FUNNY HA HA_Catalogue

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DECEMBER - 22 JANUARY 2023 MADDOX GALLERY, 9 MADDOX GALLERY

FUNNY HA HA is a thought-provoking group exhibition curated by the painter Roxana Halls. It features a selection of images which Halls finds humorous – and which she invites the viewer to enjoy too. In the process she addresses the subjectivity of humour, as well as the long-standing critical snobbery towards imagery that makes people laugh. Does good art have to be serious art, she asks?

Born in Plaistow, East London, in 1974, Halls is best known for her wrily – sometimes darkly –amusing paintings of women who defy society’s expectations. FUNNY HA HA includes five of her own canvases, alongside work by artists such as Stella Vine, David Shrigley, Sarah Maple and Tracey Moffatt.

‘I’ve always questioned the idea that humour makes an art work in some way fleeting or frivolous,’ Halls says. ‘There’s a belief that the best art is the result of an earnest and unrelenting gaze. But as the likes of Hogarth and countless Dutch Golden Age painters proved, there is more than one way of getting to the truth – and humour is among them’.

Halls’s five paintings all feature a female subject (or pair of female subjects) laughing as they engage in a certain activity. Laughing While Boating, for example, depicts the actress, Katherine Parkinson, aboard a swan pedalo on a lake outside a Butlin’s holiday camp. She sees the funny side as the outrageously long Jacobean dress she’s wearing billows over the side of the vessel, and its hemline hits the water.

Other imagery ranges from Paul Bommer’s Delftware-like tiles with ribald subject matter, to Tracey Moffatt’s tragicomic photography of Australian suburbia, via Stella Vine’s faux-naïve portraits of Princess Diana, and Wayne White’s landscapes with pithy phrases superimposed on them.

Halls sees FUNNY HA HA as doubly timely. First, because, in such challenging geopolitical times, the human race needs humour now as much as ever; and second, because in an age of cancel culture, what constitutes humour is a much-disputed issue.

‘I wish to take a long look at laughter’, Halls says – ‘be it subversive, inappropriate, hysterical, satirical, covert, broad, bawdy or biting. What interests me is to explore humour and its functions, as muti-faceted as the artists who take it as their theme’.

Halls – who cites the critic Hélène Cixous’ essay, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, as one of the show’s inspirations – has always liked to investigate cultural trends. In her popular ‘Appetite’ series, of 2013-14, she explored the accepted limits in contemporary society for women to satisfy various desires.

‘Humour is more than a laughing matter,’ says Maeve Doyle, Artistic Director at Maddox Gallery. ‘Often it is testing the boundaries of what’s edgy and what’s insulting, to give us an alternative perspective on the way we see. As FUNNY HA HA makes clear, humour isn’t just funny, it’s brave’.

FEATURED ARTISTS

Roxana Halls is a British figurative painter who is best known for her images of women laughing while escaping from catastrophic situations, she is widely celebrated for her images of wayward women who refuse to conform to society’s expectations and for her wry humour & unsettling narratives.

Halls has had numerous successful exhibitions including solo shows in London – National Theatre, South Bank; Hayhill Gallery, Cork St; Gallery 46 – and at Beaux Arts, Bath. Group shows include Bodies in Trouble (Haus Kunst Mitte Berlin); Extraordinary Portraits (Turner Contemporary, Margate); Kapow! (Stoke Potteries Museum); Dear Christine (toured UK in 2019 and 2020); and Surreal So Good (TW FINE ART, Palm Beach, Florida & Brooklyn NY). She was commissioned to make portraits for BBC Arts’ production of Katherine Parkinson’s ‘Sitting’ (aired 2021, BBC Four); featured in

ROXANA HALLS

BBC1’s Extraordinary Portraits (episode 1, aired 2022); and was interviewed on BBC Woman’s Hour and Radio 4’s Only Artists. Halls has written articles for and been featured in leading art magazines and has also curated exhibitions including Funny Ha Ha with Maddox Gallery in 2022.

A multiple award-winner, her work is held in myriad collections internationally: The Discerning Eye, St. Catherine’s College Oxford, Luke Jennings author of Killing Eve novels and Alan Grieve CBE, Chairman of the Jerwood Foundation. Works acquired for major UK permanent collections include: portrait of musician Horse McDonald for the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, 2020; and Katie Tomkins - Mortuary & Post-mortem Services Manager, for London’s Science Museum, 2022.

ROXANA HALLS LAUGHING WHILE DIGGING, 2022

Oil on Linen 183 x 183 cm

ROXANA HALLS

LAUGHING WHILE BOATING, 2022

Oil on Linen 150 x 150 cm

ROXANA HALLS SUSHI, 2014

Oil on Linen 75 x 75 cm

ROXANA HALLS

LAUGHING WHILE PERCHING, 2021

Oil on Linen 100 x 130 cm

Born in Yorkshire in 1964, Miller graduated from Chelsea School of Art in 1988 with both a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree. Following his time at university, Miller began travelling the world, living in London, New York, Berlin and Paris. In 1987, Miller had his first ever solo exhibition at the Diorama in London. He then went on to New York where he would exhibit as a solo artist at Prisunic Gallery in 1990 and 1991. Widening his French audience, with thanks to his shows at Prisunic Gallery, Miller then moved to Paris where he had three more solo exhibitions over the next five years. During this period, Miller also spent a year living in Berlin, which is where he embarked upon his writing career.

HARLAND MILLER

Although establishing himself as an artist, Miller first won critical acclaim as a writer, with his debut novel, Slow Down Arthur, Stick to Thirty, being published in 2000. Later that year, he also published At First I was Afraid, I was Petrified - a visually led book that is considered short study of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. The work’s sardonic title, borrowed from the Gloria Gaynor song, is echoed in the title of one of Miller’s later artworks, with puns and wordplay being the basis of many of the artist’s work.

Over his career, Miller has amassed a diverse collector base ranging from famous art dealers including Jay Joplin to world renowned musicians like Angus Young, George Michael, Ed Sheeran and Sir Elton John.

‘Brevity is no strength of mine’

HARLAND MILLER

I’M SO FUCKING HARD, 2001

Oil on Canvas 213 x 155 cm

HARLAND MILLER NARCISSIST SEEKS SIMILAR, 2021

Etching with Relief Printing 69 x 103 cm | AP Outside of Edition of 50

HARLAND MILLER

TONIGHT WE MAKE HISTORY (SMALL), 2018

Etching with Block Printing 104 x 73 cm | Edition of 50

Wayne White is an American artist, art director, illustrator, puppeteer, and much, much more. Born and raised in Chattanooga, Wayne has used his memories of the South to create inspired works for film, television, and the fine art world. After graduating from Middle Tennessee State University, Wayne traveled to New York City where he worked as an illustrator for the East Village Eye, New York Times, Raw Magazine, and the Village Voice. In 1986, Wayne became a designer for the hit television show Pee-wee’s Playhouse, and his work was awarded with three Emmys. After traveling to Los Angeles with his wife, Mimi Pond, Wayne continued to work in television and designed sets and characters for shows such as Shining Time Station, Beakman’s World, Riders In The Sky, and Bill & Willis. He also worked in the music video industry, winning Billboard and MTV Music Video Awards as an art director for seminal music videos including The Smashing Pumpkins’ Tonight, Tonight and Peter Gabriel’s Big Time.

More recently, Wayne has had great success as a fine artist and has created paintings and public works that have

WAYNE WHITE

been shown all over the world. His most successful works have been the word paintings featuring oversized, threedimensional text painstakingly integrated into vintage landscape reproductions. The message of the paintings is often thought-provoking and almost always humorous, with Wayne pointing a finger at vanity, ego, and his memories of the South. Wayne has also received great praise for several public works he has created recently, including a successful show at Rice University where he built the world’s largest George Jones puppet head for a piece called Big Lectric Fan To Keep Me Cool While I Sleep.

In 2009, Wayne’s life and career were chronicled in an incredible 382-page monograph, edited by Todd Oldham. The book features hundreds of images from Wayne’s earliest work as an illustrator all the way to his most recent fine art sculptures. Since the book’s release, Wayne has been traveling the country delivering an incredibly entertaining hour long talk where he discusses his life and work, while making time for a little banjo and harmonica playing.

WAYNE WHITE

SO DON’T, 2014

Acrylic on Offset Lithograph 76 x 137 cm

WAYNE WHITE

F. U. MONEY, 2016

Acrylic on Vintage Offset Lithograph 71 x 132 cm

WAYNE WHITE

WTF, 2017

Acrylic on Vintage Offset Lithograph 64 x 79 cm

LAURIE LIPTON

Laurie Lipton was born in New York in 1953 and began drawing at the age of four. Lipton was the first person to graduate from Carnegie-Mellon University in Pennsylvania with a Fine Arts Degree in Drawing (with honors). She has lived in Holland, Belgium, Germany, France, London and has recently moved back to the USA after 36 years abroad. She currently resides in Los Angeles. Her work has been exhibited extensively throughout Europe and the USA.

Lipton was inspired by the religious paintings of the Flemish School. She tried to teach herself how to paint

in the style of the 16th century Dutch Masters but failed. When traveling around Europe as a student, she began developing her very own peculiar drawing technique building up tone with thousands of fine cross-hatching lines like an egg tempera painting. “It’s an insane way to draw”, she says, “but the resulting detail and luminosity is worth the amount of effort. My drawings take longer to create than a painting of equal size. You can’t really experience the impact of the detail & intensity of one of my larger pieces on a computer screen. They have to be seen in the flesh.”

LAURIE LIPTON SELFIE, 2015

Charcoal and Graphite on Paper 145 x 159 cm

LAURIE LIPTON POST TRUTH, 2017

Charcoal and Graphite on Paper 173 x 296 cm

DAVID SHRIGLEY

‘I don’t really want to tell jokes about trivia; I’d kind of rather tell jokes about things like life and death.’

David Shrigley was born in 1968 in Macclesfield, UK, and is currently living and working in Brighton. After taking the Art and Design Foundation course at Leicester Polytechnic in 1987, he moved to Glasgow to study Environmental Art at the Glasgow School of Art until 1991. Both Shrigley’s writing projects and collaborations with musicians started early on in his career and continue to be an integral part of his practice.

In 2003, he directed the music video for the famous band Blur for their record ‘Good Song’, as well as making a collaborative album entitled ‘Worried Noodles’ in

2007, working with various musicians to interpret his texts as lyrics. Shrigley started regularly contributing cartoons to The Guardian in 2005.

Between 2012 and 2014, he mostly produced black and white drawings of his signature cartoonish characters and fragments of writing. He had a mid-career retrospective at the Hayward Gallery in London in 2013 and was nominated for the prestigious Turner Prize in the same year. In 2016, he was commissioned to install the Fourth Plinth on Trafalgar Square in the shape of a monumental ‘thumbs-up’ sculpture cast in bronze in the spirit of his signature deadpan humour. In 2015, colour took over his drawings yet again, continuing until the present.

SHRIGLEY

PANICKING,

DAVID SHRIGLEY

DAVID SHRIGLEY

OLD DOG, 2021 Screenprint

OLD DOG, 2021 Screenprint

76 x 56 cm £7,100

76 x 56 cm | Edition of 125

DAVID SHRIGLEY SHUT UP, 2018 Screenprint 76 x 56 cm £4,100

DAVID SHRIGLEY SHUT UP, 2018 Screenprint 76 x 56 cm | Edition of 125

DAVID SHRIGLEY

IT’S BEEN RAINING FOR 150 MILLION YEARS, 2020 Ink and Marker on Paper 42 x 30 cm

DAVID SHRIGLEY

UNTITLED (IT’S TOO LATE TO SAY SORRY), 2020 Ink and Marker on Paper 50 x 38 cm

DAVID SHRIGLEY

UNTITLED, 2018 Ink and Marker on Paper 39 x 30 cm

DAVID SHRIGLEY

UNTITLED, 2018 Ink and Marker on Paper 39 x 30 cm

MAGDA ARCHER

Magda Archer is a London-based artist renowned for work that combines nostalgic paintings with raw, contemporary turns of phrase. Archer (b. 1964) studied at Ravensbourne College of Art, Chelsea School of Art, and the Royal College of Art before co-founding the illustration duo Archer/Quinell, which rose to critical and commercial acclaim from 1988 to 1998.

Since her first solo exhibition Crazy Mad at The Cornerhouse, Manchester in 2011, Archer has shown across the UK and abroad including in Peter Blake: About Collages at Tate Liverpool (2000) and her breakthrough exhibition #givemeeverythingandnothingbaby at HOME, Manchester and Chapter Arts, Cardiff (2015).

Her renowned public posters for Flying Leaps immediately become recognisable landmarks in London’s urban landscape. On a global scale, Archer collaborates with major fashion designers, including her recent and ongoing project Magda Archer x The Marc Jacobs and previous work with Commes des Garçons and Jenny Packham.

MAGDA ARCHER SPORADIC MOMENTS OF DESPERATION, 2019

Acrylic on Canvas 92 x 92 cm

Acrylic on Paper 47 x 35 cm

Acrylic on Canvas Board 66 x 46 x 2 cm

WILFRID WOOD

Wilfred Wood was born in 1968 in London, grew up in Sussex then studied graphic design at Central St. Martins. After graduating he had several jobs in publishing before moving on to the satirical TV programme Spitting Image as a ‘headbuilder’. This involved making various puppets such as Rolf Harris and two headed fish.

Wood now has a studio in Hackney Wick, East London. He specialises in portraits - people that he makes up, or famous people, friends or strangers that he likes the look of. Wood regularly draws, paints and sculpts people from life, mainly volunteers from Instagram. The most important thing to Wood is that the portraits have as much character as possible.

WILFRID WOOD ZUCK, 2015

Polymer Clay and Acrylic Paint 50 x 35 x 35 cm

WILFRID WOOD SIMON COWELL, 2013

Polymer Clay and Acrylic Paint 28 x 10 x 10 cm

WILFRID

STELLA VINE

STELLA VINE

EVANGELINE HA HA HA, 2018

Acrylic on heavy-weight, handmade paper 78 x 56 cm

STELLA VINE

BEING A PRINCESS ISN’T ALL IT’S CRACKED UP TO BE, 2022

Acrylic and glitter on paper 43 x 36 cm

STELLA VINE

LIKE I SAID KEVIN, YOU’RE MY BOYFRIEND NOW, SO YOU KNOW I CAN’T LET YOU OUT OF THE APARTMENT, 2020

Ink on Paper 21 x 14 cm

STELLA VINE

ELSPETH STRUGGLED TO MAKE POLITE CONVERSATION. INSIDE, SHE WAS SCALING MOUNTAINS, CAREENING DOWN RAPIDS, THROTTLING CHICKENS, AND MAKING FIRE, 2020

Ink on Paper 23 x 14 cm

SARAH MAPLE

Sarah Maple is an award winning visual artist known for her bold, brave, mischievous and occasionally controversial artworks that challenge notions of identity, religion and the status quo. Much of Maple’s inspiration originates from her mixed religious and cultural upbringing.

Sarah’s artwork, film and performances have been exhibited internationally at galleries and institutions including Tate Britain, Golden Thread Gallery and Tallin Art Hall. Her recent commissions include The Baltic, New Art Exchange and Sky Arts.

“Maple harnesses her frustration, dismay and disappointment in prevailing attitudes into mature and thought- provoking work that challenges ideas around identity, religion, race, the artworld, feminism and

freedom of expression. Often using herself as a conduit to challenge stereotypes and normative behaviour, Maple is adept at confronting complex issues that we are all thinking about with wit, irony and a startling honesty.”

- Kate Bryan

SARAH MAPLE

THE MOST HEIGHTENED STATE OF BEING FEMALE NO.7, 2021

Collage on Paper 42 x 36 cm

SARAH MAPLE

THE MOST HEIGHTENED STATE OF BEING FEMALE NO.8, 2021

Collage on Paper 37 x 44 cm

SARAH MAPLE

THE MOST HEIGHTENED STATE OF BEING FEMALE NO.11, 2021 Collage on Paper 44 x 36 cm

SARAH MAPLE

THE MOST HEIGHTENED STATE OF BEING FEMALE NO.9, 2021

Collage on Paper 27 x 23 cm

VILLAIN

Since 2018 Villain has been playfully subverting pop culture with his art.

He came to the art world from 20 years as a fashion designer and Hollywood stylist.

Using traditional, analogue practises such as painting and collage, whilst also working in Digital mediums. He

is known for his use of Polari (the lost gay language) in his works and exploring traditional artistic tropes through a queer lens.

From Villain’s point of view, nothing is ever as it seems.

PAUL BOMMER

Paul Bommer was born in 1968, he is a British artist whose work focuses on honouring and subverting traditional decorated ceramics, chiefly delftware, often told from a queer outsider perspective - serving a unique blend of wit, artistry, nonsense and knowledge.

PAUL BOMMER PARROT, 2022

Hand-painted Ceramic Delft Tile 24 x 24 cm

PAUL BOMMER

AN EVIL WIND, 2021

Hand-painted Ceramic Delft Tile 24 x 24 cm

PAUL BOMMER CHINOISERIE BUTTPLUG, 2022

Hand-Painted Ceramic Delft Tile 24 x 24 cm

Tracey Moffatt is one of Australia’s most renowned contemporary artists, both nationally and internationally. Working predominantly in photography and film for over three decades, Moffatt is known as a powerful visual storyteller. The narrative is often implied and self-referential, exploring her own childhood memories, and the broader issues of race, gender, sexuality and identity.

Moffatt has held over 100 solo exhibitions of her work in Europe, the United States and Australia. Her films, including Nightcries – A Rural Tragedy, 1989, and Bedevil, 1993, have been screened at the Cannes Film Festival, the Dia Centre for the Arts in New York and the National Centre for Photography in Paris.

Tracey Moffatt presented Australia at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017 with her solo exhibition MY HORIZON in the Australian Pavilion, curated by Natalie King. Moffatt

has exhibited in numerous national and international art exhibitions and film festivals for three decades. In 2012, a retrospective programme of her films was held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Moffatt first gained significant critical acclaim when her short film, Night Cries, was selected for official compe-tition at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival. Her first feature film, beDevil, was also selected for Cannes in 1993. Moffatt was selected for the international section of the 1997 Venice Biennale (cu-rated by Germano Celant) and has also featured in the Biennales of Sydney, Sao Paulo (1998) and Gwangju (1995). She held a major exhibition at the Dia Center for the Arts in New York in 1997-98 and in 2003, a large retrospective exhibition of her work was held at the Museum of Contempo-rary Art, Sydney which also travelled to the Hasselblad Museum in Sweden. In 2007, her photo-graphic series, Scarred For Life, was exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum and her video, LOVE, at the Brooklyn Museum in New York.

TRACEY MOFFATT

PISS BAGS (1978), 1999

Offset Lithograph 95 x 74 cm | Edition of 60 and 10 APs

JEMIMA BROWN

Born in 1971, Oxford, Jemima Brown graduated with an MA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art in 1995. Her work in sculpture, installation and drawing has been widely exhibited in the UK and internationally. Past awards include a Fulbright Scholarship as a guest of the Graduate Program at University of California, Los Angeles, as well as the Cocheme Fellowship at

University of the Arts, London. She received the Mark Tanner Sculpture Award at Standpoint in London in 2011. Recent exhibitions include The Great Indoors at Sidney Cooper Gallery in Canterbury, UK (2019) and Peace Camp at West Berkshire Museum in Newbury, UK (2021/22).

JEMIMA BROWN

CUPCAKEFACE 1, 2021

Watercolour on Paper 42 x 48 x 4 cm

JEMIMA BROWN CUPCAKEFACE 2, 2021

Watercolour on Paper 42 x 48 x 4 cm

JEMIMA BROWN MUFFINHEAD 1, 2021

Watercolour on Paper 42 x 48 x 4 cm

JEMIMA

BROWN MUFFINHEAD 2, 2021

Watercolour on Paper 42 x 48 x 4 cm

JEMIMA BROWN HEADLESS WOMAN, 2011

Clothing and mixed media sculpture 165 x 100 x 43 cm