JANE MILLAR

Slow Life Ceramic works by Jane Millar My wall-based ceramic sculpture and installation starts with the idea of energy within the unseen interior of a ceramic object, and its actions on a surface. The work explores a territory between ideas of what is natural and unnatural; slow time - 'mountain time' - and faster plant and fleshly change and growth. Recent works in this exhibition play with ideas of resemblances, of repetitions, echoes and memory; between plant, material culture, body, planets and earth. I avoid representing these ideas literally though, preferring to discover allusive forms in an evolving series of works, often discovering these through observation of the world, through drawing in my notebooks, and then through the making process with clays of different kinds, painterly coloured slips, glazes and textures. 

Biography

Jane Millar originally studied painting, then graduated from the tapestry course, in the painting school, at the Royal College of Art in 1989. She has lived and worked in London since then, developing work through painting, textile and ceramic media. She lectures in Fine Art practice and occasionally curates projects, as part of her creative practice. Her work was selected by Brian Griffiths for Creekside Open 2019, by Alison Wilding for the Creekside Open 2017. Recent shows in 2018 include More in Common at APT Gallery; Votive, with the Clayworkers Union for the Thames Festival; Space Shift at APT Gallery, curated by Sarah Kogan; and The Ghost Tide, Thameside Gallery, curated by Sarah Sparkes and Monika Bobinska. She is working within a new context of contemporary ceramics, and developing an artists' project of future imagining, New Doggerland, which launched at Lumen Crypt Gallery in May 2019, and continuing in New Doggerland at Thameside Gallery, Woolwich, opening February 1st, 2020.

CLAUDE TEMIN-VERGEZ

Let’s tessellate… New works by Claude Temin-Vergez 

Temin-Vergez’s work implies doubling, or twinned forms, where the surface operates as both an articulated field which mirrors itself in various form of symmetries, and a place where individual refined traceries can be both lost and unravelled in the process of looking. Vergez develops forms that traverse identifications: from sexual connotation, through Baroque ornament, to formations of nature. Both the surface and image are, in this sense, metamorphic in their nature with forms constructed from a linearity that traces a force across the canvases. Influenced by Islamic design, art nouveau, and late modernist abstraction, Claude Temin Vergez’ drawings, paintings, and installations develop on the traditions of ornamentation and its relations to mysticism, taboo, and the sublime. Vergez’ works from various sources, found images and from nature, which she intuitively deconstructs and embellishes to create motifs which are simultaneously mesmerizingly complex and classically graceful. Executed with a certain clinical austerity – self-consciously stark surfaces, artificial colour palettes, and attenuated brushwork —her canvases evolve as exquisite luculent mandalas that suggest futuristic microcosms, equally biological and technological, beautiful ‘specimens’ of compelling presence. The current body of work explore the relationship between the complexity of her imagery and the subjects they first originated from. The result is of constant shifting images at once intuitive and highly constructed.   

Claude Temin-Vergez was born in Paris in 1964, since 1994 she has lived and worked in London. She Graduated from Central St Martins School of art in 1998 and The Royal Academy Schools in 2001. In 2002, she was awarded the Stanley Picker Fellowship in painting and the Abbey Fellowship in painting at the British School in Rome in 2005. She has been a Part-time Lecturer in Painting at Camberwell College of art from 2002-2015, and taught in many Arts Schools around the country. She has exhibited widely internationally and nationally. Recent group exhibitions include: ‘Ceremony’, curated by Jim Threapleton, Nb 20 Gallery London, touring to TataArt gallery, Barcelona, Spain, 2017;’Phantoms’, Angus Hughes Gallery 2012, ‘Minimal-Excess’, Open Ealing gallery, London, 2012; ‘Painter’s Mate’, Curated by Lee Maetzer, 2011, Angus Hughues gallery, London; ‘Graceland’, curated by Juan Bolivar, Paul Simon space, London, 2011; ‘Meta’, Curated by David Ryan, touring Exhibition, Ruskin Gallery, Cambridge, 2009 – ‘La Peinture est presque abstraite’, Curated be Olivier Gourvil, Le Transpalette, Bourges and Camberwell Space, London, 2009; ‘Instants, Glissements’ Curated be Olivier Gourvil , Galerie La box, Bourges, France, 2009; ‘Expanded painting’ curated by Paco Baragan, Art Basel Miami, 2008. Solo Shows includes: Claude Temin-Vergez, Ecole Regionale des Beaux Art, Valence, France (2010)- New Paintings, Madison Gallery, London (2009)- Claude Temin-Vergez, Marksman Gallery, Reading, UK (2007) - Assemblage, Space Other Gallery, Boston USA (2006).

JANE WARD

Scene New works by Jane Ward 

Private View: Friday 19th July, 6.00pm – 8.30pm 

Exhibition runs: 19th July – 25th August Opening times: daily 8am – 5pm (weekends 10am – 5pm) 

Jane Ward’s digital collages are composed of a profusion of photographic images, ranging from aerial views of mountain forests and lakes to industrial complexes and metropolitan developments. Each has been deconstructed and fragmented into component parts, and then reconstituted as fantastical new scenes. The process forces together contradictory perspectives, juxtaposing architectural close-ups with grand vistas and fine miniature details so that all sense of scale and proportion is dissolved. Jane then paints many of her scenes with ink and watercolour as a means of enhancing the dissolution of one image into another. James Freeman 2018 

Jane’s work has most recently been seen in her solo exhibitions: The Reconstructed Romantic, James Freeman, London, 2018, In These Solitudes, Le Salon Vert, Geneva, 2018, Watcher of the Skies, The Hospital Club, London, 2018 and the 2-person show Reflective at Bearspace, London 2019 She has undertaken several artist residencies including Gstaad, Lisbon, Funchal, Kilkenny, exhibiting in Europe, US and SE Asia. Her work has featured in Artfutures Celeste Art Prize, Bloomberg New Contemporaries Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition and ING Discerning Eye Jane graduated from the Royal College of Art receiving the Terrence Conran Foundation Award and the Tim Mara Prize. She lives and works in London.

MAGGIE LEARMONTH

 ‘What if …’
 
Exhibition of paintings by Maggie Learmonth
 
Coffeeismycupoftea Space
103b Dalston Lane
London E8 1NH
 
Private view: Friday 31st May 6.00-8.30pm
 
Exhibition runs: 31st May – 7th July
Opening times: daily 8am-5pm (weekends 10am – 5pm)

 
 ‘I didn’t grow up looking at paintings

I didn’t grow up looking at television

I grew up looking at fells, water and weather’ 

These paintings start from a moment in a landscape: a glimpse of something, a feeling, an experience. The starting point is often unexpected and rarely planned. As the American artist, Milton Avery, put it: ‘I was in the Tate and just stepped out into the street. I saw this boat going by, went back to my studio in New York and made these paintings’. 

Mine originate from places as far afield as Marseille, Somerset and Cumbria. From that initial encounter they evolve sometimes into a simplified form, sometimes into something more romantic in style. Either way they remain landmarks, not just acting as way-markers but simultaneously pointing to the future and provoking memories of the past. 

‘Landscape offers us keen ways of figuring ourselves to ourselves, strong means of shaping memories and giving form to thought .. place and mind may interpenetrate till the nature of both is altered’ (Nan Shepherd, ‘The Living Mountain’). ‘…remembered landscapes exist as powerful presences with which we maintain deep and abiding attachments’ (Macfarlane ‘The old Ways’)  Maggie Learmonth is a Cumbrian artist living & working in London and has exhibited widely throughout the UK since completing her BA in 2011. She has work in private collections in France, Japan, Greece, USA and UK.
     
maggielearmonth@gmail.com
www.maggielearmonth.net
07775 953077

DAVID SURMAN

Be In Clover
 
New works by David Surman
 
Coffeeismycupoftea Space
103b Dalston Lane
London E8 1NH
 
Private View: Wednesday 17th April, 6.00pm – 8.30pm
 
Exhibition runs: Wed 17th April – 19th May
Opening times: daily 8am – 5pm (weekends 10am – 5pm)
 
The human is arrested by the tremendous beauty of a verdant blanket of fresh clover that grows spontaneously in the spaces left by scorched grass. Holidaying bee maidens send dedicated crows to surveil the golden foliage that now thrives from Olympus to Valhalla. Looking closely, the human sees that life goes on below the canopy of clover; ants are busily sending and receiving messages 24/7. The human is imagining life as an ant while crows fly overhead. 

David Surman (b. 1981) is a multidisciplinary artist who tells stories. Through painting, games design, printmaking and film he creates works that combine conceptual depth with aspects of improvisation and play. Originally trained as an animator at Newport Film School, his work explores themes of the natural world, ecology and living systems, personality and identity. David moved at an early age to a remote part of the west highlands of Scotland. This direct encounter with the rugged landscape and natural world profoundly influenced him, and the isolation drove his interest in painting, film and games -- the inner world of art and the imagination. His work is characterised by a direct handling of materials and emphasis on characterisation and immersion. His approach bridges the absorbing and seductive qualities of paint, story and play. 

www.davidsurman.com

ROSALIND DAVIS & JUSTIN HIBBS

BORDER-WALL
Rosalind Davis and Justin Hibbs

#Borderwall
 ‘Artistic production is nodal, networked, and a perpetually unfinished project, things nudging each other, domino effects transpiring. The real-world analogue of this is that in an artist’s studio, it’s always a transitional moment: the detached artwork as standalone statement is a falsity, a piece of theatre. In reality, one thing leads to another, all kinds of ambient forces shaping what’s made’ (Martin Herbert).  For their exhibition Border-Wall, Davis and Hibbs present a new wall-based work created from their collaborative sculptural installation ‘Border Controls’. This work is made up of modular parts; steel frames and mirrored elements that reflect both one another and reconfigure the surrounding space, acting as an endlessly changing composing device as the viewer navigates the work. For the work Border-Wall the sculpture has been re-staged in multiple new configurations in the artists’ studio and photographed in a process of transfer from the physical to the endlessly mutable digital space. Re-assembling the sculpture digitally is a further play on the works potential to confound the boundaries between both real and illusory space. Here borders are permeable; multiple thresholds cross and overlap in a state of flux and collapse which both transforms and disorients. Alongside the new piece ‘Border Wall’ they present related individual artworks that have informed their collaboration.

Within the shadow of increasingly restricted borders and political control, regarding migration and the increasing isolationism seen both here in the UK (with Brexit) as well as the wider geographical concerns in Europe and America,. The personal and political dimensions of art-making and authorship can be seen as pertinent to wider social concerns and questions that address the dynamics of power, autonomy and control. Davis and Hibbs collaborations centre around shared themes, overlapping research interests and ongoing conversations into one another’s practices. Both have independent careers but also are a couple who share a studio, where the inevitable questions arise about how, why and where to set boundaries. Their individual practices share common references to the social, political and aesthetic agendas encoded within architectural structures and in different ways renegotiate the visual and ideological legacies of modernism to probe both real and idealised notions of space. They create different kinds of structures where the potential for interpretation or reading of context is contingent on the audiences’ individual and relational responses.
 
Rosalind Davis is an artist, curator and a graduate of The Royal College of Art (2005) and Chelsea College of Art (2003). As an artist Davis has exhibited nationally and internationally and has had a number of solo shows: no format Gallery (2017), the Bruce Castle Museum (2013); John Jones & Julian Hartnoll Gallery (2009); The Residence Gallery (2007). Selected group exhibitions have been at the Courtauld Institute; Arthouse1, Bo Lee Gallery, Standpoint Gallery, Transition Gallery; The Roundhouse; The ING Discerning Eye; the Lynn Painters Stainers Prize, Sevenoaks Kaleidoscope Gallery and no format Gallery. Her work is held in a number of private and public collections. Davis is the Curator at Collyer Bristow Gallery; a dynamic gallery in a law firm. Davis had previously co-directed and developed two arts organizations; Zeitgeist Arts Projects (ZAP 2012-15) and Core Gallery (2009-11). 

Justin Hibbs (b. 1971) studied at CSM, London (1991-94) He has exhibited his work both nationally and internationally and has also curated a series of artist-led exhibitions. Solo shows include: Between Before and After at Arroniz Arte in Mexico City (2018), Alias_Re_Covered (2015) at Carroll / Fletcher; PARA/SITE (2013) & Secondary Modern (2010) at Christinger De Mayo gallery, Switzerland; Altneuland (2007), Lucy Mackintosh Gallery, Switzerland; Metroparadisiac (2006) and I'll Wait for you (2005) at the One in the Other Gallery, London. Recent group exhibitions include Rules of Freedom, Collyer Bristow Gallery, Shapeshifters, Arthouse1 London; Abstraction I, Arroniz Gallery, Mexico, Pencil/Line/Eraser (2014), Carroll / Fletcher, London; Superstructures (2013), Arroniz Arte, Mexico City; Oh My Complex, Kunstverien Stuttgart, Germany. 

www.rosalinddavis.co.uk
Instagram: @rosalindnldavis | @justinjhibbs | Twitter: @rosalinddavis | @Justinjhibbs |

NEIL ZAKIEWICZ

MADE GOOD
 
New works by Neil Zakiewicz
 
Coffeeismycupoftea Space
103b Dalston Lane
London E8 1NH
 
Private View: Friday 25th January, 6.00pm – 8.00pm
 
Exhibition runs: Friday 25th January – 24th February
Opening times: daily 8am – 5pm (weekends 10am – 5pm)

 
A new series of panels cut and sprayed at an industrial spray booth. All the wood used is salvaged from off-cuts found in bins or elsewhere. Old wood made good. Born in 1972 in London, England, Zakiewicz went on to study at the Camberwell College of Art and University of Wales Institute before completing an MA in Fine Art at Goldsmith’s College in 2003. Throughout his practice, he has utilised modern materials alongside traditional sculpture, mixing high art with vernacular utilitarian objects and craft skills. His works investigate and challenge artistic tradition prioritising the joy of making and the act of creation itself. He has exhibited widely, both nationally and internationally, with shows held at the domobaal in London, Cell Project Space in London, Konstakuten in Stockholm and the Samsung Institute for Art and Design in Seoul.

Neil Zakiewicz lives and works in London, England.

TOM ORMOND

ZERO THOUGHT
 
New works by Tom Ormond
Coffeeismycupoftea Space
103b Dalston Lane
London E8 1NH
 
Private View: Wednesday 12th December, 6.00pm – 8.00pm
 
Exhibition runs: Wednesday 12th – Sunday 13th January
Opening times: daily 8am – 5pm (weekends 10am – 5pm)
 
The zero as a motif for these works is vehicle for starting again. Something to cover up unresolved canvases cluttering up the studio and something to see where things will lead.

SARAH SPARKES

David Soul
An exhibition for the hollow days
by Sarah Sparkes
 
Coffeeismycupoftea Space
103b Dalston Lane
London E8 1NH
 
Private View: Friday 2nd November, 6.00pm – 8.30pm
 
Exhibition runs: Friday 2nd – Sunday 25th November
Opening times: daily 8am – 5pm (weekends 10am – 5pm)
 
Sarah Sparkes has created new works, and re-configured some older ones, to create an installation specially for Coffeeismycupoftea Space. David Soul is a response to the season and its associations with ghost festivals. It is a celebration of the darkening days.

Sparkes sees the objects in the exhibition as containers and conduits for the embodying of narratives and more conceptually 'spirits'. Her subjects, which include: Janet the Enfield poltergeist girl, First Nations Ghost-dancers, neolithic monuments and artefacts and some key figures from early 20th century psychical research, all attempt (ed) to communicate with the dead.

Two rolls of wallpaper, remnants from those that graced the walls of Sparkes' childhood bedroom and kitchen, have been used together with gouache paint, digital print collage and assemblages, across the works. The work is divided into three distinct groups: The Way Home, gouache on wallpaper, 2016 Ghost – Dance, 2018 digital print and collage on wallpaper The Electric Girls, 2018, installation with found objects, digital print and LED lights 

Sarah Sparkes is a London-based artist and curator. Her work explores magical or mythical narratives, vernacular belief systems and the visualisation of anomalous phenomena. Her work is often research led and an exploration into the borderlands where science and magic intersect. She works with installation, sculpture, painting, performance and more recently film. Sparkes exhibits widely in the UK and internationally. Her work The GHost Formula, 2016, commissioned by FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) recently toured to NTMoFA (National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts) as part of the exhibition No Such Thing As Gravity curated by Rob la Frenais. She was the 2015 recipient of the MERU ART*SCIENCE Award. In collaboration with Ian Thompson, she was awarded a BEYOND artist residency at Allenheads Contemporary Arts, 2018. She exhibits with New Art Projects London. She leads the visual arts and creative research project GHost, initiated 2008, consists of an on-going programme of exhibitions, performances and interdisciplinary seminars interrogating the idea of the ghost. GHost events have been supported by Folkestone Biennial, University of the Arts, University of London, FACT, NTMoFA and Arts Council of England - in 2016/17 Sparkes was awarded Arts Council funding for her project to archive Liverpool ghost stories. She recently co-curated the Ghost Tide exhibition at Thames-side Studios Gallery with Monika Bobinska of CANAL Prjects. Sparkes has published chapters on the GHost project and has lectured extensively on this subject.
 
http://www.sarahsparkes.com/blog/
  www.ghosthostings.co.uk
http://www.theghostportal.co.uk/
 
@thesarahsparkes @theghostformula

KLAUS WEHNER

MUSEUM CLAUSUM: NOW AND THEN 

Coffeeismycupoftea Space 103b Dalston Lane London E8 1NH 

Private View: Friday 28th September, 6.00pm – 8.30pm Exhibition runs: 28th September – 21st October Opening times: daily 8am – 5pm (weekends 10am – 5pm) 

“Museum Clausum: Now and Then” is a series of photographs taken at Sir John Soane’s Museum in London. Largely preserved as Soane left the house at his death in 1837, a house, a home, a teaching collection, a museum, a time capsule… This unique historic space is now also a lively contemporary space. “Now and Then” juxtaposes two photographically distinct approaches, each in their own way corresponding to and complementing the unique Soane ‘interiors’. The sumptuous all-sharp, crisp colour images allow for studying intricate details of the historic spaces yet, many images also feature more or less faint, ghost-like traces of visitors as a distinct vestige of the moment of the 'taking' of the photograph. The grainy black and white images show partial views of visitors on a par with the displayed object fragments. 
As a direct echo of Soane’s collection, often aided by views that are additionally broken up through the architect’s theatrical use of real and illusory spaces, the photographs repeat fragmentation. The added focus on the fleeting presence of visitor’s bodies emphasises the contemporary photographic moment in tensions to the stillness of the preserved historic spaces. Soane died just before the advent of photographic image technologies. He spent great efforts to preserve detailed views of the rooms in his house through commissioned watercolours. Always distinctly open to new technology, we can be certain that he would have been fast to embrace photography as a new medium to mechanically record his house and museum. The fact that these remain largely unchanged means that contemporary photographs could actually be historic photographs, yet the Museum Clausum image titles ‘stamp’ a recent date on each image.
As a collection in itself, this presents ‘a museum of a museum’ which consciously extends the hall of mirrors effect that is inherent in all photographic re-presentation of museum spaces: a self-reflective mediation of what is already another mediation. Yet “Now and Then” is far from an emphasis on ‘institutional critique’. Instead, the images are clearly to be seen as homage not only to the uniquely idiosyncratic Gesamtkunstwerk created by a passionate individual but also to fact that successive generations have preserved and visited these spaces for some 180 years. 

Some images where shown at Riflemaker Gallery, London (2011). “Now and Then’ also featured in the three WUNDERCAMERA exhibitions curated by Klaus for Pitzhanger Manor, London (2013), Holden Gallery, Manchester (2014) and Telfair Museums, Savannah, Georgia (2017). See www.museumclausum.org for further details.

Klaus Wehner was born in Koblenz, Germany and lives and works in London, where he also studied at the London College of Printing and Goldsmiths University. As a main part of his work focuses on museum culture, he often uses the artist’s pseudonym ‘Museum Clausum’. Klaus works mainly with photography, video and installation. He also curated three WUNDERCAMERA exhibitions with the theme of photography and the museum. Visit www.museumclausum.org for a full exhibition history.

BEN WALKER

Ben Walker: ‘Solitudes and Seasons’ 

Coffeeismycupoftea Space 103b Dalston Lane London E8 1NH 

Private View: Friday 17th August 6.00pm – 8.30pm

Exhibition runs: 18 August – 16 September

Opening times: daily 8am – 5pm (weekends 10am – 5pm) 

The paintings in ‘Solitudes and Seasons’ refer to a distinct era of British culture of TV programmes and films: 1970s and 1980s educational programmes for schools, children’s films, and public information films. Looking back now these television broadcasts and films seemed imbued with a strange otherness, such as ‘Children of the Stones’, an HTV production from 1977, which was concerned with subject matter and an atmosphere, that seemed odd or even unsettling for a broadcast aimed at children, of eerily presented supernatural forces and the breakdown of normal society. 

It is the setting of these films or images that is especially important to me, which draw heavily on relationships to the rural landscape, and present that landscape as a place that ‘’seems to offer security and yet it is somehow the location of menaces far more profound than those found in the city.’’ 1 This is central to defining the overall mood of the paintings. Much of the source imagery seems familiar, comforting, and yet it is also unsettling or eerie. It is these qualities in the paintings, which are impressions of half remembered, misremembered or an imagined past, that exists on the edges of memory and nostalgia where ideas of folklore, the unknown, the weird, science fiction and the supernatural are meshed together. Embedded in these paintings is the loss of childhood innocence and with it, the death of a bygone utopia. The paintings are on coarse textured linen. The oil paint, thinned with turps, is scrubbed into the weave of the linen, and then may be removed and repainted over and over.  Consequently, traces of earlier incarnations often remain visible in the finished picture, articulating the hauntological theme of the past repeating into the present. 

1. Joe Kennedy, 2013. 

Ben Walker was born in Cheshire and lives and works in Kent. He studied at Sheffield Hallam University and Wimbledon School of Art. He has exhibited widely, including at Transition Gallery and Charlie Smith London, and in the Marmite Prize, and in 2012 won the Jack Goldsmith Painting Prize. ‘Solitudes and seasons’ will be shown as a group exhibition at the Alison Richard Building, University of Cambridge, in January 2019. With thanks to Richard Ducker.

JAKE CLARK
 
‘Concrete Idaho’

 
The recent series of paintings are a response to cardboard models and collages that I have made in my studio. They are 3D structures influenced by suburbia and games like crazy golf. I am fascinated by the details of these kinds of places and how they can be re-configured within a different environment. After making the models I photograph them under dramatic lighting. The paintings then become a strange evocation of these references where the colours capture a faded yet luminous quality. 

The houses and chair series of paintings focus more on tangible, domestic spaces, and consequently are less abstract. Though they are based on actual places they are still constructions of fictional suburban scenes. In these paintings too the foreground structures are also based on models from the studio. There is a fake plastic quality to these details where I picture something both sculptural and as flat cartoon simultaneously. The atmosphere is eerie, a darkness to counter the sense of play. 

Jake Clark studied at University of Brighton, 1989-91, BA in Fine Art and Royal College of Art, 1991-93, MA Painting. He lives in London and currently teaches at Camberwell, Chelsea and Wimbledon, UAL.

SASHA BOWLES

‘Appropriating The Past’
Coffeeismycupoftea Space
103b Dalston Lane
London
E8 1NH
 
Private View: Friday 15th June, 6-8.30pm
 
Exhibition runs: 16th June – 8th July.
 
Opening times: daily 8am - 5pm (weekends 10am – 5pm).
 
Our identity is both a manifestation of bodily presence and outer appearance within a situation of spaces or environment. In this exhibition, Sasha has appropriated images of Old Master paintings, Classical Sculptures and Family photographs to explore questions of identity and relationships. The images have been mediated onto with oil paint, re-presenting and subverting the narratives. Sasha’s disturbances and cloaking of the figures confuse and extend the original works initiating new possibilities for interpretation that asks questions as to how we understand and read these historically constructed identities. 

By obscuring the faces with painted appendages of fabric and hair; the viewer is left to interpret the figures portrayed from their outward appearance, stance and connection to one another, opening questions of identity, our relationship to the past and the ownership of these images. 

Sasha Bowles is an artist and occasional curator, she has a MA from Wimbledon College of art graduating in 2013. 

Solo exhibitions include, Hairy Interventions at Arthouse1 Gallery (2018) and Doo-plis-i-tee at 286 Gallery, London, (2016) 

Selected group exhibitions include: In the Future (Collyer Bristow Gallery 2018); Face to Face (Angus-Hughes Gallery 2018); Reportrait, (Nottingham Castle Museum 2017); Creekside Open (APT 2017); Young Masters (2017); A Table of Elements (2017); Window Sill (Griffin Gallery 2017); Shape_Shifters (Arthouse1 2016); Complicity, (Collyer Bristow Gallery 2016); COUNTER_FITTERS (Geddes Gallery 2016); The Crash Open & Photo and Print Open (Charlie Dutton); No-One Lives in the Real World, (Standpoint Gallery 2015); Bonfire of the Vanities (Display Gallery 2015); Discernible (Zeitgeist Arts Projects), Catalyst, Angus Hughes Gallery & Husk Gallery. 

Sasha has also exhibited at The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition (invited artist) and The Discerning Eye (winning the Benton Prize).   Curatorial projects include: Face to Face (Angus-Hughes Gallery 2018) ‘Bodies That Matter’ ( ArtLacuna 2013) and co-produced The Bodies That Matter 3 publication, (2014). COUNTER_FITTERS (Geddes Gallery 2016) and Catalyst (Husk Gallery 2015) Bowles has work in private and public collections in Britain, Europe and America. She lives and works in London.

BROUGHTON & BIRNIE

‘The Plotters’



Exhibition runs: 11th May – 3rd June

Opening times: daily 8am - 5pm (weekends 10am – 5pm).

Plotter: someone who secretly makes plans to do something illegal or harmful; a conspirator. Intriguer, conspirer, traitor, schemer "a GPS chart plotter".

The coffee house has become European histories place of choice for planning and disseminating plots to change or reinvigorate the world. In Vienna at the beginning of the twentieth century it would be possible to see Trotsky, Hitler and Sigmund Freud sitting with their followers discussing the views that would impact the world while in Paris, the cafes were full of artists, writers, philosophers discussing their visions of modern life: Picasso holding court at the Dome or Sartre inspiring students to revolt at the café de Flore.

With the advent of the digital age came an increase in ease and speed of contact, allowing an individual using social networks to message millions in seconds enabling the coordination of the London Riots and the Arab Spring. The flip side is the resulting data trail that provides the information for surveillance and manipulation. When next relaxing in a café, consider your fellow diner's mobile devices, and ask the question: is the person sitting opposite you texting a friend or triggering a bomb? The collaboration of the artists is a fundamental part in the production of the work. An image is chosen (often inspired by works of other artists works – Caravaggio, Degas, Guston, Rothko...) which is transformed by a constant working and re-working of each painting, passing between each other as if immersed in conversation, neither artist works with a definite idea of where they are going, only with the concept that the work needs to express when complete. The collaborative process that creates the work articulates a fundamental: no one knows where they are going, so enjoy the ride and hope you recognize the destination when you arrive.

Kevin Broughton graduated from the Royal College of Art and Fiona Birnie graduated from Exeter - they have been collaborating since 2003 using photography, video, site-specific installation, sculpture and more recently painting to produce work exploring surreal themes of anxiety and neurosis in contemporary society.

Recent solo projects include 'Our Ever-Expanding Distance from Disaster', Rum Factory Wapping London 2017, 'Absurd Monuments', Paris 2015, 'The Last Party on the Titanic', Willow Walk London 2014, BERLIN: The Forger's Tale – The Quest for Fame & Fortune', WW Gallery London 2013, - group shows include ' You Are Here', Stockport War Museum Memorial Art Gallery Stockport 2018, 'Painting Open', no format Gallery London 2017 Painting [Now] Studio One Gallery , London 2017 'Bad Behavior Open', London 2016, 'Lucy In the Sky' Transition Gallery, London 2015.

 The artists live and work in London.

GIBSON/MARTELLI

'Ruined'



Decay, ruin, broken and old things, bunkers and bomb-sites is an age old interest for artists. 'Ruin Lust' (from an 18th-century German compound 'Ruinenlust' ) is the idea that age and decay brings a patina of authenticity of the ancient world and has been borrowed time and again in popular culture and videogames. Eighteenth- Century artists and writers sought out ruined castles and picturesque landscapes, a source of visual and emotional preoccupation and a representation of the fears of industrialisation, hinting at things to come.

In the 'Ruined’ series of images the artists used a network conditioning tool to throttle bandwidth to the Apple Maps app creating a series of images showing low- resolution models downloaded before the final high resolution versions are displayed. The low polygon models with softened shapes and smeary, muddy textures speak to the idea of unmaking, the high tech creating a kind of ruin. The mapping software though up to the minute, cannot keep pace with the breakneck changes occurring in the physical world -- at some of the map sites a hole in the ground is now occupied by a building in real life and vice versa. The digital echoes an imperfect ideal.

Researching the project the artists overlaid the London Property development map with the London Bomb map. One map shows current, planned and approved large scale development works in the city. The other shows the location of bomb damage, mapped by combing several data sets from WWII. Responding to Ben Aaronovitch's comment in Moon Over Soho about the London County Council in the 1960’s , 'whose unofficial motto was Finishing What the Luftwaffe Started' seems even more apt today, the artists choosing areas proximate to former bomb sites that have been earmarked for or currently are undergoing 'development'. The future is overtaking the present as the city is built over but will eventually become, like everything, a ruin.

'So many things vanish. Yet ruins remain in the landscape, reassuring the mind that death might not be the end' - Jonathon Jones on Ruin Lust at Tate Britian.

Bruno Martelli graduated from Central St. Martins and Ruth Gibson from University of Kent at Canterbury. Their worldwide commissions include residencies in North America, China, Australia and New Zealand and exhibitions at The Barbican Gallery, Detroit Institute for Art, and The Venice Biennale. Recent solo shows include ‘Big Bob’ (2015) at Jaffe-Friede Gallery in Hanover, USA, ‘MAN A’ (2015) at UNION gallery, London and ‘80ºN’ (2014) at QUAD Gallery in Derby. In 2017 they have exhibited in several group shows in London: 'Enter through the Headset' Gazelli at Art House, 'Strangelands' at Collyer Bristow, ’Splintered Binary’ at Gossamer Fog and ‘Now Play This’ at Somerset House. Nominated for a British Academy of Film & Television Arts (BAFTA) the duo are recipients of several awards: a Henry Moore Foundation New Commission, a National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts (NESTA) Award and in 2015 they won the Lumen Gold Prize. Gibson is the Creative Fellow at Centre for Dance Research at Coventry University. The artists live and work in London.

Up and coming shows include 'This Is Where We Came In' at Angus Hughes Gallery opening 21 April Gibson / Martelli: www.gibsonmartelli.com

LIANE LANG



Prussians and Other Villains   

Private View: Friday 2nd March, 6-8.30pm 

Exhibition runs: 23rd Feb – 25th March. 

Opening times: daily 8am - 5pm (weekends 10am – 5pm).   

For many years the Cafe Sibylle in east Berlin had a strange artefact on its wall. Two knobbly bits of bronze representing the ear and piece of the moustache of Stalin. The giant statue on Stalinallee, located nearby had been dismantled during the night on government orders and one of the workmen, against his instructions had purloined the items for posterity. 

Liane Lang was inspired by this statuary scalp taking and became interested in the idea of the residue of statues that once represented power and influence. She began to create moustaches of famous men, truncated from their facial origins. These comical, ferrety appendices represent something curious about the role of men in history. Continuing the gastronomical history of the disembodied moustache Coffee is My Cup of Tea will be venue to a selection of these works. Prussians and other Villains, a selection of Prussian rulers and politicians, a box of selected fascists and some individual moustaches of great men will be on display. 

Also in the exhibition is Battle, a photographic work of the Parthenon Frieze in Berlin and Rising Damp. Both works are representative of Lang's interventions with sculptural objects. 

Lang is selling the moustache series to raise funds for her new project Glorious Oblivion. She is creating a photo series with the ambition to capture every public monument to a historic women in a major European City, from medieval nuns and queens to writers and revolutionaries.

FRANCES RICHARDSON

In Time “Once you have reached and end point you have already surpassed it” Zeno of Elea (ca. 490–430 BC)

Private View: Friday 12th January, 6-8pm

Exhibition runs: 12th January – 11th February.

Opening times: daily 8am - 5pm (weekends 10am – 5pm).

In 2003 I was given a double-page week diary that had perforated corners. These corners remained in my studio all mixed up in a saucer. One day, I decided to sew them together using one thread reordering, recovering, and restructuring these fragmented physical representations of time with a linear process. In the West we think of time in terms of a line, a linear infinite stretching out in front of us but often our patterns of existence and memory take different forms, we talk of cycles and déjà vu. The clock hands rotate round the same form everyday; the seas sweep back and forth pulled by the gravity of the moon; we are ever in a present that cannot be captured. These drawings, made in 2003, follow the same form of the stitching of the triangles.

“Incorporating the influences of philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Giorgio Agamben, Richardson’s work stands at the limit of contentless abstraction without jeopardizing the subjective elements of emotion, communication, and imagination” Cliff Lauson, VITAMIN D: New Perspectives in Drawing, Phaidon 2005.

Frances Richardson https://www.francesrichardson.co.uk was born in Leeds and studied at Jacob Kramer Leeds College of Art, Norwich School of Art and the Royal College of Art, graduating in 2006 with MA in Fine Art Sculpture.

Her drawings have been selected for Works on Paper by Sculptors, Royal Academy of Arts, Jerwood Drawing Prize, ARTfutures, and the Drawing Room Biennial Fundraiser Exhibition and exhibited nationally and internationally; Modern Times: responding to chaos De La Warr Pavilion, Unknown Fields: Recent British Drawing, Young Gallery, Salisbury, Another Dammed Drawing Show, Frances Richardson Daniel Weinberg Gallery, LA, LONDON/BERLIN, fruehsorge contemporary drawings, Berlin, Pencil and Paper, Poppy Sebire, London, In Between the Lines, Trinity Contemporary, London, The Postcard is a Public Work of Art, X Marks the Bökship, London.



Publications in which her works feature include The Art of Drawing: British Masters and Methods since 1660 by Susan Owens, V&A, 2013, Vitamin D: New Perspectives on Contemporary Drawing, Phaidon NY 2005.

HIROE KOMAI

Visible Fractals  Private View: Tuesday 21st November, 6-8p Exhibition runs: 21st Nov – 17th Dec Opening times: daily 8am - 5pm (weekends 10am – 5pm)  Komai's practice is derived from acute observations of cities and their architecture, an influence that was forged in the traditional culture and built environment of her birthplace of Kyoto, Japan. While studying in London the realisation that Modernist European architecture was strongly influenced by this traditional Japanese culture has become a fascination for Komai, and it is this relationship has been the on-going motivation behind her art.

The work is located between two and three dimensions, assimilating architectural features such as structure, material and colour, and re-configuring these elements into abstract juxtapositions of material and compositions of form. To this end, Komai uses materials acquired from local DIY shops in this series of collage works: various tapes and adhesive patterned vinyl for their colour and texture. Like the cladding on the side of much of our built environment it is transformed by the movement of the passing spectator.

In addition, Komai also transforms the everyday tools of the architect by casting various implements into bronze trompe-l'œil. These unassuming ‘sculptures’ take the viewer by surprise as the slow realisation of the double take becomes known.

Komai studied at Camberwell College of Art (BA in Fine Art, First Class Honours) and completed her MA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Selected shows: “Positions Berlin Art Fair” (Arena Berlin, Berlin, 2017); ”Window Sill” (Griffin Gallery Perimeter Space, London 2017); "Hiroe Komai Japonská Umelkyna Žila a Pracovala v Košice / Hiroe Komai Japanese Artist Lived and Worked in Košice" (Solo show, Šopa Gallery, Košice, Slovakia, 2016); "Naapurini / My Neighbours" (Solo show, Nature Centre Ukko, Koli, Finland, 2016); "Double Agency" (ArtKapsule At Koleksiyon, London, 2015); "The Alpineum Minimale 2" (Alpineum Produzentengalerie, Luzern, Switzerland, 2014); "Tod und Sterben - Death and Dying"(MGA3, Vienna, Austria, 2014)

Komai's work can be found in several national and international collections including the Gunnar Sachs Collection and in 2012 she completed a major public commission in Kyoto, Japan.

DEBORAH DUFFIN

QUINTESSENTIAL

Exhibition runs: 20th Oct – 12th Nov.

Duffin’s work begins with the observation and recording of the physical evidence of natural processes - swarms of ants, flocks of birds, rolling seas or soaring cliffs. These elemental rhythms, relationships and formations that emerge are repeated in ever changing combinations:

‘As I work, I am drawn into this force of nature; the subject and the medium begin to merge. My relationship with the drawing changes and becomes more about the process itself, my subject matter a visual tool with which to experiment and explore. Concurrently with the drawing, I collect materials that seem to have a relationship to this drawing and with which I can play; through simple energetic processes, I build a relationship with these materials. The physical activity enables me to tap into something deep within, as I focus on the work I am creating rather than the end result - watching, alert to what occurs. Each piece is a living thing that guides me towards its own completion - a new form of life emerges before my eyes – a metaphor for what I have seen and experienced’.



Duffin’s concern with relationships and interconnection extends to the formal properties of the work: the drawing and the edge of the paper, the sculpture and the end of the wall, the installation and the architectural features that become a part of the work. Working with a space, the pieces can be altered, reworked, hung in new ways in relation to their host, as an echo of the natural forces that form the world

JUAN BOLIVAR

'These Go to Eleven'

Exhibition runs: 22nd Sept – 15th Oct

Juan Bolivar makes paintings that negotiate relationships between meaning and form. His research explores dialogistic tensions within hybridity, where ‘abstraction’ acts as a historically and ideologically loaded currency - or 'readymade' - for intertextual discourse onto other sub-cultural positions; highlighting the problematisation of this genre in post-conceptual painting.

For 'These Go to Eleven' Bolivar re-enacts Malevich's last 'black square' painted in 1930, before dramatically being forbidden by Stalin from making any further Suprematist works. Using this context of interpretation Bolivar creates new meanings from the sublime to the ridiculous: Malevich's 'black square' becomes four Marshall speakers such as those a travelling musician, street performer or 'pub band' would have. Merging these disparate elements Bolivar turns Malevich's last Suprematist painting into a symbol of hope and optimism; drawing transcendental comparisons between Malevich's idea of 'pure feeling' and 'live' amplified sound.

Born in Caracas, Venezuela Bolivar graduated from Goldsmiths College receiving the Warden’s Prize, and has twice been a recipient of a Pollock-Krasner award. His work is included in The Government Art Collection, and selected for significant exhibitions such as 'New British Painting', (John Hansard Gallery, University of Southampton) and 'East International' (Norwich School of Art). His work was included in Nanjing Museum's first international exhibition of contemporary art, where he was a prize winner in 2015.

KAREN DAVID

CRYSTAL VISIONS     



For CRYSTAL VISIONS, Karen David re-enacts the ‘I Want to Believe’ poster famous from the 90s TV Series ‘The X-Files’. First seen on the wall of FBI agent Fox Mulder’ s basement office where he, with his partner Agent Dana Scully, investigated paranormal cases that no one else in the FBI wanted.

Throughout the 10 seasons of the show, those with a keen eye would have noticed slight changes to the poster as it was destroyed or replaced. The first poster had to be replaced due to the original photographer, Billy Meier - who alleges to have regular contact with extra-terrestrial beings - claiming copyright. To resolve this The X- Files production team switched the poster for its first variation with a fatter UFO positioned above the trees differently. There were then four further variations during the series. Posters have been seen in character’s bedrooms, Mulder’s home office and later in his new office in Virginia.

The Hollywood Entertainment Museum has a display of Agent Mulder’s first basement office, complete with the I Want to Believe poster and other props including the pencils thrown and stuck to the ceiling. According to the museum, the poster continually needs to be replaced as it keeps disappearing from the set.

COLIN SMITH

‘Chainsaw Love Poem and other works’

PV: Friday, 7th July, 6-8pm

 Exhibition runs: July 7th – 30^th

 
Colin Smith is a British Artist who has work in the permanent collections of many museums and important private collections around the world. He also writes about Art and has been a Harkness fellow to Yale University. He is currently an Associate Editor of Turps Banana Painting Magazine. He lives and works in London and southern Spain.

GALEN RILEY

Twit Time and Loose Endings’ by Galen Riley

PV: Friday, 2nd June, 6-8pm

Galen Riley continues her concern with the fabrication of environments and objects that articulate the transition between different spaces and states. Here Riley loosely uses the life cycle of the owl as it moves from nest to amorphous omelette. This amoeboid mesh Twit Too: An Owl Omelette is both a pre and post owl. Twit Too: An Owl Omelette references the gloop we come from and return to. 

Riley often deploys a repetitive technique, here chiefly macramé, with its time-counting nature, to evoke the physical presence of the dead and beings of the future. She uses mostly rope and string to gesture at multidimensional diagrams of space in flux. Twit: I’m Not My Usual Self comes from a flat 1970s macramé ‘Owl Kit’ expanded into three dimensions over a 24” balloon. It grows again when she attempts to blow up a 36” balloon in the complete 24” net. 

Born near Croydon, Galen Riley has lived in Hackney for twenty years exhibiting most recently with WOT NO, at the London Centre for Book Arts; Salon of the Collectorexic, The Apartment, Bows Arts Trust; Unknown Sitter, Charlie Dutton Gallery; Not Now, I’m Busy, at CSM; One Thing Leads to Another, Portland House, Malvern; Hobby Life, at Carter Presents; Laboratory Polymorphic, Tou Scene, Norway.

www.galenriley.co.uk

ALICE STEFFEN

 
‘COMMON’

 
PV: Friday, 28th April, 6-8pm

 Exhibition runs: April 28th – May 21^st

Steffen’s work embodies the language of pop culture and its stereotypes within class identity. Her themes are derived from everyday experiences of class-based segregation and inscribed social systems. From this loaded subject Steffen makes observations that result in a wry commentary of class and taste. Both autobiographical and anthropological she reflects back at us some of the complexity of class discrimination through her manipulation of kitsch and humour.

As with many artists, the topics she chooses result from an engagement with material choices. This process lies behind her intent to produce work that, while visually seductive, its content denies the apparent objective beauty of its form. From this, Steffen often combines using traditional approaches to materials, such as casting, with found objects: animating objects such as shoes, lipstick, car doors, fake nails, into sculptural forms. This partly erases the original cognition of these objects as they are reconstituted into decorative repetition or colour field, only to re-surface as class signifier.

RON HASELDEN

Series of Postcards

A selection by Ron Haselden 

‘The series started in 2008 with an image composed of twelve sunsets, which was then emailed to friends, colleagues and acquaintances to all parts of the globe. The images are usually, but not always, the results of many dog walks and from that first emailing, I have continued producing new Postcards.

To date, I have sent out over two hundred. They are all composed of several photographs. The images join, or clash or sit neatly side by side. They mostly seem to have a sculptural identity but purposely remain apart from my other ongoing sculptural works. I sometimes wonder how long the series will go on for as I continue the walks in woods, by the sea, by the river, in the rain, in the sunshine, wind and so on, but somehow it never seems to end.’

  - Ron Haselden

CHRIS HAWTIN

New paintings   

Exhibition runs: 9th Feb – 12th March.

Chris Hawtin's work explores the relationship between organic and cybernetic structures, and the effect of technological acceleration on geographic space. Giant floating machines or vessels hover above a more traditional romantic landscape in a fusion of genres, while a signpost adorned with the disembodied head of some strange character announces the title of the work, suggesting the presence of some kind of sci-fi narrative for the viewer to unravel. Working with 3d scans and architectural modelling programmes as well as paint, Hawtin's work becomes a hybrid of the technological and the organic. The digitally generated structures are a brutal interruption within the paintings yet they are subsumed into the language of the painted surface, playing with the classic science fiction image of the alien invasion.



Born in Ely, Cambridgeshire, United Kingdom in 1974 Chris Hawtin has exhibited widely both nationally and internationally. His work is in private collections worldwide and in the Saatchi Collection in London.

 http://www.chrishawtin.com

DENISE HAWRYSIO

Hey punk what are you doing with that flower in your hand?
 
Denise and Henry Hawrysio

Photographs

Private View; January 20, 6 to 8pm  -
January 10 to January 31, 2017

In this exhibition artist Denise Hawrysio has reproduced some of her late father’s poetic photographs. The negatives selected by Denise all have some form of photographic mishap such as flash or shutter malfunction, darkroom accidents or fingers in front of the lens. She has also continued her father’s experiments by printing black and white photography through colour processes and by reproducing the resulting images as a series of repetitive variations.

“Hawrysio’s work comes at photography from within. Here the arena is resolutely domestic and the intent is undeniably an attack on that quality in photography that suggests each image is its own most perfect representation. Hers is not just a purely technical exercise, but an effort that would be inconsequential without a potent subject — in this instance, Hawrysio’s family as discovered, or rediscovered, through the discards of her father’s hobby photographs.” (Davis Weaver)

-curated by Richard Ducker
 

SHARON GAL

Sweet Meat: new collages

Private View: Friday, 25th November, 6-8pm, Exhibition runs: 25th November – 18th December ‘Sweet Meat’ is an exhibition of collage work by interdisciplinary artist and performer Sharon Gal.

Working with found material from fashion magazines, catalogues and cookery books, images are juxtaposed to reveal fantastic and hallucinatory landscapes that are both enticing and repelling. Sweet Meat highlights our complex relationship with food, as nourishment and a guilty pleasure, exploring the seductive and addictive aspects of consumption.

The work is created through a playful and evolving process of trial and error. Like a mysterious jigsaw puzzle with no predictable outcome; each collage has its own rhythm and conclusion. Each is unique, but all are bound by the decision to limit the source material to lonely figures inhabiting sweet or savoury worlds.

 http://www.sharon-gal.com

HYLTON STOCKWELL

It’s All Gone Wrong

Hylton Stockwell is best known as a sculptor but he has also consistently made drawings. Some of these relate closely to three-dimensional work others, such as these, stand alone.

He began this series in ink and brush after recovering from a period of serious illness.  Much of the work contains a reference to uniform geometry, a mapping out of shape and pattern as way of holding the regular and normative, but little of such intentionality is sustained as shapes shift and morph across the page with seemingly little adherence to an overall schemata.

Lapses of concentration, splashing and blotting (the characteristics of pen and ink ineptitude in some schools of practice) are generously accommodated here. They form breaks in the expected continuum of the surface, staggering and suspending pattern and creating new rhythms.

MANDY HUDSON

Things: new paintings & prints

Private View: Friday, 9th September, 6-9pm

Exhibition runs: 10th Sept – 2nd Oct

A collection of paintings and prints, completed over the last few years, depicting particular things seen while wandering around the city: A faded curtain with an oversized, mismatched pattern, new window frames stacked outside a workshop each day forming endless variations and combinations, broken furniture left on the street, real or fake flowers viewed in distant windows: unintentional patterns, inadvertent colours, and unplanned shapes. A photograph acts as a reminder, but things develop once the painting begins; some elements are adhered to rigidly while others are edited. When a packet of plastic beads has spilled onto the pavement, in the painting the pavement itself is simplified, but each bead is painted in the position it fell to give a genuine randomness to the tiny smattering of colour. Each subject is considered individually: how much is about recouping what has been seen, the character of the thing, and how much is about the way it is painted, giving character to the thing.

 www.mandyhudson.co.uk