Julie Verhoeven: Fannying Around

Friday 9 January 2009 - Sunday 1 March 2009

In a playful return to gaudy kindergarten materials, Julie Verhoeven creates a disorienting collage of decorated paper plates, undulating and overlapping in the Hayward Gallery’s Concrete. With a flirtatious wink at the solidity and the hard contours of the building, she embraces the overload; bringing in a baroque visual language that is at once naive and crude.

Yet beyond this clash between the rigidity of the concrete itself and Verhoeven´s chromatic fireworks, there is a desire to elevate the plate to its old decorative role. Here the quaint British tradition of mounting and hanging china is reintroduced and twisted as Verhoeven brings her crudely feminine punkish picnic to Southbank Centre.