London Gallery Stroll

Andy Warhol Mark Rothko Richard Long Joseph Mallord William Turner Francis Alys William Hogarth Donald Sultan Keith Coventry

Send a letter to the Editor

Save to Del.icio.us Digg this

The most interesting and “must-see” show on Cork Street is “Munch/Warhol,” at Robert Sandelson through July 17, which presents 40 Munch prints and works on paper and 10 unique Warhol works on paper, all based on some of Munch’s most iconic images, including The Scream and Madonna.

As legend has it, Warhol was dazzled by a 1982 Galleri Bellman show of Munch works in New York and set out to make reprises which he exchanged for several Munchs from Bellman that later sold from his estate.

The grouping is ambitious, dazzling, and eclectic, ranging from an 1895 Munch lithograph of Madonna to Warhol’s 1984 interpretation of The Scream (After Munch). The pairing of the two titans certainly beats the strange tag team of Turner/Rothko, currently on view at Tate Britain, where the works are awkwardly hung and the artists kept apart, making comparisons difficult. Besides, there are many works for sale at Sandelson, at prices ranging from £50,000 to £1 million for the Munchs and $450,000 to $1.3 million for the Warhols.

Speaking of the Madonna, the National Portrait Gallery is presenting “Fabiola,” a stunning installation of Francis Alÿs’s 300 or so found flea-market paintings of the fourth-century Christian saint of the same name, who is depicted in profile under a crimson veil. The replicas, in media ranging from embroidery to enamel, are based on a long-lost 19th-century painting by a French academic painter named Jean-Jacques Henner, and Alÿs spent some 15 years collecting the haunting images, which look especially dramatic hung salon-style by Dia Art Foundation curator-at-large Lynne Cooke. They're on view through September 20. (The collection was first shown at the Hispanic Society of America in New York, in collaboration with Dia, in 2007.)

In a more secular vein, a new group of mostly abstract paintings by American painter Donald Sultan, as well as one vintage corker from the late 1980s, is on view at Ben Brown Fine Arts through September 19.

In his first London showing in more than 20 years, Sultan’s brio-filled and mostly large-scaled compositions, composed of his signature mix of enamel, Spackle, and tar on tile over Masonite, look fresh and sassy, especially Black and Blues (2009). A former prince of the roaring ’80s art bubble (see 1984's Four Lemons for evidence), Sultan continues to create excellent variations on an ever-taut interplay between still life and landscape.

Sultan past and present provides interesting context for “Brut,” a small sampler of four large works by Piotr Uklánski at Gagosian Gallery’s Mayfair mini-space through July 31. Famed for his photo-based “Nazis” series of Hollywood actors playing villainous characters, Uklánski here presents ambitious abstract works, apparently inspired by Art Brut and outsider art, which take as media practically everything — from jute, linen, sisal, and aluminum in Untitled (Monster) (2009) to resin on canvas in Untitled (Pink Placenta) (2009). These newest abstractions are densely layered, decorative, and fiendishly attractive.

A second Gagosian exhibition, of Mark Grotjahn, on view at the gallery's massive Brittania Street space at King’s Cross through July 31, is less convincing. Grotjahn, already way overplayed in the shrinking secondary market, has on view in the main space a flock of red and yellow butterfly paintings in oil on linen from 2008, based in part on Russian Constructivism. A more interesting selection of less familiar and decidedly more expressionist and tribal-influenced paintings hangs in the adjacent gallery, executed in oil on cardboard and mounted on linen.

One of the strongest works, Untitled (Yellow Face 774) (2007–08), measuring 72 by 54 inches, has a woodcut look, though the actual material is corrugated cardboard. The work and its companion mask-like pieces fairly scream with a kind of jungle lust that is much livelier than the more familiar and cookie-cutter butterfly abstractions. The show marks the L.A.-based artist’s solo debut with Gagosian in London, and while the exhibition itself has its shortcomings, the hardcover catalogue, with a gushing essay by Robert Storr, is a thing to behold.