"My day out begins disturbingly well at Tache for their breakfast event, visiting Alice Delhanty’s debut solo show Invented Fire. Alice gives us a tour of the show, which continues across two floors – I bring one of the pains au chocolat along and spend the rest of the day talking about how it is the best pastry I’ve ever eaten. These aren’t the flaking walls usually donning emerging artworks. The gallery is seriously nice. We chat with Lauren Fulcher, Tache’s director, who tells us about the gallery’s steadfast ambition to propel emerging and early-career artists. The accompanying publication, written by Anna Moss, aptly references Ezra Pound’s seminal Imagist poem In a Station of the Metro (1913); its stunning brevity clicks for me in the hyperfocused moments of colour, which Alice applies and manipulates with a squeegee across her giant canvases.
Later that day, at Minor Attractions: S t a r c h occupies Room 102, shared with LAILA, showcasing collaborative work by Moses Tan and Philip Steele. I’m beckoned in by a dismembered hand, which waves eerily like a metronome; it emerges from a fur lined leather handbag that is perched oddly on the edge of the freshly made bed. A second protrudes from the wardrobe through velvet drapes. Tan’s You Had Me at Hello and Goodbye (2026) is constructed from stuffed and sewn pale-green nylon, giving the claws their gangrenous appearance. It’s both chilling and absurdly funny. This, and Léa Porre’s fleshy palette in 107 - exhibiting with Tache across the road incidentally - immediately bring Dorothea Tanning’s surreal spell at her Hôtel du Pavot (1970-73) to mind, the installation first shown in 1974. Like Tanning’s fabric beasts that burst from every seam of its wallpaper, presentations in The Newman respond back to the four hotel walls as a hauntingly liminal site."
By Jemima Jenkins.