JOHN SUMMERS - FUTURE PRIMITIVE Mark Tanner Sculpture Award Winner 2006/7 Solo show of new sculpture funded by the award
On first looking at John Summers' sculptures you might be bewildered, amused or even repelled by their hectic surface noise - the glitter, the chaos, the seemingly randomly assembled found objects. But looking deeper you see there is an order and control as sophisticated as any traditional sculptor. The seriousness of these playful works is in their precarious harmonies. Summers excels in the metamorphosis of his materials - retaining the sense of flow and becoming in the works while holding them at a point of minute perfection.
The immediacy of his work is arrived at by continuous adjustment, as though a surgeon were working in emergency/primitive conditions, improvising with materials and instruments from a previous age. This forensic skill relates to the work made for his MA show at the Royal College, which often resembled lumps of prosthetic flesh. This almost Dr Frankenstein impulse has since shifted from animating the merely human to the creation of forms suggesting the birth of something quite unearthly.
In recent works the detritus and gore that are the by-products of Summers� practice are incorporated - offcuts of board, splurges of resin and foam become the stuff of the work. It�s a sparer, darker vision, thrown against the bling of glitter and sparkle. These abstracted forms lean and perch, or crouch ambivalently, reanimated into the figuration that never completely disappears.
Since graduating from the Slade in 1999, and the Royal College of Art in 2002, John Summers has exhibited widely in group shows both nationally and internationally, (including Studio 1.1, London 2006, 2007; Hollow, London 2005; NY Armoury Fair 2004; Bloodshot and Brighteyed, Berlin 2004, New Contemporaries 2002, 2003). His work has generated high praise and interest, and has won him several prestigious art awards, including the Deutsche Bank Pyramid Award. The exhibition funded by Mark Tanner Sculpture Award, which Summers won in July 2006, will be his first solo show, and represents an important step in his development as one of the brightest new talents in British sculpture.
The Mark Tanner Sculpture Award is now the largest sculpture prize of its kind in the UK. It is unique in its combination of offering both financial support towards the production of new work and a solo exhibition to an exceptional emerging sculptor. Standpoint will announce the winner of this year's award at the private view.
Standpoint Gallery is an independent, artist run project and exhibition space with charitable status. The Tanner award forms an important constituent part of our core aims - to act as a platform for emerging artists outside the commercial gallery system, to support the diversity and vibrancy of artistic production, to promote excellence and commitment in the artist as maker, and to provide an arena for artists' networks and professional development.
