“The glistening length of Klum’s earthworm”
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This week
🧊 offal and the shackles of femininity
🧊 A $28,500 sex-dungeon chaise lounge
🧊 failure to cope under capitalism
Events
On Wednesday we’ll come from cult painter Manuel Solano’s new show at Carlos Ishikawa in Whitechapel to be in central bright and early for Hepworth Wakefield curator Andrew Bonacina’s group show at Michael Werner, before nipping across to Niru Ratnam for painter Matthew Krishanu's solo. Thursday highlights include an opening at Mazzy-Mae Green’s new space Sherbet Green in Haggerston, and what promises to be a supremely elegant show by Jordan Derrien at VO Curations. The mysterious gallery Montague is opening for its annual two week exhibition stint on Friday too - not an occasion to be missed!
💦 9 Nov | 6–8pm | Manuel Solano: Ancestry, Carlos Ishikawa [Whitechapel]
💦 9 Nov | 6–8pm | Interior, curated by Andrew Bonacina, Michael Werner [Bond Street]
💦 9 Nov | 6–8pm | Matthew Krishanu: Playground, Niru Ratnam [Oxford Circus]
💦 10 Nov | 6–9pm | ALL NIGHT: Louis Blue Newby, Eloise Hawser, and Mimi Hope & Ben Galyas, Sherbet Green [Cambridge Heath]
💦 10 Nov | 6–9pm | piloto pardo present Darya Diamond & Hanna Stiegeler - Hungry Heart, Claas Reiss [Euston]
💦 10 Nov | 6–8pm | Jordan Derrien + Guendalina Cerruti, V.O Curations [Oxford Circus]
💦 10 Nov | 6–8pm | Niccolo Binda Residency Presentation, Standpoint [Hoxton]
💦 11 Nov | 6–9pm | Valerie Kong: Hard Copy, Montague, E8 2HN [Hackney Downs]
💦 12 Nov | Jarman Award Tour: Jamie Crewe, Grace Ndiritu, Rosa-Johan Uddoh, Onyeka Igwe, Morgan Quaintance, Alberta Whittle, Whitechapel Gallery [Aldgate East]
Exhibitions
Nevine Mahmoud, Soft Opening, until 3 December, information here.
Nevine Mahmoud’s in mass and feeling at Soft Opening plays with materiality, weight and deception. Produced from marble and cast from resin, childhood toys adorn metal plinths scattered around the room, exhibiting an almost sentient, lifelike quality. A departure from her abject, abstract composite works, the smooth surface of these sculptures has such a tactile quality it’s a struggle not to reach out and touch them. The smooth stone, manipulated from its raw form to a state where it’s barely recognisable, has taken on a new form, one that we can only imagine has the waxiness of the plastic it imitates. Mahmoud has based three of these sculptures – gates and a trike – on the iconic toys from Little Tyke; instantly imbuing them with a sense of familiarity and nostalgia. Who hasn’t played with, fallen off and fallen out over these iconic objects? Now monumentalised in marble, the toys are joined by a fawn, curled neatly in a sitting position with baby pink bat ears sprouting from its white body. I’m reminded of that video which did the rounds on tumblr in 2012 or so, of a stag wandering through an empty church. There is a reverence to the object but seen with a childlike gaze. The image is simplistic in its purity, which in turns doubles back on itself and becomes somewhat unnerving – there’s a tense anticipation. Something sinister. It’s these contradictions, between the real and the deceiving, the infantile and the sinister, the known and the unknown which give strength to Mahmoud’s work.
Veronica Ryan, Alison Jacques, until 12 November, information here
Few artists can make political work about the environment that doesn’t give off a hippie-hessian plastic’s ruining the ocean eco-warrior Camden Market/GCSE-conceptualism vibe. Utilising recycled and organic materials to make sculpture in 2022 is like screen printing t-shirts to make political statements or starting a finsta account just to share your zero-waste dinner recipes: all well and good, but at least have the self-awareness to recognise you are on a well-trodden path. Veronica Ryan’s (b.1956) works break with such clichés. Small scale and often placed directly on the floor or suspended from the wall, Ryan’s unpretentious sculptural language is punctuated by a love for electrifying jolts of colour: hot pinks, fluorescent oranges, and neon yellows that are irresistibly pleasing to look at. She mixes materials associated with the history of art (bronze, plaster) with unlikely objects – hairnets, plastic bags and medical pillows – in pairings that scream pure poetry. Even when her works are presented en masse, in such a sprawling gesamkunstwerk-like setting as this, each individual piece feels like a peculiar little world; totally human and intimate but obviously crafted and hand made. Deceptively simple. Precariously light, sewn, bound and sometimes woven together in little stacks – she was inspired by fishermen’s traditional rituals during time spent in St Ives – her works seem only just heavy enough not to be blown around the gallery by passers by. Ryan somehow brings a slick minimalism to conversations surrounding art and the environment; allowing tacit messages to hold their own. Often conceptually grounded in her heritage (she was born in Montserrat), and exploring diasporic life in the UK, she also has permanent public sculptures on view outside Hackney Old Town Hall that are worth visiting. Honouring the Windrush generation, these are fruits imported to the UK but now so much a part of life and heritage here. Breadfruit, custard apple, soursop; Ryan celebrates each bulbous shape with characteristic understated grace and elegance.
Hot links
🪱 “a visual adjacency to both male genitalia and excrement” – With references to Viennese Actionism, offal and the shackles of femininity, Naomi Fry’s analysis of Heidi Klum’s instant-classic halloween costume takes a serious look at the question on every hot girl’s lips this Autumn, ‘would you still love me if I was a worm?’.
📧 “You can pledge your life to your craft or the cause of Monarch butterflies.” – Clare Coffey gives us a good ol’ smacker of tough love in this sermon about our collective ‘failure to cope under capitalism’. Who knew the malaise inflicted upon us by jobs that have us sending emails 16 hours a day *isn’t* something only the collapse of capitalism can mend… bring me my bootstraps.
🍽️ Would you trust AI to cook you dinner? – In the name of The New York Times, Priya Krishnato allowed the GPT-3 AI bot to generate an entire menu of not-quite-Thanksgiving recipes. And it's not bad! Included in the bot’s output are ingredient lists, instructions and even handy bonus tips. Will robots feed us into a vegetative state thus taking over the world? Stay tuned to find out.
🚧 Are outsider artists the Star-chitects of the Instagram age? - Pin-Up mag deep dive into the enduringly appealing world of ‘naïve architecture’ in the age of modernist apartment blocks. We loved learning about the ‘Dutch Kremlin’, 77-year-old retired sheet-metal worker Ger Leegwater’s 5-euro entry passion project that is ‘neither religious nor political.’
🧀 “Airbnb is funding a lot of ducks.” – YES, AirBnB is taking God’s work into its own hands and giving the hipsters what they want. Which turns out to be a $10 million investment for 100 hosts to build 100 OTT absurd houses. Winning proposals include a giant snail, a wedge of cheese, a clog, a ripe avocado and a disco ball.
Add-to-Cart
add-to-cart is one of our favourite segments to write (often getting the most clicks from you readers, too!). So you can understand our dismay when we discovered Gwyneth Paltrow’s bumper new Goop xmas gift guide, which is sooo good that we think we are tempted to just give up on this segment altogether?! From the $28,500 sex-dungeon chaise lounge going wild on social media, to the DIY-dildo kit, the neon toilet paper, the $250,000 vintage Ford Bronco and the $9,700 cold-therapy tank, her team has scoured the internet for the most bonkers gifts around – seems like we can rest assured there is no cost of living crisis in Goop land! Gwyneth, if you’re listening, we’d love a PR-gifted vag candle to review xo
Parting Shot
Latest in a long line of artist-estates-selling-out-to-the-Man comes the collab we really never saw coming – fast fashion brand Shein x lifelong socialist and Marxist-Leninist Frida Kahlo. ‘Inspired by Frida’s ‘love of Mexican Folklore’ the collection features tops, dresses, co-ords and accessories. One particular jumper is emblazoned with a cartoon portrait of the celebrated surrealist below the phrase ‘THE QUEEN OF SELFIES’ (below). According to the press release, ‘Frida Kahlo’s legacy lives on!’ but honestly, with the way her image has been commodified, we’re not sure how much life she’s got left in her…