Gabriel Coxhead

Georgiana Houghton was a nineteenth-century spiritualist and medium who made art under the alleged influence of otherworldly beings. Her work fell into obscurity, but was recently rediscovered and re-evaluated as a precursor to twentieth-century abstraction. Houghton’s ‘spirit drawings’ are small, intimate and mesmerisingly exquisite, with swirling streaks of colour that overlap to form wild, spirographic latticeworks. They’re psychedelic visions of divinity, with titles such as ‘The Eye of God’, and quite astounding when you consider the staid, mid-Victorian milieu in which Houghton was working. In handwritten text on the reverse of each watercolour, Houghton explained the imagery and symbolism, or named her spirit guides (archangels, Renaissance painters). The sheer, almost hallucinatory level of detail is captivating. The gallery even provides magnifying glasses for up-close inspection – a trick copied from the British artist’s only show during her lifetime, in London in 1871. That exhibition left her financially ruined. The 22 pieces at the Courtauld constitute much of her surviving work, and are an absolute must-see.

Lamenting the under-representation of Latin American artists in major museum collections has long been a habit amongst liberal art-world types. So kudos to the Guggenheim in New York, for putting their money where their mouth is and organising this touring show, which features 45 works from the region. Many of them are excellent, not to mention historically important, such as Alfredo Jaar’s ‘A Logo for America’: an iconic, incendiary electronic billboard piece originally shown in Times Square in 1987. And there are plenty of smart pieces by younger artists too. What’s interesting is watching certain trends emerge. There are installations that explore archives and institutional displays, like Mariana Castillo Deball casts of Victorian archeological artefacts. Video art is another strong suit, such as funny and disturbing works by Javier Téllez, feauring animal-masked psychiatric patients and human cannonballs launched across the Mexico-US border. Where the exhibition falters is in relying on too many shallow, one-linerish sculptures – largely from trendy Mexico City types like Damián Ortega and his abstract modernist sculptures made from tortilla crispbread. Sadly, my guess is that the best work by these big-hitters is in collections that are private, rather than public.

Almost anywhere you go in our 2,000-year-old capital, you’re surrounded by history. Soho’s Golden Square, for instance – where Frith Street Gallery’s main venue is located – is a former seventeenth-century plague pit, with over 4,000 victims reputedly buried there. And this forms the basis for Massimo Bartoloni’s show. Unfortunately, several works come off as arbitrary or heavy-handed – especially those that evoke the number of plague victims. ‘Airplane (Over 4,000)’ is a marble column incorporating an unfolded paper airplane design: a motif the Italian artist intends to function as a kind of memorial.  But while Bartolini invokes history as a sort of atmospheric backdrop, he doesn’t tell us any specifics. Former plague pits are a dime a dozen in central London: what makes this one so special? Other works are more ironic, and more effective. ‘Golden Square’ consists of an odd, eerie piece of music that features all the instruments mentioned in Charles Dickens’s ‘Nicholas Nickleby’. And the biggest, central work is great: a huge marble sculpture, chiseled to resemble a natural rock formation, resting above a plinth-like block of the same material. It’s a clever meditation on ideas of nature and artifice – so the fact that it’s based around George II’s statue in the square outside doesn’t really add much extra.

Graham Fagen’s work is all about ‘in-between’ spaces – hidden, overlooked places, or the gaps that lie between established categories. So, the dozens of weird, washy watercolours, like psychedelic splodges with leering grimaces attached, on display here? They’re actually representations of the inside of Fagen’s mouth – a space that’s bounded, portcullis-like, by the sharp solidity of his teeth, while the deeper recesses can only be depicted as an indistinct, imagined, proprioceptive zone. And those branching, candelabra-like sculptures? Some of the branches end in metal casts of, again, teeth; but the other forms, more abstract and squishy-looking, are casts of the space made by Fagen squeezing his hand into a fist. The biggest work in this show across two venues in Southwark Park takes things in a more social and historical direction. ‘The Slave’s Lament’ is a four-screen video installation in which the titular, eighteenth-century poem by Robert Burns is set to a specially composed musical score. And much of the music, a sort of wistful, string-led ballad, sounds appropriately Scottish – indeed, the piece was part of Fagen’s exhibition as Scotland’s representative at last year’s Venice Biennale. But other elements also contribute to the mix: echoey trip-hop beats, courtesy of the track’s producer, dub legend Adrian Sherwood; and the striking figure of the singer, reggae vocalist Ghetto Priest, with his dreadlocked hair, gold-capped teeth, and Afrocentric regalia. The work, t

Paulo Nimer Pjota used to be a graffiti artist on the streets of his native São Paulo, and you can definitely see the influence in his paintings. Not that his works resemble tags or burners. But the way that he arranges various images and marks across his supports – either large, upstretched sheets of canvas or battered sheets of metal – has a kind of ad hoc, free-for-all, inchoate vibe, like a wall that’s been randomly scribbled on. Splats of paint, crayon flurries, scratches and other jittery inscriptions mix with more recognisable imagery, from comic book quotations to detailed depictions of oriental vases or Native American masks. It’s a stylistic hodgepodge, a stew of high and low cultural references – although, in arraying Greco-Roman  style pots and resin casts of plastic bottles on the floor beneath each painting, he perhaps emphasises this idea a little too forcefully. 

Lisa Oppenheim’s ‘Landscape Portraits’ are photograms – created when an object is placed directly against photographic paper. Specifically, the American artist uses wafer-thin sections of different types of wood, illuminating them from behind so that their ring patterns are permanently cast as an abstract, black and white image. ‘Cherry’, for instance, is a diptych of fine-lined, pooling, marbled shapes, while ‘Sassafras’, divided into four quadrants, is, suitably, more exotic-looking, with its intense stripe-effect, and ‘Apple’ is a soft, shimmering blur. In each case, the works’ frames are constructed out of the same wood as in the image – so you sense of a kind of conceptual game being played, the final pieces becoming like an index of their own raw materials. Plus, there’s a nice parallel between the way the photograms were made and the light-dependent process of photosynthesis. Ultimately, though, the main pleasure is simply that of becoming lost in the swirling, mesmerising patterns. 

Charles Mayton’s paintings are bright, multicoloured jumbles sometimes consisting just of abstract, glitchy swathes of colour, other times featuring a mélange of overlapping images. You’ll spot hands, things that look like bits of meat or animal, loads of staring eyes, as well as computer icons like the ‘pointing hand’ cursor or a triangular ‘play’ arrow. This technological theme extends to the pure colour pieces too, which always contain an amorphous, unpainted area of white canvas, the outline of which appears vaguely jagged or blocky, like some primitive, 8-bit graphic display. The idea, in short, seems to be all about creating a hybrid between traditional, physical painterly effects and virtual, technocratic motifs. It’s hardly new territory for painting, but this American does an effective job. 

Robert Crumb is the world’s most famous underground cartoonist. So much so that the 72-year-old doesn’t really count as ‘underground’ any more, having long ago left the countercultural ‘comix’ scene and moved into the realm of art galleries. Along the way, his subject matter has expanded too, from his original, acid-fried strips of the 1960s, through documentary forays into the lives of obscure blues musicians and Kafka, to his recent magisterial, comic-book version of the Book of Genesis. One aspect that hasn’t changed much over time, though, is his sexual fantasies. Crumb has always been the most lascivious of artists, happy to give full rein to his erotic imagination. And it’s very particular type of woman he goes for: muscular, beefy, posteriorly ample. Think, essentially, Serena Williams. At the start of his career, his fetishistic caricatures were often regarded as misogynistic. But in his ‘Art & Beauty’ series, produced from the mid-’90s onwards and shown in its near entirety here, his vision of women is much more respectful, even reverential. Williams herself features amongst the 54 works on display, as do other sports stars, their powerful, athletic poses taken from newspapers. Mobile phone snaps are another source – sexualised selfies posted online, or street shots of random, strong-looking girls – while other works depict life models. Small and monochrome, the drawings reflect Crumb’s mature, realist style, using intense crosshatching, and often incorporate appende

The title of Jac Leirner’s exhibition is ‘Junkie’. And in case you’re wondering how literally to take that, here’s the gallery’s own description of the Brazilian’s latest project: ‘Gathered over several years, the objects used in these new works were assembled and photographed during a cocaine binge over three nights.’ This oddly matter-of-fact tone also characterises the photographs themselves, with their neutral, undramatic lighting. Kept small, they depict the minutiae of drug taking and its attendant rituals: rocks of cocaine, measuring scales, razor blades, banknotes. Some images offer a more whimsical perspective – the coke whittled down into little heart shapes or faces, or placed atop tiny doll’s house furniture. Arranged into short sequences and mounted on to long, plywood bases, the banks of images form strange, Ikea-like wall sculptures, and are mixed in with other pieces made from cigarette rolling paper packets. The installation becomes about turning these ephemeral objects and playful, transient moments into something solid and permanent. Unfortunately, you don’t get the sense of much beyond that, or of anything really significant being said about pleasure or addiction. Instead, too many jokes come off as facile, such as the recurring images of quartz and stones – other rocks, geddit – used as plinths for the white stuff. Then again, treating weak ideas as if they contain deep insight is classic stoned behaviour – so in that sense the display’s meandering, recur

Polish husband and wife creative team Franciszka and Stefan Themerson wore so many different artistic hats, across such a range of disciplines, it’s quite astonishing. In a career stretching over 50 years (both died in 1988), their visual output included (deep breath): book illustration, publishing, stage design, costume design, puppetry, comic books, poster design, photography, animation, and film directing. A few projects don’t belong within any area: Stefan’s brightly coloured drawings of abstract, twisted, mathematical forms, for example, which you can’t really classify as anything except out-and-out art. But even here, it turns out, there’s a practical, applied-arts aspect, because the works are experiments with felt-tip pens which, in the early 1970s, had just been invented. Indeed, if you had to characterise the unifying theme of their work, it would be this commitment to experimentation. The aim of their publishing company, founded in 1948 when they settled in London, was to produce ‘best lookers and not best sellers’, allying works by avant-garde writers and poets with Franciszka’s cubist, sketchy, vaguely winsome illustrations. And their most longstanding association was with a similarly revolutionary piece of literature, ‘Ubu Roi’, Alfred Jarry’s scatological, absurdist 1896 play about the nature of power. The Themersons designed grotesque masks, surreal cardboard costumes and sets for various productions, as well as creating a comic-book version. The high point of

A great big pair of boobs. That’s the first thing you see – two huge, blazing neon outlines of tits, mounted on the wall. Except, maybe they’re not tits at all, just U-shaped, pinky-white curves with red circles within – merely abstract lines. So if you see them as breasts, well, that’s entirely your projection, you sex-obsessed pervert. This question – how we identify and recognise aspects of the human body – is the central theme of Das Institut, the collaborative moniker of German artists Kerstin Brätsch and Adele Röder. Or rather, it’s pretty much their only theme. Not that there aren’t some intriguing, rather mad works on display. Particularly good is a slideshow of images depicting the artists dressed up in strange, diaphanous clothes and with sections of their bodies painted the same black as the background, which creates the effect of freakishly altering their profiles. The idea is to present the human form as something malleable, indefinable, even magical. Mostly, though, these concepts are emphasised too forcefully. Many pieces initially seem abstract: huge sheets of paper featuring melting, marbled colours; gloopy, shimmering stained-glass designs; or tiny, petroglyph-like slide projections. But if you look closely you start to see human forms – facial features among the swirling patterns, or diagrammatic shapes that resolve into little figures. Not that you ever have to look particularly closely, however, because Das Institut have made the figurative elements prett

There’s only room for four of Apostolos Georgiou’s large, square paintings in Rodeo’s tiny gallery space, and they’re all called ‘Untitled’. So let’s turn instead to the title of the whole show to get a sense of the themes at play. ‘The Same Old Fucking Story’, it’s called – the sort of swearing-for-effect that might normally come across as a bit sophomoric or cringeworthy. In this case it’s a perfect fit for the work, which suggests notions of grinding repetition, of depression boiling over into rage. It’s no coincidence that Georgiou hails from Greece, with its ongoing social and economic crises. Not that his paintings are political in any direct or obvious way. Rather, the world he depicts seems somehow unreal or stripped-back. It’s a threadbare, stagey environment in which a particular, archetypal character recurs: the grey-suited, white-collar worker. Georgiou’s painting style is sketchy and blocky, the figures portrayed with heavy yet jittery outlines, so that instead of having any detailed, identifiable features, they become a sort of lugubrious everyman. An emblem of frustrated masculinity, perhaps, always performing some desperately cheerless action: lighting a solitary candle on a birthday cake, in one work, or mournfully mopping up a spilt vase of flowers in another. A third painting features two such figures together, their backs to you, presumably either pissing or masturbating against a pillar. In this context, the fourth painting, showing the character stripped