upcoming exhibitions [September]

A massive wave of interesting art exhibitions is about to hit London. The Rothko show at Tate Modern will definitely be a blockbuster (from 26 September), and Francis Bacon at Tate Britain (from 11 September) will attract flocks of visitors too (this year’s Turner Prize contenders are on show as well). Moving from Southbank to Kensington, the Serpentine will open an exhibition of new works by German master Gerhard Richeter on 23 September, and in North London the Estorick Collection will host Cut&Paste: Photomontage 1920-50 from September 24 (the Estorick is worth a trip to Highbury, it’s such a nice space, and the shows are usually pretty good). It’s enough to make me giddy, but the list goes on: Dryden Goodwin at the Photographer’s Gallery (26 September-16 November); Wallace Berman at Camden Arts Centre (26 September-23 November); Robin Rhode at the Hayward (23 September-7 December); Design Cities at the Design Museum (5 September-4 January 2009).

Psycho buildings on the Southbank

The new exhibition at the Hayward is a mix of architecture, installation and design. Best works on display are Life fog frog… fog frog by Ernesto Neto, Fallen Star 1/5 and Staircase V (my favourite, pictured) by Do Ho Suh, In the memory of H. P. Lovecraft by Mike Nelson, and the exploding (?) Show room by Cuban duo Los Carpinteros. Not so sure about the rest, it looked a bit like a funfair.

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Thanks to my friend B. I’ve discovered Bon Iver, a.k.a. American singer-songwriter Justin Vernon. I can’t stop listening to For Emma Forever Ago, truly beautiful.

3 exhibitions and 1/2

One and two: both at the Hayward Gallery (possibly my favorite gallery in London), the retrospective on Russian photographer Alexander Rodchenko and the group exhibition Laughing in a foreign language are diametrically (and dramatically) different. But this is good. The only downside (for the ones that wish to visit just one of the two) is that there is a cumulative ticket, so you’ll have to see the contemporary show even if you intended to see only Rodchenko. Personally, I was glad to visit both, and did laugh going through the ground and first floor galleries. Before heading to the Hayward I read some pretty harsh reviews on Laughing in a different…, but I thought 80% of the works were quite good. The display includes works by Nedko Solakov (best in the show), David Shrigley (a whole wall dedicated to his drawings!), Barthélémy Toguo, Doug Fishbone and Ugo Rondinone. It would be interesting to make a survey on how people react to certain pieces on show, if being foreign (in Britain) influences their perception. Apart from a couple of pieces I couldn’t see anything that would justify the shocked reactions of journalists from Time Out and Daily Telegraph. The Rodchenko display is very traditional, but interesting all the same and definitely worth seeing. Although I’m not an expert, some photographs (modern re-prints) seemed a bit poor quality. What I liked best was a wall of magazine covers designed around Rodchenko’s pictures.

[imgs via southbankcentre.co.uk]

Three: Peter Doig at Tate Britain. I liked it immensely. No, I’m not writing anything new, Doig is one of the best artists around. He could be a Russian expressionist (early Kandinsky) or a French post-impressionist (Gauguin, and not only because of his recent move to Trinidad). Anyway a must-see.

[imgs via tate.org.uk]

1/2: Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art at Barbican. The mission of this exhibition is ‘to interpret and understand contemporary art’, but I’m not so sure about the outcome. It’s a bit of everything thrown in together, definitely not helpful if one wants to understand contemporary art. I really liked the work Cultural Ties (1979) by American artist Jeffrey Vallance. That’s about it.