Sunday, November 16, 2008
Moderne Art: Serpentine Gallery
Four rooms, regular exhibitions, middle of Kensington Gardens, free admission. Sounds like a perfect cultural detour if you're ever on a stroll in the area, like I was yesterday. So I popped inside, uncertain of what the latest exhibition might involve. Aha, the work of Gerhard Richter, "one of the world's greatest living artists". Sounded promising. But what was this? We were being treated to one of his works of abstract art entitled 4900 Colours. Imagine a grid of coloured tiles, 5 by 5, comprising bright monochrome squares randomly arranged. Then take three further tiles, similarly random, and assemble them (randomly) to create a 10 by 10 square. No point looking for deliberate pattern, there isn't any, just a (random) burst of variegated colours like a wildly haphazard bathroom wall. Then create 48 further 10×10 grids, all equally random, and display them around the gallery in a random order. And that's the entire exhibition. The curators described this as "stunning sheets of kaleidoscopic colour". I described it as "an awful lot of coloured tiles", and "something so bloody simple that I could have thought of it, but didn't". The exhibition was quite pretty for a bit, but then repetitive, and then extremely repetitive. Sorry, but I can't search for meaning in random art because by definition there isn't any. Not impressed. There may be money in it, however, in which case I reckon we should all head down to Topps Tiles for a selection of coloured offcuts and some grout.
by tube: Knightsbridge
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