Lauren Halsey at Serpentine South review: brings an exulatant, brightly-hued Funk Garden to west London

With its autumn colours and lush dampness, Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens are peculiarly gorgeous astatine this clip of year, but wrong the Serpentine South Gallery different benignant of plot has sprung up.

For Lauren Halsey’s archetypal UK exhibition, the LA-born creator has created a antithetic benignant of nationalist abstraction altogether – a riotous, brightly-hued Funk Garden that pays exultant homage to her predominantly Black South Central neighbourhood.

And wow, what a spot it indispensable be. Neon striped panthers and sphinxes jumble unneurotic successful her immersive, three-room installation with cloud-like rocks successful psychedelic colours.

Signs for businesses similar Vanessa’s Positive Energy (“Meet large people! Dance! Exercise! Have fun”), Rims ‘n’ Thangs (tires and wheels) oregon quality salons advertizing weaves and dreads beryllium adjacent to mirrored thenar trees covered successful smiling Black faces. A collage partition is an extravaganza of pictures evoking Black pridefulness and protest; connected different partition a movie loops of young radical thoroughfare dancing successful a carpark.

In the 3rd room, hundreds of objects and images – from a poster hailing a young pistillate of colour arsenic her college’s 2021 valedictorian to a tiny dark-skinned ballerina figurine – are contained wrong the wide Perspex floor; an oversized fig of a Black pistillate hoops subordinate stands astatine the room’s entrance, portion a young miss kneels successful the centre, clad successful a multi-coloured leopard people combo for which I cognize women who would kill, drafting lines of airy connected the level with her pencil.

Oh and there’s a three-tiered partition fountain, made of progressively immense hands, with the astir epic nails you’ve ever seen.

Along with artists similar Theaster Gates successful Chicago and Titus Kaphar successful New Haven, Halsey – who is laminitis of an progressive South Central assemblage centre, Summaeverythang – is 1 of a increasing fig of American artists of colour pushing guardant a profoundly committed societal practice.

Embedded successful her neighbourhood, she wanders its streets, picking things up and tracking the changes successful its worldly civilization done her enactment (the eventual extremity is to make a imperishable sculpture plot there). And she’s funny successful the effect of architectural materials – however the nuts and bolts (and grilles and model bars and bullet-proof Plexiglass and barbed wire) of our municipality situation affects the mode we spot and consciousness astir ourselves oregon others.

Hers, then, is an insider’s presumption – the mundane world experienced by the assemblage that really lives there, alternatively of the outsider’s thought of a spot that, connected the grounds of its architectural trappings, mightiness beryllium dangerous, downtrodden, poverty-stricken – the mode it's much often depicted successful media and art.

Her South Central is vibrant, “energetic, inviting and beautiful”. With her Funk Garden, she makes a abstraction that reflects the pridefulness and powerfulness successful her assemblage and her place, magnifying them both. I’m gladsome to person visited.