Casually Perfect: Jo Addison at Tintype Gallery

Burrowed between a taxidermist and a nail parlour on Islington’s Essex Road, Tintype’s new gallery space is holding its first exhibition, Jo Addison’s Not Trees and People. Travis Riley braves the startlingly middle-class Islington Streets to find out more.

Unkk (2013)

Through the gallery’s colossal new front window a display of eight small pieces, simply hung, can be seen. The most obtrusive work in the show, the satisfyingly named Unkk (2013), is a plywood protrusion from the left wall, in the shape of a semi-circular prism. Whilst the bottom of the work is suspended just off the floor, the flat top of the piece is at seat height and a bite has been taken out of its edge.

A Conversation with Teresa Grimes of Tintype Gallery

Travis Riley talks with Teresa Grimes co-director of Tintype Gallery about the benefits and the bores of moving a gallery across London.

Morgan Wong's Performance: Filing Down a Steel Bar Until a Needle is Made
at Tintype's new gallery space.

My first visit to Tintype found me wandering the backstreets of Clerkenwell. It took three passes up and down St Cross Street to find the gallery, hidden away in a little upstairs room.

The gallery’s new home, resplendent on Islington’s Essex Road between a taxidermist and a nail salon does not succumb to the same criticism. Before its conversion to gallery the property was a haberdashery shop called ‘Sew Fantastic’ – though in its new guise this is tough to imagine. The gallery’s façade, framed in ornate stonework, has been fitted with a colossal new window, looking in on pristine white walls.

The Devil In All Of Us: Michael Landy’s Saints Alive

On a visit to the National Gallery, Garageland reviewer Bethany Pope notices a peculiar change befall the viewers of Michael Landy's self-flagellating saints.

Saints Alive by Michael Landy is an astonishing mixture of the new and the old. The theme is startlingly appropriate for an artist who made his first mark with a work centered around a saint-like rejection of material goods, his startling performance piece Breakdown (2001). Michael Landy gathered all of his belongings together, from furniture and books to birth certificate, piled them into a pyre, and set them alight – a visible rejection of the consumerist world. One could view this accessible National Gallery piece as a natural continuance of that theme.

Saint Apollonia, 2013

A Distant Echo of the Body Electric

Stopping off at Calvert 22, East London's foundation for Russian and Eastern European art,  Garageland Reviewer Joe Turnbull finds he has to listen very closely to hear the whispers of the body electric.

What was once a vociferous mantra of anti-communism is now just a whisper; a muted spectre of Cold War propaganda. Nevertheless, it remains imprinted on the western cultural psyche like a faded tattoo. Nowhere is this more manifest than in the curation of exhibitions containing artwork from the wrong side of the Iron Curtain. When presenting work from the former Soviet states, galleries all too often either exhibit work that is tantamount to state-funded propaganda or, as has been the case more recently, present work that stiflingly critiques the censorship and oppression of those regimes through coded Aesopian symbolism.

The Animal in the Gallery

Over the years a veritable menagerie of live animals has been introduced into gallery spaces in the name of art. In an exploration of the topic Travis Riley meets some birds, a coyote, a fox, an elephant and 12 horses.

In his work Untitled, 1967 shown at Rome’s Galleria l’Attico, Jannis Kounellis exhibited paintings with artificial flowers and birdcages containing live birds. In images of the exhibition the cages are shown stacked on either side of a canvas with three, cotton, leaf-like forms stuck to its centre. The cages form a considerable part of the material of the installation; black and white photographs show the walls of the gallery space marked with a grid of shadows. What the pictures cannot show is the inevitable clamour and aviary aroma that comes with the presence of the animals.

Der Blaue Reiter at Lenbachhaus, Munich

Visiting Munich Garageland reviewer Liza Weber takes in Gabriele Münter's staggering expressionist donation to Lenbachhaus and wonders where exactly Kandinsky's pianist has got to.

Franz Marc, Blaues Pferd I (Blue Horse I), 1911

On turning eighty years old Gabriele Münter gave, rather than received, an inestimable gift. In 1957 to Munich’s Lenbachhaus or, more accurately, to the world, she donated 90 oil paintings, 24 glass paintings, 116 watercolours and coloured drawings, 160 drawings, 28 sketchbooks and an entire collection of prints. Their corners confessed not the signature of her modest umlauted ‘M’ however, but rather nine upper case letters spelling that reddened name ‘KANDINSKY’.

Like A Monkey With A Miniature Cymbal

Whilst visiting Aid & Abet's show of perpetual loops Corinna Spencer meets Mrs Craven, who is passionate about her greenhouse, and a monkey that just won't give up.

Rhys Coren, Smile/Drop the base soundscape, 2013

All of the works in this show hold a sense of the continuous. Loops populate the gallery space, they are seen in film and paint, in sound and action, but in each instance, just before the loop becomes an exercise in futility, everything is transformed and filled with a sense of obsessive enjoyment. Paintings are worked over again and again and references are made to the heroic and to simple everyday endeavours.