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Gravity's Rainbow

Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh until July 23rd 2011
4 stars
The acid house smiley face on the sunny yellow ball of Peter
Liversidge's shelf-load of single-hued detritus speaks volumes about
this colour-focussed group show of eight artists that takes its title
from Thomas Pynchon's baroque noir. It begins with a joke by Yves
Klein, who in 1954 published a booklet of coloured paper rectangles
that purported to be the creations of some hip young kid on the block,
but which were actually found off-cuts. The fact that Liversidge too
has painstakingly remade his own rubbish out of clay and placed it next
to the original adds to the gag.

Kay Rosen's wall paintings ape Pynchon and Klein by using colours on
the basis of their aspirationally inclined names, ending up with mint
choc chip style blocks as demonstrated by 'Mud Hut between Willow Tree
and Apple Tree beside Rocky Road separated by Hedgerow from Copper
Canyon'. This is painting and decorating as art, as are Ian Davenport's
candystripe paintings in which rivulets drip down to form mixed-up
splodges on the floor, where David Batchelor's giant balls of
single-coloured rolled up cables await a giant kitty-cat to bounce them
into touch.

The List, July 2011

ends
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