Tucked away behind the Royal Academy near Green Park is Cork Street. A street of galleries. A street of expensive, established galleries. Well, it is technically Mayfair, you know. If you imagine the opposite end of the contemporary art scene from a group show in a Peckham squat, then you'll get the picture.
What drew us here this time, was an exhibition of experimental photography by Rob Carter, put on by the Forster Gallery in a rentable space on Cork Street. We've been to their Shoreditch gallery for a group show which had some superb knitted abstract expressionism, as well as some awful glib dross. So we hoped for the best.
Unfortunately it didn't really deliver. With an exhibition dubbed 'experimental' we would expect something other than hitting on a winning formula, and then just sticking with it. If experimentation is a road, then this exhibition is like being shown a couple of metres of the South Circular, repeatedly. That isn't to say that the work wasn't OK in a
saleable IKEA decorative way. It is just that it wasn't terribly exciting or... experimental.
There seemed to be three types of photograph on show, stripes of vivid colour, partially blurred scenes of Tokyo, and blurry shots of sand. But having said that, they were selling extremely well. We think that if you miss the show, you'll probably end up seeing at least one of the photographs in the background of a house featured in Property Ladder, being sold by aspiring corporate middle management types.
The show ends on Saturday. Just in case you've some boring bits of wall that need covering.
By Oliver Gili
Rob Carter "Travelling Stills" is at The Gallery, 28 Cork Street until the 19th of April.
