Seen Report: porcelain monkeys and dead cats

Hi, my name’s Jacob Wilson and I’m the staff writer of Plaster. You might remember me from the Meal Deal (RIP – did the branding ever make sense?). In this column, I’ll be out and about, taking stock of the London art scene and asking the essential questions: what’s worth seeing? Who’s worth knowing? Where’s it all going? And do we need to stage an intervention? Stay locked.

The first week of June saw the launch of London Gallery Weekend 2024, where galleries across the city open their doors for extended hours from Friday to Sunday. My weekend started on Thursday evening when I dropped by the openings of a bunch of exhibitions near the Plaster offices: Hajime Sorayama at Almine Rech, Adam Rouhana at TJ Boulting, Jodie Carey at Edel Assanti, John Baldessari at Sprüth Magers and Michaël Borremans at David Zwirner. Of them all, Borremans’ uncanny paintings of costumed sitters and ceramic monkeys stuck with me. You can’t look at them individually, you have to see them as a group. Then the similarities between the faces and poses of the po-faced sitters and simians stand out. Which came first, the monkey or the model? His picaresque diorama paintings hammer home the unreality; miniature toy monkeys play with miniature toy people. How deep down the rabbit hole are we?

On Friday, I started my tour downstairs with Leonardo Devito at The Artist Room, just downstairs from the Plaster offices. I’d happily hang up his painting of a figure sleeping in front of a burning city. But just my luck, the show had sold out. I dropped by the Bloomsbury set (Hot Wheels, Union Pacific, Herald St) and made my way to a. SQUIRE. It’s a small space, but what gallerist Archie Squire manages to do with it always amazes me. At the moment it’s occupied by Ryan Huggins’ paintings of Pluto, a gay spa in Essen. The small, blue panels, painted entirely from memory (no cameras allowed) are arranged in a frieze around the walls of the gallery. A frosted glass cubicle occupies most of the floor space and almost touches the ceiling. It forces everyone into close contact with the works and with other visitors. You never know what, or who, you’re going to find around each corner.

I skipped the Friday afters, I wanted a clear head for Saturday. I’d planned a cycle ride from my home south of the river into the city centre, to take in as many galleries as possible. Notable mentions: ‘Sin Centre’ at Hannah Barry, particularly the library complete with cowhide chaise longues and Lisa Ivory’s small panels in the red bar, a better version of last year’s ‘Hardcore’ at Sadie Coles; Isabella Benshimol Toro’s ‘Rinse and Hold’ at Zéruì, in which Toro soaks her own stripped-off clothes in resin and mounts them in PVC window frames; and Anna Clegg’s camera roll transferred to canvas at Soup. Controversial: people praised the show at Copperfield, but I found it pretty forgettable.

I should stop here, but I had to include three more shows: James Fuller’s sculptures at South Parade (now sadly closed) that preserve and update the past in ‘collaborations’ with anonymous artists and niche manufacturers. Example: electroplated casts of glass punch bowls embossed with found poetry from scientific papers; film stills woven into mattress fabric; and a beeswax vase decorated with a patent application for a horse-powered car. What could have been.

There’s a similar vibe in Brianna Leatherbury’s ‘Survival Bias’ at Brunette Coleman, a small but complex body of work in which every piece has its place. The cremation urn of a stockbroker’s beloved cat is cast in electroplated copper and incorporated into industrial fridge units, one of which occupies half the gallery. Leatherbury draws a line between the exchange of objects and an exchange of heat, modern finance meets ancient ritual and the fear of death – all in a walk-in fridge.

I didn’t expect to, but I ended up watching the whole of Matthew Barney’s new video installation Secondary at Sadie Coles HQ on Kingly Street. Barney and eleven performers tell the story of a man going from everything to nothing: in 1978 New England Patriots wide receiver Darryl Stingley was at the top of the game when he was paralysed in a freak accident on the field. The event was caught on TV and broadcast around the US. It was a modern tragedy; it wasn’t due to hubris, just pure chance. I’d never heard of let alone seen the event, still, through Secondary I understood how it seemed to Barney, then aged eight, to watch a hero cut down.