Light in the winter darkness
I'm over it, aren't you? Fortunately there's plenty going on in London to distract from the endless murk
I’m in a mild state of panic right now due to a glut of work just sort of rotting around me like too many courgettes, so I haven’t seen as much as usual this week. It feels weird.
What I’ve seen
I did drop in to a couple of commercial gallery shows, which I really should do more often, considering they’re free, small-scale (so not exhausting) and they change all the time.
First I had a glass of champagne and watched other people eat oysters at a press drinks (they’re not normally quite that glam, not sure what was going on there) for the exhibition Thomas Ruff: expériences lumineuses, at David Zwirner gallery on Grafton Street, which is the same stretch as Dover Street but the name changes for some reason at the far end from Piccadilly.
I like Ruff’s work; I find it interesting but I rarely find it moving (I do, like many people, have an affection for his breakthrough series, Porträts, made in the 1980s and born out of a perfectly reasonable suspicion, even then, of the “false, polished images in advertising photography”).
Both his medium and his subject are photography, exploring it in all its aspects and purposes, from press pictures to posed portraits, celestial images, architectural and abstract work.
The newest works on display here use an experimental process subjecting ordinary glass objects to multiple beams of light to create soft-edged abstractions that resemble monumental charcoal drawings. They’re beautiful, but they remind me strongly of Cornelia Parker’s photograms, so to me they don’t feel as fresh as I’d like on first looking. Still, they’re ingenious and I think the technical work behind them is probably more to the point.
Upstairs is a selection from across Ruff’s career, which if you don’t know his work, is a useful primer on the sheer breadth of his experimentation and exploration in the field.
It’s worth seeing if you happen to be passing through Mayfair - don’t be daunted by the shut door, just ring the bell and they’ll let you in, it’s free as I mentioned, and there’s usually a sort of crib sheet on the front desk you can take round with you. That’s on until March 22, though there won’t be oysters.
Then I hot-footed it on the same night to Lisson Gallery near Edgware Road to have a look at their two exhibitions (they have two galleries a few yards apart). Ai Weiwei: A New Chatpter (the spelling is correct), at the Bell Street location, showcases “a provocative exploration of contemporary issues through the lens of historical and artistic reference” which is a very clear suggestion that it’s quite hard to explain what’s going on, even for the AI which, at Ai’s request, wrote the press release.
