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Description: Unfired clay sculptures by one of the artists nominated for the Turner Prize in 2006.
Phone: 0207402 6075
Website: www.serpentinegallery.org
Trains: Tube: South Kensington/Lancaster Gate 
Opening hours: Mon-Sun 10am-6pm
In the past 30 years a whole sub-genre of art has appeared which trades on the fact that it looks as if it has been tipped out of a rubbish sack while making important philosophical statements about the nature of creativity, the myth of the artist-genius and the act of creation. The Turner-nominated, London-based, 42-year-old sculptress Rebecca Warren is part of this strange tradition.
The Serpentine is filled with her sculptures — large blobs of raw unfired clay — and her vitrines, which contain smaller blobs, MDF off-cuts and little neon squiggles. Neon aside, it all looks like the discarded remains of a GCSE pottery class. But anyone who is not already heading for the exit at this point will discern naked human figures and sexual organs appearing skilfully from within Warren’s amorphous shapes, like people walking out from a fog, or freshly excavated pre-Columbian artefacts, still caked in mud. This is art that plays with the deceptiveness of appearances. These crude lumps are erotic, pleasingly puzzling and formally very elegant, with a sense of balance, fragility and surrealism — which is all part of the aesthetic, and joke (though no laughter, please), of this kind of stuff. But they are, still, unfortunately rather blobby.
Warren’s art historical sources are fashionably transparent. There are the traces of her fingers left in the material à la Rodin. The roughly discernible vertical figures are molto Giacometti (and some of the more smoothly finished works are obvious homages to this wonderful artist’s early sculpture). The vitrines with bits of carefully arranged detritus in them are so very Joseph Beuys. The crude forms owe a grosse debt to the tactile bumpy-surfaced boulders sculpted by Austrian artist Franz West. But what more does Warren bring to this aesthetic? A uniquely unvarnished blobbiness, peut-être?
Which is to say that Warren’s work exposes one of the great fault-lines in the appreciation of contemporary art, and may be the subject of bitter arguments between friends who go to see it. Some advice: if you like it and wish to defend it to people who think it’s too blobby, say that its raw primeval forms are a metaphor for the creation of art, even life, itself, possessing a lineage that goes back to Michelangelo’s Slaves, those famously unfinished sculptures of crouching men emerging from rough-hewn marble. Also, fans, I would advise you to quote the German philosopher Heidegger, who thought the essence of art lay in our sensing how its forms emerge. However, those of you who don’t like this work should respond that it’s made by someone who rolls their bogeys between their fingers.
Until 10 March. Open daily 10am-6pm. Information: 020 7402 6075, www.serpentinegallery.org
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
