To begin, a niggly question: When painting or sculpture is labeled “uncanny,” what is actually being claimed? Katharina Fritsch’s image world—of effigies and doubles, skulls and spooks, votive figures and völkisch motifs—has fixed her work in this explanatory frame; the term “uncanny” is often used to describe her art, and words like “unsettling,” “dark,” and “threatening” abound in the literature accompanying her Tate retrospective. Freud’s 1919 paper is fairly precise about the defining effects of uncanny narratives and occurrences: Loosening rationality’s grip, they permit repressed mental

A quality of restrained, forceful inquisitiveness pervaded the small but intense group of pieces that made up David Musgrave’s latest exhibition (all works 2001). Within their playful diversity, the works seemed to test the boundaries of the human form and question art’s capacity to represent and articulate those boundaries. One of Musgrave’s trademarks has been wall drawings done in brown paint to create a trompe l’oeil effect, as if roughly torn strips of masking tape had been stuck jokily onto the wall, or had been carelessly left there when the thing they supported was removed. Although as

In Sarah Dobai’s photograph Above the City (all works 2001), London stretches out toward a low horizon. Even the structures that puncture the skyline—Centre Point, the London Eye Millennium Wheel, and a tower block in the foreground—reach only tentatively up the picture plane. Most of the surface is a powder blue sky across which white clouds pass. It’s a definite place, but also a space of reverie. The golden glow imparted by the sun as it sets just out of sight beyond the right-hand edge of the photograph hints at a John Martin-like sense of the apocalyptic. Mundane existence, wonder,