Chantal Joffe deals in memory. In the thick, tangible brushstrokes of her paintings and in the generous sizes of her canvases, we are invited to discover Joffe’s women - because it is often women she paints, those she admires, or those she is close to.

Joffe has a wholly unique figurative style of painting, eschewing a neat formality for gorgeously expressive brushwork, with the palpability of the paint allowing for a greater freedom in the depictions of the women she is painting. Her complex, multifaceted subjects can only come alive in Joffe’s thickly-drawn sweeps of paint, their nuances and quirks and features recognisably theirs, without being perfectly or realistically rendered.

Throughout her career, Joffe has puzzled away at the cyclical nature of family, considering her role as a mother, a daughter and a sister in a series of emotionally-charged paintings which unpick occasionally frazzled, poignant or sensitive dynamics. In Joffe’s paintings, moments in time are captured, frozen and combed over for clues. Work is autobiography – through it, we have watched her daughter, Esme, grow from child to adult, and followed Joffe through sickness and health in a series of unflinching self-portraits.

In 2021’s exhibition, Story, at Victoria Miro, Joffe considered her mother as she aged, from a young mother of three daughters and a son through to an older woman, bandage on eye, recovering from a cataract operation. The details are plentiful – the lace of a nightgown, the stripe of a sofa, the bunny ears of a Halloween costume – and so specific as to, conversely, conjure up a universal experience. Joffe shares the particulars of what has stuck in her memory, generously sharing snapshots so we, the viewers, get to know her mother, our minds then turning to our own.

In a new body of work exhibiting at Victoria Miro in November, Joffe revisits her mother again, now after her death. ‘It has been both difficult and also very moving to me to revisit memory and family in this way,’ says Joffe, who works from photographs, spending time preparing for this exhibition by sorting through a jumble of them in a big box. Mostly, the events were significant enough to capture, yet the meaning of them is lost.

‘Memory is hard to define,’ Joffe adds. She brings structure to its fluid nature, filling in the gaps between events half remembered. In her new work, she criss-crosses narrative and perception, eschewing a chronological retelling of her mother’s life for works which celebrate the everyday fragments. The unexpected moments are highlighted and emphasised, much in the same way memory itself works. The moments Joffe chooses to paint are quiet, the antithesis of the big birthday party or wedding. Joffe’s everyday is filled with cups of tea, walks, books, taking a pause on the sofa or at the kitchen table. ‘Life happens in the everyday,’ she says, simply.

Returning to her mother, now, has been a sharply emotional experience for Joffe. Daryll Joffe has long been a constant in Joffe’s story, a courageous woman who travelled around the globe with her young children, before settling in London and living opposite two of her daughters. ‘My feelings for my mother have been complicated,’ says Joffe on the fluctuating nature of their relationship. ‘But it all changes again after their death.’

Portraying those closest to her comes, of course, with a tangle of issues, springing from memory’s subjective nature. ‘My sisters will get upset about things I can’t predict,’ says Joffe, ‘like how their knees might look’; insecurities stemming from throwaway comments our parents make, which trigger a lifetime of sensitivity, creating a raw awareness of how we are perceived, which we always carry with us. Relationships between siblings, especially, can be particularly close, thorny, sincere and forthright, psychological complexities which always underpin Joffe’s portraits. Viewers recognise the elemental truth of the family dynamics in her works: the power of a parent in youth, to the acknowledgement of their vulnerability as they age, creating a complex, and often not easy, melting pot of emotion.

In Joffe’s work, memory and time cease to exist in the sense we have traditionally understood them, with the past and the future becoming an irrelevance, and leaving us with the memory of human connection as the only certainty. It is an abstract notion Joffe makes tangible in her visceral and very real works. ‘I like very much the Carlo Rovelli understanding of time as being nonlinear,’ Joffe adds. ‘When I’m painting, I have the sense that it’s all a kind of present tense, as if our ghosts are all still here, everywhere all at once.’

Chantal Joffe is at Victoria Miro London from 14 November 2025 to 17 January 2026

This article appears in the November 2025 Art Issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands from, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News + from 9 October. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

‘I often feel like a ghost… my memories are more alive than my present existence,’ writes Celia Paul in her latest monograph. It is a striking statement given the apparitional nature of her work in Victoria Miro’s current exhibition, ‘Celia Paul: Colony of Ghosts’. At every turn, Paul’s beautifully pared-down portraits haunt the walls and the viewer alike. Whether of figures or seascapes, profiles or trees, her paintings exude the knowledge of things past lingering into the present. These ghostly works speak, rather eerily and elegiacally, into the here and now.

Yet portraiture, for Paul, is also a speculative, as well as spectral, process. New works look back to former paintings, and more recent auto-portraits reference older ones by other British artists. In Ghost of a Girl with an Egg (2023), a woman looms luminous and lavish, her pearlescent flesh shimmering against the dark depths of a bed. A halved egg, the baby yellow yolk of which subtly gleams, appears pallid next to the woman’s lunar lustre. What takes one’s breath away about this mesmerising work is that Paul is here referencing Lucian Freud’s past portrait (Naked Girl with Egg, 1980-81) of her as a young woman. In her painting, Paul not only transforms ‘flesh’ into ‘spirit’, but answers back to Freud’s representation of her, to the male gaze, to a past self that deserved to shine rather than exist in the shadow of her famous lover.

The exhibition’s titular work performs this divine feat of painterly justice too. Past haunts the present, but only so Paul can now stare long and hard into the issues of yesterday. Featuring the ‘four giants of the so-called School of London: Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach and Michael Andrews’, as Paul describes them, Colony of Ghosts (2023) appears like a supernatural summoning, with this recognisable artistic quartet stark in an enclosed scene. Standing before them one wonders who is subject to whom? But if we turn our eyes to the painting on the opposite wall (Reclining Painter, 2023), it is Paul’s reclining yet directly attuned form we – and they – behold. It is Paul’s gaze and superior sense of interiority pouring out before us that claims our utmost attention.

As defiant as her auto-portraits are, Paul’s canvases are suffused with emotion, so much so that figures are bent over in tears, their plaintive positions echoed in their very titles. In Weeping Muse (2024), a figure clad in the purest of whites weeps like a votary before a saint, cleansed by her lachrymose act. In Weeping Muse and Running Tap (2024), an enrobed figure dissolves into the hot heaviness of her lamentation. Across the works, Paul’s translucent veils of paint balanced with the tremors of thicker impasto stir and enthral the viewer, conveying her grief in the very texture and composition of the paint. Ethereal in essence, but forceful in form, ‘Celia Paul: Colony of Ghosts’ moves and awes in equal measure; it recalls the past only to reinvigorate the present with timeless visions.

‘Celia Paul: Colony of Ghosts’ is on show at Victoria Miro, London, until 17 April 2025. An accompanying monograph, Celia Paul: Works 1975–2025 is published by MACK and also available from Waterstones

victoriamiro.com

Bill Prince, Editor-in-chief

'This week I was hosted by Van Cleef & Arpels for the launch of their latest high jewellery collection inspired by Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island at Vizcaya, an extraordinary, mock-Italianate villa on the outskirts of Miami. The work of early 20th century industrialist James Deering, the setting - on Biscayne Bay - and the architecture, faithfully reproducing the style of the Veneto region of northern Italy principally in reinforced concrete, served as the perfect backdrop to a lively evening of entertainment topped off with a hornpipe performed by an athletic troupe of brigands. Not your average high jewellery launch, then.'

Jack Moss, Fashion Features Editor

'Yesterday evening I celebrated the launch of JW Anderson’s somewhat unexpected collaboration with Guinness at a special dinner hosted by creative director Jonathan Anderson at The Devonshire in Soho. The reason for the location? The buzzy Denman Street pub is purportedly the best pint of Guinness in central London (though I’m sure there are plenty of claims to this title – I’m not getting involved). Comprising sweaters and T-shirts adorned with Guinness logos and historic branding, it was first revealed as part of the designer’s S/S 2025 menswear show in Milan this past June. ‘When I was younger, I was obsessed by the Guinness campaign, [the one with] the horses running,’ he said at the time. ‘Not to be cliché and Irish, but there’s something nice about the iconography of Guinness... It’s been the same forever.’ The four pieces are available now on jwanderson.com and the brand’s London store in Soho.'

Hannah Silver, Arts & Culture Editor

'This week I marked the opening of María Berrío's exhibition at Victoria Miro gallery with a special dinner at Michelin-starred Italian restaurant Luca. The art is surreal, the food, sublime - all in all, the perfect London night out.'

Nick Vinson, Contributing Editor

'I spent four days in Vienna, with Wallpaper* Alumni Matt Hranek and Hotel Sacher. We started with a private tour with Carl Auböck IV of the 400 objects on display at Iconic Auböck; A Workshop Shapes Austria’s Concept of Design at MAK Vienna. A visit to Lobmeyr included looking through original sketches by Joseph Hoffmann and Oswald Haerdtl from 1919 and 1925 respectively. That was followed by a dinner in their historic store put on by Hotel Sacher, who got out their special hand painted porcelain from Herend for the occasion, commissioned by Anna Sacher and last produced in 1959. After dinner a quick visit to the 1909 American Bar by Adolf Loos. Saturday we snuffled around the flea market, retuned to the MAK to see Adam Štěch's Elements exhibition, and the Biedermeier and Baroque rooms. Dinner was even more splendid than the night before; Hranek likes to dress up so I donned my Berluti black tie, sipped Ruinart from Hoffmann’s Patrician coupes from Lobmeyr (no stemware works better), ate Beef Wellington off another splendid service from Herend in The Sacher's Grüne Bar and went dancing at Eden, a club built in 1911 by architect Rudolf Erdös. Vienna at its very best.'

Jason Hughes, Creative Director

'Zen surrounding and modern Japanese cuisine at Yakumo Saryo in Tokyo. Owned by renowned designer Shinichiro Ogata, the restaurant is a former Japanese mansion that has been transformed into a dining retreat with tranquil garden view. '

Ellie Stathaki, Architecture & Environment Director

'Having had a sneak preview tour of the new home of Thames Distillers in South London before it opened, for our article, a couple of months ago, I was delighted to join COO George, his wife and Wallpaper* contributor Fiona, and architect Zoe there for a drink earlier this week. It was lovely to see the space alive with action and sample the company's delicious product.'

Hugo Macdonald, Global Design Director

'I’ve been in Milan this week, meeting the great and good of the local design brands. Even after two decades, visiting the HQs of these mighty manufacturers still takes your breath away; their legacies are so much more than furniture. This trip I was charmed by a photo of Giuseppina and Angelo Molteni (the founder of Molteni) on their wedding day in Giussano, 1941. Such cockle-warming happiness and humanity.'

Charlotte Gunn, Director of Digital Content

'On Monday night MJ Lenderman brought his brand of alt-Americana to London's Garage. Lenderman is a wonderful wordsmith. His second, album, Manning Fireworks – one of my favourite of the year – is packed with comic tales of tragic characters from his home in the American south ("Go rent a Ferrari, and sing the blues / Believe that Clapton was the second coming") but there was a sombreness to his performance on Monday. Lenderman's hometown of Asheville was recently hit by a devastating hurricane and he took a break from the 'hits' (see Wristwatch, above) to play an eight-minute charity track, released to raise money for Asheville's residents, and remind us they've been 53 days without water. His delivery is deadpan, he's flanked with a band who look like they'd be better placed in a hair-metal tribute act but, in my opinion, he's singlehandedly making male guitar music interesting again.'

Kris Bergfeldt, social media manager

'I recently visited The Mercer Hotel in New York to see its newly renovated rooms and attend Japanese contemporary artist Yaman Nkymn’s exhibition '(Atomi:)WHITE2BLACK∈division'.

On arrival, I was greeted with big smiles in the hotel's elegant lobby and guest library. The new rooms were minimalist but cosy, with an air of sophistication about them. For the exhibition, they transformed one such space into a traditional Japanese living room, complete with three vintage TVs on the coffee table and stacks of classic Japanese anime VHS tapes. Despite being in the heart of SoHo with the terrace doors wide open, a sense of calm prevailed.

The exhibition itself was fascinating. I learned about Shinto philosophy—a belief that everything in the world possesses a spiritual essence—while exploring the artist’s comparison of the Japanese tea ceremony with anime, separated by 450 years. Rare and valuable items, some dating as far back as 16th-century Japan, were also on display. All in all, a memorable experience.'

For Paula Rego (1935 – 2022), art was a way to make sense of the world around her, a creative untangling of both the political situation and her own personal relationships. Her work in the 1980s encompassed this tension in the juxtaposition between the childlike joy she took in the rapid way she created her work and the grown-up themes it represented. (Much later, in 2014, Rego contributed her favourite dish to our Wallpaper* artist's recipe series.)

Now, this productive period is explored in a new exhibition. ‘Letting Loose’, at Victoria Miro, looks at significant works including her Girl and the Dog and Opera series, considering how Rego used these works as an outlet for complex emotions surrounding her relationship with her husband, the artist Victor Willing. 

‘The pictures Paula made during the 1980s were rooted in personal experiences, and she ended up keeping many of them as mementos,’ says Erin Manns, director of exhibitions at Victoria Miro. ‘The paintings in this exhibition, perhaps more than any others, helped her to understand herself and those close to her. She created a cast of characters and hybrid human-animal creatures that helped represent milestone moments in her life, and helped her tackle darker and more sinister themes.’

Rego explored her feelings for Willing, who by the 1980s was extremely ill with multiple sclerosis, in Girl and the Dog, the challenges of his care seen through the lens of her Catholic upbringing. 

In the Opera paintings, she reaches further back, a jumble of colour and imagery expressing the drama she witnessed on the stage during a visit with her father, and the turbulence of her own emotional life. In The Vivian Girls it is her first visit to New York which is combed over for clues as to its importance. ‘“Letting Loose” charts a remarkable period of liberation and self-discovery for Paula,’ Manns adds. ‘The Operas are a highlight, which gained popularity around the world in the 1980s. For Rego, however, they spoke of an earlier time, of her experiences visiting the Lisbon opera house with her father in the 1950s – and her excitement at the intrigue and scandal unfolding both onstage and off.’

Ultimately, the decade marked a turning point for Rego, symbolising both personal and professional growth. ‘Moving away from a process of making collages – drawing and painting material that she would then cut up and arrange into sophisticated figurative puzzles – she began instead to engage with her childhood passion for painting as play. This exhibition is all about this newfound freedom. It was during this time that Paula started to tell her own story more vividly, using her artwork as a way of picking through her true feelings and memories.’

‘Paula Rego: Letting Loose’ is on 22 September – 11 November 2023, Victoria Miro, Gallery I, 16 Wharf Road, London N1 7RW

victoria-miro.com

‘I'm aware that it’s a triggering thing,’ Alex Hartley says, looking at the watermark that runs around the Victoria Miro Gallery in Venice. ‘I live next to a river and we flood every two or three years, so I know that it's a trauma; often the threat of it is worse than the reality.’ There’s an eerie sense of foreboding through the entire exhibition ‘Closer than Before’, which links the British artist’s new artworks with a site-specific installation, of which the tidemark is just the start. The space has borne the sign before, but it’s the first time it’s been applied by hand. Hartley hand-collected dirt from the lagoon to create a surreal echo of the past, or a warning of the future. ‘The beauty of the space put me off before,’ he says, ‘trying to rub a bit of something into it, to mess that up has been important… I like this idea that there's this threat that nature is taking back dominance.’

The gallery is transformed, the imaginary tide breaking through one white-washed wall to unearth a hidden history, linear concrete motifs and the curve of a circular entranceway set with dark glass. In Venice, where a 16th-century palazzo already lies behind the contemporary white cube of the gallery space, the pseudo-archaeological uncovering of modernist architecture set between them is incredibly convincing. ‘A lot of it was just about how you could build that illusion into 30cm,’ says Hartley, ‘trying to stop it being theatre and keep it real. It really is concrete. It’s not just dress theatre, so that was the battle of it. The details of the rubble went on last and quite often that last bit brings it alive, and makes you start to work your own narrative onto it.’

The installation was inspired by the Italian architect Carlo Scarpa, in particular Tomba Brion (the Brion family cemetery, part of Wallpaper’s Carlo Scarpa Venice tour), which became a site of pilgrimage for Hartley during his residency: ‘I went over and over again, I couldn’t get over how it felt like a bizarre portal to another world.’ 

The energy of Scarpa’s work fascinated him: ‘When you spend time in those spaces, looking at architecture, I can nearly always understand how a decision has been made by the architect. With Scarpa, it feels completely right, but I can't work out the logic about how he came to it. His connection to maths and how that fits within nature is a bit beyond anyone else.’

Three artworks in marble present alternative portals, each transformed into a vivid theatre flat with a box-style inlay revealing photographs of Scarpa’s designs that have been layered and painted over. Excavation rather than creation becomes the focus, Hartley cutting the slabs with bolt cutters to create the illusion of the natural rugged edge of stone. ‘There was this misremembered Bjork song, “everything in the world has already been invented and it lives inside this mountain and it's just waiting to come out”, and for some reason that had been going around in my head while I was making, this idea that all this stuff is already there,’ Hartley says. ‘It’s embarrassing to talk about sci-fi, but I wanted some of that to come out of it, that it might be a link to another world.’ 

Curiosity is essential: ‘That question, “What's happened here?” is the thing that I like,’ he says. ‘I always hope I can surprise people and then drive people from one work to another to try and forge connections. I think that the most as an artist you can really ask for is that you cause people to stop, to question, to try and imagine.’

Alex Hartley: 'Closer Than Before', until 17 June 2023, Victoria Miro, Venice. victoria-miro.com

Excerpt from Doppelgänger, 2019, by Stan Douglas. © Stan Douglas. Courtesy of the artist, Victoria Miro, and David Zwirner

History is fickle; those who write it are fickler still. The slippage between truth and fiction has been a long-standing preoccupation for the Canadian artist Stan Douglas, whose video installation Doppelgänger traces two parallel timelines, each as seemingly plausible as the other. Set in an alternative present, Doppelgänger is displayed across two square-format, translucent screens – both of which can be viewed from either side. A looped narrative unfolds in vignettes that depicts concurrent events occurring in worlds that are light years apart.

The protagonist, an astronaut named Alice, is teleported to a spaceship bound for a distant planet – as is her clone. Then, along with her ship the Hermes II, she returns suddenly and inexplicably. The aftermath of Alice’s mission ‘failure’ (in fact, she has arrived in a world where everything is the reverse of what she once knew) and her reception back on Earth plays out across the two screens. In one reality, Alice is lauded and received compassionately, where is treated to B12 vitamins injections and bed rest. In the other, she is considered a hostile alien, quarantined and interrogated.

Beneath the film’s retro-futuristic veneer and vibrant passages of colour – a stylistic nod to avant-garde cinema – lies a pressing message for our times. Douglas addresses the position of the ‘other’ in society through the lens of science fiction and quantum entanglement. The artist further magnifies viewers’ sense of displacement through overlapping vantage points and narratives, suggesting the possibility of infinitely diverging alternate realities.

Doppelgänger made its debut at the 58th Venice Biennale last year, and is now being staged in tandem – rather suitably – in London and New York exhibitions, at Victoria Miro and David Zwirner respectively. Additionally, Victoria Miro is presenting selected works from Douglas’ photographic series Scenes from the Blackout, in which the artist imagines the entropic effects of a total loss of power in present day New York, and how its denizens would react in the fallout. A panoramic view of a near blacked-out city is juxtaposed with glimpses of individual experience – ingenuity and lawlessness, altruism and malevolence. Douglas is holding up a mirror to our dysfunction, and it’s up to us to accept the reflection we see.

INFORMATION

‘Stan Douglas: Doppelgänger’, until 14 March, Victoria Miro. victoriamiro.com

ADDRESS

Victoria Miro
16 Wharf Road
London N1 7RW

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‘There is no other city like LA, which generates creativity for the entire world in so many modes,’ says Frieze Los Angeles executive director Bettina Korek. The California native may be somewhat biased, but LA has an indisputable pull – boosted by the thrilling new dimension that Frieze brought to the city’s cultural scene when it launched last year. This week, riding high off the spectacle that is the Oscars, the fair’s sophomore effort returns to Paramount Pictures Studios. Fittingly, the inaugural Deutsche Bank Frieze Los Angeles Film Award for emerging LA-based filmmakers is set to be awarded at the fair. Also new in 2020, Focus LA provides a platform for local galleries aged 15 years or younger, with curated artist projects advised by Rita Gonzalez, curator and LACMA department head of contemporary art. But it’s the solo acts that are raising the stakes – here, we make a beeline for the galleries risking it all on one artist.

Avery Singer at Hauser & Wirth

At 32 years old, the Swiss mega-gallery’s youngest signing is almost certainly bound for art superstardom. Lauded for her forward-thinking visual vocabulary, Avery Singer combines digital and manual techniques with gesso paint to create works on canvas that meld abstraction and figuration, historical and contemporary narratives. The artist, who hails from New York, will present four new paintings at Hauser & Wirth’s stand (B14), flexing her affinity for art history and colour theory in works like Jordan (2019, pictured below), which takes 19th-century European painting and the notion of ‘the intoxicated painter’ as starting points.

Idris Khan at Victoria Miro

At Victoria Miro’s booth (B11), British artist Idris Khan is intent on hitting all the high notes at Frieze with a meditative display of new paintings, sculptures and works on paper, largely rendered in intense shades of blue. But it’s his suite of Large Rhythm Paintings, based on sheet music, that has us completely entranced: obscuring areas of musical notation with gestural passages of oil paint, Khan leaves select elements of the original visible. Additional works include the deeply personal my mother, 59 years (2019) – an abstract monument comprising every printed photograph he could find of his late mother – as well a series of White Wall collages, and a jesmonite maquette of his public art installation recently unveiled in London.

Calida Rawles at Various Small Fires

Various Small Fires (VSF) is making its hometown Frieze debut with a showing of American photorealistic painter Calida Rawles in the fair’s new Focus LA section. The artist’s surreal paintings – depicting her subjects floating or submerged in swimming pools – dive into topics such as colourism, intersectionality, and the marginalisation of black women. The fair presentation coincides with Rawles’ first solo exhibition, ‘A Dream for my Lilith’ (12 February – 14 March), at the gallery’s Johnston Marklee-designed space in Hollywood.

Ugo Rondinone at Galerie Eva Presenhuber

‘Like a diarist, I record the living universe – this season, this day, this hour, this wind, this kind of grass… this kind of snow, this sound in the grass, this silence,’ reflected New York-based, Swiss-born artist Ugo Rondinone in a cryptic statement. The enigmatic Rondinone is revealing little else ahead of his solo presentation at Galerie Eva Presenhuber’s booth (A10), other than it comprises ten small-scale mountain sculptures and one sun painting. Watch this space.

James Turrell at Pace Gallery and Kayne Griffin Corcoran

The American artist has the distinct honour of headlining a double bill of his own work across two galleries – Pace Gallery (B16) and Kayne Griffin Corcoran (B18) – including an immersive LED ceiling installation and works from James Turrell’s Glass series. The immersive joint exhibition was conceived to bolster awareness and raise further funds for his magnum opus, Roden Crater – a monumental public arts project that has been 50 years in the making in the Painted Desert region of northern Arizona. Sitting out LA this year? Pace Gallery is hosting a solo exhibition of Turrell at its London outpost (11 February – 27 March); additionally, a survey of his work, ‘Passages of Light’, is currently on view in Mexico until 29 March. 

INFORMATION

Frieze Los Angeles 2020 runs from 14-16 February. frieze.com

ADDRESS

Paramount Pictures Studio
5515 Melrose Avenue
Los Angeles

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As Doug Aitken features in Wallpaper* USA 300 – a guide to creative America – we revisit our article from November 2019 Wallpaper*, and showcase the portfolio of work the artist shared exclusively for that issue.

Washington Boulevard in Culver City is one of the few neighbourhoods left in Los Angeles that has not yet been transformed for the worse by shiny new condos. Blocks of low-rise stucco buildings bear timeworn painted signs: ‘Jesus Saves’, ‘Guns and Ammo’, ‘Ray Blom Plumbing’. If the area hadn’t existed, Doug Aitken could have invented it. The artist has long looked to the mundane and forgotten, an archaeology of a vanishing American culture. His mirrored words or light-box wall pieces often draw from the long horizons and isolation of the West; his appreciation for it surely fated the discovery of his new studio.

Driving along Washington Boulevard four years ago, he saw a hand-lettered ‘For Sale’ sign in front of a transmission repair shop. When Aitken stopped to enquire, he was greeted gruffly by the owner, a man in oily overalls who said he would only sell to someone who worked with his hands. Aitken said he was an artist and it turned out that the owner had done work for Robert Rauschenberg and other artists over the years. After months of courtship, Aitken convinced the owner to sell him the place.

Doug Aitken’s new home

It was covered in greasy soot and contained 12 huge hoists for cars, but it was also a rare 1940s bow-truss structure with arched wood ceilings held in place by cross beams instead of interior columns. Following the sale, the owner called him to report that if he redid the signage atop the building within three months, he wouldn’t need a permit to do so. The vertical stack of signs now glows with Aitken’s images of a sunset and the phrase ‘I Don’t Know’. Illuminated at night, it beams across the 405 Freeway.

Not knowing is a philosophical position for Aitken, who seems determined to produce one epic all-consuming project after another. While his video installations – among them Electric Earth (1999), which won him the International Prize at the Venice Biennale, and Song 1 (2012), projected across the entire façade of the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC – are exercises in precision, he often embraces making art as a process with unpredictable results, working in the great outdoors, and incorporating elements of performance and live music.

Now 51, his hair is starting to grey and a few lines crinkle at the edges of his blue eyes. But he seems to vibrate with energy as he talks about his latest endeavours. In February, he installed a mirror-covered house, Mirage, in Gstaad, reflecting snowy peaks in winter and grassy hills in summer. (Initially shown in 2017 in the desert of Palm Springs, it was also rebuilt inside the State Savings Bank building in Detroit.)

This summer’s project was New Horizon, a 100ft-tall silvery hot-air balloon in which he flew around New England by day and landed at night, when it operated as a kinetic light sculpture that attracted ‘happenings’ – conversations on ideas of the future, as well as live music performances. He calls it ‘Fluxus with a capital F’. The project adds lift to the ideas behind his 2013 Station to Station, when he invited artists, musicians, poets and others to ride on a specially outfitted train that travelled for 23 days from New York to San Francisco. Wherever the train stopped, impromptu gatherings took place on the stations. A version was held at London’s Barbican Centre in 2015.

These large-scale projects are mostly produced in the Venice, California, studio that he has owned for 14 years. It’s composed of individual spaces, he explains: ‘My idea was that every room would be a different medium, so you could literally walk from sound to architecture to film, like a parcours of media. There are no objects there. Everything is a sketch, a rendering or an image. It is like a dematerial studio.’

Though Aitken had designed and built a house in Venice, he felt the need for additional studio space with room for the material. ‘I wanted to have more intimacy, living with works before they went away from me and into the public. I had this desire to live with these physical pieces, so I could change them over time.’

The Washington Boulevard studio, 8,000 sq ft with 35 ft ceilings, is a showcase for individual works such as the portfolio of photographs that he put together for the November 2019 issue of Wallpaper* (W*248); mostly pictures of weary, sun-blasted structures with little to distinguish them apart from odd signage added by Aitken. ‘I was noticing that in our cultural, social and political language, there are many new terms. These phrases are distinct time codes to right now. I became interested in taking this new language and inserting it into the everyday.’

These phrases disconcert when imposed on his photographs of buildings in desolate locations. ‘These are spaces that are inactive or dormant or in a kind of purgatory, whether that’s a big box chain store on the precipice of going bankrupt or a mini mall that’s lost its signage. I saw it as a way of looking at this incredible friction of 21st-century and 20th-century landscapes. 

And looking at this idea of pushing these questions or ideas into a physical tactile landscape that we’ve created in the past,’ he says. Despite being taken in various locations, they all call to mind the very Culver City area where Aitken found his studio. He says, ‘The great irony is that you find that landscape everywhere you go. It’s really the landscape of repetition, of uniformity. I find myself attracted to those in-between places — locations, sites or architecture —that are the spaces that would go under-recognised or unnoticed.’

In the new studio, he is also working on some of the sculptures for his show, ‘Return to the Real’, opening at the Victoria Miro Gallery in east London in October. Giant chrome circular wind chimes are being tuned, while billboard-scale light boxes feature contemporary still lifes. The show includes a more recent project, involving figures of human beings. ‘I had been working away from the gallery space for a while with projects and I found myself, about a year ago, thinking about the gallery space again,’ muses Aitken. ‘But coming back to it with a different perspective. I’d like to do something inside a white room but find a way to really rupture that. The figures of people, milled out of stone or frosted glass, illuminate and emit sound and voices. The works inhabit the space along with the viewers.

‘We went to Italy and found slabs of stone with all these layers of strata,’ he continues. ‘When I see them, I see this stacking of deep history. The figure of the body is milled, then severed in half. The inside of the stone body is mirrored metal. The body reflects itself infinitely on the inside, and on the outside it has this weight of geological history. It is very much looking at how we see time on an extremely fast contemporary level, but how we are stuck undeniably in a time code which will continue without us.’

Yet, much of the art in the show is barely visible: just sound or the movement of light. The soundscape that he is composing for the show includes voices repeating the same words and phrases over and over until they become an abstraction. Such vocal soundscapes are a new medium for Aitken, who is also composing a piece for 100 vocalists with the respected LA Master Chorale for a future performance. ‘As we started recording this at my studio, I saw the possibilities of the human voice in a new way. It was an ear-opening discovery,’ he jokes. ‘I wanted to take language beyond representation, and into another space where it becomes architecture. At Miro, it will be a dominant feature.’

For all of his skills with digital technology, Aitken is at core a visual artist. He enrolled at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena in 1987, where the fine art faculty included such groundbreaking artists as Mike Kelley and Stephen Prina. He learned how to operate in multiple media, creating music and video along with sculptural installations. 

He graduated in 1991 and three years later moved to New York. For a while, he supported himself by taking photographs and doing illustrations for magazines. But he would not be derailed. ‘I have always seen art as a necessity. You make it because it has to be made. Creating is like oxygen; it’s part of what you breathe in and breathe out to stay alive. So I think there is no real separation between art and life.’

It was in New York that Aitken showed his first large-scale installation of footage, Diamond Sea (1997), at 303 Gallery. He moved back to LA in the late 1990s but resisted showing there until 2006, when he joined Regen Projects. (He also shows at Galerie Eva Presenhuber in Zurich.) It was in LA that then MOCA director Philippe Vergne convinced him to do a retrospective, ‘Electric Earth’, in 2017. Aitken sees each of his works as individual and resisted the idea of presenting them as a serial exploration of his career. So Vergne suggested he conceptualise the show as a work of art unto itself. It was a popular and critical hit.

Despite the galleries and the new studio, Aitken has not let go of the idea of ambitious, experiential projects. In September, the Donum Estate unveiled his Sonic Mountain (Sonoma), a site-specific sculpture that mimics the changing effects of wind chimes set in a eucalyptus grove in the rolling hills of the northern California wine country. The sounds and colours from the sculpture are constantly shifting with the conditions of the environment. Perpetual art, you might call it, but it is also a call to pay attention.

‘One of the most profound things that any kind of act of creation can give you is to engage you in the present, to suddenly bring you into the present,’ he says. ‘Those moments are so fleeting and rare, but when you do find them, it is the rarest drug; it’s a private nirvana. It’s something that is inexplicable.’

As originally featured in the November 2019 issue of Wallpaper* (W*248)

Sonic Mountain (Sonoma), by Doug Aitken, at The Donum Estate. Video: courtesy of the artist

Doug Aitken's ‘Return to the Real’ series

Doug Aitken’s Return to the Real series featured as an exclusive portfolio in the November 2019 print issue of Wallpaper*.

‘Return to the Real’ was shown 2 October – 20 December 2019 at Victoria Miro in London 

victoria-miro.com

dougaitkenworkshop.com

Doug Aitken returns to London to present ‘Return to the Real’, an exhibition at Victoria Miro’s Wharf Road gallery that addresses our fascination with social media. Pictured, Inside Out, 2019, by Doug Aitken.

The very American art of Doug Aitken is, most of it anyway, at once transcendent and dangerously of the now. He is in that sense a pop artist proper. He is also able and agile in many medium and an assembler of performances (he has fantastic taste in musical collaborators) and creative happenings. His art can be big, clever, embracing of technology, accessible, often happens outdoors or on giant or multiple screens and sometimes – as with Station to Station (2013-2015) and New Horizons (2019) – moves on tracks or through the air.

Sometimes though it is quiet and small, willing to be contained in a gallery space. His new show at London’s Victoria Miro gallery, Wharf Road branch, is that but as powerfully affecting as anything he has done. ‘Return to the Real’ is Aitken’s device to make us think about our devices, the experiential subletting to Instagram, the squeal and squawk of social media. ‘It’s a counterpoint to that world of de-materiality and speed,’ he says, ‘and about seeking something which is unique or being in a place which is physical and tactile or a moment which is unrepeatable.’

Head upstairs first where three ‘sonic sculptures’, circular shiny steel wind chimes, slowly rotate in front of a large screen which flickers and changes colour. It is mesmerisingly, meditatively effective as the light plays off slowly spinning steel columns. At the same time there is music and massed human voices, singing single words and short phrases – small chunks of a piece for 100 vocalists that Aitken has been working on for a year and half. And to one side is a female form, attempting contemplation. She is carved from (carefully chosen) layered carrara marble, heavy, Aitken, says, with ‘deep geological time’. But she is also bisected to reveal a perfectly polished mirrored interior. A soul, pure and unsmudged? It too picks up the light and flickers gently. She is our hero, a minor god magicking up this small restorative universe.

The piece was a long time in the installation and only toward the end, Aitken says, did he notice that it was rooted somehow in the American minimalism of John Cage and Merce Cunningham, Steve Reich and Terry Riley and in the shamanistic art of Joseph Beuys and James Lee Byars. But if Reich and Riley were re-working the rhythms and clatter of the industrial age, this is post-industrial music; not the scattering circuit-board twitches of a solo Thom Yorke say but modern mantras, essential cycles, something to drown out the terrible noise of it all.

Downstairs things are almost domestic. A translucent acrylic young woman is slumped/resting at a table, a smart phone just out of reach. She is alive with colour but dead to the world, surrounded by light boxes, illuminated dreamscapes of delicious looking beds, swimming pools, aeroplanes, aspirational distractions, screens of plenty. Perhaps she is on her way upstairs to become our lady of the windchimes. Let’s hope so. 

INFORMATION

‘Return to the Real’, 2 October – 20 December, Victoria Miro. victoria-miro.com

ADDRESS

Victoria Miro
16 Wharf Road
London N1 7RW

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In a darkened room flashes of looming concrete walls and extruded limbs – serial images of Lina Bo Bardi’s SESC Pompéia art and leisure centre in São Paulo – pulse to a score by the German-Spanish composer Maria de Alvear. The artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien and his editor Adam Finch – the room is part of Julien’s David Adjaye-designed studio overlooking a stretch of Regent’s Canal in north London – are working on the complex choreography of footage that will eventually play across nine carefully placed 6ft-tall screens and make up the seven distinct sections of his new work, Lina Bo Bardi – A Marvellous Entanglement. It’s a kind of dancing-about architecture and a dizzying work.

Five years, on and off, in the making, the piece is Julien’s multi-part tribute to the Rome-born polymath modernist who became Brazil’s most significant architect outside of Niemeyer. Though a long way from a straight-ahead biopic – Bo Bardi would have hated anything so linear and reductive, he says – Julien wanted to make clear Bo Bardi’s creative stretch: her smarts as writer and essayist (she worked with Gio Ponti at Domus in the mid-1940s), furniture designer, exhibition designer, costume designer, theatre designer, jewellery designer, as well as her celebrations of Brazilian pop and folk culture, her role as cultural lightning rod, and her commitment to architecture as activated social space for all. Bo Bardi’s reputational stock may have risen remarkably over the last decade, but Julien insists she is still underappreciated.

Isaac Julien in his London studio, with a screen displaying his 2019 work Lessons of the hour – Frederick Douglass and, on the table, prints from his new Lina Bo Bardi film. In the background is his studio’s recreation of a display system originally designed by Bo Bardi and presented at the 1959 ‘Bahia No Ibirapuera’ exhibition

His passion for Bo Bardi’s life and work began in 2012 when he was invited to show at SESC Pompéia. Completed in the mid-1980s and designed around the husk of a retired oil drum factory, Julien calls it a tropical version of London’s Hayward Gallery but with more community outreach. ‘They run all kinds of activities – sport, dance, theatre, music, art exhibitions. It’s really utopian and the architecture is amazing.’

Julien worked with the local architect André Vainer on the installation of his SESC show, ‘Geopoetics’. Vainer had worked with Bo Bardi on the design of the building and its creative fixtures and fittings. ‘And it dawned on me that he was using all these techniques that Bo Bardi had developed for the display of the work; from the use of the materials to how the name of the show and other information was presented. That’s when I became really interested in all things Bo Bardi.’ (Julien was so enamoured of Bo Bardi’s art display devices, simple wooden ladder systems and stark concrete plinths with glass easels designed for SESC Pompéia and her Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), that he had his own made. He used them for his recent Lessons of the Hour – Frederick Douglass installation at the Metro Pictures gallery in New York.)

Designed by c, Julien’s studio features a screening room separated from the rest of the space by a blue curtain. On the screens are shots from Lina Bo Bardi – A Marvellous Entanglement, including, far right, Lina Bo Bardi, as played by the actor Fernanda Montenegro, looking through an opening in the pleated concrete walls of Coaty in the city of Salvador. On the left is Julien’s After Malevich - Red Day (Radioactive Avatar #13), 2018

More fundamentally, the show and the installation made him think about the mechanics of his own art. Julien has made his reputation with multi-screen video installations, often shown with related still photography. His work – from 1989’s Looking for Langston, through Vagabondia (nominated for the Turner Prize in 2001), Baltimore, Fantôme Afrique to Ten Thousand Waves and Playtime combines crystalline, lyrical imagery, dance and documentary, looped and fractured narratives and the occasional appearance of high-wattage stars, including James Franco and Maggie Cheung. Taking in his multiple screens requires fluid, mobile viewing, a constant flutter and flow.

‘That was one of the things I realised at SESC Pompéia; there was a choreographic conversation happening in the way Lina Bo Bardi worked scenographically,’ Julien says. ‘I had a light bulb moment in relation to my thinking about space and architecture and the distribution of images in space.’

In 2013 Julien created the poster for ‘The Ghost of Lina Bo Bardi’, an exhibition curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist at The Glass House, the architect’s former home in São Paulo. And his 2015 piece Stones Against Diamonds (Ice Cave) was inspired by a Bo Bardi letter to her husband and featured a CGI version of her staircase at the Museu de Arte Moderna de Bahia (MAM Bahia), constructed using techniques usually used in the making of ox carts. Bo Bardi managed to incorporate vernacular techniques and materials into her work more successfully than perhaps any other great modernist, a commitment which makes her work feel utterly contemporary and key to the resurgence of interest. ‘Like many emigrés, she looked at the country from a fresh perspective,’ says Julien. ‘She embraced the craftsmanship of its north east and reflected a more organic Brazilian culture back to itself.’

Detail of Julien’s Stones Against Diamonds (Ice Cave), 2015, referencing Bo Bardi’s 1959 staircase, created for MAM Bahia, and her concrete easel, originally presented at MASP, in 1969

More fundamentally, the show and the installation made him think about the mechanics of his own art. Julien has made his reputation with multi-screen video installations, often shown with related still photography. His work – from 1989’s Looking for Langston, through Vagabondia (nominated for the Turner Prize in 2001), Baltimore, Fantôme Afrique to Ten Thousand Waves and Playtime combines crystalline, lyrical imagery, dance and documentary, looped and fractured narratives and the occasional appearance of high-wattage stars, including James Franco and Maggie Cheung. Taking in his multiple screens requires fluid, mobile viewing, a constant flutter and flow.

‘That was one of the things I realised at SESC Pompéia; there was a choreographic conversation happening in the way Lina Bo Bardi worked scenographically,’ Julien says. ‘I had a light bulb moment in relation to my thinking about space and architecture and the distribution of images in space.’

In 2013 Julien created the poster for ‘The Ghost of Lina Bo Bardi’, an exhibition curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist at The Glass House, the architect’s former home in São Paulo. And his 2015 piece Stones Against Diamonds (Ice Cave) was inspired by a Bo Bardi letter to her husband and featured a CGI version of her staircase at the Museu de Arte Moderna de Bahia (MAM Bahia), constructed using techniques usually used in the making of ox carts. Bo Bardi managed to incorporate vernacular techniques and materials into her work more successfully than perhaps any other great modernist, a commitment which makes her work feel utterly contemporary and key to the resurgence of interest. ‘Like many emigrés, she looked at the country from a fresh perspective,’ says Julien. ‘She embraced the craftsmanship of its north east and reflected a more organic Brazilian culture back to itself.’

A version of this article originally appeared in the June 2019 issue of Wallpaper* (W*243) 

INFORMATION

‘Lina Bo Bardi – A Marvellous Entanglement’, 7 June – 27 July, Victoria Miro. victoria-miro.com; isaacjulien.com

ADDRESS

Victoria Miro
16 Wharf Road
London N1 7RW

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‘The pace of contemporary life has never moved so fast,’ says Copenhagen-based artist John Kørner, while peddling comically slowly on his bike installation at Victoria Miro’s Wharf Road gallery in London. The bike is attached to a moving platform topped with a stall of chairs built for visitors, parallel to a vast, 12-panel painting charting a sunrise and set. The installation is designed to ‘slow us down, and see the painting from a different perspective’.

The exhibition – ‘Life in a Box’ – revolves around the physical, emotional, and conceptual constraints of time passing, and the ways in which we attempt to ‘outrun’ them. Kørner depicts runners in cross-country garb, shifting in-and-out of focus into vivid yellow and red backgrounds, as if we're just missing them as they zoom past. In the upstairs gallery, a sweeping, floridly-coloured race track covers the floor; the finish-line dissected by a giant climbing frame that also functions as a bar, which Kørner encourages you to climb up, and order a shot.

The bar, Kørner explains, is a reflection of the time-travelling transformation we undergo when drinking alcohol. ‘It seems that lots of people change personality when they go drinking. Especially in the UK, there’s so many pubs – and I'm fascinated by this culture. It has a great impact on the demeanour. For instance, I smile more when I drink. For some people, it’s a way of escaping to a place where time moves differently.’ For better or worse.

There are lighthearted notes to the exhibition, but, as is common in Kørner’s complex practice, it’s also dense with metaphor, symbol, and serious commentary. On what exactly, Kørner leaves largely up to the viewer. The snow-peaked mountains he paints, for instance, are not meant to represent a particular range, but the idea of a mountain more broadly. Here, they seem to represent natural order and peace, offering refreshing calm from the self-defeating, fast-paced racing occuring elsewhere in the gallery.

Installation view of ‘John Kørner: Life in a Box’ at Victoria Miro, London. © The artist. Courtesy of the artist and Victoria Miro, London/Venice

Likewise the boxes seen throughout the exhibition have manifold meaning. At times, they appear prison-like and claustrophobic, drawing you in like a box set. At other times, they are protective; containing within them calming, vast green planes. For the artist, ‘they refer to anything from mental “boxes”, to apartments, to crates of apples, to TV sets, to the tall walls of a valley’. Rather than prescribe meaning, his ‘main aim is to communicate with the viewer, and have my work resonate with something in their life’.

The exhibition also contains a number of Kørner's storied ‘problems’: egg-shaped sculptures that represent the universal nature of issues, questions and conundrums. The idea has followed Kørner for much of his career, first appearing in the years after his graduation from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts Copenhagen in 1988. At Victoria Miro, they take the form of bright, primary-coloured sculptures dotted along the race track, obstacles in the way of the theoretical runners chasing their goals; and gallery visitors navigating the space, forcing them to move slowly and deliberately.

Kørner has long been of the opinion that art should exercise the imagination like a bicycle stretches the legs. He tests the theory literally, and runs the imagination ragged, in what is an edifying, dense display. Afterwards, you can climb the bar for a refreshing, transformative tipple.

INFORMATION

‘John Kørner: Life in a Box’ is on view until 23 March. For more information, visit the Victoria Miro website

ADDRESS

Victoria Miro
16 Wharf Road
London N1 7RW

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From halcyon days spent in the London Science Museum's maths gallery, to under the hood of his first Leyland Sherpa van, we're about to journey deep into the mind of Conrad Shawcross. The London-based artist is the subject of Pyschogeometries, a new book published by his gallery, Victoria Miro, and arts magazine Elephant, that investigates his practice photographically, illustratively, and through a series of writings. It’s the first book of its kind that goes into such edifying detail about the artist's work to date.

What strikes you immediately when reading it: Shawcross' practice is remarkably complex. Hang from every word as he jumps from reference to reference, from the philosophy of science, to childrens' toys, Greek mythology, Renaissance architecture and Buckminster Fuller. Keep up if you can. His sculptures may appear, on one level, like ‘childlike stacks of blocks' (his words), but there's incredible allusion, architecture and abstraction here – and that's what this book focuses on.

‘This is conceptual art that somehow also hits us in the preconscious, connects us with our most elemental wirings,’ Wallpaper* senior editor Nick Compton writes in the introductory essay, capturing the essence of the book’s title. ‘Pyschogeometries’, a theory coined by Italian physician Maria Montessori (1870-1952), suggests that being introduced to geometries at the earliest stages of development can fire up crucial neural connections and aid learning and insight – in all areas – throughout our lives. Geometry is, she suggests, ‘a gymnasium for the mind’, a way to stretch our intelligence abstractly, before we have the life materials to do it for real.

Shawcross stretches his psychogeoemtrical instincts across tetrahedral systems – a motif that recurs throughout his work, in Formation (2015), Paradigm (2016), in the Optic Cloak tower in Greenwich (2016), and in the recent Fractures sculptures (2018). In the book, Shawcross explains how he is interested in the tetrahedron mathematically, but also because of what it represents. The tetrahedron lies at the basis of nature, most obviously in H2O at molecular level, and in DNA, which comprises molecular variants of what Buckminster Fuller called the ‘tetrahelix’. These towering, brink-of-collapse, ‘whisp of smoke' sculptures represent nature, and humanity, at its most elemental.

Shawcross is also preoccupied with machinery. His early work, in particular, revolves around mechanically complex engine-making. Recall the giant, intricate rope production works, Yarn, (2001), The Nervous Systems (2003) and Chord (2009) that spooled colourful threads across London institutions when the artist was still in his twenties. ‘There is (self-consciously) something of the Victorian Gentleman scientist about Shawcross, the untethered engineer, physicist and metaphysicist,' Compton writes of the artist's fascination with nuts, bolts, cogs and axles. ‘He'd make a great Frankenstein.'

Frankenstein, maybe. Roboticist, for sure. With AI on the rise in the 2010s, Shawcross’ interest in mechanics moved into robotics. ‘I came across a five-axis robot in an art fabrication studio and it kind of stopped me in my tracks,' he explains of his first interaction with artificial intelligence, linking it to artistic progression. For Shawcross, coding is a kind of choreography – quite literally in the case of his 2012 collaboration with Wayne McGregor and Kim Brandstrup at the Royal Opera House, where he hard-coded a relentless robotic arm (‘Diana’) to dance alongside Royal Ballet’s best – Carlos Acosta, Leanne Benjamin, Tamara Rojo and Ed Watson, in swinging, pulsating time to the score.

Through all this talk of geometries, mechanics, robotics, and what the artist calls ‘audacious structural forms’, it might be all too easy to assume that Shawcross’ work lacks sensitivity, or emotion. But this is to miss his musicality, flowing contours, rhythms, references, histories. The poetics of his work is heard most clearly in the chapter called ‘Harmonics’, which focuses on Shawcross’ attempts to transmogrify sensory experiences of music into a visual medium. The pages are lined with intricate drawings, made by pendulum driven pencils; works in lighting design that dance across the page; looping sculptures that make cast iron appear weightless.

‘I like the idea of [the works] appearing at first to be a piece of industrial infrastructure in the urban realm, feeling quite austere and like functional utilitarian objects,' Shawcross writes in the book. ‘But then on closer examination, once you enter into them, you suddenly find yourself in something that beneath the cloak is more poetic, more ethereal.’ That is, in a sense, what the book allows us to do – intimately step within the works, look deep into their geometric or mechanical structuring, perceiving it how the artist himself does; poetically.

INFORMATION

Conrad Shawcross: Psychogeometries, £35, published by Victoria Miro and Elephant. For more information, visit Conrad Shawcross’ website

What do you know about a tetrahedron? For rarely has a shape responded so strangely to growth, and never has it assumed quite so much importance. The Greek philosopher Plato, writing 2,400 years ago, identified the tetrahedron – a pyramid with four triangular sides, made up of identical angles – as the essential building block on which the entire world is composed.

It’s a shape, we now evidentially know, that lies at the basis of nature, most obviously in the molecule H2O, which makes up two thirds of the world’s surface, while DNA, the very matter of our unique being, comprises of molecular variants of what Buckminster Fuller called the tetrahelix.

When one multiplies a tetrahedron then such a basic form blooms into something contradictory and abstract. Unlike other basic shapes, a tetrahedra cannot tesselate with itself. It cannot, therefore, ever fill a space. Linked together, the shape instead twists and turns in ways that seemed to defy logic, like the blooming of a great plant.

In an essay neatly titled The Simple Made Strange, Patrick Sykes writes ‘the initially self-generating quality of the fundamental form gives way to asymmetry, and a space in which the artist can intervene’. The artist to whom he refers is Conrad Shawcross, 41, who, for the Summer Exhibition of 2015, filled the Annenberg Courtyard of London’s Royal Academy of Arts with a never-ending structure of conjoining tetrahedrons in The Dappled Light of the Sun.

‘Despite their uniformly straight sides,’ Sykes writes, ‘the tendrils radiating through the courtyard appear to be twisting through the space, expanding at tangents rather than neatly stacking within it, like arcs turning on competing axes. No matter how far they are allowed to expand, they will always meet at imperfect angles and will never consummate their trajectories by closing the loops at which they hint.’

Shawcross’ work in the Annenberg Courtyard laid the groundwork for his new solo exhibition at London gallery Victoria Miro. I meet Shawcross on the day of the launch of ‘After the Explosion, Before the Collapse’, watching him install strange and beautiful sculptures that – using the tetrahedron – obey the same geometric parameters around a central helical stem. Yet each is strikingly distinct, a twisting spine supporting branches which in turn support hundreds of unique fragments. It’s as if nature can be fashioned from glass and metal.

‘It’s been a risky show, with new, uncharted work that hasn’t been made before,’ he says. ‘I was trying to find the rules and systems and logics of how the tetrahedron works, and then obey those rules. But I’m still bamboozled by the way this simple shape can form these tendril like structures that branch out and don’t join into themselves again. They’re like never-ending, enigmatic rising beanstalks.’

The show comprises of a mix of tetrahelix sculptures in dialogue with each other, in a room called Fractures, alongside a sequence of unique framed photographs. Shawcross’ photographs look like the momentary capture of an epic lightening storm over an alien landscape. They were, in fact, created in a darkroom, by the firing of a laser through photographic paper situated behind glass with a crack through it – like, for example, the chink in a wine glass.

‘They’re the exploding shadows or projections of a crack in a lens,’ he says. ‘I decided to call them Aberrations, which is the technical term for a fault in a glass or lens. I wanted to use terms that are generally associated with problems. It’s like Plato’s cave – a genius inferring of things we’ll never see, and can only guess at.’

In addition, and perhaps most impressively, the show also exhibits two mechanical works. First, high in the corner of the Fractures room, resides a circular phalanx of conjoining mirrors which, with imperceptible speed, unfolds into a shining shield before closing upon itself, like a Venus Fly Trap.

Shawcross then takes me outside. We stand together on the scaffolding that lines the street, peering through the Mayfair traffic. In the window of the gallery across the road, Shawcross has installed a huge, floating circular sculpture titled Murmuration – the word used to describe the movements of flocks of birds. Two identical metal circles, perforated like a sieve, rotate non-regularly in separate directions. As the circles  momentarily align, so mesmerising patterns of light emerge and disappear.

‘It’s the result of years of investigation into interference and disrupted surfaces,’ Shawcross says. ‘I hope it will react to the movements of passers by and the changing play of light upon it.’ It’s artwork as engineering, at first glance an industrial piece of machinery. Yet, if one passes before, it creates the same sense of ephemeral wonder as swirling starlings in the evening flight. Be sure, if you’re passing by, to become caught for a moment in its murmuration, heart-stoppingly suspended in the bustling dim of Mayfair.

INFORMATION

‘After the Explosion, Before the Collapse’ is on view until 27 October. For more information, visit the Victoria Miro website

ADDRESS

Victoria Miro Mayfair
14 St George Street
London W1S 1 FE

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The American sculptor Sarah Sze creates fractured things, exploding or imploding or perhaps both. Her works, built of everyday debris and found objects, wire and sticky tape, are site-specific small universes with their own time frames and lines of energy, spiralling out and often spilling beyond their allotted space.

For her new show at Victoria Miro’s London gallery in Islington, Sze does something unusual, flattening her centrifugal forces and pinning them to a wall. They still contain multitudes but here, in a series called Afterimage, much of it put together on site, she pulls apart her creative process, her workings out, ruminations and reflections.

Unpacking her impulses, Sze paints over printouts of photographs of her paintings, cuts up, tears and pastes. There are literal spirals, giant fingerprints, screen prints, etchings, scratchings and blown up pixels. This is a kind of cubism of the age of information overload, getting to the contemporary splintering, the attempt to contextualise and edit the daily rush of digital and IRL information.

Something similar happens upstairs but here we are in Sze’s more familiar three dimensions. She has installed a stand in for her desk and multiple screens. And around them moving images – a running cheetah, landscape from a train – are projected onto torn pieces of paper and onto the gallery walls.

There is though no choreography to the way the images run, no master plan, no edit. Just beguiling flow. Images in Debris is a classic Sze constellation, a study in memory and identity, but with a new kind of slow dynamism, a different kind of engine.

INFORMATION

‘Sarah Sze: Afterimage’ is on view until 28 July. For more information, visit the Victoria Miro website

ADDRESS

Victoria Miro
16 Wharf Road
London N1 7RW

The South Korean artist Do Ho Suh, is a perfect complement to ‘Freespace’, the theme of the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale. His fascination with rendering the built environment appears to suggest both form and memory in his work, which straddles drawing and sculpture. Victoria Miro gallery’s exhibition in Venice is the result of a three-year residency at the STPI Creative Workshop, Singapore, in which Suh created rubbings of everyday objects and interior spaces from his personal surroundings.

The delicacy and fragility of the objects, which form his on-going project, ‘Rubbing/Loving’ is compelling. To make the work he stretches paper over everyday objects such as pipes, light switches, a hairdryer and telephone, and then rubs colour into the surface. The paper pieces, which have been described as epidermis – a second or surrogate skin – create molds which contains no objects just an outline of what was there.

In addition to the sculptures, Suh was invited by the V&A, London to make a response to the architecture and interior of Robin Hood Gardens, an internationally recognised social housing estate designed by the architects Alison and Peter Smithson in East London. The work forms part of the exhibition ‘Robin Hood Gardens: A Ruin in Reverse’, (Pavilion of Applied Arts, Venice) which takes its name from the renowned American artist Robert Smithson’s writings, who described buildings in construction on the outskirts of New York as ultimately ending up as ruins, a comment on the short life span of architecture.

The film records four of the interior flats, through vertical and horizontal pans representing both time and space, all the more urgent as the flats are in the process of demolition. Perhaps a mediation not only on the heated issue of social housing but architecture’s ephemerality and ability to linger in our memories.§

See all the latest news and stories from Venice Architecture Biennale here

INFORMATION

’Do Ho Suh’ is on at Victoria Miro in Venice until the 7th July 2018. For more information visit the gallery’s website

ADDRESS

Victoria Miro
Venice Il Capricorno
San Marco, 1994
30124 Venice

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Idris Khan has built his reputation in multiple layers. He repeatedly scrawls or stacks images, creating hypnotic haunting palimpsests, buzzing and charged, dense with history and cultural memory. This is flat work made somehow three-dimensional. But in his new show at London gallery Victoria Miro, Khan goes properly solid and takes on sculpture.

One piece is a four-metre square sculpture made up of 15, tall, tightly packed fibre columns, painted in a light-sucking, despairing black. The slim spaces around the columns allow slivers of light to pass through the installation.

Khan has been researching first-person accounts of prisoners held at Saydnaya, Syria’s most brutal prison (no small claim). These prisoners were often crammed, 15 at a time, into cells designed for solitary confinement. The cells were darkened and prisoners often blindfolded, a horrible intimacy and isolation all at once, a perpetual night. A large painting meanwhile is made up of alternating dark bars, dizzying and modulating.

The centrepiece of the show is made up of 44 blocks of patinated bronze in various shapes and sizes, stamped with numbers and text; again testimonies of confinement and conflict. Other large paintings are built of these texts, fragments stamped over and over again till they are deafening, incomprehensible, erased in the clamour to be heard.

This is a dark, unsettling kind of minimalism, exercises in imagination rather than just formal experiments in mass and volume. But, as always, Khan pushes the legible trace into the abstract, generating strange resonances.

INFORMATION

‘Idris Khan: Absorbing Light’ is on view until 20 December 2017. For more information, visit the Victoria Miro website

ADDRESS

Victoria Miro
16 Wharf Road
London N1 7RW

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Last summer the Korean artist Do Ho Suh papered over much of the interior of a four-storey New York townhouse. It was thin paper, stuck down with gentle glue, a kind of second skin. Then he coated his fingers in pastel and rubbed the walls, ‘caressing them’ he says, different colours for different rooms. The rubbing got less intense the higher up the house he got and the rooms less familiar. Still, it’s a big house and it was a hot summer. Suh rubbed away his fingerprints. ‘I gave part of my body,’ he says.

Suh had moved into the basement of the house in Chelsea almost 20 years before, just after completing his MFA at Yale. It worked well as a small, 500 sq ft apartment and studio, or well enough given what Suh could afford. But it became more to him than affordable studio space. And leaving it, as he had to do, was a wrench, a sort of rupture that skinned him emotionally.

‘I was trying to hold onto something but it was also a ritual to let things go,’ he says. ‘Memories were triggered by the recovery of small textures or details that I had completely forgotten. Through the rubbing they resurfaced so I lived that time very intensively. And then I came out of it. It was like shedding skin and now I feel like I have been granted another body.’

The rubbings are now in a new studio Suh keeps in Greenpoint in Brooklyn, carefully numbered. They are precious to him. The house is being sold so he can’t go back and do it all again, even if he wanted to. His plan is to mount the rubbings on wooden panels and create a scale model of the house. The Rubbing/Loving Project, as he calls it, will be, you sense, the piece that defines this stage of his career (Suh is now 54). But it is more than that. ‘It became almost like a spiritual quest,’ he says. ‘It was not about my career, it was about commemorating my time there.’

The townhouse, once a dormitory for German sailors, was owned by psychotherapists Arthur and Doris ‘Dee’ Henoch. Dee had also been an actress and filmmaker and took an interest in Suh’s work. Arthur – who had served with actor Douglas Fairbanks Jr during World War II and not usually one for art – did too. After Dee died in 2005, Suh and Arthur became even closer. ‘He was very generous and supportive,’ says Suh. ‘We were very good friends for a very long time.’

Suh had arrived in the US in 1991 to study art at the Rhode Island School of Design. Though he spoke little English, he found the move liberating. Suh’s father, Suh Se-ok, is one of Korea’s best-known artists and Suh was relieved to be in a country that was unaware of his father’s reputation. But he also soon understood that the US’s relationship with its Korean immigrant population was complex to the point of hostility.

While still at RISD, Suh created a jacket out of military dog-tags. He called it Metal Jacket and it identified Suh as an art star in the making. He refined the idea with 2001’s Some/One, creating a swooping, armoured robe, also out of dog-tags. He has made other pieces about the individual and the collective. In 2010’s Net-Work, he constructed what looked like a fishing net but was in fact a mesh of tiny human figures, arms and legs outstretched. He is not averse to high-impact showmanship. In 2012’s Fallen Star he perched a 30-ton house precariously on the roof of the Engineering School at the University of California in San Diego.

But perhaps his most haunting work is a series of stitched-together, fabric interior spaces, pop-coloured polyester apparitions, residues, perhaps, but of something essential. The first in the series were alien to most US viewers but only because they were the internal workings of a traditional Korean house, a hanok built by his father in the 1970s. But then, as Suh offered up fragile traces of his New York apartment – of radiators, sinks and toilets and the familiar fixtures of cheap rentals and first homes – they connected. People moved within them and understood how domestic spaces can have a sort of psychic stickiness, that repeated movements within spaces might leave something behind. Place and placelessness are what people talk about when they talk about Suh’s work. Suh admits that these pieces began simply as an attempt to make his place portable, even wearable, so he could take it with him wherever he went.

Suh had imagined that New York was his forever place, but in 2010 he moved to London to be with his new wife Rebecca Boyle Suh, who works in arts education. They had a daughter. And then another. But Suh kept the studio in New York, tied somehow to that place. Uprooting and re-rooting unsettled him because he realised that it might happen again. That it was possible, inevitable even, but painful.

At a new show now on at the Victoria Miro gallery in London, Suh is presenting a series of ‘in-between’ spaces, nine fabric spectres of hallways and odd connecting places. ‘Hubs’ he calls them, from homes and studios in New York, Berlin, London and Seoul. At the end is a video screen running an animation Suh has made using hundreds of still images of corridors; an ‘infinite corridor’ he calls it, never really getting or going anywhere.

Suh’s home and studio is just around the corner from the Miro gallery, near the Regent’s Canal in Islington. It is an area of grand townhouses and the culturally curious, not unlike Chelsea. But Suh clearly struggles to feel comfortable here. It is not his forever place. ‘I always thought there should be some sort of end,’ he says. ‘A final destination. I thought that was New York but it turns out not. And I don’t feel that London is my final destination.’ The Miro show is about his time in London, he says, his place and placelessness, that sense of being in-between.

It is the ‘Hub’ pieces that feature on this month’s subscriber cover and in our fashion story, shot by Sofie Middernacht and Maarten Alexander. It is the first time Suh’s fabric architecture has been shot with live visitors, carefully styled as a colourful counterpoint in this case. Suh was an on-set collaborator during the shoot, again a new, and slightly unnerving, experience. ‘I knew I had to let go once I had agreed to do this but Sofie and Maarten were very respectful,’ he says. ‘I didn’t really say anything while they were shooting the fashion, and then we worked together on the cover. I’m used to a straightforward documentation of my work. But they had a very specific view. They played with the light and there is a human presence. It was interesting to see my work read in a different way.’

The Miro show also includes a three-screen film shot using GoPro cameras stuck to Suh’s daughter’s buggy. ‘My arrival in London coincided with the arrival of my daughter, so we explored this new environment together,’ he says. ‘Some of the films are in Korea and the interesting thing is that you don’t really notice the switch from city to city. Seoul blends with London.’

Suh also worked with the Singapore Tyler Print Institute on Specimen Series, large-scale cyanotypes of fabric objects that look like strange X-rays or spirit presences. A lightbulb from his New York apartment, among other things, appears in three forms: 3D fabric, 2D gelatin and cyanotype. ‘I think ultimately I am seeking something intangible, to see something that I cannot see, a sort of residue.’

In 2011, Arthur Henoch’s children warned Suh that their father was ill with Alzheimer’s. ‘He casually complained about loss of memory, just little things at the beginning,’ Suh says. ‘He started to forget where he had put the rent cheque I gave him so I had to reissue those several times. Finally he asked me to arrange an automatic payment.’

Suh knew he might have to give up the space and he looked for new ways to memorialise it, to mark his time there and what it had meant. He understood that the fabric pieces he had made of the apartment had their limits. ‘I always felt that there was a quality or elements missing.’ So he started to rub.

Arthur died in January last year, aged 90. His son Gary suggested that Suh keep rubbing, moving up the stairs and into the house; something Suh had wanted to do but was too polite to ask. It would be a memorial to his father and, Gary understood, a memorial to Suh’s relationship with him. But things got complicated. Arthur’s three children bounced between supporting the project and calling things off. They were keen to sell the house; a Chelsea townhouse is a considerable asset, and to have an artist rubbing and wrapping the place might get in the way of a quick deal. ‘I think my art tortured the children,’ Suh says. ‘They knew I was doing something they couldn’t do. And they completely understood the meaning of it. But the practicalities of selling the house meant they were torn.’ It was almost six months before Suh actually started work in the house.

In the meantime he started another rubbing of his apartment, his third time around. ‘It was different doing the rubbing after Arthur died,’ Suh says. ‘I knew now that I really had to move out. And I was more attentive. There have been so many lives in that house. You see a light switch that has probably been there since the 1930s. Time has accumulated on those objects. I think about how many times I flipped that switch. ‘I think when you first move in somewhere, you are more aware of the volume than the space itself. And then you forget about all that and it is about your routine inside that space. You wake up, you go to the bathroom, take a shower, flip the switches. And the movement is actually the memory of the space. The rubbings remind me of that movement.’

After that he moved on to a staircase from the apartment to the house, behind a door that was always locked. And then he moved up the house; but the higher he went, the less he rubbed. ‘The trace of loving gets weaker, and then you go into these blank spaces.’ The couple’s bedroom was off-limits, the children had said; it would be a void. And the office where Arthur and Dee saw their patients was wrapped but not rubbed. That room was for other people’s memories.

Suh finally completed the project last November. ‘When the rubbings were on the walls, it felt like a kind of illusion, but when they are removed, they become more opaque, more solid in a way. I think that when it is reconstructed, it will have a different life.’ Now he has to find somewhere to show the final piece, the complete house. He would like it to be in New York. It is, as he says, such a New York story. And the story is part of the project.

Even though the project is finished, he keeps working on his trace of Arthur’s house. ‘I love those cardboard houses that children have, that fold up. So it will be a grown-up version of that, really. It will have a metal frame and everything will be collapsible. The idea is quite simple. I want to move my house, to carry my house. It just takes a lot of effort to realise it.’

As originally featured in the March 2017 issue of Wallpaper* (W*216)

INFORMATION

‘Passage/s’ is on view until 18 March. For more information, visit the Victoria Miro website

ADDRESS

Victoria Miro
16 Wharf Road
London N1 7RW

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If we can count on anyone to wow us with spectacle it's British artist Alex Hartley. From the Arctic to outer space, it seems he has created everything, everywhere; testing the parameters of what gallerists, art and his body can do. For Hypothermia (2012) a three-hour looped single-channel video records Hartley's core body temperature dropping below 35℃. His Nowhereland project (also 2012) paraded an iceberg around London for the 2012 Cultural Olympiad, before smashing it into pieces and sending bits into orbit. In 2003, Hartley scrambled over Los Angeles architecture for his LA Climbs book, risking life and limb to describe aerial routes of the city.

With the rest of his oeuvre in mind, creating a Bauhaus-inspired ruin outside Victoria Miro's central London gallery is just another day in the office for Hartley. But for visitors, there's no denying the new installation's drama. Hartley firmly believes that there's beauty in decay – after exploring this collapsed modernist folly we're converts to the cause of decadence.

'The way the art market works now, either you have no exhibition at all and go straight to sale, or the exhibition has to be something truly special,' Hartley says of the reasons behind his foray into follies. 'The most established galleries are being challenged by artists to create more and more ambitious installations and artistic experiences.' This builds a sense of intrigue around the artist – which will ultimately boost sales anyway. At least that's the thinking.

Victoria Miro, which has represented Hartley since 2003, celebrates this ambitious vision, and was more than up for this challenge. 'The gallery team helped to develop the garden,' Hartley explains. 'It's a very restricted site, and previously there were weeping willows. Now it has gone full Thunderbirds, like Tracy Island.'

The structure bears all the symbols of an abandoned modernist masterpiece – whitewashed walls, wide, functional windows and an asymmetric footprint – or as Hartley modestly phrases it, 'a horizontal roof and a few cantilevers here and there'. When looking at it, (and look is all you can do – wading through the swamped garden is sensibly prohibited), it's easy to feel transported to another world; or at least, a forgotten part of this one. There's a Daniel Arsham-esque post-apocalyptic feel to the installation, as if we're in the future, looking back on a terrible tragedy that has befallen today. Indeed, Hartley cites JG Ballard's dystopian novels as key inspirations. 'I wanted the installation to have a timeless quality – It could be a modernist ruin, or a Victorian folly.'

Timeless it may feel, but there's a restricted future for this work. Hartley is keen to for A Gentle Collapsing II to remain site-specific, which rules out the chance of it being bought (and therefore salvaged) on the spot. However, with more ruins planned, it would be possible for Hartley to recreate the installation elsewhere, upon request. Either way, this particular version will have to be dismantled come 16 December, to give Victoria Miro its garden back.

The rest of the exhibition is more traditional in layout, and the works will last longer than their month-long display period. Photographs taken as if 'kneeling in the undergrowth' record hidden jungle scenes. The images – neatly framed, sparsely positioned – only serve to exaggerate the exotic wildness of the outside tableau, with their clean, almost sterile minimalism. Hartley describes this multifaceted, immersive exhibition as 'the most theatrical' he has ever made, which is saying something, coming from the man who sent fragments of an iceberg into orbit.

INFORMATION

’Alex Hartley: After You Left’ is on view until 16 December. For more information, visit the Victoria Miro website

ADDRESS

Victoria Miro
16 Wharf Road
London N1 7RW

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Danish artist John Kørner follows world news in his paintings with an almost journalistic vigour. Through his abstract watercolours, he has addressed everything from the war in Afghanistan to Danish sex workers. He once said that if art fails to connect with something socially relevant, it has closed too tightly around itself.

If this is the case, his new exhibition is thrown wide open. This week, Victoria Miro gallery (who have championed the Copenhagen-based artist’s work for a decade) launch 'Apple Bombs', a series of Kørner's newest 'socially relevant' works. Unusually, these paintings aren't intended to represent a single situation, place, or political moment. ‘This week, they might represent the Middle East,’ Kørner explains, ‘and next week, somewhere completely different. It’s up to you.’

One thing’s certain – the paintings’ locations are successfully ambiguous. Icy peaks give way to arid landscapes, which sit side by side with dateless architecture. ‘I find abstraction to be the best tool I have to address the serious matters I want to convey,’ Kørner explains. ‘In this instance, I didn’t want to literally paint soldiers.’ His intention was to give the paintings a universal quality, ‘so different audiences can add their own experiences and stories’.

Instead of soldiers, Kørner depicts beekeepers. On why he made this sideways move, he notes, ‘I am interested in the expression, “the land of milk and honey”. Beekeepers try and protect the good life, the sweet life.’ And so he paints beekeepers innocently tending their charges, seemingly oblivious to the brooding, war-torn skies overhead.

But why apples? ‘Apples are about the purest, sweetest thing I can think of,' Kørner explains, 'and apples also have an iconic place in history.' The speed in which Kørner reels off the biblical and mythical background of the apple suggests some serious thought has gone into this motif, and it’s inclusion isn’t to be taken lightly.

For Kørner, the apple is a ‘true fruit', and the fact that they are seen descending hypnotically all over his paintings represents ‘a fall from grace’. His intention was for the beekeepers to feel overwhelmed and ‘stunned’ by the oppressive apple bombs – which become sickly and saccharine as they roll in spilled honey.

It seems there are metaphors within metaphors in Kørner’s complex new exhibition – like the great journalistic artist that he is, Kørner allows us to read into them as much as we like, ensuring that they nag at our imagination long after we've left the gallery.

INFORMATION

‘John Kørner: Apple Bombs’ is on view until 14 May. For more information, visit the Victoria Miro website

Photography courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro

ADDRESS

Victoria Miro
16 Wharf Road
London, N1 7RW

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The Canadian multi-media artist Stan Douglas deals in what he calls ‘speculative histories’. These re-routed histories are not just playful counterfactuals but examinations of particular moments of hope and possibility; what concrete goodness might have come out that hope had it not crushed or derailed.

The Secret Agent, a new work showing at Victoria Miro’s east London mothership, is a six-screen full length drama looking at the aftermath of the fall of the dictator Salazar in Portugal in the mid-1970s, and the short-lived ‘carnation revolution’ that followed.

Douglas moves the action of Joseph Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent to this particular time and place; or as Douglas tells Wallpaper*, ‘historical time suspended in some way’.

In the original novel, set in 19th century London, the ambassador of a foreign power, almost certainly Russia, enlists an anarchist on its pay roll to blow up the Greenwich Observatory, an assault on time and Britain’s sense of imperial order. In Douglas’ version, the ambassador is American and the target is a Marconi trans-Atlantic telephone exchange.

‘Portugal had been through 30 years of fascism,’ explains Douglas, ‘and was suddenly in this state of openness and flux. They were trying to figure out what sort of government they wanted.

‘Eventually it became a conventional Western democracy but it had the potential to become almost anything at the time. This terrified America who put warships off the coast of Portugal. Nato started doing war games nearby. They were scared that a communist government might take control.’

Douglas is also interested in looking at terrorism, reading Conrad forward into Portugal circa 1975 and then on into our own age of terror. ‘The novel is really the first literary presentation of terrorism and many of the things in it are still prevalent today,’ he says. ‘And in Portugal after the revolution, there were extreme left wing groups and right wing groups doing all sorts of bombings. In this context a terrorist means very different things to different people, on the giving and receiving end. People have very different ideas of what is meant by this simple act of violence.’

Douglas moves his characters from screen to screen, around sets – a cinema-come-book store, a bar, a wonderful modernist government building and occasionally outdoors. Douglas is brilliant at patina and historical detail, cigarette smoke and cigarette-yellowed teeth and hair. Mostly the characters talk at each other, rather stagily, playing their parts in what will inevitably become a tragedy of conflicting ideas about ends and means.

At least two or more screens play at any one time. ‘Two things are always going on simultaneously,’ says Douglas. ‘But one pair of screens is governance, another pair is private space and another is the street. The street is the interface between governance and private space. Some characters are stuck in the middle, others at either end, some cross them all. And you decide who you pay attention to; the person talking, or the person listening. It’s a symbolic space. You are in the middle of the action and you have to decide how to piece it together.’

Downstairs at Miro meanwhile are a series of remarkable digital renderings of the Vancouver – Douglas’ home city – of 1948. This is a place and time Douglas has summoned up and revisited before.

These images are hi-res’d re-worked versions of images used in Douglas’ ‘Circa 1948’ smartphone app, which allowed users to wander the streets of Vancouver and pull up remarkable 3-D renders of his or her exact location exactly as it was in 1948. Douglas then used them in his neo-noir cinematic stage-play Helen Lawrence.

These are impossible ‘photographs’ of a disappeared physical landscape at night (no reproduction can do justice to the windows onto illuminated rooms or moon shadows). ‘It’s taking a photograph you can’t really take,’ says Douglas. ‘The places aren’t there anymore and there’s no light.’

‘They are a study of shelter,’ he continues. Mostly of working class neighbourhoods, a hotel squatted by soldiers returned from the Second World War, shoreline shacks and boathouses. ‘There was this law that no-one owned the land that appeared between low and high tide,’ says Douglas. The English author Malcolm Lowry spent six years in one of these shacks. Well actually two different shacks. He managed to burn one down. ‘He was drinking a lot,’ says Douglas. Between drinking and setting things in fire, Lowry did manage to complete his classic Under the Volcano here.  

This is Douglas’ fourth work that revisit’s the Vancouver of 1948, and to stunning effect. It may be his last visit. ‘I think I’m done,’ he says.

INFORMATION

'The Secret Agent' is on view until 24 March. For more information, visit Victoria Miro's website

ADDRESS

Victoria Miro
16 Wharf Road
London, N1 7RW

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The artists Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset are best known for grand-scale immersive installations tackling big issues. In End Station they built a fake New York subway station, an entire social housing block for Celebrity – The One and Many, the homes of an art collector and an architect in serious decline, and perhaps most famously, a fake Prada store in the Texas desert. The sublime is not their concern. Neither, on the whole, do they do minimal or personal. ‘Self-Portraits’, the duo’s new show at Victoria Miro’s Mayfair branch, is both. And it’s ever so simple. 

Essentially, the pair track a life – two lives – in art through sometimes blown up, sometimes not, museum wall labels. Revelatory moments, career-changing or emotional insights, identify-forming identifications and psychic blows – we suppose, but can only suppose – are here.

Works by David Hockney, Ross Bleckner, Roni Horn, Martin Kippenberger, Keith Haring and Nicole Eisenman are namechecked. (Ingar told us once that he had visited the Rothko chapel in search of the sublime, of the transcendental, the transfigurative even, as many artists and other do, and came away unmoved. So there is no namecheck for him.)

There are no reproductions of the actual art here. Instead the labels take on the shape and form and material quality of art; they are made in marble, they are paint on canvas and metal, charcoal on paper. The pair are famously sceptical about the traditional gallery space as a place to experience art; the ways it gives an authority and reverence indiscriminately (though you must presume discrimination somewhere).

They like their art to work harder, to command and create interest outside the temple. Or to create a total space within the temple. ‘Self-Portraits’, then, is perhaps another sly dig at the system; the explanatory tag becomes the art because we only know anything as ‘art’ because the tag tells us it is. The tag marks out art, the tag becomes art. (In the past, they have spent 12 hours painting a White Cube gallery space even whiter. In another exhibition, they mounted the actual recovered wall surface of various museums on canvas. ‘Self-Portraits’ can be seen as part of a continuing series.)

'Self-Portraits',' they explain, 'is reminiscent of our early projects in which we analysed the very format and process of exhibiting by using the seemingly insignificant components common in museum or gallery displays. We’ve turned these into something that suddenly gains a different meaning, that becomes the main focus – in this case, the small wall label, which is normally just there to inform you about the corresponding work.'

But there is more here than that. The pair are also curiously, pleasingly old-fashioned in their predilection for narrative – and this is, in part, their story. This is a self-portrait. It also questions how much our identity is built from these markers.

'The exhibition shows what we, Ingar and Michael, share,' says the duo. 'In a rather unfiltered way, it tells about our inspirational sources. The titles on these label paintings and engraved marble reliefs all refer to events and situations in our own personal lives, or to important dialogues between us, since our collaboration is based on our dialogues.'

It might also be a glorious celebration of art. It might suggest that you can better, truly understand someone if you know what has moved them, what meant something at a particular time. And even more than that, that we are bent into shape by those moments. It might. It is always hard to tell.  

INFORMATION

'Self-Portraits' is on view until 7 November

Courtesy the artists and Victoria Miro, London

ADDRESS

Victoria Miro Mayfair
14 St George Street
London, W1S 1FE

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The art of American artist Kara Walker, whose giant sugar sphinx became a surprise tourist draw last summer in New York, is not for the faint-hearted. But then, dealing with the black American experience, as Walker does, leaves little space for wry humour or fancy tickling.

In ‘Go to Hell or Atlanta, Whichever Comes First’, her first show at London’s Victoria Miro gallery, Walker has created a number of new site specific works, retelling America’s nation-making with the most brutalising of race and gender relations as its modus operandi. There are no happy whistling cowboys here.

Walker’s best known medium is the cut paper silhouette and here, with The Jubilant Martyrs of Obsolescence and Ruin, she creates a large tableau across an entire wall of the upper gallery. There are rearing horses everywhere and the noise of terrible violence.

In the Four Idioms on Negro Art series, Walker channels primitivism, folk styles and Basquiat. Here, sex is violence and cocks are weapons. Love seems in short supply.

Taking up another wall is The Stone Mountain Dr Martin Luther King referred to in his famous “I Have a Dream” speech of 1963 (with monument to the Confederacy completed in 1972), a large photograph (with a long title), shot by the photographer and filmmaker Ari Marcopoulos. Stone Mountain sits in a park outside Atlanta – Walker grew up nearby – and is the world’s largest exposed granite monolith. It was also adopted as a spiritual home by the Ku Klux Klan and its surface has been scarred, blasted and carved into a bas-relief of the Confederate generals Robert E Lee, 'Stonewall Jackson' and president Jefferson Davis. Walker asks, ruling out Taliban-style removal, how to let such a thing stand. Will nature remove or obscure it – or history recast it?

INFORMATION

'Go to Hell or Atlanta, Whichever Comes First' is on view until 7 November

ADDRESS

Victoria Miro
16 Wharf Road
London, N1 7RW

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Bernd and Hilla Becher studied at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in the late 1950s and both ended up working at the city’s Troost advertising agency. They began a creative relationship that has shaped European ‘fine art’ photography for the last four decades – and, if anything, their influence only increases. The Bechers’ cooling towers, lime kilns, gas tanks that look like giant footballs and other super-functional architecture – all shot under flat, gloomy, sun-and-shadowless skies and mostly in the industrially scarred landscape around the Ruhr – loom larger than ever, now iconic. (They were the dark stars around which all else seemed to spin, at least year’s ‘Constructing Worlds’ show at the Barbican).

But as ‘Düsseldorf Photography: Bernd & Hilla Becher and Beyond’, a new show at the Ben Brown Fine Arts gallery in London, makes clear, their influence has been direct and personal. In 1976, Bernd was appointed professor of photography at Düsseldorf art school (technicalities meant that the husband-and-wife team couldn’t teach together but its clear, given their creative relationship, that Bernd’s students were getting the Bechers as a package deal).

By this time, Düsseldorf’s art school was already playing a key role in the development of European contemporary art. Joseph Beuys had been appointed professor of sculpture in 1961 and the academy’s students included Anselm Kiefer, Gerhard Richter (who went on to teach painting there) and Sigmar Polke. The Bechers would create a photography department of similar pull and power. Its alumni includes Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth (who originally enrolled to study under Richter but switched courses), Andreas Gursky, Elger Esser, Axel Hütte and Candida Höfer, all represented in the Ben Brown show (it also includes works by Thomas Demand – though Demand studied sculpture at Düsseldorf rather than photography). The joy of the show, of course, is looking at what these photographers took from the Bechers – that mix of the clinical and the sublime - and what they added along the way.

ADDRESS

Ben Brown Fine Arts
12 Brook's Mews
London, W1K 4DG

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The work of young British sculptor Conrad Shawcross is looming large and small in London this summer, as part of multiple gallery shows and as permanent fixtures as he emerges as a public art A-lister. His large-scale immersive installation The Dappled Light of the Sun has just been plugged into the Annenberg Courtyard of the Royal Academy on London's Piccadilly as part of it's annual Summer Exhibition (Shawcross it the Academy's youngest member).

The massive sculpture is five conjoined 'clouds,' made up of thousands of tetrahedrons built in steel - all 30 tons and seven-and-half miles of it. Standing six metres tall, visitors to the RA can wander underneath Shawcross' cloudscape and consider how chaos and beauty can be generated out of perfect order and geometry.

Opening on June 10 at the Victoria Miro gallery, North London branch, is an exhibition of smaller scale Shawcross works, mostly studies for Paradigm, his monumental sculpture to be installed outside the new Francis Crick Institute in Kings Cross. Paradigm is a 14 m-tall twisting stack of weathered steel tetrahedrons, which increase in scale as they push skywards. It is one metre wide at street level but five metres wide at its summit.

In April this year, Shawcross' Three Perpetual Chords, a series of giant steel loops, landed in South London's Dulwich Park, replacing Barbara Hepworth's Two Forms Divided Circle, which was stolen in 2011. And further afield, the New Art Centre, Roche Court in Wiltshire is showing a series of Shawcross works, inside and out, until July 26.

We spoke to an understandably frayed Shawcross about his busy year...

Wallpaper*: You're having an incredible year in London. Are you over the hump in terms of just getting everything done?
Conrad Shawcross: Yeah, pretty much. We have just finished the installation at the Royal Academy. We had to work at night using cranes.

W*: And how much was all this grand strategy and how much accident?
CS: Well, in the art world things get delayed and moved around, so you hedge your bets and line up as many things as you can. But suddenly all these things seem to have come at once so it's been a perfect storm.

W*: How have you managed to get the Miro show together with everything else going on?
CS: Miro gallery is kind of a supporting show. It's mostly a series of studies for Paradigm that will be installed in King's Cross. And there are a couple of other works called Manifold, which are really studies of how music decays into silence.

W*: You use the tetrahedron as a literal and conceptual building block, an essential building block?
CS: Well, to be honest, it's a very awkward building block. The Greeks thought of the tetrahedron as the essence of matter, indivisible matter. But if you build with them, they radiate out and bifurcate, like branches of a tree. It's irrational. The closest example is something like neural pathways in the brain.

W*: Do you use computer modelling when devising these sculptures?
CS: Yes, they need to be closely engineered and I work with a company called Structure Workshop on the modelling.

W*: You're not an artist who hands over the production side to other people. You don't do it all yourself though?
CS: No, with the RA commission we could only do about 20 per cent of it in the studio.  And we worked out it would involve 12 and half years of welding work for one man so we needed help. It was an epic job.

W*: And you can't really improvise as you are going along?
CS: Not really. A little bit, but the sculptures have to work structurally, the engineering has to be right and they have to be safe.

W*: What happens to The Dappled Light of the Sun after the RA Summer Show?
CS: It's for sale, so hopefully someone will buy it. It's designed to last for ever. It's a shelter; efficient, interactive.

W*: You now have permanent installations in public spaces. The works in Dulwich Park for instance, do you think about them differently to the gallery pieces?
CS: The pieces in Dulwich Park are huge but approachable and tactile. Children can play inside them, lovers can sit on them. It's very moving to watch people using them actually. And they will look different from season to season because they polish in the summer as they are used and rust over in the winter.

W*: And the work outside the Francis Crick Institute is a really huge work. It will become part of the cityscape.
CS: Yeah, that is a different kind of thing. It's monumental, 14-metres tall, and will become a real part of the city. It's called Paradigm because it's about how new paradigms are built on old ones until the whole thing collapses. And the sculpture is engineered to be as tall as it can be before toppling over.

For over a decade British artist Idris Khan has been seriously playing with the idea and form of the palimpsest - multiple-layers of words and images, a compressed stretch of time where the past leaves visible traces. In previous works he has made composite photographs of every stave of Chopin's Nocturnes, every page of the Quran, every Bernd and Hilla Becher photograph of gas holders and every one-a-year-for-forty-years image of the Brown sisters by Nicholas Nixon, amongst many other things.

In each case, Khan's subject gains a new rattle and hum, becoming less distinct, sometimes dissolving and other times becoming more substantial. Always though, Khan’s images have an odd beauty - he is not afraid of that - and the Polaroid melancholy of the past in the present

In his new show, however - 'Conflicting Lines' at Victoria Miro Mayfair in London - Khan's traces are his own. He has scrawled phrases in oil stick, roughly wiped them away, then scrawled again and again till his blank square is blackened over. He has done the same thing in reverse with chalk on blackboard. The phrases are not random but, as the exhibition title suggests, a response to the waves of images of bloody conflict that now wash over us; each one super-imposing itself on the last, creating its own fuzzy fog of war.

Khan has photographed these scrawls somewhere between 500 and 2,000 times, pushing in, pulling out and changing angles. He has then painstakingly put all these shots together, picking up particular curves and edges of text.

Khan talks about Roland Barthes' idea of 'punctum', the particular detail in a photograph that 'pierces its viewer' with its emotional charge, This is what Khan is aiming for. The final, large prints are mesmerizing, as though Khan were coming at Agnes Martin Minimalism from new angles.

Khan has always pushed photography towards the painterly, his repeated marks acting like brush strokes. In a series of five platinum prints - the result of printing process that produces a richer tonal range than normal printing with a matte finish - his abstracted scrawls become almost monochrome water colours. And if Khan's process is more hidden in these images, the effect is more complex and haunting.

ADDRESS

Victoria Miro Mayfair
14 St George Street
London
W1S 1FE

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Sarah Sze’s sculptures are objects in time and space, manipulations of time and space. More than that, they are models of how we think - or don’t or don’t often think enough - about time and space. In that sense they are everything a sculpture can and should hope to be.

Sze, who represented the US at the 2013 Venice Biennale, created a conceptual bird feeder for the High Line in New York, and who takes over both branches of London’s Victoria Miro gallery this month, studied architecture and painting. Which, if you do a kind of reductive arithmetic, might equal sculpture. And that maths seems to work as a way of looking at Sze’s work. She is certainly concerned with volume, scale and light - her installations take over galleries, stretch outside, climb upwards and drill and drip downwards. But she is also a master of colour and composition.

In the Miro’s Mayfair space Sze has installed 12 new small-scale sculptures - some of them mobiles. Alexander Calder, of course, is recalled and Sze - who spent seven months at Calder’s atelier in 2002 at the invite of the Calder Foundation - acknowledges that Calder, and his instinctive engineering, is now in her DNA.

One of the sculptures includes a take on Crick and Watson’s modelling of DNA. And Sze says that, despite her training, these works are less architectural models, a teasing projection of what will be, than a scientific model, ‘a mapping of behaviour in time and space’.

Sze suggests they are also attempts to ‘model in space’ poetic effects or narrative tricks. There are models for a 'Passing Thought', a 'Mixed Feeling', 'Deja Vu', 'A Double Entendre' and even a 'Dangling Modifier'. Of course, as models of these things, they are failures - fragile, beautiful failures. And that is the point.
 
These are also models as Sze says, of 'the passing of time'. And so, inevitably, of grief and loss. Like Rachel Harrison, Sze uses everyday objects and debris, though always newly bought. (Harrison and Sze seem to be re-imagining the possibilities of sculpture, what materials can be enlisted. Richard Serra certainly thinks so and compares Sze’s work to ‘Pollock and Twombly in space’.) But Sze’s models are not complex sign systems and suggests there is little reward in a careful inventory. They are traces of human behaviour, taken out of place and time; not random, of course, but not clues or pieces of a puzzle.

Sze also creates landscapes and this is what she does on three floors of Miro’s East London space (these installations were originally shown at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia last year but have been reworked and rethought for the Miro show. This is part of Sze’s method; to reimagine a piece, to break it and rebuild it, every time it is taken to a new space, to let it evolve.)

On the first floor is a sort of disintegrating desk, composed of wire, stationary, take-away coffee cups and potted plants (which feel like the only element which have a shot at permanence. Potted plants also appear in the galleries apparently private spaces, glimpsed through an open door. It has an oddly powerful effect, the breaking of the fourth wall). Sze has a fascination with the breakdown of materials and bits of the desk seem to have fallen away and floated out into space and more of it might do so any second.

Also on this floor are some of Sze’s 12 silkscreen prints of newspaper front pages dated January 1,  2014, from twelve different locations in twelve different time zones, and with all photographs replaced by images of the night sky as seen from that particular place and at that particular point in time. The remainder are in the Mayfair gallery.

On the second floor Sze again uses newspaper front pages to create a kind of calendar; 90 of them and this time exclusively from the New York Times. Each day is marked by a new front page spread but in every one, the pictures have also been replaced; this time by images of the natural world: snowscapes, seascapes and rockscapes. And on each one is a rock or a clay fragment or a wire model of a shape, eternal, immutable, and in one case, a down jacket becoming a flower.

Upstairs there is more rock. Or apparently so. What appear to be huge boulders, carefully arranged, are in fact wire mesh models covered with images of rocks. They look, at first glance, massive and imposing and then you sense that you can probably roll one along the gallery floor with one hand. On the wall are thirteen abstract and monochrome canvases, the colours in the rock photographs, apparently a dead moon dust grey, separated and brought vividly to live. There are also real rocks, four to a picture. The room is a compelling composition. None of which gets to how quietly beautiful and moving the show is; how much it challenges our sense of where and when we are.

The sleeping security guard is already the star of this year's edition of Frieze. He sits, we assume he sits there still, head propped against a wall of the Hauser & Wirth stand, snoozing oblivious, tweeted and Instagrammed, gone social, possibly even viral. It doesn't look like a happy sleep, or a tormented sleep or an active sleep, just a standard preparation for death sleep. Frieze can get you that way.

Visitors look at the tagged-up security guide and smile or think about a prod. Is he art or just a lazy sentinel? He is art of course - phew, no unpleasantness required then - actually Sleeping Guard by Christoph Büchel. And he is part of what is easily the most interesting and successfully conceived stand at the fair.

Curated by Mark Wallinger, a new signing for Hauser & Wirth, the stand is cluttered and domestic. Titled 'A Study in Red and Green', it is a take on Sigmund Freud's study in Hampstead and greater than the sum of its Louise Bourgeois, Martin Creed, Paul McCarthy, Roni Horn, Subodh Gupta (amongst others) parts. It feels nocturnal, like the seemingly random-but-not-stops of a restless unconscious. Perhaps these are the security guard's dreams. Who knows what he has seen. There are other interesting things to look at, disorientating and random in their own way, but nothing as arresting.

Carsten Höller has created a kindergarten at the Gagosian stand. Which is nice. Cory Arcangel's carpet on the Lisson Gallery stand is a success. The gallery goes big on Arcangel's video pieces and Ryan Gander's concrete sculptures and to good effect. Thomas Dane's stand is well composed and I liked the paintings by Ella Kruglyanskaya, a New York-based Latvian, at the Gavin Brown stand which looked French and flighty and funny though no one else seemed much taken.

There is a strong showing from Brazilian galleries this year, including Galeria Luisa Strina from Sao Paulo and the excellent A Gentil Carioca from Rio. They are a welcome addition to the mix, even if most of the action is around the cluster of blue chips during the press and VIP opening (how 'V' is always hard to know. The Frieze caste system remains impenetrable.)

The experience (more of an 'assault' in the past) is also generally more civilised this year. BarberOsgerby's Universal Design Studio has designed the tent and the aisles are wide and there is more air in the air but still too few places to sit down and get your bearings. The VIPs - men in art scarves and art spectacles, tottering ladies in leopard print skirts with taut, tortured looking faces - are as worth watching as ever. And listening too.

The more abundant air is kissed, dinner arrangements made (and probably forgotten) before they wobble or glide back to their idling luxury sedans which will spend much of the rest of the day snarled and stuttering amongst other luxury sedans. While our security guard, happily or unhappily, remains oblivious.

ADDRESS

Frieze London
Regent’s Park
London NW1 4PJ

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Art doesn't talk much about money. Which is ironic really. It certainly doesn't talk about art's new status as asset class. Isaac Julien's new film installation 'Playtime', which opens today at the Victoria Miro gallery Islington branch, talks about money and art and the damage done across seven large screens for over 70 minutes. In one segment the actor/artist/poet James Franco, a slick black-suit-white-shirt black-tie avatar of the contemporary art market (filmed in the room where he is now projected), sells art as 'treasure' to be hoarded, shared and enjoyed. It is mesmerising (and Franco's case almost convincing).

Contemporary art isn't much for narrative, lyricism or beauty either. Playtime has it all. Another segment, based on interviews with the photographer Thorsten Henn, Julien's friend and occasional collaborator, tells the story of an Icelandic creative who gets part way to building his modernist dream home only to have the bank withdraw its funds as the country falls into a financial black hole of its own creation. The crushed creative haunts his modern ruin and rages against a system that failed to warn him that credit is a cruel mistress while outside the harsh landscape of rock and snow remains beautifully indifferent. At one point the Henn stand-in is framed, burned alive in his feature round window that has become a dying sun.

In another segment the Chinese actress Maggie Cheung conducts an (entirely scripted) interview with the auctioneer Simon de Pury. He looks a bit like the big bad wolf, licking his chops at the idea of the hammer coming down on a big digit sale. A two-screen video installation, 'Kapital', in which the artist talks turkey with academics such as Stuart Hall and David Harvey, has been installed in the lower gallery.

Playtime was three years in the making and is the most ambitious project yet for an artist who has done a reverse Steve McQueen, making his first movie, Young Soul Rebels in 1991, before moving into photography and video art. Now 53, Julien is currently available in multiple formats. Victoria Miro is running an exhibition of accompanying Playtime photography at its new Mayfair gallery while his nine-screen video installation, Ten Thousand Waves, is at MOMA in New York until February 17. MOMA has also just published Riot, a career retrospective.

We caught up with artist Isaac Julien as technicians corrected colour balance in preparation for Playtime’s opening...

W*: There is not much art about money. And there is certainly not much art about art as asset class. It’s a dirty secret in a way. You are talking about it very explicitly.
Isaac Julien: Different artists address it in different ways. I think that Jeff Koons does, and it is not a dirty secret in his work. It is very implicit in Damien Hirst’s work. I was really interested in having a discussion. Hence making and showing Kapital as well. And it is not just about art, or the art world, everyone is part of this conversation.

How much of the film is scripted and how much documentary? The interview with Simon de Pury for instance.
All the cases in the film are derived from interviews. Then we edit the interviews, create a script and get the actor to improvise around the script. That’s how the fictional element gets developed and in all the cases we did exactly the same thing. Even with Simon de Pury, we interviewed him over a period of three months. Did an interview, edited that, did a second interview, edited that, and presented him with his text. I’ll let you into a secret though. Maggie Cheung and Simon de Pury never met. That’s why it had to be so scripted. There was about three weeks difference between Maggie asking the questions and Simon answering them. There is a little clue in there, a tracking shot and Simon’s not actually talking to anyone.

The Reykjavik section is a real cautionary tale...
The character is based on the photographer Thorsten Henn. I met him in Iceland in 2004 and he collaborated on a lot of my photographs. And the house in the film is his actual house. He was doing a lot of advertising work and decided to build his dream house. But Iceland was one of the first places that got hit in the crash of 2008. He lost his house, his family, his wife. His story though encapsulates the journey that a lot of people made. And he says: ‘Why did no one stop him?'. But there was this very laissez faire attitude in Iceland. They just left everything completely crash.

Maybe Wallpaper* shares some of the blame. Maybe it’s all our fault for selling this dream of the beautiful modernist home?
Yeah, I was thinking about that house and Wallpaper*. I love Wallpaper*. I don’t think it is your fault. But I see the house as a modern ruin. And what happens to design when there is this trauma, the foreclosure on this modernist dream. It was something really important to have that as a metaphor. The other building he walks through is the Olafur Eliasson-designed concert hall in Reykjavik. And that’s a building that the government decided to go ahead with, despite the crash. Both projects are about ambitions and desires in design and architecture. It’s a beautiful house you know but two months after we filmed there some kids set it on fire. Thorsten still sort of owns that house and he would like for it to be turned into an art space in some way. It was built to be an artist’s studio and I think it would be fantastic if there was an art organisation or patron who could look at space and reconfigure it, do some conservation work on it and for it to be what it was originally intended to be.

More generally, you are not afraid to be beautiful and use narrative, which is not what everybody wants to be doing at the moment in contemporary art.
That lyricism relates to the cinema of people like Derek Jarman, the kind of cinema that I liked to see. That could be part of a British culture, instead we are given a certain stereotype of what images should go with certain subjects.

With the success of Steve McQueen, are you suddenly getting hollywood execs calling looking for another black British artist and filmmaker?
No. I think what is interesting though is that you have Steve’s success with nine-Oscar nominations and you have John Akomfrah’s piece about Stuart Hall, which is on at Tate Britain at the moment. I do think that needs to be acknowledged somehow - there are these black artists who have been working in film, working in our own different ways.

And maybe it will be more accepted to bounce from art to film and back again? But you did it the other way round, made the movie Young Soul Rebels and then moved into art.
Yeah, well the reason I did it was I didn’t want to get bored. There was something a bit boring about British Cinema. I don’t want to knock it too much, we have done very well, but I don’t think that the real excitement and creativity of Britain is really allowed to shine at the moment. If they look around the visual field, they would find lots of different voices.

Watch a preview of Isaac Julien's new video work  'Playtime', 2014, unfold. © Isaac Julien. Courtesy the artist, Victoria Miro, London and Metro Pictures, New York

ADDRESS

Victoria Miro
16 Wharf Rd
London N1 7RW

Victoria Miro Mayfair
14 St George Street
London W1S IFE

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We've all explored the power of repetition - whether condemned by a teacher to write lines, whose literal meaning is consumed by a greater consciousness, or flummoxed by uttering a single word so often, it loses all meaning. The artist Idris Khan is a young virtuoso of repetition. And experiencing his work, as with other adventures in repetition, is like watching the whole transcend the sum of its parts.

The Wallpaper* Handmade 2012 contributor has entranced patrons with his digital composites. He's layered every page of the Koran in a single frame and every stave of Chopin's 'Nocturnes' to beautiful, if bemusing, effect. His latest works venture out from there, this time layering his own writings into abstraction. For 'Beyond the Black', at London's Victoria Miro gallery until 9 November, he has used Friedrich Nietzsche's 'The Birth of Tragedy' as inspiration, engraving his analysis onto rubber stamps, then overlaying them in celestial formations until they leave the literal world and enter the sublime.

The artist, who favours monochrome, has gone for a Rothko-esque all-black look in many of his works here. His backgrounds are layers of black pigment, rabbit skin glue and slate dust, which he sanded down before building up the text in black oil paint. The exception is one climactic installation, in which 120,000 lines of text are stamped directly onto the gallery wall.

'Beyond the Black' is a love letter to modernists like Rothko, Ad Reinhardt and Richard Serra, all artists who worked with a black-on-black palette. Yet as the title hints, it is also a philosophical departure from modernism. The difference is Khan's use of language as a medium, employed to represent a barrier to true spirituality and also as a reaffirmation of our humanity.

ADDRESS

16 Wharf Road
London N1 7RW

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