The Agency is pleased to present the British artist Jack Duplock with a series of new paintings and drawings. Duplock obsessively utilises the imagery of pulp fiction and vintage pop culture incorporating them into psychedelic paintings that are heavily collaged, full of intense colour and laden with familiar references. Drawing is essential to his practice and drawn characters, heads, toy animals, zombies and boom boxes are cut and collaged onto dense viridian landscapes, like ciphers of a parallel universe. The paintings are strewn with cues to heavy metal, 70s pop and comic strip characters. Covered in glitter and fluorescent colours they are viral amalgams of highly degenerate fantasy landscapes.
Rather than adhering to a West Coast style, which so far has been the domain of painting inspired by comic strip and pop culture, Duplock finds his own style, which is essentially British, not unlike Peter Blake who adapted American pop into his own unique painterly language. His fantasy landscapes draw on references to childhood toys and the familiar and yet they appear intensely private at the same time. Structural devices are used, such as the reflective rays of diamonds and bubbles, which cover the surface in regular patterns. His landscapes are swamp-like mazes with mysterious clues to lost mansions and unconnected zombie like figures intermingling with masked men and glamorous doyennes of the clubscene. Duplock recently showed in Mexico and his most recent work makes a nod to the seedy world of wrestling with the odd dismembered head thrown in, all flanked by sexy women in capes and sparkling sunglasses. Rather than being unsettling the works are joyously surreal and take pleasure in the stuff pulp fiction is made out of, only more loosely associated and embedded into fantasy forests.
Jack Duplock graduated from the RA in 2000 and has since shown internationally, a/o at Cynthia Broan and Cohan and Leslie Galleries, New York, Bloomberg Space, London and Arcuate Arte Contemporaneo, Monterey. Most recently he was included in Soul Stripper at Projet Midi Brussels, with a/o Bas de Wit, Andrew Mania and Thomas Raats. Hehas previously been selected both for the John Moores Painting Prize as well as the New Contemporaries.
S.T.O.R.A.G.E is pleased to present the Chinese artist Wen Wu, with a new installation of paintings. During her time at the Qingdao, Wen Wu became interested in magazines depicting Western culture. Restrictions on the publications allowed meant that she found materials in magazines about 40s and 50s Hollywood, and the costume drama. She proceeded to make a series of paintings of Chinese women in Western outfits, in particular those that had been represented in American films set in Shanghai and in Western clothing. Wen Wu has examined the image of exotic femininity with those and progressed to representations of Western women, in particular inspired by Victorian nudes. She paints them with a very soft palette over and over again, paying exaggerated homage o feminine perfection and submissive beauty, often choosing an oval canvas with touches of gold leaf.
For her current series she has chosen the historically accurate, yet, taboo breaking Greek myth of Ganymede to further play on notions of pure aestheticism and sexual taboo. Ganymede is interpreted to have been the lover of Zeus and depictions from ancient times through to the Baroque have shown Ganymede to be a beautiful young man raptured by an eagle (Zeus). Historical representations frequently depict Ganymede as a hermaphrodite. Wen Wu has created a series of oil paintings of Ganymede on wooden shapes, which nestle into the space like fragments of a fresco, including the ceiling. The works are impossible to determine as of their time, as they mimic historical portraiture and the nude, whilst irrevantly dripping paint over the finely painted images. The series on Ganymede is coupled with the portrait “ Shanghai Lady” and a story written in Chinese, which speaks of the desire to be free of gender constraints and to become another. Wen Wu has created a perplexing vision of indefinable sexuality, whilst making it seem seductive at the same time. By defying gravity the paintings nestle within the architecture in an unruly fashion, neither being frescos nor conventional paintings, which makes it uncomfortable yet compelling viewing.
Wen Wu was born in Qingdao, China in 1978. She graduated in 2001 with a Fine Art degree from Qinghua University, Beijing. She moved to London in 2004 and achieved an MA in Fine Art in 2005 at the London Metropolitan University.
