The Antique Wardrobe Vicky Wright & Audrey Reynolds
15 November - 19 December 2008 Private view 14 November 2008, 6-8pm
"That was the period when Simone developed a mania for breaking eggs with her behind.” – Story Of The Eye, Georges Bataille, 1928.
As we stand on the brink of financial ruin and potential world calamity, one may recall the writing of Georges Bataille, who poised at the gateway of Europe’s last major collapse into tyranny, penned his most visceral and climatic work. Plundering the depths of MOT’s own exhibition history, two artists have surfaced whose work is reminiscent of Bataille’s rendering of the human condition.
Vicky Wright’s work owes much to Bataille and before him, De Sade. Take for example the more overtly sexual paintings such as ‘Der Planisphere’, in which a vulva like mass is pierced by a large shard of glass, or even the reversed darkness of her ‘Extraction’ paintings. In her work she explores man’s desire to extract the resources of our earth beyond the necessary, to plunder, as Kurtz in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the mineral rich earth disregarding human cost, reveling in his methods of cruelty and repression. She paints a series of portraits, ‘Extractions’, of what could be 19th century entrepreneurs, yet these portraits are reversed, literally painted on the back of the support, turned inside out. The paint seeps into the unprimed wooden support, forming a void or shadow out of which strange mineral outcrops protrude. In some of her titles Wright alludes to Maniae, the Greek goddesses of madness sent to punish Orestes. Wright’s trust in paint’s transformative alchemical powers comes at a prudent time, when other avenues are perhaps showing their limitations her manipulation of base minerals conjures a dark portal though which we see our own collapsing reality.
Audrey Reynolds provides the perfect accompaniment. Again she works within the defined disciplines of painting and sculpture grounded in manipulation of medium and nostalgically presented in recognised historical genres: busts on plinths or reliefs influenced by 17th century interiors. Like Wright, Reynolds is able to produce a tension though her highly skilled use of quotation that dances through time without becoming purely about its’ own place in art history. David Lillington has said that she makes cartoons of Art Shows, which suggests a removal or criticality through humour, yet Reynolds maintains a refinement and presence within the work. Her new sculptures adopt a different position, gone is overt mimicry and in its place comes something transformative, pure matter, abstract and familiar at one moment in time. Her sculptures seem to exist between many different genres, enticing you into recognition before shape shifting out of reference.
VICKY WRIGHT studied at RCA and at Goldsmiths. She has held solo exhibitions at IBID Projects London (2005) and IBID Projects Vilnius Lithuania (2004). She has participated in numerous group exhibitions and has been recognised by many major art awards including being the Winner of the Jerwood Painting Prize (2007) and the National Portrait Gallery BP Portrait Award (2003) as well as finalist in the Celeste Painting Prize (2006). Her work is currently featured in the John Moores Painting Prize Exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, which runs until 4th January 2009.
AUDREY REYNOLDS (b.1969) studied at Bath College of Art and Chelsea College of Art, London. She has held solo exhibitions at Parlour, London (2006) and 1,000,000 mph, London (2004). She has also participated in group exhibitions at Ancient & Modern, London (2008), Netwerk / Center for Contemporary Art, Aalst (2006) and in the 60th Anniversary Show, at Gimpel Fils, London (2006).
Both artists participated in The Full English at MOT, London in 2003.
