Friday

SALLY KINDBERG



Sally Kindberg

The Great Exhibition


5th - 28th November 2009

PV 4th November 6:30 - 9:30pm


The Great Exhibition is a title that suggests some overwrought and overarching conceptual theme - perhaps a deconstruction of exhibition strategies or of reflections in the hall of mirrors of commodity fetishism - rendered in the cool tones of that conceptual minimalism that has become the tasteful aesthetic of contemporary art. You might think so but you would be wrong.


Sally Kindberg just doesn't do tasteful minimalism and the title is a red herring. She gave us painterly Y fronts in a gilt frame as her The Masterpiece for the 2008 Jerwood Contemporary Painting Prize, and in the 18 months since then has been producing new paintings that are always cockily fence-sitting between the sublime and the ridiculous.


This exhibition previews a selection of these new works and from the ghoulish bouffant and bow of The Horrible Kid to blanched grin of The Maniac there emerges a fuzzy logic where doubt and uncertainty have upended any rational science of vision. What emerges in its place is a kind of blurred clarity that celebrates the surreal disjunctions of everyday life.


The Great Exhibition also includes a new video work called Mood Swings, the journey which muzaks around with the flickering flame of Luv, and a persistent sculpture called The Thing of which the less said the better.


In a sense the only thing that really links The Great Exhibition to its namesake is that it also came to the Deep South (where it passed into myth leaving just a name and a football club). In this case there is at least something to see at the end of the journey and a pub attached for good measure.


Text by Jeremy James Wood



No comments:

Post a Comment