Adrien Ghenie’s The Fear of NOW: Poignant Observations within our Digital Age, Thaddeus Ropac Gallery , London
By Kate Fensterstock
Romanian painter Adrien Ghenie’s newest body of work at Thaddeus Ropac is another profound example of the artist’s ongoing careful consideration of the form to content relationship. A preoccupation that is central to Ghenie’s practice, the artist investigates the possibilities of his mediums and to what extent their execution can best negotiate the complex and evolving significance of the subject matter. Initially inspired by his surroundings during the Covid-19 pandemic, Ghenie observed the change in human form that is now hunched over mobile phones and other digital devices. In The Fear of NOW, on view until 22 December, Ghenie addresses physicality and composition in the technological age, whilst expertly navigating the corresponding social and cultural themes that coincide with such a critical influence on the human condition. He engages the history of painting and our collective memory to situate his practice within the contemporary, reinforcing the nature of our present using systems of reference from our past. We are confronted with inescapable truths about mass culture, the digital age and our relationships with these institutions.
Thaddeus Ropac has chosen to display Ghenie’s charcoal drawings at the start of the exhibition, a curatorial decision that offers the opportunity to appreciate the artist’s mark making and handling of the medium as a fundamental component to his practice. The capacity to view process and movement is a raw and organic insight into how Ghenie infuses emotion into his bodily forms.



Several of his abstracted portraits offer more realistic renderings of items like chairs, desks and TVs as anchors that situate the viewer within the landscape. But his figures’ faces and bodies become lost in swirls of shape and colour as the subject’s identity becomes all-consumed by and eventually indistinguishable from the media stream it engages with. Our cultural inability to maintain individuality is rendered physically here as the subject’s head gets sucked into the world displayed on the screen of his television. In The App, the only canvas featuring two subjects, the dynamic between the two is mediated if not completely damaged by the presence of mobile phones, a condemning remark on the nature of human communication in the digital age.



Ghenie considers the influence of technology on our socio-cultural constructs with a particularly striking display of Marilyn paintings. The paintings disrupt the iconic Warhol screenprints since Ghenie has reconfigured Marilyn’s facial features into something grotesque and undesirable. In works such as Figure with Remote Control and The App, where Ghenie shifts focus to individuals’ subservience to such technologies, the Marilyn paintings reflect on our relationship to fame and the dissemination of images and alerts us to the extent this relationship has evolved since the 1960s. Ghenie is aggressively alerting his viewer to the ugly truth that lies hidden behind the imagery that consumes us, a truth that is now much harder to see with the development of technological media. These concerns are what Ghenie would describe to be The Fear of NOW, a sentiment communicated terrifyingly yet beautifully through an exceptional attitude to medium and subject.

Amy Sherald at Hauser and Wirth: Widening our World
By Kate Fensterstock

As the artist’s largest exhibition at Hauser and Wirth, Sherald does well to deliver to her viewer ‘the world we make’. The show’s title is a poignant description of her artistic intention, which is to recognise the historical roles of Black men and women within society, specifically as represented in portraiture, and acknowledge injustices of past representation before “putting more complex stories of Black life in the forefront of people’s minds,” as the artist explains. In other words, to build and embrace a world where we have the power to provide truth and integrity. Sherald does this by humanising the Black experience where she depicts her subjects in both historically referential and in everyday settings, at once immortalising them and reinserting them into the art historical canon through a new lens. This includes the painting For love, and for country (2022), a rendering of the iconic photograph V-J Day in Times Square (1945) by Alfred Eisenstaedt showing a US Navy sailor dramatically kissing a woman in Times Square, New York City. The recreation of a familiar image urgently surfaces themes of persistent inequalities facing minorities after military service, as well as gender roles and sexual identity as further marginalisation.

In A God Blessed Land (Empire of Dirt) (2022), a man sits proudly atop his tractor in the manner of 19th century portraiture that reinforced the freedoms and opportunities of capitalism in America. But a Black subject reminds the viewer of the historic inequalities that range from slavery during this period through systemic racism that would prohibit true pursuit of capitalist success. Sherald often uses vehicles like tractors and motorbikes to address notions of masculinity, as well as progress, whereby the vehicle is a literal and figurative tool for growth, movement and the ability to advance forward.



Sherald is equally concerned with women’s roles in the context of race and wider culture. In To tell her story, you must walk in her shoes (2022) the artist depicts a woman against a rich purple background with knitted legs in motion across her jumper, alluding again to this idea of forward motion and individual progress. The title subverts a metaphorical expression via traditional female themes of fashion, sewing and craft to remind the viewer of the complexities of the Black as well as the wider female human experience. The background colour of Sherald’s canvases are always carefully chosen, providing a non-designated time and setting which provides a certain timelessness to the scenes. Additionally, the colour highlights an absence of skin colour that nullifies a widely accepted social reference point and directly challenges perceptions of Black identity.

A monumental show which is perfectly displayed in a space as grand as Hauser and Wirth, Sherald has commanded the viewer attention via a careful destabilising of culturally accepted practice. In turn, we are encouraged to reconsider and redesign the associations we apply to crucial components of our society, creating a world that is wider than before.
Cecily Brown at Thomas Dane Gallery, London
By Kate Fensterstock

Studio Pictures at Thomas Dane sees Cecily Brown returning to work in small scale, if not the smallest scale for the artist. The show, on view at Thomas Dane Gallery in Mayfair until the 17th December, features over thirty works completed as recently as this year or as early as 2004. During this broad time frame, the portfolio maintains a strict consistency, which is the negotiation of small space, where each canvas barely exceeds 40 cm x 30 cm in size.
Following some of the largest work Cecily Brown has achieved to date, many of which were displayed at the monumental Blenheim Palace show in 2019, visitors are encouraged to reflect on the artist’s capacity to work in both grand and intimate scope. Brown’s ongoing investigation between the abstract and the figurative is inherently linked to the viewers own engagement with form and colour, to independently extract from the scene, an experience notably diverse when the canvas differs so drastically in scale.

As the gallery explains, “the grands formats are where you lose your breath, and the small paintings are where you lose your mind.” The intention of such intricate and complicated mark making on a limited plane is to look closely, slow down, and consider the detail. Thomas Dane chooses to quote Edgar Degas, “it as if you looked through the keyhole.” An excellent description of the perspective the viewer is taking to engage with this work. But peering through a keyhole could suggest a forced distance, a taboo voyeurism that taunts and even tortures the subject. Viewers are left with a fetishized inaccessibility to Brown’s total impact which in turn prevents full satisfaction. The vivacity of the work within these canvases can feel suffocated, trapped by the parameters of the canvas.

The impact of Brown’s practice is in the exploration between dream and reality, where human form meets an ethereal landscape whipped up in an erotic or violent narrative, sometimes both. The challenge is to wander, and wonder, through the perceived and the intended by the artist’s hand. But the keyhole does not always leave adequate room to navigate this space, instead we are whipped up in a storm of colour amidst brief mirages of form we cling to like land mass. Works like A Hunting Scene (2020) and The Favourite (2022) don’t quite carve out much for the viewer to grasp, and the work flattens despite so much activity.


Instead, many works consider form and storytelling through new mechanisms, an exciting tactic from the artist. Brown’s use of colour in each work is extraordinary, each one glowing in jewel-like purples, golden oranges and forest greens that work tirelessly to give the work its shape. The Harvest Festival (2021) and Anthony in the Garden (2008) use careful shifts in hue specifically to denote space and depth, building the scene though still maintaining a primarily abstracted subject matter.


Violet is the Night (2013) does well to engage more figuration, as purple casts a glow over a scene where two figures entwine themselves amidst atmospheric chaos that at once engulf them yet still leave them utterly undisturbed.

Save a Prayer (2013) and Le Bain (2019) are clever interpretations of Desmoiselles d’Avignon (1907), expertly referencing Brown’s iconic approach in line with the famed Picasso composition, through deploying a conscious balance of the figure and the abstract. Although challenged in achieving the same affect seen through the ability to navigate the larger paintings, Cecily Brown’s Studio Pictures features a refocus of the lens that means we will never stop looking.

William Kentridge at the Royal Academy, London: A fully immersive journey with conscious freedom of exploration
By Kate Fensterstock

“I have no expectation of what people take away, I have no need for them to take anything specific…I hope people can see it with an openness and understand that they are going to construct the meaning themselves as they make their way through the exhibition.”- William Kentridge, 2022.
These words delivered by the artist at the end of a documented exhibition tour for the Royal Academy very concisely sum up a series of multifaceted and complex elements that are most intriguing about this major retrospective, on display through the 11th December in London. Kentridge’s philosophy described here manifests itself seamlessly through his choice of medium, his approach to storytelling, and his greater perspectives on the human experience which all inform this relationship with the viewer.
The exhibition encompasses work from as early as the mid-1980s, a period when the resistance to the oppressive apartheid regime became increasingly militant and efforts to relinquish control resulted in greater success for the artist. As a result, Kentridge’s work in these years, reflecting the fervent activist climate of his home country, was allowed increased exposure and recognition on an international scale. His work in theatre and television production in Johannesburg in the 1980s included acting and set design, which would inform his work in film, animation and large-scale installation, whilst his roots lay in drawing and printmaking.

Drawing would engineer the evolution of his practice and inspire bigger picture notions surrounding fate and the uncertain. The ability to wipe away charcoal, to smudge and manipulate it so freely, opened up all possibilities of addressing more carefully the reality of the unstable and unpredictable nature of living, namely within the political infrastructure of his contemporary South Africa. In Untitled (Woman and Hyena) (1986), Kentridge references apartheid oppression in representing government officials as animals, the hyena clung close to the body of a white upper-class woman. Dependent on death as well as an engineer for cleansing and absolving the unwanted remnants of the kill, the hyena is well placed as a symbol of the apartheid, shown here as protecting and fostering a hierarchical society represented by this woman and her distracted, evading gaze. Kentridge’s triptychs which include Embarkation (1987) and The Conservationist’s Ball (1985) provide a German Expressionist approach to socio-political critique set within an electrifying landscape that unfolds a narrative for the viewer, as if watching the multi-dimensions of a theatrical performance. However, Kentridge leaves the changing and gestural effects of charcoal as a reminder that not everything can be predicted or controlled.


This aspect of charcoal so vital to Kentridge’s practice fosters an utterly unique way of mixing his media to create a totally new form of expression. In his Drawings for Projection, Kentridge begins a drawing and shoots it with a movie camera before making changes to the drawing and shooting another frame. The sequence eventually reveals the smudges and the erasures of the process overall, purposefully revealing the evolution of the drawing and making a powerful statement on the inherent nature of action and process which is imperfect. These Drawings for Projection would result in films such as the Soho series, which features the semi-autobiographical story of the complex relationship between the protagonist, Soho Eckstein, and his home city of Johannesburg.


The charcoal leaves traces of past memory or knowingly rewrites what has occurred, fostering Kentridge’s own freedom of exploration and expression whilst blurring the limits of dream and reality. There are distinctive elements of Surrealism and the uncanny in these works born from the way in which the artist mixes drawing and animation. The viewer is anchored within the storytelling but left to drift and ultimately submit to a personal navigation within this fantastical world that the artist intends to provide access to. This approach is also masterfully handled in an adjacent gallery with Black Box/ Chambre Noire (2005), a mechanical puppet show that integrates opera, film and animation and addresses the history of West Africa (now Namibia’s) German colonial forces and genocide in the early 20th century.

The Royal Academy has curated the exhibition flawlessly, where each decision acutely respects the artist’s work and considers the viewer experience (something that is simultaneously of utmost importance to the artist). With each gallery devoted to a significant medium or series, the visitor can engage in each specific component in depth, ahead of considering the fascinating negotiation between mediums that so critically informs Kentridge’s practice, such as within the Drawings for Projection films and Black Box/ Chambre Noire (2005). This curatorial attention is vital through the retrospective in order to absorb the complicated blending and re-referencing of Kentridge’s themes and styles, not to mention the sheer scale of his works which are set free by the soaring heights of the Royal Academy ceilings.
One gallery is devoted to tapestries, which Kentridge began making in 2001 in collaboration with the Stephens Tapestry Studio. The raw mohair of the tapestries is sourced from Angora goats farmed in the Eastern Cape where it is spun, carded and dyed before being transferred to the looms on the outskirts of Johannesburg. Kentridge’s drawing is rendered as a collage before adapting to the dimensions of the tapestry, another fascinating blend of mediums that pay homage to the resources of his home country and create a new channel for artistic expression. Furthermore, the tapestries act as versions of his film projections, large-scale designs that provide a stage set for the artist’s narratives that address South African socio-political and cultural themes. A sculpture of a travelling figure placed alongside a tapestry that depicts the perilous migrant journey extends the storytelling beyond the surface of the tapestry, again traversing modes of practice to provide additional impact surrounding these complex themes.

The central gallery of the exhibition features a replication of Kentridge’s studio space, serving as the beating heart of Kentridge’s approach to drawing, his foundational medium, and cleverly anchors the visitor as they begin to further investigate Kentridge’s relationship between drawing and other choices of medium. The gallery displays more drawings, where there are now raw and visceral landscapes of the African wilderness marked up with coloured lines that reference the colonial land claims. But the visitor is also introduced to Kentridge’s work with collage and ink and language, where bold textual phrases are written across the pages of found books. Phrasing such as The Full Stop Swallows the Sentence and Leap Before You Look address human notions of language and communication, cultural references that impact understanding as well as the concept of protest, mimicking the signs used by activists. In using pages of books that are torn out and pasted to the wall, Kentridge plays with private and public proclamations, perhaps also alluding to how history might be written or rewritten based on the individual perspective. In the short film De Como Nao Fui Ministro D’Estado, Kentridge draws himself pacing through the pages of a book, deep in thought, navigating the landscape of the text yet simultaneously imposing himself within it. Such work that moves between and blends mediums continue to provide innovative methods for the artist’s own negotiations and communications with his viewer.


The preoccupation with words and language continue within the artist’s Flowers series. Sheets of paper are collaged together and painted over, to create the flowers and feature quotes from historical, philosophical and medical texts that will reference health benefits of certain plants, or allude to Mao-era maxisms about popular sacrifice for the greater benefit to the nation. The sheer size of the Flowers, monumental in size, challenges our notions of presentation in encountering what is normally an intimate and domestic display that now feels so public and grand in scale.

The influence of Chinese culture through this ink painting medium and Communist politics reverberate in the gallery which displays Notes Toward a Model Opera, a film which tangentially refers to the current expansion of Chinese state interests, a form of economic colonialism, across Africa. The film is uniquely displayed on the walls of the gallery in a semi-circle, and enclosed on the opposite side with glass and a wooden frame through which visitors that approach it can initially view the film. The viewer can then enter the gallery to observe the film behind the glass but not before the artist challenges our notions of perspective and access. In this film, the graceful ballerina is dressed as a soldier and dances with a rifle, referencing the state-approved Yangbanxi operas that provided the only approved music sequences of the Cultural Revolution. Kentridge adapts such elements of oppressive government influence on culture in China and blends these carefully with those of Africa, reinforcing the importance of the themes through his ongoing fusion between differing mediums and subject matter.


In a final ultra-immersive approach to curating Kentridge’s rich and varied body of work, the artist’s Trees series are installed adjacent to the gallery that shows the film Sibyl (and subsequently the chamber opera Waiting for Sibyl, written by Kentridge and music composed by Nhlanhla Mahlangu and Kyle Shepherd). The trees together form a grove and reference the legend of the Cumaean Sibyl, where visitors seeking information about their futures would write questions on leaves of trees. Kentridge expertly integrates the visitor experience across phases of his retrospective, fully engaging them into the storytelling of his film and the opera from which it is born, and even playfully nods to the leaves as they link to the pages of a book that in turn make up the composite of the tree and the artwork itself.

This effortless transition between dimensions of the artist’s practice reaches its crescendo within the final gallery, where the viewer there meets Sibyl within Kentridge’s film, yet is echoed in the display of the original theatrical costuming and stage set that again moves the visitor between renderings of media, a wholistic and multi-facted cultural experience.


William Kentridge at the Royal Academy is vast both in size and richness of the material. In embarking on a retrospective that features an enormous amount of work in diverse mediums with constant regenerations of material, the Royal Academy has exceptionally delivered to do an iconic artist justice, and respect his intentions surrounding viewer experience. The artist’s skilful approach to nuances between his narrative, his materiality and the visitor journey provides a multi-dimensional, full-scale impact which simultaneously allows for personal exploration and independent consideration engineered by the curatorial team at the RA. Such an opportunity for learning, exploration, and reflection will not be easily forgotten.