Page 29 - Art Review

Previewed

After a couple of years under wraps while the 90,000sqm distribution centre in the with collages and sculptures. During the
renovating – included in that the restoration candy-toned, product-dense Amazon (2016), opening-night performance that, in a sense,
of 66 pyramidal glass skylights, formerly faulty the iconic empty shelving of Prada II (1997) activates these, an astronaut (Keogh) will
and unusable, now allowing natural light into to semifictionalised scenarios such as Review emerge from his cryopod after a couple of years
the building for the first time – the Hayward (2015), in which Angela Merkel and three former of suspended animation and engages with
Gallery is reopening for its 50th anniversary. German chancellors sit before Barnett Newman’s the nested creations; the scenario flipping
It’s doing so with a panorama of panoramas: huge Vir Heroicus Sublimis (1950–51). The artist’s between exploratory reorientation on a rocket-
1 a first UK retrospective for Andreas Gursky. ‘zips’, Gursky has said, here represent shifts in eer’s part and tour of an artist’s studio, the
The Leipzig-born artist has spent four decades German political eras – abstract-looking images, accumulations either artworks or attempts
working towards what he calls ‘the encyclo- as his own practice increasingly advocates, still to repair the ship. (Audio from the performance,
paedia of life’: visual evidence of the manmade stand for something. (Paging his dealer Larry recorded, will float over the installation for
in photographs that are huge, hyperobjective, Gagosian: an edition of Gursky’s oeuvre ought the rest of the show.) Keogh, who’s Irish himself,
panoptic and, in recent years, digitally adjusted. to be shot into space tout de suite, both as affir- is interested in ‘how surface and texture can
Some 60 works strong, Andreas Gursky will mation of human possibility and cry for help.) transmit narrative’, as was written in a press
take viewers around this benighted world in Somewhere up there, figuratively at least, text for a 2016 show that used drawings under
a day (or couple of hours): stock exchanges to 2 is Sam Keogh, whose Kapton Cadaverine at Kerlin a floor of plastic sheeting, fleshy sculptural
music festivals, 99-cent stores to planted fields, involves a grimy spaceship interior adorned lumps and, again, a performative element

1 Andreas Gursky, Amazon, 2016, inkjet print, 207 × 407 × 6 cm.
© the artist/DACS. Courtesy Sprüth Magers, Berlin, London & Los Angeles

2 Sam Keogh, Kapton Cadaverine, 2017–18, mixed-media installation,
dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Kerlin Gallery, Dublin

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