April 2017

Upcoming

David Batchelor, PSYCHOGEOMETRY, Matt’s Gallery, private view 23 April 3 – 6pm, exhibition runs 26 April – 11 June 2017, Wednesday – Sunday, 12 – 6pm

For his first exhibition at Matt’s Gallery, David Batchelor will show his first wall drawings together with an installation of over a hundred spray-painted works on paper. Each wall drawing features an angular, silhouetted, black, stencilled form up to three metres tall that is bathed in an atmosphere of toxic fluorescent colour. These large pieces derive the smaller works on paper, which Batchelor has been developing for the last decade. All the works refer loosely to the tradition of geometric abstraction that was developed in Europe a century ago.

The origins of Batchelor’s new works lie in a series of illuminated sculptures he began to make in the early 2000s. In each of these works, such as Magic Hour, 2004-07, (which was exhibited in the Hayward Gallery’s Light Show in 2012) a central form assembled from salvaged commercial lightboxes is framed by back-projected coloured light. These works were simultaneously dark and colourful. Since that time Batchelor has been making an on-going series of drawings that make use of a similar relationship between colour and blackness. For Batchelor, these works are a response to the unique quality of colour that is found in the city. Unlike the natural world, where most colours achieve maximum intensity in daylight, the modern city only reveals its full chromatic spectrum at night.

The works also continue the dialogue between two- and three-dimensional form and between painting and sculpture that has been a hallmark of Batchelor’s practice for over two decades.

This exhibition is kindly supported by Arts Council England.

 

Richard Grayson, Possessions_inc.

Possessions_inc is a video and web project by Matt’s Gallery and Richard Grayson. Episode 11 is currently available to watch.

Over 2016 and 2017 Matt’s Gallery will be posting monthly instalments of the video project Possessions_inc. Part series, part blog, part essay, part talking head, Possessions_inc. is an expanding exploration of: ideas of value, ways we invest in objects, the Bilderberg owl, animatronics, the mystery of Rennes Le Chateau, codes, fakes, oligarchs, the missing head of Philip K Dick, treasure hunting, M.R. James, the V.I.P. Lounge, drug smuggling, computer animation, animism, Pygmalion and the insurance industry.

To subscribe please sign up to the Matt’s Gallery mailing list

To watch the episodes click here

Artists’ News

 

Graham Fagen, The Slave’s Lament, National Galleries Scotland, Scotland, 20 May – 29 October 2017; Comar, Isle of Mull, 19 March – 05 May 2017; GALERIE DE L’UQAM, Montréal, 24 February – 8 April 2017

Graham Fagen’s The Slave’s Lament is travelling to the National Galleries Scotland, Comar in Isle of Mull and Galerie de L’Uqam in Montreal. Replete with a moving score written by Sally Beamish, performed by the Scottish Ensemble and Reggae singer Ghetto Priest, and produced by legendary On-U-Sound founder Adrian Sherwood, Graham Fagen creates a fascinating soundclash, where Burn’s poetry finds a haunting bedfellow in Jamaican reggae music – and finds much common ground. This evocative video installation was originally curated by Hospitalfield, Arbroath and exhibited at Scotland + Venice 2015, when Graham Fagen represented Scotland at the Venice Biennale.

 

Graham Fagen, Polygraphs, Gallery 4, Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA), Glasgow, 17 February – 17 September 2017

Graham Fagen will be exhibiting work as part of the group exhibition Polygraphs at Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern Art, Gallery 4. Polygraphs is a group show with works from Glasgow Museums’ collection revealing how artists create alternative, and sometimes fictitious, discourses to question dominant narratives in identity, politics and history. The works in the exhibition look at the testimonial research and object evidence which has informed our historical identity and re-present this to review our relationships to the slave trade, colonialism, feminism and sectarianism.

 

Melanie Jackson, Flurry, online essay commission, Museum of English Rural Life, 28 March 2017 – ongoing

Melanie Jackson has produced an online essay titled Flurry, commissioned and hosted by the Museum of English Rural Life.

 

Melanie Jackson, Metallurgy, Demonology & Materiality, talk and editions at Arts Catalyst, London, 01 April, 2pm

Melanie Jackson will present a talk alongside writer Angus Cameron to discuss the demons that have populated the shafts and galleries of mines around the world through history, and the contemporary example of El Tío (The Uncle), believed in Potosi, Bolivia, to be the Lord of the underworld. This talk takes place alongside the exhibition Conflict Minerals at the Arts Catalyst. Concurrently, two of Jackson’s limited edition prints, Cerro Rico (The Rich Mountain) and El Tio (The Uncle), are available to purchase via the Arts Catalyst website. These are accompanied by an essay written by Angus Cameron, available online.

 

Jimmie Durham, At the Center of the World, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, 29 January – 07 May 2017

The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles is showing the first North American retrospective of Jimmie Durham. At the Center of the World, the artist’s first major U.S. exhibition since 1995, features nearly 200 works from Durham’s expansive practice including sculpture, drawing, collage, printmaking, photography, and video, dating from 1970 to present. “Durham is an important American artist whose work is crucial to a full understanding of the history of American art. He provides a singular and vital perspective on America’s colonial history, while also approaching his work from a distinctly international position, believing that artists should be citizens of the world”, said Hammer Director Ann Philbin.

 

David Troostwyk, Fully Awake, blip blip blip, Leeds, 06 – 21 April 2017

David Troostwyk’s work is featured in a group exhibition at blip blip blip, titled Fully Awake. Curated by Ian Hartshorne and Sean Kaye for Teaching Painting, Fully Awake is the first of a five part intergenerational cycle of exhibitions involving academics, artists and art educators in the UK. Over the next 2 years it will involve 180 exhibitors and 60 UK institutions. In each version of the show several artists are invited to submit a piece of work to be included in an exhibition. In addition to submitting a piece of work themselves, the artists are also asked to invite two ‘guests’ (each of whom will also submit work for exhibition) with the following conditions: one must be an artist that they have been taught by; and one must be an artist that they have taught. This unorthodox invitational approach creates unexpected fluid networks through collaborations and the exhibitions are intended to reveal these.

 

Willie Doherty, so it is, The Mattress Museum, Pittsburgh, 07 April – 07 August 2017

Willie Doherty is showing a new film work titled No Return as part of the group exhibition so it is at Pittsburgh’s The Mattress Museum.  The exhibition features artists from Northern Ireland and is curated by accomplished performance artist, educator and researcher John Carson. “I selected these artists because I have admired for a long time, the strength, depth and integrity of their work,” John Carson said. “They have all found ways of making powerful and uncompromising artistic statements in challenging circumstances.” Other artists include Ursula Burke, Rita Duffy, John Kindness, Locky Morris, Philip Napier, and Paul Seawright.

 

Alison Turnbull, Five Easy Pieces, Large Glass, London, 03 March – 05 May 2017

Alison Turnbull exhibits Old Street Dust as part of the group exhibition Five Easy Pieces at Large Glass in London. The exhibition brings together abstract paintings and drawings by Turnbull, Susan Collis, Jeff McMillan, Jeremy Moon, and Allyson Strafella. The title of the show refers to the work of composer Igor Stravinsky, whose piece of the same name was composed in 1917, a hundred years ago. Old Street Dust (2016) is based on a photograph of a building façade in Old Street, London. Turnbull has noted where air pollution has blackened the stones exposed to the fumes, presenting an extraordinary metamorphosis: the building is transformed into a vision of light and shade, a dance of geometric shapes.

 

Alison Turnbull and David Osbaldeston, Drawing Biennial 2017, Drawing Room, London, 02 March – 26 April 2017

Alison Turnbull is showing Norma/Medellín and David Osbaldeston A Page From A Book: A Note Upon Synchronicity at the Drawing Biennial, taking place at the Drawing Room in London. The biennial offers insights into how artists contend with a world in rapid and disorienting flux. A snapshot of contemporary drawing practices, the exhibition includes more than 200 new and recent works on paper by leading international artists.

 

David Osbaldeston and Imogen Stidworthy, Public View, Bluecoat, Liverpool, 04 February – 23 April 2017 

David Osbaldeston and Imogen Stidworthy will be showing work as part of the group exhibition Public View. Curated by Bluecoat Artistic Director Bryan Biggs, the exhibition brings together works by 100 artists who have previously exhibited at Bluecoat, reflecting something of the organisations’ curatorial interests and distinctiveness. The show will feature work from a number of high profile artists including John Akomfrah, Sonia Boyce, Jeremy Deller, John Latham, Mark Leckey, Elizabeth Magill, Yoko Ono and Yinka Shonibare. 

 

Jordan Baseman, Blackout, Montclair Film Festival, Montclair, USA, 28 April – 07 May 2017

Jordan Baseman’s film Blackout will be screened at the Montclair Film Festival in New Jersey. This annual festival connects global filmmakers with audiences in a diverse, culturally vibrant community by presenting films and year-round programs that engage, entertain and educate through the power of visual storytelling.

 

Jordan Baseman, Cove Park residency

Jordan Baseman has been awarded a residency with Cove Park, located on 50 acres of unspoilt hillside overlooking Loch Long on Scotland’s west coast. He will be in residence mid-August to mid-September. Founded in 1999, Cove Park’s residency programme actively responds to the diversity of contemporary artistic practice in all the art forms, whether performing or visual arts, crafts, literature or music. Their interdisciplinary programmes, for both individuals and collaborating groups, offer time, space and freedom to make new work and to find new ways of working.

Michael Curran, Susan Sontag

Michael Curran in collaboration with artist Joe Walsh and musician George McFall to produce a video for Dominic Waxing Lyricals song Susan Sontag. The video uses the card game Fish to explore narrative and interpretation – alluding to Sontag’s seminal text – Against Interpretation. ‘To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world – in order to set up a shadow world of meanings.’

 

Anne Bean, WE ARE THE SPACE, Liverpool Hope University, Liverpool, 21 April 2017

Anne Bean will present a performance titled WE ARE THE SPACE as part of the two-day conference Sacred Places: Performances, Politics and Ecologies. A Multidisciplinary Perspective. The conference is aimed at investigating the actuality of sacred places in contemporary society; their practices and performances, politics and ecologies, from the perspective of Performance Studies. This event is part of the ongoing research project of Liverpool Hope University’s Research Cluster ‘Cartographies of Belonging’, and the first of a series of activities designed to create a web of networks that examine and redefine the terms of human agency in relation to the environment, at both a micro- and macrocosmic level.

 

Anne Bean, Emit: A Dialogue Through Time, Coleman Project Space, London, 18 March – 9 April 2017, performance and talk 9 April 2017

Anne Bean has been invited by Coleman Projects to produce a solo exhibition of new work that have grown out of her film-performance project Night Chant – originally conceived for the Whitechapel gallery’s 2015 symposium Performance and Politics in 1970s. Bean is interested in the different ways artists have been influenced over the years by the permissive space that performance art has provided. Night Chant is a short film that explores her personal connections with five artists who sadly, and suddenly, died a few years ago. Two of them – Alexis Hunter and Rita Harris – were based next door, or very near, to Coleman Project Space during the seventies. In a recent Art Monthly interview, Bean said of these relationships: ‘We are each other’s archives and legacies’. Sunday 09 April at 4pm there will be a talk by Dr Eleanor Roberts on the legacies of women artists working in the 1970 s, following on from Anne Bean’s performance at 3 pm.

 

Lindsay Seers, CASEBOOKS, Ambika P3, University of Westminster, London, 17 March – 23 April 2017

Lindsay Seers is exhibiting in the group show CASEBOOKS, a collaboration between Ambika P3, Dr Lauren Kassell, Director of the Casebooks Project, and Dr Natalie Kaoukji, Research Fellow at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge. Curated by Dr Michael Mazière, the project presents a diverse and radical range of responses to the manuscripts of seventeenth-century English astrologer-physicians Simon Forman and Richard Napier. Inspired by ideas of alchemy, astrology, power, prophecy, knowledge as well as the materiality and content of the archive, CASEBOOKS presents six new works spanning sculpture, video and audio installation, live performance, robotics and artificial intelligence.