Exhibitions This Week

Caroline Ierodiaconou’s “Untitled” exhibition at the gallery in the City Library has several large powerful figurative paintings and a large number of small drawings. The exhibition title “Untitled” is more like a ‘no comment’ than a lack of title. Ierodiaconou is not preaching at her audience, the paintings are not symbolic; they reflect the uncertain feelings of the audience without pathos. Her paintings have a clinical beauty and a sinister atmosphere pervades all of them. The images are powerful and disturbing reflecting our culture’s unease that the environment or even our bodies may be a threat. In one painting a pair of gigantic pliers floats over a hooded, but otherwise naked, pregnant woman. In another two women in plain white underwear and white clinical nose and mouth masks look suspiciously at a third worried woman in between them.

Ierodiaconou’s small drawings mostly of nude figures are presented with dizzying intensity that collage real elements, like envelopes and diary pages with the floating, spinning nude figure.

I wanted to see more of Caroline Ierodiaconou’s paintings after this exhibition and I found more at Saatchi Online.

It is a comfortable experience to sit in the gallery on the upper floor of the City Library – look at the paintings and read the current art magazines. There is an upright piano in the gallery for the public to play but I haven’t heard anyone play it yet.

Upstairs at 69 Smith Street Gallery there are currently 3 photography exhibitions that are worth a look and the climb up the stairs.

Georgina Koureas “I’ll come back for you” series of Type C photographs has a coherent vision of the relationship between objects and architecture in the ordinary run down domestic world. Photography is great at recording details of wear and deterioration and Koureas uses this to great effect. Contributing to the poetry images are the titles with their sardonic take on prosaic statements like “I’ll come back for you” or “Don’t leave me this way”.

Caroline Halstead’s series “Fragmentary Observations” is an interesting exploration of the ordinary images that photography preserves by printing them on post-it notes. The post-it notes are stuck onto the gallery wall in a large cluster. They reminded me of transient, ephemeral nature of much of ordinary photography.

“Urban Irace – a photographic perspective of the urban condition” is series of urban night scenes by Nick Kind. They are exciting, dynamic images but a bit bombastic and I’ve seen these kind of images too often to be interested but someone else might think they are great.

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