MICHAELANGELO ANTONIONI   

Red Desert a k a Il Deserto Rosso 1964-France/Italy-Psychological Drama/Feminist Film PLOT DESCRIPTION Red Desert (Il Deserto Rosso) once more combines the considerable talents of director Michelangelo Antonioni and star Monica Vitti. Cast as Giuliana, an unhappy wife, Vitti suffers from an unnamed form of depression or malaise. Her quicksilver emotional shifts disturb everyone around her, but they, like she, pretend that nothing is truly wrong. British engineer Corrado Zeller (Richard Harris) seems to understand what Giuliana is really after in life, and he acts upon it by entering into an affair with the troubled woman. Giuliana eventually comes to terms with her physical and mental pain, but this hardly means that she's "cured" in the conventional sense. Monica Vitti's sense of isolation is heightened by Antonioni's (and cinematographer Carlo DiPalma's) choice of colors, and especially by Carlo Savina's bizarre electronic musical score. This is a landmark movie in Antonioni's effort to portray alienated individuals in contemporary life; he places people against towering forms of technology to emphasize their smallness and lostness in the modern world of technological change. 

~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide  

AMANDA BEECH

Amanda Beech produces artworks, writing and collaborative curatorial projects in the UK and internationally. Her work explores the relationship between notions of freedom that are central to democracy and an aesthetics of violence. Solo exhibitions include, The Patriot, The Economist, London, 2003, and Falk, MOT International, London, 2006. Recent group shows include One Way Street, Sheppard Gallery, Nevada, USA, 2007, Little Private Governments, University Gallery, University of Essex, 2006, and Episode, temporarycontemporary, London, Leeds Met Gallery, Leeds and South Florida Arts Centre, Miami, 2005-6. Publications include: 'The Folly of Critique' Transmissions, Speaking and Listening, Vol.5; ‘Out For Justice’ Exhibition cat, Strategies Against Marketecture 2004 and ‘On Violent Ground’, Inventory issue 14, 2005. 

Beech is Director of MA Critical Writing and Curatorial Practice at UAL London and lectures in Postgraduate Critical Studies in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College

SEAN DAWSON

In the most recent work, the original images and references are gleaned from various sources such as iconographic, modernist architecture (eg. Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavillion & Rem Koolhaas buildings) or high-end fashion, which represent aspects of culture that are highly designed and endowed with an extreme visual aesthetic. The work as a whole continues to be generated by my interest in the relationship between process, illusion, photography and painting. These elements are brought together to explore the transformative potential of a process that lies parallel to the dialogue between analogue and digital reproduction, in order to attempt to image a world between representation and abstraction. This is born out of a lifelong interest in the illusionistic tropes of the cinematic and photographic screen, the historical tradition in pictorial painting especially the baroque, as well as the pictorial devices used in trompe-l’oeil painting which activates the representational plane as both image and object simultaneously. 

“Projected along endless, Klein-bottle-shaped corridors, the eye’s perspective is canted with the planes that everywhere refuse the vertical, nowhere come to rest in the horizontal. The body, or rather its introjected projection, is relentlessly impelled forward at warp speed, as if suspended in the virtual frames of ‘Doom’, with gravity-bending contortions that seem to defy Nietzsche’s aphoristic invocation of the end of perspective: ‘we cannot see around our own corner’”. (from Warped Space, Anthony Vidler, pp204-205)

KIRSTEN GLASS

I use collaged magazine arrangements as a compositional starting point for large scale theatrical paintings. The idealized surface quality and smooth intent of the source material itself becomes physically flawed and conceptually corrupted by the humanising process of painting and narrative reassembly. It is within this process of corruption that the possibility of ambiguity opens up. In addition to the readymade ‘expressive’ poses of the magazine models who I reimagine as vampiric sirens calling the viewer into the paintings’ non-space, found objects are introduced as clues or props and occasional bands of borrowed text (from such sources as pop lyrics, make-up ads or other peoples’ love letters) combine to form a dislocated narrative where, free from a central plot, I’m left with a structure for interpretative play. While the aggressively vacuous nature of this game insists on an elaborate framing of meaningless symbolism, it seems to simultaneously obscure and act out my personal stories, perhaps using the death mask of media appropriation as an alibi for the fragile possibility of expressiveness. Or do these pop-gothic webs expose the paintings’ and perhaps even the Imaginations’ status as nothing but a personal arrangement of commercially produced fantasy? 

The title slogan ‘WAS IT DESTINY? I DON’T KNOW YET’ (lyrics from Blondie’s ‘I’m Always Touched by Your Presence Dear’) is crudely painted on the left hand panel of a diptych which has been reworked and remixed from an earlier painting entitled ‘You’re My Beachy Head’. This cut and paste process runs right through Glass’s practice from the initial magazine collage ‘maquettes’ from which the paintings are structured to the rearrangement of elements such as found objects, text, smaller paintings and framed pictures hung on the main panels. Through this process a fractured narrative is produced which deliberately fails in its  attempt at grandiose personal ‘expressiveness’ and is clearly only able to speak through received images in a compositional game of endless displacement. Amplifying the characteristics of the magazine mentality, the posturing, vacuous sentimentality, glamour and overall aimless seduction become, in Glass’s work, cheapened and garish to the point of aggression.

DERECK HARRIS

Central to Harris' current research is an investigation of the similar and contrasting ways recent painters use tropes of technological representation and abstraction to critique seductive imagery. His study raises ethical and semiological questions. What is the relationship between desire and unfulfilled promises of satisfaction in the apprehension of a seductive image? What kind of questions arise when viewing paintings of these images? For the past decade Harris has been interested in the way our desires can be manipulated by the promise of satisfaction held out by an image. He is also interested in the relationship between truth and banality in the function of advertising, and how sign, image and text conflate to excite desire and trigger the anticipation of promised satisfaction. This research has resulted (since 2000) in a focused body of paintings which reflects and comments on these phenomena through the means of their production; that is, through celebratory visual spectacle. 'Each [of the paintings)is as assertive but impenetrable as a vitrine. Many are like aquariums with the figures pressed against the glass. The atmosphere is liquid, with a certain tangible viscosity and an aquatic instability of light. The figures are separate and of different substance but move within this molten environment, the long fluid lines of their silhouettes sufficiently like those of the amorphous background to indicate a shared buoyancy. The attenuation of limbs in sharp recession suggests a physicality separate from our own. Glass is everywhere known and not seen ... Behind the glass there is [another] separation, that between the figures and the fluid disorganisation of the rest of the image. The technical complexity of Harris' work is directed towards this partition, and the richness of his handling underscores its importance [Extract from Ecstactic Void by Jane Lee in Asral Smile, paintings 1998 - 2002 ISNB 0-948327-14-6 ] A growing number of artists are interested in the ways that painting and other image-based forms can assume and transform the iconography of advertising/fashion/youth culture. Within American and British Pop Art a canonised historic lineage exists which includes James Rosenquist, Andy Warhol, Lichtenstein, Chuck Close, Richard Hamilton, Mel Ramos, Tom Wesselman, Ed Ruscha and, more recently, Jack Goldstein, Jeff Koons, Richard Phillips and Richard Patterson. Their paintings provide the starting point for the situation and context of Harris' work. The 'critical' starting point for these artists (and for those included in Harris' curatorial project : 'The Dream of Putrefaction') is that of sourcing 'found' images and re-materialising them in paint. In this way the painterly means of seduction can be used, in dialogue with the appropriated popular culture imagery, to comment on, or to critique, the visual evocation of desire. Harris believes it is impoertant when discussing the critical construction of the paintings to distinguish between 'aestheticised' (painterly) seduction and images of human figures which are constructed to effect a 'sexualised' seduction.

ANTON HENNING

shown courtesy Lance Entwistle Collection

Anton Henning (German, born Berlin in 1964) is a painter whose diverse subjects and styles, from abstract to figurative, from pin-up girls to interiors are plundered knowingly from art history and popular culture. However, unlike Picabia to whom he has been compared, Henning’s diverse paintings are united by a delight in sensual pleasure, a passion for the tactile quality of paint, and a critical and subversive wit. Recurring motifs and subjects, particularly the Hennling – a propeller-like design that metamorphosis from tattoo to sculpture to abstract design, reveal further unity within his oeuvre. Sandpipers, Lizards & History is Henning’s first major show in London, and presents over a dozen new paintings including abstract interiors, pin-up girls, a naked self- portrait, and a beach scene. In Sandpipers, Lizards and History the top-floor of the gallery has been transformed into a lounge. The installation includes colourful murals, comfortable furniture, paintings and lamps. It creates the effect of an unreal world, and a sense of being inside one of Henning’s paintings. Indeed, his installations are loosely based on his earlier paintings of lounge interiors. There is a tension in Henning’s practice between his abstract and figurative works, and this tension is often played out within a single canvas. For example, in Pin-up No.96 (Ariadne), 2005 (pictured above) a sunbathing naked woman is overpainted on an abstract patterned background that can be read as a huge beach towel. However, Henning has given the work a black horizon, introducing an element of pure abstraction, and giving the total composition a sense of the surreal. This playful combination of disparate elements and styles helps to make seemingly familiar imagery strange and arresting. By overpainting he creates further tension between spatial depth and the picture plane. Henning lives and works in Manker, Germany. He has exhibited widely throughout Europe and had recent solo shows at the Kunstmuseum Luzern (2003) and the De Pont Foundation, Tilburg, Holland (2002). In March 2005 he opened a two-year installation at the MMK Frankfurt and in October 2005 he will have two solo shows at the Krefeld and Herford Museums in Germany. Henning’s work is included in many important museum and private collections across Europe. He is represented by Haunch of Venison.

JOSIE MCCOY

www.josiemccoy.co.uk

I am currently working on a series of paintings and lithographs inspired by the idea of the ‘American Dream’, and the inevitable darker subtext that is present in any paradise. Using oil paint like watercolour, I build up the painting in thin layers to make the surface glow - an imitation of a television screen. The unearthly colours accentuate this. The green hue references traditional techniques of painting, where green was used as under-painting to give luminosity to the surface colour.  Painting offers a version of reality in the same way as films do. Working from photographs of the television screen allows me to paint an isolated, spontaneous moment, which the character hasn’t specifically performed for. I paint portraits of these unreal moments. I pare down the image to include only the information required for the character to be recognisable and for their expression to be conveyed to the audience. The viewer is presented with a split second of time, suspended in paint. 

MARILYN MINTER

Marilyn Minter has been considering representations and ramifications of glamour for the last thirty years, but it is worth considering just what is connoted by the word. Minter, it seems, defines this concept by the book, or at least intuitively leans toward its etymological truth, which aligns glamour with magic spells and illusory attractiveness—never with fictional ideas that propose glamour as some kind of natural condition. All of which is to say that Minter has been plumbing the depths of (al)chemical beauty (and its breakdowns) for a very long time. 
 In one of her earliest series of work, a group of black-and-white photographs from the late 1960s, Minter went right to the source—her own mother. Snapping pictures of her aging, substance-abusing, bedridden parent, Minter captured the queasy day- to-day undoings and recastings of physical appearance. Obsessed with tasks of pruning and priming, Minter’s mother, clad in nightgown and propped with pillows, refused to let even a stray eyebrow lay seed. The photographs, at once gorgeous and grotesque, made nearly everyone who saw them so uncomfortable that the artist hid them away in a drawer for the next three decades. 
 In conjunction with her practice of photography, Minter makes paintings (enamel on metal), showing a special interest in Photo-Realist methods of representation. Culling imagery from cooking shows, porn videos, and beauty advertisements, the artist posits a visual  continuity between seemingly disjunctive sensual experiences. By intentionally conflating the pleasures of cuisine and cunnilingus, Minter renders straightforward yet ambiguous images that shore up the constructed nature of their meanings. In Minter’s hands, a lobster tail is apt to become infinitely sexier than a penis, and the accoutrements of beauty will never ensure perfection. In recent works, she paints hyperrealistic images that look more photographic than photographs, and snaps photographs that look utterly painterly. Choosing models whose race and gender are open to interpretation, Minter hones in (literally and figuratively) on the imperfect trappings of high couture in large-scale color photographs and paintings that at once magnify, fetishize, and abject their subjects. Plumped, rouge-stained lips drip with slimy egg yolk; the glittered eye of a model is accompanied by a peach- fuzzed face; the wearer of studded Christian Dior pumps has apparently been doused in mud, and dirt infiltrates every crease of her perfectly manicured feet. The ambivalence in Minter’s works does not leave us any less seduced by them: we simply have a harder time cleaning up and simplifying the true nature of our much more complicated desires.