Bloomberg New Contemporaries, ICA - exhibition review
This annual shebang of art-school students and recent graduates has a decent record of predicting future stars. Four years ago, I was reviewing work by Ed Atkins in this show; he had a superb Serpentine exhibition earlier this year.
The three artist selectors — Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, Enrico David and Goshka Macuga, all former Turner Prize nominees — have whittled down 1,400 artists to 55 and, on the whole, it’s a good selection, erratic but with some genuinely powerful work.
But there’s one glaring problem. Out of the 55 artists, 22 are video artists or are showing videos of performances. They’re mostly shown in a dedicated audiovisual space, some in a showreel, others on monitors, and the time needed to see them all would be four hours. It makes for an unwieldy heart of the show — having this much video seems unfair on the artists, many whose work simply won’t be seen by many visitors.
Of the videos, I enjoyed Marco Godoy’s Claiming the Echo, in which a sombre choir sing an unlikely protest song: “They call it a democracy but it is not!”. Elsewhere, painting and sculpture highlights include Yi Dai’s Nocturne No.3, which looks minimal and monochrome at first but, up close, is like a zoom into a body, with nylon stocking, hair and a fleshy pallor.
There’s a strong aspect of the grotesque in this year’s show, perhaps reflecting Chetwynd’s influence, from Adam Zoltowski’s Dirty Old Man, a mocking take on bird-poo stained public sculpture, and Adam Wallace’s paintings of obese figures with hilariously obscene collaged orifices.
Until January 25 (020 7930 3647, ica.org.uk)
