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Sadie Coles HQ

JP MUNRO : The Foundations of the Twenty-first Century

‘I enjoy picking at that wound of not knowing visually what something means. I remember, growing up, I never understood any paintings, what they meant or why that subject had been chosen…So I think I enjoy that…fear, almost, of looking at an image.’  - JP Munro quoted by Murray Healy in ‘In Deeper Reference Praise’, POP, Autumn / Winter 2004

JP Munro’s paintings zoom in on history, illustrating selected moments and acting out scenes from mythology. Emperors and their lackeys peer into tombs, warriors engage in bloody battles, and figures indulge in pagan rites and mass orgies. The bodies are often the rich golden colour of sandstone, lending them a statue-like quality that compounds their sense of history.

image : JP Munro, Victory or Death, 2004

Nadia Hebson : GRAND MAL

What is initially a bewildering choice of subject matter; Flemish portraits, medieval landscapes and marine paintings are all plundered for Hebson’s Grand Mal. By cutting adrift these simple iconic images from their (art) historical context Hebson services them for her own ends. Testing the plausibility of sentiment as a continued convincing subject matter for painting. These heightened images corralled together begin to suggest an ambiguous psychological realm.

Painting on copper and zinc with small tentative marks the paint is worked to a point of fatigue. Weeping doppelgängers and phantasms of galleons glow and fizz unnaturally in filmic negative.

image : Nadia Hebson, White Tree, Oil  and Glitter on Copper, 38cm x32cm.

Keith Talent Gallery

Chris Wraith

Chris Wraith's paintings are an industria of textured linear forms that protrude from the surface, with overlapping reliefs that construct complex futurist architectural forms. Using computer programs as a starting point to form the drawings, these are then sent electronically to industrial manufacturers to form templates that will cut out the shapes using printing presses on pre-textured paper. The positive and negative forms are collaged taking the starting point of early modernist relief's. Rather than the white noise of a Frank Stella they emit the notion of a tech-noir hinterland.

Alison Jacques Gallery

Sam Salisbury

“Sam Salisbury's paintings and drawings vary from highly detailed images of men and women in strange uncanny situations to more ambiguous works that include both representational and abstract elements. Exploring various techniques and methods of painting and drawing, Salisbury uses unusual color combinations and creates extremely stylized renderings of the human figure. He uses images from the mass media as well as his own photographs and films to create composite figures, with the men usually small, bearded, and reminiscent of the hippies of the late -1960s and 1970s, and the women presented as towering, excessively glamorous, fashion-model types. These figures often appear in natural settings and their relationships are undefined, prompting viewer to draw their own conclusions or form their own narrative. The psychologically complex relationship between the sexes in these works recalls the paintings of John Currin and the comic art of R. Crumb”.
Text by Dominic Mollon, curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

image : Sam Salisbury, Untitled, 2005, Oil on wood panel,102 x 127 cms / 40 x 50 ins

Varda Caivano

"Painting for me is a way of questioning images, where visible objects with a secret depth appear to reveal a kind of irrational truth. The paintings operate as a bridge, a transitional space that evokes an inner world". Varda Caivano

Victoria Miro Gallery presents a new series of paintings by London-based artist Varda Caivano for her first solo exhibition. In these works, the processes of perception that inform the practice of painting are discreetly played out. Cavaino’s paintings offer subtle suggestions of images; hints of forms which hover on the verge of definition, confident in their location just outside of representation. They evoke a sense of immediacy, establishing a relationship between the experiences of viewing and of painting.

image : Varda Caivano, Untitled, 2004. Oil on canvas,50.5 x 40.5cm

MIHO SATO : AMNESIA

The last attribute of Miho’s painting is that of history painting. They appear to be private, remote, anonymous, and bereft of particularity. They also appear as an uncomfortable presence in the grand setting they now occupy, as if stolen in through the back entrance. They might even appear to avoid the light of day. As such there is something of a fugitive character in them. Some of these attributes are due to the way they explore a border region between the life and non-life of the image. As paintings they are strangely immobile, as if caught in a nether region in which all movement has ceased. The image sets up a paradox, or makes visible a splitting that serves to evoke both intimacy and distance as attributes at the source of the spell the image casts. The act of painting appears to push the image back into a regressive plane in which it is stripped back to an almost spectral core.

Anselm Kiefer : Für Chlebnikov : PART I

The focus of Part I is a group of thirty paintings that revisits Kiefer's long fascination with the quixotic work of Russian experimentalist Velimir Khlebnikov, whose analytical systems based on arcane mathematical calculations underscored the vast paradoxes at work in the march of history. Kiefer casts Khlebnikov's ideas in the theatre of the historic sea battle, incorporating actual model ships into the turbid, highly worked surfaces of his paintings. These will be housed in a purpose-built pavilion in Hoxton Square that recreates the dimensions and character of one of Kiefer's own ateliers in Barjac, Provence. Simultaneously three huge and complex paintings relating to the Khlebnikov series, as well as other complementary sculptural and graphic works that give insight into the artist's detailed working processes, will be shown in White Cube

Neil Gall : Atoll Villas

At times Neil Gall's paintings seem to be referencing Dutch still life or surrealist landscapes, at others they appear to be entirely contemporary and without precedent. It is as though Gall has built up layers of art history with the illusory dexterity of paint itself. This is in part due to the strata of his working process: modelling and assemblage, photography and painting. When the paintings are shown on their own they might be read as perverse abstractions; when, as here, the sculptures appear too, the interplay between two and three dimensions amplifies the oscillation between abstraction and figuration.

image : Neil Gall, Hidden by the Calami, 2004, 122 x 147cm

DAN ATTOE : YOU GET WHAT YOU DESERVE

In Dan Attoe’s work landscape plays a significant role and moreover the American landscape. Attoe seems to use landscape as a psychological backdrop that subtly reflects the actions of those who populate them. Minute individuals often appear lost inside gigantic rural stage sets whilst playing out recurring themes of sex, violence, death and religion. Through his paintings Attoe explores some of the tensions and anxieties that underlie American culture.

Brendan Lyons

Brendan Lyons’ paintings are made of artists’ paint only. The entire surface, structure, and supports consist of artists’ paint alone.
A cross-section cut between any two points of any one painting, would reveal paint only. The paintings are then fixed to the wall using further artists' paint as an adhesive. This leaves just one element (paint) attached to the wall.

The gallery spaces appear to be littered with the remnants of previously installed works. Fragments of paintings remain attached to the wall by abandoned staples, tape, and blu-tack. Some areas are marked out or isolated by hazard tape. Picture hooks remain in place, without their absent paintings. However, on closer inspection, all elements are revealed as artists’ paint alone.