Moving on then.
Gallery four showcases the work of three more British artists and is the most playful so far. Mark Pearson's trio of sculptures are decidedly odd. They are pastiches of Nazi iconography. Or to put it in the terms used by the guide "[he] approaches building a Nazi-esque standard with all the gusto of a football hooligan on a garden shed rampage".
Quite.
They are really parodies rather than pastiches with plywood plinths supporting collections of cheap beer steins and topped by a tin foil Brandenburg Eagle. I found them quite amusing, a reaction that I think the artist hoped for. Having read out one of the more florid passages ("encapsulates the feelings of inadequacy and impotence that underlie white supremacist culture") I paused for reaction from my friend. She leaned closer, looked at the shelf supporting the eagle and said "I quite like that colour pink".
Barry Reigate was represented by two paintings and three sculptures. He is clearly a fan of cartoon imagery for the paintings, while quite chaotic in overall execution have quite a few cartoon characters embedded in them. This is quite appropriate considering that the three statues of cartoon rabbits have neon lighting tubes embedded in them. Embedded in rather painful looking positions. I shall leave the image to your own imaginations. Like Pearson, he has produced work that is both humourous and grimly grotesque.
The third artist, Iain Hetherington had four bright, cheerful, colourful paintings each with a central image of a baseball cap. They were a vivid contrast to the stark white walls of the gallery and quite appealing.
In gallery five the first thing to catch my attention was the title of the first piece, a series of black and white posters of various sizes, inexplicably titled "Jerking Off The Dog To Feed The Cat". It was quite effective but having read the description at least ten times I am no wiser about that title. The artist, Alastair MacKinven has eight more pieces and while the series of four that the guide raves about most struck me as less interesting variations on Escher's endless staircases theme, at least a couple of the others showed that his geometric forms can be interesting. Oddly I had the opposite problem with Pablo Bronstein whose work was by far the most technically competent I'd seen so far. The trouble was that it was technically competent architectural drawings. They were well done but left me completely cold.
Gallery six was a bit of a mish-mash. Three life size cardboard cut-outs of models from Clare Stephenson, sevem paintings from Phoebe Unwin and two odd pieces by Goshka Macugo. Both Unwin and Stephenson were well enough done but not really to my taste. Only the Macugas held my attention more than momentarily. One I didn't really get - a desk with some books and lamps on it - but the other was a sculpture of the famous medium (and fraudulent charlatan) Madame Blavatsky levitating, It was very effective and the facial carving was especially impressive.
That's all for now, but in the next entry I shall tell you all about the artist who impressed me most in the gallery.
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