Angela Bulloch has separated art into three easy categories for you: colour, myth and geometry. Or as she’s calling them in this show of sculptures and video: rainbow, unicorn and rhombus.
The German conceptualist’s approach is clever, because it boils things down to what art looks like, what its ideas are and what its shape is. The gallery is hellbent on making that more complicated than it is though, describing one work here as ‘hosting a programme of prismatic light’, when it looks like a lamp the artist bought in Tiger or something.
But the rest of the show is much better, made up of a series of minimalist sculptures that grow in size as you walk through the gallery, one rhombus high at the start, stacking up to six at the end, like geometric totem poles. They’re complicated shapes in shades of red and orange and yellow and purple that nod to modernist greats like Constantin Brancusi, but informed by contemporary ideas of digital categorisation and data capture.
Downstairs those rhombuses come alive in a video where they twist and move around the gallery, their colours shifting and their shapes morphing, like really fancy sculptures for the bridge of the starship Enterprise.
This is playful, pretty, clever conceptual sculpture in a genre all of its own: sci-fi Ikea modernism.
