Karl Blossfeldt / Gert and Uwe Tobias / Black Eyes and Lemonade at Whitechapel Gallery

Entry: Free

Whitechapel Gallery currently has several free exhibitions on. I saw the following three this weekend and would recommend them all.

Karl Blossfeldt (ends 14th June)
This was my favourite of these three exhibitions. Blossfeldt was a photographer working in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He developed his own cameras, allowing him to magnify and photograph plants in great detail. The 80 prints in this show are phenomenal; huge close-ups of stems, leaves and buds that show every hair and vein. Completely context-less, these images seem little like plants and more like buildings or bones or microbes or aliens. It's hardly surprising that Blossfeldt's ideas were taken up by the Surrealists.

Gert and Uwe Tobias (ends 14th June)
This exhibition of work by contemporary Romanian artists, Gert and Uwe Tobias, is filled with menace. Their work is a mixture of large paintings, smaller collages and pieces of sculpture, all brightly-coloured and often drawing on a folk-art aesthetic. However, there are skulls hidden in the abstract patterns and dismembered bodies everywhere. Amorphous blobs of coloured clay, decorated with dead flowers, rise from pieces of crockery. In one memorable painting a woman with an insect where her head should be sits at a spinning wheel, watched by an owl with human hands and a heron's legs. It looks like a fairy tale before the happy ending.

Black Eyes and Lemonade: Curating Popular Art (ends 1st September)
This is little exhibition is about a much larger exhibition of the same name held at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1951 as part of the Festival of Britain. The original exhibition was curated by Barbara Jones, an artist, designer and writer. It was expected that Jones's exhibition of “popular art” would focus on folk art and hand-crafted items, and while it included some of that, Jones also added mass-produced items. She mixed adverts, packaging, toys, furniture and a host of other things in what looks like it would have been a thoroughly enjoyable mish-mash. This show uses archive material of the original exhibition to look at the way Jones challenged ideas about art.