Our editors on the exhibitions they’re looking forward to this month, from Wolfgang Tillmans and Momentum 13 to Marina Tabassum’s Serpentine Pavilion
Tiago Mestre: Fogo Fumo
Gomide & Co, São Paulo, 7 June–9 August
There are a few lines I keep coming back to in Ivo Andrić’s novel The Bridge Over the Drina (1945), which I’m currently reading. He describes the drunks in his home town as they slowly fall into a stupor: ‘They were lovers of shadow and silence…. They sat there and drank, and while drinking waited until that magical light which shines for those completely given over to drink should at last burst upon them, that joy for which is sweet.’ It is a scene that resonates with Tiago Mestre’s ceramics: drunk vessels of burnt ruby brown in the long tradition of the Alentejo, where the Portuguese artist was born. These pitchers, jugs, jars, amphorae, bowls, cups and mugs seem to have a kind of reflective sentience, yet their shape is warped, slumping and collapsing as if infused with the effects of the beer and liquor they imaginatively could contain. There’s a slow melancholy to them. Mestre, taking reference from the tasca, the cellar and the shop – timeless places to waste time – will hang his inebriated sculpture across a metal bar dissecting the gallery, the light playing on the crevices of each work, changing its form as the day passes through the window. Alongside the vessels, he will install a collection of elongated, snaking smoking pipes, warped ceramic versions of the clay pipes the artist found washed up on the riverside in London, the shank and stem stretching out and undulating as marked by the time passed since their last smoke. Oliver Basciano
