4 June - 17 July 2010

 

Hales Gallery is pleased to present Richard Slee's first solo exhibition at the gallery.

 

Slee is one of Britain's most important contemporary ceramic artists. His work attempts to challenge every conventional notion of that genre, transcending its utilitarian roots whilst also sidestepping the self indulgent aspects of the studio tradition which became ubiquitous in the late twentieth century.

 

In the past, Slee has messed with the cultural, historic and vernacular possibilities of the ceramic object, using puns, humour and his vast array of craft skills to transform the ordinary into the surprising.

 

For this exhibition Slee has focused on excessive ornamentation and has included several new and expansive installed works such as Ping Pong 2009/10, an extravagant work that presents the humble table tennis ball as a Baroque frippery and Scorpions 2009/10, a crazy menagerie of menacing insects made from casts of ornate picture frames.

 

Many of the works use utilitarian objects as a starting point but Slee renders the possibility of function as a distant memory, rather like the evolutionary remains of a tail. Usefulness is replaced by frills and curls. The Rococo staged gesture replaces any remaining vestiges of 'fitness for purpose', rendering the sculptures as parodies of themselves.

 

A massive china road hammer originally designed for levelling paving stones, an oversized junior hack saw, a selection of heavy toothed saws with ridiculously impractical handles and a glazed shovel with a curvy wasted blade. Unlike Duchamp's snow shovel of 1915 (in advance of a broken arm) Slee's version is only in part readymade. The handle from a real tool is fused with a carefully hand fashioned spade, thus emphasizing the incompatibility of both material and style.

 

Paramount 2010, another small sculpture in the exhibition is made from modelled picture frame corners using a shelf as a plinth. It resembles the blackened mountains of the Paramount pictures logo originally made in charcoal from a W.W Hodkinson drawing and used between 1923 and 1941. Whilst the work has the scale of a mantle piece ornament it has an element of comedic menace.

 

The show accompanies From Utility to Futility, Slee's solo presentation at the new ceramic galleries in London's Victoria and Albert museum. 5 June 2010 - 3 April 2011

 

Richard Slee's work is part of various collection including the British Council, Los Angeles County Musuem, Musuem of Arts and Design, New York, Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, Japan, National Museum, Stockholm, Sweden, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, USA, Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park, Japan, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London

 

Image:
Richard Slee
Junior Hacksaw
2010
Ceramic and metal blade
57 x 20.5 cm 22.46 x 8.08 in
Courtesy of Hales Gallery, London

 

 

Hales Gallery
Tea Building
7 Bethnal Green Road
London E1 6LA
T +44 (0) 20 7033 1938

 

Hales Gallery 

 

Read On... Hales Gallery, London 

 

 

 

2 June - 10 July, 2010

 

Matthew Bown Galerie is proud to present the first solo show in Germany by the British artist Richard Wilson. Ever since the creation in 1987 of the work 20:50, currently on permanent display in the Saatchi Collection, London, Wilson has been recognised as one of the foremost British artists of his generation. The show at Matthew Bown Galerie presents new sculpture, film, and a survey of Wilson's projects in the form of drawings and models.

 

Red Hot consists of a 20 x 20 x 20 cm cube fashioned from stainless steel. It stands on a simple column of white fire-bricks which in its simple purity of form references not only 1960s minimalism but the whole classical tradition in sculpture. The steel cube is heated to a temperature approaching 1000 degrees, at which point it acquires a fiery red-orange hue. On one level, Red Hot is a playful meditation on the question of colour in sculpture: the colour is both 'artificial', in that it is induced, and 'natural', in that it is the colour of the material itself. But the work, which cannot be approached too closely or touched, and which distorts the air around it, also embodies the latent ferocity of an idol. An encounter with it evokes the quests that are central to ancient and modern cultural discourse: for the Golden Fleece, the Holy Grail, or into Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, for example. In our own time, the unattainable Utopia of Communism was often expressed by the heraldic use of the colour red and in the "revolutionary" content of pure geometric forms.

 

Richard Wilson's stop-motion film Butterfly narrates a painstaking resurrection. A Cessna light aircraft that has been crushed into a ball of metal scrap is then teased and pulled apart again into some kind of semblance of its original vital form. The aeroplane emerges from the twisted block of metal like a butterfly from its cocoon.

 

In addition to Red Hot and Butterfly, the show at Matthew Bown Galerie includes drawings and models that illustrate several of Wilson's projects, including 20:50 and Turning The Place Over, which was installed in Liverpool in 2007 and is recognised as one of the most spectacular works of public art in Britain.

 

Richard Wilson is one of the UK's leading artists working in sculpture, installation and multimedia. He was born in London in 1953. Since the 1970s he has been creating largescale works that challenge expectations of the formal limits of sculpture. He rose to prominence in the mid 1980s with the installation 20:50 - a key work in British installation art - where he filled Matt's Gallery in east London to waist height with sump oil (in recent years this work has been on display at the Saatchi Collection). For his solo exhibition at LA MOCA in 1996, Wilson took a cue from the ubiquitous LA swimming pool for the work Deep End; while in 2000 for the Millennium Dome New Sculpture Project in London, Wilson sliced a vertical section from a 600 ton sand dredger. He has represented Britain in the Venice (1986), Sao Paulo (1989) and Sydney (1992) Biennales. Wilson is also the subject of monographs including a recent publication by the Tate Gallery, written by Simon Morrissey.

 

 

Image:
Richard Wilson
Red Hot, 2010
Stainless steel, thermal bricks, power supply, 134 x 46 x 46 cm
Courtesy of Matthew Bown Galerie, Berlin

05.06. - 24.07.10

 

Mitterrand+Sanz is very pleased to present recent works by Fred Wilson.

 

Wilson, born in the Bronx in 1954, has been the subject of numerous exhibitions in museums and cultural institutions throughout North America, Europe and Asia. His work has also been featured in more than one hundred solo and group shows including representing the United States at the 50th Venice Biennale (2003), the Whitney Museum Biennial (1993), and Museum as Muse at MoMA in New York.

 

Wilson's unique artistic approach is to examine, question, and deconstruct the traditional display of art and artefacts in museums particularly in regard to racial content and cultural assumptions. With the use of new wall labels, sounds, lighting, and non-traditional pairings of objects, he leads viewers to recognize that changes in context create changes in meaning. Wilson's juxtaposition of evocative objects forces the viewer to question the biases and limitations of cultural institutions and how they have shaped the interpretation of historical truth, artistic value, and the language of display. His installation at the 2003 Venice Biennale focused on the history and images of people of African descent from the early years of the Venetian Republic to the present, bringing together Venetian old-master paintings, black murano glass chandeliers, and other Venetian rococo decorative arts.

 

The present exhibition features works specifically selected by Ami Barak with the intention of illustrating Fred Wilson's complex relationship to his practice of art within a limited, but immediately visualized, exhibition space transfiguring the artist's language of institutional critique for the gallery space.

 

For instance, the work 'Regina Atra' (2006) is a copy of a diadem made for the coronation of George IV, often worn by Queen Victoria, but perhaps most familiar from the image of the younger Elizabeth II found on banknotes, coins and stamps, only, in this case, constructed of black diamonds. More than a simple reversal of white and black as qualities of aesthetic attractiveness, or even a comment on the exploitation of valuable natural resources by colonial powers, the object provokes a consideration of the symbolic order the slave trade was founded on.

 

Another work, the bust with a white scarf obscuring the label describing his ethnicity, represents a man called Ota Benga, who was a Congolese pygmy exhibited in the Anthropology Department at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition during World Expo in Saint Louis 1904.Ota Benga-along with the other representatives of "primitive" cultures-was juxtaposed at the world's fair to the heroes and technological feats of the Western industrialized nations. Two years after the fair, he was displayed in a cage with an orangutan at the Bronx Zoo as an exhibition.

 

Also included is another bronze, 'The Mete of the Muse.' This pair comprising one work, are painted in a black patina and a white auto body paint. The black Egyptian figure represents Africa, the white "Classical" figure represents Europe and the West.

 

Another series of works are paintings of flags of African and African diaspora nations stripped of color and reduced to their graphic forms in black on the raw canvas.

 

Wilson has been the recipient of numerous honours and awards and, in 2008, was appointed member of the Board of Trustees of the Whitney Museum of Art, New York, the only artist currently serving as a trustee of a major New York museum. He received an Honorary Doctorate from Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY, Maine College of Art, Portland, and was elected President of the Board of Trustees of the Sculpture Center in New York. He is the recipient of the 10th Larry Aldrich Foundation Award as well as the prestigious MacArthur "Genius Award."