A place to linger

Andrew Lambirth

Wednesday, 6th May 2009

Isa Genzken: Open, Sesame!
Whitechapel Gallery, until 21 June

Passports: Great Early Buys from the British Council Collection
Whitechapel Gallery, until 14 June

The Whitechapel has just re-opened after a major renovation and expansion, increasing gallery space by 78 per cent, incorporating and transforming the old library next door as part of a Heritage Lottery Fund assisted project. The results are spectacular: the original exhibition spaces which have beguiled generations of gallery-goers are still there, looking better than ever, with the addition of several new areas to discover. As a result, the Whitechapel can offer a range of exhibitions at any one time and will no longer need to be shut for lengthy periods to rehang. In fact, there’s so much to choose from it’s easy to miss one of the displays until you become familiar with the building’s layout. It’s worth spending time getting to know the various spaces, and there’s a stylish new restaurant in addition to the existing café if you need refreshment.

The main exhibition is devoted to Isa Genzken (born 1948), a German sculptor little-known in this country but considered to be highly influential. The rather better-known Wolfgang Tillmans affirms that she is ‘hugely admired by fellow artists’ and that her work ‘has an incredible formal clarity whilst delving deep into society’s underbelly and the struggles of our time’. It’s refreshing to hear such sentiments from an artist rather than a historian or curator, but I still don’t really know what they mean. I can recognise and appreciate the formal clarity of many of the objects in the interesting installation on the ground floor of the Whitechapel, a number of which look like furniture hybrids or even giant bodkins, but apart from a slight satiric edge to the works upstairs, I find it difficult to identify any ‘deep delving’. In fact, in notes made going round the show I described the work as private nightmares and the acme of the synthetic.

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