TJ Boulting doesn’t smell great. Actually, it stinks. A gross, acrid odour greets you as you walk downstairs into the gallery; the stench of eggs.
This health and safety nightmare is Sarah Lucas’s fault: the megastar British artist came into the gallery and smashed a thousand eggs against the wall to inaugurate this show. Lucas’s work has left a vast yellow, dripping stain down the main wall of the space, shell and albumen crumbled against the plaster. It’s a brilliant, joyful, funny work, riffing snarkily on the masculinity of ‘action painting’, the history of abstraction, all while protesting against the way women’s bodies are used and reduced down to nothing but fertility and procreation.
Lucas has always been obsessed with eggs, most famously using two sunny side ups as stand-ins for her own boobs in one of her most iconic photos. And she’s not the only one. Eggs are everywhere in art history,
And now they’re in this basement in Fitzrovia which has been filled with small, gorgeous pieces of eggy art. There’s a precise, intense little Boo Saville drawing of an egg balanced on a potato, two neat modernist composition by Rafal Zajko, an excellent small brown still life by Dana Powell, head-swirling parental surrealism by Gareth Cadwallader, a lovely nude of a woman peeling boiled eggs by Nettle Grellier. And there are big names too: a tiny Man Ray, an intimate Francesca Woodman.
Throughout, eggs are seen as symbols of sustenance, of birth and rebirth, of sexuality, and of so much more. Eggs have been written into the fabric of art history (literally, egg tempera has been one of the most important painting mediums since the time of the pharaohs) so this stinky show of shells and yolks feels almost natural.
So often group shows are boring, themeless messes. This is still a mess, literally, but it’s not boring. And its theme is eggcellent. 300 words until an egg pun, not bad.