From the Bed to the Shed:Rachel Whiteread @ the Gagosian.

Sheds in art galleries were already a cliche over a decade ago. There were simply too many of them, they took up too much space, and, for the most part, they said very little and weren't even particularly aesthetically pleasing to look at.

The focus of Rachel Whiteread's new show at the Gagosian on Grosvenor Hill in Mayfair is, of course, a shed. Two sheds actually. They're painted entirely white, they're dilapidated - intentionally of course, and they're slowly being reclaimed by nature. Or at least representations of nature. It's distracting enough but it's not, to my mind, the "lockdown masterpiece" described by The Guardian's art critic Jonathan Jones.

Far from it. But that didn't really matter. It was my first visit to an art gallery in the whole of 2021 and it was just so bloody good to get out and about doing this kind of thing again. I bought a copy of the Saturday Guardian, took the 63 bus to Southwark, and then the tube to Green Park. The first time I'd been on the tube since October!

I walked through Mayfair and looked with envy at the alfresco diners and drinkers (only slightly bemoaning that I'd not had the foresight to book) and, apart from the infernal and impatient honking of taxi horns, it was an utter delight. When I left the gallery I continued my perambulations and passed through Fitzrovia, Bloomsbury, Clerkenwell, and Farringdon before getting the bus back home from Blackfriars Bridge.

As if it was the most normal thing ever. Which not so long ago it was - and soon enough will be again. I have my next gallery appointments booked for this Friday and I could easily be swayed into booking a pub or restaurant table after too. It didn't really matter to me or not, on this occasion, if the art was good or bad and that's just as well because, truthfully, it was neither.

It was mostly unremarkable. Internal Objects, for that is the name of the show, consisted of, as mentioned, two sheds called Poltergeist and Doppelganger (I'm not sure which was which - hence no titles). While the Gagosian's own website quickly descends into an alphabet soup of interpretation and justification for the work ("the formal language of Minimalism", "hidden narratives and secret histories", and "geometric seriality") before going on to reference both John Steinbeck and the Joshua Tree National Park, I didn't see it quite like that.

The papier mache posting as rusty corrugated iron was a neat trick and it was aesthetically pleasing, the squiggly patterns which suggest someone had been moving their messy coaster around an office desk a bit too frequently and carelessly were reasonably pleasant to look at, and the bits of paper attached to the wall were, quite frankly, crap but the main focus was the sheds.

Of course it was the sheds. Unlike Jones, I did not find them either "alarming" or particularly "engrossing" but they were easily the most interesting things on show. There was a lot of talk, last year, during the first lockdown - the nicer one, about nature healing itself or nature reclaiming its space (goats in Llandudno, a lack of vapour trails in the sky, and all that) and these 'sheds' that are being taken over by the 'trees' that have grown inside and underneath them seemed to work as a metaphor for that.

Lockdown masterpiece though!? Not for me. Whiteread has made great work before, 1993's House most famously, but these, to my eyes, are less revolutionary in both concept and design. We're in a rather ludicrous situation at the moment where public galleries like Tate Modern, the National, and the Royal Academy aren't allowed to reopen but commercial galleries, because of their very commercialism, are. That should give us some sense of this government's priorities. I'd say a worrying sense but it you're not worried about this government already you've not been paying attention.

That notwithstanding, it was lovely to go out and look at art in person again - instead of through a computer screen. It was lovely to walk in the fresh and crisp May air of central London. I will soon see more, and better, exhibitions than this but, for now, it doesn't bother me much that I was as underwhelmed by the art as I was happy to be allowed to go and look at it.