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Not for nothing is this show sponsored by Habitat

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(Not for nothing is this show sponsored by Habitat.)The perverse thing about all this is that the young painter who had such problems with artifice has turned into a middle-aged painter besotted with artificiality. Walk back to Lunch-Time (1985) and you will see where all of this has been leading. Where once Caulfield looked on prawn-cocktail chic with an impassive eye, his absorption in it has now become complete. His late paintings are no longer about the forensic reproduction of other people's patterns. They are about using those patterns - Japanese plates, button-backed red velour, pink napkins - to generate patterns of the artist's own.Somewhere along the line, Caulfield has stopped painting pictures which are merely about other people and has begun to paint pictures about himself. Give him another 20 years and you feel he may be doing abstracts: I look forward to seeing them.Hayward Gallery, SE1 (0171 928 3144), to 11 April. The Alan Cristea Gallery, W1 (0171 439 1866) is showing Caulfield's prints until 13 March..

ADVENTURES IN CONTEMPORARY ART NO 19: ANDREAS GURSKY Beneath a featureless white sky flows a grey body of water flanked by horizontal green banks. Parallel to the green runs a grey path on the near side of the ruffled water and a grey shoreline on the far side ... The first image to grab my attention is the very scene I've been walking through to get to the gallery. If it is Hyde Park, then all the geese and trees and people have been removed from in and around Serpentine Lake. Andreas Gursky does digitally manipulate his monumental photographs. But this picture is called Rhein, so clearly I'm on the wrong track: I'll orientate myself in a minute.All the photographs are huge. Some are empty of people: an aerial view of Los Angeles at night; an expanse of suspended cellular ceiling in Brasilia; floor after floor of identical hotel balconies with hanging plants.

Actually, there is the occasional person in the hotel's corridors, but they are so tiny relative to the monolithic facade, so separated by unbroken lines of corridor, that they serve to emphasise an essential absence of humanity.And some have lots of people: politicians milling around on different levels of the Bundestag, bald pates and sheaves of papers prevalent; a sea of young heads and shoulders pointing in the same direction at a rave; skiers walking across snow-covered ground, the line of tiny figures stretching all the way from one side of the picture to the other.I stop in front of a diptych of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. The two panels make a single scene, row upon row of trading-floor workers arranged in a triangular format, the traders facing the empty centre of the room. Red sound-damping screens on the wall, red-carpeted corridors between the rows of desks, and hundreds of red-waistcoated workers, four-digit numbers on their backs. They're on the phone, reading the financial press, shouting to colleagues, using keyboards, looking at monitors.

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