Brigitte Polemis | Just a Number
13 Jun - 29 Jun 2013
 
Urban spaces inhabited by faceless men in suits arranged in rows, circular formations, spirals, or overlapping layers as repeated motifs: these are the key features in the new group of works presented by Brigitte Polemis under the title “Just a Number”. Yet, although specified by their general title as works commenting on the dehumanisation of man in western industrialised societies, they seem however to strangely defy their ‘inhuman’ message, engaging the viewer in what one increasingly understands to be the imagery of the poetics of a world where man and machine have long been reconciled.

Chelsea Futurespace proudly presents Four Decades an exhibition of prints by Sir Peter Blake, selected by the artist. Blake’s work takes its influence from the realms of pop culture, literature, music and contemporary art. The suites of prints in the exhibition include his series of Appropriated Alphabets, Alice in Wonderland, The Butterfly Man (Homage to Damien Hirst) and Homage to Schwitters. Other highlights include prints from the Found Art series, screenprints from collage and portraits of musicians including Chuck Berry, Brian Wilson, Ian Dury, The Everly Brothers and The Clash. The show covers the diversity and dexterity of Blake’s practice as an artist working in print across the last four decades.
Sir Peter Blake is renowned for his influence on Pop Art and culture and is frequently referred to as the ‘Godfather of British Pop Art’. He has worked with bands and musicians including The Beatles, Oasis and Paul Weller, designing the iconic cover for The Beatles’ ‘Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’. Blake’s work transcends the divisions between high art and pop culture, with visual influences from artists such as Kurt Schwitters to music icon Frank Sinatra.
An internationally acclaimed artist, Sir Peter Blake (born 1932) studied at Gravesend Technical College before attending the Royal College of Art. He subsequently taught there and at other institutions including St Martin’s College. A major retrospective of his work Now We Are 64 took place at the National Gallery in 1996 and at Tate Liverpool in 2007. Sir Peter Blake was knighted in 2002, for services to art.
Exhibition in association with CCA Galleries and Paul Stolper Gallery.

The Faggionato Gallery is delighted to announce their forthcoming solo exhibition of the Japanese artist Yoshihiro Suda. The exhibition, Suda Yoshihiro, showcases his hyper-realistic wooden sculptures of plants and flowers.
 
The nature of the environment or gallery space is central to Suda’s creativity. For Suda, the sculptures are ‘interventions’; subtle additions to an existing space or display. Each sculpture is only half of the work of art – the other half is their installation. The element of surprise is core to Suda’s work. In October 2000, he installed interventions at the Buddha’s Smile exhibition at the Okura Museum of Art in Tokyo. The sculptures were placed into the display cases, causing visitors to take second glances. Similarly, upon entering this exhibition, visitors will initially question whether or not they have overlooked something. The startling realism of each sculpture demands closer inspection, even though the viewer is already aware that in the gallery environment it is unlikely that there are real plants growing out of the walls. This merging of the boundaries between reality and illusion creates a surreal sense of the ordinary becoming the uncanny.
 
Suda developed his interest in carving plants as an undergraduate at Tama Art University in Tokyo in the early 1990s. This was a time when contemporary art was primarily conceptual and the notion that art coud be decorative or aesthetically pleasing was largely ignored. Suda felt troubled by this and wished to create works of art that were unique and yet did not require any knowledge of contemporary art theory. Indeed, Suda’s self-taught sculptural techniques blend traditional carving practices with modern concepts relating to the role of art in daily life. He is influenced by the idea of continuing in the tradition of Japanese Old Master sculptors, while his decision to elevate and display such mundane objects as plants and weeds challenges our preconceived notions of what is a ‘work of art’. These sculptures revive traditional notions of beauty and craftsmanship in art, inviting the viewer to observe more closely the seemingly insignificant ornamentation that can be found in the everyday.
 
Born in Yamanashi, Japan, Suda lives and works in Tokyo. In 1992, he received his BA in Graphic Design and has exhibited internationally in numerous solo and group shows. Recent museum shows include the Chiba City Museum of Art in 2012, The Manghha Museum of Japanese Art and Technology, Krakow, in 2011, Asia Society Museum, New York, and the Contemporary Museum, Honolulu. In 2008 his work was included in Out of the Ordinary at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. His work has been exhibited extensively in group shows in the USA, Japan, Germany, Australia and Quebec. His work is held in numerous international public and private collections, including, The National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo, Leeum Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul, The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Australia, The Israel Museum, National Gallery of Canada, Neues Museum Nurnburg Germany and the New Art Gallery Walsall, Birmingham.

Food is essential for life and energy. For millennia it has been intrinsic to human culture and our relationship with it often reveals much about our lives. Yet, food is also a conundrum. For many it is pleasure, comfort or joy but for others it is pain, anguish and hardship, being both greed and hunger.
 
Through drawing and printmaking, Mary Dalton’s work is informed and enthused by stories and personal life experiences, from teaching the homeless, working at London’s renowned Borough Market to living close by a major pheasant shooting woods. The response is often personal, sometimes political, inspiring her to produce abstract, intricate and often dark narratives. Dalton is not afraid to confront the darker side of our relationship with food letting her works throw new light onto our need for food consumption and the enigma’s it can sometimes cause.
 
Exhibiting alongside the works will be Dalton’s first book, ‘Embracing the Surplus and the Unwanted’ and several textile pieces. Typeset by the award winning Whittington Press, the book contains numerous hand printed pages and illustrations focusing on our need and waste for food. The textile pieces are an extended canvas from the printing press, a second outcome for a larger narrative. The fragility of embroidery and disembodied figures play homage to and fully encapsulates the spirit of this exhibition and encourages us to think differently about the way we use food in daily life.

‘Photography is art without a sense of doubt. To photograph is to paint using the available light, and to try to keep alive old techniques, to produce work in very small, qualitatively valuable editions. Each print or glass plate is a unique, one-off piece…’
 
Julieta Schildknecht’s exhibition at The Piper Gallery is an installation of photographs presented in a ‘back-stage’ gallery space. Works reserved for such areas - whether at galleries or art fairs - are often rarities and are brought for viewing by special request. When thinking about this, another resonance for the artist is the work of Pina Bausch, whose dance shows, though never publicly advertised, were always sold out, their popularity spread entirely through word-of-mouth and personal text messaging between those in the metier. In this installation, some photographs are presented veiled – as hidden images, reminiscent of the way that pornography used to be hidden behind curtains, other works are to be viewed by climbing a ladder, three works can be viewed from the distance of the balcony. Origami pigeons lead the way from the front door to the exhibition entrance...
 
At a time when film manufacturers and photo labs are in decline, it is more important than ever to reassert the value of photography.

Sprovieri is delighted to present “Provas Circunstancias do Brasil” an exhibition of works by Jimmie Durham which were produced in Rio de Janeiro for the space co-owned by the gallery and will be exhibited in the UK for the first time.
 
The show is a celebration of material; using found pieces of wood (some from fallen trees, others bought in the local market) and stones Durham applies labour-intensive work of pounding, sawing and sanding.
 
“I love material. In Rio de Janeiro I have used mostly wood, as I used mostly ceramic shards in Lisboa. But it is not me that has this fascination with stone; it is Europe...
To be influenced is to change, and I love the energy of changing (when I left Mexico I quit smoking after forty years of being a chain-smoker)...
Sarat Maharaj has said that the making of art is the production of meaning. The making of art is an intellectual endeavor. So then we need anything, any material, any field (text, science, music) any concepts that might be of interest.
One of the most liberating phenomenon these days is the understanding that art can be made of absolutely anything (if the artist is serious enough).
If I put these three things together as a kit, (the necessity of change, art as intellectual work and the fact that art can be made of anything) perhaps I am on my way to becoming homeless.”
 
Jimmie Durham, São Paulo, January 2011
 
Born in Arkansas in 1940, Jimmie Durham is a sculptor, essayist and poet. He will take part in the 2013 55th edition of the Venice Biennial “the encyclopedic palace” and his solo exhibitions in Europe include MuHKA, Antwerp (2012), the Glasgow International Festival (2010), the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2009), the Musée d'Art Contemporain, Marseilles (2003), the Museum Voor Actuele Kunst in den Hague (2003), the Kunstverein, Munich (1998) and the Wittgenstein Haus, Vienna (1996). Durham has participated in several editions of the Venice Biennale (1999, 2001, 2003 and 2005) Documenta (1992 and 2012) and the Whitney Biennale (1993 and 2006), among others.

Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied: One Terabyte of Digital Age
 
18 April - 17 June 2013
 
The cultural foundation for today‘s web was not created by Tim Berners-Lee, Mark Zuckerberg or Tom Anderson, but by its users, inside the tiny spaces they were assigned by Internet Giants.
The exhibition One Terabyte Of Kilobyte Age showcases thousands and thousands of amateur home pages from the free web hosting service Geocities, from the second half of the 1990s. Established in 1995 and purchased by Yahoo in 1999, Geocities was suddenly shut down by Yahoo in 2009. Realising its cultural significance, the Internet Archive team managed to rescue an incomplete portion of Geocities which now lives on as a massive downloadable Torrent file.
 
Over the period of the show, Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied will present a stream of snapshots of this lost city and its archival ruins, documenting the visual culture of the web and the creativity of its users. The project provides a glimpse into web publishing when users were in charge of design and narration in contrast to the automated templates of Facebook, YouTube and Flickr.
 
About the artists:
 
Moscow-born artist Olia Lialina has, for the past decade, produced many influential works of network-based art: My Boyfriend Came Back from the War (1996), Agatha Appears (1997), First Real Net Art Gallery (1998), and Last Real Net Art Museum (2000). Currently she is a professor at Merz Akademie in Germany. Lialina writes on digital culture, net art and web vernacular.
 
Dragan Espenschied, born in Germany. His music and online art has received international acclaim. He co-founded the home computer band Bodenständig 2000 that toured and released records throughout Europe and the USA. He has also won the Webby Awards People’s Voice NET ART (2004), and the ZKM International Media Art Award (2001).
 
Since 2002 Olia and Dragan have worked together. Among their collaborations are Zombie and Mummy (2002-2003), Midnight (2006), and Online Newspapers (2004, 2008, 2013), Digital Folklore Reader (2009). Individually and as collaborative partners, the work of both artists has been exhibited extensively online and at venues including Ars Electronica, Linz; the New Museum, New York; Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; Transmediale, Berlin; Havana Biennial, Cuba; ACAF, Alexandria; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; ABC Gallery, Moscow; ZKM, Karlsruhe; Madison Square Park, New York.