AMY'S LONDON: LIMONCELLO, WE LOVE YOU

   

all images: Installation Views 'We Love You', Courtesy Limoncello Gallery, London

Last Wednesday saw the opening of East London gallery Limoncello’s new space in the Russian Club’s studios, Dalston. Taking a big step up (in terms of floor space if not geography) from their former shoe-box premises, directors Rebecca May Marston and Rosa Tyhurst have expanded with gusto into their bright, beautiful new space with a raucous group show – ‘We Love You’ – for which gallery artists have been invited to show one piece alongside a piece that has served as inspiration and another from a ‘hot tip’ emerging artist. Unsurprisingly, given the breadth of the Limoncello roster, the result is a pleasingly motley affair with several large sculptural work such as John Frankland’s precarious and gently comic tower of stacked pink balloons (2012) or James Torbles’ ‘Folded Concrete’ slab (2012) vying for immediate attention amongst the assembled video, photographic, painted and printed works.

Although a sense that the show was crowded doubtless owed much to the spectacularly busy opening night where the crowds of young ‘creatives’ managed to make even the commodious premises seem claustophobic. Given space to breathe, the ‘We Love You’ concept allows for revelatory moments of clarity and coherence. Yonatan Vinitsky’s series of photographs, ‘T-R-A-P’ (2011), articulates a strong preoccupation with solid form and colours, repetition and re-configuration, echoed in the double-sided Anatal Biro composition (1950) and beautiful ‘Morgen Rot’ and ‘Abend Rot’ (2000) screenprints by Rupprecht Geiger that bookend it. Deceptively simple, Jack Strange’s levitating tower of stacked CDs  (‘Blank Maxwell’ 2012) is shimmeringly, liquidly beautiful – a magpie reminder of the over-looked glamour of the banal and quotidian.

‘We love you’ is an appropriately upbeat declaration from this East End upstart whose expanded new space is indicative of its (deservedly) growing and increasingly established status on the London art scene. And good luck to them. Limoncello, we love you too!

COLOGNE: MAX FRINTROP - RICOCHET

   

all images:  installation views, Max Frintrop, Ricochet, Courtesy: Galerie Chaplini

 'Geometry', as Isaac Newton once said, 'does not teach us to draw these lines, but requires them to be drawn.' Here we are, surrounded by geometry - the beginning of each and every brushstroke. Max Frintrop (*1982) dedicated his exhibition 'Ricochet' (= a rebound, bounce or skip off a surface) at Galerie Chaplini to these primal lines, investigating in the limits of a 2 dimensional canvas. His wooden sculpture, growing into- and out of the walls and the ceiling, appears as an extension of the colourful paintings. The surface is penetrated. Two- and three dimensionality shake hands and create a space within the space, hypnotising us with their undoubtful, logical truth. Beauty without frills. Conceptuality without severity. The lines are drawn, geometry is born.

FRIEDRICH KUNATH

     

From top: Friedrich Kunath, "The Inside Of The Outside Of A Dream", 2012, "The Years We Had Were Not All Bad (Free Agents)", 2011/12, "Almost Summer", 2012; Courtesy: all images BQ, Berlin, Photo: Roman Maerz, Berlin

'Come back romance, all is forgiven' neon-coloured letters welcome the visitors of BQ's stunningly well smelling gallery space. Friedrich Kunath's created a world, somewhere between kitsch and sarcasm. His current show 'Things we did when we were dead' approaches death, failure or melancholia with an enviable effortlessness. Kunath (*1974, Germany), who is also a represented artist at White Cube in London, avoids the surrealism-trap by showing more self-irony than anything else. His paintings are always on the fringes of a failed masterpiece-copy, but their layers continuously confuse, somehow and truly unexplainable develop into something beautiful, dragging the attention to incoherent details - bananas, clowns, American advertise illustrations, Brothers Grimm drawings, Pinocchio with tits. Romance, in Kunath's painterly world, is transformed into a compost of old memories and tightens up in his pathetic self-portrait The Inside Of The Outside Of A Dream. Kunath reanimated Romance. It returned, but this time it gives us the finger.