Scottish artist Roddy Buchanan makes his Lisson Gallery debut this month with a series of new video installations and photographic pieces. The games that people play remains a consistent theme; for this year’s Venice Biennale he presented beanbags of the exact body weight of boxing stars such as George Foreman and Mike Tyson alongside details of their lost bouts. For his Lisson show Buchanan has been collaborating with Edinburgh’s premier baseball club: one piece consists of two projections facing each other across the gallery in which a baseball is pitched from one side and caught on the other and can be heard hissing through the space between.
There is a journey to the depths of a fevered subconscious at Emily Tsingou where the entire gallery is being engulfed by the new “dreamt-of drawings” by Los Angeles-based Jim Shaw which whip up a meticulously executed cocktail of images culled from Surrealism, Photorealism and comic books, and also incorporate 3-D elements. Shaw, who describes his dream imagery as “unexpected phenomena and a complex repertoire of visual and verbal puns”, started working on this body of work in the early 90s, but he has never used this wall-to-wall format before.
A cacophanous vision of a different kind can be found at Sadie Coles HQ which is presenting the first solo show in the UK of German artist John Bock. Whether he is spouting incomprehensible pseudo-scientific theories, building ramshackle structures from found materials, or staging an insane fashion show, Bock draws on a combination of Dada theatre, Situationist performance and scatter aesthetics to present a deliberately absurd and absurdist challenge to his audiences.
James Rielly first attracted widespread attention with a series of small paintings taken from photographs of children and adults that went on show in Charles Saatchi’s “Sensation” in 1997, in a special room designated for Over 18s, alongside the Chapman’s mannequins. These days, Rielly is still making low key, but emotionally ambiguous, paintings of children and adults, but now they have increased in size and tend to be less sexually suggestive. In his first solo show since he moved from Laurent Delaye to Timothy Taylor, Rielly’s adults tend to display their childishness while the children seem almost ominously grave and mature. Watercolours range between £1,000 and £2,000, and oils go up to £16,000.
There are more children over at White Cube with British artist Claire Richardson’s photographs taken in and around a Rudolf Steiner community in the northeast US, where pre-pubescent nippers gambol in lakes and cover themselves in mud in seeming pre-lapsarian bliss. However, as everyone knows, there is always the potential for monstrousness and cruelty in such antics, and beneath the outdoor frolics of these fresh-faced youths, there always lurks the memory of The lord of the flies...
Andrew Lewis made his one-man debut last year in fig-1 with his “Spatial awareness show” of visionary models and drawings for proposed projects and buildings which aimed to transform life in cities and suburbs into a futuristic paradise. Now, for his first show at Laurent Delaye, Lewis’s skill as an architectural draughtsman and model maker continues to be put to idiosyncratic use in “Ark Royale with cheese” in which an imposing military warship has been installed in the midst of a Georgian London square, and kitted out for utopian living.
Vladimir Dubossarsky and Alexsander Vinogradov make the kind of flashily executed, academic epic paintings that poured out of post-perestroika Russia in the 1980s and covered the walls of the now-defunct Roy Miles Gallery. However, this show is in Shoreditch, not plushy Mayfair, and while the Russian duo’s style may be retro, the bizarre subject matter of their monumental works currently on show at Vilma Gold goes way beyond heroes of Russian history and revolution. There is even a new painting for their British debut, which stars, appropriately enough, The Queen.
Maria Chevska is well known for her richly allusive paintings which explore the relationship between image and language, and in her new paintings on show at Andrew Mummery the short fictional extracts that are poured in kaolin to form a raised text on their surfaces are taken from the short stories of Raymond Carver. These are accompanied by a series of objects/sculptures constructed from cloth hardened in kaolin which Chevska describes as “prosthetics” and which have been arranged in a close relationship with the paintings.
There is also a close relationship to prosthesis in the painted papier-mâché heads of Austrian artist Franz West and his sculptures and installations currently on show at Gagosian have been described as “in-between forms.” Also in this exhibition is a series of environments that combine everyday objects with diverse works of art by the likes of Michelangelo Pistoletto, Jean-Marc Bustamente and Jannis Kounellis. L.B.
Roddy Buchanan, Lisson Gallery, 52-54 Bell Street, London NW1 5DA, % +44 (0)20 7724 2739, fax +44 (0)20 7724 7124, contact@lisson.co.uk (20 September to 19 October)
Jim Shaw, Emily Tsingou Gallery, 10 Charles 11 Street, London SW1Y 4AA, % +44 (0)20 7839 5320, fax +44 (0)20 7839 532, www.emilytsingougallery.com (15 September to 27 October)
John Bock, Sadie Coles HQ, 35 Heddon Street, London W1R 7LL % +44 (0)20 7434 2227, fax +44 (0)20 7434 2228, www.sadiecoles.com (until 20 October)
James Rielly, Timothy Taylor Gallery, 1 Bruton Place , London W1X 7AD, % +44 (0)20 7409 3344 fax +44 (0)20 7409 1316 (12 September to 27 October)
Clare Richardson, “Harlemville”, White Cube , 44 Duke Street, London SW1Y 6DD, % +44 (0)20 7930 5373, fax +44 (0)20 7930 9973, www.whitecube.com (5 September to 13 October)
Andrew Lewis, “Ark Royale with cheese”, Laurent Delaye, 11 Saville Row , London W1X 2AE, % +44 (0)20 7287 1546, fax +44 (0)20 7287 1562, (until 15 September)
Vladimir Dubossarsky and Alexsander Vinogradov, Vilma Gold Gallery, 62 Rivington Street, London EC2A 3AY % +44 (0)20 7613 1609, fax +44 (0)20 7256 1242, vilm.gold@telinco.co.uk (until 16 September)
Anna Chevska, “Why don’t you?”, Andrew Mummery, 63 Compton Street, London EC1V OBN, % +44 (0)20 7251 6265, fax +44 (0)20 7251 5545, info@andrewmummery.com (5 September to 6 October)
Franz West, Gagosian Gallery, 8 Heddon Street, London W1R 7LH, % +44 (0)20 7292 8222, fax +44 (0)20 7292 8220, info@gagosian.com (6 September to 20 October)
Originally appeared in The Art Newspaper as 'Pitching and catching at Lisson'