Fisun Güner
Metro
Monday 18 August 2003

Wrestling with the dog-eared Utopian ideals of Modernism, this intelligently curated show couldn’t be further from your run-of-the-mill summer offering. Four young international artists are represented here, each of whom has been awarded a year-long residency at Bermondsey’s sought-after Delfina Studios.

Playing perceptively with High Modernist forms, the pieces seem to cleverly undermine the sleek minimalist aesthetic with a distinctly contemporary DIY feel.

Haluk Akakce paints soaring modular forms straight onto the gallery walls, creating a coolly elegant backdrop against which the smaller woks on display present a coherent interplay.

Nicola Wermer’s series of tall ashtrays address the corporate world of slickly functional but bland design. But look closer and you’ll find they possess something of the homemade. Similarly, Wermer’s small abstract collage works resemble dynamic Vorticist forms, but are executed from flimsy magazine cut-outs.

Perhaps Gareth Jones best represent this ambivalence. Tape Loops is a series of three works in which the tape of a cassette is wound round a number of wall brackets in a taut cat’s cradle, underscoring the tension between obsolescence and modernity. It’s a theme echoed in Katja Strunz’s towering construction of rusty braziers.

Finally, the cool minimalism of the art space infiltrates the world of the home makeover in Jones’s series of plywood plinths. Fitted with wooden pegs, the modular units lie scattered on the floor, as if inviting you to construct your own variations in the finished piece.