Elusiveness of the Eclipse

Many of the works in this exhibition are as slippery as the title suggests: Raoul de Keyser and Neal Tait's fragmented, nearly abstract paintings; Isa Genzken’s freestanding concrete frames; Andreas Slominski’s steel tube in which, if you crouch down low enough, you’ll find a packet of chewing gum.
Miroslaw Balka, meanwhile, is the most elusive of all in this show of 14 artists.

One work is a glass cup fastened to a rusted metal ring nailed to the wall, like a basketball hoop. Another work is a wooden trellis-like construction on a terrazzo base, entwined with a string made of chewing gum. Why two artists are keen on chewing gum isn’t clear.

This exhibition is all about those ‘in-between spaces’, in which things refuse to be measured, framed, fixed, or are simply hidden from view.

Darren Almond and Felix Gonzalez-Torres both show clocks, a too obvious metaphor for time’s slipperiness; while the elusiveness of both meaning and memory is clunkily suggested in Cerith Wyn Evans’s words mobile, in which each of the words — ‘I call your image to mind, call and recall’ — are etched on separate mirrored bars that shift randomly.

The most poetically resonant work belongs to Mona Hatoum. A huge circular container is filled with sand across which a metal blade, grooved at one end and flat at the other, slowly rotates, hypnotically creating deep ridges which it then proceeds to erase at a stroke.

Until Aug 21, White Cube, 48 Hoxton Square N1, Tue to Sat 10am to 6pm, free. Tel: 020 7930 5373. Tube: Old Street

Eclipse: Towards The Edge Of The Invisible