Going Public, International Art Collectors in Sheffield (until 12 December)
Sheffield gets a quadruple whammy of top-notch artworks from four world-class collections of contemporary and 20th-century art, which are currently occupying five of the city’s public galleries and museums and—especially spectacularly—its cathedral. In the latter, contemporary works from the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Collection in Turin have been deftly installed to strike up a spirited and disquieting dialogue with their sacred surroundings. Works include dramatic tapestries by Goshka Macuga and Pae White across and along the nave; Micol Assael’s recording of a fluttering trapped bird in the crypt, and the Chapman brothers’ flayed, dangling Cyber Iconic Man who drips blood into a side chapel.
More subtle subversion is on view at the Graves Gallery. Situated upstairs in the city’s art deco Central Library, the gallery is hosting a beautifully organised show of rare works and archive material focusing on Marcel Duchamp and his relationship to Dada and Surrealism, collected over the past half century by the Berlin-based collector Egidio Marzona. In the Millennium Gallery, Looks Conceptual, a selection from Nicolas Cattelain’s collection of 1960’s and 70’s conceptual art and its contemporary legacy, includes major pieces by Sol Lewitt and Dan Flavin as well as Do Ho Suh’s life-sized recreation of a Berlin apartment in green polyester gauze. Dominique and Sylvain Levy’s dsl Collection of contemporary Chinese art in all media, especially film and video, occupies both the Site and Sheffield Institute of Art galleries, with a special emphasis on the radical artists from the Guangdong Province —formerly known as Canton. Let’s hope more collectors—and cities — follow the example of this important new initiative.
Prem Sahib: Side On, ICA (until 15 November)
Throbbing Minimalism could be the alternative title for this deft, elegant show that confidently riffs on austere Minimalist conventions of crisp grids, geometrically precise forms and everyday materials while infusing these time-honoured tropes with quietly intense and witty carnal references. In the ICA’s downstairs gallery a discrete orgy is in full swing, as stacked towers of flesh pink sanitary tiles suggestively interlock while hoodies and puffa jackets are squashed into intimate scrums of grappling embraces between plates of glass, that also prop up pairs of neat testicular eggs. On the wall, a trio of neon scribbles pulses with what seem to be uneven deep breaths with the cottagey feel further underlined by a leafy false window set high into the ICA wall.
Upstairs and down, monochrome panels of silver, gold and black have been almost imperceptibly beaded with tiny drops of what could be sweat or condensation, which also bear the smears of human contact. There’s more mixing of exquisite and abject in Sahib’s piece de resistance, a floorpiece called Tuesday in which the squares of what look like a black shiny dance floor are dusted with a light smattering of talcum powder that is both scuffed with the footprints of dancers but which also resembles a starry sky. Sahib is often associated with a band of collaborators that includes Eddie Peake and George Henry Longly, but here he confirms that his artistic voice is absolutely his own.
Mat Collishaw: The New Art Gallery, Walsall; In Camera: Library of Birmingham (both until January 10)
Hirst may have his pickled beasts, but it is his friend, and Goldsmith’s contemporary, Mat Collishaw who consistently presents the dark underbelly of the YBA generation. From his art world calling card of a bloody, magnified head wound displayed in a neat grid of lightboxes at Hirst’s 1988 Freeze exhibition, to the array of exquisitely presented images of sex, death and horror that comprise his current Walsall survey, Collishaw continues to be endlessly inventive in his exploration of the beauty in brutality, and in his probing of our endless fascination with the taboo. In the somberly lit galleries of Walsall he combines the language and traditions of art history with the latest technologies to contemplate our mortality as well as our morality. There’s a gorgeous yet horrific sequence of giant, vivid photographs depicting an almost heraldic parade of squashed butterflies and moths; a series of sculptures in which the petals of exotic plants ooze with suppurating sores and pustules; and—in a truly grim but compelling contemporary memento mori—the last meals of Texas death row prisoners, their ham sandwiches, their wraps and French fries—are meticulously composed and lit in the manner of 17th century Spanish still life paintings.
Art has always relished a body in extremis and in Collishaw’s hands a slowed-down film of a contorting, acrobatic pole dancer resembles a Rubens deposition as much as a salacious entertainer, while a room lined with phosphorescent paint flashes with epic images of anguished parents attempting to rescue children from disaster zones, which flare and then fade like the horrors that we see on the news every day. The culmination of these uncomfortable musings comes in Collishaw’s re-enactment of the hideous but abidingly popular art-historic subject of the Slaughter of the Innocents that here takes the form of a spectacular spinning zoetrope which, when hit by strobe lights, makes the atrocity spring to life and unfold mesmerizingly before your eyes. Also don’t miss Collishaw’s haunting installation at Birmingham Library in which crime scenes from the 1930’s and 40’s—an empty room, a rumpled bed, a snowy lane—are momentarily illuminated like bad dreams that tug at the pyche and reverberate in the subconscious.
Ryan Gander: Fieldwork, Lisson Gallery (until 31 October)
A feature of the popular 1970’s TV show The Generation Game was when the winners got to watch an array of consumer goods pass by on a conveyor belt and could take away as many prizes as they could remember. This format has been revisited as an element by Ryan Gander where more than 30 strange but inspirational objects from the artist’s collection—a slashed teddy, a conjoined pair of watches, a pair of dead pigeons—glide past an aperture, leaving a memory game of bizarre associations behind them. Concealment and revelation run through this most thought-provoking of shows where Gander’s elliptical practice leaves much of the figuring-out and connection-making up to the viewer.
But while there are no easy answers, Gander’s work engages rather than alienates with the artist seemingly as curious the visitor to see what emerges. When he tries to recreate the colour of the Suffolk sky near his home he presents us with all the options, and there’s a glee to his poetic clogging of the galleries with stones from a nearby shingle beach that run through Lisson’s lower spaces as far as the eye can see. He even emblazons his mobile phone number on a billboard outside the gallery and if you call, there’s a good chance that he will either answer or ring you back.