Trisha Donnelly, Serpentine Gallery

If you like your contemporary art served up with concrete explanations and unequivocal meanings then Trisha Donnelly’s forthcoming exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery is probably not for you. If, on the other hand, you delight in being a little bamboozled and enjoy being spirited away by the intuitive, the imaginative and the fantastical, then Donnelly’s exhibition  – her first solo show in the UK –  is just the ticket.
It’s hard to define…
Critics have found it hard to categorise Donnelly’s work as her art defies genre definitions. She works across a wide range of media – video, sound, photography, drawing and sculpture and performance, often merging different mediums into each another. Ideas such as sound being experienced in sculptural form are explored, or the delineation between sound and text. For example, a series of sketches from 2002 have titles that exist only as sound files – sounds that, appropriately, cannot be described in words. 
Keeping things under wraps
If Donnelly’s art is somewhat elliptical, so is the information around her exhibitions, as indeed is her own modus operandi. She is known for her elusive and unconventional approach. During an interview she answered questions about her work by playing tracks from her iPod. Similarly, in the opening of her first show at Casey Kaplan gallery in 2002, she rode in on a white horse announcing she was an envoy sending out word of the capitulation of Napolean, her brief speech ending with “I am electric. I am electric.” 
The intrigue of uncertainty
Like the Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader, Donnelly’s work encompasses a kind of anti-communication, self-mystification and anti-documentation, and there is something strangely alluring about this. As the critic Jerry Salz observed: 'she still doesn't embed thought in materials. But she is finding ways to embed them in you.'
The curator Laura Hoptman commented that the general challenge of explaining Donnelly’s art is what makes it so important to the present time. Come to the Serpentine and decide for yourself.