Questing, Colour, and Form
ZAUM! – Reviewed

Reckoning with uncertain times, a group exhibition taking its name from a century old movement is a tonic, says Mike Pinnington…

Z – A – U – M. ZAUM. With its roots in the early 20th century Russian futurist movement, this was the name given to a language of experimentation beyond meaning (‘za – beyond’; ‘um – mind’). Developed by radical modernist poet, Aleksei Kruchenykh, it is said to have inspired Malevich (he of the black square), in “trying desperately to free art from the dead weight of the real world…” with a new painterly language of colour and form outside established perimeters. Never fear: “In our art,” said Kruchenykh, “we already have the first experiments of the language of the future.”

ZAUM lends its name and, more than a century on, some of its intent, to an ambitious group exhibition currently on display at 50MV, an artist-run space in Sefton’s Waterloo. Across its 15 works, there is the suggestion of striving for new, different ways to address and reckon with our own uncertain times. Bridging the gap between then and now is Sir Terry Frost (1915–2003), renowned for his use of Cornish light, colour and shape, all of which informs the strikingly beautiful Newlyn Yellow (1996).

The space, though (formerly home to a high street newsagents), is otherwise populated with works made this decade (the majority of them this year), making this an exhibition of our moment, one that has otherwise come to be defined by an art that commonly, understandably, is overtly wrestling with the socio-political concerns of the day. ZAUM!, however, like its anti-language namesake, possesses a more gnomic – some may say more sophisticated – quality, implying philosophies, and answers, just out of reach.

James Bacchi-Andreoli (who, alongside Luke Skiffington, is the exhibition’s co-curator) mentions processes of accident and chance, unplanned encounters, and of losing and finding, all of which seem present in his gesso and coloured pencil odyssey, Inside Outside 1 – a fragmented cut-up grid of cul-de-sacs, wrong turns and happenstance. There is, similarly, something of the labyrinthine in the painstakingly hand-chiselled angular furrows of Sasha Holzer’s Walnut (above).

Jane K Morter‘s sculptural piece, meanwhile, seems to evoke a lost futures moodiness, with the brutalism-inflected wall work, Lightfold. Molly Thompson’s architectonic acrylic on panel construction, Transitional Measures, with what the artist describes as ‘off-kilter geometries’ invites us to adopt a topographic perspective; David Ryan’s eye-catching Zones 8 goes further still, putting one in mind of a zoomed out, abstracted Google Earth screen grab.

Alongside all of this form, there is certainly no lack of colour. Mike Carney‘s Untitled (above, detail) has a pleasingly outside-the-lines quality in its bleed of inky greens, oranges and blues on non-porous Yupo paper – a study in ‘visual and aural abstraction,’ says Carney. Clem Crosby’s fabulously named Almighty Meat is a frenetic riot of mostly primary colours, while Christopher Peterson’s Untitled is a tablet-like rune of symbology, its layers suggesting a puzzle to be solved. Safe to say: the chromatically inclined amongst us are covered.

Questing, colour and form are all here, then, combining multiple nods to the heyday of abstraction with an up-to-the-minute hue. A tonic of an exhibition, ZAUM! offers works defying current expectations of the visual arts landscape. To paraphrase the poet Kruchenykh: might we already have the first experiments of a new language of the future?

ZAUM! is on display @ 50MV Gallery until 28 June

Images: Installation photography, courtesy Luke Skiffington; Sasha Holzer, Walnut (2026); Mike Carney, Untitled (2024, detail)

Mike Pinnington