At dusk on a winter’s night, the blank white windows contrast eerily with the dark brickwork of this former industrial building; inside it is reversed – the windows project the dark colour of the night sky against the white walls of the gallery spaces. It is interesting to see how different these spaces look at different times of year and day.
The exhibitions on show in the Gagosian gallery space are predominantly monotone – black, white and silver – with the slightest hint of other natural colours. Two exhibitions of two different artists working in the USA, one of precise architectural photographs recorded as a snapshot in time, the other of zebras, turtles, giraffes, deer, alligators and other animals in a balanced but apparently chaotic writhing seething mass.
German artist Vera Lutter, who now lives in New York, created a camera obscura from an old shipping container from which to photograph the beautifully-proportioned ancient Greek temples in the Italian town of Paestum, dating back to 600 to 450BC, and the more modern Effelsberg Radio Telescope at the Max-Planck-Institut für Radioastronomiey in Germany, one of the largest scientific telescopes in the world.
Two series of photographs, “Turning Time” linking structures over 2000 years apart, connecting out to other worlds, Olympus home of the Greek gods and out into the deepest areas of space, where signals may take light years to be received, reflecting Lutter’s interest in the forces of time. Perhaps the telescope may be receiving signals from space from the same time as when the temples were built?
American artist Nancy Rubens’ enormous sculptures with animals, birds and reptiles, climbing over each other, grabbing, fighting and biting at each other are both chaotic, but balanced. Closer inspection reveals them to be garden ornaments and sculptures piled on top of each other, some new; some old with remnants of paint, carefully supported and held together by a grid of carefully-located wires, as Rubins explores in “Diversifolia” the tension between the different objects and how, like crystals, they grow into something new, larger and completely different, yet retaining their original identities.
