Chris Hawtin - Recent Works on Paper

Chris Hawtin Recent Works on Paper

Published for the exhibition: CHRIS HAWTIN - RECENT WORKS ON PAPER at Morgan Art Consulting Christou Lada 5-7 (Platia Karitsi) 10561 Athens November 2013

Chris Hawtin Recent Works on Paper

As with all Chris Hawtin’s work, these drawings (they are drawings in the most fundamental, reductive sense of a series of marks made on a surface) focus on the theme of the relationship between the technological and the organic, and hybrid forms created through this dynamic.

Consisting of two distinctive types of mark-making; phenomenological ‘events’ and hand-made gestures, the former, a mechanical process, a chemical reaction between dissonant substances poured onto the surface, which take on the appearance of depictions of organic matter; plants insects or animals, and the latter, stylised brush marks, made with industrial or hand-crafted tools of plastic or metal, intervening with the poured material, sweeping it along in it’s course. These marks appear stark and considered, machine-like in their directness.

Through this integration, a hybrid, cyborg, form is created, where mechanical structures appear to intersect, restrain and manipulate organic material, generating together an image of some new alien animal anatomy – not only alien in it’s strangeness, but also from it’s inception; it’s realisation being the reverse of it’s facture, where the mechanical process appears organic and the gesture appears mechanistic.

The works are given titles which emulate scientific classification; all under the umbrella of ‘Assimilated Metatypes’, a fictional category denoting their origin as integrations of forms of marks, each also has its own subtitle – the name of an existant or extinct type of natural organism. As if these ‘Frankenstein’ forms are the result of a re-evolution of these organisms from the scientific alchemical experimentation of the creation of the work.

With these works Hawtin calls into question the nature of abstraction and figuration, and the ability of presenting ‘pure’ form within image making, and the nature of our perception of an organism as a distinct territory in the 21st century.

Assimilated Metatype - Edmontonia 2012. 180 x 150cm

Assimilated Metatype - Rhamphorhynchus 2012. 180 x 150cm

Assimilated Metatype - Deinonychus 2012. 180 x 150cm

Assimilated Metatype - Ornitholestes 2012. 180 x 150cm

Assimilated Metatype - Tetra 2013. 76 x 56cm

Assimilated Metatype - Conifer 2013. 76 x 56cm

Assimilated Metatype - Parakeet 2013. 76 x 56cm

Chris Hawtin Born 1974, Ely, Cambridgeshire, UK Lives and works in London Education 1996-1999 - Chelsea College of Art & Design, London 1995-1996 - Northbrook College, Worthing Solo Exhibitions 2013 - Malgras/Naudet, Manchester - Morgan Art, Athens 2012 - The Unity Engine and Other Stories, Galleria Art Lounge, Lisbon - Predator, C & C gallery, London 2011 - Malgras/Naudet, Manchester (with Miles Thurlow) 2007 - The Hive, Bartesera Gallery, Athens 2000 - Thomas Cook, London 1998 - Fairfields Arts Centre, Basingstoke Selected Group Exhibitions 2013 - Great Men Die Twice, Comporta, Portugal - W.A.R., Jacob’s Island, London - Modern Witchcraft, ASC gallery, London - Ubiquitous Aqua, George’s House Gallery, Folkestone - Art 13, Madrid - India Art Fair, New Delhi 2012 - Forbidden Planet, Jacob’s Island, London 2011 - Supermarket Art Fair, Stockholm - Project PIGS Case, Studio SKOUZE3, Athens 2010 - Polar Union, Denman Arts, London 2008 - Works on Paper, Gallery 53, London 2007 - On Waking, The Octopus, Athens 2006 - Another Product, Cornerhouse Gallery, Manchester 2005 - A Night on Earth, Oh Gallery, Bethnal Green, London - Shelved, The Octopus, Athens 2004 - Barden’s Boudoirs, site-specific project, London 2003 - √-1 A Survey of British Abstract Painting, Kontainer Gallery, Los Angeles Collections Saatchi Collection, London Private collections in UK, Greece, Portugal