“the dead-end of just vibing”
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This Week
💦 A little kiosk of bone juice
💦 shuttle-loomed slubby reverse sateen
💦 Fucked vibes
Events
With a grand total of 54 shows opening across the city this week, we really are spoilt for choice. We’ve picked out some highlights below, including Vilte Fuller’s first solo show at Niru Ratnam, Taro Qureshi’s generous curatorial experiment Come One, Come All, and Rachel Rose’s narrative-driven Enclosure at Pilar Corrias. P.S. spittle hears that Damien will be serving up fish and chips at Gagosian!
🧊 8th March | 6 - 8pm | A.R. Penck: Paintings 1974–1990, White Cube Mason’s Yard [Green Park]
🧊 8th March | 3 - 8pm | Rachel Rose: Enclosure, Pilar Corrias (Eastcastle Street and Savile Row) [Oxford Circus]
🧊 9th March | 6 - 8pm | Inside Out, group exhibition including Sophie Mei Birkin, Max Boyla, Sonya Derviz, Antoine Leisure, Kin-Ting Li, Ding Shilun and Scott Young, The Artist Room [Piccadilly Circus]
🧊 9th March | 6 - 8pm | Vilte Fuller: Little kiosk of bone juice, Niru Ratnam Gallery [Oxford Circus]
🧊 9th March | 6 - 8pm | Damien Hirst: Natural History, Gagosian Britannia Street [Kings Cross]
🧊 10th March | 6 - 8pm | Three’s a Crowd, Soho Revue [Piccadilly Circus]
🧊 11th March | 6 - 8pm | Come One, Come All, open call curatorial experiment by Taro Qureshi, The Function Suite [Stratford]
🧊 10th March | Julia de Ruvo: I PROMISE I DON’T BITE / JAG LOVAR ATT JAG INTE KOMMER ATT BITA DIG, Guts Gallery [Hackney Downs]
🧊 12th March | 4 - 9pm | Saxifrage, group exhibition including Azeri Aghayeva, Camilla Bliss, Max Boyla, Sophie Goodchild and Penelope Kupfer, Kupfer [Hackney Central]
🧊 10th March | 6:30 - 10pm | Deep Meaningful Conversation (Art Show & Book Launch) Ugly Duck, SE1 3PL [London Bridge]
🧊 11th March | Paulo Nimer Pjota, Maureen Paley [Bethnal Green]
Exhibition of the week
Sin Wai Kim: A Dream of Wholeness in Parts at Soft Opening, until 16 April
Lining the walls of Soft Opening’s Hackney space are glowing portraits, encased in acetate. Smears of blue, green, hot pink and black mark out the imprint of a face. These are perhaps the works for which Sin Wai Kim is best known, ‘face wipe’ portraits created as the artist removes makeup from their drag performances. The works are quietly haunting, a death mask to each character they play. In the next room, you see the characters in action, animated. Played by the artist, and inspired by traditional Chinese and Cantonese opera, in which set characters recur across narratives identifiable by their masks, the film presents three characters struggling to discern the real from the dreamt, and the self from the other. The work is beautifully presented with sumptuous costumes and trippy edits, a delicate and subtle mediation on identity.
Hot Links
🎨 Things have changed since the time of Ghiberti and Donatello - Spike magazine’s Hans-Jürgen Hafner on the trials and tribulations of being an artist assistant. In the age of market and institutional calls for mass-produced and production line quantity art from stars as varied as Tracey Emin, Martin Kippenberger and Darren Bader, Hafner asks ‘Is it naïve to still ask who actually made the art?’ DO NOT READ if you buy into the idea of the art-market-darling-as-lone-wolf schtick; apparently ‘Nam June Paik didn’t even know how to turn on a TV!’
🇺🇸 “First of all there is a major flaw in America, the American people are basically anti-intellectual” - An illuminating (rare) 1977 French cable TV interview with the crucifix-clad esteemed science-fiction writer and ‘psychonaut tightrope walker’ Phillip K. Dick, who speaks on pulp paranoia, French-influenced literature, and American censorship of the sci-fi industry.
🃏 “suddenly he was gallivanting through the plastic, the distasteful, the absurdist and slightly offensive (aesthetically, anyway)” - Since taking the helm of Loewe in 2013, Jonathan Anderson has quietly pushed the boundaries of luxury fashion, culminating in this season’s frankly bizarre collection. Rachel Tashjian explores why recent trends (or lack thereof) have led to the return of Surrealism in fashion.
🎂 “If cake as art is silly or cringe or cute then so is all painting” - spittle has previously commented on the Tiktok ‘everything is cake’ trend which, artnet notes, has not yet fully abated. In this comprehensive deep dive on the cultural significance of this contemporary cake ‘moment’, Katie White covers the pressing phenomenon from every angle, including: the politics of cake, the working woman/sugary pink femininity, subversive cake, and grotesque food pornification.
🐎 “It is unlikely my own fatigues will ever be called upon to clasp the lower foreleg of a horse” - This nerdy fashion piece is subtitled ‘An anthropologist discovers workwear’ and follows Josh Berson’s journey from the Spartan, minimalist, only-one-pair-of-pants type, to the type who writes ‘I found myself in possession of a repro Baker fatigue in an updated silhouette, sewn up in the kind of shuttle-loomed slubby reverse sateen that has made the textile mills of Okayama the object of awed whispers in a certain segment of the menswear demographic’, for 032c.
🌊 Life buffeted by vibrations and waves, moods and intensities - Mitch Therieau on how Big Tech has absorbed the lexicon of countercultural movements for The Drift. From ‘Good Vibrations’ and ‘the mysterious Yoni or female energy of nature’ and even the phrase ‘big mood’ or Tinder’s ‘Vibes’ feature, Theriau’s piece urgently charts the lineage of the vibe in the time of its supposed shift. Read on to understand this ‘shared moment of ambient disaster as it unfolds’…
Add-to-cart
Ukrainian designer Anton Belinskiy collaborated with 032c to create a FREE UKRAINE T-Shirt which dropped to phenomenal interest and promptly sold out. Emblazoned with the Ukrainian passport, Belinskiy notes how the ID document represents ‘heritage’, ‘where people belong, what burdens them, and who they want to be.’ The design has now been made open source; with the publication encouraging interested parties to make their own to raise funds for the cause! For those interested in screenprinting more t-shirts to raise funds, contact Margo (margo.kirlan@gmail.com) at Anton Belinskiy Studio. All proceeds go to DEUTSCHES ROTES KREUZ, Nothilfe Ukraine and Voices of Children, Ukraine.
Parting shot
Artist Issy Wood shared the good news of her debut appearance in the New York Post…
Love,
London’s beating ‘art <3 <3 <3 <3