Unholy Truths * * *
at Initial Access, Four Ashes, nr Wolverhampton
Reviewed by Terry Grimley
The third exhibition drawn from Frank Cohen's private collection of contemporary art features works produced on four continents since 2003, with just one earlier piece by American artist Mike Kelley dating from 1989.
Its proposed theme is a supposed new taste for the Gothic, but if there is one principle which connects these works it is that they do not speak directly but present readily-accessible imagery in an inexplicable and disturbing way.
A partial exception - in the sense that its satirical stance can be more easily read - might be The Unholy McTrinity 3 by Britain's former enfants terribles Jake and Dinos Chapman, in which Ronald McDonald and two friends stand in for Christ and the two thieves. The figures have been cast in bronze from wooden originals which imitate African art.
According to curator David Thorp, this show reflects a passing of art-world interest from China to India in terms of emerging art schools. There is one typically inscrutable Chinese painting - Yue Minjun's Between Men and Animal, a giant group portrait of eight broadly-grinning, identical figures with Pan-like horns and shiny pink skin, as though they were made of plastic. As a piece of painting it is (presumably) deliberately banal, as an image it is quite unsettling.
The Indian contingent consists of two sculptors, Sudarshan Shetty and Tallur L.N., born in 1961 and 1971 respectively. Shettu's work has had little exposure in Britain, whereas Tallur studied in Leeds.The former's Untitled (Double Cow, from the show Love) has two metal cow skeletons joined at the hoof, as if showing a reflection in water. The udder doubles as a bell which rings at regular intervals. Tallur L.N.'s Esophogeal Reflex is a lifesized baby elephant, attractively carved in blackened wood, which drips silver excrement.
If works by Dirk Bell, Dan Colen and Matthew Greene can be taken as representative of new American painting, it's difficult not to feel that it has entered a decadent phase. In comparison with the bombastic self-confidence and straight-to-museum scale of most postwar America art, these paintings are generally small (apart from Greene's The Pollinators, which looks like a blown-up magazine illustration) and arch, not say twee, in character.
Colen's Untitled (Blow Me) is a still life with candle and quill pen which could be a detail from a Disney cartoon, while Bell's untitled flower piece seems to hanker after art's naive backwaters.
There is a glimmer of interest in a series by Mike Kelley in which he has used models to reconstruct photographs. One shows two Nazi thugs (the original photograph is remarkable for its homo-eroticism), the others two young women, one Catholic the other Jewish, lighting candles as part of religious rituals.
German painter Till Gerhard has some interesting paintings which revisit the hippy era with the free-association feeling of a sinister dream. In Der Spiralgott (Hoheres Selbst) people dance around a maypole which is topped by John Lennon's severed head. In Helterskelter a figure who might be Paul McCartney, wearing the animal mask from Magical Mystery Tour, stands in a field with three helter skelters in the background.
Gerhard's work has an eerie fascination, but is it really very good painting? His paintings gain a certain narrative force from being seen in depth (there are five here altogether, of which the most recent, from this year, is unconnected to the others in subject), but no individual painting quite seems strong enough in its own right.
Finally, one of the most impressive pieces is Douglas White's Crow's Stove, a life-sized palm tree made of shredded lorry tyres which sprout through a battered antique cabinet. It must be a nightmare to manage as part of a collection, but it's a technical tour-de-force.
* Until December 15 (Tue-Fri 11am-4pm; admission free). Units 19 & 20, Calibre Industrial Park, Laches Close, Off Enterprise Drive, Four Ashes, Wolverhampton. For further information call 01902 798999 or visit www.initialaccess.co.uk
