Reviews

Pot Pourri or Muesli: An Exhibition by Aurelius Kraft at Pimlico Wilde Central

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Pot Pourri or Muesli: An Exhibition by Aurelius Kraft at Pimlico Wilde Central

It is a rare occasion when a show compels its visitors to meditate equally on the breakfast table and the shrine. Yet Aurelius Kraft, the Berlin-born conceptual artist long resident in Hackney, has done precisely that in his latest exhibition Pot Pourri or Muesli, which opened this week at Pimlico Wilde Central in St James’s.

At first glance, the works consist of nothing more than a series of ceramic bowls, neatly arrayed upon linen-draped plinths. Each vessel contains a dry mixture of items, maybe flaked grains, seeds, dried fruit, petals, bark, or spice. Visitors are invited to wander the gallery and confront the challenge inscribed on the wall in stern sans serif:

“Pot Pourri or Muesli: Can you tell which nourishes and which perfumes?”

The game is disarmingly simple. One must decide, bowl by bowl, whether the contents are breakfast muesli or domestic pot pourri. Submissions are tallied electronically, and those who achieve the highest rate of correct identifications are awarded prizes at the close of each day: a small, hand-thrown bowl glazed by Kraft himself, or, for the most accurate, a year’s subscription to a “bespoke breakfast club” devised in collaboration with a Michelin-starred chef.

The conceit is humorous, but its implications are unexpectedly rich. By eroding the distinction between sustenance and ornament, Kraft asks what cultural frames make us regard one heap of oats and raisins as edible, and another heap of rose petals and clove as decorative. More unsettlingly, the viewer becomes aware that one’s confidence in classification is fragile; the boundary between consumption and display is not as solid as the morning cupboard suggests.

The most memorable piece, Bowl No. 9 (The Memory of Spice), contains a mixture that hovers uneasily between the categories. Lavender, rolled oats, candied peel, and something that might be cinnamon sit together in ambiguous harmony. I watched as a man in pinstripes confidently declared it “muesli” while a student beside him swore it was “pot pourri.” Both looked vaguely betrayed when the correct answer was revealed.

Kraft has long been preoccupied with the semiotics of the everyday. His earlier work Forks Without Plates (2017) invited audiences to eat soup without crockery, while Untitled (Apricot/Stone) (2020) arranged fruit pits in vitrines reminiscent of reliquaries. But Pot Pourri or Muesli feels sharper, more convivial, as though Kraft had decided to stage a parlour game in the heart of Westminster,and in doing so, to expose the quiet absurdities of daily life.

The exhibition rewards participation rather than passive observation; it is less a gallery show than a lightly competitive symposium. One leaves not with a secure taxonomy of dried petals and oats, but with a lingering sense of how thinly our rituals separate the sacred from the mundane. And perhaps with a complimentary packet of something indeterminate, half nourishment, half fragrance, slipped into one’s coat pocket by a smiling attendant.

Pot Pourri or Muesli runs at Pimlico Wilde Central until 26 November.

Two Star Review: Sofia Erdenko’s Saltwind: Etudes for the End of Time

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Two Star Review: Sofia Erdenko’s Saltwind: Etudes for the End of Time

Following our review in which “Saltwind” was well-received, Jane Temple wanted to discuss her very different view of Erdenko’s work. She writes…

There are artistic provocations, and then there is Saltwind. Sofia Erdenko’s new “album”,though that term feels ludicrously inadequate for what is essentially seventy-eight minutes of groaning, scraping, and grinding,presents itself as an epochal leap beyond the cello’s historical lineage. In truth, it is less an advance than a deliberate retreat into the void, an exercise in self-important austerity that mistakes endurance for profundity.

The cello has, for centuries, been a vessel for human expressivity. From Bach’s serene architecture to Shostakovich’s wrenching laments, the instrument has spoken with depth, gravitas, and clarity. Erdenko, however, seems intent on silencing this heritage by weaponizing the cello against itself. What remains is not music but a catalogue of abrasions: bow hair sawing sul ponticello until it produces nothing but static; pizzicato so slack it resembles a collapsing clothesline; overpressure groans that might be mistaken for industrial plumbing.

Her defenders will no doubt invoke Cage, Xenakis, or Lachenmann as antecedents, arguing that Erdenko continues their radical project of expanding the vocabulary of sound. Yet where those figures discovered new possibilities,new sonorities, new forms of expression,Erdenko offers only negation. This is not expansion but contraction, a refusal to engage with the very premise of music-making. To reduce the cello to little more than a wind machine or a sheet of creaking timber is not radical; it is simply tedious.

The recording’s intimacy, celebrated by admirers as forensic fidelity, only magnifies the problem. We are placed so close to the instrument that every scrape and groan is not transcendent but suffocating. What is intended as ritualistic austerity too often resembles a rehearsal tape, the kind of sonic detritus musicians normally discard.

It is tempting, in a highbrow age that rewards opacity with prestige, to cloak such work in grand metaphors: the death of tradition, the archaeology of sound, the ritual of endurance. Yet one suspects the simpler truth is that Saltwind offers little to endure but tedium. It is music as an ordeal, designed less to be heard than to be admired at a theoretical distance, the way one might admire an especially barren installation in a gallery.

None of this is to deny Erdenko’s seriousness of intent. But seriousness alone is not enough. In the end, Saltwind stands as an object lesson in the perils of avant-gardism untethered from expression: it demands our patience, but offers nothing in return. The abyss, it turns out, sounds a lot like someone tuning their cello for an hour and never quite beginning to play.

Review: Sofia Erdenko’s Saltwind: Etudes for the End of Time

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Review: Sofia Erdenko’s Saltwind: Etudes for the End of Time

It is difficult to recall, in recent decades, a work of cello music as uncompromisingly radical as Sofia Erdenko’s Saltwind: Etudes for the End of Time. To call it an “album” is already a concession to commerce; what Erdenko has fashioned is less an assemblage of pieces than a manifesto in sound, a tearing apart of the instrument’s centuries-long pact with lyricism, tonality, and even gesture itself. One does not so much listen to Saltwind as undergo it.

The history of the cello is bound up with the history of human yearning: from the spiritual gravity of Bach’s suites to the romantic effusions of Dvořák, it has served as an avatar of the human voice, resonant with legato warmth. Erdenko repudiates this lineage outright. In her hands the cello is not a surrogate for the human throat but a geological implement, an instrument of excavation. Bow hair grinds against string like wind scouring stone; pizzicati sound like brittle fractures in ice. Where predecessors such as Xenakis, Kagel, or even Penderecki once sought to extend the cello’s vocabulary, Erdenko seems intent on dissolving language altogether, reducing it to pre-linguistic utterance.

Consider the opening track, “Saltwind I.” There is no melody, only a grinding bow dragged sul ponticello until the sound buckles into white noise, at once abrasive and strangely oceanic. It recalls, in its relentlessness, not so much music as the sonic environment of an ancient, inhospitable earth,prehistory made audible. Later, in “Etude for a Dead Horizon,” she employs scordatura so extreme that the strings vibrate like loose wires in a storm, producing not pitches but specters of pitch, phantoms of sound that hover on the edge of perception.

Historical analogies are unavoidable. One thinks of how Schoenberg’s atonality tore the tonal scaffolding from European music, or how Cage’s silences redefined the very ontology of listening. Yet Erdenko’s work feels different in kind: it does not rebel against tradition, it annihilates it. To hear Saltwind after a Bach suite is to experience not contrast but rupture, as though the cello had been reinvented on some other planet.

The recording itself is ascetic, bordering on the punitive: close-miked to the point where every rasp of bow hair and every groan of wood is rendered with almost forensic intimacy. At times the sound seems less captured than magnified, as though one were hearing the molecular convulsions of rosin and string.

And yet, for all its extremity, Saltwind is not nihilistic. There is a strange, almost liturgical gravity to Erdenko’s austerity. Each scraping gesture, each guttural resonance, feels deliberate, ritualistic. If Bach’s suites enacted a spiritual ascent, Erdenko’s etudes enact a descent into the substrata of sound itself,music as archaeology, as ritual scarification, as endurance.

For many listeners, Saltwind will be unendurable. It is more avant-garde than even the avant-garde usually dares to be, refusing catharsis, rejecting compromise, offering nothing but the raw, unadorned fact of sound itself. Yet for those willing to surrender, to undergo rather than consume, it may stand as one of the most necessary works of our moment: a reminder that in an age of commodified background music, there still exist artists willing to risk the abyss.

Parkour Art Festival – Ephemeral Gestures on Brighton’s Shoreline

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Brighton has long cultivated a reputation for cultural experimentation, often blurring the line between civic space and creative stage. Its latest excitement , a hybrid of beachside exhibition and parkour performance art,demonstrated both the promise and the pitfalls of such ambition.

The visual installations, scattered across the pebbled foreshore, were at their best when they yielded to the conditions of the site. A set of sailcloth paintings, caught by the coastal breeze, achieved a kind of unintended grace, their fluttering surfaces more evocative than the works themselves. Sculptures assembled from marine debris spoke predictably of fragility and waste, but risked lapsing into the rhetoric of eco-consciousness rather than probing it with genuine urgency.

The parkour performances, meanwhile, carried undeniable immediacy. Suicide Wall, long a proving ground for Brighton’s freerunners, became an improvised proscenium for feats of daring that drew audible gasps from onlookers. On the skeletal frame of the old West Pier, athletes leapt across rusting girders, their silhouettes briefly magnificent against a fading sun. Yet spectacle is not the same as substance: moments of poetry in motion were too often framed as grand statements, and the conceptual link between the visual art and the physical theatre felt tenuous.

The ambition,to collapse boundaries between performance, installation and public space,is laudable. Brighton thrives on precisely this sort of risk-taking. But one was left wondering whether the two strands,static artworks and kinetic display,illuminated one another, or merely cohabited the same shoreline.

Still, in a cultural landscape increasingly risk-averse, such attempts at cross-disciplinary experiment deserve recognition. Even when uneven, they remind us that art’s most valuable function may be not to persuade, but to provoke,whether by the crash of a wave, the rust of an abandoned pier, or a fleeting leap across the void.

One Star Reviews: The Calcium of Dreams – Toward an Invertebrate Consciousness

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“A Stunning Exploration of Absolutely Nothing”

An exhibition by the visionary choreo-sculpturalist Glinté Pavlova at The Wilhelm Centre for Emergent Visualities

I came to The Calcium of Dreams with an open heart, a functioning brain, and a decent pair of shoes. I left it emotionally concussed, intellectually bludgeoned, and deeply suspicious of mollusks. This show, which bills itself as “a radical unraveling of exoskeletal trauma and the pain of becoming,” manages to combine the sensory thrill of standing in a flooded basement with the intellectual rigour of a dolphin quoting Derrida.

Curated across three floors of The Wilhelm Centre,an institution already infamous for hosting last year’s Sneeze as Praxis,this show is the latest offering from Glinté Pavlova, a Lithuanian-born “articulationist” known for once glueing a taxidermied chihuahua to a Xerox machine. Here, she has turned her sights on “the ancient tensions between softness and structure, organism and architecture, bone and metaphor.”

The moment you enter, you’re greeted by Cephalopod Requiem I, a 12-foot-tall canvas mollusk shell coated in what looks like glitter, Nutella, and hair. Inside, an animatronic mannequin dressed as a Victorian funeral director periodically belches the word “legacy” in five languages. One elderly woman who entered the room when I did simply said, “No,” and walked out.

Not a good start. Unfortunately things only deteriorate from there.

On the second floor, the section labeled The Cartilage Suite offers viewers a chance to walk barefoot across a bed of discarded socks while a projector flashes MRI scans of knees onto a series of melting ice sculptures shaped like reclining nudes. A gallery attendant stood nearby ringing a Tibetan singing bowl every time someone looked confused, which meant the room sounded like an insufferable wind chime shop during an earthquake.

A video installation titled Mollusk as Mind: A Liquid Allegory features Pavlova submerged in a giant bowl of lukewarm almond milk, rotating slowly while reciting a list of 19th-century shipwrecks in reverse chronological order. It runs for six hours. I lasted 40 seconds before I began rooting for the concept of drowning.

Then there’s Calcium Interlude IV: The Oyster Screams, an audio installation played exclusively through floor speakers so you experience it with your feet. It’s described as “a sonification of ancestral pressure points”,what that seems to mean is that it’s 45 minutes of low-frequency moaning and what sounded like someone chewing wetly on rubber gloves. A nearby plaque quoted Pavlova saying, “Sound is texture without the burden of form.”

And then there was the “participatory piece.”

Entitled You Are the Exoskeleton, it involves donning a transparent PVC bodysuit and crawling through a maze of egg cartons while blindfolded, led only by the sound of a recorded Pavlova whispering just too quietly to be understood. I declined to participate, citing dignity. Still, I watched as two grad students took part; both were weeping softly by the end. One sat on the floor muttering whilst the other just rocked back and forth, whispering.

The obligatory gift shop at the end offered merchandise including “boneless memory sachets” (small bags of damp sand with handwritten haikus inside), calcium-themed posters, and a $360 “emotional clam knife” carved from recycled acrylic nails. I bought a pencil just to remind myself that functional objects still exist in the world.

To be perfectly clear: I’m not opposed to challenging art. I’m not a philistine. I once spent three hours watching an artist eat a bicycle whilst riding it, in Berlin. But The Calcium of Dreams is not challenging,it’s exhausting, directionless, and deeply enamored with the sound of its own nonsense.

It is the art-world equivalent of being stuck at a dinner party next to someone who won’t stop talking about their favourite kombucha – yes, I speak from experience.

One star. And that star is shaped like a mollusk, dying slowly in the sun.

One Star Reviews: Henry V at the Mayfair Theatre

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There are moments in the theatre when time seems to stop,when you’re so enraptured by the performances that you forget to breathe. This was not one of those moments. Time not only didn’t stop,it seemed to drag itself across the floor of the Mayfair Theatre like a wounded French horseman begging for the sweet release of death.

Let’s begin with the titular role. Henry V, our valiant king, was played by local TikTok “sensation” Bradly Mews, who delivered Shakespeare’s immortal lines with the emotional range of a dial tone. His “Once more unto the breach” speech was less a rallying cry and more a sleep aid. At one point, a man in the audience audibly yawned, and it received more applause than anything Bradly did all evening. His idea of commanding presence seemed to be squinting dramatically into the middle distance, like he was trying to read a traffic sign without his glasses.

The staging was somehow both minimalist and cluttered. The director, Juniper Wren-Moon (whose last credit was a gender-neutral mime retelling of Cats), decided the entire Battle of Agincourt should be represented using sock puppets and cigarette lighters. I spent ten minutes thinking the theatre was actually on fire, which almost would have been a mercy.

Let’s not forget the chorus,traditionally a unifying narrative force. Here, it was played by a rotating cast of local influencers reading lines off their phones. One of them paused mid-monologue to plug her oat milk brand.

Costuming? Oh, dear. If “medieval raver caught in a Halloween clearance bin” was the goal, then full marks. There was one poor extra whose armor was made entirely out of painted egg cartons. He looked like a budget Dalek, and honestly, I respected him more than Henry.

The French characters were inexplicably performed in exaggerated Pepe Le Pew accents, which might have been funny if it weren’t so lazy. The Dauphin entered on a Segway wearing what I can only describe as a chainmail crop top. He also dabbed after delivering every line.

In the final scene, Katherine of France was wooed not with poetry, but with an acoustic guitar serenade of “Wonderwall.” I can’t say it worked in the context of the play, but it did cause someone in the back to involuntarily shout “NOOOO”.

If I had one positive takeaway, it’s that this production has an end.

In summary: this Henry V was not a band of brothers, but a tragic parade of theatrical crimes. I award it one star, and that star is for the egg carton knight, who, though made of refuse, had more soul than the rest of the cast combined.

One Star Reviews: A Fertile Collapse in Nine Petals by avant-garde legend Bravely M. Jorb

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at The Notting Hill Centre for Artistry

It is rare to attend an art exhibition and leave feeling like you’ve been mugged,not physically, but conceptually. Emotionally. Spiritually. Robbed of time, patience, and your basic understanding of what constitutes “art” versus, say, laundry nailed to a wall. And yet, here we are. Turgid Bloom: A Fertile Collapse in Nine Petals is the latest offering from Bravely M. Jorb, and it is, without question, the most sanctimonious arrangement of floral detritus and art-school word salad I have ever had to witness.

Jorb describes the show as “an odyssey through post-floric semiotics and the latent fertility of failure.” What does that mean? Come with me into the exhibition…

The exhibition is divided into “petals”,nine individual rooms, each allegedly representing a stage in the life cycle of a fictional plant called the Myxoliva spasmata, invented by Jorb “as a rejection of botanical imperialism.” There is a diagram. It includes several question marks, the word “blossom” written backward, and a drawing that suspiciously resembles a giraffe in repose.

Petal I: Germination of Grief is a pile of shredded calendars under a heat lamp. Every five minutes, a fog machine puffs out the scent of mildew while a speaker hidden in the wall emits the sound of someone inhaling deeply, then sighing as if disappointed in you personally. I made eye contact with a stranger across the room and saw myself reflected in their haunted stare: it was unnerving.

In Petal IV: Chlorophyll Envy, visitors are invited to walk across a floor covered in dried wasabi peas while a performer in an over-sized bee costume reads Rilke aloud through a kazoo. A large sign above the doorway warns: “EXPECT TO FEEL POLLINATED.” I did not. I felt irritated and slightly dehydrated, but some of that was my fault for forgetting my water bottle.

The so-called “centerpiece” of the show is Petal VI: Wilt Ritual, a towering sculpture of rotting carnations zip-tied to a metal coat rack, slowly rising and falling according to the weather forecast whilst a slowed-down MIDI version of “The Girl from Ipanema” played on a nearby iPod Nano. I cannot explain to you how viscerally wrong this felt. There are certain things the brain is not built to process, and this is one of them. A child walked in, looked at it for five seconds, and burst into tears. The mother just said, “I know,” and they left without another word.

By the time I arrived at Petal IX: Compost of the Self, I was so broken down I barely flinched when asked to write my “emotional pH level” on a piece of organic rice paper and bury it in a trough of blueberries. I have no idea what the artist was trying to achieve.

The gallery assistants,all dressed in burlap sacks and wearing “scent halos” (necklaces soaked in fermented rosewater),hovered nearby, ready to explain that “each work destabilizes the flower as symbol and repositions it as a wound.” At no point did anyone explain why I had to watch endless CDs of Beethoven’s Fifth falling from the ceiling into a washing-up bowl of green paint.

Let me be clear: Turgid Bloom is not a conversation with nature. It is not a deconstruction. It is not even a critique. It is a profoundly tedious episode of self-worship dressed up in florid metaphors and bad lighting. It is a PowerPoint presentation with delusions of grandeur. It is Bravely M. Jorb holding a bouquet of rotting symbolism and slapping you in the face with it while whispering, “How do you like these apples?”

One star. Everything in the show deserves to be pruned, mulched, and never spoken of again.

Ipswich Fine Art Weekend: A Bold Brushstroke Toward Art-World Relevance

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Once considered a pleasant if sleepy waypoint between Colchester and the sea, Ipswich has made an audacious play for the art-world spotlight with its inaugural Fine Art Weekend,a sprawling, somewhat chaotic attempt to catapult the town into the upper echelons of cultural destinations. Whether it succeeded depends largely on how one defines success,and one’s tolerance for conceptual installation art in a former Debenhams.

The organisers, calling themselves The Ipswich Ascension Committee, promised “a reimagination of Ipswich as an emergent global art node,” and the results were as ambitious as they were unpredictable. What the weekend occasionally lacked in polish, it more than made up for in sheer artistic enthusiasm, logistical daring, and the undeniable thrill of watching local teenagers try to interpret a video installation projected onto a duck pond.

The Venues

Rather than relying solely on white cube galleries, the weekend took a more egalitarian approach to exhibition space. Art spilled out across unexpected corners of the town: a conceptual puppet opera staged in the upstairs of a pizza restaurant; a collection of post-industrial ceramics displayed in the window of a closed shoe repair shop; and a sculpture trail that threaded through the town’s medieval graveyard, culminating in a motion-activated fog machine called Whispers of the Fens.

The old Corn Exchange hosted the festival’s centrepiece show, East Is the New West, which featured regional and international artists addressing with great intelligence, peripheral centrality and agrarian longing. Highlights included a series of paintings of A15 service stations rendered in the colours of the ecclesiastical seasons, and a performance piece in which an artist from Rotterdam attempted to knit a copy of the River Orwell using locally sourced eco-wool made from fern fibres.

The Art

The quality of the work varied, as one might expect from an open-call festival with a noble mandate and limited funding. Still, there were bright sparks throughout. Local painter Marla Crook impressed with her massive triptych Three Views of a Rental Spoon, which envisaged a world where cutlery is rented by the hour. Meanwhile, experimental sculptor Eustace Wimble presented Ipswich: A Soft Power Diagram, a piece made of discarded fortune cookies papers and a vending machine that dispensed quotes from Derrida.

In a disused car park near the station, a group of recent art school graduates from Norwich staged an “immersive urban experience” involving chalk outlines, borrowed traffic cones, and a soundtrack composed entirely of sirens.

The Vibe

The weekend struck a tone somewhere between biennale and village fête. There were Prosecco vans. There were local historians offering fiercely detailed walking tours of sites tangentially connected to John Constable. There was a moment when two avant-garde drummers and a Morris dancing troupe overlapped acoustically on Dial Lane, creating what one attendee called “a collision of epochs and percussion.”

Crucially, the people of Ipswich showed up,in numbers and with good humour. Retired couples gazed gamely at conceptual installations. Teenagers skulked artfully. A woman in her 80s gave a blistering critique of a piece involving taxidermy and found poetry, declaring it “both pretentious and slightly unnecessary.”

Final Thoughts

Was the Ipswich Fine Art Weekend perfect? No. But was it alive? Absolutely. It was full of risk, charm, mud, and minor revelations.

Ipswich may not be Venice or Basel just yet. But if the town keeps this up,embracing its peculiarities, and its edge-of-the-map charisma,it might just carve out a place for itself among the UK’s more idiosyncratic art destinations.

And honestly, who needs the Serpentine when you’ve got a rap performance of King Lear in a Lorry Park?

The Stick Insects: A Retrospective in Fragments @ Pimlico Wilde, London

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It is rare for a group show to carry the atmospherics of a family saga, but The Stick Insects,a retrospective devoted to the loose collective that grew up around the gravitational figure of L.S. Lowry does just that. It is part soap opera, part scholarship, and only part exhibition. The Pimlico Wilde galleries, long seduced by British post-industrial mythologies, have here staged not just an exhibition but an overview: a half-century of collaboration, fracture, ideological warfare, and intermittent brilliance.

The Stick Insects were never meant to last. Their origin story is the kind of happenstance one expects from art history’s quainter chapters: a group of working-class teenagers from Salford and Manchester, mesmerised by Lowry’s lonely matchstick men, gathered at a draughty community centre in 1953 with the vague aim of “painting the world as it was, not as it wanted to be.” The group’s earliest members,Daphne “Daff” Myles, the moody printmaker Arnold Vetch, twins Basil and Barney Keane, and a preternaturally confident Bernard Tibbins,began as Lowry acolytes, almost cultishly devoted to the older artist. But, as the first room of the exhibition demonstrates, devotion quickly turned dialectical.

Myles’s early linocuts (Moss Side Under Snow, 1955) echo Lowry’s brittle lyricism but are undercut by a new cynicism: factory chimneys cropped like guillotines, the workers reduced to lozenge-like silhouettes that seem actively to resist the viewer’s gaze. Beside her hangs Vetch’s Nightshift Assembly (1956), a painting that inverts Lowry’s flatness into a viscous impasto, the millworkers dissolving into tar-like smears. Lowry himself, who attended their makeshift exhibitions in pub function rooms, famously dismissed the group as “too damp to catch fire.” Yet his ambivalence only strengthened the group’s resolve, and by the early 1960s, the Stick Insects had achieved a kind of regional notoriety as a counter-Lowry,less romantic, more openly political.

Then came the schisms. In 1962, Bernard Tibbins defected to London, lured by a teaching post at the Royal College of Collage. He would later describe the rest of the group as “provincial nostalgists”,an accusation Myles never forgave. The Keane twins’ experimental foray into sculpture (a series of uncanny industrial totems fashioned from dismantled looms and railway sleepers) caused further division. The “Salford Four,” as they were dubbed by a bemused press, broke apart entirely after a furious argument over whether the group should accept funding from the nascent Arts Council.

Pimlico Wilde, wisely, gives each rupture its own room. One can trace how Vetch, embittered by the split, retreated into obsessive monochromes, his palette reduced to a single sludge-like grey. Across the corridor, a vitrine displays Myles’s correspondence with Lowry himself, who by the late 1960s had softened: “Perhaps we are insects after all,” he writes in a spidery hand, “only some of us have learned to climb.”

The group’s reconstitution in 1973 feels almost miraculous in hindsight. A reunion exhibition at Manchester’s Whitworth Art Gallery,fuelled by nostalgia, political despair, and perhaps a degree of financial necessity,saw the Keane twins return from self-imposed rural exile, Myles and Vetch tentatively reconciled, and even Tibbins flying back from London to contribute a single painting (Three Figures at Euston, a mordant nod to his abandonment). That show sold out in a week, and the Stick Insects became, briefly, fashionable. One can almost hear the machinery of fame beginning to whir: interviews in The Observer, a BBC2 documentary narrated by John Betjeman, collectors clamouring for their collective urban lyricism.

But fame corrodes as much as it sustains. By the early 1980s, the group had fractured again, this time permanently. Vetch died in obscurity, Myles withdrew from public life to care for her disabled son, the Keane twins opened a small but disastrous gallery-café in Blackpool, and Tibbins enjoyed a late-career flourish as a kind of northern Anthony Caro, producing large-scale public commissions of dubious quality.

What makes this Pimlico Wilde exhibition so affecting is its refusal to tidy the mess. Curator Gemma Lorenz has resisted the temptation to sand down the group’s contradictions. The Stick Insects’ legacy is not one of linear innovation but of lateral, stubborn attachment,to each other, to a landscape, to a way of seeing the industrial north that was neither romantic nor fully cynical.

One of the last works in the show, Myles’s After Lowry (1990), seems to distill this ambiguity. It is a simple scene: two children on a cobbled street, chalking lines that mimic the tramlines long since ripped up. The palette is muted, the figures faceless, yet the painting radiates an unexpected tenderness. It is impossible not to read it as a quiet farewell,to Lowry, to the group, perhaps even to the idea of collective artistic struggle.

The catalogue essays will tell you that the Stick Insects are enjoying a market revival,Tibbins’s Moss Lane Football Crowd recently sold for a record sum,but the true value of this retrospective lies elsewhere. It demonstrates how minor movements, even those marked by failure, can generate a thick web of influence. One sees their DNA in the grimy social realism of contemporary painters like Chantal Jakes, in the community-mapping projects of the award-winning Forster Collective, even in the anonymous street murals blooming on Salford’s derelict mills.

The Stick Insects were never glamorous, rarely unified, and often unmanageable. But in their awkward persistence, they produced a body of work that still vibrates with a hard-won dignity. “We were always climbing,” Myles once said. “Perhaps we were only insects, but we were climbing all the same.” This exhibition honours that climb without smoothing over the stumbles.

It is, in its own ragged way, a triumph.

Beyond the Banana: A Review of the Exmouth Academy’s Brazil Painting Show

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The Exmouth Academy’s much-anticipated exhibition, “Brushstrokes of Brazil: Liminal Vibrancy in the Tropics”, promises a deep dive into the nation’s contemporary painting scene. What it delivers, however, is a kaleidoscopic fever dream of artistic ambition, chaotic juxtapositions, and more references to post-colonial discourse than even the most ardent political junkie could digest.

I arrived expecting an immersive exploration of the Brazilian psyche via paint. What I encountered was an exhibition that seemed determined to answer the question: “What if we put samba, existential dread, and Rousseau’s jungle fantasies into a blender and forgot to put the lid on?”

The Works

At the heart of the show is a tension between Brazil’s lush, visceral aesthetic heritage and its artists’ relentless pursuit of conceptual complexity. Take, for instance, “O Sol Nunca Me Ama” (The Sun Never Loves Me) by João Cordeiro. This monumental canvas features a hyper-realistic avocado sliced open to reveal a yawning void, its edges inexplicably smeared with gold leaf. A metaphor for globalization? A critique of Brazil’s agricultural dependence? Or just an homage to brunch culture gone wrong? The accompanying wall text,a 650-word manifesto,was as opaque as the pitless avocado itself.

Further along, Larissa Tavares’s “Palimpsesto das Favelas” (Palimpsest of the Favelas) arrests the eye with its maddening refusal to cohere. Tavares layers gauzy washes of color with bursts of angry, abstract scribbles, over which she has collaged what appear to be receipts for pão de queijo. “It’s an interrogation of neoliberal transactionalism,” I overheard one visitor murmur, stroking their chin. But to me, it felt like someone spilled their lunch money on a Jackson Pollock.

And then there’s “Ode ao Mosquito” (Ode to the Mosquito) by Beatriz de Lima, an installation masquerading as a painting. The artist has smeared actual mosquito blood across a stark white canvas while a recording of buzzing drones from the ceiling speakers. It’s a visceral and deeply irritating piece, which I suspect is exactly the point. “The mosquitoes are both the colonizers and the colonized,” one particularly verbose guide explained. “They are the oppressors, yet also victims of the climate crisis. It’s genius.”

The Themes

The show’s overarching curatorial narrative,if one can find it in the chaos,is an attempt to distill Brazil’s artistic identity into something both contemporary and deeply rooted in tradition. This is, of course, an impossible task, and the exhibition doesn’t so much tackle the challenge as gleefully revel in its impossibility.

You’ll find nods to Brazil’s colonial past in nearly every piece, often juxtaposed with jarringly modern elements. One painting featured a meticulously rendered 18th-century sugar mill but dotted with QR codes. When scanned, they directed me to a Spotify playlist featuring only Bossa Nova remixes of the Macarena. Bold? Yes. Meaningful? Perhaps. Overwhelming? Absolutely.

There’s also a distinct sense of ecological urgency running through the works, with many artists addressing deforestation, biodiversity loss, and the commodification of the Amazon. But rather than hammering the viewer with doom, the exhibition opts for a more playful (if baffling) approach. One standout was “Desmatamento #4”, in which artist Raul Pessoa used actual tree sap mixed with acrylics to paint what appeared to be a melancholy toucan smoking a cigarette.

The Experience

The layout of the show is as confounding as the art itself. The gallery walls are painted a deep, pulsating pink,presumably meant to evoke the Brazilian sunset but more reminiscent of a nightclub. Meanwhile, the lighting is erratic, shifting between dim, jungle-like greens and harsh fluorescent whites. At one point, I accidentally walked into what I thought was another room of paintings but turned out to be a live capoeira demonstration. Whether this was intentional or simply an unfortunate scheduling overlap remains unclear.

By the time I reached the gift shop (featuring eco-friendly caipirinha kits and tote bags with the phrase “Art is the Amazon of the Soul”), I felt both intellectually exhilarated and vaguely unmoored.

The Verdict

“Brushstrokes of Brazil” is a triumph of contradictions. It’s a show where beauty and bewilderment collide, where the line between profundity and pretension is gloriously blurred. The paintings might not all resonate, and some might outright baffle, but the exhibition achieves something rare: it forces you to think. Or at least to pretend you’re thinking while desperately googling “symbolism of bananas in post-modern Brazilian art.”

Go see it. Bring an open mind, a willingness to be confused, and, ideally, bug spray.