Rudolf Stingel: ‘Untitled’, 2015 – oil on canvas, 244 x 244cm
There’s a certain perversity to the first show at the new Sadie Coles space in Davies Street: it features four paintings by Rudolf Stingel in a show which continues with a further four paintings in her spacious gallery on Kingly Street (to 18 Dec). That could have accommodated all eight in comfort, suggesting that the elegant new premises were unnecessary. As for the show, there’s a comparable perversity to the effort in making huge photorealist versions of what are just illustrations from vintage German calendars. Yet the animals so shown take on a lively current presence, even as they play neatly with chronologies: photography as a record of the past, linked here to a calendar month and its subsequent reworking; and the time spent in painting, made explicit by patterned impasto brushstrokes which come into abstracted focus when you get close. In the gallery’s words ‘the original image is disclosed and withheld in the same instant’, making for a metaphor for memory. By way of bonus perversity, Sadie’s husband, Juergen Teller, recently provided his usual plenty in an extensive exhibition in the Phillips auction space directly opposite his wife’s new outpost (10-20 Nov). That included all 72 images from the new series ‘Kanye, Juergen & Kim, Château d’Ambleville’. The reality couple are pursued through the French countryside by the trouserless fiftysomething photographer in anorak and rainbow coloured footwear, in what seems to be a case of ‘you bring the looks, I’ll bring the socks’.
Juergen Teller: from ‘Kanye, Juergen & Kim, Château d’Ambleville’
Most days art Critic Paul Carey-Kent spends hours on the train, traveling between his home in Southampton and his day job in London. Could he, we asked, jot down whatever came into his head?
