The Top Five Shows to See in the UK and Europe
What to see this weekend – from the frustrated sexuality of Jack O’Brien’s sculpture in London to Martha Jungwirth’s energetic abstractions in Paris
What to see this weekend – from the frustrated sexuality of Jack O’Brien’s sculpture in London to Martha Jungwirth’s energetic abstractions in Paris
Ginny on Frederick, London
Jack O’Brien captures something about how we try to articulate, and act on, our desires. He loads each article of clothing with meaning, an erotic archetype or fantasy. These sculptures – and the histories of desire they contain – are hinting at a relationship with late capitalism; the articles of clothing that are incorporated gesture in the direction of commodification. The white vest and football socks suggest a kind of sexual performance that can be bought and donned like a costume, but their relationship with consumption remains abstract.
Galleria Franco Noero, Turin
If Håkansson’s work can be seen to inherit traits of time-based conceptual or entropic land art – or even to indirectly reference environmental, processual works such as Joseph Beuys’s 7000 Eichen (7000 Oaks, 1982) – then he leaves the final stages of their realization deliberately open to the natural world. Nowhere is this question of finitude more apparent than in A Painting of a Bird (#001–#003) (all 2021). Three sheets of plain wood, each featuring a perpendicular protruding rod, are placed high up on the brick walls at the grassy, open-roofed end of the space.
Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris
Martha Jungwirth’s choice of material intimates that the ruins we will leave behind are less noble than those found in places like the Parthenon. And yet, in that gap between her painterly surfaces and the meaning attributed to them through her titles, Jungwirth uses materials such as old cardboard not only to lament the current state of things but also to repurpose and transform.
Gasworks, London
Bassam Al-Sabah is interested in power. Previous projects by the Iraqi-born, Belfast-based artist explored themes of war and geographical dislocation, referencing his own childhood experiences of the American invasion and his family’s exile from Baghdad. Yet rarely is the work overtly biographical or didactic in nature, instead opting for subtle storytelling and a deep reading of large themes.
Zollamt MMK, Frankfurt
In Frankfurt, Gqunta summons her ancestors via her dreams to reassociate herself with her alienated and alienating inheritance. She reclaims severed connections between herself, the land and that which grows on it, as well as the physical, mental and emotional implications of that process. In her hands, the ugliness of South Africa’s famous landscape is revealed.
Main image: Lungiswa Gqunta, 'Tending to the Harvest of Dreams', 2021, installation view, ZOLLAMT MMK, Frankfurt. Courtesy: the artist and MMK, Frankfurt; photograph: Diana Pfammatter
