Woo! Juergen Teller @ICA

I don’t want to say I wasn’t excited to see Teller’s famously humorous portraits, but the ‘Woo!’ of this post’s headline isn’t mine, but the exhibition’s title. A shout without an explanation, it’s self-mocking and understated, yet tells a story and packs a punch, much like Teller’s photographs.

I’m going to immediately dismiss Teller’s more recent work, the series Irene Im Wald displayed outside the main room in tiny sepia stills, as if even the curator knew they weren’t that interesting. ‘Intimate’ as these family portraits taken in the woods may be, unless you, like Teller, love his Mum, you aren’t going to take much away from it.

Irene Im Wald also loses out by being mounted directly opposite Teller’s typically large portraits of Vivienne Westwood letting it all hang out;

Westwood – A Sister Doing It For Herself

the grand dame of fashion reclines nude on a chaise lounge, displaying her privates in insouciant poses that manage, in all their starkness, to convey both grace and vigor.

The rest of the portraits are, like Teller’s commercial fashion compositions, a visual – and intellectual – treat. The wildly sexy photo of actor Lars Endinger in mud and scant underwear, wearing an upside-down crown while glowering at the camera, steals from Hamlet the title of ultimate Anti-Prince, especially as you’d have to be blind to miss the homo-erotic charge of the captured moment- Teller certainly didn’t.

The laugh-out-loud picture of Victoria Beckham, a gloriously inverted take on the diminutive WAG, shows only her high-heel clad feet hanging over a massive shopping bag, and is titled Legs, Bags and Shoes. She may not smile much, but that girl has a sense of humour.

A Nineties photo of Bjork and son in an Icelandic sulphur lake is intoxicating. The singer’s pixie features and her son’s similar beauty are framed by white clouds of smoke and turquoise water, as delicate and otherworldly as the subjects themselves.

In contrast, Teller’s self portraits are crushingly self-mocking and wry; Unlike the models he photographs, he doesn’t strike a pose, but instead displays his fat and hairy stomach in Self-Portrait With I-Phone, or, in the delicious I Love My Wife, exposes his flaccid penis curled beside his wife’s pregnant belly.

Teller’s gift for subverting an image with witty words is most evident when he shows us a darling photo of his young daughter, seemingly as fresh and dewy as the bouquet of flowers by her side; until we see that the photo is titled Lola With Nits (2005), and realise that she is damp with head-lice treatment, not with dew.

This typically Teller twist captures the spirit and honesty that makes him one of the significant photographers, not just of fashion, but of our time. He shows his subjects in all their truth, and with it in all their beauty. I say Woo!

Legs, Bags and Shoes

Woo is at the ICA until 17th March 2013

http://www.ica.org.uk/?lid=34587

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A Cold Winter @The Whitechapel Gallery

Gerard Byrne’s video installations at the Whitechapel Gallery have some points of interest; particularly his A man and a woman make love (2012), making its debut there. Far more interesting is the Viral Research exhibition upstairs.

Byrne recreates moments in history, but not moments most people would have heard of. A man and a woman re-enacts a 1920s conversation on sexual politics between members of the Surrealist Movement. It is entertaining to see this encounter filmed like a cheap Seventies sitcom, and I liked the switching perspectives on each screen; sometimes a screen went off altogether, forcing the audience to shuffle round the room to find the next one, like so many art-chasing sheep.

Other than this spectacle, Bryne is fairly inaccessible. His choice of arcane and archaic episodes may try to ‘explore the way we understand the present through how we view the past,’ as the blurb claims, but for me they didn’t throw light on anything and they’re frankly a little dull.

The pieces borrowed from the Collection Sandretto Re Rebaudenengo to make up Viral Research have a more visceral power. The only colours on show are black and white. The  8 hilt-less knifes that make up Eva Marisaldi’s Untitled (1994) are white, each blade enscribed with a target – ‘diplomatic people,’ ‘world fever’ or (my favourite) ‘some complication.’

Ptotr Ulanski’s Untiltled (Alpha and Omega) (2012) is black, in colour and deed. A selection of vases and pots hang sideways on the wall; the closer you get the more threatening they are, out of place and gravity, ready to attack or fall. The darkness glimpsed down their spouts is ominous, taken out of everyday context and poured down your throat.

This tone of extraordinary danger in the ordinary is carried through the show; Charles Ray’s eponymous Viral Research presents a variety of chemistry vessels filled with dark liquid, instead of the clinical cleanliness the viewer expects of such containers, and his black and white photograph Untitled shows a human figure casually strung up on the branch of a tree.

For a feminist slant on the same theme, Zoe Leonard photographs objects that are meant to be female aides. From a medieval chastity belt to a 1930s beauty calibrator to a set of gynecological implements, all look exactly like crude instruments of torture, and Leonard’s point is loud and clear (see the original 1930s beauty calibrator in the photo below).

This last is more than can be said for Byrne’s icily cerebral take on things, and on that basis, I recommend heading straight upstairs.

Gabriel Byrne and Viral Research run @The Whitechapel Gallery until 8th March 2013

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Gaiety Is The Most Outstanding Feature Of The Soviet Union @The Saatchi Gallery

Isn’t it ironic? Gaiety is, of course, not the first thing that springs to mind when you think of the Soviet Union. More like grey concrete, grim women in headscarves and cabbage soup. This exhibition, despite its flamboyant title, does nothing to disprove the stereotype. Decades of creative repression are not easy to bounce back from.

A special shout out to Gosha Ostrestov, the most contemporary sensibility on show; his work -inevitably?- references troubled urbanisation and the nightmare bureaucracy that is truly the most outstanding feature of the Soviet Union. He creates disturbing, life-sized tableaux of masked, and therefore interchangeable,  officials punished at last (see photo).

Criminal Government (2008)

Also of note are Janis Avotins’ massive canvases in dark or washed out hues, framing tiny phantom figures who are dwarfed by the weight of Soviet history, suggested by the textured paint around them. These ghosts evoke a collective past; a woman in a shawl, the disembodied heads of politicians, the hand of an official hanging from the sleeve of a black suit.

Striking, if not pretty, are Dasha Shishkin’s portraits of a society corrupted, sketched like oversized comics onto sheets of paper. Elegantly-clad women grow long noses and suck food from a dismembered torso in Survival Takes a Good Memory (2012). What Does It Matter To Her Ever Creating Womb If Today Matter Is Flesh And Tomorrow Worms (2012) – try saying that three times fast – offers a Bosch-like vision of orgiastic players, with the same Pinocchio noses plus  piggish tails, running wild.

A detail from What Does It Matter To Her Ever Creating Womb If Today Matter Is Flesh And Tomorrow Worms (2012)

There are two photographers exhibited, the famous Boris Mikhailov and the lesser-known Sergei Vasiliev, who wasn’t an artist but a prison guard who took pictures of prison tattoos. The intricately tattooed torso’s of the prisoners are intriguing, but the photos themselves are not art.

Like Michailov’s, they are a social document, and photography as social document is the most common and dated (circa 1950) form of Eastern Bloc expression. I recently saw about 300 like this at a DDR retrospective in Berlin.

One of Mickhailov’s Case Histories (1997-98)

However, Michailov’s work is outstanding; his hyper-real, grotesque yet defiant portraits of people left destitute by the collapse of the Soviet system between 1997 and 1998, are still shocking fifteen years on.

From what is, as usual at The Saatchi, a huge collection of works, there is little else of note. Humour is all but nonexistent (although I did like Lenin as Coco-Cola fan – see below) The tone is of aged disappointment; very much the legacy of the Soviet experiment.

Gaiety Is The Most Outstanding Feature Of The Soviet Union is at The Saatchi Gallery until 5 May 2012

http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/whatson.php

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The Reaper Unmasked – Death: A Self-Portrait @The Wellcome Colection

This exhibition showcases a small portion of the death memorabilia owned by Richard Harris, a former antique print dealer from Chicago. What drove Harris to assemble such a morbid collection is unfortunately not revealed. I suspect it would be at least as intriguing as the exotic miscellany on show here.

Death is a fine subject for mortal contemplation; some might say the only subject. The problem with representing death  is that you end up with a lot of skeletons and skulls. An awful lot, especially of skulls. Wood, gold, plaster, bronze, tin, bead and clay, not to mention bone. And that list is far from exhaustive.

The centerpiece, literally, is Jodie Carey’s In The Eyes of Others (2009), a massive bone chandelier, broken pelvises forming rounded tiers that hang from bendy spines. Don’t panic, it’s artfully moulded plaster. Displayed as it is here, in cramped quarters and low to the ground, I feel it is robbed of its gravitas, and my response was equally stunted. As strikingly gruesome as sculpture gets, you might think, until you see John Isaac’s wax sculpture, ‘Are you still mad at me?’ (2001). The flayed flesh of

‘Are you still mad at me?’

the anatomically detailed man reminds us that the way people first learned medicine was by chopping up bodies.

Another large-scale piece by the Argentinian Mondongo Collective is Calavera (2011), a plasticine collage in the shape of – you guessed it – a skull, with a thousand references to Western culture, from books – A Clockword Orange, In Cold Blood – to neo-classical architecture to nursery rhymes, all crushing a South American shanty town at the bottom, an allegory you don’t need me to interpret.

The 297 other exhibits roam centuries and references. There are Pre-Colombian skulls  stamped with numbers, changing death into a commercial and anthropological venture, genuinely unsettling skeleton family portraits by Marcos Raya and Goya’s frustratingly tiny etchings on the horrors of war. The exhibition opens on the gorgeously Gothic Vanitas Still Life With a Bouquet and A Skull (1643) by Adriaen van Utrecht, a beautiful comment on the ephemeral versus the eternal. The Zizenhausener Dance of Death, a series of hand-painted figures made by Anton Sohn circa 1822, shows skeletons cavorting with pedlars and  high-kicking with bishops, as charming as death gets.

Ultimately this exhibition doesn’t answer any questions, but it doesn’t set out to. The source of our fascination, like Harris’, lies in the fact that nothing can give us the answers, except death itself. It is a striking self-portrait, as macabre and mysterious as Death himself might wish.

Vanitas Still Life With A Bouquet And A Skull

Death: A Self-Portrait runs at The Wellcome Collection until 24th February 2013

http://www.wellcomecollection.org/whats-on/exhibitions/death-a-self-portrait.aspx

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Save It For A Sunny Day: The Rain Room @The Barbican

Entering the dramatic perpetual gloom of the Barbican’s Curve – a space named after its shape – the thunderous sound of a torrential downpour hits you before you round the corner, waking your inner child who’s just dying to see it rain indoors, and, jeez-louise, you can walk in it and not get wet!

This is the central conceit of the Rain Room, an installation that comes to life through audience participation, as the art lies in the experience of walking through a shower that dries up only over your head, brought to us by Random International, a collective specialising in  immersive and interactive projects.

Inside The Rain Room

When I read the rave reviews garnered by the work, I did feel a little skeptical – it’s just walking through water that’s controlled by sensors, innit? I quickly realised that was my boring adult self at work, reasoning away the magic.

The spotlight highlights the raindrops as you enter, thousands of diamonds falling in lines and shattering at your feet. If you look up as you walk back, the light turns the drops into tiny kaleidoscopes, like a downfall of gems. How often do you get to look up into the rain (without goggles)?

Of course the real magic lies in staying dry. It sounds so simple, and it is – literally elementary. Yet the illusion of control over our – or my – least favourite element is powerful. I saw participants, including myself, raising their hands in the air and twirling around, making the most of the god-like ability to part waters.

I was lucky enough to be the last one out on my visit, so I got a few moments alone, without the annoying flash of I-phones or other people’s dry patches getting all up in my space. Surrounded by the shape and sound of precipitation in the semi-darkness, without having to make a run for shelter, was quite something; not enough to make me love rain, but enough to experience a fraction of its power, the full force of which our friends in other parts of the country are all too familiar with.

Go, by all means, and enjoy it. But take a pack of patience. With only 5 people allowed in at a time, expect to wait. And wait. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

The Rain Room runs at the Barbican till 3rd March 2013

http://www.barbican.org.uk/artgallery/event-detail.asp?ID=13723

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A Hurricane Of Desire – A Bit Of A Wind Got Up@Flowers Gallery

The exhibition’s eponymous piece is A Bit of a Wind Got Up (2012), a typically large-scale  canvas by the wonderful Kevin Sinnott, and it bears all the hallmarks of his talent; thick brushstrokes, dynamic colour, a vibrant tableaux and lashings of desire as dense as the paint.

The painting depicts a  woman hanging washing,

A Bit of a Wind Got Up

a breeze lifting her apron, her throat and wrists exposed as geese roam at her feet, the neck of one stretched phallically towards her skirt. The painting is alive with the movement created by its textured surface, fluid composition, and assault on the senses. The wind isn’t the only thing getting up. Even I wanted to sleep with the sultry housewife.

Public Private Life (1997 – 2006), also deals with lust, as a voluptuous woman lounges on a sunbed, stared at enviously by a lone girl and lewdly by a group of boys while her husband/lover turns away from the viewer, distracted, jealous or simply irrelevant. Of course its not only the bare subject matter that creates the tension. The rub lies in the little moment captured in Sinnott’s powerful daubs, in which all characters experience a little revelation, and again, the composition invites your eye – and your mind – to roam.

Billy Jean (2012)  sees a shocked woman abandoned on the curb, clutching a baby as a man slouches away into the night. The moment captured and the emotions shown tell a whole book worth of story. The urban landscape is clearly American, and while Sinnott is an Irishman born in Wales and based in London, there is more than a touch of Americana in his work.

Falling Man (2008), as well as continuing in the Rococo and Baroque style of all Sinnott’s art, has a Frontier feel that echoes through the remote landscape of A Bit Of A Wind Got Up and the emotional drama of Don’t Ever Leave Me, Baby (2011). Falling Man throws a man literally into the arms of a red-nailed, red-dressed femme fatale, who catches him as he swoons. This role reversal also echoes the hyper-real but simultaneously dream-like atmosphere (created by subject matter versus style) that runs through Sinnott’s work, as in Don’t Ever Leave Me, Baby,

Don’t Ever Leave Me, Baby

where a girl wraps herself around her cowboy-esque lover so closely they almost meld into one.

The show’s tour de force is Above It All (2009), another hallucinatory scene, where two figures, a man and a woman, at first glance apparently drowsing on a hill, reveal themselves to be floating above a valley of terraced and semi-detached houses,  a view straight from Sinnott’s Welsh childhood. The buoyancy of the image is magical, and the figures, a belly wantonly exposed, seem to have fallen asleep to dream lascivious dreams.

Sinnott’s paintings have to be seen in the flesh to feel the full force of his fevered vision. He transforms the everyday into a portrait of the intimate and passionate interactions between human beings, and more importantly, recreates that passion and intimacy between the viewer and the painting. Get hot and bothered while you can.

Above It All

A Bit Of A Wind Got Up runs at Flowers Gallery until November 24th.

http://www.flowersgallery.com/

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Brush It Off: Brush It In @Flowers Gallery

Brush It In is ‘the beginnings of a post-Photoshop engagement with reality,’ alleges the accompanying blurb at the fine Flowers Gallery in Dalston, which rarely disappoints in its selection of artwork. Unfortunately rarely isn’t never. This exhibition, aiming to elevate the digital editing of images to the status of high art, falls short; I entered quite dubious and left very skeptical.

Richard Hamilton is currently gathering rave reviews at the National for his pioneering use of computer images with paint, among other things; I’ve yet to see it, so can’t comment, but my first reaction to Photoshopping is to shout humbug. Hamilton only turned to it when he ran out of time, almost on his deathbed. Two pieces in Brush It In nearly proved me wrong – Anne de Vries’ Cave2Cave (2010), a two-part piece created by putting cave photos off the Internet into a cardboard box, photographing the photo’s reflections in mirror foil  then printing this image onto mirror foil – go girl -, has a cold, eerie beauty, with its muted chromatic colours and surprisingly  stony textures, as if the rock refused to lose its essence no matter what process it was put through.

Anne de Vries Cave2Cave

If Vries makes a study of rock, Christine Feser makes a study of paper in Konstruckt (2011). The painstaking process of photographing an individual strip of paper, printing this image, placing another strip of paper over the print, photograph and repeat ad infinitum –double go girl–, until the whole frame is filled, produces a visually solid structure that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Little more than the sum of its parts is Darren Harvey-Regan’s The Halt (2011), a real axe buried into a photo of itself, a screamingly obvious comment on image versus reality that I could knock up myself in about five minutes. Ditto his Grounds of Doubt (2011), a photographic strip of paper, with a rock printed at the bottom, peeling away from its frame. More or Less Obvious Forms (2011) is slightly more interesting, but only slightly. Photos of classical Greco-Roman objet d’art – a vase, an armless statue – are printed with a checkered pattern, making the solid objects flat and oddly two dimensional. Rather than promoting Photo-Shop, this made me think, they looked better before you messed with them.

Antonio Marguet’s Deodorant Games (2011) are meant to be playful, and their brands (Exotic Juicy Tutti Frutti and Santa Barbara New Car Scent) certainly are. The actual images baffled me, because they bore no relation to deodorant ads, unless they’ve started using pink bendy sausages and deflated balloons. I understood he might be trying to ‘subtly reference body parts,’ but the results are downright ugly to view, once again undermining the worth of digital tools.

Also interesting only in their ugliness were Fleur van Dodewaards’ Study for a Black Nude and Nude Studies (2011). Before you get your hopes up, the nudes in question are angular shapes. Joshua Citarella’s 231,639,853 and 126,270,089 (2012) were likewise remarkable only for their blandness, as various shapes and objects are Photoshopped into who cares what.

Intersecting Values of Hue and Brightness

Citarella’s Intersecting Values of Hue and Brightness (2012), for all its grandiose title, is basically the image you would get if you messed around with the colour tools in Photoshop for a couple of minutes. You, or a five year old child. Hanging it slipping off the wall fails to make it more intelligent. Even the artist knew this one deserved a low price tag.

I was sorry to leave with all my Photo-Shop prejudice in tact; strengthened if anything. Overall the art on display here has exactly the knocked-off, inconsequential quality that I’ve always associated with Adobe’s most infamous product. Brush It In is further undermined by a stunning exhibition downstairs at the Flowers Gallery, by the hugely talented Kevin Sinnott, which is all about pure paint. Look out for my next post….

Brush It In runs at the Flowers Gallery until November 24th.

http://www.flowersgallery.com/home/

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All That Glitters Is Real Gold: Giuseppe Penone @The Whitechapel Gallery

A special shout out to the Bloomsberg Commission currently on show at The Whitechapel Gallery; I’ll keep it short and sweet. Giuseppe Penone’s Spazio di Luce (Space Of Light), a 12m hollow tree trunk cast in bronze with a gold-leaf interior, turned on its side and supported by the few short branches left in place, is simply stunning, animating the truism, truth is beauty and beauty truth.

That’s not me

You can read elsewhere about the magical sensation you feel when you peer inside its radiant interior and the clever effect achieved by aligning the branches and the hollow trunk so that, viewed head-on, they look like a sun with a golden centre and wooden rays. The artist’s obsession with nature and man’s relationship with it, illustrated here in the fingerprints left on the bark from its first wax cast, is also well-documented elsewhere.

As much as the above, what fascinates me is the insecticide appearance of the sculpture viewed from the side; the trunk is cut into segments, each throwing their branches down to the ground or up into the air like so many arms and legs. The final segment narrows into the rounded appearance of a head. The wood is alive, so the next question must be, what is it feeling?

Are there many creatures in procession or is it one creature alone? Are the branches waving in celebration or they thrown up in pain? Ultimately, are we dancing or are we dying, and are we doing it together or doing it alone? This sculpture knows that to search for one answer in the life-cycle is a fool’s quest, because the answer is an irrefutable YES to all of the above. And inside that contradiction lies yet another space of light.

The Bloomsberg Commission: Giuseppe Penone: Spazio di Luce is at The Whitechapel Gallery until August 2013

http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/home

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An Italian Court Jester; Maurizio Cattelan @The Whitechapel Gallery

I first saw Maurizio Cattelan in the Abracadabra exhibition at Tate Britain in 1999, when I was barely out of nappies (OK, I was in my teens, but that’s not dissimilar). Bidibidobidiboo (1996), his taxidermied squirrel slumped over a miniature kitchen table, pistol slipping from its paw, has stayed with me since then. It moved me that much, and still does today.

Bidibidobidiboo‘s tiny figure is as vulnerable and insignificant as each one of us, and equally touching in its silliness, helplessness and the meaningless detail of its life. Dirty plates pile up in the squirrel’s sink and a glass of water sits on the table by its head. The chair opposite is angled to suggest a conversation just ended, perhaps a companion who has walked away. Viewing this tiny, tragicomic tableaux from above, as gods might view men, imbues it with a pathos that belies its size.

Cattelan, who is infamous for his much larger sculpture, La Nona Ora (The Ninth Hour, 1999), depicting the Pope hit by a meteorite, has a dark and deadly wit. We Are the Revolution (2000) sees a boy-size wax likeness of Cattelan hanging from a clothes rail, dressed in the signature grey felt jacket of artist and activist Joseph Beuys. Beuys pursued an artistic agenda that championed art with a social conscience, full of wordy rhetoric and long explanations of his work. This is diametrically opposed to Cattelan’s anarchic practice, in which he frequently uses a ‘stand-in’ at interviews, equipped with a stock of evasive answers and non-sensical utterances. Here he renders the artist-as-revolutionary obsolete.

The untitled rug showing a map of Italy as a the packaging for a round of Bel Paseo’s Formaggio, a particular smelly brand of cheese, illustrates Cattelan’s uneasy relationship with his homeland. If you were in any doubt that an insult was intended, a wax hand with only a middle finger to extend hangs above the rug, a gestured repeated in a 36ft sculpture of the same hand (titled L.O.V.E.) which Cattelan placed in front of Milan’s stock market building in 2011, directed towards the Italian public. Love it. Hate the bankers.

In another sculpture the Star of David emblem of the 1970s terrorist group Brigate Rosse, famous for violent attempts to destabilise Italy by acts of sabotage, robberies, and kidnappings,  is turned into a cheery neon Christmas decoration. Next to this sits a bag of rubble retrieved from Milan’s Contemporary Art Pavilion when it was destroyed by a Mafia-related bomb attack. Whether these are tributes to political outsiders or comments on the inadequacies of the Italian government is anyone’s guess, but what is clear here as in all his political pieces is Cattelan’s contempt for the system.

Cattelan’s reworking of the Brigate Rosse’s emblem

This collection is less a retrospective of Cattelan’s career and more a small sample of his incongruous and perverse takes on the world. Considering the pranks Cattelan had pulled in his time, including erected a full-sized HOLLYWOOD sign over the largest rubbish tip on Palermo, Sicily and creating a sculpture of a schoolboy with the head of Adolf Hitler kneeling in prayer, what is on show here is somewhat tame. However it may be just enough to introduce the uninitiated to the charms of the art worlds’ foremost agent provocateur. And it’s worth a visit if only to catch the sublime and sublimely titled Bidibidobidiboo.

Collection Sandretto Re Rebaudengo: Maurizio Cattelan runs at the Whitechapel Gallery until 2nd December 2012.

Whitechapel Gallery Home Page

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Up Close and Personal: Thomas Schutte @The Serpentine

“It is the common wonder of all men, how among so many million faces, there should be none alike” (Sir Thomas Browne). Thomas Schutte might say that it’s a wonder how in only one man, there can be so many million faces. His exhibition at the Serpentine is a masterful, even obsessive, study of portraiture in all its different forms, reveling in the act of catching the essence of a subject with a deft touch and a sly wink.

Schutte has several intimate small scale portraits on show, so small they might pass as doodles from a lesser artist; here they are delicate figurative responses to the problem of true representation. The playful Adolf and Rubber Duck (2007) sees the eponymous duck don a Hitler mustache and a swastika, reducing the high falautin Nazi agenda to something loud but ridiculous, while Me (2007) subverts the innate conceit of an artist’s self portrait by presenting ‘me’ as a vainglorious swan;

Self Portrait (1975)

similarly Self Portrait (2008), displays the self-centered artist with a heart for a face, while the achingly handsome Self Portrait (1975) knowingly dons dark glasses and a sneer, as if to ask the viewer, “Don’t I look cool?”

The proof that Schutte is neither a preening swan nor a shrinking violet comes in the wonderful series Mirror Drawings (1998 – 99). His face is rendered again and again in the rounded frame of a vanity mirror, the eyes always searching and what they see always changing. So ingeniously does Schutte catch the lines and tones of each face that after a while I began to feel as if I was looking at myself in the mirror – surely the Holy Grail of portraiture. His drawings of his children, Henri and Carla (2012),while more traditional and sentimental, still show Schutte’s characteristic ability to capture character in a few strokes.

The other half of the exhibition, Schutte’s large-scale sculptures, are divided into the personal and the political. The personal show the same mastery of technique as his sketches, but lack the depth of meaning.

Walser’s Wife (2011)

Walser’s Wife (2011), a head sculpture of lacquer on aluminum, with its nod to African art in its patterned hair and closed eyes, is beautiful but empty. I understood that the piece was referential, but learnt nothing about the mysterious Mrs. Walser. Similarly the Polynesian-inspired Woman with Flower (2006), with its touch of Gauguin, was glamorous and unmemorable.

The centrepiece of the show, Vater Staat (2010) is as intriguing as everyone says; the impassive features of the gargantuan leader are so well balanced that he becomes truly global – he could be Caucasian, Asian or African. The authoritarian state is part of the human condition. Huge and imposing yet apparently frail and immaterial under his robe, this is literally a head without a body, a capital without a country, a leader without followers.

Surrounding and looking down on Vater Staat is Innocenti (1994), a series of photograph portraits of eerie and deformed wax faces, seemingly as far from innocents as it is possible to be. Do these figures stand for the supporters of the regime, the ugly machinators behind every great dictator who at his downfall declare themselves innocent? Or are there no true innocents left in this world? When we become onlookers to political atrocity and declare ourselves innocent through inaction, are we as ugly on the inside as these demons are on the outside? Like the greatest portraitists, Schutte poses the question, what does humanity look like? And then he leaves us looking at our own reflections.

Vater Staat (1994)

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