Isa Genzken

On the way to the gloriously restored and expanded Whitechapel Gallery, I noticed a bizarre looking lady dressed in a hot-pink jumpsuit and yellow kiddy wellies coming out of a 99p shop, laughing manically. This description could almost apply to what I saw inside the gallery, where German artist Isa Genzken's recent gaudy sculptures display their colourful cheapness with a similarly hysterical joie de vivre.

Genzken applies neon tape to foil-backed mirror columns (naming them after friends such as Wolfgang Tillmans), constructs toytown scenarios and psychedelic doll's-view skyscrapers from Perspex, while also making some serious statements about architecture and texture in her elegant, coloured-glass towers. This is her first retrospective in London, beginning quietly in the '80s with an abstract portrayal of her former husband Gerhard Richter as a sleek, black wooden pole in addition to some conceptual meditations on our inability to communicate, as represented by old radio antennae poking out of table-top concrete ruins (called 'World Receivers'). The plasticky adhoc, additive sculpture comes later and looks much more blasé and jerry-built, but is also infinitely more fun. Take her newest piece, 'Street Party', in which a shop mannequin lies prone with a candlestick protruding like a gas mask from its face and two even dumber dummies hang around in shop trolleys, waiting for a New Orelans-style Mardi Gras procession that never comes.

This lack of decorum leads the viewer on a merry dance around the work, tutting at messy drips and corners coming away unstuck, but also subconciously imbibing her mini-environments and architectural dioramas as fantastic, futuristic places or states of mind. Towers lean and list, her models for Ground Zero cleverly highlighting the futility of such priapic, vertical structures, yet also proposing an altogether more optimistic, flowery worldview.

But, like her silent shop dolls, much of this rings hollow. The empty, paneless windows that lead you into the exhibition (neatly echoing the title 'Open Sesame!') are merely frames with no pictures, devices for looking at nothing. Genzken's surface-over-substance aesthetic makes it hard to love her work. The glittering materials and soulless models attract us briefly like magpies, but also foster doubt and refuse to reveal their true intent. She's much more than a mere vacuous colour-player, but Genzken teases and confounds rather than truly conveying or convincing. Instead, I recommend standing in Genzken's room of idyllic beach huts, orange sunshades and her ridiculous, punning self-portrait called 'Slot Machine' to appreciate the humour and lightness of it all. German artists don't have to be deathly serious.