Haunch of Venison presents its first solo exhibition of New York based artist José Parlá. Born in Miami of Cuban parents artist José Parlá’s vibrant works explore the multi-layered histories of cities and urban environments; his paintings and site-specific installations are created both in his large carriage house studio and also works outside throughout city surfaces. His expressive painting style and layers of ephemera and found objects combined with calligraphic abstraction have a lyrical feel to them, are uniquely his. This exhibition presents new paintings, works on paper, photographs and sculptures throughout our three gallery spaces.
Parla’s work acts as a record of his journeys through streets that he navigates, using a map of one city to direct you through another. He documents his city walks through photographs as well as at times collecting detritus from the streets, once back in the studio they are used to build the composition of each painting.
Language and writing are key themes within Parlá’s work. He often incorporates layers of text from street posters he collects while traveling. His own stylized calligraphy is worked into and on the surface of each painting, and although it is always partially obscured and indecipherable, it is a personal narrative of his experiences and a record of stories he discovers on his various journeys.
Parla’s paintings are made in reaction to the urban environment; they are impressions of what we are surrounded by, a response to the energy that courses through every city. Parla brings beauty to ruggedness and decay, and a language of his very own to what he sees and feels around him.
José Parlá summarizes the work in the exhibition Broken Language: For most of my life I have experienced being in transition and migration. This feeling allows me to bring the broken languages of the global community and its conditions into the gallery. My work is an empire of fragmented cacophonies, observed performances, palimpsestic musical gestures, and topographical compositions governing the essence of the cities I’ve travelled through. José Parlá has exhibited internationally, including major shows in London, New York, Paris and Havana. In 2012 he exhibited at the 11th Havana Biennial, Cuba, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York, the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, and was added to the collection of the British Museum.
Haunch of Venison, 103 New Bond Street.
-
Thomas Joshua Cooper Messages
01 Feb - 28 Mar 2013
Haunch of Venison presents an exhibition by internationally renowned landscape photographer Thomas Joshua Cooper.
For over thirty years Thomas Joshua Cooper has made landscape photographs in some of the most remote and isolated locations around the world. This exhibition brings together over twenty photographs, many not seen in public before, that showcase rare works from the beginning of his career.
Thomas Joshua Cooper has been a figurehead for British fine art photography since the 1970s as both a practicing artist and within the field of art education. In 1973 Cooper was invited to teach at Nottingham Trent Polytechnic, and was instrumental in it becoming an important centre for landscape photography. Cooper worked in the Midlands for the next six years, making works in the quarries and forests and on the moors of Derbyshire and Shropshire, where he made some of the early works that are the focus of this display.
The works in Messages are selected to also tell the story of who has influenced and inspired his work. Cooper suggests that the artist is always, in some way, in dialogue with both peers and precursors when making their work, something that he characterises as an ‘ongoing conversation’. The works in the exhibition make this explicit by including the subtitle, ‘Message to…’ and include artists such as Richard Serra, Robert Frank and Timothy O’Sullivan and also the great Japanese haiku poets Basho and Issa.
The photographs in the exhibition range from the past thirty years and are made in diverse geographical locations including the UK, California, Derbyshire, Tokyo and Provence.
