Stuart Shave / Modern Art

Always ahead of the curve, one of London's most influential modern galleries has moved out of the East End where it has been since 1998 and into W1. Until 28 April, Stuart Shave / Modern Art was in Vyner Street, in the Hackney/Shoreditch/Bethnal Green heartland of London's trendmeisters. It has moved into 6,500 sq ft of ground floor space in the somewhat anonymous area north of Oxford Street, once home to the city's garment industry. A fashion showroom morphs easily to a gallery but architect David Kohn has transformed these premises into bright, calm connecting rooms with huge glass frontage onto the street.

The opening exhibition is a triumph. Nigel Cooke has just 15 paintings in his show New Accursed Book Club but they are mesmerising and memorable. Thirty-five year old Cooke is a graduate of Goldsmiths and now lives near Canterbury, away from the indulgent excess of the London art crowd. The imagination of his work, the effortless technique, thought-provoking imagery and sheer beauty of the canvases will confound critics who say that traditional painting skills are dead.

He portrays a grim coterie of deluded artists, distracted by drink, drugs and self-importance, occupying a blighted urban landscape. These figures are not thrusting young talents pushing back the boundaries of art. They are hopeless losers, pissing (literally) on their predecessors and ignoring Cooke's exhortation to "Do Something". There are sly hints at the greatness they have turned their back on: the bandaged head of Van Gogh, or Chardin's still-life tableaux transmuted here into "Painter's Lunch". The epic tradition of the Renaissance is subverted but crammed with detail, a modern morality play as bearded hippies search for their next fix and the urban landscape dies amidst weeds and dirty concrete. It's an apocalyptic vision but Cooke's impressive pictures show that talent has no sell-by date and he may not hit the headlines but he's one to watch

Show runs to 24 May. Tuesday - Saturday 11am - 6pm. Free
23-25 Eastcastle Street, London W1, 020 7299 7950 www.modernart.net

Caption:
Nigel Cooke
Painter's Grandson, 2008
Oil on canvas
Courtesy the artist and Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London
© Nigel Cooke, 2008

 
 
 
 

Isa Genzken / Ground Zero

This German sculptor, recently described as the most important artist in the world by Monopol magazine, takes a daring look at the site of the devastated Twin Towers, Ground Zero. Her crazy collection of plastic, spray paint, glass, rubber, soft toys, porcelain figures, artificial flowers, photographs, textiles, mirrors, and general household waste asks to be taken seriously as a proposal for reviving New York's most sacred icon. It's an irreverent contradiction to the intensely political and symbolic plans submitted by the great names of the architectural world.

Genzken is fascinated by the skyscraper and America's towering skylines and sees a direct link between New York and the art of sculpture. But though she proposes buildings with a social purpose - a church, hospital, car park, disco or shopping centre amongst others - there's a subversive subtext that makes you laugh, and think, at the same time. The shimmering, playful pieces in this exhibition use the detritus of everyday life to bring humanity back into a world destroyed by violence. The show occupies most of this handsome building in Piccadilly which used to be a bank - the ground floor, mezzanine and rarely-opened American Room at the top with its fine carvings and door frames from an earlier, grander age. Make sure you visit the vault in the basement. No exhibits down there but there's a huge walk-in safe with its vast heavy door, and the loos.

Show runs to 17 May. Tuesday - Saturday 11am - 6pm. Free
196A Piccadilly, London W1, 020 7287 2300 www.hauserwirth.com

Caption:
Isa Genzken 2008
Car Park (Ground Zero), detail with washing baskets and toy cars
© Isa Genken
Courtesy Hauser & Wirth Zürich London and Daniel Bucholz, Cologne
Photo: Jens Ziehe

 
 
 
 

Art in the city

Two new guides to the contemporary art scene in London and Paris are published this month. These handy-size paperbacks are essential reading for art lovers and the merely curious, with an entertaining and expert insight into the art scene in two capital cities. Art in the City offers a thorough, informed guide to artists, current trends, more than 300 public and private galleries and exhibition spaces in both London and Paris, with useful maps, art colleges, fairs, important organisations, gallery tours and walks, and public art installations. Each artist entry is illustrated with a large image of the work and the London guide has a separate section on photography. Art in the City is published 2nd May by Quadrille, £9.99 each. Available at all good bookshops or go to www.artinthecityguides.com

 
 
 
 

Mews42

Jesper Thomsen's striking apartment in South Kensington is a uniquely flexible space, part residence, part art gallery. This month he is staging Oriental Desire, an exhibition of paintings by a truly international artist, Madeleine Paternot.

Born in California with an American mother and a Swiss father, Paternot was brought up in Switzerland and England, studied cultural anthropology at Vassar, the prestigious New York college, followed by time in Morocco, New Zealand and Japan where she realised her true talent for painting. Though largely self-taught, she has an instinctive ability for figurative painting and has experimented with Asian techniques of silk and wood block printing on fabric.

In this show, she works chiefly with charcoal, gold pigment and varnish made from crushed beetle shells to create pictures of mysterious erotic allure. The female nude, stylised flower shapes and Chinese alphabet characters inhabit her work. There are large individual canvases, screens and triptychs (all priced at £5,000 or less) plus a collection of neat small square works (£400 each) on a vibrant celadon background that look good clustered together as a set. This is unashamedly decorative art and it's not surprising that high-profile interior decorator Kelly Hoppen has been Paternot's champion, saying "in this magical blend of cultural and artistic traditions, Madeleine has achieved a mysterious quality which I find intriguing and satisfying." Show runs to 22 May. Viewing is by appointment or online. Email Jesper Thomsen on jt@mews42.com or visit www.mews42.com/paternot

 
 
 
 

Ruth Hinkel-Pevzner

You don't get much more edgy than this. In a dilapidated old warehouse, (imagine the set of 24 or a serial killer TV show), Ruth Hinkel-Pevzner has a five screen video installation The Car tracing a hopeless unrequited love. She uses footage sourced from the Russian State Film Archive which is grainy, jumpy and elegiac. Though the film sequence is just 10 minutes long, the journey across the city traffic from day into night is vivid and unbearably sad. Over the images, the artist/narrator speaks her own prose-poetry, capturing the pain of loss and uncertainty. In the reception area of the installation, where you wait for the next performance on bright blue retro chairs while taking in the street action of Shoreditch, there are photogravure prints of stills from the video work, each with a line of voiceover, and sold in sets of five. The show runs to 26 May. Thursday - Friday 12noon - 7pm, Saturday, Sunday and Bank Holiday Mondays 12noon - 5pm. Nicholls and Clarke Building, 3-10 Shoreditch High Street, London E1, 020 7371 2460 www.hinkel-pevzner.org The show has been co-produced with Measure, the not-for-profit organisation set up in 2000 by Simon Day and Jon Scott. Measure aims to combine a passion for art with architecture and history, placing exhibitions in disused buildings and hidden spaces. For more information visit www.measure.org.uk

Caption:
The Car by Ruth Hinkel-Pevzner