Anne Brégeaut and Marko Mäetamm: Happy End

Nettie Horn, London
9 January – 8 February

Vyner Street was like something from Dickens last night: thick freezing fog hung heavy, a few lonely footsteps echoing on the cobbles, lamplights hazy orange, a few murmurs emanating from the cosy pub. Not surprisingly, Nettie Horn was pretty empty, except for a small throng at the £1-a-bottle beer bar. I wasn't in the mood for alcohol since it felt like there was a Victorian miasma in the air around the gallery and I could come down with tuberculosis or rickets or something at any moment. Groups shows at Nettie Horn are usually ace. This one, called Happy End, featured only two artists, and started off promisingly with Anne Brégeaut’s cute, sadistic and sad (Superman in a forest of flames) magic eye-type drawings, wicked children's book illustrations and charming little sculptures on shelves – one of them two cakes of soap apparently humping each other, called Fuck Me Please Darling (2006). Estonian artist Marko Mäetamm's video in the back room though: seen it here before in the same room, and it underwhelming then too. Couldn't they have found something new/different? It's a story slideshow in which a scientist offers to solve Maetamm's money problems (he's trapped in a university teaching job, and too tired to make his art) by slaughtering his resource-draining wife and children. Somehow the nightmare/fantasy isn't brutal enough and Mäetamm's solicitations for pity need to be more self-indulgent and less tortured and guilty to really have an effect.
James Westcott


Anne Brégeaut, installation view at Nettie Horn. Photo: James Westcott


Marko Mäetamm, no title, 2007