Sadie Benning/Ian White review: Playing tricks on a sense of time

Sadie Benning ★★★/ Ian White ★★★★

Two strands of painting feature in Sadie Benning’s new work. They’re on different scales: small works, where abstract enamel paint and photographs are suspended in a watery resin; and larger works in painted wood.

In both, a sense of time is prominent in form and content. The wood works look deceptively immediate in their simple forms — Tree Mall is a naively drawn tree and a image of a Fifties shopping mall. But up close, it’s clear the forms are distinct parts. In the small works, you see the accretion of layers: transparencies, abstract painterly forms, old photographs, which merge, press forwards, sink backwards. But while both groups absorb and intrigue, they also seem somehow remote. Benning aims for lack of fixity but, for me, at least, this keeps her work just out of emotional reach.

It’s a great tragedy that Ian White died of cancer at 41 in 2013, just as the discipline he had long worked in — performance art — had become mainstream in British museums. White’s show here is a fitting tribute, but inevitably tantalising, since we’re bereft of the works’ protagonist. Yet there’s enough here to evoke his importance.

Most powerful is his collaborator Jimmy Robert’s revisiting of a work they made for Tate Britain in 2004, where White’s physical commitment, quirky intellect and distinctive voice seem very much alive.

Until Jun 24