Paul Hobson, Director of the Contemporary Art Society, recommends his favourite exhibition of the week.
Phyllida Barlow, RIG
2 September – 22 October 2011
Hauser & Wirth, 196A Piccadilly, London, W1J 9DY
Phyllida Barlow’s installation at Hauser & Wirth’s Piccadilly gallery re-enacts the urban cacophony of Piccadilly indoors and colonises every inch of it.
A completely captivating and charming show from the moment you walk into the gallery. This show engulfs you from the start, it forces you to negotiate your way between and though groups of sculptures- some of them wearing jolly hats of paper or brightly coloured cloth, some of them angular, painted in grubby colours. They cluster in previously unseen spaces and corners of the gallery. Basement rooms must be visited by first passing a giant set of upside down magnets shapes that seem to want not to let you by them, so completely and rightfully do they inhabit their underground corridor space- to a pitched loft at the top where one at time you are allowed up a steep iron staircase to peer in on a group of delightful hanging rag-rug pompoms that are seemingly serenely occupied in business in a world quite apart from ours.
Let us know what you think of this exhibition at membership@contemporaryartsociety.org