Anthea Hamilton and Thomas Kratz @ Mary Mary

Anthea's 'Composition with crab' with Thomas's 'Pussy Painting' is an
example of the rough formulation of the work in this show; the
traditional formal qualities of sculpture and painting holding in
place an emptied-out and debased performed presence for the viewer.
Anthea's composition is a tyre with a mannequin leg outstretched from
the side of it as if provocatively nuzzling around a door. On top of
the tyre sits a plaster hand with a capsule resting in between its two
fingers, a playful and pathetic emulation of two legs and a semi-erect
penis. Completing the crude joke is a crab sitting on top of a tube
resembling a classical column, emanating from which is a fishy smell. On the wall behind, Thomas's Pussy Painting reduces the literal and
allegorical transcendence of the picture plane by Lucio Fontana's cut
canvasses to a roughly painted vaginal opening appearing through
swathes of expressionist marks reminiscent of bodily fluid.

The two sculptural compositions sitting in front of the two paintings
in this first room seem to speak for painting and sculpture in
general- they are announced as painting + sculpture, an occult altar
to inherited Modernist formulations. These works rely on staging the
formal qualities of their media to play out either dystopian joke or
sexualised dramatisation of the act of the viewer's consumption. The
viewer is left with painting and sculpture as cultural objects that
perform their effective critical and productive boundaries as
pre-determined facts. Critically aware but not hopeful or inventive in
aspiration. [Darren Rhymes]