The Whitechapel Gallery Reopens

The Whitechapel Gallery Reopens

31 March, 2009
by: Tom Jeffreys

So after two years and £13.5 million, The Whitechapel Art Gallery finally reopens. Unfortunately for me, they've scheduled the Press View on the same day as that of Madness & Modernity over at the Wellcome Collection, and today is thus something of a mad-cap art dash.

Perhaps it's my haste or just my innately appalling sense of direction but I find the new layout more than a little confusing. Where, say, the Saatchi Gallery triumphs, is the ease in which one can simply wander around – it's just obvious. Here, the ground floor consists of two major galleries and that's fine. But it's upstairs that it becomes a little bit difficult, with an array of staircases, rooms and corridors to confuse over-worked and under-concentrating art critics like yours truly.

In addition – and this might just be because it's Press Day – but there's very little in the way of signage or explanatory spiel. This is not in itself a problem (indeed, it can be a virtue to let people make of art what they will) but combined with an odd layout, the Whitechapel Gallery is not as user-friendly as it might be.

Anyway, enough griping, what's all the art like? Well, there's quite a lot of it, so let's be quick. The advance hype was about Goshka Macuga's Bloomberg Commission that incorporates a 1955 tapestry version of Picasso's Guernica. This colossal work takes up the whole of one wall of Gallery 2. From there a plush blue carpet extends out to a large circular wooden table like something out of the lair of a Bond villain. This displays a host of political pamphlets, maps, photos, letters and other assorted political documentation. There's a video and a sculpture of someone who looks like Colin Powell, and a stack of accompanying newspapers to take away. Aside from harking back to the exhibition of the real Guernica here in 1938, it's difficult to see what the fuss was about.


Isa Genzken, installation view Whitechapel Art Gallery

The main exhibition is a retrospective of contemporary artist Isa Genzken, and this is much more interesting. Gallery 1 begins with a selection of floor-based works from the early 1980s. A few yards in, and the emphasis shifts towards the vertical. There's a series of tall structures a bit like totems or speakers made from wood, glass, mirror and a variety of metals. These pieces display an interest in underlying structures – the skeletal forms that underpin all architectural works.

Upstairs now, and the focus shifts from a formal exploration of structural possibility to something smaller and more DIY. Where downstairs plinths were made of industrial metals, upstairs these are largely wooden. These smaller works still display a fascination with the process of construction, but here it is more personal and more human. The installations of the mid-2000s continue this development but extend the scale to something more immersive and forbidding. These are strange and disturbing works – wheelchairs and Zimmer-frames hint at what happens when the structure of the human body begins to falter. These later works contain a real clash of textures and ideas, but the exhibition does well to suggest some kind of linear progression to Genzken's oeuvre.

In addition to these two shows, there's also a room's worth of early Whitechapel purchases that includes work by the likes of Damien Hirst, Lucian Freud, Ben Nicolson, Paul Nash, Chris Ofilli and David Hockney. The Hockney painting – Man in a Museum (Or You Are in the Wrong Movie) – depicts a man looking lost in a gallery. Returning to the office to find I've missed various smaller side-exhibits, I curse the unhelpful layout and smile at the title of Hockney's work: here, it seems pretty apt.

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Tom Jeffreys