Image credit: Maurizo Anzeri, Family Day, 2009.

The Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art has been hyped from its beginning in 2002, and I was quite excited to venture down to Newcastle to check it out. Set along a completely revitalized waterfront, on the south bank of the River Tyne in Gateshead, there is no doubt that Newcastle is still tough and gritty, though tough and gritty and revitalized by culture, and so I actually had high hopes for the exhibition programming.

Only, I find most of these big spaces incredibly dry. No permanent collection frees up a lot of space and programming, so what happens then is a blockbuster paired with something experimental, and only rarely do these exhibitions have a dialogue with each other or appease more than one crowd.

On a beautiful Sunday afternoon, the cafe and patio is expectedly bustling, but inside, the galleries were mostly empty. The sole highlight was the Maurizio Anzeri exhibition, his first solo showing in the UK, and his fiber interventions into found portraits were a solidly presented small solo show, but it was something you would expect of a visit to a commercial gallery.

I had heard great things about Robert Breer, but none of that praise mentioned he’s a better formalist painter than filmmaker, and kinetic sculpture. I actually quite liked the simplicity of his paintings, where most of his investigations in form began, but their separation in display from the bulk of his films and sculptures were troubling. Also unfortunate was the Mariah Robertson exhibition on the main floor, where bigger is definitely not better.