John Armleder: About Nothing. Works on Paper 1962 - 2007

South London Gallery
2 Feb – 25 Mar 2007

This exhibition of Armleder’s drawings fills almost all the wall space of the South London Gallery. It includes a snowflake wall paper, designed by the artist purposely for the show, running along the top half of the two long walls, in orange and green. The wallpaper itself reminded me of something I could buy in Habitat, and I disliked it. Though the exhibition is a survey of his drawings it does contain an awful lot of them. As so many of them were so high I could not look at them with any intimacy. I could not see how they were made. Can you have drawing without intimacy, without access to its means of production? Though the sight of all the drawings was impressive, I found myself frustrated by the limited access to the work and the sheer spectacle of the exhibition.