Marvin Gaye Chetwynd changes her name like the rest of us change our socks. It’ll surprise no one to learn that Marvin Gaye isn’t her given title, it’s not even her first alias. Previously, she was known as Spartacus, before taking on the deceased soul singer’s moniker in a tribute to his ‘free spirit’. Everything she does has an element of silliness, as if she’s openly blowing raspberries at the public with her endearingly bonkers work, and this exhibition is no different. Taking its name from gender neutral pronouns, ‘Ze & Per’ sees Marvin try to contain her usual explosive, ritualistic performance art into a series of 10 ‘paintings’. The use of quote marks there isn’t some snide critic side-eye, it’s just that these aren’t paintings in any conventional sense. These are huge, bestial reliefs, with crude 3D structures of moray eels and kaiju-looking monsters that hang outside the canvas with big, gnarly grins. Sadie Coles HQ is made to look less like a gallery space, more like a school play co-ordinated by a frustrated screenwriter who has watched one too many Roger Corman movies. At the end of the room, a congress of bright red and yellow salamanders boing out from a wallpapered surface with hands on hips, making it impossible not to laugh.
But Chetwynd’s love for slapdash photocopied artworks has not gone anywhere. They’re just hiding behind her monsters. A reproduced black and white image of a Richard Dadd painting acts as a backdrop for a giant, ginger bat. And one side of the gallery is covered in faded paste-ups of the ‘Pompeiian Wall’, making this bizarre cardboard carnival look like an Atlantean city. Even more so when you see Chetwynd’s reworking of French illustrator Edmund Dulac’s drawings for ‘The Little Mermaid’.
It’s an undeniably bizarre, incongruous collection of work, but one that feels more like a performance piece frozen in time than anything else. But it does make you crack a smile, which is a rarity in an art gallery. Marvin will probably change her name again one day, but let’s hope she never loses her sense of silliness.