FOUR STARS

 

‘If I had a world of my own’ said Lewis Carroll’s Alice, ‘Everything would be nonsense.’
This exhibition, staged to coincide with Oxford’s Alice Day on Saturday, provides an adult perspective on nonsense, drawing heavily on the Dadaist and Surrealist traditions. Both traditions reject reason and logic, rather depending on irrationality and intuition in order to state or resolve the juxtaposition between dream and reality. This has a contemporary resonance with a world where everyone can produce, Photoshop and then distribute their own myths widely and immediately.
Of the 25 pieces in the exhibition most are two dimensional, exceptions being Finn Stone’s Sit, and Cyberdog (illustrated here). Both are mixed media sculptures, the former a creamy white ceramic dog, baronial in stature, with a lavatory bowl, Duchamp style, replacing the head. The latter sits, chained, patiently waiting as his retro computer of a head signals a readiness to obey.
The exhibition includes a substantial body of work from Desmond Morris, distinguished academic and anthropologist who in later life has concentrated on his lifelong involvement with art. With resonances of Miro and Picasso in Untitled I~IV, he gives us an engaging series of ink   drawings of abstract figures that amuse as well as inform.
Rufus Knight-Webb’s two acrylics on canvas are startlingly different. On a Lily Pad, resonants of Henry Moore, the figure’s two one-eyed heads and its body smoothly serpentine in pastel greys. By contrast Drunken Goddess positively leaps from the canvas, thick layers of paint providing additional emphasis to the impossible explosion of personality, colour and action that make up the piece. Each piece of work blurs boundaries suspending the actual somewhere between reality and the impossible.

 

O3 Gallery
Until July 28
01865 246131