Alex Farrar, ‘Crepuscular (sweat painting)’, 2017 – jersey cotton, silicone, aluminium stretcher bars. Courtesy the artist + Copperfield, London + Dürst Britt & Mayhew, The Hague
Summer is close! Before you know it we’ll have the RA Summer Show (the 250th, running 12 June – 19 Aug,), Wimbledon (2-15 July) and the PROMS (13 July – 8 Sept). I’ve already seen some art matched to hot weather. At Copperfield. London (to 23 June) the ‘half mocking, half nostalgic British Summer Time distils the allure and revulsion of that particularly British sea side summer experience’ — inspired by gallerist Will Lunn hearing the Brexit announcement while stuck on the Isle Of Wight. Centred round a swimming pool (of carpet, not water, courtesy littlewhitehead) it includes several of young Dutch-based English artist Alex Farrar’s seductively repulsive ‘sweat paintings’, which riff on minimalist traditions by applying silicone to a T-shirt in order to imitate the look of both an embarrassingly soaked top and certain abstract paintings. Luckily there is no smell, and the same can be said of the Anouk Kruithof photographs included in the excellent but otherwise not particularly seasonal show ‘Concealer’, curated by Tom Lovelace for the Peckham 24 festival last weekend. The wide-ranging Mexico City based Dutch artist makes a parallel abstracting move. She invited 25 people to do an extensive work-out in a gallery in Copenhagen in order to take photographs which cite stress, rather than heat, as the cause of sweaty armpits – which she perceives as aesthetic scars of nervousness and discomfort. Have a cool summer…
Anouk Kruithof: ‘Sweat-stress (armpit right/yellow)’, 2015 – Ultrachrome print with diasec, 40 x 60 cm
Art writer and curator Paul Carey-Kent sees a lot of shows: we asked him to jot down whatever came into his head
