Tomas Weber

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  picks December 15, 2020

  Antibodies

  “Antibodies”—the products of the immune system without which we must be anti-bodies, physically restrained, abstaining from contact—is a large, rousing mixed show, consisting of works by twenty international artists. Caught in the briefest of moments between its opening and Paris’s second lockdown, the exhibition is bursting with art that commands you variously to stand well back, keeping your distance, or to come closer.

  Achraf Touloub’s ink and acrylic line drawings are filled with meticulously repetitive patterns, overlaid with large swollen forms. At the top of the remarkably prophetic National

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  picks August 24, 2020

  Apostolos Georgiou

  Apostolos Georgiou’s peculiar scenes beckon you in. The Greek painter’s show at Rodeo London, “One by One”—occurring simultaneously with another Georgiou exhibition at Rodeo’s gallery in the Athenian port city of Piraeus—comprises three paintings, hung low on the venue’s exposed-brick walls, placing the viewer on the same level as their almost life-size human figures. Georgiou’s scenarios are set in architectural spaces where one might imagine mingling, but any impressions of closeness are rebuffed with sardonic pleasure. The characters, with ashy marks for eyes and features in pasty grays, are

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  picks July 22, 2020

  Magalie Guérin

  Magalie Guérin’s eight small-scale abstract oil paintings are inspired by real objects in the material world and offer the fun—and the trouble—of crowds. The Montreal-born, Chicago-based painter’s supple forms, too industrial for biomorphs yet too yielding for machines, jostle for space and attention in “q p,” the artist’s first solo show at Amanda Wilkinson Gallery. Gesso elements in low relief, little more than crinkles, accompany the painted objects, gently raising the possibility of extra dimensions.

  Untitled (res 9.1) (all works 2020) and Untitled (res 9.2) mirror each other symmetrically—as