Herald St

Say Less

Curated by William Pym

Herald St | 2 Herald St, E2 6JT

6th - 30th April 2022

Museum St | 43 Museum St, WC1A 1LY

10th May - 18th June 2022

Simon Evans™

Paul Graham

Chris Killip

Justine Kurland

Hanna and Klara Lidén

Ari Marcopoulos

Joan Nelson

Philadelphia Wireman

Celia Pym

Anthony Reynolds

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Say Less is an essay exhibition.

It is an idea on a topic in visual form. It is a small view from our big world, a passionate and true view, but not something comprehensive.

It is a group show of eleven artists from around Europe and the United States, represented by work from 1969 to 2022.

Say Less, the essay exhibition, unfolds as an essay, in chapters. Photography turns into collage, montage and graft.

From there we find craft. It is a journey in process, practice and a certain clear honesty of expression.

‘Say less’ is a millennial neologism that, like all good slang, bears opposite meanings.

It is a conspiratorial, loving hurrying of ‘say no more,’ like the listener is already on board and with it.

It is also chippy condescension in the name of concision, like the listener is already bored.

Say Less, this exhibition, aims to reflect both sides of the saying.

It is emphatic about the power of images and objects to require fewer words, and it addresses the exhaustion we have about the volume of words already in the world today.

It is designed to be self-evident, and for peace to be found there.

British social realism from the 1960s to the 1980s, at its poetic and formal maximum, is represented by vintage prints from Paul Graham’s seminal A1 - The Great North Road series (1983); important prints from the early 1980s by Chris Killip; and a suite of snapshots, a young man’s eye in a packed neighbourhood pub in Newcastle in 1969, by Anthony Reynolds. Reynolds has been a gallerist and art dealer in London since 1985. This is the first time his art has been shown.

From there, and then, photography mutates. Ari Marcopoulos has been documenting New York and the world, day by day and year by year, for more than four decades. The three diptych prints in this exhibition come out of a prodigious period of small-run zines and combination images that Marcopoulos made for the people close to him in 2020-2021; rhythm, sequence and echoes tell of a total life practice. Justine Kurland’s recent SCUMB works, collages that disembowel and reconfigure photobooks of the male canon, will be shown for the first time in London with a new series made from Lee Friedlander’s prurient 1991 monograph Nudes.

Kurland’s physicality recalls Klara and Hanna Lidén’s 2007 video Techno Battle, a lesser-shown loosie of riot and mischief-making. Materiality comes to the fore with the wrought miniature sculptures understood to be made in the 1970s by the anonymous Philadelphia Wireman; a heavily accreted new collage by Simon EvansTM vividly depicting a time and a place, and a moment without beginning or end; and the knit work of Celia Pym, in sculpture that is technical, conceptual and entirely to do with the big picture of what we keep.

With three landscapes by American painter Joan Nelson from 2011, the only paintings in the exhibition, our view disintegrates into pure atmosphere and communion, revealing the journey’s end and the ultimate yield if we choose to say less.

Text by William Pym