Thomas Danes Gallery in London's Picadilly is host to a rather charming exhibition of Albert Oehlen's new drawings. The gallery is a good fit for Oehlen; neat and crisp, his drawings look like they have easily slotted into space in this habitat, almost as if they have grown organically from the building.

It is a strange mixture of huge and tiny work, but they do not sit awkwardly side by side one another. The smaller pieces are undoubtably more successful, they are delicate and they somehow own up to their own fragility by use of collage and smaller scale, in a way the larger pieces seem to be resisting. Not to say that Oehlen's larger work doesn't have its own particular selling point;  the contrast between the impenitrable opaqueness of the black paint with the transcience of lightness of the charcoal is very interesting, and the limited palette helps the marks create an explicit visual language that one can almost decifer but its tantalisingly kept at arms reach.

There isn't that much to say about this exhibition. Oehlen is one of the most influential painter's of this century, and his drawings are very pleasant. But not worth going out of your way to see if you aren't in the area.

3/5.

The first impression I got of Tal R's latest work when I was assending the staircase at Victoria Miro was how washed out his new paintings were. I couldn't have been more wrong.

Tal R's new work is more figartive and compositionally more mature in terms of balance of forms and the colour has the vibrancy of Gorky or Matisse. Although the tones are bright Tal R has the knowledge of paint to make them work, and although at first glance they seem to boarder on naive art, they are actually very complex pieces of work that are extremely self aware.

Tal R's work is rich with art historical references, which is one of their more interesting aspects; from the thick line present at the bottom of each painting as a nod towards colour field and sixties abstract in general, to more specific references to early Rothko in the block forms of "The Little Frenchman". The strange Victorianesque charactures take the viewer back to ideas of Goya and the grotesque, whilest the magnificent "Hermes" features a Kandinsky style control explosion of colour that creatures a very clever fluid eyeline guiding us gently down the painting.

In particular "Science Fiction", the title piece of the exhibition deserves a mention for its fantastic composition, the empty areas act as a wonderful foil for the dense colour and a useful breathing space, and exemplify just how well considered these paintings are.

Victoria Miro rarely disapoints, and this amazing gallery space in east London has done it again with a stella exhibition. I can't recommend it more.

5/5.

The Jerwood drawing prize this year is pretty much what can be expected of the Jerwood drawing Prize every year. There’s a handful of photo-realistic pencil drawings, a portrait or two, some collage, and a splash of video art thrown in as an after thought for good measure. Normally, there are some real gems amongst the selection (for example Minho Kwan’s epic detailed piece that secured the student prize in 2007) but this year it seemed even more than a damp squib than normal. With a record amount of entries, you can’t help but wonder why they didn’t pick, well, better stuff.

That’s not to say there isn’t some good work here. Robert Battam’s  “Untitled” had the meticulousness of an Eschder drawing, the procise nature of a blue-print and the fragility of a collage. Ka Wah Lu’s “Floating creature, secret Joy 1, 2 and 3” were an interesting tryptich, delicate and ethereal, the materiality of the ink on glass spoke of trying to capture the transcient and make it corporieal. The winner, Gary Lawrence, had created a giant map of a fictional land which not only was a beautiful flight into an imaginary world but also provided an interesting comment on appropriating cartography.

After these two stunning pieces we are greeted by the usual rehash of photo-realistic paper on pencil works that does absolutely nothing to draw you in. As one of the foremost international drawing prizes, I am a bit disappointed that Jerwood does not have the courage of it’s convictions to stand behind what drawing has evolved into, rather than hiding behind what it used to be as if to say “you may think the video art’s a bit strange, but look! We still have technically proficient stuff over here to validate our existence!”

The two most disappointing aspects of the show were Roanna Well’s “Found Garment”; any interest in the subtly of the marks by way of the stitching suddenly becomes somehow redundant whenyou see it’s a found object, when normally found art is strong enough to stand up to at least an initial level of scrutiny; and  Brendon Lyons’ “Untitled”. “Untitled” is a blank cork board in the corner of the gallery, and if its designed to be a witty piece engaging a debate on what is classified as art ‘m afraid it falls completely flat.

All in all this year, as usual, hit and miss. But the Jerwood Prize is swinging dangerously close to being more ‘miss’ year by year.

2/5

Since the 1990s, New York born artist Ingrid Calame has been working with tracing. She works on-sit at specific locations and records every stain, crack, bump and mark she finds there, building up the layers when she gets back to her studio to produce a final outcome. And when looking around her new solo exhibition at Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket gallery, you’d be hard pressed to see how her work has moved on in the last twenty years.

The first piece, “sspspss…UM biddle BOP” (2005, pictured) is very large and engaging, and reminded me of the short story by Borges, “An exactitude in science”, where a countries obsession with cartographical exactitude becomes so intense that only a map the same size as the land will suffice. One gets the idea in this piece, rather than creating a new illusionistic world as so many artworks do, takes a much closer look at the world we inhabit. Despite its large scale, it retains an organic grace in the way it curves off the wall and spills onto the floor in front. This was a great first piece to have In the exhibition, unfortunately it was also the highlight.

The work in the next room was what I can only describe as a poor-mans jasper johns. I was developing a soft spot for the fragile yet computerised assemblage of her drawings, which is precisely the reason why they work: they seem so ephemeral and transient; the marks seem to float off the paper; the gaudy numbers combined with what seems to be a sudden interest in painterly expressionism in the overlaid grey is jarring in terms of curation and puzzling. ("Arecelor Mittal Steel Shipping Building One No. 233" 2009, pictured)

 Most of the exhibition is quite similar from this point on, lots of enamel paint on aluminium pieces, all roughly A2 size- I can understand why she uses it as it would make the paint very tactile but it starts to seem a bit easy and repetitive, especially when one looks at the dates of two very similar adjacent paintings and sees one was done in 1997 and one in 2005.

Up the stairs is another large installation spanning the whole back wall, but rather than being impressive like “sspspss…UM biddle BOP”, it leaves me a little cold. The only formally interesting parts of this work seem to be the mistakes, where the pigment has smudges over into parts that should have been pure white.

Calame’s most recent work is much larger in scale and although one gets the feeling this is her attempt at a grander level of composition it falls a bit flat, as it just looks like everything else in the exhibition

Although this review has been quite negative, one thing that must be said is that it was quite a mixed bag. Although I confess I was getting very bored by her repetition as a walked around the lovely Fruitmarket gallery space, there was a few genuinely intriguing things: the drop shadow that is created through multiple layers of tracing paper gives the work an interesting three-dimensionality, and the sparser aluminium painters have a level of inviting hypnotism to them, one engages with the forms more are starts to create their own narrative from them. Mostly though, only go and see this if you have a couple of hours to kill in Edinburgh.

2/5

INGRID CALAME, 5^th August- 9^th October 2011, Fruitmarket Gallery, Free – part of the Edinburgh International Art Festival

To many who saw the adverts for the new exhibition at Dulwich Picture House, “Twombly and Poussin: Arcadian Paintings”, the pairing would have seemed odd. What could Poussin, a seventeenth century French Baroque painter gain from a comparison to Cy Twombly, the recently deceased successor of Pollock’s abstract expressionism? The most obvious initial problem is the distance between the two in terms of style. Many who are fans of Twombly will find the Poussin’s drab, those who love Poussin will find the splats of colour frivolous and hedonistic. But for those that love both, this is a rare treat.

There are links, granted, as the exhibition blurb desperately points out. Both immigrated to Rome in their thirties, both are artists of myth and histories, both are romantic painters in their own right. But these links seem tenuous, and could be used to pair together any number of artists from the entirety of art history. The thing that is the most interesting about these two works sharing a wall space is precisely what they don’t have in common. For example, Both Twombly and Poussin, like hundreds before have tackled the subject of Apollo, and it is interesting to see the differences in style, a sort of ‘before and after’ of art history.

1 & 4 out of 5

Tracey Emin is an artist that's had so much exposure not only within the context of the illusive 'art world' but throughout the general proletariat that when I heard there was a major retrospective of her new work I was suspicious that there would be anything there that I hadn't seen or heard before. I will, before I begin admit my distrust in what I see as the shameless 'showboating' of the YBAs, and this was the attitude I had whilst walking through the doors of the Hayward Gallery.

The show is as mindlessly self-indulgent as you would expect from an Emin retrospective, but there are moments of genuine sadness too. She constantly depicts herself as no more than a spread pair of legs in her drawings, sometimes not even with a head, and in one of her more famous works, “I've got it all” (2001) there is a sense of a girl who can’t quite believe her luck.

Emin comments herself in the exhibition guide, “I’m not known as a text-based artist, but I should be”, and indeed she should, words fly everywhere in this exhibition: stitched on fabric, scrawled in biro, monoprinted, scrawled and etched. At some points it does seem a little contrived, one find themselves thinking, ‘surely she knows that ‘betray’ doesn’t have an ‘e’ on the end, couldn’t she use spell-check?’. But, an amended Emin artwork would not be an Emin artwork. The works with words are by far the most powerful; her prose is an unedited stream of consciousness that has a rawness that’s hard not to empathise with on some level.

An interesting discovery to be made about Emins work is, when altogether in this manner you can see just how much she is an artist totally engaged in art history. Within her work you can see clearly her admiration for artists like Bruce Nauman, Dumas, the fragility of Schiele’s drawings, Munch, Abstract Expressionism et al.

All in all, this show is a superb representative of Emin’s oeuvre, and so I reluctantly admit defeat. I came in expecting a self-serving bundle of shock art, but what I found was genuinely moving, engaging, whitty and yes, occasionally shocking. Tracey Emin truly is the queen of British Art.