DAVID BATCHELOR – FLATLANDS

Posted on 2013-11-24

David Batchelor is best known for his vividly-coloured sculptural installations of illuminated lightboxes, industrial dollies and other found objects. These three-dimensional works perhaps belie the fact that the root of his interest is and always has been in drawing, painting, abstraction and the monochrome — preoccupations that are best charted in his immensely varied two-dimensional work. This exhibition is the first indepth presentation of David Batchelor’s drawings and paintings.

Having originally studied painting, Batchelor has, over the last 20 years, made colour hisleitmotif. Not the colour found in nature, but the synthetic colour of the illuminated street sign and lurid glare of the nocturnal metropolis. Whether using conventional materials such as pencil, ink, pastel, gouache and acrylic, or highlighter pen, spray or gloss paint and industrial tape; whether making drawings or paintings intended to be simply drawings or paintings, or carefully-plotted diagrams of proposals for sculpture, Batchelor’s two-dimensional works show how formal rigour and a modernist aesthetic can be subverted by the deployment of intense, exuberant colour.

The exhibition presents drawings and paintings created over the last two decades, including the most recent October series and preparatory drawings for sculpture, presented alongside the large-scale, kaleidoscopic installation, Disco Mecanique (2008).

Opposite – October Drawing (by way of bombing), 2013

Exhibition runs through to January 26th, 2013

Spike Island
133 Cumberland Road
Bristol
BS1 6UX

www.spikeisland.org.uk

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DEB COVELL – ZERO

Posted on 2013-11-24

Covell’s new works reference pivotal moments of 20th century abstraction, in particular the non-objective, geometric elements of Suprematism. Works such as Fold 1 and Fold 2 (2013) are akin to Suprematism’s most notable work Black Square (1915) in which Malevich rejected pictorial space. Black Square constituted the “zero of form” for Malevich.

In Zero Covell’s works omit the traditional support of a canvas or board; instead, she explores the malleable properties of paint in a playful process which starts with a rectangular mass of set paint onto which she creates cuts and creases. She then collapses the object into a solitary heap on the floor or suspends it vertically on the wall.

Covell’s works exist as both paintings and sculpture and thus evade the aesthetic autonomy of each individual medium – the central tenet of Modernism – as theorized by Modernist critic Clement Greenberg in the mid 20th century as her works conflate two mediums and therefore eschew “medium specificity”. As such, Covell creates a new visual space in which painting, which is typically a horizontal plane that projects the illusion of three dimensions, becomes a three dimensional sculptural object that defies pictorial illusion.

Opposite – Drape, 2013

Exhibition runs through to December 7th, 2013

Untitled Gallery
Friends’ Meeting House
6 Mount Street (Bootle Street Entrance)
Manchester
M2 5NS

www.kerlin.ie

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PAUL WINSTANLEY – ART SCHOOL

Posted on 2013-11-18

During the Summer months of 2011 and 2012 Paul Winstanley photographed the empty fine art studio spaces of Art Schools throughout England, Scotland and Wales. The artist abided by certain governing rules; the camera was held at the same height for each shot, the studio was photographed as found and the lighting was natural. The result is a comprehensive photographic archive of previously overlooked and un-documented sites of creative potential. This archive has given rise to a truly remarkable body of paintings and a new photographic publication.

The paintings in this exhibition, drawn from his photographs, closely subscribe to this minimal experience of place that is both documentary and sublime. They describe place and yet become, themselves, objects of space defined as much by the transience of light on surfaces as place articulated. Painted on panel, they physically reflect the hard surfaces of walls and screens within the imagery and re live the memory of place as both illusion and object. The visual language approaches abstraction and yet these paintings never lose sight of their social and political content.

Opposite – Art School 17, 2013

Exhibition runs through to November 24th, 2013

Kerlin Gallery
Anne’s Lane
South Anne Street
Dublin 2
Ireland

www.kerlin.ie

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SARA BARKER AND RYDER – ARCHITECTURE

Posted on 2013-11-18

Working with a combination of painting, welding and jewellery-making techniques, Barker (born Manchester, 1980) draws out unexpected properties in material with a sculptural fluidity and lightness. Founded in 1953 as Ryder and Yates, Ryder Architecture is a leading architectural practice based in Newcastle upon Tyne, Liverpool, Glasgow and London. With its early achievements rooted in the European Modernism of Le Corbusier and Berthold Lubetkin, the practice has an integrated approach, designing buildings which elegantly fuse form with function.

Exhibition runs through to March 2nd, 2014

Baltic Centre for Contemporay Art
Gateshead Quays
South Shore Road
Gateshead
NE8 3BA

www.balticmill.com

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MARK BRADFORD

Posted on 2013-11-18

Using materials found in the urban environment, such as billboard sheets, posters and news print, Bradford’s expansive, multi-layered collaged paintings explore the dynamics of social abstraction, where image is fused with context.

The title of the exhibition, Through Darkest America by Truck and Tank, is drawn from a chapter in the memoir of the former American president Dwight D Eisenhower in which he relates his experience as a member of the Transcontinental Motor Convoy of 1919. This encounter, coupled with his observations in Germany during the Second World War, led to the adoption of a nationwide highway system in the US in the 1950s. Applying the map of the interstate roads as a point of origin for a number of paintings in the exhibition, Bradford deftly combines abstract compositions with topographical points of reference that shift in and out of focus. The creation of the freeways, borne out of military exigency to deploy troops across the country, also arbitrarily ripped through communities, including Bradford’s own in south central Los Angeles. Similarly, ruptures, fractures, incisions and segregations echo throughout the work.

In paintings such as The Last Telegraph (2013), passages of dense and dark colour are cut and sanded to reveal intricate cartographic arteries momentarily suggesting the heat and energy of lava flows. The surface of Riding the Cut Vein (2013) is interrupted by an incandescent diagonal fissure, analogous to a natural phenomenon convulsing through a synthetic conurbation. Palimpsests of shimmering networks and tributaries ripple throughout Shoot the Coin (2013), while in Nodding Gunpowder (2013), monochromatic striations are woven in patterns surging back and forth.

Opposite – Michigan, 2013

Exhibition runs through to January 12th, 2013

White Cube
144 – 152 Bermondsey Street
London
SE1 3TQ

whitecube.com

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TOM WESSELMANN

Posted on 2013-11-11

Wesselmann’s choices of subject matter – nude, still life, landscape – are universally recognisable classical themes from the canon of art history. Over the course of his career, he reinterpreted these using his own distinctive visual language, characterised by a reductive line, bold, flat primary colours and often the inclusion of symbols of American culture and patriotism. Works included in this exhibition, such as Mixed Bouquet with Leger and Monica Sitting with Mondrian, clearly demonstrate his respect for a European painterly tradition, but are suffused with wit and a sense of playfulness indicative of that new generation of American artists.

As with many of his Pop contemporaries, Wesselmann appropriated source material not just from fine art but from everyday sources such as advertising, magazine pin-ups and household products. His egalitarian approach applied also to his innovative use of materials, bringing industrial paint and metals into his practice.

The exhibition at the Alan Cristea Gallery focuses on prints made during the latter half of Wesselmann’s four-decade career, including some of his most significant etchings, aquatints and screenprints. Works from his influential Great American Nude series (begun in 1961) will be included in the exhibition. The series was born from Wesselmann’s desire to create an iconic genre in the same way that Steinbeck, Mailer and Hemingway sought to create the ‘Great American Novel’.

Exhibition runs through to December 21st, 2014

Alan Cristea Gallery
31 & 34 Cork Street
London
W1S 3NU

alancristea.com

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