“how’s my dealing??”
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This week
🧊 zephyrs huffing kinetic energy
🧊 fuel for illicit Frieze afterparties
🧊 Spongebob Tiki
Events
As you may or may not know it is nearly Frieze week, where everyone collectively pretends to lose their minds in a sort of communal compassionate act for those sales assistants on the front line carrying the burden of tending to the ostentatious displays of wealth and ritualised waste that serves as a past time for certain subsets of the art world. Thankfully there are some really top notch exhibitions & events on to mark the occasion so we’ll let the point slide just this one time…
💦 5 October | 6:30–8:30pm | Ufuoma Essi: Is My Living In Vain, GASWORKS [Vauxhall]
💦 5 October | 6–9pm | Gertrude PRESENTS, Truman Brewery [Shoreditch High Street]
💦 5 October | 6:30pm | Gray Wielebinski & Baron Books, Book and Edition Launch, ICA [Charing Cross]
💦 6 October | 6–9pm | Oliver Osborne: Mantegna’s Dead Christ, Union Pacific [Aldgate East]
💦 6 October | 6–8pm | Tschabalala Self: Home Body, Pilar Corrias [Oxford Circus & Piccadilly Circus]
💦 6 October | 6–8pm | Solomon Garcon: ‘S N I T C H’, Rose Easton [Bethnal Green]
💦 6 October | 6–8pm | Nevine Mahmoud: in mass and feeling, Soft Opening [Bethnal Green]
💦 6 October | 6–9pm | Tai Shani, Gathering (new space) [Piccadilly Circus]
💦 6 October | 6–8pm | Somaya Critchlow: Afternoon’s Darkness, Maximmillian William [Oxford Circus]
💦 7–13 October | Last Days, Royal Opera House (New opera art-directed by Matt Copson!) [Covent Garden] | £14 - 35, tickets here
💦 7 October | The Place of Complete Surprise, Indigo+Madder, hosted by The Shop, Sadie Coles [Oxford Circus]
💦 8–9 October | 11am–7pm | Tom of Finland Arts & Culture Festival, curated by Gemma Rolls-Bentley, Second Home, Spitalfields [Liverpool Street] | Tickets here
Exhibitions of the week
Helen Marten: Third Moment Profile | The Almost Horse, Sadie Coles, until 29 October, information here
The weird thing about weaving written fiction into an artwork is that it asks viewers to apply their imagination to the narrative they are reading – forcing them to focus and concentrate on something they’re not looking at. The art asks you to shut your eyes, open your imagination, and give in to fantasy and fiction. Helen Marten’s new show at Sadie Coles did exactly that. Eloquently typed on her artworks were fables exploring a pastoral landscape: squirrels, dandelions, xylem sap etc. We didn’t read them all… but their analogue dreams and illumination of tricky and uncouth relationships between humans and Mother Nature seemed to gently mock the sanitised realm of contemporary art. The aesthetic of Marten’s 26 new paintings seemed to do the same. Marten is known for her immaculately rendered works that – like Magali Reus’s – seem to be so intricately produced that they look like products; like the perfectly moulded interiors of new cars. Stuck on the copper coloured panels of the new paintings in this exhibition were kitsch frogs holding umbrellas; creepy, funny and bringing to mind the strange outdoor objects that would fascinate me as a child in an *unnamed* friend’s weird parents’ garden, Marten hijacks these disparate elements and makes them interesting – in a Mark Leckey-esque way. A central sculpture titled ‘The Melancholy of Resistance’ (2022) caught our eye: marbles, freeze dried strawberries and candywrappers all strewn on a resin horse and cart. Like the stories typed on the paintings, my mind was lost in childhood nostalgia and time spent in my own little world, miles away from now – fantasy and fiction.
Forrest Bess: Out of the Blue at Camden Art Centre, until 15 January, information here
A fisherman from Texas (yes, we didn’t know Texas had a coast either), Forrest Bess has long been admired as a painter sitting on the borders of what institutions would consider outsider art. His bold, imagined compositions, which relay the intense visions that the artist experienced throughout their life, are framed in driftwood collected by the artist. Bess’ canvases are intimate in size, and displayed on darkened walls - there’s a personal, almost spiritual air in the gallery, with tones even more hushed than usual. The intimate feeling encourages you to take a little more time to look at the works. This kind of looking – slow, measured, somewhat meditative – lends itself well to the works, which seems to be imbued with their own symbolism, an internal logic. This exhibition highlights Bess’ homosexuality, research into gender theory and his manifesto on the possibilities of hermaphroditism, all which have been largely ignored by institutions historically. Camden’s inclusion of archival material from Bess’ manifesto adds an imperative interpretation of the work. As artist Ken Okiishi articulates in an Artforum article; “the tangential praise around Bess’s practice is that it always meets these “difficult” biographical details as stopping points… This type of dislocated biography is used as an arbitrary—even infantilizing—critical (and curatorial) haze that “protects” us from seeing what is going on. With Bess, these critical blinders are particularly politicized…” Viewing Bess’ work through the lens of his theories and his identity, which can be seen as key parts of his practice in and of themselves, is crucial. These seemingly straightforward, small, abstract canvases are layered with a rich, complex symbolism, concealing as much as they reveal.
Hot links
🧽 “Tiki utopias trend during recession” – The Nymphet Alumni pod takes a deep dive on Tiki culture in their latest episode. From scum-bro aesthetics and sleazecore to mid-century tiki, SpongeBob tiki, Elvis’ vacations and Kim Kardashian’s interiors, we learn how a *pretty problematic* notion of Tiki has infiltrated our lives way more than we thought.
🥪 Ginny on Frederick is “the white, tiled unit with the tense, inviting potential of cruising” – Frieze have profiled friend of the ‘sletter Freddie Powell in their most recent issue, alongside other emerging galleries including <3 Queercircle <3, and we couldn’t be happier to see the spotlight turned away from mid size and mega galleries for once!! At the rate new galleries are opening, this will surely have to develop into a weekly feature… call us pls Frieze x
🃏 “dilettantes, sloganeers, trust fund anarchists… Instead of what would Jesus do, its what would Deleuze do?” - Via Alissa Bennett’s Twitter account, we found the blogspot How’s My Dealing? Like a precursor to the @cancelartgalleries account the site invites anonymous readers to publish their thoughts on each of New York’s galleries/dealers. Come for comments like: ‘Awesome staff, but he's a tyrant,’ and ‘Lets collectors curate shows and pick her artists, then pretends she's a curator herself…’ *tea has been spilled*
💄“No Face Is Your Real Face” – Sin Wai Kin is back with a much needed dose of psychosexual eroticism for FREE on the internet. Settle in for some Somerset House centred dreaminess with Kin’s dazzling trademark makeup that is the offspring of drag performance aesthetics and traditional chinese theatre.
🌊 “Due to threat of incineration, impending legal doom, and unattainable business goals, SELCHP Recordings is renaming to… SELN Recordings” - spittle contributor Conrad Pack’s new GREATEST HITS album just dropped, with tracks like Forwards sitting ‘somewhere between spiralling Tekno and the haunted memory of a fallen marching band trying to get back their drum kit’. All we know is you won’t regret dropping it at any illicit Frieze afterparties next week. Stream here xoxo
Add-to-cart
Since Dominique Levy, Brett Gorvy, Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn and Amalia Dayan joined forces and rebranded as LGDR last year, we’ve witnessed many a gallerina tripping her tongue over the merger’s name. Luckily, employee of the month and friend of the newsletter @fab_al has made just the hat for anyone who struggles to remember the acronym. Show your love for secondary market deals with this fetching denim cap – and at just £30 a pop you won’t have to dip into the Rothko budget to be seen in one of these!
Parting shot
Lomex Gallery founder Alexander Shulan seems to have some intel on the next big thing! They may not have an MFA or have any works in major collections but their Mum thinks they’re great, so consider the deal closed… With a guerrilla PR campaign this innovative we expect to see this wünderkind gracing the walls of Regents Park’s big tent next week