our little friend

an indicative visitor from chegworth valley.

hanson street, somerville, ma

back in the field

a basement in paris.

it had to be done

when just starting research on R&D networks in art, you cannot pass up the opportunity to see a large fraction of the major dealers when they come to a large park 5 minutes from where you live. so i went to frieze. every other stand had a bunch of stuff by gerhard richter on display. and there seems to be quite a lot of carl andré and donald judd inventory too. it is interesting to see which galleries are absent and which artists are in short supply—and speculate about why. blum & poe were undoubtedly the best stand. they dedicated their entire space to a salon-style showing of pieces by mono-ha school japanese artist kishio suga. other nice stuff:

martin boyce at the modern institute

edith dekyndt's yellow blanket covered in silver leaf (up top), and paintings by john mcallister at carl freedman

olafur eliasson's fading mirrors at tanya bonakdar

richard long's stones and clay-washed wall at lisson gallery

a lot of weird southern arabian and neolithic stuff at rupert wace gallery

a beautiful wall of not-books by irma blank (another case of nominative determinism?) at P420

"september 1955" by ben nicholson at richard green

the shadow series by philip hanson at corbett vs dempsey

nicolas de staël at malingue (why are his paintings not on show at more museums? this is also the clyfford still problem.)

anthony caro's flat, yet dimensional metal sculptures at mitchell-innes & nash

pierre huyghe's aquaria evoking the dystopian world of michel houllebecq (my interpretation) at esther schipper

zhu yu's proposals for the member states of the UN at the long march space

waqas khan at galerie krinzinger

massimo bartolini at frith street gallery

there was also a large florilegium by ottomar ellger, who had someone in his atelier paint the reflections of a window on every single glossy berry in a large bunch of white currants. close examination of this painting (see the rose petal above) demonstrates the transparency and luminousness of old oils, which more recent oil paintings nearly never achieve.

the day was not a total loss.

like everywhere else

after the initial burst of irritation, london turns out to be more or less like everywhere else, except better for cyclists, not so good for rain, amply provisioned with parks, and oddly undersupplied with legumes. however: fewer dogs and less tea-drinking than i'd expected and would like.

We saw stars
And waves; we saw sands, too;
And despite many crises and unforeseen disasters,
We were often bored, just as we are here.

baudelaire, "le voyage" IV

a comforting thought. and not bored yet. in fact, not often bored.

detail-oriented

it's worth visiting hauser & wirth's show of reinhard onnasch's collection at their savile row galleries. few of the pieces were actively boring, and there was a rare sighting of some beautiful clyfford still canvases. also, nothing is for sale so there is no pressure to buy. i know that this will set many minds at ease in these difficult economic times.

morris louis's paintings always capture my attention, more for their detail than their enormous size—the cloth of the canvas itself is a compositional element in these paintings (the same reason i like sigmar polke's three lies of painting), and the gentle bleed of the thinned acrylic is particularly appealing.



and john wesley, despite the simplicity of his figures, somehow manages something like anatomical accuracy in his very stylised figures. it is the type of accuracy that omits everything except what's needed to put across the point; a sort of distillation.



the nicest thing, however, was the quiet glass box by larry bell which was a bit overwhelmed by its placement in the back room, opposite a flavin fluorescent tube wall-installation. this image does not do justice to the encounter in person.

one box down

nineteen to go.

the palace

of fruit, 76 rue montorgueil in paris. it may be true that chasselas is better as a table grape than a wine grape.