It's a neat curatorial approach, aligning a group exhibition with a visually rich, ideologically stretchy and highly influential art/design magazine of the 1950s/’60s – an explosive period for abstract art, regularly doorstepped by artists ever since. The mould-breaking themes of Dieter Roth et al’s eighth issue of Spirale, a graphic mash-up of intellectually complex but visually simple languages, certainly gets one around the problem of how to present a diverse selection of geometrically composed or pattern-based works in a small, designer-homely room.
The muesli human/fruit mix title refers to a concrete poem by fellow Spirale founder Eugen Gomringer, but the real exhibition poster boy, perhaps, is the late Ettore Sottsass, father of 1980s Italian design movement, Memphis. Curator Justin Beal has written of his irritation with (and re-negotiation of) Sottsass’s commercial hi-jacking of modernist principles and the stripey vase shown certainly fits with the irreverent experimentation of the largely emerging group of practitioners here: from Alice Channer’s elegant, knife-pleated swathe of high-street dots on silk and Nick Kramer's almost identical linear yellow metal sculptures, at points almost lost against Olivier Mosset's sunshine-coloured swatch of a ‘mural’.
And, essentially, the show works much like one’s negotiation of the publication itself (taking pride of place on a plinth), the tendency being to want to flick through rather than attempt intimate acquaintance with the logic of each loose leaf. While the Swiss-ly crisp appeal of the magazine does make one yearn for the modern froideur of old as opposed to the grubby chic rebranding of yesteryear today, take a step back and the op dots, minimalist stripes and Color Field swatches appear to choreograph themselves into improbably eclectic variations of the same scene.