- Venue
- Viktor Wynd Fine Art Inc
- Location
- London
What an intriguing place is Viktor Wynd Fine Art Inc. Both shop and gallery; library and museum; art setting and theatrical backdrop. To step through the front door on Mare Street is to enter an alternate world. I feel like Alice, and this is my Wonderland.
Strangeness and Charm is an exhibition with it’s own language, derived from the Gothic and the Surreal, mundane everyday existence and the otherworldly. There are references to science and magic, myth and literature, death and irony. Here, historical fiction overlaps postmodernism and it all combines to represent both the wonders of the universe and the minutiae of life.
This is a group show with six artists, whose work is both clustered together and scattered amongst each other. Yet there is an overriding feeling of unity, created by the hand of curator Richard Ducker. Referencing “the puerility of the present”, a term coined by Georges Bataille describing a state best avoided, Ducker has explored the reconciliation of myth and the poetic, and between ritual and rationalism.
It’s beautiful reading, and to a degree, reflected on the walls. The work was largely and pleasantly surprising, sharing a consistent depth of meaning, and managing to be both complimentary and diverse.
The stellar standout was two new pieces by Kate MccGwire, Host II and Host III. Returning to her favoured medium of pigeon feathers, MccGwire has created work of breathtaking delicacy and gravitas. Flakes of ash and the finest charcoal nestle amongst each other, like the open pages of a book. Feathers of porcelain on accordian-like spines float off the walls and emerge from the corners. Like an underwater organism, born from materials of the sky, these works breathe. Mesmerising in their fragility, I held my own breath while taken in my their spell, and soon discovered a silent movement before my eyes, as if slowly inhaling and exhaling. The ethereal feather and the gritty urban pigeon are once again transformed into a work of wonder by this talented artist.
Dallas Seitz’s Loch Ness Monster is a playful Nordic submarine with dangling wooden buoy testicles. Alice Anderson’s Alices in an unsettling yet entrancing series of photographs exploring an ugly beauty. The portraits of facial disfigurement and underwater morphing effects is let down only by poor presentation.
The mixed media sculptures of Hilary Jack are whimsical and witty, delightfully endearing, and the epitome of postmodernism. Titles Stag Tramp Overlooks Devastated Arcadia and Running Woman in a Blue Dress Trips Over a Heap of Shit and Hangs Herself give some indication. In the more traditional mediums, both the paintings by Andro Semeiko and the photographs by Liane Lang are concept-heavy yet fall short in execution, losing their foothold in a space crowded with talent.
Strangeness and Charm, in this setting, is a contemporary collection of quirkiness and ephemera, and I am enchanted.
