Two solo shows at Nottingham Contemporary: Yelena Popova’s After Image and Michael Beutler’s Pump House

Go to Saturation Point website for my review of two very different exhibitions currently on show at Nottingham Contemporary. Michael Beutler’s Pump House and Yelena Popova’s After Image. Whilst they are completely separate shows they do share some things in common, both artists work in their medium’s “expanded field”, Popova being nearest to painting and Beutler nearest to sculpture. Both create installations rather than single art objects and both work in idioms that have roots in twentieth century abstraction, branching out into their own foliage under highly contemporary skies.

Michael Beutler, Pump House, installation shot, detail, photo by Sam Kirby, image by courtesy of Nottingham Contemporary

Beutler’s amazing labyrinth of hand made walls, tools, furniture and models is a repeat-with-differences of the recent show at Spike Island Bristol. The differences reflect the different spaces, though they are similar in many ways, the link being the architects Caruso St John who transformed the Spike Island space only two years before their design of Nottingham Contemporary. Here are a couple of photos, but really you have to be there to experience it. Continuing in the tradition of the total art experience or Gesamtkunstwerk, it is a delight for all the senses.

Michael Beutler, Pump House, detail: wall Elefant Und Schwein 2010 / 2016

Popova’s installation more or less divides into paintings in one gallery and a video piece, a digital animation, in the other. The paintings are at the same time wonderfully fragile, their images in delicate washes only just there, and robust, the heaviness of the linen and and clarity of its weave taking precedence over image, the arrangements of the paintings then becoming more important than any individual one.

Yelena Popova, Public Gallery, detail: Untitled 2016, mixed media on linen + wooden pieces, dimensions variable, Photo by Sam Kirby, image by courtesy of Nottingham Contemporary

In the digital animation This Certifies That, a collaboration between Popova and computer programmer Noel Murphy, multiple images of the Euro banknote, are randomly generated in constantly changing sequences, to the accompaniment of a mesmerising soundtrack by Nottingham based sound artist Rebecca Lee. The words “an excess of images leads to a crash” and “a new sequence begins” can be heard intermittently, perhaps marking the ending and beginning of each sequence. The narrative here references a late 19^th Century political conspiracy, led by Leon Warneker, who, working with a loose grouping of anarchists, attempted to crash Russia’s economy by flooding the market with forged banknotes. The work surely also brings to mind the financial crisis of 2007-08 precipitated by the credit crunch. The continuation of the guilloché lines from the video piece into the surrounding space as a wallpaper looks like a ‘pure’ abstract drawing. However, as what you see is always more than just what you see, it is also a reminder of the all-encompassing reality of capitalism as a system, whilst the work as a whole suggests the possibility of the system crashing and something new emerging in its place.

Yelena Popova, After Image, detail: Installation shot of gallery 1, my photo

There’s a very attractive monograph/catalogue available for the Popova show, with texts by Brian Dillon and Claire-Louise Bennett. Highly recommended! I wish there had also been a document for Beutler’s Pump House. However, Nottingham Contemporary have uploaded this marvelous video of his talk prior to the show.

I have written a review of these two shows for Saturation Point, click here to read it and I hope to write discussion pieces for Abcrit at a later date.

Both exhibitions are on show until 25 September 2016

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Channa Horwitz Review at Saturation Point

Go to the Saturation Point website for a review by Mark Liebenrood of the Channa Horwitz exhibition on show at Raven Row, London until 1 May.

Channa Horwitz (1932–2013, Los Angeles) was a pioneer of “a distinctly Californian minimalism” in the late 1960s and 70s, although she received scant attention from the art world until the end of her life.

Channa Horwitz, Canon 6 Variation II, 1982 Ink on Mylar. Courtesy Collection Oehmen, Germany, photo by Timo Ohler

 

Read the full review here

Gesso and acrylic paint on nothing! Deb Covell’s new painting at OBJECT / A

The exhibition Here and Now, recently on show at OBJECT / A, Manchester, UK, featured just the one artwork, a wonderful painting entitled Present (2016) by Deb Covell, a painted black square, without a support, gesso and acrylic on nothing, suspended from the ceiling by wire.

Deb Covell, Present, 2016, gesso and acrylic, 140 x 140 cm. Image by courtesy of the artist

 

Read my review of it here at the Saturation Point website.

Katrina Blannin Annodam at Jessica Carlisle

Katrina Blannin‘s very smart looking solo show Annodam at Jessica Carlisle closes in just two days.

Katrina Blannin, Annodam, installation photo by Tom Carter, image by courtesy of Jessica Carlisle

Geoff Hands recommends going to see it, in his article at Abcrit, though I had deliberately avoided reading what he has to say until now because I was writing my own review and I didn’t want to be influenced. You can read my review here at Saturation Point, the online editorial and curatorial project for reductive, geometric and systems artists working in the UK. 

Katrina Blannin, Annodam, installation photo by Tom Carter, courtesy of Jessica Carlisle

Annodam is Madonna spelt backwards, all the paintings in the exhibition being strangely connected to the Madonna del Parto (c.1455-60), a fresco by Piero della Francesca. But how are they connected? Read more here

Saturation Point Projects present Clear Sight at Sluice_ 2015

Saturation Point Projects present Clear Sight at Sluice_ 2015

Judith Duquemin / Hanz Hancock / Patrick Morrissey / Laurence Noga / Andy Parkinson / Charley Peters

“The more stuff in it, the busier the work of art, the worse it is. More is less. Less is more. The eye is a menace to clear sight.” – Ad Reinhardt

This exhibition will show a selection of work by contemporary artists who all adopt a reductive position in the context of current art practice. ‘Reduction’ as a term is not limited to defining a single artistic movement, but the threads or references contained within the semiotics of their work demonstrate a consistency – in the use of geometric metaphor, iconographic presence, systems-related elements, and other characteristics associated with the methodology of constructivism and its stylistic/intellectual descendants. The exhibition seeks to demonstrate that this genre has a strong, ongoing presence and that its traditions continue to be developed and explored.

16 – 18 October 2015, 11 – 6pm. Bargehouse, OXO Tower Wharf, South Bank.

Reception: 15 October, 5 – 8.30pm

 

 

At Saturation Point: Ben Woodeson at Berloni, and more…

New at Saturation Point: Patrick Morrissey reviews the Ben Woodeson exhibition Obstacle now showing at Berloni Gallery,

Ben Woodeson, Rat Trap Neon

Other new things at the Saturation Point website include a review by Alan Fowler of  Lothar Götz at Domobaal Gallery, a review of Adventures of the Black Square by Laurence Noga as well as his review of the recent Generator exhibition, also essays  Beyond the Algorithm Towards the Infinite by Laura Davidson and In search of meaning by Nathan Cohen. 

Check it out at www.saturationpoint.org.uk

From Centre at The Loud & Western Building

From Centre, an exhibition of reductive abstract works, curated by Saturation Point and Slate Projects was on view at The Loud & Western Building, from 11 April to 26 April 2015 showing the following artists:
William Angus-Hughes, Rana Begum, Martin Church, Nathan Cohen, Rhys Coren, Natalie Dower, Judith Duquemin, Julia Farrer, Ben Gooding, Lothar Götz, Hanz Hancock, Tess Jaray, Silvia Lerin, Peter Lowe, Patrick Morrissey, Laurence Noga, Charley Peters, Richard Plank, Giulia Ricci, Carol Robertson, Robin Seir, Steve Sproates and Trevor Sutton.

Installation shot, from left to right works by Laurence Noga, Patrick Morrissey and Martin Church. Image by courtesy of Slate Projects.

It’s an impressive line up, spanning several generations of artists, born in every decade from the 1930s to the 1980s, and making a convincing case for the growing relevance of abstract art in the UK.

Installation shot, works from left to right by Natalie Dower, Martin Church, Julia Farrer, Rhys Coren, Laurence Noga. Image by courtesy of Slate Projects

Thinking about abstraction’s continued relevance may require me to at least mention Zombie Formalism, (“Formalism because this art involves a straightforward, reductive, essentialist method of making a painting and Zombie because it brings back to life the discarded aesthetics of Clement Greenberg”), if only to suggest that the term, coined by artist -critic Walter Robinson, quoted in brackets above, seems to refer more to the market than to the art and may appear more pertinent in the USA than in the UK where alternative modernisms have sometimes held more sway than the version associated with Greenberg and Fried. It is Constructivism I have in mind, its UK variant Constructionism and the Systems Group, which for the artists at From Centre are more central than Abstract Expressionism etc.

The reductive (but not necessarily essentialist or straightforward) works on view at From Centre seem to me to be a genuine attempt at continued participation in a living, though contested, tradition.

Installation shot, works from left to right by Julia Farrer, Robin Seir, and Tess Jaray. Image by courtesy of Slate Projects

In Dower’s 2013 Painting Polymorph, a subtle pink rectangle is halved down the middle, from which the central point of a pale yellow circle is found, and within that circle a white rectangle beneath an irregular black triangle are positioned. Or maybe there is no “above” or “beneath”, a rectangle within a circle is divided into three different shaped triangles, two white and one black. Alternatively, we simply have a rectangle divided into nine other shapes. The figures and their relationships are not random but calculated mathematically, the parts being strictly determined by the whole, to my mind the most elegant definition of a system. The painting has subtlety, serenity, beauty and a little excitement too, with its alternating views and the slight after-imaging taking place.

Natalie Dower, Polymorph, 2013, oil on canvas, 61 x 86.5 cm. Image by courtesy of the artist.

Other artists here who employ mathematical or numerical systems include Peter Lowe, a former member of the 1970s Systems Group founded by Malcolm Hughes and Jeffrey Steele. He defines systems in his work as “a way of communicating an intelligible idea in terms of shapes colours and forms, or an organisation principle that I predetermine and allow to run to see what the outcomes will be…” In his painting here, Triangles within a Dodecagon, he takes the regular twelve sided shape as its starting place and bases an equilateral triangle between two of the vertices, or along one of the sides. A second triangle is found by taking the base across three vertices, a third across four and a fourth across five. The fourth triangle being the last one that can be produced by following this process, is exactly central, each of its sides spanning four sides of the dodecagon. In the painting here the resultant figures are positioned on a square canvas, losing the surrounding dodecagon altogether. The colours, black, white and red create four planes: a white ‘background’, in front of which is a plane including the largest and smallest triangles in black, in front of which is the red triangle, in front of which is the white triangle. Of course they shift creating varying perceptual gestalts.

Installation shot, from left to right, works by Peter Lowe, Rana Begum and Nathan Cohen. Image by courtesy of Slate Projects

There are shifting gestalts in Rana Begum’s painted relief, No. 317, the actual three-dimensionality of the piece, combined with the movement of the viewer results in multiple variations of form, whereas in Charley Peters’ fascinating painting Plexus we are presented with the illusion of flatness within an illusory three dimensional space.

In Giulia Ricci’s Order Disruption Painting there’s something strange going on spatially, the patterned repetition of a triangular motif creating something akin to a systemic field which breaks down in places as the pattern is interrupted, resulting in the appearance of wormholes or spatial anomalies that can also be interpreted as twisting forms caught in the net of the surface whilst at the same time forming that surface. For me, her work explicitly links system to visual pattern.

Giulia Ricci, Order/Disruption Painting no.2, 2012, Laser engraved laminated board and acrylic paint, hand painted, 61 x 101 x1.8cm, Edition of 3. Image by courtesy of the artist

All the artists in this show, perhaps to varying degrees, share an interest in system and/or series. The two tend to go together when a numerical system is being explored. However Julia Farrer’s Knot in Time, seems more to be the product of an entirely empirical enquiry. In both approaches I think there is a search going on, not for the one definitive statement but rather for knowledge. The traditional notion of the masterpiece is challenged,  just as it seems totally out of step with our post-digital experience. With Farrer perhaps we have series but not necessarily system, with Laurence Noga I think we have both, but the system is more operational than mathematical.

Yet, each work in this exhibition does command attention as its own thing, perhaps the title of Carol Robertson’s painting Aura is suggestive of this. Whilst in the work different coloured bands surrounding a circle might be likened to an aura, I wonder if that famous Walter Benjamin opposition between mechanical reproduction and the aura of the single artwork is also being referenced. Paradoxically, the serial methodology both challenges and upholds the singularity of each individual piece: singular within series, one but not all.

There may exist differences in emphasis between the generations represented in this exhibition. Perhaps the older artists show more interest in structure in comparison to the younger ones who may appear as interested in the breakdown of order as in its establishment. Contrasting, say, the Trevor Sutton painting Christow with Giulia Ricci’s Order Disruption Painting, could reinforce this view, as might opposing the serene geometry of the Natalie Dower to the visual excitation of Patrick Morrissey’s work, or the stability of Sutton with the kinetic, off- balance effect of Morrissey (see image below), and I know I am going too far in contrasting the contained circularity of Farrer’s Knot in Time or Robertson’s Aura with the eccentricity of Martin Church’s Definitions (Study No. 3), because mostly what I am finding here is continuity.

Installation shot, from left to right works by Trevor Sutton and Patrick Morrissey. Image by courtesy of Slate Projects

Without succumbing to the much too linear (non-systemic) notion of progress, I do want to suggest that these generationally diverse artists, in their shared commitment to an economy of means and a formal language, rooted in the tradition of constructivism and systems art, continue to develop this rich field of artistic activity.

Watch this space!

(There is an illustrated catalogue accompanying the exhibition, with excellent essays by Nathan Cohen and Laura Davidson and an introduction by Alex Meurice.)

Other Rooms at Basement Arts Project

Basement Arts Project, a non-traditional exhibition space in the cellar of a domestic house just outside Leeds, recently hosted Other Rooms, curated by Saturation Point, (Patrick Morrissey, Clive Hanz Hancock and Charley Peters), a show featuring works by the following artists: Giulia Ricci, Sarah Sparkes, Andy Wicks, Ben Woodeson, John Workman, Clive Hanz Hancock, Patrick Morrissey, Charley Peters, and Walker Hill, each containing its own light source, and each artist responding, whether in film, sculpture or installation, to this darkened alternative space, or other room.

Ben Woodeson, Super Sexy Sculpture.. Oh Yes! 2014, brass, cord, neon, books. My snapshot

I don’t know if I would be entirely correct to describe the works as “site specific”. I could imagine the animated films of Morrissey or Peters and the Ben Woodeson sculpture for example, having independent and portable existences. But I could also argue that appearing here they take on a character that is at least partially determined by the space itself, Woodeson’s Super Sexy Sculpture… Oh Yes reflecting its surroundings not outwards, as one might normally find in a mirror, but rather by way of its concave stainless steel surface, enfolding the external project space into itself, surrounding its own surroundings, as it were.

Patrick Morrissey, Goodbye Ploy 2, 2014, Animated Film, (my photo)

Patrick Morrisey’s film Goodbye Ploy 2, a system of flickering red and orange triangles and rectangles in grid formation, shown against the stone wall, will look like this only here, incorporating the particularities of this uneven surface into the moving image, such that the boundary between system and environment becomes ambiguous. Shown elsewhere, the image would assume some of the specific characteristics of another place. In this work the neutrality of the screen that normally allows film to transcend the limitations of geography is contradicted.

Hanz Hancock, Inside/Outside, mixed media, my photo

Clive Hanz Hancock’s installation constructed of circular pieces of PVC tubing stacked in a narrow vertical wood container alongside a fluorescent strip light is situated in a slim alcove. The light rather than illuminating the rest of the construction, tends to dazzle, distracting the viewer, bringing more attention to itself than to the subject we might have wished it would throw light upon. It is almost as if the light subverts its own purpose. Also, similarly to Goodbye Ploy, whilst the work could conceivably be sited in another place, at another time, making it a stand-alone sculptural piece, it will look the way it looks here only as long as it is positioned in this one space, so could be said to exist only here, affirming the particularity of the here and now whilst also contradicting the mobility of the stand-alone art object, or commodity.

Sarah Sparkes’ Flue is inherently tied to the site it inhabits and enlivens. An LED infinity mirror is located inside a hole in the chimney breast that may once have conveyed exhaust gases from a stove to the outside of the building. Am I to see in it a metaphor for the relationship of an artwork or exhibition venue to the external world? Not so much the world in the artwork, as the artwork in the world, in which it appears as a vapour which soon disperses and is forgotten. It may also be that, appearing to recede infinitely into space without ever representing objects in a ‘real space’ this art object presents us with illusion for its own sake. Rather than holding up a mirror to the world, this work is a mirror that provides access to the immateriality of illusion as illusion. Not a window on the world but a portal, or perhaps even a means of transportation, into infinity. Equally I sense being enticed to look into the flickering light as one might look into a fire and see images, the work, in this interpretation, now relating more to the inner world of the viewers’ imagination.

Sarah Sparkes, Flue, 2014, Mixed Media. (My Photo)

Imaginary worlds, from a distant or mythical past seem to feature in John Workman’s Box of Clouds, a metal light-box salvaged from disused darkroom, containing a painting on glass of a figure in a landscape, the light inside glowing through the painted clouds and trees like the dying light of a Claude Lorrain painting and creating a dreamlike quality.

Andy Wicks’ installation, on the other hand, directs my attention to the world immediately in and around the artwork, to the here and now of the project space itself, rather than to immaterial, infinite or imaginary worlds. Making use of LEDs arranged around an empty plane, like a frame around a blank canvas, it’s as if he transposes the tradition of monochrome painting into another key. I am reminded of David Batchelor’s extensive series of photographs of naturally occurring monochromes, except that in Wick’s installation the monochrome occurs by artifice, constructed, but by different means than paint on canvas.

Andy Wicks, Untitled, 2014, installation, (my photo)

I’m struggling to work out what’s happening in collaborative duo Michael Walker and Martyn Hill’s golden, glowing, internally-lit drawing, struggling that is, to work out how it is constructed and from what materials, is it card? It has the appearance of something more hi-tech than that. This engaging piece, featuring serial repetition of geometric units in a grid, likely employs a mathematical system that I am attempting to grasp, and again, not quite getting perhaps because of the back-light fatigue I am experiencing. There is a point at which a regularly repeated sequence starts to dissolve into a unified monochrome expanse and that’s happening for me now, so that what I am most aware of is the golden light emanating from this rectangular box-like object that is not painting, or sculpture or drawing but perhaps a merging of all three. And this not quite getting it is, I think, part of the attraction. I am required to put in an effort with a work that gives up its secrets slowly.

Walker Hill, Prototype, Illuminated pared Drawing# 1 . 2015, (my photo)

I’m now engrossed in Charley Peters’ animations, 99 Drawings and 99 Drawings #2(RGB) ≤ (∆ ̇3) totally fascinated by these line drawings that become a cube that seems to construct and deconstruct in the process of rotation. In a way it’s a study in object formation, or how we construct three dimensions when our eyes actually see only in two. It is equally a demonstration of how we perceive movement when a series of drawings are presented to our eyes one after another in quick succession, that systems quality of emergence when two events are combined and something new and unexpected is generated, resulting here in a piece of work that is endlessly fascinating.

Charley Peters,Still: 99 Drawings #2(RGB)≤(∆ ̇3), 2015, animated pixel drawings. (my photo)

Giulia Ricci’s beautifully slow moving animation entitled Order and Disruption is beguiling, a pattern in blue on white is interrupted as parts become slightly out of sync’ with the rest, and then realign as other sections become slightly out, creating a sense of morphing and bending of space with worm-like figures appearing here and there, but so slowly that it’s difficult to differentiate between my own shifting perception of changing gestalts (that would be there in a still image) and that which is a result of the animation, almost as if that ‘other room’ of my own neuro-logical processing, perhaps not such a ‘black box’ after all, is here coming into awareness.

Giulia Ricci, Order and Disruption, animated film, image by courtesy of the artist and Saturation Point

Thank you Basement Arts Project for your warm welcome, especially as my visit is made out of normal gallery hours. This is a great space for showing and seeing new art, and I am sure I will be back another day.

Other Rooms was on view at Basement Arts Project from 16 Jan to 25 Jan 2015.

New at Saturation Point

Frederik De Wilde, NanoBlck-Sqr #1, 2014, courtesy the artist and Carroll / Fletcher

See Saturation Point, the online editorial and curatorial project for reductive, geometric and systems artists working in the UK, for new interviews with

Carol Robertson, interviewed by Patrick Morrissey

Estelle Thompson, interviewed by Laurence Noga

Julia Farrer, interviewed by  Andy Parkinson

also for recent reviews including:

Francesca Simon, Site Lines, by Andy Parkinson

Frederik De Wilde’s NanoBlck-Sqr #1, by Laura Davidson 

Jonathan Parsons New Paintings by Judith Duquemin

Carol Robertson, Circular Stories, by Charley Peters

There are many good things going on at Saturation Point…but don’t take my word for it.

At Saturation Point

Catch my new review of Making Matters at the Saturation Point website here.

Left, Francesca Simon, In Construction, 2014, acrylic on linen on wood, diptych, each panel 122 x 93 cm. Image courtesy of the artist and Beardsmore Gallery, London. Right, Andrew Bick, OGVDS-GW #5, 2014, acrylic, marker pen, pencil, watercolour, oil paint and wax on linen on wood, 76 x 64 cm. Image by courtesy of the artist and Hales Gallery, London