It’s a Saturday evening. I’ve just finished work, and I’ve got a pint in my hand. After staring at a kitchen sink for most of the day, I’m looking forward to seeing Merlin Carpenter’s solo show David’s Soul at the Quality of Life Gallery in Glasgow’s West End, which I hope is going to be more exciting. As I wait for a friend to arrive, I check the gallery's Instagram bio which reads: “We are the best gallery in London, we just happen to be somewhere else” - I’m still struggling to decide whether this serves as a diss to Glasgow or just another instance of the exhausting Londoner-in-Glasgow attitude.

There’s the occasional self-imposed belief that they are the first to discover the city, and then proceed to go on to explain to everyone, including Glaswegians, about why Glasgow is so great. Being a student at the GSA, I’m all too well accustomed with the unfortunate inevitability of shittily painted cans of Tennents lager or the shallow holiday maker, arts and crafts-esque work by some of the relocated students. Although knowing Merlin Carpenter for his constant ability to avoid being categorised by style or subject matter, I know this show will be far removed from the former. My friend arrives, and we look at Google Maps to plan our route to the flat in which the show is taking place, only to be shown that the gallery is on the same street as us. Perfect.

I overhear an American voice confirming that I was probably in the right place. Heading up to the top floor of the tenement flat we are greeted with a dram of whiskey in true Glasgow fashion. We enter the living room of gallery owner Richard Parry’s family home where four Mercedes-Benz dual suspension patronise the carpet. I'm quickly airdropped to 1990s Cologne with Kippenberger et al. Present. The steeds are lined up in the centre of the room, taking the form of either trophy horses or the swaggering cool kids in the school playground. I sat down against the wall and began to read the fifteen-page press release. Around halfway through, I look up and see musician and artist Joanne Robertson get told off for grabbing the handlebars, which made me giggle. I too was wondering how well these bikes could do a wheelie. The press release serves as some form of ancient manuscript regarding the mystifying history of the bikes, their conception, storage and eventual delivery to the living room of Richard Parry. To quote from the singing voice of a mouse who had eaten its way through the bike's brake cables in the barn where the work was stored:

“I'm truly sorry Man's dominion, Has broken Nature's social union, An' justifies that ill/
opinion, Which makes thee startle At me, thy poor, earth-born companion, An fellow-mortal!”

It feels only fitting for a press release of such length and esoteric nature to accompany Carpenter, who is also esoteric and lengthy in nature.

The bikes dominate the living room. It should feel like a salesroom of sorts, although Richard Parry's pastel blue walls mute that sterile feeling that we’re more used to experiencing. We can see Carpenter express his distrust for the art world as the bikes embody the flashy and cocky collector. Carpenter’s been known to criticise the art market before with his work, such as the painting slash performance The Opening (2007) at Reena Spaulings Fine Art in which he vandalised his own show, scrawling phrases like “DIE COLLECTOR SCUM” and “I LIKE CHRIS WOOL” across canvases. It’s quite clear that he struggles to come to terms with being a participant in the fried, shitty, circle-jerky viewing and buying domain that we all take part in. But, I think these themes become more apt when explored with less blatancy: in an obviously comsumer targeted, branded parternship, specialised object-artwork, like a mountain bike.

It seems as if I should have no connection to something as pointless or outwardly exorbitant as souped-up Benz bikes - I felt submissive to its glamorous and sharp aesthetics. They feel inescapable and ambiguous: similar to how BMW gatecrashes its way into high culture by sponsoring Art Basel. Something is troubling about seeing a non-art object collide into a high-end artefact, accompanied by the collective bewilderment of looking at eighty grand worth of bikes in someone else’s very nice living room. It’s here that Carpenter can engage us with his interests in Marxist Theory. I’m going to outline commodity fetishism again because it’s been long enough since our readership read theory.

The work references Marx’s theories on the transcendent value placed upon objects as they become commodities. This, in turn, disregards any value of labour required for the production of the objects. Carpenter presses this further as he re-authorises the readymade and, in turn, exploits the labour further, giving it a surplus of higher and more disillusioned value.

The pieces have previously been shown at Galerie Christian Nagel in 1999; Art Basel (2007) Kunstverein (2007). It's important to note this is the first time the work has been shown in almost 30 years. The white cube is becoming increasingly further from the status quo, and with that seems to come accessibility. Art is coming back into the hands of neighbours and being shown in kitchens, living rooms, old shops and basements.

Very few of us have reason or desire to go to Art Basel and turn on our bullshit sieve in the hope to see those one or two archive pieces we've been waiting for the IRL moment with. It’s exciting to start seeing more physically inaccessible art in less capitalised spaces. There's becoming a reduced us and them attitude regarding established and grassroots projects.

A review of "Banana Karenina" by The Pegram Collection and Alex Heard, which took place on a bridge in Archway last month.

I have 5 minutes at home to change into a dress adequately chic enough to fit my role as fashion show attendee. I am going to Bananna Karenina, a “performance featuring 9 dresses,” which will be staged on Sussex Way bridge, a no-where landmark vaguely in Archway.
To hold a show in public is to trust in the participants to behave when the hierarchy between audience and artist is removed. If vulnerability was hiding behind the texts of another man, the cracks in the lo-fi setting made the whole thing feel unassuming and human.
The show is a collaboration between artist Alex Heard and designer Mack Pegram, aka. The Pegram Collection. Described on Instagram as a museum in Buckinghamshire, a place random enough to blend into the brown and grey mush of Somewhere in England.
I make it to the bridge, where I am greeted by a horde of familiar faces I hardly ever get to see this far north of the river. The bridge overlooks a train track and I feel pride at recognising the reference despite never having read the book. Anna Karenina (1876) is one of those books that is so solidly book it feels you should have read it, haven’t read it, but probably really, actually have read it. It is like the bible, or Pride and Prejudice (1813).. If the railway was once a symbol of the modernising forces of industry, we now find them to be slightly ruined, going on as if they didn’t know how to stop.
People are holding pieces of paper and I. I want to get my hands on one. I ask someone where they got theirs, and I am interrupted by a youthful man in a suit who runs around the corner and emerges with a sheet for me. He is one out of two bow-tied servers carrying trays of water and wine. The servers wear suits for the very reason I am wearing my chic attire: servers wear suits.
Swooning music starts to play out of a boombox to my left, quiet at first and then loud enough to recognise it isn’t accidental and that the show is starting. The first model appears across the bridge. She is wearing a long and shapeless white robe, plain except for lines of black text which become legible as she gets closer. A friend speaks into a microphone and recites the text on the dress.
First, the front. Then, after the model turns, the back.
Though
Kitty’s
Toilette,
coiffure
and
all
the preparations
for the
ball had cost her
a good deal of trouble
and planning..
The next 8 models come and go similarly. The text appears in bursts of differently sized clusters, varying in dramatic and comedic effect.
Simple, natural, graceful - and, at the same time - gay and animated..
The words, ripped out of Tolstoy’s novel, are ready-made statements which have miraculously been given legs to walk on. No longer sitting next to Tolstoy’s characters, they can stand for everything.I feel that some of them are descriptors of the models themselves. Sometimes two words are placed together in a way that makes me laugh or seems to represent some distant truth that I know about the world. Or that I have been told I know about the world, and what our story is about, and how things go wrong, and so forth.
The models are styled in regency-era themed accessories: feathered boater hats, a basket of apples, twigs and other pastoral trimmings. An English re-reading of the novel’s original Russian setting. It’s 3pm on a Sunday in November and the sun is beginning to set over the bridge. When the music cuts in between songs, it is replaced by the rustling in the trees, the sound of wind blowing hair into the models’ faces and the fabric of their gowns in and around their legs, making it hard for them to walk. When the models pause long enough over the bridge, things seem still and I am tricked into feeling like everything fits and makes sense.
Families, lime-bikers and stray pedestrians are forced to meander their way through the obstacle course of cameras, speakers, and the bodies of former and current art students. One man, who looks smart enough to stage his own show, or has maybe gotten lost on his way east to join the other old and hatted eccentrics of London, is asking what this is all about – “it's a fashion show, I think.” A woman walks and runs as close to the edge of the bridge as possible, hoping to disappear into the brick, but this only makes the fashion-art-audience giggle harder. Others stop and will stay till the very end.
A man is filming the whole thing on his iPhone camera. Gliding around models and audience, up and down the catwalk. I learn later that this is one man out of a collective behind the Instagram account @27b.6_. I have seen their wordless and voyeuristic portraits of pedestrians before. The camera lingering uncomfortably long till their subject(s) start to crack in a Warholian screen-test fashion. The account representative was invited by the artists themselves; though they may not have anticipated him stalking the catwalk as he did.
When a bright orange train of the London Overground passes the tracks and the models change back into their preferred city attire, a leftover bouffant hairstyle will be the only reminder that the audience has seen any art at all. We scurry back into London’s walls.

Introducing the press release is Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence. A helplessly romantic push toward self-affirmation, it also stages life as an absurd play of recurring archetypes, charged with the history that shapes them. The collection pokes fun at the city’s self-seriousness and fashion’s obsession with the future. Clothes are read too quickly, identities too fixed. Designed away from the city, the garments return mischievous, repeating our absurd metropolitan codes, but askew.

Mack is selling t-shirts on the table at the post-show reception. People are trying on the various prints, trying to find one that will fit their vibe. G puts on a tank top printed with a big “It” and M is happy with hers because the question mark at the end of the sentence will poke out of her cardigan in a nice manner. If the lines of text imitated the nonsense of optometric eye-tests, we are failing hard. The alphabet is to us only nice looking shapes, decorating a white backdrop.
Coming away from the show, I realise that I am wearing a '60s-vibe top and that my outfit is awfully charged. My outfit is the beige lint roller of all of history before me, and my '60s top is a ball of hair caught in its sticky tape.

While thankfully less common than in Berlin, a city replete with smoothened, outsourced objects often mistakenly seen as the end of thoughtful conceptualism rather than as the product of a much lower common denominator—a Ringbahn-bound collective condition of smooth-brained apathetic “coolness”
conceptual art in New York can at times feel like a circle jerk for bisexual men whose flirtations with the same sex are limited to the moments of tantric, pseudointellectual foreplay they partake in at downtown openings.

At Maxwell Graham, a merely aesthetic or self-aggrandising relationship to conceptualism has always been out of the question. While some of the gallery’s roster admittedly does less for me than the work of, say, Hamishi Farah, Ser Serpas, Cameron Rowland, and Tiffany Sia, there is little of the juvenile “I only got into conceptual art through Joseph Beuys” sentiment one often intuits in small downtown galleries. In “Display,” Zoe Leonard’s new exhibition at Maxwell Graham, comprised of only six gelatin silver prints depicting armor housed in nondescript museum and institutional settings, thought—the foundation of good conceptual work—is refreshingly at the forefront.

Much like the cold, detached hubbub sustained by the aforementioned men who sour conceptualism’s current reputation, the objects pictured seem as if they should foreclose sensuality or eroticism altogether in the way they privilege the episteme. And they do. Ranging between 300 BC - 1600 in origins, each piece of armor, even with its voluptuous tassets and faulds, is obviously masculine, immediately neutralizing the knowledge of the erotic, an arguably feminine power that Audre Lorde famously described as being often “misnamed by men and used against women.” Repeat those same forms multiple times within the same sterile vitrines, compositions, or gallery walls without providing historical context, and that repetition amasses into something more monumental: critique.

This is what Leonard’s practice does best—looking, repeating, serialising, aggregating to the point that form, always bound to history, begins to speak for things that transcend history. In the case of “Display,” what first emerges from this continuity of forms spanning 2,000 years in origins is the tired persistence of patriarchal militancy and violence throughout the history of the West—a fact that can be condensed into everything from the objects themselves, such as the muscle cuirass of the Romans and Greeks or the plate armor of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, to the rationalizing containers, such as the ethnographic, imperial museum vitrine, that precipitate their initial formation and absolve the sins that lie in their wake.

Leonard may share convictions with the mechanised, lens-based approach of the Düsseldorf Becher School, but her work is ultimately more aligned with the libidinal sleight of hand wielded by fellow queer conceptualists emerging in the late 20th century, e.g. Felix Gonzalez-Torres, David Wojnarowicz, Glenn Ligon, than any photography movement or school. Hence, the desire that still bursts out from “Display,” some of her most acerbically mundane work yet.

This rupture is concentrated in one photograph, Display IX (1994/2025), displayed on the wall directly behind the viewer as they descend the stairs to the main gallery dedicated entirely to photographs of garments used in war and feudal contexts. Having been initially confronted with images of statesque armour, frozen in mechanical movement, repeated, doubled, and pictured ever so slightly differently to the point that their historical idiosyncrasies are rendered moot, the act of turning around and seeing the broken ab-laden torso of a broken muscle cuirass depicted in Display IX (1994/2025) wrests the most powerful element from repetition’s grasp—difference. And with it, desire floods the scene, too.

This is hardly the same libidinal or auratic territory underlying Leonard’s 1992 text declaration on the occasion of Eileen Myles’ presidential bid that she wants a “dyke for president,” nor the critical erotics lingering in her early 1990s images of chastity belts, lifted skirts, anatomical models, and the Niagara Falls, or her late 90s images of urban trees breaking through the fences meant to enclose them. Indeed, the desire occasioned by the image of the broken muscle cuirass is more memetic and pornographic than it is erotic. After all, Display IX is still a picture of an object of war.

However, it is precisely because it resides in that unspeakable zone wherein war and desire commingle, that the image also tests the very bounds of acceptable desire, sex, and discursive practices—an equally abstract and material dynamic from which queerness emerges. Keeping with the photographer’s past work, this desire is not only theoretically gay, but empathetically so, in no small part because it immediately evokes the visual schema of Grindr, where one is most likely to stumble upon a naked, cropped, floating male torso today.

But surely one cannot outwardly express gay desire upon seeing the cuirass without entirely betraying Leonard’s searing critique? Leonard’s work somehow convinces me that both positions—the anti-war critic and the shamefully desiring subject—can be held at the same time, however delusionally. After all, the desire that breaks through this particular dusty vitrine is ruled neither by eros, nor agape, nor philia. It seeks release neither through sacrifice nor mutual destruction but instead mistakes the momentary mania of visual possession and pornographic arrest with the inexhaustible wells of the haptic and the erotic.

The cuirass, a form de-eroticised upon its moulded excision from the human body, already reached the artist broken and caged. She furthered this deadening process by capturing the fragment in black and white, transforming it into a fetishistic spoil of history in much the same way that ethnography, the progeny of empire pictured throughout “Display,” has historically relied on violent acts of photographic capture to fix culture as a fetish object as a means to keep it, study it, exploit it, be turned on by it, degrade it, and eventually dispose of it.

Like Bilderatlas Mnemosyne (1924-), Aby Warburg’s unfinished project tracking the recurrence of classical images, gestures, and motifs across the history of Western art, Zoe Leonard’s practice often directs our gazes to histories that lie anywhere but the past. In “Display,” she pushes this to discomfiting ends, probing the psychosexual undercurrents of masculinist projects like war and questioning the latent biopolitical violence in 21st-century digital cruising (See the NYPD’s recent usage of Sniffies as a means to track and arrest cruisers at Penn Station) and the torso-directed desires it inculcates in viewers such as myself at even the most inopportune, or dare I say inappropriate, moments. At Maxwell Graham, the conceptual photographer first presents us with this sharp, Warburgian account of antiquity’s violent, pornographic “afterlife.” Then, she shatters things over our heads.

While in London Marina Abramovic is placed in the gallery-as-rave, Tamara Trauermarsch find that in Milan they put Nan Goldin in an airplane hanger, like a can of Bud Light in a 2000s HBO show.

From the raw intimacy of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1981) and the celebratory portraits of trans identity in The Other Side (1992), to the haunting memories of Sisters, Saints, Sibyls (2004) and the childlike melancholy of Fire Leap (2010), each piece builds a fragmented autobiography of survival and loss. Later works such as Memory Lost (2019) and Sirens (2019) plunge into addiction and ecstasy, while her most recent You Never Did Anything Wrong (2024) and Stendhal Syndrome (2024) expand Goldin’s vision toward mythology, abstraction, and the eternal cycles of life and death.

That didn't end well.

What we certainly weren’t craving in Milan was yet another slideshow of Nan Goldin’s portfolio. This format applied to her work is now as tasteful as that piece of Brooklyn gum you've chewed for ten minutes. Please note that, in this case, that piece of gum has been passed from mouth to mouth for at least 20 years. Terrifying.

In the same way I ask myself what was I expecting by having sex with a man on the first date, I wonder about my expectations when, at the entrance of the exhibition, the staff asked me to cover my phone's camera with a branded sticker. Was I in seek of a feeling? Was I supposed to walk around feeling proud to have been there? I don’t identify as a third-grader grappling with his first bruises and sexual experiences.

At that point, I wished the stickers were 'egg shell', so that the core of the exhibition would have been seeing everyone walking around scrubbing their phones camera covers like a desperate with a scratch card.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get a second date and neither the satisfaction of a single broken eggshell. Both cases, I got a waste of time.

Worried that the exhibition could have been too lukewarm, they designed a route where every series of photographs was enclosed in a huge felt tent. There were at least seven different ones, each in a different colour and with a different soundtrack. They all had one thing in common though: the heat was nearly deadly and only acceptable if the purpose was to host the naked and afraid in the dead of winter. Even though the most naked and afraid probably couldn't have stand the environment either, and I'm not talking about the temperature.

The show's subtitle should’ve been 'Nightmare tents rotation': who on earth feels the need on a weekday afternoon to be trapped in a tiny, dark, sweaty space with tons of art workers? For Christ.

And anyway, Nan’s crusade finding refuge inside Pirelli Hangar is like hosting a punk funeral inside the Vatican.

The irony burns brighter than the spotlights sweating on those felt walls. Watching rebellion get institutionalised never gets any less obscene.

They love to define this kind of exhibitions “dialogue”. Sure, if by dialogue they mean a pointless monologue echoing through a cathedral of good intentions where the staff whisper about activism as if it’s an artisanal cheese: rare, pungent, perfectly aged for the website’s palette. I wonder if the real performance were the enthusiasts cosplaying empathy, in the need to look radical while staying perfectly respectable like a banker in fishnets, or an terrorist with a press release.

And the crowd applauds, amazed that despite being the size of an airplane hanger: the exhibition was conveniently tote-bag sized.

Apart from that, the last stop of this hour of slaloming Berghain-esquely through alt kids and uncool adults was the only one worth it. And that's probably why I couldn't see anything from how crowded it was. Welcome to Panorama Bar.

For those unaware, the infamous Berlin’s club is the happy alternative: they'll make you cover the camera anyway but you get drugs and can fuck behind the corners.

Pick - A - Boo!

Q3 Curated by ProblemChild Advisory

September 4 - October 19, 2025

Albert R. Sawit takes us on a journey through "Q-3", an exhibition curated by Problem Child Advisory - another psychologically tortured and semi-autonomous guerrilla art Instagram page - and Alyssa Davis Gallery, the renowned nomadic downtown gallery that’s been curating shows with chic posters since 2016. “Q-3” is a reference to the third quarter of the fiscal year, paired with a selection of artworks whose summary could be described as "post-internet" and "girl-art", "digital grotesquerie" and “machinic fetishistic art akin to transformer toys”. Together, they generate an exhibition geared unabashedly toward Silicon Valley cash flow. Digital solutions to real art world problems!

Featuring work by Diego Gabaldon, Kyle Gallagher, Nina Hartmann, Leif Jones, Gyae Kim, Danka Latorre, Jack Lawler, Sean David Morgan, In June Park and Cameron Spratley

We experienced complete context collapse on Henry St. My father and I, like many of the others assembled on the sidewalk for Q3, had attended the Armoury Art Fair beforehand. By the time an ‘art world enthusiast’ arrives at the exhibition, they have probably seen close to 100 small shows in the form of individual booths dotted across several fairs. Perhaps a few more cohesive openings in Tribeca or Chinatown.

It would be safe to say these viewers have encountered 500 works of art, easily destroying any strong or certain idea about what world we exist in by the time we got to the show. Outside of Q-3, there was a different kind of crowd - dirtier and younger – some kids blowing smoke across the sidewalk, baseball caps with frayed edges – more cargo pant pockets than I care to recall – and the kind of Chinatown glitter that sees rhinestones all over everything – hats, tees, and teeth. Who is Problem Child Advisory? A seemingly ownerless, Instagram-centric sort of whose-who type of visual storytelling-based insights on art, whose niche (or populist) selection of internet artists draws an above-average crowd.

The first thing to grab my attention was a picture frame that looked like it had been made in an auto body shop, Diego Galbadon’s SPEEDFRAME (1,2, and 3) 2025 series. It was as if the people who made the car from Speed Racer had a side hustle in framing. Macho-centric, jacked-up accelerationist framing that appeals to both the consumer critical CSM graduate and the technocrat. Galbadon’s obsession with sport as ritual is reflected in the gargantuan architecture of his framing device, like a baroque baldachino.

I was moving a bit too quickly to actually stop in my tracks, but I did take a picture. Upon further inspection of the image, I realised it was a soccer game – or a rendering of one, with the words "DARE TO DO" spelt out by the fans in the crowd. It was a commentary on the sports industrial complex: the commemorative cups, the scarves, the sea of inevitable merch that comes with being at the top of your ‘field’. The most important part of this deluge of liquid merch is the container that holds it all together - a stadium. Like the football stadiums that accompany the most notable empires, the frame becomes this celebration of the work inside, a protector, a reminder, but most importantly, an indicator of value. V Q3.

The next attention grabber was a furless, silicone deer, covered in overlapping tattoos. Leif Jones, Bed Bugs Cure Laziness (Deer 1) 2025. A work which also appears on the cryptic Instagram account of its maker @leifffffffffffffffffffffff. The tattooed skin recalls a bad stick and poke given by friends - the sort of Instagram grid post to go triple platinum on drainer feeds.

The last work I’ll bring up is a painting I liked because of its transparency and honesty. Sleight of Hand 2025 by the artist In June Park. It was a simple airburst image of a few handshakes occurring simultaneously; it stood out as a reminder of forced exchanges. The art world is for rich white people – it is their playground, and we are all just here because of their ego. No matter how much we stylise or abstract the narrative, at the end of the day, the art world is about creating capital and moving it through various systems so it can accumulate value. Sleight of Hand alludes to the vectors of financial manipulation, but to its formal qualities: slight blurring, JPEG light texture, creating an impression of artists' increasing freedom through digitality.

All of the works in Q-3 can be categorized as "Net Art" - Problem Child Advisory surpasses the traditional gallery system - in a way - by sourcing artists outside of the network, defying the brick and mortar space, Sam Altman style. The works speak to each other through unfiltered internet language - this isn’t super flat - or digitality prematurely re-packaged as a movement, these are, and I quote, a purportedly “anti-establishment” and “anti-gate-kept” forms of art making.

Does this mean that if you see a work on the Problem Child Advisory Instagram, and like it, you can just purchase from the artist directly? Curating in works such as Sleight of Hand (2025) suggests that cutting out the middleman might be welcomed by the page. Would love to know if this is actually the case. Slide in our DM'S.

Correspondent Maria Juana dives into the "Saatchi Yates Rave", or the concept-store gallery's venture into the London underground. Marina gained acclaim for her psychologically terrorising performance art about state oppression, and now she's in the same line up as Fake Mink. If not exactly a net good, the event leant toward the absurd rather than the abyssal. God bless the dichotomy.

In London you either die a hero, or live long enough to put on an event. It seems that upon her return to the city, Marina Abramović has met the same fate. To initiate Saatchi Yates into her exhibiting repertoire, the help of the infamous, London-based collective Virus was enlisted. With its tenuous links to clubby acts on both sides of the Atlantic, I can't deny that my interest was piqued.

Marina is the kind of person I'll always have a soft spot for. Like an ex, or the celebrity crush of my teen years. Nothing awful they might do could ever truly negate how they once made me feel. I stood by her when she attempted to 'raise the vibration of Glastonbury' and consequently 'heal the world' in a custom Riccardo Tisci dress, and if these DJ rumours were true, fuck it, I'll stand by her now.

As my best friend aptly pointed out, we were witnessing "mixed-levels of swag." The well-to-do fashion kids stood in stark contrast with the abundance of quote-unquote 'normies.' Quirked-up women in their 40s and suited blokes in their late 30s lined up right alongside the London ravers and people who- if you squinted hard enough- had an instagram that hovered next to them like a ghostly and well-followed child. In fact, the whole night could have been Phillipa Snow's Trophy Lives: On the Celebrity as Art Object, adapted for a kinaesthetic learner.

As the night grew closer, the plot thinnened. There was still no lineup to be seen. Anyway: a black cab rolled up, and out stepped Marina herself. As the groups of shaggy-haired boys thrashed their not-so-quirky locks into a frenzy, I felt in the flattening flash of a fit pic, a not-quite-profound levelling of worlds.

I'd be lying if I said I didn't have fun - even if Marina didn't end up making her DJ debut. That said, rumours of Lady Gaga's presence in the collectors' room replenished the intrigue. As 11pm hit the clock and the normies dissipated, the real freaks could come out (and listen to LV Sandals). Just another night being on the cutting edge, I guess.

Actually though, the music was really good. The lineup justified itself, Wraith9, Mechatok and Charlie Osbourne tore. Free WhiteClaw on tap gave brief respite from the £16 doubles I'd drunkenly spent. And as I'd so desperately prayed, Marina's aura was left intact.

It’s not hard to see why the PR team took this particular route, as plastic surgery and culture-at-large bring Charli XCX and Abramovic closer and closer together. It makes sense in the meme-marketing landscape that has been cooked up in coked-out Shoreditch new-builds over the last few years. If the intention was to entice the younger ‘alt’ crowd into buying shit from Saatchi Yates, I think that falls flat - especially since some miscreant (allegedly) robbed one of the £1.8k prints. It becomes part of their larger project of art-as-clout-proximity/socially-mediated experience that the gallery are pushing through their buy-in membership system.

According to my elementary calculations, this exhibition would see a gross profit of £2.16m. This largely mystified night kicked off a mega-sale of her works- with 600 blue stills and 600 red stills up for grabs. It's a huge chunk of change to try and make in one go. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll know there’s a 2008-style financial bubble about to burst. From an outside financial perspective, it seems like Saatchi Yates’ diversification through their infamous membership scheme needs some interim revenue-smoothing. It’s typical crypto-mentality, applied to pop-culture: buy low and sell high. And get out before the bubble bursts.

Whilst New York Film Festival got swishly underway, our distinguished Milanese superstar cut her teeth with this write up of what might have been the roughest film festival I've ever heard of. Finding it to be a bit too straight-boy: less Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures, more poliziottescho, Holli Would says that you might wanna WIPE your hands after you leave Milan's Amateur film festival.

I want to meet the plug and I meet the plug.

Shortly, I’m half drunk in a taxi bound for a too-many-thousand-meters complex of abandoned offices turned into an artist-run liminal space which is actually patronised by some mysterious entities and led by people with seemingly little control. Most importantly, this space called Bim is far from everything but itself. I don’t go often. I've been literally twice including this one.

Despite the miles of distance we came to take part into this cultural momentum, when we arrive we’re not focused on the independent screening program being held outdoor as much as we are in the provisorily abandoned bar spot that we, just being there, vandalise. I feel people are annoyed by our too open disengagement and we’re annoyed by them judging us.

And so we sit and start watching, and soon enough this turns out to be a terrible idea.

It’s a short movie by Cane Morto, a trio of white Italian guys from (maybe) Geneva, who seem to both endorse and mock a bubbling cauldron of underground signifiers and languages. I feel a little embarrassed for them.

I check them on socials, and what I get is a disturbing level of multi-hyphenation. In what looks like their 16-post-grid chase for artistic recognition, Cane Morto have already done performances, painting shows, video works, public art commissions, organized drawing auctions, happenings… and the list goes on. But none of it seems to really grasp anything reletable, at least to me—and this, trust me, has nothing to do with their possibly being outsiders, naifs, or with whatever backdoor they might have used to get into this world.

I could just call it a case study in ridiculousness—they’re ridiculous amateurs rather than people who actually channel irony within their art practice—but what worries me is the hint of shortcuts being taken.

If anything, they give off an alarming “I-could-do-conceptual-art-too” vibe, like some rookie schoolboys that just want to conquer art—use it, squeeze it, put it to work like a capitalist machine, instead of even sitting down with her, giving her some time, talking with her.

I’m talking about the type of guys who think that they’re smarter than everyone else in the class, including the prof, and this faux belief blinds them to the point that, after the first months of course—maybe after a lesson on Duchamp—they think they’ve already hacked some secret, deep-seated logic behind conceptual art. Fueled by a certain dumb excitement, their little eureka moment convinced them that they can churn out tons of stuff that costs them little personally and can be produced at full speed: this is the conceptual work, this is the concept, the idea, the meaning, and you can multiply is as many times as you want.

Didn’t I deserve an A? Isn’t this how art works, prof?

I need a drink.

Right after, the video we came from far away to watch is finally being screened. Since before it starts, big noise is being made for Loris, Bernardino, and Tres Bones, the trio gravitating around a more expanded Milan-based videoart orbit—operating under the name of NoText Azienda—who, in some capacity, worked on this piece.

Under the lens of a trademark erosive colour treatment, a tough, indigestible story about an immigrant man scammed by his lawyer unfolds. The monologue, describing in first person the experience of the scammed one is poignant, and it keeps it brilliantly simple, it makes me feel the desperation, the hunger, and the praise for revenge, like it was blood in my mouth after I’ve bitten my tongue. It ends into an orgy of sex, abuse, and torture, inflicted to the scammed into the abandoned park of a Milanese suburb.

I stand up and cheer and scream and I couldn’t be more enthusiastic not only because of the coke. I'm so glad these atmospheres can still slip into art realms through those beloved backdoors.

Men dressed like Italian dandies, with 70s suits and haircuts and gelatine in their air, eating in squalid spots with their shirt open to show an hairy chest and a gold chain, bringing on stage their Califano-drama and the squalor of their existential conditions.

Let’s just no bullshit: despite the art world last-decade interest in the last ones, in the ones who lives at the margins, in the long-time misrepresented, these kind of subjects are too ugly, apparently even too virile, and their bad taste is too unredeemable, to be taken into account by Art. No matter how their condition actually is one of misery and crisis, no matter how this world is hurting them, chewing them and spit them on the asphalt.

Downtown New York's Baudelairean beauty has been canonized in Nan Goldin's photobooks, but Italy's national popular discos aren't the ones you'd find there. The poetry rippling through the wrinkles of these old guys ripped straight out of a Poliziotteschifilm resists that kind of canonisation.

The night ends in a bath of drugs, squalor, and misery, to the point that I feel kinda like one of those characters. The day after, a text from Bernardino thanks me for the kind words. I can’t remember those words, but I do believe them now more than I could ever.

ITALIAN TRANSLATION

Ennesimo mansplanning non richiesto né tantomeno necessario di ciò che la donna solitamente nasconde nelle mutande: senza scrupoli ma con tanti salvaslip, così leggiamo la nuova apertura firmata Thaddaeus Ropac a Milano, Sabato 20 Settembre.

Al di là del fatto che non una singola faccia fosse bella o gioiosa durante l’opening, forse data l’assenza di una qualunque bevanda alcolica presso il catering -composto da acqua naturale e succo di pesca- la nuova sede della rinomata galleria è presso Palazzo Belgioioso.

Da depliant, i due artisti dialogano su livelli molteplici nel corso della mostra ma, come sostiene il curatore Luca Massimo Barbero, in definitiva non sono legati da "una prossimità formale né da un'affinità di linguaggio, ma da una tensione condivisa. L'idea, cioè, che l'arte non rappresenti ma annunci, che non descriva ma evochi, che sia prima di tutto, un atto di apertura verso l’origine”. Non occorre una gran immaginazione per ricollegare la apertura al punto dove tutto ha origine, la vulva. Courbet lo sa meglio di chiunque altro. A quanto pare non è il solo.

Le pareti delle sale espositive sono un glory hole fatto e finito ma del resto ognuno ha i suoi gusti. Chi siamo noi per criticare?

Concetti Spaziali di ogni taglia e nazionalità, cavità violate tutte dalle lame di Fontana, che altrimenti non avrebbe venduto più una tela. Sex sells, when not consensual more. I numeri parlano, si invita consultare il sito XNXX.com e il prezzo di vendita di queste opere. Fortunatamente al piano secondo dell’edificio la mostra culmina aprendosi su un ufficio con tavolo, sedie e contratti d’acquisto: qui si ritiene più consona la categoria Anal.

“Woman written by a man”: un’autoreggente spaiata, un orecchino d’oro, un tubino nero con glitter e in ultimo una gomma da masticare Big Bubble che una puttana ha portato a passeggio una nottata intera sotto il tacco a spillo; questo rosa shocking porta il titolo La Fine di Dio (1963) e ci piacerebbe questo Dio fosse il maschilismo.

Nostro alleato Baselitz appende uomini a testa in giù con una tavolozza scrupolosa di bianchi, neri, gialli e rosa. Tutto gli si può rinfacciare meno che il non essere inclusivo, difatti da bravo contemporaneo a colazione mangia cancel culture. E gli uomini appena citati, da titoli, sono in realtà donne, una, Rosa Riposa (2019).

Scrupoloso Georg lo è anche in ritratti espliciti come Ohne Titel del 2024, un inchiostro rosso su carta di una signorina che si copre il sesso. Come biasimarla; l’eccezione che conferma la regola e se ne compiace. Lui non mette titolo perché è senza parole come “non ogni uomo, ma quasi”, davanti al rifiuto.

Un Arlecchino (1950) in terracotta, al servizio dell’amore fa capolino da dietro un arco; sproniamo a far riferimento all’immagine per cogliere suggerite assonanze che purtroppo scadono sempre nel monotematico. Noi dovremmo forse fare di rimando psicoterapia, freudiana. E un test STD.

Lasciando l’edificio, un rivolo di scale foderate di rosso. L’Aurora Viene è il nome dato all’esposizione; se questa Aurora fa riferimento al flusso mestruale, stringo la mano al sig. Barbero. È quel periodo del mese, ma non si preoccupi, come parecchi curatori al giorno d’oggi ho la buona abitudine di lavarmene le mani.

Osservando il palazzo dal cortile, vicino all’entrata una grande scultura fallica, il primo uomo in mezzo a tante donne. Solleva vedere come quantomeno ci avessero avvertito: che fosse una mostra del cazzo era in introduzione, quella che viene spesso saltata nella lettura. Si può dire di questo opening che è un vero e proprio salto della quaglia e di noi che l’abbiamo scampata bella, amiche!

ENGLISH TRANSLATION

Yet another unsolicited, let alone unecessary, example of mansplaining about what women usually hide in their underwear: without scruples, yet so many pantyliners, this is how we must understand the opening by Thaddeus Ropac's in Milan.

The new location of the renowned gallery is at Palazzo Belgioioso (trans. beautiful and happy face building)- despite this fact, everyone looked ugly and unhappy- perhaps due to the lack of alcoholic beverages during the function.

According to the brochure, the two artists engage in dialogue on multiple levels throughout the exhibition but, as curator Luca Massimo Barbero argues, 'The idea is that it the art is first and foremost an act of openness towards the origin’.

It doesn't take much imagination to connect this opening to the vulva. Courbet knows this better than anyone. Apparently, he's not the only one.

The brash masculinity of this 'act of openness', however, turned the exhibition into a glory hole. And anyway, to each his own.

Concetti Spaziali of all sizes and nationalities, cavities violated by Fontana's blades, who otherwise would not have sold another canvas. Sex sells, when not consensual, even more so. The numbers speak for themselves; please consult X.Videos to see the selling price of these works.
Fortunately, on the second floor of the building, the exhibition culminates in an office with a table, chairs and purchase contracts: here, the Anal category is considered more appropriate.

“Woman written by a man” : an unpaired stocking, a gold earring, a little black dress with glitter and, lastly, a piece of Big Bubble chewing gum that a bitch wore all night long under her stiletto heel; this shocking pink piece is entitled La Fine di Dio (The End of God, 1963) and we would like this God-ending to be male chauvinism.

Our ally Baselitz hangs men upside down with a meticulous palette of whites, blacks, yellows and pinks. He can be accused of anything but not being inclusive; in fact, like any good contemporary artist, he eats cancel culture for breakfast. And the men just mentioned in the titles are actually women, one of whom is Rosa Riposa (2019).

Georg is also meticulous in explicit portraits such as Ohne Titel from 2024, a red ink on paper portrait of a young woman covering her genitals. How can we blame her? She is the exception that proves the rule and is pleased with it. He does not give it a title because he is speechless, like “not every man, but almost”, in the face of rejection.

A terracotta Arlecchino (1950), in the service of love, peeks out from behind an arch; we invite you to consult the image for suggested similarities that unfortunately always end up being monothematic. Perhaps we should refer to a Freudian psychotherapist. And take an STD test.

Leaving the building, a trickle of red-lined stairs. L’Aurora Viene is the name given to the exhibition; if this Aurora refers to menstrual flow, I shake Mr Barbero's hand. It's that time of the month, but don't worry, like many curators nowadays, I have the good habit of washing my hands of it.

Observing the building from the courtyard, near the entrance is a large phallic sculpture, the first man among many women. It's good to see that at least they warned us: it's a dick of an exhibition.

We can say that this opening was a close call and that we got off lightly, my girl-friends!

July 12 — September 6
2025

The apparatus of Her Selected Works struck me: railings holding the artworks and the postcards on the rack display as you walk in. They kind of carried the show.

I was under the impression that the works on show were a part of Carlotta’s “collection”. I.e. She was a collector and the works she had purchased were a product of her taste. The curatorial angle is that these are works which could have been collected and kept in storage, so their arrangement is like a hide-and-seek of meaning. As a curator, these works are still, invariably, part of her taste - but it would have been a relief to know that some kind of circular economy existed between the chic state-funded central european art world and the significantly less financially supported London artistic circuit. It would be great if this exhibition signalled that some kind of a) collecting and b) economic transfer had taken place. Gave the vibe of the scene in Tenet (2020) where he breaks into the tax-free hyper-secure non-dom art storage facility. Untaxable offshore funds.

Andreas Schmid’s work Figure Nr 1, 2025 was a highlight: a conttraposto cubist figure whose frame is constructed from various watercoloured ovals is painted on antique card. Schmid constructed a frame for the card, akin to an Ilizarov apparatus, which holds the folds upright with brass poles and screws. Daniel Zeballos’ it’s dark train of thought with too many carriages, 2025 a fine graphite drawing on torn paper, has been seemingly drawn, then torn and re-assembled. This play between material, texture and tromp l’eoil is also present in Gritli Faulhaber’s Ohne Titel (La Solitaire, Zitronengelb) (2024) where 70’s wallpaper-appliqué surrounds the silhouette of a 1920’s flapper. The work was previously shown as part of Les Garçonnes at Gauli Zitter, Brussels, where I think it was better served, contextualised by Faulhaber’s other paintings that muse on the relationship between decorative pattern and depiction of the human form, ala Alois Riegl.

A Deconstructed archive-on-display-type-beat is very cool but actually super hard to execute in principle, especially if the works displayed form a cat and mouse of meaning that is not ever fully deciphered. It would have been great to have some more presence - even heavy handed - from the eponymous "collector".

Kern Samuel, Rough Draft, 12 July–6 September, 2025

If this was a review based upon taste - the show would not score so high. But actually, its hard to fault. Soft Opening‘s curation and programming tend to be pretty exquisite, boasting a museum-level attention to detail that smaller/newer galleries itend to overlook.

No one would forget the catwalk-like structure built for Gina Fischli’s April 2024 show, Love Love Love, or the stainless steel industrial floating frames that housed Maren Karlson’s ectoplasmic graphite drawings for Staub, Storeng. At Soft Opening, it is usually a “no notes” situation, which cannot be said for everyone in the clean-goth-come-gallerist circuit.

In Rough Draft two stretches of stitched canvas hang in the centre of the gallery. Bars and Blocks (Janky Hankies) (L) and ® droops onto the floor three-quarters down, the underside of their stitched panelling clearly on display. You can examine up close Samuel’s building of patchy coloured canvas, sometimes bleached, sometimes block colour. One half of the title, “Janky Hankies” refers to the colour-coded signalling system popular in West Village gay communities of the 70s and 80s. It could mean “top” or “bottom” or - according to Bob Damron’s Address Book (1980) key sexual information:

Left Worn Brown Bandanna = Scat Top

Left Worn Mustard Bandana = Has an 8” plus

Legible at the edge of (R) and (L) is a faint imprint of the artist's foot. Is this historical, homo-social colour coding, paired with his bodily imprint, a biographical component (personal or otherwise).

(R) and (L) imitate strip quilting—a form of piecework quilting originating in Gee’s Bend, Alabama, which was pioneered by a community isolated by systemic racism. In Gee’s Bend, compositions were fabricated using salvage cloth, ultimately resulting in arrangements that rejected both convention and symmetry. Rather than following pre-existing patterns, Gee’s Bend quiltmakers group their works into categories: ‘Abstraction & Improvisation’, ‘Pattern & Geometry’, ‘Housetop & Bricklayer’, ‘Lazy Gal’ and ‘Work Clothes’ - Samuel’s title “Bars and Blocks” references this arrangement.

Samuel builds on the idea of fabric as an everyday communicator of repressed codes, sexual or otherwise…fabric as an identifier, a symbol, an illicit message. Even the display of ® and (L) imitates a code of the past - each spring, the quiltmakers of Gee's Bend would “air the quilts” as a way of exhibiting an otherwise private, domestic object.

In 9 Lives a wall drawing of a nonagon is filled with nine other nonagons in various shades of green chalk. The sketchy wall drawing contributes to the relevance of the exhibition's moniker, Rough Drafts, but also mimics a talisman, beacon, or mural. Hence, I guess, the hermetic reference. The number Nine is also a magic alchemical number which, according to the press release, apparently harnesses “the ephemeral nature of site specificity to enact a tension between resolution and transition”. Gee’s Bend Quiltmakers and alchemy: that’s the esoteric art-history knowledge holy grail.

The pièce de résistance of the show was 3 Stacks. Thirty stacks of brown, well-handled A4 sheets were placed upon a custom-built timber desk, each containing a variety of diagrams, collages, marks and a biscuit in its wrapped labelled "DIA COOKIE". It resembled a children’s workspace, or Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne if he went to steiner school. The nïave, or frantic, gestures of 9 Lives are echoed in the pieces installation. As the night went on the papers found themselves increasingly scattered across the floor. Leafing through these pages felt strangely utilitarian —the opposite of the usual East End gallery space filled with unattainable concepts. Samuel’s work makes me feel like I'm lying on a quilt and catching the stitches with my hands.

3 Stacks has the feeling of rummaging loosely through papers with little purpose other than to feel them flutter.

I wish that all objects had been able to be touched, as quilts are intended. Call me craft centric.