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Even in the musical-chairs world of gallery relocations, a return to Shoreditch must be a first. That’s what erstwhile Vyner Street resident Kate MacGarry has done, opening a handsome, airy room a stone’s throw from where she first set up shop in 2002. The inaugural exhibition is a display of creative levity courtesy of Florian Meisenberg – a youngish Berliner who has upped sticks from that contemporary artist mega-magnet and now lives in quaint old New York.
Superficially, the work looks German – in the style of Abel Auer and Uwe Henneken – but Meisenberg treads nimbly over references old and new from both sides of the Atlantic, sampling surrealism, riffing on nth-generation abstract-expressionist heroics. He possesses a nice touch. The best paintings treat the canvas as an arena for rhythmic configurations of objects (banana, sock, ice-cream cone…) and body parts, that mix a kind of painterly dance with free association.
Sometimes paintings are ‘released’ from their stretchers, or lengths of painted silk are hung from mops and brooms that jut from the walls like flagpoles. In this deceptively bright and breezy world, psychological masks are allowed to slip. ‘I have pain everywhere… my pure existence hurts… my eyes feel as if they would like to pop out of their orbits…’ reads the painted text that covers two canvases; and is surely, a joke about the authentic emotion as it relates to a background of 1950s-style abstraction. Elsewhere, passing references to the business end of contemporary art – as in small paintings headed with the names of major-league galleries – add to the sense that beneath whimsical appearances lie serious thoughts and a steely resolve.