December Art Gallery Highlights in London

Thomas Ruff New Works at David Zwirner until January 5^th 2017

Thomas Ruff has been collecting archival media clippings from American newspapers across several decades. The exhibition features both large-scale and smaller works from his press++ series reflecting a variety of themes and sources, including car adverts, new reports on car crashes, Hollywood stars and space exploration. Ruff has scanned the front and back of the original documents and combined the two sides, layering the front of the images with the many annotations, stamps, signatures, and smudges on the back that are typically made during the editing and production of images for publication. These seamless montages of image and text, at once compromise the integrity of the image as much as add relevant context. The overlap causes each side to lose its intended information and merge into a new image altogether. Ruff’s recurring themes on appropriation and authenticity come to fore through his use of technology to manipulate and deconstruct the image rendering new possibilities. His interest on image surface, on the very skin that makes up the image as an object, opens new structures for photography. In Ruff’s work layers of information coexist seamlessly. Whilst the image source is very prominent on first encounter, it becomes obsolescent in favour of the newly created image.

Teller on Mapplethorpe at Alyson Jacques Gallery until January 7^th 2017

To coincide with what would have been the 70th birthday of the American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, Alison Jacques has invited photographer Juergen Teller to curate the exhibition. Teller has worked in collaboration with The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation in New York to make his selection. As an unconventional and irreverent fashion photographer, Teller brings a new insight into lesser-known works by Mapplethorpe. The exhibition includes Polaroids from the early 1970s as well as Mapplethorpe’s characteristic medium of silver gelatin photographs from the mid-70s through to the late 80s. Some of his best-known works, like the homoerotic sexually-explicit images, feature alongside subtler and more intimate views of Mapplethorpe’s work. Portraits, still-life and close-up cropped arrangements yield sensuous, tactile and sculptural qualities like only Mapplethorpe could obtain from his subjects.

Natalia LL Probabilities at Roman Road until January 14^th 2017

From the Polish feminist avant-garde, Natalia LL’s Probabilities focuses on her early series from the 1970s. The show presents photographs and videos from her Consumer Art and Post-consumer Art series, drawing attention to consumer culture and the status of women at the time. I was a bit reluctant to see why this work would be relevant today but my suspicion was dismissed within a second looking at the work. Today’s reading of the artist’s pornography parody is even more poignant considering the commodification and sexualizing of women as passive agents is still so prevalent. Challenging the stereotypical and masculinised image of the female role in pornography and consumer culture is as relevant today as in the 70s. However, to get at it with Natalia’s humour and satire deadpan confidence seems even radical today. A proto Kim Kardashian visionary.