Walking into Gabriel Orozco’s show is like waking up with a headache and trying to piece together whatever the hell you did last night. Everything in the Mexican conceptualist’s exhibition is splintered, disjointed, a history you can’t make sense of. There’s a round of applause as you walk in, but the ovation morphs into the sound of rain.
There are recognisable things here – cars, a football, cigarettes – but they don’t make sense. They’re suspended mid-air, broken into pieces, flipped upside down. An old Citroën has been split in half and glued back together too small, too narrow.
There are kids’ toys and games, ceiling fans twirling with rolls of toilet paper attached to their blades, tree branches that have sprouted cigarette butts. So many artists deal with the idea of memory and the passing of time, but few manage to capture the slipperiness of it all like Gabriel Orozco. The whole show feels as if it’s about history, but stripped of its big names and important dates, leaving behind a bunch of fragmented memories instead.
It’s all a bit too ephemeral, dense and self-satisfied, as if he can’t stop patting himself on the back for being so clever. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t good, it’s just odd, discomfiting art that makes you feel you’re about to forget your pin number. White Cube Bermondsey, London, until 8 November I like colour as much as the next guy, unless the next guy is Mary Ramsden, and then I might be beat.
What you see first in the Yorkshire-based artist’s huge new abstracts is big washy swathes of colour, one canvas all neon pink and green lost in a haze of deep purple, another all mauve and lilac in a vastness of blue. They’re explosive bursts of hue and tone, totally mesmerising, abstraction at its abstractest. But look more, look longer, are those flower petals?
Shafts of daylight through slats in a window? Everything is being constantly pulled between abstraction and reality, each work vacillating between still life and colourfield experimentation. Years ago Ramsden was painting love hearts over and over, as if she was abstracting her teenage diaries.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
