VG Award 2016 3 September - 17 September 2016 Vordemberge-Gildewart Foundation Prize curated by Richard Grayson
Annely Juda Fine Art 23 Dering Street (off New Bond Street) London W1S 1AW ajfa@annelyjudafineart.co.uk www.annelyjudafineart.co.uk Tel 020 7629 7578 Fax 020 7491 2139 Monday - Friday 10 - 6 Saturday 11 - 5
Annely Juda Fine Art is pleased to be able to exhibit the 13 artists who have been put forward by the curator Richard Grayson for the annual Vordemberge-Gildewart Award. Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart, who was born 1899 and died 1962, was a member of a number of important groups such as de Stijl, where he was with colleagues such as Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg, and he lived during the second world war years in Holland, where Max Beckmann was a good friend of his. He also was friends with artists such as Kurt Schwitters, El Lissitzky, Hans Arp amongst others. Apart from being a wonderful artist he was an important teacher and taught at the well-known art school in Ulm in Germany. His works are to be found in most major museums such as Tate Gallery, London, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Centre Pompidou, Paris and many more. The Vordemberge-Gildewart Foundation was founded nearly 40 years ago in 1977 by his widow Ilse Engelina Vordemberge, nĂŠe Leda, who wanted very much for this award to be there to help young artists in the name of her husband and his teachings and therefore set up this foundation before her death. Each year a substantial prize is given to one artist and for many years has been one of the largest awards in Europe. The awards have been presented in many different European countries, often in important museums. An international jury including museum directors, art historians, art critics and artists will make a decision at the beginning of the exhibition who should be awarded the prize. The only condition from the Foundation is that the artists should be practising and under 35 years old as the idea of the prize is to help an artist financially in the more formative years. I would like to thank the board members and the jurors for their help. Especially I wish to thank Richard Grayson, who has curated this exhibition and I know how much effort and hard work he has put in. David Juda, 2016
It has been a pleasure to be asked to develop the list of artists to be considered for the 2016 Vordemberge-Gildewart Award. Given that the criteria for the award, that it is intended to support the practice of working artists under the age of 35, this list of artists in the exhibition is one of many hundreds of other hypothetical lists that could have been generated, and in an ideal world there would be many exhibitions containing scores of artists and the award would be granted multiple times. What directed my thinking in this particular iteration was a consideration of practices that in one way or another inflect or reflect the technological innovations that are shaping our culture. This seems to me in concordance with the approaches and practices of Vordemberge-Gilderwart himself who, as an artist, made work the conception of which was inflected by the technologies of his time, the machine, and the way that the industrial was shaping ways the world might be imagined. That melding of the technological and the social underpinned his approaches and those of De Stijl, of which he was a member. In his case this took him into the direction of ‘Absolute Art’ a pure modernist abstraction that increasingly excluded reference to the outside world. In today’s context digital innovations seem to lead more towards a hybridity rather than a purity. So the artists represented here all elide codes and combine approaches. Not all of the works make reference to the digital realm but all of the works mix codes and cross definitions and indexes. The artists are generating new and innovative hybrids that are shaped by or reflect the complex operations of these technologies and their wider play on our worlds and our imaginations. Richard Grayson, 2016
Aaron Angell (b. 1987) Aaron Angell works primarily with ceramics, producing sculptural tableaux referencing hobbyist cultures, naturalistic forms, and the underground hand built ceramics of Britain from the 1970s and 80s. Angell is interested in marginal forms of image making and hopes to encourage new ways of thinking about the culturally nuanced history of ceramics by focusing on the material as a vehicle for sculpture. In his own words Angell wants to ‘flatten the material’, looking beyond the medium to view the works as autonomous sculptures, and rehabilitating ceramics not as a material suffused with its own history, but as one of pragmatism, economy, and intuition. Angell writes: ‘I am interested in non-canonical histories, marginal forms of image making, the aesthetics of archaeology and excavation, and the purposes and history of poetic thought. I work primarily with ceramic material, but also make images using reverse-painted glass, and sculpture and images in other media. I prefer to view my practice as a whole, as a mosaic or compost of images and persistent ideas. I am also founder and director of Troy Town Art Pottery, a radical and psychedelic ceramic studio for artists on Hoxton Street. The pottery conducts archaeological research, glaze research, and apprenticeships for local young people as well as hosting around 30 artists in residence a year.’ Recent solo exhibitions and projects include: Troy Town Art Pottery, Hoxton. A programme of artist residencies, materials research, exhibitions, workshops for specific groups from the local community, and an apprenticeship programme for young adults (2014 - ongoing). The Death of Robin Hood, Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, for Glasgow International (2016), The Death of Robin Hood, Glasgow Botanic Gardens, for Glasgow International (2016), Variations on the Chaldon Doom, Markus Lüttgen, Cologne (2016), Grotwork, Studio Voltaire, London (2015). Recent group exhibitions and projects include: British Art Show 8, Various venues (2015 - 2016), Pool, Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover (2014), British, British, Polish, Polish; British and Polish Art Since 1990, CCA, Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw (2013), and A History of Inspiration, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2013). Forthcoming projects include: GOMA, Glasgow (2017), Artist in residency and organiser/exhibitor in That continuous thing: Artists and the ceramic studio 1920 - today, Tate St. Ives (2017).
pink bird 2015 glazed stoneware 40 x 40 x 55 cm
Iain Ball (b. 1985) Iain Ball’s work is informed by an awareness of the infinite opacity of contemporary structures and relationships: where greater scientific insight only leads to greater complexity and increased obscurity. He draws on Bruno Latour’s concept of Black-boxing, where a simple surface contains (and obscures) the vastly complex operations within. ‘Through various iterations and collections of aggregate content, my work explores speculative (both real and imagined) scenarios pertaining to weird cultural transformations which are manifested as the result of sudden spurts of rapid technological change and stewed within periods of stagnation and lament. As such, I am interested in how the past and future can be ‘hacked’ and altered via the deployment of strange energetically charged object/devices. Energy Pangea / Rare Earth Sculptures (2011) is an ongoing series and research project which develops various ‘sculptural systems’ or aggregate swarms by implanting newly created hybridised sculptural objects into pre-existing and emergent environmental contexts. My work tends to be project based, modular and open-ended as new exhibition and presentation opportunities allow for recent developments to morphologically transform the pre-existing sculptural system. Each project is treated as a constantly evolving swarm of media with specifically created primary nodes and input/outputs working much like a blackbox. Recently in Praseodymium (2016) I have worked with the idea of developing a psycho-technical artifact which harvests and transmutes various contemporary paranoias such as belief in alien abductions and secret government mind control programs into a renewable energy source, in Terbium 2016 the sculpture was co-released with a digital ep single and music video made for Goch, a Forest Psytrance producer from Macedonia and released through the digital record label Quantum Natives.’ Artist’s Statement, 2016 Iain Ball has a MFA in Sculpture, Slade School of Fine Art, London, 2015 and BA Fine Art, Oxford Brookes University, 2010. Recent solo exhibitions include: Praseodymium, Cell Project Space, London (2016), ENERGY PANGEA+GOCH live > Terbium Energy catalyst/Solar Maximum/ Hybrid Synergy Drive, Future Gallery Berlin (2015), (Rare Earth Sculptures) Lanthanum, presented by openyourkimono.org, London. Recent Group Exhibitions include: Grand Orpheus Highway La Plage, Paris, The Disorder of Things, Kvalitar CZ and Rare Earth, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna (2015). Praseodymium: Rare Earth Sculpture originally commissioned by Cell Project Space as ‘Praseodymium Intracrine Signal Aggregate’ 2016
Oliver Beer (b. 1985) Oliver Beer’s background in both music and fine art led to an early interest in the relationship between sound and space, particularly the voice and architecture. He has translated his research into fascinating installations and performances in which spectators take part by the mere fact of their presence, and he makes sculptures and videos that embody, literally or metaphorically, the physical expression of this subtle relationship and the way the human body experiences it. Within and alongside his work with sound, Beer creates subtle and diverse sculptural, installation and film projects whose provenance sometimes seems biographical; but in which his play with universal – often intimate – concerns draws on shared emotions and perceptions. The Tristan Ensemble series (2015) was developed during a residency at the Watermill Centre, NY. Beer developed a technique for stimulating the “wine glass” resonance effect with any empty vessel, without having to physically touch it. Using this technique he brought together a selection of pots and vessels from the Watermill Collection to make them “sing”, creating a vast and disparate musical instrument from the collection. Each object has its own unchanging musical note at which it resounds – a note that is the same today as it was the day of its creation. For the Vordemberge-Gildewart Foundation exhibition Beer has chosen vessels from diverse historical and geographical origins and, by amplifying and juxtaposing the resonant notes specific to each vessel, constructed the famous Tristan Chord. Heard in the opening phrase of Richard Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde, the Tristan Chord is harmonically unstable, and often recognised as the origin of modernity in music; much as one might identify the origin of modernity in painting with the works of Manet or Cezanne. After studying composition Oliver Beer read Fine Art at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, University of Oxford, 2009, and studied Theory of Cinema as a postgraduate at the Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris III (2012/13). Beer’s work has been exhibited at Centre Pompidou, Paris; MoMA PS1, New York; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Ikon Gallery, Birmingham; Lyon Biennale; Modern Art Oxford; WIELS, Brussels; Watermill Center, New York; Fondation Hermès, Paris, Tokyo, Seoul; and Frank Gehry’s Louis Vuitton Foundation, Paris.
The Tristan Ensemble 2015 live sound installation based on tuning the harmonics of antiquities from the collection of Robert Wilson Installation view, Watermill Center, New York
Beth Collar (b. 1984) Working across sculpture, sound, drawing and performance, Beth Collar’s practice questions the construction of a collective historical consciousness and the desire to commune with pasts both real and imagined. She draws on mythology, archaeology (both its actions and its artefacts), psycho-geography and specific narratives of locality, to mould complex and layered works that articulate and refract these concerns through the lens of her subjective narratives and experience. Her works construct arena where these different indexes of experience collide and inflect each other. A tax receipt might be pinned to the wall with arrowheads; a prosthetic hand lies submerged in a bucket of water merging a specific body horror with the echo of a hand rising through water in Arthurian legend. She writes of recent projects using clay and flowing water: “Deposition is both a geological term and an archaeological one. It is the name given to deposits of silt left by a river - the opposite of erosion - and in archaeology, it is the name for a discovered object; the find. I am particularly interested in purposeful depositions in watery places (like ritually ‘killed’ swords, bog bodies and other offerings) and what this tells us about the human relationship to water and to material possession. I’ve been thinking of this pond as a holy well, sacred pool, chthonic bloodbath in which to cast things. Depositing items into the water that in turn get eroded, re-distributed, re-organised…” Beth Collar is based in Bristol. Recent solo shows include Fig-2, ICA, London (2015) and Happy Birthday Gallery, London (2015) and solo performances for The Cipher and the Frame at Cubitt, London (2015) and a Saturday Live at the Serpentine Gallery, London (2015). Recent group exhibitions include Tarantallegra, Hester, New York (2016), Tall Tales, The Freud Museum, London (2016), Secret Surface KW, Berlin (2016), A Million Lines at the Bunkier Sztuki Collection, Krakow (2015). Performances include Preserves and Presences Irish Museum or Modern Art, Dublin (2016), Bob Cobbiiiiiiiiing Live at Raven Row, London (2015), Palimpsest, a performance collaboration with William Cobbing, Hayward Gallery Project Space, London (2014). She is currently artist in residence on the Figure of the Witch research group at the University of Bristol. A new performance will take place at the Glasgow Women’s Library in November 2016 as part of the Tall Tales touring exhibition.
studio documentation
Laura Eldret (b. 1982) A central focus for Laura Eldret’s recent practice has been her experience working in Teotitlan del Valle in Oaxaca state in Mexico, a community famous for making rugs. She was drawn to the ways that the society works and ways that the population communicates and interacts through a wealth of rituals and ceremonies. As well as making a record of the town she commissioned rugs from different rug makers, seeing these productions as ‘receipts of exchange’ that allowed her to get to know the makers and the community they constitute. “Central to my work is a fascination with the ways that people come together to perform and perpetuate cultural identities, at the moment particularly the politics and export of collective identities. I make performances, events, videos, drawings and fabric works and have previously worked with diverse groups of people, including boxers, builders, fire fighters and Zapotec weavers. My projects are formed out of a process of constructed or found social exchange, with ideas being proposed, recorded, performed and re-iterated. The resulting works that can be seen as records and experiments in how sociability can be proposed and recorded in a shared experience, video or a material form. I am increasingly involved with contemporary art discourses about fabric, and notions of experimental ethnography and anthropology. I am interested in exploring the social value of fabric in relationship to esoteric cultural practices. Reflecting the history of textiles in forging trans-regional connections and engaging with the use of design motifs as a tool for cultural branding, mimesis and affect. I am interested in fabric’s ability to wrap, comfort, soften, shield, conceal and display, and how it might also be used in banners in protests, rallies, or ceremonies, for example, to rethink social expectations, and bring alternative social voices into an artistic discourse.“ Artist’s Statement, 2016 Laura Eldret has a BA Fine Art Painting, Wimbledon School of Art, London, 2004. Recent Solo projects include, The Juicers, Fig-2 50/50, ICA, London (2015), Gotas, Annka Kultys Gallery, London (2015). Group exhibitions include, The Interior, Ditto Gallery, London (2015), Graphics Interchange Format, Focal Point Gallery, Southend (2015), Drawing Biennial 2015, Drawing Room, London (2015); Hey, performance at Artlicks Weekend, London (2014) and Tan Lines, Tannery Arts, London (2014).
Installation view, Laura Eldret ‘Gotas’ at Annka Kultys Gallery, London, 2015
Jamie Fitzpatrick (b. 1985) Jamie Fitzpatrick constructs objects and installations that draw on the languages of official and memorial sculpture - the statues of kings and queens, warriors and politicians - made to celebrate the acts of the powerful and installed in public spaces in cities to represent their dominion over their subjects. Fitzpatrick recreates these bewigged and bejewelled representations in foam, animates them with engines and sound and splashes them with coloured wax to form sculptures and assemblages in a carnivalesque explosion that simultaneously reveals, subverts and inverts the power relations that they embody. They are acts of humour and violence that remodel icons of patriarchy, imperialism and social hierarchy. The artist says, ‘Taking influence from ideas on power-infatuation and sexually suppressive conditioning, the sculptures imply some transgressive act. They are grubby, cheeky and irreverent; their spoilt surfaces an undermining reaction against social repression. They are built to both entice and repulse like piles of cartoonish excreta or iced cakes, to be both consumed and voided at once. ...Recent exhibitions have focused on drawing out the theatrical potential of these works... (and) have treated the exhibition space like that of a stage, a site of action, playing with the point of encounter between the viewer and the artwork as some tangible point of potential tension. In doing so, the works are able to affect a far more tangible and emotional form of dominance and imposition on the viewer through the use of a heightened theatricality.’ Jamie Fitzpatrick lives and works in London. He has a BA in Fine Art, Philosophy & Contemporary Practice from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee (2009) and an MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art (2015). Recent solo exhibitions include: (loudly) Chomp, chomp, chomp, VITRINE Gallery, London (2016). Recent Group exhibitions include: XL Catlin Art Prize (2016), Bloomberg New Contemporaries (2016), Bluecoat, Liverpool & ICA, London (2016), UK/Raine, Saatchi Gallery, London (2015), Pangaea 2015 Residency, Pangea Sculptor’s Centre, London (2015), Off The Wall, HQS Wellington, London (2015), New Contemporaries 2015, ICA London (2015).
Installation View from XLCatlin Award 2016
Patrick Goddard (b. 1984) Patrick Goddard works with video, publication, performance and installation. His politically loaded narrative based works unfold with a self-critical awareness and never becoming overtly or directly politically illustrative: rather they demonstrate approaches that interrogate the attitudes that they seemingly exemplify. The works invert with insight and black humour the position of the aloof cultural critic and construct situations that flip criticism back on the artist’s own ideology and presumptions. This serves to constitute a practice that wrestles with the very nature and complexities of ‘commitment’. By incorporating a plurality of ideological standpoints, meta commentary, and multiplying reflexive knots, the works reflect the artist’s own sincere misgivings and fumbled attempts to create a personal and political integrity. In Free Radicals (2014), a free-verse poem is read over point-of-view visuals of what appears to be a water slide. Occasionally a second voice chimes in like a heckler from the back, deriding the pomposity of the primary narrator. The poem loosely revolves around ideas of ‘chaos linguistics’, the political vigour of the outsider and a breakdown of language. “One dyslexic says to another: ‘can you smell revolution?’ The second replies ‘I can’t even spell my own fucking name mate’ (that doesn’t even make sense) and with this spellbind the ideas disintegrate into a cot death concept, flaccid as a summarised joke.” Patrick Goddard works in East London. He has a MFA from Goldsmiths University (2011) and is currently a doctoral candidate at The Ruskin, University of Oxford, in Fine Art Practice. Recent solo shows include: Gone To Croatan, Outpost Gallery, Norwich (2015) and Revolver II, Matt’s Gallery, London (2014). Recent group shows include: Fig-2 with the White Review, ICA, London (2015), Objective Considerations of Contemporary Phenomena, M.O.T. International Projects, London (2015), IV Moscow International Biennale of Young Art, Moscow Museum of Modern Art (2014). Recent performances have taken place at Matt’s Gallery, N.O.W.here Gallery, Wysing Arts Centre, French Riviera, and Grand Union. He completed a residency at Black Rock in 2016 and at Wysing Art Centre in 2014. His debut graphic novel, Operation Paperclip, was launched at Matt’s Gallery in June 2014.
still from the video Free Radicals 2013 / 5’45” / HD digital file for projection
Joey Holder (b. 1981) Joey Holder’s work maps the shifting boundaries between the natural and the artificial and explores ways that this becomes increasingly blurred and interconnected through developments in contemporary understanding and technology. ‘I am interested in the structures and hierarchies of the technological and natural world and how these systems are constantly abstracted. Mixing elements of biology, nanotechnology and natural history against computer program interfaces, screen savers and measuring devices, I see no object or substance in any fixed state or with any permanent definition, identity or order; everything is transforming and morphing into something else; everything is a mutant and a hybrid. Connecting forms which have emerged through our human taste, culture and industrial processes I investigate complex systems that dissolve notions of the ‘natural’ and the ‘artificial’. GM products, virtual biology and aquatic creatures are incorporated into an extended web; challenging our perception of evolution, adaptation and change. By contrasting so-called ‘organic’ and ‘man-made’ substances and surfaces through a series of abstractions, I create a world of manifold layers, none more unified or natural than the next. These hybridities may suggest a particular function or natural form but remain elusive through their odd displacement.’ Artist’s Statement, 2016 Joey Holder has a BA from Kingston University (2002) and a MFA from Goldsmiths College, Unversity of London (2010). Recent solo/duo exhibitions include: Lament of Ur, Karst, Plymouth (w/ Viktor Timofeev); TETRAGRAMMATON, LD50, London (w/ John Russell); BioStat, Project Native Informant, London (2015) and HYDROZOAN, The Royal Standard, Liverpool (2014). Recent group exhibitions include: The Uncanny Valley, Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge (2015); Sunscreen, online and at Venice Biennale (2015); A Plague of Diagrams, ICA, London (2015); WEC - Whole Earth Catalyst, The Composing Rooms, Berlin (2015); h y p e r s a l o n, Art Basel Miami, (2014); Vestige: The Future is Here, Design Museum, London (2013) and Multinatural Histories, Harvard Museum of Natural History, Massachusetts, USA (2013). Holder was a finalist for the Dazed Emerging Artist Award (2013).
P R O T E U S 2015 blue back print, flat screen, video 12 min 03 sec dimensions variable
Marguerite Humeau (b. 1986) Marguerite Humeau makes work that seeks to manifest things and events that lie beyond our perception. She collaborates with a wide spectrum of experts and researchers in the development of her projects and in the construction of the complex sculptural and sound environments that generate these speculative worlds. As Nadim Samman has written, “Marguerite Humeau’s work stages the crossing of great distances in time and space, transitions between animal and mineral, and encounters between personal desires and natural forces.” ‘Proposal for resuscitating prehistoric creatures’ , is an opera which sets up the rebirth of cloned creatures, their wandering and their sound epic. They are seeking to evolve in our contemporary era. The designer, who became the heroine of a quasi-mystic epic journey, aims at resuscitating the sound of prehistoric creatures by reconstructing their vocal tract. This is problematic from the scientific point of view: since the vocal tract is made of soft tissue, it does not fossilise. The only things that have been preserved through time are the surrounding bones. The inner parts have to be redesigned. Humeau had to overcome the difficulty of telling history, and prehistory; and also to create a work from non-existent, inaccessible, or lost data. Design, fiction, science, speculations and phantasms serve the project ambition. Advices from experts as well as predictions are used to craft the roars of the new creatures.’ Artist’s Statement, 2016 Marguerite Humeau studied at the Design Academy Eindhoven (2007-9) and at the Royal College of Art, London, where she obtained her MA in Design Interactions in 2011. Her work has been shown in various solo and group exhibitions in galleries and museums including: Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Manifesta11, Zürich (2016), TBA21 Thyssen Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna (2015), Serpentine Gallery, London (2014), Museum of Modern Art, New York and a Hayward Gallery Touring exhibition (2014). Her work is part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and of the Fonds de Dotation famille Moulin (Lafayette Collection), Paris.
The Opera of Prehistoric Creatures 2011 left to right: Entelodont “Hell Pig”, Australopithecus Afarensis “Lucy”, Ambulocetus “Walking Whale” resonance cavities, larynx with vocal cords, windpipe, artificial intelligence approx. 700 x 405 x 900 cm
Lawrence Lek (b. 1982) Lawrence Lek creates speculative worlds and site-specific video simulations using gaming software, video, installation and performance. Often based on real places, his digital productions reflect the impact of the virtual on our perception of reality. The work manifests different facets of a forever expanding possible future that links to the world that we know but which is shifted and refracted by the actions of narratives and histories that are at the moment virtual. In Berlin Mirror (2042 Retrospective) 2016, fictional artist Daniela Graham leads a guided tour of her centennial exhibition at KW Berlin. Born in 1942 to a chemist who worked at the factory in the courtyard where Kunst-Werke now stands, the artist looks back on over sixty years of her practice in sculpture, video, and performance. Moving between her early years growing up in Berlin, to her memories of East Germany, art school, and her current exhibition at the institution. In QE3 (2016), a sculptor brings the QE2 ocean liner back from Dubai, to turn the vessel into a new home for the fire-damaged Glasgow School of Art. Designed and built amid the social and industrial upheaval of the 1960s, the luxury liner returns to a city undergoing extensive change under the auspices of urban regeneration. From its moorings in Dubai, the ship passes through the Suez Canal, encountering refugee boats in the Mediterranean, oil rigs in the North Sea, and the post-industrial cityscape of Glasgow. Continuing Lek’s use of architectural media as a means of social critique, the work transforms the QE2 from a symbol of heavy industry into an institution for art. Lawrence Lek lives and works in London and is a graduate of the The Cooper Union (2012), The Architectural Association London (2008) and Trinity College, Cambridge (2004). His work has been featured in recent exhibitions at Tramway, as part of Glasgow International 2016, KW Institut, Berlin; Cubitt Gallery, London; Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge and the Delfina Foundation. He is recipient of the Jerwood/FVU Awards (2016), the 2015 Tenderflix/Tenderpixel Artist Video Award and the 2015 Dazed Emerging Artist Award.
QE3 2016 Full HD video, stereo sound, 20 min 21 sec Architectural model 60 x 60 x 65 cm
Rebecca Molloy (b. 1985) Rebecca Molloy explores relationships between worlds increasingly defined by the shifting matrix of digital media and its social networks, its trending images, the rumours and memes that shape an individual’s sense of self, and the languages and approaches of painting. Her projects combine painted images with video and sculptural elements to establish new connections and expressions. “My work is largely formed of installations that combine painting, sculpture, video and performance as a way to create an alternative understanding of the human body and its interactions with its surroundings. Promiscuous narratives are formed in the work, as the interactions between objects, videos and sound build up a bodily experience. Bodies appear in fragments across the mediums used, whilst the surfaces of objects may resemble the pores of skin, and psychological notions are hinted at through text and sound resulting in installations that explore the psychology, physiology and physical qualities of human beings. These themes are combined with a visual language that is based around painting as it is used to transform surfaces, objects and video screens in order to envelop the viewer into an alternate painted reality. The components of painting are deconstructed and reorganised as sensations, colour and textures which are strewn across objects, flattened into graphics and revealed in new forms of whipped cream, chocolate milk and hundreds and thousands. Even when painting seems all but abandoned, it is actually flourishing wildly amongst flowing pools of lava, wooden surfaces and plumes of ribbon.” Artist’s Statement, 2016 Rebecca Molloy has a MA in Fine Art Chelsea College of Arts, 2014, and a BA in Fine Art Coventry University, 2008. Recent solo exibitions include: Till Death do us Party, Vitrine, London, Three, cueB Gallery London. Selected Group Exhibitions include: Moving Image Margate, Margate House, Margate (2016), Wild Beasts, Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun, Leeds (2016), UK/RAINE, Saatchi Gallery London (2015). Recent residencies and awards include: City and Guilds of London Art School Residency (2015), Trelex Residency, Switzerland (2015), Elizabeth Greenshields Award (2015) and UAL Patrons Bursary, Chelsea College of Arts (2014). Diet Coke Break 2015 papier mache doughnut, installed with video, painting and sculpture
Athena Papadopoulos (b. 1988) “Athena Papadopoulos’ multidisciplinary practice encompasses a range of processes, including drawing, painting, collage and assemblage. Combining family photographs with hand-drawn figures, magazine cuttings and found objects she creates perversely humorous scenarios offset by a formal visual delicacy. Existing as layered wall-hung assemblages, stretched bedsheets, and oversized propped cushion-like sculptures to amended pieces of clothing, Papadopoulos’ objects suggest riotous narratives where fact and fiction are uncertain, and where protagonists remain mysterious and their motives unclear. The fabric supports on which this cornucopia plays out are splashed and stained with various substances that read like a convenience store shopping list: Pepto Bismol, Berocca, hair dye, red wine, lipstick, henna, Gaviscon and Milk of Magnesia. There are a number of strong associations that these materials throw up – substances that are swallowed to aid digestion of the unpalatable or to rebalance the body after excess, or substances that are applied to the exterior to disguise or exaggerate features, to mark us into certain ‘tribes’. Papadopoulos’ imagery and the loosely defined narratives she suggests, spring from her father’s photographs of social events. However, rather than being a direct record or response to family history, the scenarios are reimagined and expanded into something more universal and open-ended through a fantastical accumulation of imagery including pop cultural and art historical references.” Paul Luckraft, curator Zabludowicz Collection, 2015 Athena Papadopoulos completed an MFA in Fine Art Practice at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2013 and a BFA in Visual Art and Theory at the University of British Columbia in 2011. Recent solo exhibitions include: Rancho Rat-King-Cougar, Supportico Lopez, Berlin (2015), Zabludowicz Invites: Athena Papadopoulos, Zabludowicz Collection, London (2015) and Honeymoon in Pickle Paradise, The Landmark Hotel, London (2014). Selected recent group exhibitions include: k hole, 6817, Los Angeles (2015), Metaforms, Collins Park, Miami Beach (2015), Natural Instincts, Musée Espace Arlaud, Lausanne (2015), Bloody Life, Herald St, London (2016), Wild Style, Peres Projects, Berlin (2016), Streams of Warm Impermanence, David Roberts Art Foundation, London (2016). The Grapevine (Dear Stalker) 2016 hair dye on image transfers, fabric, thread, nail polish on alligator claw, suede, jewelry chain and eyelets, wood and deet antlers covered in resin-based glue mixed with self-tanner and synthetic hair clippings, clear enamel and screws 230 x 210 cm
Viktor Timofeev (b. 1984) Process, in the drawings of Viktor Timofeev, is the end in itself. Over the past decade he has - across a variety of disciplines but most conspicuously in his works on paper - created an overlapping series of elaborate worlds governed by internally coherent and endlessly ramifying systems. The only world to which these works must be faithful is their own, and ideas are followed through to their conclusions rather than amended or adjusted to fit any pre-existing schematic. They are, in the sense of allowing an unruly and disruptive idea to run its course, playful. That they are faithful only to their own interior logic is one reason that Timofeev’s drawings are difficult to categorise; another is the bewildering range of his tastes and influences. Among the visual languages identifiable in his work are those of architecture, coding, constructivism, mathematical illustration (one work included here brings to mind Leonardo’s contributions to Pacioli’s Divina proportione), anatomical sketching, gaming, capriccio from Piranesi to Cedric Price, rule-based choreography, 3D modelling, and, I am sure, innumerable others that I have failed to pick out. The worlds of Timofeev’s making can, like our own, only be understood through the application of numerous interwoven disciplines. The systems by which we live cannot be adequately described by chemistry, sociology, or culture; we rely upon a variety of approaches. So it seems to me with these drawings, which - whether rendered on paper or on screen - form only one part of Timofeev’s multidisciplinary project. If these alternate realities have a single unifying principle, it is that complex structures arise through the combination of simple ones. The rules are constant and predictable, but the patterns by which these basic elements interact are not. They appear to me as hermetic systems defined - like societies, economies, species - by this property of emergence. Process rather than substance is the essential constituent, in a universe characterised by tendencies rather than resolutions. Things are forever in flux. From: The Play’s the Thing, by Ben Eastham. Process written on the occasion of the Drawing Room Exhibition S.T.A.T.E, by Viktor Timofeev Viktor Timofeev lives and works in London. He was born in Riga, Latvia and gained his BFA from Hunter College, New York (2008). Recent solo exhibitions include: S.T.A.T.E., The Drawing Room, London; Sazarus I, Jupiter Woods, Vienna, and Proxyah, Jupiter Woods, London. Recent group exhibitions include: Vaporents, Voidoid Archive, Glasgow; Piknik na Obochine, Exo Exo, Paris; Longshore Drift, Sorbus Gallery, Helsinki, and Nimm’s Mal Easy, Austellungsraum Klingental, Basel. Lens 2016 coloured pencil on paper 50 x 35 cm
ISBN 978-1-904621-75-9 Photography: Aaron Angell: Courtesy the Artist and Rob Tufnell, London and Cologne Iain Bell: Courtesy Cell Project Space and the Artist Oliver Beer: Copyright the Artist Beth Collar: Courtesy the Artist Laura Eldret: Courtesy the Artist, photo: Dan Weil Jamie Fitzpatrick: Copyright Tom Carter and the Artist Patrick Goddard: Courtesy the artist Joey Holder: Courtesy of the Artist, footage for the video was provided by Katrin Linse, Biodiversity Biologist from The British Antarctic Survey Marguerite Humeau: Pierre Antoine for STUK Lawrence Lek: screenshot courtesy the Artist Rebecca Molloy: Courtesy the Artist Athena Papadopoulos: photo: Oskar Proctor, courtesy the Artist, Emalin and Supportico Lopez Viktor Timofeev: Lucy Dawkins, courtesy Drawing Room London and the Artist works Š The Artists text Š Richard Grayson
Printed by Albe de Coker, Belgium