“Mean boys take up space”
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This week
💦 vanilla, almonds and buttercream
💦 Jacquemus x Richard Green gallery?
💦 late-stage capitalism, again
Events
We will be joining the hordes in Venice next week so no spittle from these spittlets in the interim! See you out on the canals babies, don’t forget your Loro Piana (gallerists), Margiela (publicists), Prada (curators) and Miu Miu (artists) x
🧊 10 April | 6–9pm | Seana Gavin: Hidden Tracks: A decade of Free Parties, Gallery 46 [Whitechapel] | Free, RSVP here
🧊 11 April | 6–8pm | Devlin Claro: My Sorry Ass, Qrystal Partners [Elephant and Castle]
🧊 11 April | 6-8pm | Trevor Shimizu: Past/Future, Modern Art [Old Street]
🧊 11 April | 6-8pm | Barbara Kruger, Spruth Magers [Green Park]
🧊 11 April | 7pm/8pm | Dani Marcel: 400 old, Sprüth Magers/Kupfer [Green Park/Shoreditch High Street]
🧊 11 April | 6-8pm | Scene III: Chris Huen Sin-kan, Forwards and Backwards, Back and Forth, Matt Carey-Williams [Paddington/Edgware Road]
🧊 12 April | 6-9pm | Trespassing Threshold: Johannes Bosisio, Hubert Marot, Gabriela Pelczarska, Andrei Pokrovskii, Pei-Hsuan Wang, ZÉRUÌ [Peckham Rye]
🧊 12 April | 6-9pm | Can Sun: Bruises, Mandy Zhang Art [Marble Arch]
🧊 12 April | 6:30pm | Eva Dixon & Benedikte Klüver: Lands End, MAMA [Whitechapel]
🧊 13 April | 5-8pm | Gal Schindler: Wishing Well, Ginny on Frederick [Farringdon]
Exhibition of the Week
Leo Costelloe: special day at Neven until 18 May, info here.
A young girl is obscured by a white veil in the window of Neven gallery. A highly creepy vibe pervades the space. There is something of the "string-haired ghost girl" from 2002 horror film The Ring in the sculpture, sending our skin crawling. Assembled by Leo Costelloe, the sculpture is composed of a restored 1930s Victorian doll adorned with a 1960s wedding dress, veil, synthetic wig and faux flower bouquet on a large plinth that appears to be levitating. A single, spindly hand peeks out from below the veil, looking like it might reach out and grip a passerby at a moment’s notice.
Titled special day, this solo continues Costelloe’s ongoing project to think with and through the loaded concept of the ‘wedding’ and it’s accompanying stylistic expectations and cliches. Previous shows have seen super-camp multi-tier wedding cakes made with vanilla, almonds and buttercream frosting presented in Dalston exhibition/studio spaces – a far cry from the posh golf club they might usually be found in – and moving image works like Beautiful Bride in the City which was screened earlier this year at Kupfer. On the wall at Neven are perfectly/neurotically styled blonde wigs, ready to be worn down the aisle and papped from every angle. Again, creepy. Hanging on the sterile gallery wall, they at once made us think of Dolly Parton… and Big Fat Gypsy Weddings… gay hairdressers in rural towns, people growing their hair to be sold in western countries, and all the sad wigs in wig shops that get dusty without ever being worn. But while it might be easy to make fun of the pomp and hysteria of the wedding, or the twisted pressure to show love by spending money – or all the patriarchal gendered discrepancies in trad misogyny-wedding! – Costelloe’s work is all the more alluring and curious because of its eerie beauty, unique appearance, technicality and showmanship.
All elements of the show are beautifully crafted, delicate, and fragile – evidenced, for instance, in the wall based handmade silver cutlery display. We instantly think of gift lists emailed to wedding attendees which usually demand bland household domestic objects: silver cutlery (for *special occasions*); KitchenAid standmixes(?), and presumably these days: airfyers (vom). But bland Costelloe’s knives, forks, and spoons, are not. Incorporating gorgeous satin ribbon, silver, lace garter, Akoya pearl, glass and diamanté flowers, they at once look like ritualistic relics from a strange pre-modern time, while invoking that feeling of absolute fascination, obsession, envy and joy of diving in to someone else’s jewellery box – beauty and possibility become overwhelmingly intertwined.
Hot Links
💕 ‘a reliquary of Full-Spectrum Kitty that would impress the Vatican’ – one of the best reviews of Somerset House’s monstrosity exhibition, Cute, we commend this valiant (although, quite short) attempt by William Kherbeck to review what to us seems pretty review resistant – ranging as it does from hyperpop to ‘subtexts of innocent sexual attraction’, the climate crisis, horror and, of course, mass marketing a la Hello Kitty.
🍸 ‘Oh, Times is so great because – you’re living in them, but once you’re reading about them, they’re over.’ – Spittle faves Ken Okiishi, Karen Archy and Calle Henkle, among others, explore the lore and legacy of Times Bar, an artist-run bar which opened in Berlin in the mid-noughties… we’re dreaming of an era of €50 rent to return !!
🥺 ‘With co-hosts Frank Gehry, Edythe Broad, Chrissy Teigen and Sean Penn’ – Jane Fonda, John Legend, and Larry Gagosian… dream intimate gallery dinner rotation? The activist/actress/icon (Jane) is organising a benefit auction with Gagosian and Christies to support groups lobbying against an oil drilling bill in California. We’re curious as to whether Jane’s niece, Pilar Corrias, was offered right of first refusal x
🔧 Not the one where Adam Driver inexplicably transforms into a horse at the end – Directorial Daddy Jonathan Glazer has shot Prada’s latest campaign with Scarlett Johansson, as she pootles around New York with their iconic Galleria bag. We wish this means there was an Under the Skin sequel on the horizon but we’ll just have to wait and see//hope and pray
⚰️ ‘Things are grim enough without these shivery games … We love apocalypses too much.’ – For the Guardian, Dorian Lynskey dissects our obsession with the apocalypse – from Lars von Trier to Sally Rooney to White Lotus. It’s not us, it's late-stage capitalism.
Add-to-cart
spittle-fave writer Geoffrey Mak’s new memoir-in-essays – ‘A ferocious inquiry into art and desire, style and politics, madness and salvation, and coming of age in our volatile, image-obsessed present’ – looks absolutely fab! ‘Mean boys take up space, wielding cruelty to claim their place in the pecking order,’ says Mak, continuing: ‘they are the emblem of our society: an era ravenous for novelty, always thirsting for the next edgy thing, even at our peril…’ #gulp
Available here for £15.40
Parting Shot
Seen on Instagram… Richard Green (Old Master and Modern British paintings dealer on New Bond Street) recently going viral for their Instagram reels making gilt frame art cool again – are giving their space to purveyor of microbags, Jacquemus?! Anyone got any more intel? xo