If you ever get joy from the written word, you might not like “Buoys Boys,” Fiona Banner’s pun-themed exhibition by the sea.
De La Warr Pavilion
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Real Live Painting in Britain
BEXHILL-ON-SEA, England — Liveness is a difficult quality to prescribe in a work of art. But to borrow a phrase from an obscenity trial, you will know it when you see it. This is especially true when the medium is painting. It is alive, yes, but it is not always so vital as in the current show, I Cheer a Dead Man’s Sweetheart, at De La Warr Pavilion.
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Reality at Two Removes: Alison Turnbull at the De La Warr Pavilion
BEXHILL-ON-SEA, England — Structural plans, both manmade and cosmic, are brought to light by the paintings of Alison Turnbull. The meticulous results are abstracted if not complete abstracts.
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The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things
BRIGHTON, U.K. — It was 1624 when the poet John Donne wrote: “No man is an island, entire of itself.” Nearly 400 years later he would have blown a gasket to see the way we use mobile phones and social networks. And were he to have seen a new show at Nottingham Contemporary, he might have been moved to add, “And no object either.” Artist-curator Mark Leckey has put together a range of art and artifacts with a wealth of connections to ourselves and each other. If Donne wrote his most famous line at a time of sickness, these days he might have jotted it down in a blog and been led to reflect that the web looks set to outlast us all.