See what they did with the title? House. Work. It’s a bit like ‘housework’, except it’s in two parts, which is very clever, because it makes the subject of houses way more deep and ambiguous. Which is nice, but needless, since on very straightforward terms this is a highly enjoyable show about a very straightforward subject: houses. (As well as gardens, backyards, streets and squares. Oh, and pools, as seen in Peter Doig’s desolate ‘Untitled (Kricket)’ and Jules de Balincourt’s glitzy ‘Valley Pool Party.’)
Half the fun is seeing unlikely artists and locations rub shoulders, like Alice Neel and her ‘Belmar, New Jersey’ painting and LS Lowry and his Salford streets. It’s an interesting comparison: both artists lived through the same period, both went through formal education, and both developed idiosyncratic, faux-naive styles of painting (which doesn’t mean Neel’s piece is particularly good: there’s a reason she’s best known for her portraits). Other pairings are more incongruous, like Karen Kilimnik’s cutesy-but-knowingly-so French château and Celia Paul’s tender depiction of her first house. Detached versus personal; house versus home.
As you’d probably imagine, it all starts to get a bit psychological. In John Kørner’s ‘1st Floor Museum’, passages of the canvas are left exposed and bare, almost as though he’s trying to dismantle all the murky, Freudian workings of the domestic abode. And despite the odd misfire, the show works as a whole because we’re so familiar with the subject: we all have our own interpretative baggage to bring to the table. With most group shows you end up drifting around and wondering what the bloody hell everything has in common. There’s no danger of that here. Instead it’s in the differences, the variations on a theme, where the really interesting stuff lies.