o The beginning of the month sees London still in the aftermath of the Tate Modern launch, with a plethora of exhibitions convened to show off new spaces and/or the spectrum of a gallery’s artists for the delectation of the international art world. Victoria Miro unveiled her new building in a stunning state of dereliction (albeit with some exquisitely gleaming white walls). The Miro stable is large and varied, running from Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Little Sparta columns, to Alex Hartley’s minimal sculpture and Andreas Gursky’s photographic panorama of a bleak shopping mall, via a gruesome wallpiece by Brazilian artist Adriana Varejao. Chris Ofili is represented at Wharf Road by the first of his “Captain Shit” series of paintings, while back in Victoria Miro’s original Cork Street gallery a show of large, looping, wittily intricate drawings, confirms their crucial relationship to his paintings.
o Returning to the East End, Benjamin Rhodes’ and Fred Mann’s new joint gallery Rhodes + Mann (see diary) celebrates the fact that their combined artists are so diverse, while Anthony Wilkinson avoids the one-work-per-artist approach by giving three of his artists—Matthew Higgs, Angela de La Cruz and Elizabeth Price—a room each in which to realise a project. The result is kinder to both artist and viewer: Price’s hairdryer, single trophy and housefly resonate disquietingly in the expanse of the first room; in a back space Higgs’ framed title pages of books and single video work are wryly austere; upstairs three of Angela de La Cruz’s paintings have been specially, and suggestively, collapsed to fit the space. Outside there’s a gloriously misspelt slogan-cum-sign by Bob & Roberta Smith.
o Touching sculpture, whether ancient or modern, is usually not encouraged—Carl Andre has stated that the oil from a single human hand can do more harm to a work than a multitude of scuffing footsteps to the floor of a gallery—yet this month, in the art-packed area of Shoreditch, visitors are encouraged not only to touch the work, but to wash with it. “Zeep” is a life-sized self-portrait sculpture by Dutch artist Marisca Voskcamp, which is made from glycerine soap. According to the artist, the way in which the work evolves as it alters at the hands of its audience is akin to the unfolding of a slow motion film. In order to assist in the ablutions of its audience this giant, human-shaped bar of soap has been put on show by Dominic Berning at Shoreditch Gallery next to a minimal sink by architect John Pawson.
o The figures in Alessandro Raho’s first solo show at Asprey Jacques may be safely attached to the walls, but his crisp-edged paintings and drawings of his friends and himself possess a powerful almost physical immediacy. Although Raho has always worked with photography, he has never, until now, shown photographs as works in their own right.
o LA-based Richard Hawkins’s first UK solo show at Corvi-Mora brings a very twenty-first-century sense of decadence to Warren Street with his ability to combine a wide range of influences ranging from gore movies, male supermodels and Symbolist art.
o Henry Bond’s photographs have established him as the flâneur of our fragmentary, urban times. Now two books and two simultaneous shows of his photographs provide a exhaustive view Bond’s all-encompassing vision: La vie quotidienne and Point and shoot, and the shows of the same name at Emily Tsingou and 2 & 6 Shorrold’s Road are like a Cresta Run through the high and low points of an urban (and often urbane) existence.
o “In your dreams” is the title of a mixed show at Fa 1 Contemporary Art which takes a small sketch by Salvador Dalí as its starting point and then fast-forwards into the contemporary subconscious to include a short film by Hadrian Piggot in which hand-washing goes beyond hygiene into obsessiveness and a series of drawings by Simon English in which hybrid figures embrace and move across the walls. There are video narratives by Saskia Olde Wolbwers.
o Rineka Dijkstra’s photographs of pubescent boys and girls standing on sea shores around the world won her the 1999 Citibank Prize for photography and have recently been on show at the Saatchi Gallery. There is more adolescence in her Anthony d’Offay exhibition this month with images of young people at play in Berlin’s Tiergarten park and these are shown along with Dijkstra’s response to a commission from the Anne Frank Foundation which involved taking group photographs of fifteen-year-old girls, the age of Anne Frank when she died.
o Less specific explorations of memory in Entwistle’s two spaces find Rachel Lowe’s “Memory of a free festival”, depicting the silhouetted images from a range of 70s sources and animating them with flickering projected light, while upstairs Jason Brooks’s hyper-real portraits and studies of funereal wreaths in black and white are joined by “Crossing the brook”, a scaled up re-worked version of a painting by Turner.
o There is still a lot of artistic action in South London, and not just around Bankside and Bermondsey. Mark Bystriansky, formerly of Lotta Hammer Gallery has founded, with his artist wife Natasha, Peeps Gallery which is currently presenting a mixed show entitled “Charlie’s friends”. The gallery promises to “introduce paintings, sculpture, artefacts, ice cream and other works of art”. While Charlie’s identity remains open to speculation, the show’s line-up of artists includes Bob and Roberta Smith, Peter Harris, Martin Boyce and Stuart Taylor.
Originally appeared in The Art Newspaper as ‘Leaving an after-Tate'