John Hurrell – 10 September, 2025

Two artists are presenting work here in unison, in pairs juxtaposed on the walls. Ammon Ngakura has two paintings and a subtle floor sculpture that plays with lidless stacked transparent boxes, a floorplan and light. Maggie Friedman lives in LA and has two paintings.

With the two green Friedman contributions, Untitled Kati Heck, Classsic V, 2025, The Upstairs at Bortolami 39 Walker presented by Sadie Coles HQ New York, 2025), 2025 and Untitled Jeff Koons, Party Hat, 1996-97, The Broad Museum Los Angeles, 2025), 2025 we see a star spangled witch’s hat and an amusing quoted image of what seems to be a man and a woman violently molesting each other. Perhaps they are drunk. Lots of empty bottles lie at their feet. Their faces are obliterated.

Interspersed throughout these faint but aggressive party images are angular disruptive negative spaces that help generate a paranoid social environs. There is a suggestion of absurdist satire or social critique. Her appropriated images are ethereal, being free of brushmark traces, while Ngakura in comparison is not bristle shy.

The pairing of these two quite-different painters is like the pairing of two dance partners who have to bodily co-ordinate to be successful. To cohesively create an effective third exhibiting entity with some sort of intimate two-way conversation through spatial proximity.

Ngakura’s Tilted Arc presents the vertically stacked, stretched out clothing of unseen horizontal sleeping figures. Invisible but relaxed garmented bodies in whimsical states of dreaming perhaps. Arranged in bunks like in a dorm, they look like thick horizontal letters of inflated denim—filled with the night sky.

The Ngakura works have a cavelike ambience presenting symbolic totemistic animals that live in an undulating claustrophobic intestinal space. These fascinating images of hybrid mammalian forms (a rat/crab hybrid playing with shadows) seem to be inhabiting a dreamlike mythical state. Maybe it hints of Surrealism inspired by very early Jackson Pollock.

When I was a toddler, my mother used to read me bedtime stories from the Bible every night before I went to sleep. We had a thick hardcover book of Old Testament stories revamped for children, that had glossy colour illustrations, and one of my favourites was Jonah and the Whale.

Earlier this week I happened to be reading an anthology by the novelist the late Paul Auster, The Invention of Solitude (faber and faber) and in it (p.124-6) he comments at length on the Book of Jonah. He obviously loved this tale too.

Coincidentally Ammon Ngakura has here a painted version of this theme in this Coastal Signs show. It is a wonderful concoction that exudes a Disneyesque cartoon quality with the unnerving, single, piercing eye, and an intestinal pouched koru attached to a folded, doubled-up, jack-knifing tail ready to spring into a straight line.

The three burning matches, crab shadow and camp-fire make Jonah’s horrendous ordeal in the huge marine mammal’s gut seem like a summer holiday at the beach. It is a gorgeous, endlessly fascinating painting, richly laden with disparate evocative maritime imagery, that flickers back and forth in time and geological location.

This show is an excellent pairing of two super-talented artists that resonate well together. Much pleasurable speculation is to be had from close scrutiny.

John Hurrell

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