Bistros and Brasseries

Second Skin at Sid Motion Gallery, Richard Wright, Isabelle Young, Eve Ackroyd and more!

Welcome back to Art Advice - normal service is now resumed after the half term hump and a particularly busy time in the day job. The latter has been in the form of Second Skin, a new exhibition I’m curating in collaboration with Sid Motion Gallery, opening this Wednesday 6-8pm - all are welcome. It features textiles, ceramics, paintings, prints and video from four artists who explore traces of personal and collective experiences through the domestic and the everyday - Arrange Whatever Pieces Come Your Way, Lisa Milroy, Julian Stair and Ann Sutton. It’s looking great and here’s a sneak preview.

Moving on to some less personal recommendations, I want to mention two good shows I’ve seen recently - Richard Wright at Camden Art Centre and Isabelle Young at Cedric Bardawil.

It’s always refreshing when an exhibition confounds expectations, and that was my experience with the Richard Wright show. He’s not someone who has regularly been on my radar since he won the Turner Prize in 2009 for his intricate wall paintings, and I can’t claim to have kept abreast of his work. But the Camden show is a lovely reminder of a fascinating practice. It continues his interest in responding to place and context, and the wall paintings are present - in one case beautifully rendered high up the gallery wall, slight and imperceptible.

But there’s also much more. Architectural interventions in the form of large metal screens inset with leaden glass hang from a ceiling, highly intricate works on paper, some in the pages of books, architectural studies, abstract watercolours - there’s a lot to engage with here. What does it all add up to? I don’t know, but it’s a rewarding experience trying to decipher the languages and reference points thrown into Wright’s absorbing mix.

Isabelle Young’s show at Cedric Bardawill has just closed so this is a more general recommendation to check out her work. A photographer who focuses in on architectural details and the play of light within them, fostering these spaces with an almost painterly feel, for me her work recalls the great Luigi Ghirri, and not just because Young has regularly worked in Italy. Her most recent body of work captures the history of the famous Palio di Siena - not so much the actual event itself, but the spaces around it, the ‘overlooked moments of quiet and shadow’. There’s also a weight of expectation in the tone of these photographs, a calm before the storm. See more of her work here and here.