Excitement a long way from Kansas

Amid the monochrome sculptures of female American modernist sculptor Louise Nevelson, you may think for a moment you are Dorothy in the black-and-white opening scene of the Wizard of Oz, when the twister smashes the houses of Kansas into matchwood.

In Nevelson’s wall-reliefs and occasional sculptures, bits of wooden furniture — bedposts, skirting boards, chair-legs, banisters, doorknobs, carved decorative mouldings, those wavy bits of wood that your granny has around the top of her curtains — as well as rough wooden offcuts and the odd dustbin lid, are arranged in monumental Cubo-constructivist assemblages. They are often piled taller than human height and painted in a minimalist matt grey-black. The effect is tantalisingly ambiguous — exhilarating in its diagonals, yet ghostly and funereal in its palette.

Here, at long last, is a proper exhibition of an important artist worth putting in the stunning, high‑ceilinged palace — sorry, make that private art foundation — of philanthropist and magazine proprietor Louise Blouin. Her gallery is one of a number of build-your-own ICAs that London’s fractional billionaires have opened in the last two years (like David Roberts’s 111 Gallery, Alex Sainsbury’s Raven Row and Anita Zabludowicz’s 176).

Louise Nevelson (1899-1988) belongs firmly to the postwar generation of American sculptors, whose reference point was Picasso, but she’s a bit too decorative and complicated to make it to the top of this league. She doesn’t really get as far away from her influences as one would like — some pieces look like three-dimensional versions of Juan Gris or Fernand Leger paintings and this exhibition is also not as comprehensive as it should be, with no works from the Fifties and few from the Sixties. But Nevelson’s work — at its best in works such as Cascade VIII, a grid-like arrangement of 20 or so shoe-sized boxes, each with their own dreamlike arrangements of door knobs, hooks and triangles of wood — has elegance and excitement.
Until 14 June. Information: 020 7985 9600; www.ltbfoundation.org.

Louise Nevelson: Dawns and Dusks
Louise Blouin Foundation
W1