ICA visit this week

The Mall in London

On Wednesday as part of the Contemporary Art gallery visits we went to the ICA in the Mall. Some years ago I was an ICA member an I still sometimes visit, often for their somewhat non-conventional Christmas cards.
The artists work that we were looking at were a diverse bunch Tauba Auerbach, David Robilliard and video works by Hito Steyerl. We also visited the Fox reading room to look at the Scrapbook exhibition there.

There was a piece on Tauba Auerbach in The London Standard this week that gave a brief glimpse into what a bright cookie Tauba is, that said the works on show here are engaging and pleasant, unusually they are not overly derivative but I found them calm and somewhat minimalist, one of our group likened the 3 dimensional pieces to the composer Philip Glass.

The work of David Robilliard who died in 1988 was a sharp contrast, to me at first sight it appeared faux naive, but direct on later seeing some of the artists poetry I saw that the style of painting was fitting for the words but to see the paintings by themselves revealed the somewhat limited landscape that he inhabited.

The videos of Hito were an altogether different style of work, complex and ironic they offered a strong critique of our times particularly with reference to the economic meltdown - the quality of picture and projection was good (not aloways the case in such work) but I find Gallery video installations frustrating in that there are no start or end times and people just drift in and out.

For me it was a good experience to revisit the ICA and the £1 day membership is very good value.