New London Talent: Future Map 08

Suki Chan, Tomorrow is our Permanent Address

Jera May, The Delirium of Joy

I was really excited about The David Roberts Art Foundation's Future Map 08 show - a handpicked selection of new talents from the University of the Arts London postgraduate courses. However it all felt a little... safe. Great work, good quality and all very slick, but nothing got my heart racing (as Saatchi's Four New Sensations did).

A few works stood out for me though: Suki Chan's Tomorrow is our Permanent Address featured a huge video screen with broken glasses laid out on the floor in front of it, creating a cityscape-like silhouette on the screen, which also showed giant images of broken glasses - resulting in a disconcerting 3-D effect. Jera May's huge pile of furniture featured a hidden projector which made silhouette images of seagulls flying across a kitsch oil painting hanging on the wall behind.

The Double Club, Carsten Höller

It's art.. but not as we know it. Carston Holler (of the Tate slides fame) brings a bit of Congolese vibrancy and colour to a North London warehouse with The Double Club. This "art installation" fuses African and Western influences, as a club, bar, restaurant in one - where a traditional Congolese copper bar stands next to a swish restaurant (serving up Congolese dishes and pricier European fayre) ... and decorative tiles contrast with cobbled stone floors. The revolving dance floor is tiny, but there's a huge window into the bar area... I'm sure most of the punters wont even realise its supposed to be art - but that's the point, isn't it?

Its only here for six months before being dismantled and sent to the Prada Foundation in Milan. Enjoy it while it lasts..

Stolenspace

Chloe Early

Brick Lane's StolenSpace gallery can always be relied upon for great contemporary urban art, but tonight's show surprised in for its lack of graffiti and focus on purely beautiful painting in bold, bright brushstrokes.

In Chloe Early's large canvases at her solo show, it looked like the animals had escaped from the circus and joined a fashion shoot - complete with trippy lighting, plunging swimsuits and urban backdrops.

Chloe Early

Vilma Gold

Charles Atlas' large-scale video projections are hypnotic - it's worth spending some time to absorb the endless stream of black-and-white grid lines and swirling op-art patterns, fused with found images from old films and the internet, dancing silhouettes and everyday objects that appear to fly around the room.

Gallery goers at Vilma Gold

Frieze goers

London art fairs

Without doubt the highlight of my week at the London art fairs was certainly not the supermarket-like Frieze, but the smaller, fresher exhibition of young London artists - The Future Can Wait on Brick Lane.

The beautifully cavernous and stark space in the Old Truman Brewery beat the Regent's Park cubicles for one thing. And there was no braying... and no pushing or shoving. Just space and time to absorb and enjoy some really exhilarating art work.

Some of it was irreverent and more than a little bit crude - a video of a lady snogging a dog (yes really), some of it was moving (Helen Dowling's Breaker), and some was just plain beautiful - the giant coral-like polystyrene sculpture by Aisling Hedgecock, or the compelling portrait of a Girl with the Lipstick by Sarah McGinity. There is most definitely a New London Scene to watch.

Aisling Hedgecock, Barockarama

Girl with the Lipstick by Sarah McGinity

Having said that, Frieze did offer up some flashes of inspiration - I loved the "happenings" - an undercover team of gigolos chatting up dealers' wives, a crazy Buenos Aires gallery that practically trashed its own stand, a reconstruction of Reykjavik bar Sirkus, and smoking booths where people tried to look relaxed having a fag and becoming "art" in a see-through pod.

Appetite Gallery, Buenos Aires

Smoking Booths, Norma Jeane

Apparently people were buying (some of the best stuff was snapped up before the fair even started)... but both the mood and the art at Frieze felt muted.

Kounter Kulture private viewers