“Travelodges, and Frube yoghurts squirting”
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This Week
💦 Lomex’s Giger coin bears a legless xenomorph
💦 Duchamp playing chess with a nude Eve Babitz
💦 Pygostyle - what is it, what does it mean
Events
So many wonderful exhibitions this week - and an exciting new space opening for Guts Gallery in Hackney. Berlin-based Mexican artist Manuel Solano’s I STILL LOOK LIKE A MODEL looks incred, as does artist-cum-accessories designer Leo Costelloe’s at RRPS. Shout out to Sadie Coles for hosting Queer Direct at their space on Saturday – spittle hears that a party may be to follow. Ears to the ground!
🧊 9 February | 6–8pm | Manuel Solano: I Still Look Like a Model, Carlos Ishikawa [Stepney Green]
🧊 10 February | 6–7pm | Craft-Tech: Panel Discussion, New Contemporaries, Contributors: Laurie Britton Newell (Chair), Lilah Fowler, Jahday Ford & Eva Rothschild | Free
🧊 10 February | 6–9pm | Corbin Shaw: Nowt as Queer as Folk, (Guts Gallery new space opening), Unit 2, E8 2AA [Hackney Downs & Hackney Central]
🧊 11 February | 7–9pm | Pygostyle (Ahaad Alamoudi, Lulua Alyahya, Tom Hardwick-Allan), The Residence Gallery [London Fields]
🧊 11 February | 6–10pm | Leo Costelloe: And if this is the end I want a boyfriend, Ridley Road Project Space [Dalston Kingsland]
🧊 12 February | Queer Direct, The Shop at Sadie Coles HQ [Oxford Circus]
🧊 12 February | 12–8pm | Holy Island (Danny Fox and Kingsley Ifill), Hannah Barry Gallery [Peckham Rye]
Exhibitions of the week
Roy DeCarava: Selected Works and Rose Wylie: Car and Girls at David Zwirner, until February 19
Roy de Carava’s monochromatic prints fill two floors of David Zwirner’s London location. The deeply intimate works, which focus on the aesthetic sensibilities of the medium of photography, rather than the medium’s ability to document the present, offer quiet, poetic glimpses into mid-century New York. Upstairs, Rose Wylie takes over, and her humorous works spill out of the canvas and take the shape of playful and glowing glazed ceramic sculptures. Characteristically mixing text (‘Every evening she runs down the hill like an assyrian danser, her dog on a lead behind her’) and form (in this case, a topless dancer, lit by the light of the moon), Wylie continues her incredibly positively affirming romp through domestic situations and mundane objects, all made ironic and a little absurd by her quick wit and no-nonsense style.
Roxy Lee: Cold Lunch at Ridley Road Project Space. Now closed, images here
‘I don’t think money makes a good outfit [in the club]. I don’t think brands necessarily make good fashion. Initiative and reference make good looks,’ Roxy Lee said in an interview describing her attitude to image-making ahead of her show Cold Lunch. Known for her radical and under-recognised (by the art world, at least) work documenting utopian queer club nights such as Adonis and Chapter 10, Roxy has seen more nightlife-related glamour and hedonism than most – all gloriously captured on film. This show – her first solo since graduating – incorporated all the ‘explicit’ works Instagram would never let us see. Think group sex in Travelodges, myriad erect penises and Frube yoghurts squirting out of bumholes! A far cry from anything we’ve seen at The Photographers Gallery, this show evidences the real creativity – and sex-positivity – happening in the margins, beyond the algorithms’ shamefully oppressive censorship. spittle couldn’t agree more with Lee’s assertion: ‘To some extent, I think censorship is absolute bollocks.’
Hot links
💸 The art world’s disgraced fake heiress, Anna Delvey, tells her side of the “Summer of Scam” - Insider gets the exclusive scoop from Delvey herself on life in prison, Daily Mail-sourced biases in the US court, why ‘she doesn’t ‘need any more jail friends, thank you very much’ and why she will NOT be watching Inventing Anna which launches this week on Netflix. spittle, however, couldn’t be more excited.
💞 “what are the chances that a friend’s mother just happens to have a taste for gay arthouse?” - Huw Lemmey of ‘Bad Gays’ podcast writes a beautiful obituary of the recently passed, stylish and homoerotic filmmaker James Bidgood in his newsletter utopian drivel. He concludes, ‘Tonight we can celebrate his life by rewatching Pink Narcissus and, on sleeping, letting it cloud our wet dreams in a fuchsia mist.’ hubba hubba.
👽 “The bland, eminently OK American icon” Matt Damon hawks Crypto.com / “Fortune favours the brave” – Domenick Ammirati heads to the openings of ‘biomechanical’ artist HR Giger at Lomex and neo-geo artist Ashley Bickerton at O’Flahertys in NYC for Artforum while spilling all the goss. Read it if only for this brilliant line: ‘Artforum readers may be unfamiliar with so-called American football, but for reference, you could say that the pastime exists at the intersection of art and technology.’
⛓ “Getting the tube in full latex is dreadful, though.” - Emma Garland reports from the front lines of non-cis-heteropatriarchy, spotlighting sex-positive parties like Crossbreed and Adonis which have exploded in popularity as spaces where anyone can play, play, play. NB, the strict dress-code is “not designed to weed out cis straight men – it just so happens cis straight men are put off dressing up”... sign us up.
🖼 “Art is just a useful idiot in this scenario” - Domenico Quaranta explores whether artists could be the real losers in the NFT Ponzi scheme, pointing out that, actually, an NFT certificate of ownership ‘is basically a lie - asserting that the associated file is unique when it is anything but’. Yikes.
👩💻 “anything is preferable to the bought-off pabulum pumped out by gallery-owned magazines” - In this display of criticism-of-criticism, which explores the rise of the use of the first person in art writing, Martin Herbert investigates how we became SO self-centred.
Add-to-cart
Just in time for Valentine’s Day, Telfar has your date-night drip all sorted and available for a mere $322. Only in Passion Red, their iconic bag is the perfect carrier for all your emotional baggage. We’ll be taking the large. Purchase here.
Parting shot
To celebrate the Queen’s jubilee this week, we bring you the crown jewel of Matt Hancock’s art collection, Damien Hirst’s Beautiful Portrait, The Queen (2014). Matt seems to think Damien had a lot to say with this piece, and either lugs it around with him, hanging it in the background of every zoom frame, or has commissioned a copy for every room in his house. We wonder what new squeeze Gina thinks of it…
Love,
London’s beating ‘art <3 <3 <3 <3