BEYOND BEYOND
London Gallery Weekend kicks summer into high gear
ON THE LAST FRIDAY IN MAY, the garden of St James’s Church, Piccadilly, played host to a congregation of critics, curators, and gallerygoers, who sprawled across the benches and grass—usually patronized by office workers on their lunch break—to catch Touch Song, a performance by Italian artist Adelaide Cioni, whose exhibition “True Form” was also showing at the Approach. The proceedings kicked off just after 2pm, when two dancers—each dressed in goofy pink costumes of giant hands—maneuvered around the garden to an original score by Dom Bouffard. It was London Gallery Weekend (now in its fourth year), and this felt like the official kickoff, even though a bunch of shows had opened the night before (I was still nursing the hangover). Thankfully, the weather stayed dry, and the performance perked up everyone’s mood. I was trying to pick which show to visit next; if only those giant hands could have helped me decide with an epic game of rock-paper-scissors!
My afternoon was spent touring the Mayfair galleries, at first by myself, and later on with a group of fellow writers and PR people. Surrealism and its legacy seemed to be a recurring theme in the neighborhood. Waddington Custot had a group show called “Beyond Surrealism,” the highlight being a shelf display of deadpan readymade-inspired objects, including Bill Woodrow’s Clockswarm, 2001—an old-fashioned mantel clock made of bronze and gold leaf. Over on Savile Row, another show with the word “beyond” in the title was Leo Park’s impressive debut with Carl Kostyál, “Beyond Pleasure.” The wood-paneled walls played host to Park’s recent portraits of big, fleshy, bulbous forms, while a side room was plastered with at least a hundred preparatory drawings that looked like the kind of doodles you might scrawl during a Freudian therapy session. Meanwhile, Ben Hunter Gallery was showing the work of the late Ithell Colquhoun, a surrealist turned occultist and a somewhat neglected name in twentieth-century art—although it seems she’s about to finally have her moment, with this gem of an exhibition offering a foretaste of her much-anticipated exhibitions next year at both Tate Britain and Tate St Ives.
The late afternoon found me in my second place of worship: Gagosian’s off-site presentation of Nan Goldin’s Sisters, Saints, Sibyls, exhibited in a deconsecrated chapel on Charing Cross Road. The building was also once the home of the infamous Limelight Club, opened in the mid-eighties by Peter Gatien (the eye-patch-wearing nightlife promoter most famously associated with the New York club kids). Visitors were led up to the balcony, where Goldin’s triple-screen presentation mixed video, photography, and music to tell the story of her older sister’s experience in psychiatric detention, her subsequent suicide, and the effect this had on the young Goldin. It’s a sad, brutal, powerful piece of work, made even more so by the dark, claustrophobic environment the exhibition takes place in.
Margate-based gallery 243 Luz had a slick little show called “Downtown,” hosted by the Shop at Sadie Coles. Photos by Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff document the insides of worn handbags. Shot in stark black-and-white, each bag is yanked open to reveal its empty contents. The press release mentioned “online secondary markets for luxury goods,” but for me they brought to mind the discarded handbags you sometimes see abandoned around town—snatched out of the hands of some unsuspecting victim, emptied of their valuables, and dumped on the sidewalk.
My boyfriend Eric joined us as we headed to Hauser & Wirth, where Alice Haguenauer showed us around their double exhibitions of Harmony Korine and Isa Genzken. Wasserspeier and Angels, Genzken’s sprawling installation—a post-9/11 riff on geopolitics featuring taxidermy, giant wineglasses, and the odd UFO fiber-optic lamp—hasn’t been exhibited since its first showcase in 2004, at the gallery’s original London outpost. Next door, Korine’s “AGGRESSIVE DR1FTER Part II” showcased glowing, infrared-looking paintings based on stills from his latest film. I’d been at the private view a few weeks earlier, where Korine mingled with fans and spent the whole night wearing a green ski mask.
We then caught a packed talk by art critic Jonathan Jones at Thaddaeus Ropac, where he clutched a glass of white wine and delivered his thoughts on its current Rauschenberg exhibition. This was a hot ticket, as many eager gallerygoers had been curious to see the legendary Guardian staffer in real life. The exhibition, and Jones’s talk, focused on Rauschenberg’s ROCI project (Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange), which involved the artist’s global touring exhibition in the late eighties, showing in territories with poor records of artistic freedom: Tibet, Cuba, the former Soviet Union. The talk ended in front of Rauschenberg’s monumental Caryatid Cavalcade I/ROCI CHILE (1985), made for his exhibition in Santiago’s Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, and featuring silk-screen imagery of the museum’s own interiors.
Gallery Weekend’s opening reception was somewhat short and sweet: drinks, speeches, and two hours of organized mingling in the packed upper galleries of the Royal Academy. Travel bursaries had been provided by Art Fund to curators from institutions out of town, giving them a much-needed chance to come to London for a few days of networking, studio visits, and gallery-hopping, and many of them were working the room. The financial situation in many of the UK’s cash-strapped councils is so grim that the idea of sending staff from their cultural institutions to London for the weekend would otherwise be out of the question.
People kept asking me if I was going to “the dinner,” although I had no idea what or where “the dinner” was. Instead, I ended up with other guests who had spilled over into the Chequers Tavern, hanging out with our friends Toby Taylor from Bold Tendencies and Sorcha Lyons-Hookham from Corvi-Mora. My own after-party dinner consisted of a drunken Five Guys at Piccadilly Circus, sometime near midnight.
Saturday I was working my day job, as art writing doesn’t pay the bills, but I was back on the gallery jaunt come Sunday. I decided to keep things local and stayed south of the river. Sid Motion Gallery was a twenty-minute walk from home, nestled off the Old Kent Road in an industrial neighborhood full of artist studios and workshops. The gallery’s exhibition, “Searching Minds,” brought together works by Max Wade, Carole Gibbons, and Roy Oxlade. Motion gave me a tour of the show, which had just opened—the eighty-nine-year-old Gibbons had made it down from Glasgow for the private view, and the gallery had hosted a children’s drawing event the day before. Wade, the youngest of the three artists, had been greatly influenced by Oxlade’s work—the late Oxlade is one of those artists often regarded as “a painter’s painter.” Over in Peckham, Trafalgar Avenue was showing vibrant felted tapestry pieces (each suspended from the ceiling) by Nottingham-based artist Sophie Goodchild. The gallery is situated on the ground floor of a Peckham tenement, where founders Graham and Carlos Silveria Martin also live. Graham welcomed me in, and explained that this was the first show in eighteen months, during which time they’d refurbished the space.
Hannah Barry, whose Peckham gallery has also been refitted to become the “Sin Centre,” provided one of the standout shows of Gallery Weekend. Based around an unrealized project by English architect Michael Webb (it was, in fact, his thesis—which he famously took seventeen years to complete), Sin Centre was technically a group show (many artists have contributed, including Harley Weir, Tali Lennox, and Joe Sweeney), but the press release described it as incorporating “various specified entertainments.” Downstairs had a functioning bar said to be open on Saturdays (until late). Upstairs looked like the drawing room from a postwar British spy movie. Guests were welcome to sprawl on the sofas (made by George Rouy) or browse the books in the “Love Library.” Barry talked us through the concept and gave us some complimentary chocolates, made by her brother and available to purchase—the peppercorn flavor could trick your tastebuds into thinking you’re eating a steak. The books on the Love Library’s shelves had been recommended by a bunch of art-world movers and shakers, and the gallery staff had assembled the physical stock, buying them secondhand or online. Inside each book was a golden sticker revealing the name of whoever suggested its inclusion. Upon learning this, I immediately made a beeline for the copy of Sex and the City, to see whose name was inside: It had been recommended by Spittle, the gossipy Instagram chronicler of London’s art scene, so that made sense. The show had the vibe of an essay come to life: footnotes and bibliographies and references manifesting as fixtures and decor and interactions; even the bathroom was an installation. I still can’t quite get my head around everything Sin Centre had to offer, and will be going back to prop up its bar in the weekends to come.
My Gallery Weekend technically spilled over into Monday. I’d met Mary Lodge from Nahmad Projects on Friday evening, and had promised to swing by their show. It was worth making the journey back into central London: Nahmad’s exhibition, “Layers of Time,” was the second show I’d seen that juxtaposed the work of an older artist with someone much younger. This time the late Italian artist Giorgio Morandi was paired with Alexis Ralaivao, and it worked splendidly. Morandi, who in his lifetime rarely left his native Bologna, painted rustic-looking bottles and household items, things you’d find in the pantry of an Italian villa, coveted to the extent that these items are still preserved by a museum devoted to his work. This in contrast with Ralaivao’s subject matter—a restaurant table, with its white linen and unused wineglasses, or a silver tray from room service nestled on a hotel bed—items also coveted, like Morandi’s, but in this case for one night only.
Much conversation had been had about what the core purpose of Gallery Weekend is. To raise awareness that London has a stellar network of galleries? I think we already know this, but maybe we just needed reminding. Many of the industry people I spoke to said footfall to their galleries was up, considerably—in some cases threefold. Being able to visit the shows during the whole weekend definitely felt like a luxury, although a note to all galleries: Next time, remember to update your one-off Sunday opening hours on Google; then, footfall might be even higher!
