NEWS ARCHIVE

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DAVID BATCHELOR - Slug Fest

28 February - 31 March 2012

Galaria Leme Sao Paulo

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MARY HURRELL - Call

28 January - 3 March 2012

Carlos/Ishikawa

Unit 4, 88 Mile End Road

London E1 4UN

Call, 2012.
Courtesy Carlos/Ishikawa and the artist

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AK Dolven - Museum of Contemporary Art, Norway

January 14 2011 - January 15 2012

Museum of Contemporary Art , Norway will dedicate a year to the group exhibition Absolute Installation with key international installation works. 

A K Dolven's moving mountain will share its exhibition space with Louise Bourgeouis' C E LL VIII (1998).

moving mountain (2004) is part of the National Gallery's collection. The work was filmed on an island solely inhabited by birds in Røst, Lofoten. In a large scale walk-in wooden installation visitors hear the intense noise from hundreds of birds while a wall sized video projection depicts the heads of two women facing away towards a rugged mountainous landscape.

In the same space Louise Bourgeouis' C E LL VIII (1998) shows textiles and sculptural elements placed inside a large steel cage. Bourgeouis has spoken of how her installation works with their many autobiographical references suggest a manifestation of psychological space.

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David Austen - Modern Art Oxford

till 20 Feb 2011

David Austen In Conversation at Modern Art Oxford with Nicolas Roeg Wednesday 26 January, 6pm  Booking essential on 01865 813800
David Austen 'End of Love' (film still), 2010	Join David Austen and renowned English film director and cinematographer, Nicolas Roeg, in conversation as they discuss Austen's ambitious new film End of Love. Roeg is director of such landmark films as Walkabout (1971), Don’t Look Now (1973) and The Man Who Fell to E arth (1976).

David Austen’s practice encompasses painting, drawing, sculpture, and more recently film and shows an unceasing fascination with people, through myriad observations of thoughts, actions and relationships, reaching from the tender to the absurd. Austen’s ambitious new film, End of
Love, created for his Stanley Picker Fellowship at Kingston University, occupies Modern Art Oxford's Project Space.

Set on the stage of an empty London theatre, End of Love shows twelve characters who are vulnerable and alienated; they expose themselves as suffering figures, all are hurt, lost or broken and their performances resonate with a directness and rawness that typifies Austen’s practice.

Referencing theatre, literature, expanded cinema and performance as well as the artist’s personal practice, End of Love is a poetic expression of love’s elusiveness, the non-linearity of time, and fleeting facets of personal memory.

Austen’s exhibition extends into The Yard, with the evocatively titled Smoke Town. The walls are clad with giant billboard posters of the film’s protagonists and short enigmatic texts that read as film titles or characters’ names, which stem from such sources as the gothic novels of American writer William Faulkner and the graffiti on a Dublin cemetary wall. Illuminated by a series of spectacular hanging lights fabricated from concentric rings of steel, The Yard is transformed into an atmospheric space resonant of an other-wordly station platform or the threshold to a gotham theatre.

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John Stezaker - Whitechapel Gallery

29 January - 18 March 2011
Gallery 1

John Stezaker Love XI, 2006, collage. Private Collection, Switzerland. © The Artist.

John Stezaker is fascinated by the lure of images. Taking classic movie stills, vintage postcards and book illustrations, Stezaker makes collages to give old images a new meaning. By adjusting, inverting and slicing separate pictures together to create unique new works of art, Stezaker explores the subversive force of found images. Stezaker’s famous Mask series fuses the profiles of glamorous sitters with caves, hamlets, or waterfalls, making for images of eerie beauty.

His ‘Dark Star’ series turns publicity portraits into cut-out silhouettes, creating an ambiguous presence in the place of the absent celebrity. Stezaker’s way of giving old images a new context reaches its height in the found images of his Third Person Archive: the artist has removed delicate, haunting figures from the margins of obsolete travel illustrations. Presented as images on their own, they now take the centre stage of our attention

This first major exhibition of John Stezaker offers a chance to see work by an artist whose subject is the power in the act of looking itself. With over 90 works from the 1970s to today, the artist reveals the subversive force of images, reflecting on how visual language can create new meaning.

John Stezaker is organised by the Whitechapel Gallery, London, and Mudam, Luxembourg.

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Posted July 2010

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Posted June 2010

Pavilion presents  Elizabeth Price
15 - 19 June 2010
 
Video Still: Elizabeth Price, USER GROUP DISCO (The Hall of Sculptures), 2009

Pavilion presents a week of screenings and events with artist Elizabeth Price. Working primarily with digital video and reprographic media, Price reformulates and re-inscribes collections and archives using artefacts drawn from the debris of modernism, popular culture, consumerism and science-fiction. During 2010/11 Price will be exhibiting in the British Art Show and developing a major new commission with Film London.   

 Pavilion
7 Saw Mill Yard
 Round Foundry
 Leeds
 LS11 5WH
 www.pavilion.org.uk

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Posted June 2010

New Paintings by Ben Deakin

Tannery Arts Gallery, 55 Laburnum Street, London E2 8BD

 Private View 30th June 2010, 6-8pm
Opening times: 1st-3rd July 2010 12-6pm

"Nothing to be done" mutters Estragon, in the opening line to Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot". Despite sounding like a statement of despair, Beckett's characters have been said to explore the notion of "nothing" as a thing to be done. The phrase is repeated as the lives of Vladimir and Estragon unfold, and we become increasingly aware that "nothing" is a state of existence contrived by the repetition of mundane and obsessive actions by the pair.

Like Beckett's characters, the artist strives to create order out of habits, processes and practice. Most commonly associated with painting, this desire to elicit meaning from the mundane similarly comes with no guarantee of success. In spite of this the artist continues, to paraphrase Beckett, to resume the struggle and "Nothing to be done" becomes a call to arms.

The paintings in this exhibition vary in handling and style, often featuring ephemeral or transient interventions within landscapes which could be nowhere as much as anywhere. They might equally be separated into fast paintings and slow paintings, fluid gestural works sitting alongside highly detailed ones. This offers a view into a process where contemplation, indecision, playfulness and bloodyminded-ness play equal part. All paintings are documents of their own creation, a process in which nothing, is to be done.

Ben Deakin studied at Central Saint Martins college of Art and Design, gaining an MA in Fine Art in 2006. He was recently awarded a residency in the Klondike Institute of Arts and Culture in the Yukon territories of NW Canada. He lives and works in London.

www.bendeakin.com

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POSTED MAY 2010