Muse Reviews: 6 April

A round-up of the week’s reviews…

‘Exploration Architecture: Designing with Nature’ at the Architecture Foundation. Courtesy Daniel Hewitt

Art, Architecture and Sustainability (Camilla Apcar)

These structures may be hypothetical, but the organisms and natural objects that have inspired them are exhibited in plain view. Sea urchins, cuttlefish bones, radiolaria, pine cones, corals and conches all have a place – in fact, as the Foundation points out, there’s a 3.8 billion year research and development project here that contemporary architects are benefiting from.

‘The Pale Fox’ (2014), Camille Henrot. Installation view, Chisenhale Gallery, London, 2014. © ADAGP Camille Henrot. Photo: Andy Keate. Courtesy kamel mennour, Paris and Johann König, Berlin

In Pursuit of an Idea: Camille Henrot at Chisenhale Gallery (Imelda Barnard)

Here the artist is anthropologist, only her subject is the whole of human evolution, the universe, knowledge itself. This whistle-stop tour through the history of the world takes in art and culture, science and myth. Here are books, the internet, babies, eggs, foxes, wolves, cities, global warming. Wikipedia gone mad.

dock (2014), Phyllida Barlow. Photo: J Fernandes, Tate Photography

Disarmingly joyful: Phyllida Barlow’s ‘dock’ at Tate Britain (Lily Le Brun)

All impossibly huge, the extraordinary, sprawling structures tease gravity and stretch into the furthest corners of the 100 metre-long central galleries. Remarkably, in spite of its ambition and enormous scale, dock manages to be entirely without pretension.

Looking Ahead: Anselm Kiefer’s retrospective at the Royal Academy (Digby Warde-Aldam)

The artist is here to announce his first ever career retrospective in the UK, which will open at the Academy in September. It’s a major coup for the RA and a source of enormous excitement to the art world. The 69 year-old German artist, though, looks decidedly impassive: ‘the old work is boring,’ he says in heavily accented English, ‘I look ahead.’