An aerial view of the 2015 Serpentine Pavilion filmed using a drone. #SerpentinePavilion #selgascano #aerial #drone

A video posted by Serpentine Galleries (@serpentineuk) on Jun 26, 2015 at 2:07am PDT

See more photos here.

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Pure Evil

Featuring a mix of established and new players, this show pays homage to this genre of contemporary art as well as the people who’ve proudly eschewed traditional art routes, coming from backgrounds such as rave, film, design,  fashion and of course, graffiti. The 11 artists involved were picked by J Patrick Boyle, a Bristolian artist and curator  – and he’s included infamous names such as Pure Evil, Sick Boy and Sweet Toof while you’ll get to see some of the exciting work  from our favourite picks Coby Walsh, an illustrator from London and South Africa’s Nicci van P.    There’s no question that these new works will be bold, innovative and further evidence of the appeal of urban art –  so like a good Banksy, catch them if you can.

Go Hard or Go Home runs from October 31st to November 4th.  For more info, visit: www.gohardorgohome.info

Cept

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Flailing human efforts to cross, contain, and to comprehend the magnitude and power of the natural world? This is classic sublime. Welcome to Bill Viola’s new show at Blain|Southern, where a selection of new video works by the artist will knock you for six.

Viola forces us temporarily out of a life on autopilot and has us think about the broader significance of our everyday actions. The conclusion seems to be – there isn’t much significance. Frustrated Actions and Futile Gestures, the work which gives its name to the exhibition as a whole, offers exactly what it says on the tin. Nine screens show torturously repetitive actions – painstakingly sweeping up tiny bits of gravel into a wheelbarrow only to pour them out again, pouring water into a broken glass jug only for it to gush out of the side. Even love and romance come under scrutiny in this bleak work, with relationships whittled down to a looped film of a couple intermittently slapping and tenderly embracing one another, between long, dull periods of standing opposite one another.

It’s a pretty heavy show. Viola certainly doesn’t hold back on addressing the big questions: life, death, and meaning thereof. I came out of the gallery feeling a bit like I’d been run over. Certainly some works are stronger than others, and as a whole the exhibition is no great work of philosophy. But Viola engages the moving image unlike any other and his works are poetic, powerful, and will give you more than a few things to think about. (Words: Florence Ritter) 

Bill Viola: Frustrated Actions and Futile Gestures is at Blain|Southern until 27th July. For more information, click here.

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So that’s why it’s worth checking out Vibe Affordable at Vibe Gallery. It runs from the 13th-27th June, with a special opening night on the 13th which includes first pick of the available art, a live DJ, drinks including a Pimms corner, nibbles and a live performance from Dutch visual artist Alexandra Arshanskaya, who will be performing a unique and special Live Drawing show. Aimed at introducing art lovers to artists and vice versa the exhibition allows you to engage with the artists as you take in their work.

Other artists featured in the showcase include Alyrical, Gloria Bornacin, Linzi Louise, Christina Peake, Teclah Muropa all providing work across a variety of mediums, styles, prices and tastes to suit all from the art novice to those that like to think they know their Surrealism from their Existentialism.

With all artwork available for between £40 to £4000, this is your chance to pick up a unique piece from credible artists – and who knows how much it could be worth in a few years? (Words: Lucy Palmer) 

Admission is free. Visit www.vibeplace.com for details on opening night and featured artists.

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new and different ways. The projects on show at D Eye Y were developed with input from members of the local public, who were invited to partake in a series of workshops held in Battersea Park, commissioned by the Pump House Gallery. Participants were taught how to make cameras out of objects as unexpected as peanut shells, and how to take fantastically warped portraits of their surroundings with their own bespoke SlitScan cameras – which they themselves made from scratch. Holding an image of the world in your hands, with the knowledge that you have Done It Yourself without any digital input, suddenly seems impossibly far-fetched and incredible. BBKP’s projects are about innovation, problem-solving and the practical exploration of materials. Their inventive approach to their apparatus creates a new kind of camera vision and lends a real physicality to the photographic print which comes to be valued as an object in itself, not just one of hundreds of images. Take your time over this show –there’s a lot to see. (Words: Florence Ritter) D Eye Y is on at the Pump House Gallery until April 7th. For more info, visit: www.pumphousegallery.org.uk

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First up – Belinda Cadbury and her meticulously pencilled patterns on paper. Cadbury’s work is about craft and process, rather than creativity and imagination, and each work is carefully executed, tightly finished and smudge-free. But the uneven densities of the markings within each of her carefully demarcated forms betray the personal labour that went into each of the works, without ever undermining the integrity of the design and its rhythm.

Alison Turnbull and Sarah Cawkwell both seek existing patterns in our everyday lives and, lifting them from their original contexts, isolate or re-work them to explore their aesthetic potential free of meaning. Turnbull’s interests lie in the topographical, in maps, charts and graphs. Her systematically placed dots and lines interact with the systems of her sources, and invigorate the page surface in playful and enchanting ways. Cawkwell turns to the domestic. A lot of her artistic practice comprises relatively uninteresting, middle-of-the-road charcoal renderings of dressing and undressing rituals, but Petherbridge has astutely selected only those works which dissolve the figurative into abstract patterning. Woven textiles, buttons and the folds and creases of fabric serve as departure points for lovingly rendered small-scale studies in pencil and wash.

The highlight is set to be Wendy Smith, who lacerates her dazzling white boards with inked lines which cross and merge to form intricate, interlocking patterns that shimmer and dance on the page. Smith’s drawings have a graphic quality and are so frighteningly free of imperfection it is easy to imagine them to be machine-made. Together in series Smith’s work looks like the result of hundreds of experiments in drawing, but experiments with no hypothesis, no analysis and no evaluation.

Smith’s works, as with the others shown at the gallery, are not reliant on theory. They do not purport to communicate any personal or objective reality to us but rather express the artists’ fascination with mark making itself. The crisp, clean visual clarity of the works at Art Space Gallery provide the ultimate in visual satisfaction and are not to be missed. (Words: Florence Ritter) 

Narratives of Arrival and Resolution runs 25th January – 22nd February. You can see the catalogue for the exhibition here: www.artspacegallery.co.uk/BOOKS/Narratives/pageflip.html

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Anyone fortunate enough to have seen and experienced Filmaktion at Tate Modern recently will be familiar with the work of Malcolm Le Grice. Recognised as a major figure in the development of experimental film in the UK, Le Grice’s Castle 1 (1966) or ‘the light bulb film’ is a must-see at this show. Le Grice has said his ‘main interest is in creating experiences rather than concepts’ and this collaged film is just one of a number of works seeking to bring the cinematic experience consciously into the space of the audience. Le Grice’s unconventional use of sound in the editing process of this film cannot go without a mention. William Raban, Gill Eatherley and Annabel Nicolson – Le Grice’s Filmaktion contemporaries – are also represented in this exhibition not only by film but by text and images.

Original expanded cinema works were never produced for a gallery, in keeping with the movement’s radical intent they were shown in more unusual spaces – so several of the earlier films on view have been modified. An expanded cinema exhibition without any live performances possibly misses the point, so a programme of live events does feature throughout its run. There are those who’d argue that expanded cinema is all around us – we are quite used to seeing moving images in a gallery setting but these flicks really are pictures of a different kind. (Words: Eri Otite)

Film in Space is on at the Camden Arts Centre  until February 24 2013. For more info, visit www.camdenartscentre.org

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The work of Iveković  – who came of age in Yugoslavia and lives and works in Croatia –  has been produced against a backdrop of political unrest. In Triangle (1979), she employs both performance and photography to document her political activism as she performs a deliberate provocative act. Elsewhere, reappropriated glossy magazine ads confront current injustices against women  or pay homage to forgotten political heroines. Media representations of femininity are also explored, exposing the clichéd notions of beauty in both video Make Up, Make Down (1978) and collage Double Life (1975-76).

Unlike many of her contemporaries, Iveković never left for the West during Yugoslavia’s political upheavals yet her work is relevant to a wider international audience – so here’s an opportunity to get to know her better. (Words: Eri Otite)

Sanja Iveković: Unknown Heroine is showing at the South London Gallery and Calvert 22 until February 24,  2013. For more info, visit www.southlondongallery.org or www.calvert22.org

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Mull has pursued various careers, in stand-up comedy, music, film and TV, but he has an extraordinary natural talent as a painter. Using a palette of muted browns, greys and greens, Mull combines and layers imagery from different, unidentified sources, managing to create a cut-and-paste photomontage effect in oils. The scenes are dreamlike in their fragmentation, with glossy surface planes that are as impenetrably two-dimensional as old photographs.

Of course, the appropriation of the photographic aesthetic in painting is nothing new, and Mull’s endeavours fit into a rich lineage of works including those by Gerhard Richter and Chuck Close. However, Mull’s paintings are enriched with further historical referents. The paintings’ articulation of a specifically suburban emptiness and loneliness gives more than a nod to Edward Hopper, whilst Mull’s smooth treatment of paint and the filmic unreality of his compositions suggest stylistic influence from French Nouveau Realiste Jacques Monory. There is even a tongue-in-cheek reference by Mull to Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon in his almost-eponymous portrait of four middle-aged (and fully dressed) women gazing at us from a white-decked porch in Akron, Ohio. In another work a woman grins out at us inanely, kicking out a shiny nyloned leg from her white garden chair, her clownish smile as circus-like as the tumbling gymnasts behind her. Some of the works on show are sad, some funny, some absurd to the point of critical in their portrayals of the promises of commercial culture.

Okay, so about that TV career…Martin Mull was Vice Principal Mr Kraft in Sabrina the Teenage Witch. I struggled with whether to mention this but decided that it just cannot go unmentioned. I know it will now be an effort to quash memories of Hilda, Zelda, Harvey and Salem whilst looking at this collection of melancholy and sardonic paintings, but make that effort: after all, John Lennon went to art college; Winston Churchill produced some striking landscape paintings; even Marilyn Manson has dabbled in watercolours (albeit with questionable results) – people do different things, so Mull’s slickly executed, thought-provoking paintings are well worth seeing. (Words: Florence Ritter)

Martin Mull: Leap of Faith runs until 26th January 2013.  For more info, visit www.benbrownfinearts.com/exhibitions/64/overview

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