Sarah Dwyer

Falling into Positions
Dates: 24th February – 30th March 2012
Private View: 23rd February 2012, 6-8pm

Josh Lilley is pleased to announce the opening on Thursday 23rd February of Falling into Positions, the second solo exhibition at the gallery by Sarah Dwyer.

Dwyer’s works evolve through a natural process of improvisation and spontaneity.  She works quickly, building up layered interpretations, veiling previous directions, constantly revising her canvases as an entire composition – in order to create dynamic works that represent a continued study of the subconscious.  At times drawing on the canvas, she pulls together inchoate shapes and ambiguous forms, to give a presence to something suggestive but unknown.

Elements of Irish poetry spill onto Dwyer’s canvases.  Her mark-making echoes the flow of action writing, a painterly parallel to James Joyce’s stream of consciousness passages. His poetry – full of suggestion and ambiguity – reflects the hybrid forms within Dwyer’s paintings – full of experimentation and lyricism.  Dwyer builds on allusions and free associations, bringing a certain unpredictability to her painting.

Although her work is impulsive and momentary, it is unavoidably historical, imbued with a reference to paintings past.  Just as Joyce’s works are built upon the understanding of historical literature and poetry, Dwyer self-consciously shadows historical painting.  She builds on Arshile Gorky’s ability, for example, to describe ambiguous floating shapes in an indeterminable ground, dragging them away from the figurative- an autonomous engagement with the physicality of the paint. Multiple styles jostle for primacy in her artistic vocabulary, so that the viewer is kept constantly engaged.  The result is dynamic and courageous painting.  Bold areas of colour compete for attention and play against each other, wrestling with the brushwork for prominence over form.

Sarah Dwyer – Born 1974 in Cork, Ireland. Lives and works in London

Dwyer graduated from the RCA in 2004, winning The Sheldon Bergh Award. Previous solo exhibitions include Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin, 2011, Hands Stuffing a Mattress, Josh Lilley Gallery, London, 2009, and Kybidou Gallery, Tokyo, 2007. Group exhibitions include Fade Away (touring exhibition), Transition Gallery, London, & Gallery North, Newcastle, 2011, Fear, Lo and Behold, Salon de Vortex, Athens, 2011, and Sarah Dwyer & Diego Sainz, Godoy, Madrid, Spain, 2007.

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Sarah Dwyer Turning Vacancies 2012 Oil on linen 204 x 185 cm/ 80 x 73 inches

Matt Lipps

Dates: 13th January – 17th February 2012
Private View: 12th January 2012, 6-8pm

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Josh Lilley is pleased to announce the opening on Thursday 12th January of the debut exhibition at the gallery by US artist Matt Lipps.

While Lipps’ works exist firmly within the realm of photography, his conceptual approach to date has fundamentally been that of an appropriation artist.  Through a process of extracting images from diverse source materials, Lipps re-organises visual icons from our cultural history into his own compositions.  His photographs engage with juxtapositions of scale, of time, and of familiarity – focusing on subjective hierarchies in order to explore ideas of context and categorisation.

For his first solo exhibition outside of the United States, Josh Lilley is delighted to present Lipps’ new HORIZON/S series in the downstairs spaces of the gallery – while three distinct works from his HOME series of 2008, will introduce his practice upstairs.

HOME series shows a selection of photographs of Lipps’ own childhood home, montaged amongst the dramatic landscape shots of American photographer Ansel Adams.  Such iconic American images infuse a drama and emotional power in the work, when set against the humble interiors and decor representative of everyday life.  An Ansel Adams image also provided the inspiration for Lipps’ HORIZON/S series.  In 1933 Adams photographed the inside of the storage room at the De Young Museum, the home of several diverse collections of sculpture.  Such a composition stimulated Lipps to create his own collections of figures, mined from the late 1950′s American journal for the arts – Horizon Magazine.  The publication was launched with the express invitation to its American readers to join with its editors, in a quest towards discovering what they foresaw as a horizon between high art and culture;  intended to deliver a model of good taste and sophistication to its audience.

In order to re-assemble such a collection of imagery, Lipps has cut out these characters and objects – reconfiguring them into sculptural three-dimensional stage sets.  Lit with acid lighting from the sides, the construction is then photographed into a seamless image.  This effect is one of the remarkable traits of Lipps’ work; the fact that his finished pictures mimic so closely processes easily achieved by contemporary computer programmes and technology.  Lipps’ work is in fact entirely analogue – where the appropriation of images is sensually dramatised and then captured.  Lipps sees his own work as re-mixing our relationship to images in general – making us rethink the context and operations they assume.

With that in mind, the artist has organised his HORIZON/S series into simple categories such as Women or Men in Suits.  As such, characters from diverse periods and contexts are brought together into the same space.  Often the stark categorisation seems inadequate, and the collection borders on the farcical when the normal boundaries of time and scale are ignored.  In this regard Lipps’ work becomes an analytical deconstruction of the subjective choices taken up by the editors of Horizon Magazine – that old-fashioned pioneer of good taste.  By focusing on selection and re-configuration, his processes bring attention to cultural norms and choices within American society;  questioning how images are presented in the media, while also challenging photographic heritage.  His work Untitled (Horizon Archive) stands as the centrepoint to this focus of his work – a jumbled conglomerate of figures from different ages and cultures, all replete with the magazine styled sterotypes they embodied.

Matt Lipps – Born 1975, lives and works in San Francisco.

Lipps gained his Masters in Studio Art from the University of California in 2004.  Previous solo exhibitions include, HORIZON/S, Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles, 2011, Matt Lipps: HOME, Silverman Gallery, San Francisco, 2010.  Two person, group exhibitions and biennials include, Tilt Shift: New Queer Perspectives from the Western Edge, Luis de Jesus Gallery, Los Angeles, 2011, Cutters/ Berlin: An Exhibition of International Collage, Pool Gallery, Berlin 2010, FotoFest 2010 Biennial, Houston, Texas, and Matt Lipps/Caroline May, The Apartment, Athens, Greece, 2008.

Lipps’ work will be included in the upcoming Saatchi Gallery exhibition Out of Focus: Photography, from May to July later this year.

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Matt Lipps Untitled (Stove) 2008 C-print, edition of 5 plus 2 AP 113 x 77 cm/ 44.5 x 30 inches

Robert Pratt

From Table Top to Tiger Print
Dates: 25th November – 22nd December 2011
Private View: 24th November 2011, 6-8pm

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Josh Lilley is pleased to announce the opening on Thursday 24^th November of From Table Top to Tiger Print – the debut exhibition at the gallery by British artist Robert Pratt.

Pratt’s work evolves from his keen eye for the minute eccentricities of everyday life.  He is fascinated with the details that go unnoticed by most – the dirty marks built up on the glass of a window, or the effervescent bubbles in a fizzy drink.  By rendering them in a physical form, Pratt’s installations draw our attention to these subtle moments of observation; ones we may have briefly noticed, but never properly considered.

Pratt purloins objects from their everyday environment and venerates their idiosyncrasies, allowing us to consider them anew. Distributed around the gallery space we see a collection of his momentary acknowledgments brought together into a conceptual bundle.  Each observation Pratt hijacks from the world around him, is transformed through his sculpture into an individual character that competes for attention across the space.  Pratt’s works are composed of found objects that are repurposed for the gallery so as to exaggerate their peculiar traits.  His sculptures revere the everyday, overlooked object, transforming it into something alive, responsible and full of personality. Through Pratt’s touch, such textures and associations become his own army of characters.

Whilst other artists might incorporate found objects into their work, perhaps by adding to them or aestheticising them, Pratt is not afraid to let them stand for themselves. He adopts a Duchampian sense of irreverence to how sculpture should be composed – addressing banal subject matter while forlornly attempting to make beautiful and bring attention to the discarded. He also engages with how his works are affected by the inevitability of the viewer’s gaze, whereby intended or anticipated modes of display are challenged and counteracted.  Such a realization then reactivates his work and practice as a whole, where the approximate relationships between each work on the floor speak more about the concept of retrieval itself, rather than the possibilities a found object might acquire.

Robert Pratt – Born 1984, lives and works in London. Pratt graduated from the Royal Academy Schools in 2009.  Previous solo exhibitions include Glazing, Glazing, Glazed, The Cello Factory, London, 2011, Resistance is an Afterthought, Royal British Society of Sculptors, London, 2010 and Bendy Straws and Beached Whales, ANDOR Gallery, London, 2010. Selected group shows include Restrike, Poppy Sebire Gallery, London, 2011, Friendship of the Peoples, Simon Oldfield Gallery, London, 2011, and Extension, Vilma Gold, London 2011.
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Robert Pratt Star Rosette 2009 Paper, glass bottle, rubber and nylon thread 74 x 75 x 75 cm

Incredulous Zealots

4 Painterly Interrogations from LA

Analia Saban, Annie Lapin, Asad Faulwell, Jeni Spota

Dates: 12th October – 19th November 2011
Private View: 11th October 2011, 6-8pm

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Josh Lilley is delighted to announce the opening on Tuesday 11th October of Incredulous Zealots – a group exhibition featuring work by four LA-based artists - Analia Saban, Annie Lapin, Asad Faulwell, and Jeni Spota.

Lara Wisniewski, LA-based curator and writer, discusses their contribution to the Los Angeles art scene below;

Psychologically aggressive…zealously dedicated…relentlessly driven…exuding religious fervour;  all apt phrases to describe the four young Los Angeles artists participating in this exhibition. Their work is driven by an obsession to paint and then maintain control of their medium – either through the way their ideas actuate themselves, or by controlling the material itself.  It appears these four artists do not take any aspect of the painting process for granted, neither its history nor its physicality.

It might seem strange that an artist from Los Angeles would be so intense, so consumed by detail and control.  How does so much tension manifest in endless stretches of sunny days?  Then again, when we view these four young artists’ work, we have to remember their predecessors – Chris Burden, Paul McCarthy, Mike Kelley and Ed Ruscha etc – whose most innovative and outstanding works are psychologically disturbed, subtle, and sometimes not so subtle negotiations between strictures of reality and fantasy.  Alternative religion also has its long history in the city;  fanaticism and organisation are the earmarks of the Dianetics movement or the celebrity studded Kabbalah Centre, while smaller episodes found a voice – such as Charles Manson’s homegrown cult and its tragic, outrageous ending.  It is hard to put a finger on the pulse that makes Los Angeles a home to these strange niches, as the city has always been a safe haven where outsiders become insiders by bringing dreams to their fullest expression.  The eternally good weather seals their desires under a hopeful veneer that eventually cracks in the dry climate.  As Los Angeles culture has proven, too many sunny days can beat shadows into the mind.  LA’s dark underbelly is indeed a well-cultivated and fertile ground.

Asad Faulwell’s paintings are homage to the forgotten women of the Algerian War.  When her soldiers were losing their war of independence against the French, their Muslim wives and sisters stepped outside of their prescribed submissive roles and made themselves battle ready.  Faulwell’s works are intricately painted – eerie and poetic black and white portraits of these unique women, based on photographs taken during the time that they were on trial in the French courts.  His paintings seem more like nest eggs where the women are finally celebrated and cradled within brightly colored, elaborate, repetitive arrangements – reminiscent both of Henri Matisse’s decorative patterning as well as Faulwell’s own Iranian/Islamic tradition of geometric design.

Jeni Spota relishes the act of manipulating the slow, stiff material of paint, organizing its excess into a painterly, dimensional image.  Her small, intense works, sometimes up to two inches deep in oil paint, depict religious icons, traditional Italian Renaissance images, and compositions of hundreds of cherubic angels with haloes.  These works appear complicated at the outset, but when read as personal iconic documents of Spota’s life, they take on an intimate warmth – albeit to obsessively clutch to one’s personal memories by re-inserting them into larger histories.

Annie Lapin’s work is a dynamic, grappling journey with the frustratingly immutable two-dimensional surface of painting.  The formative power of primitive art – examining the initial human impulse to create images such as is seen in cave paintings, is the current focus of her work – seeking ways to convey the basic human instinct in an all encompassing image or archetype.  Layers of colour fog over a distant view in some of her paintings, where perhaps Lapin herself is searching for an elusive truth.  Sometimes her work has a Turner-esque effect in which colors and shapes hurtle around the canvas in a fury.  Her paintings may not always yield a metaphysical epiphany but they do show the inner workings of a devoted seeker.

Analia Saban is the disciplinarian of the group. Her studio is a veritable factory of experimentations dedicated to the dissection of a painting.  Saban burns, cuts and destroys her painting surfaces with lasers threatening them with annihilation but then transmuting them into their residual, final form – sometimes as delicate as paper cutouts.  It is the mistakes she tries not to make that yield pulchritude, the carefully considered look of an intentional accident.  The final result is a conceptual, visually minimal object in which the history of painting is brought to bear, her judgement and its verdict being the beautifully inevitable result:  another painting entering into the world.

Los Angeles artists believe in the act of painting even if at times it becomes a tool of self-manipulation, mutilation, and control.  Yet historically, painting at its very best has done no worse than torture its creator only to draw him into the creation of more works.  The unspoken agreement in most centers of artmaking today is that painting cannot be made without a heaping dose of irony.  In Los Angeles though, a painter gets emotional, obsessively passionate about his or her mode of expression, making certain that they are rigorously hunting down every stage of their process.  These artists scrutinise, fervently question, delve into dark psychologies and demand that painting be something more.  Yet all the while they persist with their chosen medium earnest in their scepticism, always in love with paint itself.

- Lara Wisniewski is a freelance arts writer and curator based in Los Angeles, California.  She is currently finishing her first novel Notes of Passage.

Analia Saban – Born 1980 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, lives and works in Los Angeles.  Saban studied at the University of California Los Angeles, LA, CA.  Previous solo exhibitions include Grayscale, Thomas Solomon Gallery, Los Angeles, 2011, Information Leaks, Josh Lilley Gallery, London, 2010, Living Color, Galerie Praz-Delavallade, Paris, 2009, and Wet Paintings in the Womb, Galerie Spruth Magers, Projeckte, Munich, 2007.  Selected group shows include Painting Expanded, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, 2011, Here Soon Now, Rubell Family Collection/Contemporary Arts Foundation, Miami, 2010-11, Gifted, Josh Lilley Gallery, London, 2010, and Baker’s Dozen at the Torrance Art Museum, CA, 2010.

Annie Lapin – Born 1978 in Washington D.C. lives and works in Los Angeles.  Lapin studied at the University of California Los Angeles, LA, CA.  Previous solo exhibitions include The Pure Space Animate, Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles, 2011,  Parallel Deliria Iteration, Pasadena Museum of California Art, Pasadena, 2009, and Parallel Deliria, Grand Arts, Kansas City, MI, 2008.  Selected group shows include Five from L.A., Galerie Lelong, New York, 2011,  I’ll Let You Be in My Dreams if I Can Be in Yours, Fredericks & Freiser Gallery, New York, 2010, and L.A. Now, Las Vegas Art Museum, Las Vegas, 2008.

Asad Faulwell – Born 1982 in Caldwell, ID, lives and works in Los Angeles.  Faulwell studied at Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA.  Previous solo gallery exhibitions include Les Femmes D’Alger, Kravets Wehby Gallery, New York, 2011.  Selected group shows include LA to Tehran: Mapping the Transitional State of Iranian Contemporary Art, The Guild, New York, 2009, and LA Art Show, Barker Hangar, Santa Monica, 2008.

Jeni Spota – Born 1982 in New York, lives and works in Los Angeles.  Spota studied at the School of the Art Insitute of Chicago, IL.  Previous solo museum exhibitions include Don’t Tread on Me, Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica, 2011 and Giotto’s Dream, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 2008.  Previous solo gallery exhibitions include For the Great Tally, Brennan & Griffin, New York, 2010, and Tra La La, Greener Pastures, Toronto, Canada, 2009.  Selected group shows include Gaylen Gerber, Renwick Gallery, New York, 2011, Never Let Me Go, Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago, 2011, Stranger Than Fiction, Santa Barbara Art Museum, Santa Barbara, 2010, The Perpetual Dialogue, Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York, 2009, and LA Now, Las Vegas Art Museum, Las Vegas, 2008.

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Analia Saban Fade Out (from White) 2011 Laser-carved acrylic on canvas 51 x 41 cm/ 20 x 16 inches

Christof Mascher

Urban Ornamental
Dates: 9th September – 7th October 2011
Private View: 8th September 2011, 6-8pm

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Josh Lilley is delighted to announce the opening on Thursday 8th September of Urban Ornamental – the second exhibition at the gallery by German artist Christof Mascher.

This new body of work sees Mascher supplement his fantastical landscape paintings on panel and wood with a variety of other practices; paper porcelain reliefs, ceramic sculptures, and his Mind Storage Rack cabinets; all articulating a development within his pictorial language and storytelling.

Mascher’s works can be seen to continue a dialogue with northern European painting through his own individual mythology – set out across his various landscapes and scenarios. Depictions of allegory, the surreal, hybrid creations and characters, and the anthropomorphic awakening of the natural world – can all be traced to a legacy of artists that began with Bruegel and Bosch. Yet his images reveal a thoroughly unique way of gathering and disseminating visual information, providing an insight into how he controls and compartmentalises ideas, signifiers and motifs in his work.

Interested in how imagination allows the surreal to emerge into life, such creations are integrated into his images on horizontal layers that sweep through his paintings. This stage-setting is crucial – allowing Mascher to easily engage with the objects or characters he is inserting onto the picture plane. From this comes a desire to control and harness such forms – giving him the opportunity to expand his practice across different media. While working with ceramics is in effect a new mode of drawing for Mascher, the freedom gained from reflecting back on his own intuitive processes – is best captured in his series of display cabinets.

Mind Storage Rack is Mascher’s modern-day version of a Wunderkammer, or cabinet of curiosities. Historically such objects were regarded as a memory theatre, conveying the owner or patron’s control of the world he inhabited – through its indoor, microscopic reproduction. For Mascher, the Mind Storage Rack possesses a similar function – both as an opportunity to confront and oversee his creative decisions, while also providing a moment’s pause; a focus that re-circulates and inspires the content and energy of his paintings.

Christof Mascher – Born 1979 in Hannover, lives and works in Braunschweig, Germany.

Mascher studied at the Hochschule für bildende Künste (HBK), Braunschweig, under Professor Walter Dahn. Previous solo museum exhibitions include Kunsthalle Emden, Germany, 2011, Galerie der Stadt, Remscheid, Germany, 2008, and Museum of Modern Art, Goslar, Germany, 2008. Previous solo gallery exhibitions include Alley Cat, Michael Janssen, Berlin, 2010, Meshes of the Afternoon, Josh Lilley, London, 2009, and Fake Empire, The Happy Lion, LA, 2008. Selected group shows include All in Together Now, at Mai 36, Zurich, 2011, The Forgotten Bar / Galerie im Regierungsviertel, Berlin, 2010, and Re-Reading of the Future, International Triennale of Contemporary Art, National Gallery, Prague, 2008.


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Christof Mascher MSR...YOIS 2011 Mixed media 100 x 50 x 10cm

Peacock Trousers

Gabriel Hartley & Appau Junior Boakye-Yiadom
Dates: 1st July – 10th August 2011
Private View: 30th June 2011, 6-8pm

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Josh Lilley is delighted to announce the opening this Thursday June 30th of Peacock Trousers – a two-man exhibition at the gallery by Gabriel Hartley and Appau Junior Boakye-Yiadom.

Sharing a graceful, and somewhat experimental approach to their practice – where an irreverent humour, sense of performance, and enjoyment of colour are connecting threads, Peacock Trousers will feature 5-6 new large-scale sculptures by Gabriel Hartley, as well as an installation, film, and edition of photographs by Appau Junior Boakye-Yiadom.

The first two gallery spaces contain works by Hartley – whose sculptures appear to have been momentarily frozen in an act of collapse. Seemingly awaiting activation, they display an explicit monumentality in their inert states. Yet the power of Hartley’s work lies in his ability to fill such minimally formal sculptures with a sense of character – with an emotional capacity, and with a sense of humour. These anthropomorphic works dazzle, tease, and confuse with their sprayed and tarnished surfaces, and their contorted and irreparably bent limbs. Brancusi comes to mind, especially in the more totemic works on display – and also in the use of coloured wallpaper downstairs, forming a backdrop for the presentation of the sculptures. Yet while Brancusi’s works were etched out and carved from marble, bronze and wood – Hartley creates a sense of tension from a process which is not so readily identifiable.

They indeed seem as though they are made from metal, ceramic, wax or rock, when in fact the sculptures start with coloured sheets of paper, which are crumpled, folded or manipulated. These are then covered in resin and fiberglass, which are subsequently carved away or smoothed over, giving the effect of platinum metals or corrugated stone. The wallpaper consists of numerous drawings made from the same type of a1 paper from which the sculptures are constructed. The drawings call to mind the Frottage works of Max Ernst – using various surrealist motifs such as the eye, the key, and pairs of breasts. The Surrealist interest in cave painting is also alluded to here by Hartley, where he maximizes dramatic effect by placing these figures in front of the wall based drawings.

Just as Hartley seems able to conjure life or induce paralysis in his sculptures, so too do we see the more literal effects of performance in the installations, films and photos of Boakye-Yiadom. Enacting scenarios and actions upon ready-mades, Boakye-Yiadom’s work deals with the after-effects of such happenings, reveling in the sudden absence of himself – and the banality within the artist’s practice as a whole.

Boakye-Yiadom presents three works in Peacock Trousers. The first, entitled Peacock, is a set of 8 photographs – each showing a low-lying lampshade with an increasing number of light bulbs perched beneath it. In each instance a different coloured glow emanates from the lamp – casting a rainbow of colours over the whole series of works. The turning on of a light bulb is often seen as a sign of an epiphany, however in Boakye-Yiadom’s work, it is playfully deadpan through its straightforward construction. The work also references historical still life – where the light bulbs have a similar composition to the classic fruit bowl. In traditional still life painting the light source comes from somewhere outside the composition, whereas in Peacock the whole subject is the actual source of light. Interrogation, and military medals of merit are other sources being touched upon in the work.

Bx2 is a development on Boakye-Yiadom’s installation Red Stallion – where a pair of boxing gloves dipped in bright red paint, hang precariously on a noose above a bucket. Bx2 introduces a silver bucket dipped into a bucket of black paint and strung up to dry by a hang mans rope. Exploring ideas around paint and colour, as well as an active participation with everyday objects, Boakye-Yiadom creates a feeling of tension and apprehension – despite the absurd nature of his installation.

Golden Underground shows the artist playing the piano with a paintbrush, painting the piano’s keys in the process. The film stop-starts, accompanied constantly by a rendition of Scott Joplin’s seminal Ragtime work – Maple Leaf Rag, played and recorded specifically for the piece by pianist Chris Jerome. Maple Leaf Rag set the standard for Ragtime music, which was at the forefront of popular culture / music at the time. In Golden Underground, Boakye-Yiadom’s use of Joplin’s much reproduced composition, is aligned with the classic image of ‘the artist in studio’ (such as Vermeer’s ‘The Art of Painting’ 1666) – through his own painting performance on the piano. Drawing parallels between these acts of creativity, Boakye-Yiadom focuses on the notion of the artist becoming more self aware of his role within society. Such an act not only allows Boakye-Yiadom to explore perceptions of cultural and racial stereotyping, but also makes visible the instinctive elements of his practice.

Gabriel Hartley – Born 1981 in London, lives and works in London. Hartley studied at the Royal Academy Schools, London (2005-2008). Previous solo exhibitions include Crimping, Furini Arte Contemporanea, Rome, 2011, Gabriel Hartley, Foxy Production, New York, 2010, and Gabriel Hartley, Swallow Street (Hauser & Wirth Project Space) London, 2009. Selected group shows include Rearrange your face, Sorcha Dallas, Glasgow, 2011, Young London, V22, London, 2011 and Newspeak: British Art Now, Saatchi Gallery, London, 2010.
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Appau Junior Boakye-Yiadom – Born 1984 in London, lives and works in London. Boakye-Yiadom studied at the Royal Academy Schools, London (2005-2008). Previous solo exhibitions include Misguided Warrior, Squid & Tabernacle, London, 2010, and Backwash, Primo Alonso Gallery, London, 2009. Selected group exhibitions include This is England, Uno & Uno, Milan, 2010 and A Broken Fall, Josh Lilley Gallery, London, 2009.
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Gabriel Hartley Trousers 2011 Paper, resin, fibre glass, 254 x 89 x 28 cm

Fabian Seiz

French Park / I Was Here
Dates: 6th May – 24th June 2011
Private View: 5th May 2011, 6-8pm

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Josh Lilley is delighted to announce the opening on Thursday May 5th of the debut show at the gallery by Viennese sculptor Fabian Seiz.

As human consciousness experiences space in the presence of time, the fixing of space in an artwork can be read as an artist’s attempt to freeze time, thereby transcending the limits of his or her own ephemeral existence. The sculptures in Fabian Seiz’s exhibition French Park / I Was Here, are in this sense a response to humanity’s enduring need to leave behind a sign, a mark, a footprint – a record of its presence. Seiz scratches “I was here” in the bitumen covered ground of the upstairs gallery. He adopts this familiar epithet to extend his own presence in the space for the duration of the exhibition – thus implicating the viewer in this process as we leave our own mark on his work and the exhibition itself, through our footprints on the floor.

Throughout history different epochs have worked to extend the artist’s transient scope beyond the boundaries of his or her own existence. Just like the self-portrait and other cultural achievements, garden design has reflected changes in the ways we experience and define ourselves. In the 17th century a new mode of extending one’s reach emerged when the central perspective – whose vanishing lines in the Renaissance originally served the purpose of facilitating the representation of space in painting – was transformed into the pictorial landscape of the French Park, or Jardin à la Française.

Seen from a well-defined, privileged vantage point, vanishing lines would converge in infinity within one’s natural surroundings. Standing in this exhibition amongst Seiz’s sculptures, the viewer’s gaze travels down and through this troop of assembled characters – beyond the confines of space.

Yet despite this heightened sense of awareness within one’s own environment, the French Park also stands as an emblem of humanity’s attempt to control and manipulate nature to its own desires. Fabian Seiz’s interest lies in humanity’s constant search for orientation – our resort to all kinds of philosophical and scientific abstractions, each with its own language, logic, and imagery – as a means of finding explanation. The various works in this exhibition convey the park’s measured ideals, yet at the same time each work deals with a different adopted system. Atlas (2009) for example, breaks down our attempts to model and divide the world around us. Corrugated cardboard flops pathetically around the central structure of the work, failing to stand up to the rigid wooden base. The splashes of colour on a white board hint at our invented system of colouring countries on an atlas, a system referring to our colonial histories, rendering it arbitrary and ineffective. Through these works Seiz pokes fun at our scientific and philosophical attempts to measure, define and rationalize, making sculptures that reveal our inadequacies.

Our perception of our environment is thrown into doubt as we confront his helpless, hapless characters. Seiz’s sculptures appear like machines and yet they have no clear function. While showing complex construction, they are naively put together out of basic raw materials. Incorporating wood, mdf, card, paper and felt, Seiz’s structures are doomed to failure, representing a failed ideological project that will never come to fruition. While these feats of ambition seem condemned from the outset, it is through this abject failure that his works find their profound effect.

Through his astute touch for materiality, his poetic sense of composition is infused with an irreverence and playful humour that allows Seiz to deconstruct the purpose of sculpture. He uses it not to represent reality but to question what sculpture can achieve. Forms have been taken apart and put back together again, wherein his structures appear to demand rather than reveal information. Rather than searching for answers Seiz explores the notion of how ideas are conceived, and how those ideas become forms and finally, objects. Succeeding in highlighting these apparent contradictions, his works contribute to this ensuing confusion.

Fabian Seiz – Born 1975 in Vienna, Austria, lives and works in Vienna.  Seiz studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, in Vienna (1993-1999). Previous solo exhibitions include Fear Of, schaufenster, KÖR am Kunsthalle, Vienna, 2011, Three Heights Tall, Layr Wuestenhagen Contemporary, Vienna, 2009 , and I Could Hit the Ceiling, Wilkinson Gallery, London, 2008. Selected group shows include Treffpunkt, Hamish Morrison Gallery, Berlin, 2011 and Contemporary Art, Museum Liaunig, Neuhaus / Suha, 2011.
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Fabian Seiz Another end of Painting, 2010 Wood, mixed media 106 x 110 x 120 cm

Carla Busuttil

Rug & Gut & Gum
Dates: 18th March 2011 – 28th April 2011
Private View: 17th March 2011, 6-8pm

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Josh Lilley is delighted to announce the opening on Thursday 17th March of the debut show at the gallery by South African painter Carla Busuttil.

Drawing upon her own family histories – of both an escape from genocide, and an emigration to a society founded upon racial prejudice and exclusion, the twenty paintings in Rug & Gut & Gum explore Busuttil’s investigation into abuses of power and violence, focusing on the individuals or groups of people responsible for such acts. The knowledge and experience of her Armenian relatives fleeing Turkey at the beginning of the 20th century, and her own birth and childhood in South Africa during the height of apartheid – have both enlightened and darkened her perceptions of humanity and its struggle for control. Through the rendering of these ambiguous characters – executed in her expressionistic brush-strokes, build up of paint, and boldness of colour – Busuttil seeks to place them and their actions up for account.

Some of her subjects may be well-known figures, yet she prefers to rely on visual cues in the paintings – rather than depicting them in a solely representational manner. It is important for her that her treatment of such subjects is not restrained by subjective judgment, but that there should be a tension between the (real or imagined) recognition of these figures and the way they are painted. While there is a strong African resonance within the paintings, and specific references to the Armenian genocide, many of these works are non-geographical in their makeup in that they do not focus on a particular place or person, but are rather a collage of events that have taken place over a period of time. Each work is drawn from a combination of found or real imagery, together with fictional elements and characters. Often the boundaries between fiction and fact are blurred into recurring themes – such as that of Zig Zag, who first appeared in her work a few years ago.

The real image components are sourced primarily from magazines, newspapers, and the Internet. Busuttil then extracts the essence of such an event or character, highlighting it and bringing it to the fore. By minimising the language of paint, and using striking blocks of colour – Busuttil creates a sensory and emotional engagement with the viewer. The thick application of paint allows every gesture to reveal a savage quality that undermines the decorum of her subjects. Leaders and soldiers become abstracted cartoon like caricatures – diluted portrayals full of aggressive expression. In a nod to the capacity of painting’s history to grapple with emotion through course brush-strokes and the quick instincts of paint, her works also allude to the looseness and confident gestures of Kirchner, while emanating the solitude and loneliness of figures in the work of Edvard Munch.

Though the acts of many of her figures are beyond reproach, Busuttil makes them seem vulnerable or awkward in order to bring them down to an accessible level. The title itself – Rug & Gut & Gum – comes from the book Money by Martin Amis – where he describes the vulgarity of shady characters trying to stem the effects of aging through cosmetic dental work and expensive hair. This absurd and ultimately doomed pursuit, that of immortality and perpetual power, is shown to be a product of greed and vanity. Through such visual parodies, Busuttil is able to evoke the unspoken horror of how tyrants are gradually embraced by society, and how we, under the spell of their public charisma, become passive participants in their wishes.

Carla Busuttil – Born 1982 in Jonannesburg, South Africa, lives and works in Berlin.  Busuttil studied a Masters in painting at the Royal Academy Schools, London (2005-2008). She featured in Newspeak: British Art Now, at the Saatchi Gallery, London, 2010, as well as being included in Daily Miracles, Josh Lilley Gallery, 2009, and Jerwood Contemporary Painting Prize, Jerwood Space, London, 2009. She had a solo show at Gimpel Fils, London, 2009.
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Carla Busuttil Zig Zag and the Delta Force 5, 2010 Oil on canvas, 200 x 240 cm

Benedetto Pietromarchi

Another Place
Dates: 14th January 2011 – 4th March 2011
Private View: 13th January 2011, 6-8pm

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Josh Lilley is delighted to announce the opening on Thursday 13th January, of the debut solo exhibition at the gallery by Italian sculptor Benedetto Pietromarchi.

Two years ago, Benedetto Pietromarchi was awarded the Kenneth Armitage Foundation Fellowship, which allowed him to live and work in the late British sculptor’s studio residence in Kensington.  During that period, as well as making new work he has also spent a good deal of time travelling — not in the conventional geographical sense of moving from place to place, but in the imaginative mode associated with the mental wanderer, the armchair traveller.  The current body of work has emerged in large part from that meditative process and particularly from Pietromarchi’s interest in the nebulous realm of psychogeography.

As Guy Debord, the founding guru of psychogeography himself acknowledged, the term has always had a “pleasing vagueness”, but to Pietromarchi its significance was clear enough.  For him it marked the intersection of a number of his enduring interests, touching upon the idea of the voyage, the patterns of geological time, humanity’s ecological footprint, the illusory nature of representation.  And there was something else that Pietromarchi noticed too. Despite its origins in aesthetics and the transformation of urban life, psychogeography has spawned no visual art to speak of, its main legacy lying instead within the literary and political spheres, and of course in the act of walking itself, where psychology and geography coincide.

The apparent absence of any psychogeography-inspired sculpture prompted Pietromarchi to combine into a whole a number of the ostensibly discrete works that have emerged from his recent research.  It is these drawings, photographs, ceramic objects, and an intriguing diorama construction, that make up the current exhibition.  While he has loosely conjoined them in such a way that they enrich and illuminate one another, they remain autonomous objects, each with its own subtle allusions.  In this sense the work preserves something of the oneiric nature of psychogeography’s essential character, while illuminating its connection to a surrealist sensibility.

Pietromarchi’s classical training and respect for craft give him mastery over a broad range of studio disciplines.  The decision to build a diorama might have prompted less versatile contemporary artists to outsource the work to a specialist workshop.  However, the need for a kind ‘wrap-around’ hexagonal enclosure of backlit screens combining drawing and photographs merely presented to Pietromarchi an opportunity to do what he enjoys most — to hunker down and construct it all himself.  The result unwittingly updates a long-neglected aspect of London’s Enlightenment visual culture — the panoramas, dioramas and other optical devices that proliferated in the early nineteenth century.

Pietromarchi’s screen chamber is a bewitching creation in the tradition of Philip de Loutherbourg’s famous Eidophusikon, or Louis Daguerre’s dioramas that wowed the London public in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.  Such ‘devices of wonder’ offered momentary escape from the here and now, a flight into the immersive solitude of the self.  Pietromarchi’s low-tech construction achieves a similar dream-like effect, drawing us into its strange oceanic ambience, slowing time, reconnecting the eye to the imagination.

The current body of work extends the arc of Pietromarchi’s creative trajectory to date.  We now look back to the extraordinary ceiling-hung work entitled Module 1 — an inflated rubber harbour-fender mounted with a steel-framed seat, completed shortly after commencing his Armitage Fellowship — and view it in a fresh light.  A compelling sculptural object possessed of both airborne and maritime connotations, hovering somewhere between Géricault, Jules Verne and Heath Robinson, Module 1 offered a foretaste of the surrealist psychogeographical travels that lay ahead.

Journeying deep into his mind’s eye, beneath the radar of his conscious mind, Pietromarchi has discovered a rich seam of experimental material that will likely sustain him for some time to come.

Tom Flynn
London 2011

Benedetto Pietromarchi – Born 1972 in Rome, lives and works in London.
Pietromarchi studied at the Accademia delle Belle Arti di Carrara, Italy, 1994-1998.  Solo shows include Carrozza, Flora Fairbairn Projects, London, 2007, It’s for Real, b-49 project space in Rome, 2007 and Meteopathic, Trolley Gallery, London 2005.  Group shows include A Broken Fall, Josh Lilley Gallery, London, 2009, Reconstruction 1 at Sudeley Castle, 2006, and Sine Qua Non, Bischoff/Weiss, London, 2005.  He is currently artist in residence at the Kenneth Armitage Foundation, in London.
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Dr Tom Flynn is a London-based art historian and writer. He lectures on the art market and museum studies at Kingston University and founded The Sculpture Agency to promote critical thinking about historical and contemporary sculpture. He is currently writing a Students’ Guide to the Art Market

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Benedetto Pietromarchi Untitled 2010 Terra-cotta, ink, ceramic 50cm x 25cm x 20cm

Gifted

Curated by Ben Street
Dates: 14th December 2010 – 7th January 2011
Private View: 11th December 2010, 6-8pm

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Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it. Do something else to it.  Jasper Johns

Gifted takes the premise of the seasonally popular tradition of the ‘Secret Santa’ to create a self-reflexive and playful assessment of the gallery and its roster. ‘Secret Santa’ is a way of unifying colleagues in a workplace by obliging them to buy each other Christmas presents with a particular price limitation.  The recipient of your gift is randomly assigned, resulting in varying degrees of delight, relief, or anxiety for both parties.  The preparation for this show has taken the same approach, with the geographically disparate gallery artists made to play office colleagues participating in a game of seasonal gifting.  Each artist was asked to submit one work of art to be randomly assigned to another.  Everyone gave, everyone received.  These ‘gifted’ works were then altered to whatever extent the recipient wished.  Some have undergone only minor changes or none at all – taking the inspiration of the received work as a gift in itself.  Others have been transformed almost beyond recognition.  In the final stage of the process, ownership of the work has passed to the recipient.  As with all the best parlour games, the absurdity of the premise allows for a relaxation of formalities and the revelation of unexpected patterns, kinships and meanings.

A roster of gallery artists creates a kind of virtual community of individuals, united under common approaches and attitudes.  Yet that community (like that of the art world as a whole, as well as online communities) is just that: virtual.  Divided by geography, these individuals are being asked to think and operate as a corporate body.  This exhibition is a way of thinking about the communities in which we all, in some way, participate.  Each work in Gifted is a token of a real interaction between constituents of a nebulous community.

A gift is a small impingement into your world by another person.  It’s something they’ve left in your life.  Its strangeness – the way it doesn’t quite sit with the rest of your stuff – is a reminder of the strangeness of other people, their weird tastes and unusual smells.  Making a received gift palatable to you means changing it to suit your world, just as accepting a new friend into your life requires a bit of amiable attrition.  That alteration might be tiny (wearing your own smell into a new shirt) or large (dyeing that shirt bright blue).  The works shown in this exhibition are a reminder of how objects passed between people accrue a provenance that transforms them into things of unexpected power.  It’s through apparently minor personal interactions – playing games, giving gifts – that new meanings and ideas suddenly make themselves known.

Artists Analia Saban, Nick Goss, Sarah Dwyer, Belen Rodriguez Gonzalez, Carla Busuttil, Matthew Musgrave, Rebecca Nassauer, Vicky Wright, Clara S Rueprich, Benedetto Pietromarchi, Michael Huey, and Christof Mascher.

Dedicated to Rebecca Nassauer

Ben Street is a teacher of Art History and a lecturer at the National Gallery.  He is a former lecturer at the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York. He writes on contemporary art for Art21, Artnet, Saatchi Online and Artreview.com.  He is currently working on a monograph on painter Andrew Sendor and a catalogue essay for the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

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Michael Huey (From Nick Goss) Untitled 2010 Slide projection on canvas 72 x 95 cm