In the past 30 years a whole sub-genre of art has appeared which trades on the fact that it looks as if it has been tipped out of a rubbish sack while making important philosophical statements about the nature of creativity, the myth of the artist-genius and the act of creation. The Turner-nominated, London-based, 42-year-old sculptress Rebecca Warren is part of this strange tradition.
The Serpentine is filled with her sculptures — large blobs of raw unfired clay — and her vitrines, which contain smaller blobs, MDF off-cuts and little neon squiggles. Neon aside, it all looks like the discarded remains of a GCSE pottery class. But anyone who is not already heading for the exit at this point will discern naked human figures and sexual organs appearing skilfully from within Warren’s amorphous shapes, like people walking out from a fog, or freshly excavated pre-Columbian artefacts, still caked in mud. This is art that plays with the deceptiveness of appearances. These crude lumps are erotic, pleasingly puzzling and formally very elegant, with a sense of balance, fragility and surrealism — which is all part of the aesthetic, and joke (though no laughter, please), of this kind of stuff. But they are, still, unfortunately rather blobby.
