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From: Nned Thisom Category: Art Date: 09 May 2009 Time: 05:11 AM Review: Michael Raedecker is best known for grey paintings of lone buildings, sitting eerily in very sparse American seeming landscapes. The works were made with swirls and washes of acrylic paint with lights and details sewn in using different coloured threads. This exhibition is of new work, mixed up with key works from the past five years. I suppose the artist wanted to take our presumtions of his subject matter out of our brains. The show features no lone bulidings, but a couple of pictures of washing hanging on lines, some barren streets, some small abstract works, a still life, some flowery patterned pieces and a some vases of flowers. It is hard to understand what the artist is aiming for with this show, and the painful realisation that infact he is just, as the blurb in the leaflet says, presenting a reinvention of 'different genres from the history of art including still lifes, landscapes, interiors, history and flower paintings'. Which of course, he is not. This exhibition is surprisingly and dissapointingly dull, and the sense from the work is that it is drifting along with little passion from the artist. The big pictures are generally made up of panels, so it's easier for sewing I suppose. These panels often have sewing that mimics and mirrors drips made from the paint on the panel next to it. This way of working suggests to me doodling, time to spend putting things in the picture that are not needed and don't add anything, perhaps trying to avoid starting the next one. Where the work was most interesting, and probably at it's most jarring, was when the paintings were heavily embroidered with flowers, particularly a large dark greeny grey painting in the third room. The flowers are in a ring around the edges but this ring is slightly lopsided, perhaps reminding us that this is art. To be using a method which is associated more with the opposite sex and from a different generation probably gives Raedecker more cudos as an artist in the theory books. The paintings do however retain a sense of the matcho in scale. I remember seeing a Raedecker painting in a painting show at the Whitechapel a few years ago, called 'The Edge of the Real' or something similar. That painting was absolutely knock out, since then things have gone all downhill. I highly recommend not going to this exhibiton.