Alma Pearl opened last year, occupying a substantial L-shaped space alongside the Regent’s Canal towards Haggerston – conveniently close to Seventeen for a double visit. In the tradition of Matt’s Gallery, named after Matt E. Mulsion, founder Robin Klassnik’s sheepdog, Alma Pearl isn’t the gallerist, but her dog. Go to the website and you can see Alma included in installation shots: go to the gallery, and you’ll get more sense out of her mistress, Celeste Baracchi. She opened with ‘Positions’, a discontinuous three-part exhibition that explored ‘positions in painting across generations in the expansive field of the medium’. Other shows have tended to be consistent with that, such as Colombian Jhonatan Pulido’s architecturally-derived abstractions, Margarita Gluzberg’s meditative spheres, and BLCKGEEZER’s exploration of black; while ‘Bitch Magic’ a group shows across diverse media, explored materialisations of ‘the feminine’.
Currently you can see the second half of Cullinan Richards’ show, in which the latter stage alters the first through various interventions, but leaves much of it unchanged. One of Sophia Yadong Hao ’s ‘prompts’ from her accompanying text summarises its fascinating complexities: from unfolding abstraction a radically feminist and liminal zone emerges, and overwhelms the aesthetic and hence political conventions that have persisted, for far too long, as the sole means available for staging what we choose to categorise as ‘reality’. Charlotte Cullinan and Jeanine Richards, who have worked collaboratively since 1998, often use mirroring – hence, my photo shows the Italian gallerist doubled in the doubling work of her double artists.
London’s gallery scene is varied, from small artist-run spaces to major institutions and everything in between. Each week, art writer and curator Paul Carey-Kent gives a personal view of a space worth visiting.
