Action Gesture, Performance - Review Rosemarie Castoro

By Ben Luke

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Accompanying Action, Gesture, Paint is a small but excellent related show, Action Gesture, Performance, where we see the performative tendencies within the painting of the period unleashed beyond the canvas. Highlights include Ana Mendieta’s video Butterfly, where she appears as a winged figure, almost a hallucination of morphing colour.

There’s also footage of Niki de Saint-Phalle’s shotgun painting, where she literally shoots bags of paint stuck to collaged canvases, and two fantastic films of Martha Graham’s choreography, which still astounds even on grainy old film, nearly a century on.

Whitechapel Gallery, from February 9 to May 7; whitechapelgallery.org