33 Portland Place, London W1B 1QE 11am-7pm until 17th October
Ah yes, the title says it all… Vanity! Mortality! Skulls! And, er… Butterflies! Hold on, though, there’s something missing. Where is Mr Hirst? Thank goodness, he’s nowhere to be seen amongst the 25 or so artists in this show, which is bound to be one of the talking points of Frieze week. Unlike at The Holy Trinity Church’s show, there’s no sex- but there’s plenty of death.
The word vanitas refers to the seventeenth-century genre that showed organic objects decaying or dead in still-life paintings. All Visual Arts’ show is in a brilliant setting, a few such old masters, generally containing skulls, dotting the stripped back walls of an original 1775 townhouse by Robert Adams. Skulls ain’t changed in 300 years, but the media that they’re reproduced in has- for example, Alistair Mackie’s no-nonsense Mud Skull is precisely that. Mao’s head in an immaculately white bust is partly replaced by Bouke de Vries with a field of tiny skulls. Hirst’s fellow YBAs the Chapman Brothers celebrate skulls with horror maggots and creepy crawlies thrown in, as in Skull (2008). The ghoulish brethren are also here with some of their umpteen variations on Goya’s Disasters of War, the horrific image of mutilated bodies on a ravaged tree- the limited edition resin sculpture Same Thing Only Smaller is precisely what the title says. The Chapmans’ candy colours are like a spoonful of sugar to help it all go down.
Enough of the skulls already. Butterflies are delicate beautiful miracles that die soon, so they are a metaphor for life’s brevity rather than its end. (Hirst has a load of big, new shimmering butterflies at the Scream Gallery, by the way). The creatures have settled in the deconstructing heads in That Same is He by Tom Gallant- or are they moths? In any case, Gallant has a display of mounted moths here as well.
But what’s special here? Some unexpectedly varied things.
A big Jonathan Wateridge canvas Real Life Counterparts is one of the few works not trying to be timeless, showing blood and strewn baggage in a room being examined by black guys who may be from forensics, with a plane parked outside. It’s Hollywood, which is Wateridge’s usual domain, and it’s a refreshing update on painting’s old fiction of the staged snapshot-drama composition.
Another sort of snapshot is one of Ori Gersht’s big super-fast shutter-drop photos of an exploding vase of flowers, Time After Time. Was it Antonionio’s 1970 film Zabriski Point that first tried to slow down an explosion as art, a theme that peaked in Cornelia Parker’s famous frozen exploding shed installation? Gersht’s images take on still life by capturing its moment of death as it shatters. Totally different in timeframe and scale are the exquisite models of interiors by Charles Matton, seen through glass, like those big museum displays that used to contain the Serengeti or Paleolithic villagers, but much smaller. One is Library homage to Georges Perec II, in which Matton seems to have individually crafted each of hundreds of antique books on the shelves and uses mirrors to extend his miniaturised space. He has a precise command of such space’s structure, and Perec was a twentieth century novelist who played with word structure. Matton is meticulously accurate in Sigmund Freud’s Study II- some will recognise Freud’s anthropomorphic chair (the original was included in the Barbican’s sublime Surreal House show), but the sharp-eyed will see that even the tiny Wiener Zeitung newspaper dropped on the floor has a 1938 headline about Austria’s Anschluss with Nazi Germany. Snow lies on the bare tree glimpsed through Freud’s window. Winter is falling, across the mind of man as well as the tree. These works are wonders, capturing atmosphere through insane yet calm attention to detail.
The absolute opposite to that are the canvases of Aaron von Erp. They have the roughest technique of anything in the show, almost like prison art by amateurs re-assessing their position. Indeed, this is prison art- van Erp depicts cell spaces where torture and isolation dwell, and the figures inside them are disappearing in agony- voids open in skulls, limbs melt away, but red mouths remain, transfixed in pain. These are powerful and scary, and their crude finish makes that more so.
There’s something of Magritte’s domestic sinister surrealism in Slick by Kate MccGwire (yes, two c’s). From a fireplace, magpie feathers cascade and flow across the floor, even penetrating crevices in the floorboards. That’s going to be a bugger to install in the gaff of some collector.
There may be clichés in this exhibition, but there are also works in which some great established and emerging artists are still exploring the age-old theme of life’s brief candle-flame, and it’s extinguishing. It all goes to show, there’s plenty of life in death yet.
Herbert Wright
