Danh Vo: Chicxulub review – art from the Garden of Eden to the end of the world

By Adrian Searle

It is just a year since Danh Vo’s two interrelated London exhibitions. Now he is back in the city with a show whose tenor is quieter, more reflective, somehow almost pastoral: except that the disquiet in Vō’s art never goes away.

Partway through the current exhibition I found myself on my hands and knees, surrounded by huge felt tubs and ad-hoc, artful planters filled with grasses, ferns and other plants I mostly couldn’t identify, the smell of damp loam in my nose. Among all this unexpected greenery I was trying to look inside a glass-walled refrigerator unit within which a pair of legs dangle, one foot crossed over the other in the position of the crucified Christ. On top of this unit, in a second vitrine, sits a Greco-Roman marble male torso. From a distance, legs and torso seem to form a single headless figure. The legs look unnervingly like refrigerated human body parts. Flesh or not flesh? Up close, I discover that the toenails are gilded in gold. Later, I learn that the legs are cast from Vō’s partner. The work is called Beauty Queen.

Danh Vō at White Cube Bermondsey … every day the huge American flag will shrink as the logs it is made from replenish burning stoves around the gallery. Photograph: Nils Jorgensen/Rex/Shutterstock

As for all these delicate ferns and grasses, the masses of flowering daisies and chamomiles, they remind me of Albrecht Dürer’s famous 1503 watercolour of a patch of turf, not simply a study in realism but a study of God’s purpose, even in the smallest and least regarded of things, the profusion of differences and cohabitation. Dürer, for what it is worth, was probably gay. How the mind takes flight...READ MORE