Tarbaby and the Funcooker

TARBABY AND THE FUNCOOKER is Lizzie Hall’s exhibition at Altenburg & Co. “Fun title,’ you might think. Well, it’s a fun show. And that’s not to say that it’s some kind of lightweight entertainment. It’s a lot more than that, and as well it points to the fact that real artists don’t need a style, rather they need the ability to respond to this world.

Suddenly, there are 8 ‘Scuds’ all in line, each a stitched cloth sculpture on steel support. Mysterious and completely captivating.  Step into the next room and there’s ‘Untitled (Pink)’ which is kind of pink, yes, but there’s a lot of other colours in there as well. It’s essentially non-figurative, and yet the scrubbing and punching with the brush, the overpainting, those yellows, orange and earth colours, the white, it keeps on going. And so does the small ‘Amuse Bouche’ which is ferric chloride and spray paint on wool. I don’t know but that affected me in some strange way. Then there is a lovely painting on extremely coarse hessian. Just as Lizzie finds and responds to materials, she searches with the brush, not simply for a painterly effect, or to signal that paint is paint but rather in a thoughtful manner, finding oblique connections to the visual world while accepting that art works are simply made of substances.

There are 17 pieces in this exhibition, among them a couple of paintings on tarpaper. And that’s fine because there is a lot of everything in each art work. I went there expecting to see something pretty good and came away with so much more. The exhibition