding the most prominent court, covering the walls with intensely colourful abstractly-patterned faces on handmade paper and rapidly sketching all-comers: my wall portrait was number 552. The idea, in a neat reversal, is to produce, distribute and share by traditional means a version of online experience.  

Francisco Vidal with one of his portrait drawings. I should add that they’re not meant to be realistic…

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 Emily Young: Call and Response: London @ The Fine Art Society, 148 New Bond St

 To 29 Aug: www.faslondon.com/fine_art_society_contemporary/exhibitions

Caramel Dark Face, 2015 Caramel Onyx – 23 x 16 x 19 cm

Emily Young, though born in London was partly raised in Rome and recently returned to live in Italy, where she works with the most traditional of means– free carving  in the manner of Michelangelo. Yet there’s a 60s counterculture feel to how she sees her conversation with stone as being ‘small part of mankind’s most serious, most elemental conversation, that with Earth’. So it makes some sense that in her youthful days experimenting with drugs she was the Emily in Pink Floyd’s ‘See Emily Play’. Here, in the London half of a show shared with Venice, she shows an ability to release faces from a huge variety of minerals – typically discards from defunct quarries, which she prefers for their characterful imperfections.

Verdite Forest Head, 2015Verdite 23 x 23 x 20 cm
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Justin Hibbs: Alias_Re_Covered @  Carroll / Fletcher, 56 – 57 Eastcastle St – Fitzrovia

To 12 Sep: www.carrollfletcher.com

 

Installation view

Justin Hibbs’ first solo show at Carroll / Fletcher is something of a multi-dimensional juggling act. It’s simplest to start with his version of Joseph Albers’ album cover  for Mussorgsky’s ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’. That connects with music and design, and is made with a pin-striping machine on linen, causing glitches which link to the humanising acceptance of errors in even the most computerised of future imaginings. The music cues the show’s ambient soundpiece, and the glitches anticipate the crashed computer screen as a generator of sleek abstractions which set off a dance of two and three dimensions as paintings fold out into sculptures. It’s too complex to describe quickly, but preliminary ideas form a sort of brain in the central room, and some domestically coloured walls offset the industrial aspect of what proves a seamlessly holistic show.  Given that Hibbs embraces the fault, I’m tempted to complain,  does his show itself have enough?

Alias Re_Versioned, 2015

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Impingement no. 63 (installation detail)

Impingement no. 63 – Ink on perspex model