Robert Rauschenberg

GAGOSIAN GALLERY | BRITANNIA STREET
6-24 Britannia Street
February 16–March 28

Robert Rauschenberg, Mirage (Jammer), 1975, sewn fabric, 80 x 69".

Rarely does the output of a staunchly canonical artist blow one away as it does in this exhibition of Robert Rauschenberg’s “Jammers,” a tight series of works made between 1975 and 1976. The twenty-one pieces on view are made of brightly colored fabrics that are stitched together or hung on rattan poles and all are more restrained and less wrought than one expects from the late artist. The “Jammers” series emerged out of Rauschenberg’s permanent move from New York to Captiva Island, Florida, in the early 1970s, as well as a trip to India in 1975 to research textile production.

A virtual breath of fresh air, these works are sunnier, quieter, and freer than much of Rauschenberg’s output. Large cuts of muslin, silk, and cotton have been stitched together in combinations that recall skies and seas, awnings and deck chairs, as well as an earlier period of painting—in particular that of Rauschenberg’s teacher Josef Albers. In Mirage (Jammer), 1975, a composition of marigold and red rectangles is barely obscured by a translucent fabric that hangs over a section of the work, as a mist or cloud might draw a veil over something bright on the horizon. In an untitled work of the same year, a red gingham fabric seems to be unfurling itself from two tin cans with a flourish, eager to wave about in the wind.

Poles and cans act as weights on a number of works, sagging the fabric while serving as subtle reminders of the pull and drag of the world, and of the raw detritus that figured into the artist’s works that were made in New York. And yet, for the most part, these works are delicate hymns to color, light, and fabric itself—something wafer thin and vulnerable to every crease or rumple, yet powerful enough to blaze brightly on the horizon or to guide a sailboat across the ocean.

— Laura McLean-Ferris

Keith Tyson

PACE GALLERY | 6 BURLINGTON GARDENS
6 Burlington Gardens
February 7–March 28

*Keith Tyson, The Metamorphosis, 2011-12, oil on aluminum, 66 3/4 x 66 3/4".

Panta rhei, or “everything flows” in Ancient Greek, is a concept that refers to the world’s state of never-ending flux, and it is the title of Keith Tyson’s exhibition at Pace London. Here, in sixteen new paintings inspired by poetry, music, and personal references, the artist explores his ongoing interest in the networks and systems that construct our existence.

Colorful abstract shapes appear to be sucked into another dimension in the piece Curves of an infinite order, 2012, in which Tyson has applied a layering technique, painting over another picture and then scraping back the newer surface to partially reveal the image beneath. The effect is disorienting, similar to a television with poor signal that flashes between two channels and then decides on a fuzzy combination of both. A green serpent peers piercingly with a yellow eye from under multiple layers of paint in The Metamorphosis, 2011–12, bypassing a double helix, octopus tentacles, human bones, and snails. Human faces are also detectable; a child in a white sun hat can be seen where the paint has been removed, smiling and oblivious to the chaos around him.

In The 2nd Law (Mythic Dad), 2010–12, we see maggot-ridden plastic rubbish bags floating in a landscape of stars and distant galaxies, bursting and full while they seem to orbit a looming black planet. The philosopher Heraclitus, with whom the concept panta rhei is associated, opined that “the fairest universe is but a heap of rubbish piled up at random.” He was clearly not referring to junk and coffee cups like those seen in Tyson’s painting; rather, he warned that our universe, however orderly it may seem, is unsystematic and ever changing. In this exhibition, Keith Tyson’s work reminds us to consider the beauty amid this instability.

— Grace Beaumont

Thomas Joshua Cooper

HAUNCH OF VENISON | EASTCASTLE STREET
51 Eastcastle Street
February 1–March 28

Thomas Joshua Cooper, The Promise of Apple Trees, (Message to Paul Strand and Agnes Martin) Galisteo, Santa Fe County, New Mexico, USA, 1999/2000–2002, silver gelatin print, 6 x 9.”

On first glance, Thomas Joshua Cooper’s photographs seem to suggest another era. These are definitely not snapshots, nor are his subjects fleeting or transitional like the subjects snapshooters seem keen on capturing. Instead, Cooper offers quite the opposite: a sense of permanence, through images of the land, as if to remind us that long after humanity disappears, nature and its beauty will still reign.

The eighteen small silver gelatin prints in this exhibition, collectively titled Messages, have been selected from a period between 1969 and 2002. The Messages also provide valuable insight into Cooper’s artistic thinking: Each is dedicated in its subtitle to an artist (e.g., Morris Graves, Richard Serra, Minor White) or poet (e.g., Basho, Issa).

Working with a nineteenth-century five-by-seven camera, Cooper is obliged to cart the apparently outmoded piece of technology about like an outdoorsman with simple tools or a plein air painter. Unlike the latter, however, Cooper produces results that are far from an instantaneous impression: The depth of field achieved in each image creates a sense of a prolonged moment in time slowing unfolding. For example in The Promise of Apple Trees, (Message to Paul Strand and Agnes Martin) Galisteo, Santa Fe County, New Mexico, USA, 1999/2000–2002, one of the smaller images in the show, a seemingly casual image of a back garden with young blossoming trees offers a meditation on the flowering plant. The puffs of blooms that cloud the field of vision—some in focus, others not—recall the allover quality of Abstract Expressionism. Here Cooper suggests that images of nature can be equally representative of the present as anything modernism has to offer.

— Sherman Sam

Geraldo de Barros

THE PHOTOGRAPHERS' GALLERY
16 – 18 Ramillies Street
January 18–April 7

Geraldo de Barros, Sobras, 1996–98, silver gelatin print.

This exhibition of São Paulan artist Geraldo de Barros is the UK’s first, and it serves up not just a winning introduction to de Barros’s dynamic, technically brilliant collages and photomontages, but (albeit incidentally) a teaser as to how much biographical context such a show needs. Curators Isobel Whitelegg and Karen McQuaid’s selection comprises twenty-two examples of Barros’s Fotoforma montages, 1949–51, alongside twenty-eight Sobras (Leftovers): small-scale collages made from images from his personal photo album, between 1996 and 1998. Accompanying this is a brief wall text, a vitrine containing photographic scraps relating to the making of the Sobras—the remnants’ remnants, so to speak—and a “chained library” of reading matter.

So what kept de Barros busy between 1951 and 1996? Well, in 1951 there was a Grand Tour around Europe: a meeting with the avant-gardes in general and Max Bill in particular. Later, he founded Brazil’s first visual communications firm, a workers’ design cooperative, and a vast modernist furniture-making business. He also made key contributions to Brazilian Concrete and Pop art, and participated in assorted biennials. From 1979, disabling strokes led first to delegated artworks made from industrial materials such as Formica and, eventually, to the enigmatic, small-scale Sobras. (“After I got sick, I became better,” he joked.) Another, broader de Barros survey is surely waiting to happen, which would be different from this, but not necessarily better. Here, the selective view tightly focuses on de Barros’s terrific graphic sense and his formidable ability as a printer. Compositionally, the works are consistently poised, tense, and unhesitating, and the earlier Fotoformas are thrilling displays of darkroom trickery: Plotting out their construction proves impossible. The sharp focus also heads off any pathos narrative about de Barros’s final illness, a move the artist himself would surely have approved.

— Rachel Withers

“The Magic of the State”

LISSON GALLERY | LONDON
29 & 52-54 Bell Street
March 27–May 4

Anja Kirschner & David Panos, Ultimate Substance, 2012, HD Video Installation, 34 minutes.

A curatorial collaboration between Lisson’s Silvia Sgualdini and Beirut, a Cairo-based exhibition space and art initiative, this show is presented in Lisson’s London gallery following an exhibition featuring the same artists at Beirut’s Cairo space. And though the backdrop to “The Magic of the State” is an Egypt that has been shaken to its foundations and a Europe continually faltering on its structural apparatus, the seven artists in this show ponder the mechanics of state power.

Stand Behind Me, 2013, a performance by Liz Magic Laser at the London opening and documented by a video recording in the space, draws attention to the intense theatrics of performing the role of leader. Here, a dancer silently re-enacts the rhetorical hand gestures of the likes of Angela Merkel or Ed Milliband during recent political speeches as we read their words rolling by on an Autocue. Anja Kirschner and David Panos’s video installation Ultimate Substance, 2012, filmed in Greece, suggests that the invention of coinage in that country ushered in concurrent developments in mathematics, geometry, and abstract thought. A more ritualistic, oblique expression of power is played out in Lili Reynaud-Dewar’s multimedia installation Cleda’s Chairs, 2012, which includes stacked monitors playing clips from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Notes for an African Oresteia (1970), combined with a video of two bikini-clad girls in blackface smothering a set of fabric-covered chairs that belonged to the artist’s grandmother in black polish, as well as a sculpture made from the chairs themselves, as a way of conveying a transformation in different forms of rule.

Christodoulos Panayiotou’s two subtly arranged collections of small black-and-white photographs from the photographic archives of Nicosia’s Press and Information Office, taken between 1960 and 1977, are perhaps the exhibition’s highlight. The series “New Office,” 2012, depicts the transformation of the state office of Archbishop Makarios III, who became the first president of Cyprus in 1960. What begins as a spartan bureaucratic room fills up over time with auratic objects—antiquities, treasures, encyclopedias, and artworks—markers of history, economy, knowledge, and culture, the tools used to build a state. “New Office” is an apt reminder of the way in which powerful ideas become divested in objects and people, transforming both into conductors of a mystic charge, open to appropriation, and exploitation.

— Laura McLean-Ferris

Jodie Carey

EDEL ASSANTI
272-274 Vauxhall Bridge Road
April 10–May 11

View of “Jodie Carey: Slabs,” 2013.

Jodie Carey’s Untitled (Slabs), 2012, is an ambitious installation of seven large (about ten feet tall) cast plaster slabs, reinforced with burlap and mounted on wooden armatures. Crowded into this small gallery, they have a stronger, more intimate presence than their display last year in the roomier premises of the New Art Gallery in Walsall, England—an intimacy wholly beneficial to their effect.

Gently and painstakingly tinted with colored pencils, the surfaces of the “slabs” bring to mind a portable Sol LeWitt wall drawing, covered as they are in delicate fields of pastel hue that form a striking contrast with their heavy-duty supports, which in turn function as a kind of reality-check. The wooden frames are pinned down by hand-sewn burlap sandbags, an expedient (otherwise the frames might topple forward) that becomes an important part of the design—more “reality.” If at first the “slabs” appear as freestanding paintings, the manner in which the support reveals its construction—suggesting traditional plastered supports bound with organic materials such as horsehair—clarifies their status as sculptural works to be experienced in space.

Carey belongs to a new generation of sculptors, predominantly female, who combine an exploration of materiality with a strong sense of craft, and an aesthetic of construction verging on the Brutalist. She avoids the common pitfall of overlaying meticulous construction with unnecessary connotation, opting instead to adopt a refined and restrained “it is what it is” aesthetic. Carey will open two new exhibitions in Berlin later this month, at the Galerie Roland Anselmi and the Neue Berliner Räume; Untitled (Slabs) bodes well for these shows and for her future work overall.

— John-Paul Stonard

Pae White

SOUTH LONDON GALLERY
65 - 67 Peckham Road
March 13–May 12

Pae White, Too much night, again, 2013, mixed media, dimensions variable. Installation view.

Pae White has accurately described South London Gallery’s light-filled central space as ethereal. In her latest site-specific installation, Too much night, again, 2013, the artist stretched thousands of red, black, and purple threads made of acrylic fiber across the room, engaging with the interior’s natural luminosity that pours in overhead. The taut strands spell out two words along the room’s longest walls—one UNMATTERING and the other TIGER TIME—building on White’s linguistic work at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia last year. In crossing the strands in opposing directions, however, here she creates a more immersive environment: A triangular canopy ascends over the center, allowing the visitor to physically walk the length of the words.

White’s work often exists within the applied and the fine, but in this installation there are greater suggestions of high modernism, specifically an enjoyable sense of inhabiting a Naum Gabo sculpture. The artist conceptually links this work to her late-night anxiety over the installation of the project, the threads’ dark colors loosely based on a Black Sabbath album cover that terrified her as a child. TIGER TIME aptly suggests this nocturnal unease, while UNMATTERING reads as an attempt to assuage those night terrors—a textual description of a hypnotic event in which the artist has been immersed as well as the viewer. Walking beneath the canopy, one experiences a constant push and pull between solidity and impermanence. The threads draw the space, articulate the sculptural form of the individual letters, yet enmesh into painterly, dream-like hazes. We, in effect, become the shapes that animate the strings.

— Ben Luke

Anne Hardy

MAUREEN PALEY
21 Herald Street
April 12–May 26

Anne Hardy, Notations, 2012, C-print, 57 1/2 x 95 1/4”.

As odd as it may sound, Anne Hardy’s obsessively detailed scenarios recall Joan Miró’s 1920s paintings of fields and farmhouses. Miró’s flattened picture planes are staged and artificial tableaux of signs and objects, which Hardy achieves with photography’s limited depth of field. Her peculiar type of precision, one that accounts for every inch of the composition of hand-made marks and found objects assembled and used, also recalls the fastidiousness of Andrei Tarkovsky's sets. So much of Tarkovsky’s obsessive perfectionism in choosing and arranging every object was aimed at building atmosphere as much as a scene, even though it was destined to be trash after being recorded on film. This wouldn’t appear to be so far from Hardy’s own intentions.

Everything seen in Hardy’s photograph Notations, 2012, was once ordinary: a branch picked up from a fallen tree, broken eggshells that are painted silver, paper targets hurriedly taped to the fiberboard wall, the same wall to which the branch is attached. Black cords string CD disks and balloons at odd intervals along the wall, which is drilled and dented by what appears to have been innumerous air-rifle shots. Some objects—vases, some inverted, crocodile clips, a battered metal plate—sit on a shelf or on the floor in front. It’s difficult not to get drawn into indexing and listing all that is in front of you in an effort to figure out what’s going on, or rather what has gone on.

There are three other photographs of similar DIY displays and two realized installations in the exhibition that span the gallery floors. The constructed spaces come as something of a surprise as they display interiors that previously would only have been assembled in the artists studio, only later to be photographed and then destroyed. Here, they can be entered. As these displays are windowless, they convey a suffocating subterranean feeling already present in the photographs. Hardy’s environments, whether presented as photographic record or as an accessible space, are filled with the absence of performative acts, each with their own gnomic, disconcerting purpose, however approachable the residual things seem to be.

— David Rhodes

John Riddy

FRITH STREET GALLERY
17-18 Golden Square
April 12–June 1

John Riddy, Palermo (Palazzo Delle Poste), 2012, archival pigment print, 29 x 36 1/2".

John Riddy’s photographs of Palermo are the outcome of repeated visits to the Italian city over several years. This series, made over a span of three years beginning in 2011, feature superb monochrome images that possess a thrilling intensity and a sense of complete resolution. Looking at them, one can imagine Riddy doggedly trudging the city streets and returning again and again to possible locations, to assess whether the light, perspective, architecture, textures, and distribution of details might generate a picture that announces itself as definitive—inevitable, even. His habit of shooting in the early morning leads to pictures that are literally depopulated, but metaphorically screeching with traces of human activity, from the setting up of shrines and monuments to the spraying of graffiti.

In Palazzo Delle Poste, 2012, a sleeping dog slumps against the polished marble of a twentieth-century modernist municipal building. The dog is a crucial, strategic detail; the tone and texture of its hair draw out the quietly luscious marble textures that occupy most of the picture. In Giardini Inglese, 2013, a strange, poorly maintained maritime monument of two sailors in a rowboat looms in a sepulchrally gloomy background, and in Piazza Marina, 2012, a fabulously contorted banyan tree trunk contrasts with a filligree of leaves, wire fences, and glimpses of patrician city buildings. Riddy’s camera is socially omnivorous, documenting abandoned shopping carts, muddy puddles, and market stall detritus as compellingly as it does faded Palermitan grandeur. Giovanni, 2013, and Caletta San Erasmo, 2012, both show scruffy-looking locations on the seafront, punctuated with scatterings of litter, neglected wooden boats, and concrete lampposts, but what’s happening on dry land is counterpointed by skyscapes so spacious and luminous that they transform the whole scene into landscapes with a positively classical aura. These are photos that lock your eyeballs onto their complex surfaces, and keep haunting you long after you’ve left the gallery.

— Rachel Withers

Falke Pisano

THE SHOWROOM
63 Penfold Street
May 1–June 15

Falke Pisano, Structure for Repetition (not Representation), 2011-13, wood, fabric, collage, blackboards, chalk, dimensions variable.

Falke Pisano’s solo debut in the United Kingdom takes up the mercurial nature of the mental condition, providing an unsettling representation of the mind. Consider 5 Black Boards, 2011-2013, an ongoing project that consists of six chalkboards featuring drawings by the artist. Each time Pisano presents this work, she brushes away her previous work and creates a new one. That said, dusty remnants of past chalk sketches conspicuously haunt the background—a wink at the process of erasure itself. Here, the artist presents drawings relating to her research on the human body as well as imagery based on medical history. Together, the boards recall the dawn of rational humanism during the Renaissance and the advent of modern medicine in the late eighteenth century. The inherently temporary nature of her project evokes mental flux and instability, while the history of medicine hovers like a specter, at once ephemeral and formidable.

See also two videos, Composition and Disorder of Composition, both part of the series “Disordered Bodies Fractured Minds (Private M., Patient A. & Traveller H.),” 2012, which feature the voice of a person—a male in one, Pisano in the other—recounting stories taken from various texts and reports of mental and physical breakdowns following trauma, mental illness, and substance abuse. In both videos, the monologues run over a disjointed series of images, creating a visual and audible stream of consciousness, musing on the state of the speakers’ self-professed insanity.

An overwhelming presence in the exhibition is the main installation, Structure for Repetition (not Representation), 2011–, for which the artist has hung black curtains throughout the space. It dominates the gallery like a diabolic labyrinth, with dark fabric looming ominously above the other smaller works. In the same way that history both supports and haunts Pisano’s work, the installation simultaneously forms a shadow over these smaller pieces and provides them with their architecture. The structure’s placement next to the Showroom’s large wall-length windows leaves it vulnerable to the changing elements, a backdrop for pathetic fallacy.

— Ashitha Nagesh

“Detouched”

PROJECT ARTS CENTRE
39 East Essex Street, Temple Bar
January 24–March 30

View of “Detouched,” 2013.

There’s some semantic juggling going on with curator Anthony Huberman’s concept for “Detouched.” The word he has chosen for the exhibition’s title, he writes, isn’t a real word, instead existing “somewhere between retouched and detached. It’s also fairly close to untouched, which means that it has a lot to do with touch . . . ” This introduces works by A. K. Burns, Alice Channer, Sunah Choi, Dennis Oppenheim, and Seth Price, which are juxtaposed to explore ideas of physical presence in a world where experiences are now distanced, felt through the taps of our fingertips as we interact over the Internet.

Burns’s video installation Touch Parade, 2011, is a set of reenactments of YouTube videos dealing with touch compulsions. Vegetables and eggs are ground underfoot; rubber gloves are donned in layers; a balloon is rubbed, held, explored. The repetitions consolidate to create a sort of immersion in sensation, becoming visceral as it builds. Oppenheim’s film Air Pressure (Hand), 1971, operates in a similar territory, as a jet of air is directed at the artist’s flesh, distorting and moving the skin of his hands, reminding us of how alien the substance that covers our bodies can sometimes seem. This film also works as a meditation on the artist’s primary agent—the hand.

Choi shows Abdrücke (Imprints), 2011–13, a series of five graphite and pastel frottage drawings. These reproductions of surfaces, sidewalks, and gratings may be seen as simulacra, metaphors for Baudrillard’s view that contemporary experience is merely a simulation of reality. Channer and Price contribute sculptural elements to the show. Channer’s Amphibians, 2012, is an assemblage of stainless steel, aluminum, marble, and elastic, arranged in a form that is not quite animal but seems uncannily on the cusp of becoming alive; while Price’s Untitled, 2007, is an example of that artist’s most pared-back work. Plastic coatings negate the materiality of the cherry burl and bird’s-eye wood, from which the artist has cut a pair of flat abstract shapes. Faces materialize in the negative space, and the wood is recontextualized, hanging on the wall, its utility gone—untouchable.

— Gemma Tipton

Philomene Pirecki

GREEN ON RED GALLERY
26 - 28 Lombard Street East
April 18–May 25

View of “Frame, Fold, Fracture,” 2013.

Suspended between the original and its copy, the process of making and the act of showing, Philomene Pirecki’s “Frame, Fold, Fracture” sheds significant light on the ways in which an exhibition offers a momentary stasis within an artist’s cycle of production. Employing a precise economy of means, Pirecki calls attention to how the specificity of a gallery, contingencies of display, and the handling of an artwork can affect its materialization.

A series of seven drawings, “Agent (Mailed from Cambridge and London to Dublin, Weeks 1-7),” 2012–, are installed near the entrance to the show. These works, each made of a sheet of A4 plain white paper taped to carbon copy paper, are being mailed from the gallery to the artist in London and back again over the course of the exhibition. Upon return to Dublin, the drawings are unfolded and pinned directly to the wall. Adjacent is “White Wall,” 2013, a large wall that have been daubed with colorful swaths of paint. This series begins with digital photographs of the gallery and of Pirecki’s studio walls. The photographs are magnified to reveal imperfections and discolorations in the digital file; these are then used as samples to produce custom-mixed emulsion paints, which the artist applies to the original wall. In a cumulative process, Pirecki then places discrete works—one of the “Agents,” posters, photographs and a white monochrome painting—over the painted wall. The result is an overlapping of separate bodies of work, as well as an ongoing assemblage that is constantly remade, rephotographed, and redisplayed—stretching the boundary between an artwork’s making and its undoing.

The series “Reflecting,” 2013, like the wall works, is based on an initial catalyst—a photograph that the artist rephotographed prior to exhibiting. Each subsequent reproduction of the photograph constitutes a new iteration—or, to use Pirecki’s term, “generation”—of the ongoing series. During the exhibition, Pirecki will rephotograph the work in the gallery space and then archive the resulting prints in her studio. On the next opportunity to exhibit, Pirecki will rephotograph this material, which is both a discrete work and the source of the next reproduction.

— Pavel S. Pyś

Cleary & Connolly

CASINO MARINO
Cherrymount Crescent, off the Malahide Road
March 24–October 31

Cleary & Connolly, The Iso-Symmetroscope, 2013, mixed media, dimensions variable. Installation view.

William Chambers’s Casino at Marino is a tiny puzzle box of a building, full of architectural tricks and illusions. Built in the 1750s, it is the most important neoclassical building in Ireland, and yet Chambers, also architect of London’s Somerset House, never saw it—he never even visited Ireland. Despite this, his genius haunts the site, providing the subject for Anne Cleary and Denis Connolly’s installation The Absent Architect, 2013.

Formally trained in architecture, Cleary & Connolly explore the spatial dynamics of perception through their practice. Their earlier works include Pourquoi pas toi (Why Not You), 2009, which was exhibited at the Centre Pompidou and used real-time computer modeling to project visitors into the screened works. The Absent Architect develops this idea differently and takes it further. In one of the three elements, the columnar The Iso-Symmetroscope, situated in the entrance hall, contains a series of mirrors that reflect unexpected vistas, heightening the existing optical manipulations in the architectural space created by Chambers, which include windows that are different sizes inside than they are from the exterior, a door that is larger in appearance than in actuality, spaces that lead nowhere, and a false door.

The Temporal Symmetroscope, another element of the installation, envisions a dramatic reimagination of Chambers himself within the Casino discussing plans with his patron, the Earl of Charlemont. The scene fades, however, when one stands immediately before the monitor, the anachronism replaced by a projection of the viewer. Briefly, the audience and the imagined ghosts of the building intersect. This provokes a sense of the layering of time, and thus explores how the resonances of various lives are held and congealed within historic buildings such as the Casino.

— Gemma Tipton

Alice Channer, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Linder

THE HEPWORTH WAKEFIELD
Gallery Walk
February 16–May 12

Linder, Penetrating the Interior, 2013, collage, 10 7/8 x 8 1/8".

Made in response to the work of a woman and curated by women, this trio of subtly interconnected yet discrete exhibitions by three female artists (Alice Channer, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, and Linder) at different stages in their careers is spread across five communicating rooms at the Hepworth Wakefield. The influence of Barbara Hepworth, the presiding deity of the place—whose love of gardens, fashion, birds, music, opera, and dance are variously invoked, perhaps more by Linder, as she seeks to engage with Hepworth’s legacy, than the two younger artists—may be partly responsible for the unabashedly feminine feel of the works on view. (It would have been interesting to see how a male artist responded to the same brief.)

The brightly colored cropped images of shells, birds, animals, and plants that edge their way into the faded 1950s ballet photographs in Linder’s light boxes have their counterpart in Alice Channer’s sinuous metallic and resin-cast forms inspired by marine life, collectively titled Invertebrates (all works cited, 2013) after two of the pieces on display. The light boxes themselves—widely used in department stores and the cosmetics industry—evoke Hepworth’s monolithic cast sculptures in their sheer scale and sculptural presence. In this respect, they are not unlike Jessica Jackson Hutchins’s three ladder works, draped over with painted canvases that have been collaged in places and weighed down with glazed ceramic objects, including a form resembling a dog’s head.

The works by all three artists appeal to the inner sense of touch. Linder’s thirteen cut-paper collages with fanciful titles like Hundred Meetings and Palace of Hearing, fusing photographs of female models culled from fashion and lifestyle magazines with images of furniture and household appliances, are in fact named after different acupuncture points. Everyday domestic objects also dominate Jackson Hutchins’s works, from the armchairs with watercolor, gouache, and collaged prints on their surfaces to the hand-molded ceramic vessels resting on them. Cast in bronze and painted with nail polish, severed fingers pressed into the sharp stainless steel rim in Channer’s Invertebrates express the artist’s but also the viewers’ irresistible, if frustrated, desire to touch and move beyond the surface of these seductive works.

— Agnieszka Gratza