Mind the Gap

Mind the Gap, a group exhibition at Kent Fine Art, is rife with framed, cream and gray, rectangular works which anchor unruly neighboring pieces displaying buckled textures, blurred resolution, or smoky graphite diffusion. This deadpan order aesthetically controls the show’s mood of generalized social and political anxiety. Overshadowed in the artworld by Damian Hirst’s multi-national polka-dot painting juggernaut, the show nevertheless connects the dots between 20th century global events. Free market formats such as those used in precise ink on paper—works by Mark Lombardi and Fernando Bryce—pointedly portray U.S. governmental money laundering and the Jewish holocaust, respectively. Splashes of red alert us, in photo-based images by Hans Haacke, Richard Hamilton and Alfredo Jarr, to the consequences of war, social protest, and selective human erasure. Most haunting of all are two pieces with sound, although one is exhibited silently. A video transfer of Joseph Beuys’ filmed performance, “Filz-TV” (1966/1970), fills the gallery with a banal German news report as the artist abuses a rabbit-eared felt television. Seen, but not heard, is Dennis Adams’ “Lullaby” (2004) based on an Eric Clapton record found inside the prison cell of RAF leader Andreas Baader after his alleged suicide in 1977. These works and Heidi Fasnacht’s panoramic photomontage, “London Blitz” (2011), most palpably situate the individual within our nuclear era as if across from us in the mirror.