Recent exhibitions

Stumbled on Maria Nepomuceno at Victoria Miro in town - floor and wall based sculptural works incorporating clay vessels and straw braid weaving. The artist is Brazilian. It's on till 7 January (and the way the gallery's door opens is ... interesting ...) -

Really exciting - the colour, the shapes, the materials all working together - we stood in the middle of the room and whipped out our sketchbooks! In all the other exhibitions visited, I took no photos, reckoning they're likely to be on the gallery's website, or elsewhere online.

Abstract Expressionism at the RA - rather a lot of it, and not my favourite art movement ever. The "Violent Mark" room was great, Franz Kline and Robert Motherwell, and some artists new to me, Jack Tworkov and Conrad Marca-Relli (known for collage). Two huge Sam Francis paintings in another room caught my eye - well, they dominated the wall space, and were vivid orange and blue! Revelation of the day was David Smith's early sculptures, before all the 3D boys had to use big sheets of thick metal to be taken seriously.

Franz Kline, Vawdavitch, 1955

Robert Motherwell, Wall Painting No.III, 1953

Conrad Marco-Relli, The Passage (L-L-12-61), 1961

David Smith, Blackburn, Song of an Irish Blacksmith, 1949-50

Not sure if this one was in the show -
Hudson River Landscape, 1951

Richard Serra's drawings at Gagosian Davies Street, till Dec 17th (his sculptures are at the bigger space near King's Cross, till Feb 25th). The use of etching ink gives them a low-level rugged texture.

Ed Rusha's paintings at Gagosian Grosvenor Hill (till 17 Dec) are about form and size - the form of a word is fixed, but its scale is not - but this doesn't hold when words are arranged in a system, when they observe a scale in which the size of the word-as-image corresponds imperfectly to the size of the word-as-concept.

(via)

The camera came out again for the fun paintings by Holly Frean at Paul Smith's shop on Albermarle Street -

Sheep, dogs, baboons - go to her website for more images of her work

A detail