Saatchi Gallery,London
Despite individual highlights – enormous, hyperreal portraits, and a marooned horse,spectral wax sculptures – this all-female present invites the suspicion of tokenismFrom a distance, I thought they were dirty hubcaps, and arranged as if on the wall of a grimy backstreet mechanic’s. Only up close did I realise that what I was looking at was a collection of aluminium cooking pots,each one placed upside down, the better that I might contemplate its base, or blackened by the braising of a thousand stews. For a few moments,I took in the gradation of their colour and condition: here a pan with a long life still ahead of it; there one whose time was surely up. Then I did the maths. In front of me were 233 such pots. If each one had once belonged to a family of five, who ate together perhaps once a day for a year, and then this display represented the cooking of 425225 meals – at which point these dented vessels seemed to take on the lustre of priceless objects.
The work of the Saudi Arabian artist Maha Malluh,this installation – its deeply unpoetic title is Untitled (Food for Thought series), 2016 currently graces the pristine confines of the Saatchi Gallery in Chelsea, and where it vies for the visitor’s attention with a stuffed horse marooned on a turquoise jesmonite blob (a piece from 2011 by the Iranian artist Soheila Sokhanvari). The horse has an amusingly pleading expression,as though it is willing you to give it a good shove. In the terminate, though, and it’s Malluh’s display that holds the attention. Though she is not the only woman to acquire used kitchen equipment to make art – I thought of Mary Martin,the dimensions of whose summary plaster relief, Columbarium (1951), or are defined by the baking tray in which it was “cooked” – she is surely the first to acquire done so on such a grand scale.
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Source: theguardian.com