What's On: London

Date
29 September 2011

Each week we have selected three top exhibitions going on in London and featured them on our dedicated What’s On listings site – see – and we thought we’d start sharing them with the wider world right here on the blog. So to kick it off we would like to recommend all those faffing about in the capital this week to go and see Postmodernism at The V&A, or Peace Prong at Beach London, or Echo by Francis Upritchard at the Kate MacGarry Gallery. Or maybe all of them. Go crazy.

Postmodernism V&A

There has been much anticipation surrounding the V&A’s in depth survey of cultural collateral from one of the most “controversial phenomena in recent art and design history” – that is to say, Postmodernism. More pertinent now then ever, the consumerist excess that defined some of the more gauche and confident trademarks of the movement is one that affected a lot of popular culture – fashion, music and film – and was shockingly at odds with the contemporary economic climate. A difference that can easily be recognised as a freedom, a parody and an attitude that traversed its label as a mere “style.”
www.itsnicethat.com/whats-on/postmodernism

Sister Arrow: Peace Prong Beach London

The sci-fact, sci-fiction stylings of Sister Arrow (also answers to George Mellor) and her “imaginary pygmy cultivar super-race called Sumo Babies” are the focus of Beach London’s latest exhibition. Peace Prong. Her debut solo show, promises a variety of prints (to buy), paintings and drawings along the visual themes of everything from ethnobotany to the quantum world. That is to say, abstract botanical microcosms and the halcyon people that populate them and a lovely looking array of colourful riso-photo studies. Show runs until October 9.
www.itsnicethat.com/whats-on/peace-prong

Francis Uprtichard: Echo Kate MacGarry Gallery

Francis Upritchard has marshalled a cast of outsider characters to perform a sort of psychedelic play – “The Misanthrope, the vilified and cruel beast, Mervyn the fool, John the knowing jester.” Each player is mid-convulsive movement, painted with a recurring, vaguely 1960s colour palate and surrounded in the exhibition by their seeming detritus, utensils and artefacts. Some found, some made – these pieces are a curious collection that make use of many crafts, the process infused with both new meaning and old folklore: “Echoes reverberate between the present and past in an attempt to identify a semblance of shared experience, and make sense of modern life.” Show running until October 15.
www.itsnicethat.com/whats-on/echo

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About the Author

Bryony Quinn

Bryony was It’s Nice That’s first ever intern and worked her way up to assistant online editor before moving on to pursue other interests in the summer of 2012.

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