“It’s very Carrie Bradshaw, le filet de fish”
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This week
💦 capitulating detours springing from hell far from eden
💦 cthonic digimon lore
💦 a futuristic city called Neom
Events
This week we’re looking forward to a show by Luca George at Xxijra Hii that opens on Fiday, telling the story of an artist ‘whose luck goes from bad to worse after they are awarded the opportunity to work with an art fabrication company on a new piece of work…’, intriguing! The day before (Thursday), we won’t be missing Poppy Jones’ show of hauntingly beautiful paintings on suede, opening at The Artist Room in Soho.
🧊 22 Mar | 6–8pm | ‘City of Rooms (part one)’: Louise Bourgeois & Eva Gold, Rose Easton [Bethnal Green]
🧊 22 Mar | Guessing 6–8pm because this info is not available anywhere x | Adam Cruces: Chimera, Public Gallery [Aldgate]
🧊 23 Mar | 6–8pm | Poppy Jones, The Artist Room [Piccadilly Circus]
🧊 23 Mar | 7–8:30pm | R.I.P. Germain artist talk, The ICA, tickets here [Charing Cross]
🧊 23 Mar | 6–8pm | Haroun Hayward: Event on the Downs, Hales Gallery [Bethnal Green]
🧊 24 Mar | 6pm | Luca George: The Immersive Experience, Xxijra Hii [Deptford]
🧊 25 Mar | 2–5pm | Mark Beldan, Window 135 [New Cross Gate]
🧊 25-30 Mar | Essay Film Festival at the ICA [Charing Cross]
🧊 26 Mar | 7–8:30pm | The Gramounce supper club hosted by artist/chefs Inês Neto dos Santos & Nora Silva, Chisenhale Gallery, tickets here [Mile End]
Exhibition of the Week
Evangeline: Chaff, a. SQUIRE, until 8 April, information here.
We had no idea what eschatology meant when reading the paragraph-long press release describing Evangeline’s inaugural show, Chaff, at new gallery a. SQUIRE (temporarily occupying a gorg semi-residential space on Shoreditch High Street). As the word represented a high percentage of the total count, we consulted our Oxford English Dictionary, which defines it as ‘the part of theology concerned with death, judgement, and the final destiny of the soul and of humankind’. The notion of apocalypse has fascinated artists forever, from John Martin’s biblical storms of the 1850s to the FT describing Anne Imhof as ‘an artist for the end of times’ or just this weekend The New York Times describing Josh Kline as ‘an artist for the end of the world’. Evangeline’s paintings - sometimes haunting, always elusive - blend a surrealist interest in collaging ephemera from disparate places and times with a narrative tendency that assimilates religious iconography and implied rituals; in her accompanying stream-of-consciousness essay, she describes both the strange bureaucracy of marriage and ‘capitulating detours springing from hell far from eden’. Like Alastair Mackinven, for whom Evangeline worked as an assistant, she is a master of working paint to a degree of polished finish that few young artists are capable of. In our favourite painting in the show, Big Tits (2023), a crucified body stands in front of a purple chequerboard wall, swarmed by Ann Craven-esque birds. The bowels of this Promethean figure are exposed and a nun in the bottom right of the image gazes intently at the viewer, accusatorily. Despite the violence, the painting radiates a strange and unpredictable beauty. We’re intrigued to see what’s next! For Evangeline, and also a. SQUIRE xo
Hot Links
🍆 “I’ve never jerked off to any artwork." – A charming review in Filthy Dreams of Coming Attractions: the exhibition of icon John Waters’ collection, currently on view at Baltimore Museum of Art. The works in his tongue-in-cheek collection include a Richard Tuttle that John himself reverentially likens to ‘a failed woodwork project left unclaimed from summer camp.’
📺 “Hello MTV and Welcome to my Exhibit” – This latest MTV offering gives 7 up and coming market darlings the chance to win $100k and an exhibition at the Hirshhorn (lol). Special guest judges include Adam Pendleton and Kenny Schachter (hey, he’s got to make back the money Inigo stole somehow). Previous iterations of art-themed reality TV haven’t caught on, we’ll be waiting with baited breath to see if The Exhibit bucks the trend.
🗞️ Come for the headline, stay for the comments section – Every now and again, we LOVE to roll our sleeves up, take a deep breath, and dive into the comments section of an article that has riled up middle-aged Brits. We can’t tell for sure if Hannah Jane Parkinson’s latest piece forthe Guardian, about how she hates Cezanne and most still life paintings, was written to deliberately grind your ma’s gears, but she succeeds nonetheless. Dad jokes, genuine anger and pseudo-intellectual takes abound.
🐦 “Mr Pigden ... you’re alive.” – Writer and political and sociological theorist William Davies goes in on emojis, unboxing vids and surveillance capitalism in this lecture for the LRB, which examines how the ‘reaction economy’ has shaped our current social climate… yikes
⛓️ “MBS told its designers that he liked the aesthetic of ‘cyberpunk’” – Mohammed bin Salman (MBS for short), the 36-year-old crown prince of Saudi Arabia, is at it again. Not satisfied with spending $500 billion on creating a futuristic city called Neom on an expanse of desert the size of Belgium, he is now transforming a mountainous part of the Saudi desert, with temperatures of 40 degrees, into - yes, you guessed it - a ski resort.
🍟 “My highest and lowest points at fashion week are all linked to McDonald’s” – Daniel Rodgers, one of our favourite young fashion writers, asks the big question: ‘Why do fashion people love to pose with McDonald’s meals at fashion week?’
Add-to-cart
It’s official: 2023 is the year of side hustles. We have no idea how Ilenia Rossi - sales gallerina for Sadie Coles HQ - has the time to be rustling up gorgina bouquets for Almine Rech gallery dinners and in-the-know clients. With only 330 followers (and like 180 last week?!) VERDE flowers are this month’s under-the-radar hot ticket to creating your own Loewe-esque universe, available via DM here. Make ours a red anthurium with dianthus barbatus and green allium - plus a hot pink stick of rhubarb… that’s lunch sorted for the week xox
Parting shot
We’re sure we remember, just months ago, Josh Baer joining the masses to virtually flagellate NFTs. And yet, here he is, singing the praises for their forefather (beeple). What spittle wants to find out is; what made him change his tune? Perhaps LGDR taking a beeple to ABHK (with a reported 9 Million price tag) gave the artist actual legitimacy? ANYWAY rest assured that if we’re ever in Charleston, South Carolina, we’ll swing by the ‘museum’ so you don’t have to xx