“One can often be thwarted by some antidisestablishmentarianism”
Curated by Richard Meaghan and Andrew Foulds
ARTISTS
Richard Meaghan
Andrew Foulds
Boo Saville
Paul Rooney
Emma Talbot
Brendan Lyons
Louise Thomas
The Singh Twins
Jaap de Vries
Antidisestablishmentarianism?
1 The movement which apposes the removal of an established authority from the position which that established authority now holds. Usually the right of that established authority to hold this position has only been assumed by that authority to be their right.
2 A really big word that means you’re against the disestablishment of stuff.
3 A long and entirely useless word used by posh gits to try and sound funny and intelligent.
4 The word high school kids use to sound smart while tapping off the bong.
5 The way to use one of the longest words in the dictionary in such a way that it makes sense in conversation.
6 One who is against those who are against those who want to commence a new form of life.
7 The movement which apposes the removal of an established authority from the position which that established authority now holds. Usually the right of that established authority to hold this position has only been assumed by that authority to be their right.
8 This is a word that describes a person or persons who are against the person or persons who are against an establishment of something or issue.
9 The fear of the measure of the amount of hate a person has of non-established society.
10 A very large scrotom.
(text taken from http://www.urbandictionary.com/)
Richard Meaghan
FORTHCOMING EXHIBITIONS
2009 Kapellmeister pulls a doozy; Danielle Arnaud, London
(Artists- Richard Meaghan, Andrew Foulds, Tamsin Morse, John Stark, Zavier Ellis, Andy Denzler, David Hancock, Rui Matsunaga, Rene Holm, The Singh Twins, Julian Lee)
Curated by Richard Meaghan
2008 No Current Bun; View 2 Gallery, Liverpool (solo)
Richard Meaghan & Rene Holm; galarie bn24, Hamburg, Germany
Group Show; Copenhagen, Denmark
Curated by Rene Holm
SELECTED RECENT EXHIBITIONS
2007 I’ll be your mirror; Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool & Gallery Primo Alonso, London
(Artists- Marit Andreassen, Jemima & Dolly Brown, Gordon Cheung, Juno Doran, Leo Fitzmaurice, David Hancock, Owen Leong, Andy Magee, Rui Matsunaga, Stuart Semple, Hannah Wooll, Dawn Woolley, Isabel Young, Richard Meaghan.
Curated by Richard Meaghan & David Hancock)
2006 Exposed- Art & Culture from England’s Northwest; Manchester Square, London
(Artists- Chris Ofili, Keith Tyson, Richard Meaghan, Kevin Cummins, Peter Saville, Rachel Goodyear, The Singh Twins, Neville Gabie, Ian Rawlinson, Leo Fitzmaurice.
Curated by Stephen Snoddy)
Jerusalem; Dean Clough galleries, Halifax
(Artists- Gordon Cheung, David Hancock, Richard Meaghan, Beth Harland, Roderick Harris, Reece Jones, Peter Lamb, Rui Matsunaga, Tamsin Morse, Simon Woolham.
Curated by Richard Meaghan & David Hancock)
Richard Meaghan's paintings are invented and are an amalgamation of a number of differing experiences that revolve around memory, making use of allegorical and pictorial inventions and references from art history. Meaghan's narrations are not linear, but rather associative and analytical, so that the works function like short stories, in which the plot is compressed into single images. However, the fragments have to be pieced together and thus can seemingly fall somewhere between dream, nightmare and reality. The resulting paintings appear as visions of somewhere familiar yet strange, uncanny shimmerings based on careful study of our world that in turn suggests another.
Andrew Foulds
FORTHCOMING EXHIBITIONS
2009 Kapellmeister pulls a doozy; Danielle Arnaud, London
(Artists- Richard Meaghan, Andrew Foulds, Tamsin Morse, John Stark, Zavier Ellis, Andy Denzler, David Hancock, Rui Matsunaga, Rene Holm, The Singh Twins, Julian Lee)
Curated by Richard Meaghan
Andrew Foulds creates complex personal narratives using a wide of found visual material from early photographs to Horror films, The aim is to evoke a mood so that whilst the story is personal, the reading can be universal and can be seen to evoke the epic and the mythical archetypes of the past.
Boo Saville
The first time I laid eyes on the work of British artist and Slade graduate Boo Saville, I was immediately struck by the intensity, intricacy and rawness of her monochromatic ink drawings most of which were created using the humble ballpoint pen which according to the artist can be "worked just like graphite and ink". Since graduating from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2004 Saville has notched up an impressive list of achievements in a short space of time with her work having been exhibited at the General Public Gallery in Berlin, the British Affordable Art Fair and Sesame Art Gallery in London and an exhibition at the extremely prestigious London gallery Martin Summers Fine Art Ltd planned for Spring 2008. In 2004 Saville became one of the first members of the artists co-op The Children of !WOWOW! which enjoys cult status among the contemporary art fraternity with big name artists such as Matthew Stone, Gareth Cadwallader and Ellie Tobin behind its success.An obvious eye for detail and what can only be described as a masterful and innovative use of tonal variation has resulted in works that are far from what one would expect to see from a traditional ink drawing. Detailed, realistic and expertly executed depictions of monkeys and other primates dominate Saville's work and are full of personality and appeal but it is her more adventurous, abstract works that are the most exciting. The ghostly human figures and alien-looking life forms with titles such as 'Grimace', 'Bang Face' and 'Bogman' evoke an immediate response that seems to constantly evolve as one becomes acquainted with each image. It is these works that truly showcase Saville's creativity and ingenuity.
Nicholas Forrest (art critic)
Paul Rooney
Artist Paul Rooney was born in Liverpool in 1967, and trained at Edinburgh College of Art. Paul’s individual practice focused from 1997 to 2000 on the music of the ‘Rooney’ CD’s and performances. He achieved an appearance in John Peel’s Festive Fifty in 1998, and a Radio 1FM ‘Peel session’ by Rooney was broadcast in 1999. Paul now primarily works with text, sound and video, focusing on the voices of semi-fictional individuals exploring the presence of history within the everyday. The works use or reference narrative forms such as short stories, songs, audio guides and sermons.
Commissioning bodies for Paul’s work include Ikon Gallery, Birmingham and Site Gallery, Sheffield. He has had residencies at Dundee Contemporary Arts/University of Dundee VRC and Proyecto Batiscafo, Cuba, and was the Tate Liverpool MOMART Fellow for 2002-2003, the ACE Oxford-Melbourne Artist Fellow for 2004 and is currently the United Artist’s Fellow at the University of Wolverhampton.
Paul has shown recently at Tate Britain, London; BALTIC, Gateshead; Kunst-Werke, Berlin; and at the Shanghai Biennial and showed in British Art Show 6 which toured around the UK in 2006. Other recent projects include a red vinyl record broadcast on Radio Lancashire, Radio 1 and BBC 6 Music, a video piece for Film and Video Umbrella touring to eleven cities around Europe and a short story published by Serpent’s Tail. Paul is currently working towards separate solo shows at Matts Gallery, London, Collective Gallery, Edinburgh, and Kunstlerhaus, Nurnberg, in 2008.
I currently make text, sound and video works that focus on the ‘voices’ of semi-fictional personas which are presented as written, sung or spoken monologues. The works use or reference narrative forms such as short stories, songs, audio guides and letters, and have as their basis the nature of individual subjectivity and identity in relation to place and history.
The narratives voiced by the personas – a hotel maid, a packaging company middle manager, an airborne sprite – sometimes start from a real interview with a real person or group of people, but are as likely to arise from a scene from a novel, a TV documentary or an overheard local urban myth. Each voice is not presented as a unified identity but as a collection of many different voices or cultural and historical references, and all of the separate sources that are referenced in the monologues, including the interviews, are not treated as authentic or inviolable, but are often extended into fiction or used mischievously.
I try to allow each piece I make to filter a different set of ideas through the persona involved. A short story I published recently explored a comedian’s ambition for his writing, and his willingness to literally erase himself to fulfill the potential he felt that his writing had. A recent sound work extended the Brecht/Weill song Pirate Jenny into a hotel maid’s meditation on the presence of history within the everyday; and a new 16mm film I am working on, based on a packaging company manager’s trip to Paris in May 1968, engages with the subjective experience of contemporary events as often one of distance rather than engagement.
There are moments in the works when we suddenly glimpse into a world of unsettling absurdity or ambiguity, and these moments, triggered by comically odd twists in the narrative or by the visual or musical context, are crucial to the understanding of the work as a whole. I am interested in the way our mundane and routine world also resonates with constellations of historical presences, unfulfilled potentials and the messiness of our subjective experience. It is often through confabulation – the creation of imaginative fictions – that we are able to sense this rich potential within our everyday world.
Emma Talbot
Emma Talbot studied at Birmingham Institute of Art and the Royal College of Art. She was a Rome Scholar in 1995 and spent six months in the USA on a Bob and Susan Summers studio award in 1996.
Recent exhibitions include solo shows ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’ at Transition, London and ‘Emma Talbot in translation’ at Quay Arts, Isle of Wight and group shows; ‘The Craft’ with Cathie Pilkington (in association with Marlborough Fine Art) at Folkestone Metropole Galleries and Transition, London, ‘Painted Ladies’ with Eleanor Moreton and Rose Wylie at The Surgery, London, G:Love, Lange Gasse 28, Augsberg, Germany, ‘Goth Moth’, Transition, London, ‘Thy Neighbours Ox’ Space Station 65, London, ‘Acid Drops and Sugar Candy’ Foster Fine Art, London and Transition, London.
Emma Talbot has exhibited internationally in Paris, Le Havre, Tornio , Hameenlina, Sydney, Berlin and Rome, and has work in private and public collections including J. Sainsbury plc, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Unilever, English Heritage.
Emma was guest editor for the ‘Painting + Translating’ issue of Garageland magazine.
Emma Talbot’s paintings of women are open-ended narratives. The figures and spaces are painted from images found in fashion and lifestyle magazines dating from the 1960s to date, sourced in archives and library collections.
These paintings reference the language of desire and aspiration but are at odds with what we see in current mass media, referencing out-of-print images, which, for their original marketing purpose, are now defunct. The paintings draw on ‘old dreams’ and describe a life which full of anti-mainstream, alternative activity, suggestive of kidnappings and cults, brat camps and hide outs.
The lumpy physicality of the paint and use of tertiary colour emphasises the fictional space that occurs when found images are translated into painted scenarios.
Brendan Lyons
Selected recent exhibitions
Solo
‘Window Paintings’ @ Liverpool Biennial Independents 2006.
‘Brendan Lyons’ , @ Hollow Contemporary, London, 2005.
‘Brendan Lyons’ (with Piers Secunda) @ Seven Seven, London 2004.
Group
‘Superscope’ @ Lounge, London , Feb/March 2008
‘Sovereign European Art Prize 2007’ @ Club Row , London Mar 2007.
‘Celeste Art Prize 2006’ @ The Well, London May 2006.
‘Hollow Salon’ @ Hollow Contemporary, London 2006.
‘Art Gene NW Prize 2005’ @ Art Gene, Cumbria, UK 2005.
‘Jerwood Drawing Prize 2004’ @ Jerwood Space, London, + UK tour incl.
Manchester, Birmingham and Cardiff
'Paint in 2003' @ Century Gallery, London Oct 2003.
Many of Brendan Lyons' paintings are made of artists' paint
only. The entire surface, structure, and support consist of
paint alone. A cross-section cut between any two points of
any one painting, would reveal paint only. Other works
consist of sheets and strips of dried artists’ paint – which
are then placed or fixed to other elements which form its
support. These can be windows, floors, walls, and even
traditional canvas supports.
Through experimentation with the techniques of painting,
and the material of artists’ paint itself, Brendan Lyons uses
the traditions and references of Western painting as a
base from which to investigate various issues of interest.
The paintings deal with issues of perception, implied
space, context, surface, framing, language, signs,
reference, history, time, givens, boundary, attachment,
ambiguity and association. Oppositions such as
internal/external; negative/positive; front/back; use/form;
surface/structure; simple/complex. Undecidables such as
painting and/or support; signifier and/or signified;
representation and/or original; subject and/or object.
The selection of ‘what’ to make from this artists’ paint, and
It’s context, are central to Brendan’s practice.
Louise Thomas
June 2007
Concrete Hole You Clench My Soul
PZ Gallery, Penzance
Curated by myself. Showing recent work by Yasmin Ineson, Cat Bagg, Rose O'Gallivan and myself.
X-posure Revolver
PZ Gallery, Penzance
Artists led revolving exhibition. Curated by Jesse Leroy Smith and Volker Stox. Showing work of both established and emerging artists.
4 New Sensations
Brick Lane, LondonArt prize organised by The Saatchi Gallery and Channel. The exhibition, sponsored by Coutts and the Zabludowicz Collection was held at the Truman brewery, brick lane, London.
Sunrise with Sea MonstersTrinity Buoy Wharf, London
www.sunrisewithseamonster.net
A self initiated and self directed graduate group show.
Debuting new contemporary Cornish art in London.
Position: Head of fundraising/initiator of event.
June 2007
Falmouth Graduate showWoodlane campus, Falmouth, CornwallDegree show.
March 2007
Ferdynand Zweig Scholarship
Poly arts Centre, Cornwall
Exhibition of work made after receiving the scholarship that allowed me to conduct studies in Italy. Including paintings, photography, journals and film.
August 2006
ShelflifeThe gallery, SurreyJoint painting show with Jonathon Stubbs. Organised and curated by ourselves
My current work is the exploration of tourist space both past and present. Sites of interest for me include children’s holiday resorts, hotel architecture, Lido's in Britain and resort complexes. I work in a hotel and I have collected many recommended hotel brochures from the bedrooms. My recent paintings have been produced through the collection and reassemble of these holiday brochures. It is the innate banality of the holiday resort that fascinates me. I am influenced directly by the brochures. There are no traces of the past nor are their signs of the future.
The Singh Twins
Solo Exhibitions
2006 Masala Art; Anant Gallery, New Delhi, India. 7th-21st March 2006.
2005 Past Modern;The Singh Twins; major retrospective at The City Gallery, Leicester.
4th June - 9th July 2005.
2005 Past Modern:The Singh Twins; major retrospective at The Walker Art Gallery,
Liverpool. 22nd January - 17th April 2005.
2004 The Singh Twins; Derby City Museum and Art Gallery. 22nd September - 24th
October 2004
Group Exhibitions
2006 Two 2 Tango; Organised by Gallery Nvya but held at Lalit Kala Academi, New
Delhi, India, 15th-29th April.
2005 The Via Dolorosa Project; A multi-media presentation of the 'Stations of the Cross'
by artists of different faiths. St Mary's Church, Slough then touring. (An 'Art
Beyond Belief' initiative launched on 19th March 2005).
2004 Ritu:A Gathering of Seasons; Organised by Anant Art Gallery but held at Triveni
Kala Sangam, New Delhi, India. 8th - 17th January 2005.
2005 Faith; Nottingham Castle Museum.18th December 2004 - 13th February 2005
The Singh Twins employ traditional techniques used in Indian miniature painting to produce vibrant, exquisitely-detailed paintings that are a joy to explore. Some of the paintings are by a single twin – others are produced in tandem, with both painting simultaneously. The exhibition features works from the past seventeen years, as well as some new pieces.
The fusion of Asian and Western influence and their interest in global iconography has generated some fascinating juxtapositions in the Singh Twins’ paintings. This is both a reflection of their dual cultural identity and a clever vehicle for political and social commentary.
Their colourful, illustrative pictures cover a diverse range of challenging themes, from materialism and the cult of celebrity to politics. They question existing stereotypes and attempt to redefine narrow perceptions of heritage and identity in art and in society.
The Singh Twins’ work has an optimistic, decorative visual quality that captures the attention of the viewer and draws them in to the minute detail. Although their observations are often witty, closer inspection and interpretation reveals that they are dealing with themes of important critical debate.
Many early works, such as ‘All Hands on Deck’, were created in response to the prejudice that they encountered as art students when their style was criticised for being inappropriately rooted in an Eastern artistic style.
Some of their most famous paintings are deliberately provocative, encourage debate and have sparked lively reactions in the media. These include the Beckhams as ‘the New Royal Family’ and the more serious ‘Nineteen Eighty Four’, which depicts the human tragedy of the Indian Government’s storming of the Golden Temple in 1984.
During Manchester’s 2002 Commonwealth Games, the Singh Twins were appointed as official artists in residence. They produced their SPOrTLIGHT series, which examined the relationship between the worlds of sport, media and celebrity. It features sporting icons such as Venus Williams, Muhammed Ali and David Ginola.
More recently they have worked on ‘The Art of Loving’ Ragamala series. This takes its influence from traditional miniature paintings that developed in 17th century India. These ‘ragamalas’ traditionally reflect the emotions prompted by melodies (or ragas) of classical Indian music. The Singh Twins reinterpret the Ragamala tradition in a contemporary context. Each work adopts the title of a modern Western popular song whose theme, melody and lyrics reflect the key sentiments of the painting.
Jaap de Vries
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
2006 Let your body talk , ARTI E AMICITIAE, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
2006 KUNSTVLAAI, Westergasfabriek, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
2007 20 HOXTON SQUARE, London, UK
2007 Decay, Decadence and the Demimonde. THE HOME HOUSE, London, UK.
2007 Gallery Majke Hüsstege, Den Bosch, the Netherlands
2008 Gallery Stefanie Bergot, Paris, France
My work is centred on juxtaposing a world controlled by prohibitions and another, more sacral world: the world of play. Recurring themes include: ‘the unity of the sacred’, ‘the erotic’ and ‘the aesthetic’.
The basis of my work is painting and water-colouring. I also make films, photographs and sculptures. I am motivated by my experience ‘that the world in which I live does not tally with my desires’.
Art, I believe, enables me to create the space that allows those desires to come alive that in the world around me are subordinate or hidden. I like to experiment with different materials: paint, ink, rubber, photo/paper, purfoam, aluminium etc. I usually work on the standing format 200 x 150 cm. I have developed my own techniques, which involves working on paper and aluminium, with acrylics, cutting up shapes, and subsequently 'sticking' them back on the base with paint...
I use watercolours to create imperfect portraits, in which the mutilation is a metaphor for genuine experience. The watercolour shows that it is the paint itself that makes the wounds; the blood-flowing paint apparently has the capacity to do the same as real cutting. A face evidently still has the power to speak and to torment us with the question what experience it is hiding from us, and apparently the paint itself (and not the representation) is enough to convey this power. Unlike the moving images of a film, art (painting) allows us to experience the unreal as unreal and thereby creates an intimacy and rapport with our desires, in an atmosphere that allows us to become conscious of ourselves and our desires!
Tuesday 18 December 2007
Kapellmeister pulls a doozy
Richard Meaghan & Andrew Foulds present
Kapellmeister Pulls A Doozy
A Proposal
The fictional Mary Kapellmeister was born to immigrant parents in Liverpool on 1st May 1892. Her seminal play The Bankers was released to strong, if localised critical acclaim in 1921 and lent heavily on her experiences of the First World War for the story and tone of the work. The narrative follows the fortunes of a group of bank clerks who head off to help in the war effort and the psychological and physical strain placed on the women they left behind. It is thought that Kapellmeister used the letters from her fiancé and brother, who both died in the war, to inform her account of the atrocities that faced the young men sent to the trenches, however, it must also be understood that much of the atmosphere evoked will have been from the fractured imagination of a woman drowning in grief. It is unknown why this play did not propel Mary onto greater success, perhaps the often surreal quirks (the whole of the cast were males, harking back to traditional theatre) were too much to take for a mere provincial audience. She died penniless and out of work only 5 years later at the age of 34.
The name Kapellmeister derives from the term given to the director of a modern choir, however, the term originated from the director of the orchestra, choir or opera in the household of a German prince. The use of this name is intended to suggest a complexity to Mary’s character, to enhance her outsider credentials and build on the myth of the tragic genius. Living as a second generation German immigrant in England during the First World War, we can surmise that her family would have received a certain amount of trouble from the wave of nationalist propaganda that surfaces at the onset of the war. There is also then, the issue of where your own allegiances lie, especially as she may have also had family living in and fighting for Germany. The logical conclusion of this personal history is that it is easier to understand how someone in Mary Kapellmeister’s position could see with more clarity the futility and stupidity of the war.
Then there is the matter of Mary’s idiosyncratic quirks, such as her use of an all male cast in The Bankers. It seems counter-productive, especially as the feminist movement was at last starting to show signs of advancement, particularly due to women’s important role in the factories during the First World War, ending the myth that they could not handle hard labour. It may be deemed possible that Mary had no interest in the feminist movement and that producing an all male cast- even for the female roles- was a way of lubricating her relationships with the male dominated hierarchy within the theatre system. It could also be read that by negating the presence of women within the play, she is actually accentuating the impact of their absence, heightening the sense of an emotional imbalance. Add this to evidence within the paintings that the male actors playing female parts seemed to be encouraged to maintain their masculine traits, such as keeping facial hair, adding to the sense of the ludicrous, and the second option seems most likely. The intention of giving our heroine a quasi-political surface, yet leaving the question open to interpretation has been to add flesh to her artistic skeleton, giving her a life outside of Andrew Foulds and Richard Meaghan’s interests and challenging the modernists notion of definitive’s.
For Richard Meaghan and Andrew Foulds and the artists involved, Mary Kapellmeister and The Bankers offers an opportunity to explore within a restricted contextual space their mutual interest in the themes of fantasy and nostalgia. They have both used the story of Mary Kapellmeister in their own individual way and their intention for themselves and the artists involved has always been to create artistic re-interpretations and not illustrations of the various events.
Richard Meaghan
Richard Meaghan’s paintings are invented and are an amalgamation of a number of differing experiences that revolve around memory, making use of allegorical and pictorial inventions and references from contemporary art and art history. Meaghan’s narrations are not linear, but rather associative and analytical, so that the works function like short stories, in which the plot is compressed into single images. However, the fragments have to be pieced together and thus can seemingly fall somewhere between dream and reality. The resulting paintings appear as visions of somewhere familiar yet strange, uncanny shimmerings based on careful study of our world that in turn suggests another.
2008 One can often be thwarted by some antidisestablishmentarianism, Gallery Primo Alonso, London (artist & curator)
No Current Bun, View2Gallery, Liverpool (solo)
Richard Meaghan& Rene Holm, Galerie db24, Hamburg, Germany
Group Show, Galerie Wolfsen, Denmark
2006-7 I'll be Your Mirror; Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool; Gallery Primo Alonso, London (artist & curator)
2006 Exposed; Manchester Square, London (curated by Stephen Snoddy)
Jerusalem; Dean Clough galleries, Halifax (artist & curator)
Rui Matsunaga
“There is a fusion of contemporary cartoon animation and ancient mythology in Matsuanaga’s paintings. They show us the shapes and attributes of what we might call Modern Gods.” (Morgan Falconer, RA Magazine 2002) Rui Matsunaga is interested in exaggerating the tension between reality and fiction in the everyday, where the fairy-tale seeps through, guiding and revealing a dimension fused with the magical and spiritual. Books and films of fantasy, Science Fiction, mythologies and Japanese comics (Manga) inform my paintings and merge around the figures she paint. Everyday images collected from magazines, newspapers and photographs are used as starting points and are morphed into the otherworldly. Through the slow process of painting, she becomes far more involved with the images, nurturing the ordinary figures into revealing the entities existing in a magical or spiritual world.2007 Tech-Mac-Maya-Kon (Solo), Primo Alonso, London2006 10th Planet, Unit A04 Tower Bridge Business Complex, Bermondsey, UK I’ll be your mirror, Liverpool Biennale, Liverpool (Curated by David Hancock and Richard Meaghan) Jerusalem, Dean Clough, Halifax Heathen Threshold, Sartorial Contemporary, London Outdoors, Danielle Arnaud Gallery, London2005 We have Left the City Gates, Nunnery Gallery, London (Curated by JJ Charlesworth) New London Kicks, Wooster Projects, New York RAdical, Jerwood Space. London NLK (In association with Armory Show), SohoHouse, New York
Rene Holm
René Holm’s extensive series of paintings Things Happen seem to touch on such existential themes as destiny and free will. In many of the pictures we encounter a person in front of a house with these two elements blending together with the trees, the sky and the landscape into an atmospheric unity. Many of the works have a certain melancholy about them. One senses loss, upheaval, change, belief and doubt, but at the same time a feeling of strength, a taking on board of the fact that things happen. One never knows what tomorrow may bring, a daily reminder that yesterday we could not prepare ourselves for what was destined to happen today.
We cannot control our destiny, but it is that very awareness that gives us strength, the strength of the individual. It is as if these works remind us how inclined we are to link our identity to our surroundings and just how fragile that can be. Our job, our family, as well as material things such as our house and where we live. René Holm has taken his characters and placed them outside, With their backs to their houses, in the middle of a natural world where night and day, summer and winter, are indistinguishable. But far from giving a feeling of insecurity and fright, there is a focus on the person, standing boldly in the foreground, liberated from their surroundings, calm, upright and looking the spectator directly in the eye.
At the same time one cannot simply interpret these pictures as a tribute to pure individualism. Certain works present more characters, lending a greater complexity and – not surprisingly – reminding us that we are individuals with a need to be near others. In Carpe Diem we see a man and a woman in the foreground. Behind them is a road that runs under a covered bridge. The couple are at once united and separated – despite the fact that they are holding hands, their bodies and faces are directed away from each other. Will they remain together or go their separate ways? They both seem static and reluctant. Maybe they are nervous about taking their first step towards uncertainty – whether together or by themselves? Through the bridge we perceive a brighter sky. Hence the title. Movement is necessary: seize the day, live in the here and now, follow the light! If you dare!
You could have it all focuses on the uneven number three and its unlucky significance in human relationships, here in the form of three girls, two of whom are opposing the other. The girl who is standing alone has her back to the spectator. Her exclusion is further symbolised by the dark tree between the girls, the stem of which divides into three: one branch above two others that are intertwined.
The pictures in Things Happen deal with the small chance events and the big choices, which for a moment can knock us off course. Sometimes the result is something better, sometimes something worse, but overall there is a change that can make us wiser, happier, sadder, more lucky or unlucky – all of which are a part of the life we live.
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
2007 Gallery Franz Pedersen, group
2007 Vilnius Painting triennial – Vilnius Contempoary Art Museum
2007 Art – Herning, group
2006 Janus Art Museum Tistrup, group
2006 Gallery Franz Pedersen Horsens, Outsiders” solo
2006 Galery Wolfsen, Ålborg, “ Sixteen Destinies” solo
2006 Art - Copenhagen, group
2006 Art - Herning, group
Andrew Foulds
Through exploring the historical qualities of paint and closely observing the detritus of our environment- discarded postcards, spoiled photographs, old horror film annuals and exercise manuals- Andrew Foulds strives to find what is at the heart of the current social and emotional condition. Juxtaposing strange dissonant characters that seek to mimic the epic personality defining creations of myth, he hopes to enliven a narrative that forces the viewer to confront the complexity inherent to notions of social interaction and isolation.
David Hancock
The focus of my work has been the idea of escapism, whether through youth subcultures or by directly referencing historical utopian visions. In my latest series of works, I have attempted to create a series of tableaux that discuss a variety of issues that effect young people. Partly inspired by the films of John Hughes and the ‘Brat Pack’ and their cynical attempts encapsulate the zeitgeist of the period; I have contrived a way of developing a body of work that embodies the experience of youth. As with my more recent work, these paintings are also drawn from a narrative base, which is supplied through a network of acquaintances and based upon real experiences sent to me as prose. It is my intention to create a continual narrative that runs throughout the body of work based around the relationships between a selection of individuals. They will feature either singly or as a group and be completely interchangeable, appearing randomly situations so that it will appear as though we are tracking the lives of a group of friends over a period of time, in a similar way to a soap opera. Their lives will become intertwined as their relationships commence or disintegrate.
Another key reference in my work is the signifiers taken from historical works of art. These are suggested in the work through the appropriation of composition, gestures or objects. The selection of these works is to allude to the narrative that forms the basis of the work. In a society marked by increasing mobility, my work reflects the desire for intimacy. I have chosen to create a Utopia within the fabric of my work that draws parallels between desires of the past and those present in our own society.
Solo Exhibitions:
2007 ‘How Can Someone so Young Sing Words So Sad’, Transit, Mechelen, Belgium
2006 ‘Who Will Eat my Sadness’, The Agency, London
2005 ‘The Beautiful People’, Leicester City Gallery
Selected Group Exhibitions:
2007 ‘Teenage Kicks’, Vegas Gallery, London
2006 ‘I-POD Killed the Video Star’, Showroomama, Rotterdam, Netherlands
‘I Ain't No Yesterdays News’, Gallery Likovni Krug, ExitFest, Serbia & Tour
‘Portreto Formate’, ARKA Gallery, Vilnius, Lithuania & Tour
Andy Denzler
In view of current events and my ongoing examination of the virtual design process I have started to pursue a new direction in my artistic expression. Photographic elements have started to appear in my hitherto abstract works of art and may find their most prominent expression in my latest portrait series. The blurring and the movement in these figurative works have been inspired by press photography and my fascination with the light effects of film, video stills and photography. The use of sepia in the black and white portraits enhance their photographic character as if they were historic images. The harmonic interplay between contrary tonal gradation, heavy and light forms, or dense and transparent textures requires subtle balancing. The inner balance of the works radiates at the same time stimulation as well as calm.
Affected by the new media my works may be associated with “New Paintings” and its tension between polar opposites, which have always influenced my work: between the individual and society, between freedom and order. My works respond to traditional portrait painting through an expressive and multilayered application of paint and the subsequent removal there of. The soft responds the hard, the smooth answers the rough. The identity of each protagonist is strengthened by the haptic/direct intervention. This makes the people who are portrayed appear much more vulnerable. Ultimately, it serves as a reminder to the vulnerability and transience/transitoriness of our existence.
There is something to be said for being by oneself. Such moments can provide freedom for contemplation, insight and
reflection. My paintings allows a viewer to enter into a private, psycho-geographic space. Each space, each canvasI I am painting suggest a type of psychological landscape in which viewers might find themselves in – a desolate yet strangely passionate landscape that shapes itself through colour, time and mystical topologies.
Solo Exhibitions
2007 Galeria Filomena Soares, Lisbon
2006 Ruth Bachofner Gallery, Los Angeles
University of the Arts, London
Kashya Hildebrand, Zurich
2005 Kashya Hildebrand, New York
Galerie Raphael Rigassi, Bern
Mönchof Galerie, Wehrli, Kilchberg
Group Exhibitions
2007 Anticipation, One One One, London
2006 Frieze art fair, London
Kunst 2006, Zurich
2005 Galerie Wandelbar, Gstaad
Kashya Hildebrand Gallery, Geneva
2003 Art Basel 34, Basel
Tamsin Morse
Morse's landscape paintings have a deep relationship to the specific way in which they are made. Encompassing the action of drawing they come to exist in another world beyond nature. Their purpose is to suggest the real, content wise and compositionally, but with use of colour and line, create, on second glance, a fairly ominous and slightly sinister world. Morse sees much of her painting and drawing as a kind of writing; no more so than in the repetitive 'squiggles' within the work which she sees as a composition of an abstracted written narrative that formulates into a figurative element. For example, shaping areas of ground or bark with quick marks of the paintbrush, that are describing a form rather than painting it flat or tonally.The worlds she paints are initially inviting through their familiar genre and accessible colour. On closer inspection they become quagmires and inaccessible hostile environments that are uncomfortable and unwelcoming.
Solo Exhibitions
2006 One in the Other, London
Group Exhibitions
2007 Jerwood painting Prize, London
2006 Between a rock and a hard place: the Stone in Art, Rove, London Territory, Uni of Arts, London
Black Moon Island, One in the Other, London
The Singh Twins
Solo Exhibitions
2006 Masala Art; Anant Gallery, New Delhi, India. 7th-21st March 2006.
2005 Past Modern;The Singh Twins; major retrospective at The City Gallery, Leicester.
4th June - 9th July 2005.
2005 Past Modern:The Singh Twins; major retrospective at The Walker Art Gallery,
Liverpool. 22nd January - 17th April 2005.
2004 The Singh Twins; Derby City Museum and Art Gallery. 22nd September - 24th
October 2004
Group Exhibitions
2006 Two 2 Tango; Organised by Gallery Nvya but held at Lalit Kala Academi, New
Delhi, India, 15th-29th April.
2005 The Via Dolorosa Project; A multi-media presentation of the 'Stations of the Cross'
by artists of different faiths. St Mary's Church, Slough then touring. (An 'Art
Beyond Belief' initiative launched on 19th March 2005).
2004 Ritu:A Gathering of Seasons; Organised by Anant Art Gallery but held at Triveni
Kala Sangam, New Delhi, India. 8th - 17th January 2005.
2005 Faith; Nottingham Castle Museum.18th December 2004 - 13th February 2
Julian Lee
Although clear in subject, my paintings neither directly define nor specify, rather observe. There are no people but the human presence is always there. An early morning stroll through the still empty and quiet streets before the city awakes, or twilight before the night begins. That short experience for me is the city’s unconsciousness at it’s most visible and is where I’m tapping into.
To most city dwellers, the slow, gradual changing of the seasons is a miracle often ignored or taken for granted. Nature itself plays a major role in the work with seasonal change and its colours deciding my palette. I feel I owe it to the sheer beauty and diversity of nature to rendered it painstakingly in paint with an almost classical appreciation. A sort of romantic homage.
These paintings have a distinctively north European D.N.A. A reoccurring theme is that of Nature. To most north Europeans nature is a metaphor for a Society Utopia. To most English nature is considered a private sanctuary. Being English and living in the heart of Germany allows me to celebrate and explore both sensibilities.
Behind the „Europeaness lie more contemporary issues. Graffiti is random, relentless, pointless, sprayed everywhere, over anything, and on any available surface, including my canvases, which are also surfaces. Nature and Graffiti mirror each other, growing rapidly, obsessively fighting for space. Graffiti is part of the landscape, part of the painting.
Recent Exhibitions
2007 (Solo) Galerie Schuster, BERLIN
2007 Scope Art Fair, Basel
Future Exhibitions
2007 Live Visual Collaboration with musicians Wolfgang Flür (ex-Kraftwerk) and German band
John Stark
The uncanny and the sublime find their most cogent expression in contemporary visual culture in genres like horror and fantasy. John Stark's sombre black-and-grey paintings combine their imagery with the Romanticism's rhetoric of landscape. He underlines how the concerns and motifs of the 19th-century high culture continue to thrive in 21st-century popular culture and investigates the possibilities afforded by these subliminal continuities of Western culture."
The recent series of small paintings attempt to cater for an individual’s love of luxury in the same way as a goldsmith or furniture maker. I look back to painters like Salvator Rosa, Jan Fyt, Ruisdael, Bercham, and Friedrich. They are loosely referenced in the paintings through an intuitive process alongside various films, postcards, novels, comics and found images. The works themselves waver between the familiar and the unexpected, the melodramatic and the gothic, Romanticism and Death-metal."First of all, what is the Beautiful?
For Schelling it is the infinite expressing it self in the finite; for Reid, an occult quality; for Jouffroy an indestructible fact; for de Maistre what is agreeable to virtue; for Pere Andre what conforms to reason.
And there are several kinds of Beautiful; a beautiful in the sciences, geometry is beautiful; a beautiful in ethics, Socrates death is undeniably beautiful. A beautiful in the animal kingdom. A dog's beauty consists in its sense of smell. A pig could never be beautiful, given its filthy habits, nor a serpent, for it evokes ideas of baseness....In short the primary condition of the beautiful is unity in variety, that is the principle." -Gustave Flaubert, 'Bouvard and Pecuchet'
Recent Exhibitions
2007 Eau Savage II, Fieldgate gallery, London
Les Fleur Du Mal, Gallery Primo Alonso, London
New London Kicks, Soho House, New York
Kapellmeister Pulls A Doozy
A Proposal
The fictional Mary Kapellmeister was born to immigrant parents in Liverpool on 1st May 1892. Her seminal play The Bankers was released to strong, if localised critical acclaim in 1921 and lent heavily on her experiences of the First World War for the story and tone of the work. The narrative follows the fortunes of a group of bank clerks who head off to help in the war effort and the psychological and physical strain placed on the women they left behind. It is thought that Kapellmeister used the letters from her fiancé and brother, who both died in the war, to inform her account of the atrocities that faced the young men sent to the trenches, however, it must also be understood that much of the atmosphere evoked will have been from the fractured imagination of a woman drowning in grief. It is unknown why this play did not propel Mary onto greater success, perhaps the often surreal quirks (the whole of the cast were males, harking back to traditional theatre) were too much to take for a mere provincial audience. She died penniless and out of work only 5 years later at the age of 34.
The name Kapellmeister derives from the term given to the director of a modern choir, however, the term originated from the director of the orchestra, choir or opera in the household of a German prince. The use of this name is intended to suggest a complexity to Mary’s character, to enhance her outsider credentials and build on the myth of the tragic genius. Living as a second generation German immigrant in England during the First World War, we can surmise that her family would have received a certain amount of trouble from the wave of nationalist propaganda that surfaces at the onset of the war. There is also then, the issue of where your own allegiances lie, especially as she may have also had family living in and fighting for Germany. The logical conclusion of this personal history is that it is easier to understand how someone in Mary Kapellmeister’s position could see with more clarity the futility and stupidity of the war.
Then there is the matter of Mary’s idiosyncratic quirks, such as her use of an all male cast in The Bankers. It seems counter-productive, especially as the feminist movement was at last starting to show signs of advancement, particularly due to women’s important role in the factories during the First World War, ending the myth that they could not handle hard labour. It may be deemed possible that Mary had no interest in the feminist movement and that producing an all male cast- even for the female roles- was a way of lubricating her relationships with the male dominated hierarchy within the theatre system. It could also be read that by negating the presence of women within the play, she is actually accentuating the impact of their absence, heightening the sense of an emotional imbalance. Add this to evidence within the paintings that the male actors playing female parts seemed to be encouraged to maintain their masculine traits, such as keeping facial hair, adding to the sense of the ludicrous, and the second option seems most likely. The intention of giving our heroine a quasi-political surface, yet leaving the question open to interpretation has been to add flesh to her artistic skeleton, giving her a life outside of Andrew Foulds and Richard Meaghan’s interests and challenging the modernists notion of definitive’s.
For Richard Meaghan and Andrew Foulds and the artists involved, Mary Kapellmeister and The Bankers offers an opportunity to explore within a restricted contextual space their mutual interest in the themes of fantasy and nostalgia. They have both used the story of Mary Kapellmeister in their own individual way and their intention for themselves and the artists involved has always been to create artistic re-interpretations and not illustrations of the various events.
Richard Meaghan
Richard Meaghan’s paintings are invented and are an amalgamation of a number of differing experiences that revolve around memory, making use of allegorical and pictorial inventions and references from contemporary art and art history. Meaghan’s narrations are not linear, but rather associative and analytical, so that the works function like short stories, in which the plot is compressed into single images. However, the fragments have to be pieced together and thus can seemingly fall somewhere between dream and reality. The resulting paintings appear as visions of somewhere familiar yet strange, uncanny shimmerings based on careful study of our world that in turn suggests another.
2008 One can often be thwarted by some antidisestablishmentarianism, Gallery Primo Alonso, London (artist & curator)
No Current Bun, View2Gallery, Liverpool (solo)
Richard Meaghan& Rene Holm, Galerie db24, Hamburg, Germany
Group Show, Galerie Wolfsen, Denmark
2006-7 I'll be Your Mirror; Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool; Gallery Primo Alonso, London (artist & curator)
2006 Exposed; Manchester Square, London (curated by Stephen Snoddy)
Jerusalem; Dean Clough galleries, Halifax (artist & curator)
Rui Matsunaga
“There is a fusion of contemporary cartoon animation and ancient mythology in Matsuanaga’s paintings. They show us the shapes and attributes of what we might call Modern Gods.” (Morgan Falconer, RA Magazine 2002) Rui Matsunaga is interested in exaggerating the tension between reality and fiction in the everyday, where the fairy-tale seeps through, guiding and revealing a dimension fused with the magical and spiritual. Books and films of fantasy, Science Fiction, mythologies and Japanese comics (Manga) inform my paintings and merge around the figures she paint. Everyday images collected from magazines, newspapers and photographs are used as starting points and are morphed into the otherworldly. Through the slow process of painting, she becomes far more involved with the images, nurturing the ordinary figures into revealing the entities existing in a magical or spiritual world.2007 Tech-Mac-Maya-Kon (Solo), Primo Alonso, London2006 10th Planet, Unit A04 Tower Bridge Business Complex, Bermondsey, UK I’ll be your mirror, Liverpool Biennale, Liverpool (Curated by David Hancock and Richard Meaghan) Jerusalem, Dean Clough, Halifax Heathen Threshold, Sartorial Contemporary, London Outdoors, Danielle Arnaud Gallery, London2005 We have Left the City Gates, Nunnery Gallery, London (Curated by JJ Charlesworth) New London Kicks, Wooster Projects, New York RAdical, Jerwood Space. London NLK (In association with Armory Show), SohoHouse, New York
Rene Holm
René Holm’s extensive series of paintings Things Happen seem to touch on such existential themes as destiny and free will. In many of the pictures we encounter a person in front of a house with these two elements blending together with the trees, the sky and the landscape into an atmospheric unity. Many of the works have a certain melancholy about them. One senses loss, upheaval, change, belief and doubt, but at the same time a feeling of strength, a taking on board of the fact that things happen. One never knows what tomorrow may bring, a daily reminder that yesterday we could not prepare ourselves for what was destined to happen today.
We cannot control our destiny, but it is that very awareness that gives us strength, the strength of the individual. It is as if these works remind us how inclined we are to link our identity to our surroundings and just how fragile that can be. Our job, our family, as well as material things such as our house and where we live. René Holm has taken his characters and placed them outside, With their backs to their houses, in the middle of a natural world where night and day, summer and winter, are indistinguishable. But far from giving a feeling of insecurity and fright, there is a focus on the person, standing boldly in the foreground, liberated from their surroundings, calm, upright and looking the spectator directly in the eye.
At the same time one cannot simply interpret these pictures as a tribute to pure individualism. Certain works present more characters, lending a greater complexity and – not surprisingly – reminding us that we are individuals with a need to be near others. In Carpe Diem we see a man and a woman in the foreground. Behind them is a road that runs under a covered bridge. The couple are at once united and separated – despite the fact that they are holding hands, their bodies and faces are directed away from each other. Will they remain together or go their separate ways? They both seem static and reluctant. Maybe they are nervous about taking their first step towards uncertainty – whether together or by themselves? Through the bridge we perceive a brighter sky. Hence the title. Movement is necessary: seize the day, live in the here and now, follow the light! If you dare!
You could have it all focuses on the uneven number three and its unlucky significance in human relationships, here in the form of three girls, two of whom are opposing the other. The girl who is standing alone has her back to the spectator. Her exclusion is further symbolised by the dark tree between the girls, the stem of which divides into three: one branch above two others that are intertwined.
The pictures in Things Happen deal with the small chance events and the big choices, which for a moment can knock us off course. Sometimes the result is something better, sometimes something worse, but overall there is a change that can make us wiser, happier, sadder, more lucky or unlucky – all of which are a part of the life we live.
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
2007 Gallery Franz Pedersen, group
2007 Vilnius Painting triennial – Vilnius Contempoary Art Museum
2007 Art – Herning, group
2006 Janus Art Museum Tistrup, group
2006 Gallery Franz Pedersen Horsens, Outsiders” solo
2006 Galery Wolfsen, Ålborg, “ Sixteen Destinies” solo
2006 Art - Copenhagen, group
2006 Art - Herning, group
Andrew Foulds
Through exploring the historical qualities of paint and closely observing the detritus of our environment- discarded postcards, spoiled photographs, old horror film annuals and exercise manuals- Andrew Foulds strives to find what is at the heart of the current social and emotional condition. Juxtaposing strange dissonant characters that seek to mimic the epic personality defining creations of myth, he hopes to enliven a narrative that forces the viewer to confront the complexity inherent to notions of social interaction and isolation.
David Hancock
The focus of my work has been the idea of escapism, whether through youth subcultures or by directly referencing historical utopian visions. In my latest series of works, I have attempted to create a series of tableaux that discuss a variety of issues that effect young people. Partly inspired by the films of John Hughes and the ‘Brat Pack’ and their cynical attempts encapsulate the zeitgeist of the period; I have contrived a way of developing a body of work that embodies the experience of youth. As with my more recent work, these paintings are also drawn from a narrative base, which is supplied through a network of acquaintances and based upon real experiences sent to me as prose. It is my intention to create a continual narrative that runs throughout the body of work based around the relationships between a selection of individuals. They will feature either singly or as a group and be completely interchangeable, appearing randomly situations so that it will appear as though we are tracking the lives of a group of friends over a period of time, in a similar way to a soap opera. Their lives will become intertwined as their relationships commence or disintegrate.
Another key reference in my work is the signifiers taken from historical works of art. These are suggested in the work through the appropriation of composition, gestures or objects. The selection of these works is to allude to the narrative that forms the basis of the work. In a society marked by increasing mobility, my work reflects the desire for intimacy. I have chosen to create a Utopia within the fabric of my work that draws parallels between desires of the past and those present in our own society.
Solo Exhibitions:
2007 ‘How Can Someone so Young Sing Words So Sad’, Transit, Mechelen, Belgium
2006 ‘Who Will Eat my Sadness’, The Agency, London
2005 ‘The Beautiful People’, Leicester City Gallery
Selected Group Exhibitions:
2007 ‘Teenage Kicks’, Vegas Gallery, London
2006 ‘I-POD Killed the Video Star’, Showroomama, Rotterdam, Netherlands
‘I Ain't No Yesterdays News’, Gallery Likovni Krug, ExitFest, Serbia & Tour
‘Portreto Formate’, ARKA Gallery, Vilnius, Lithuania & Tour
Andy Denzler
In view of current events and my ongoing examination of the virtual design process I have started to pursue a new direction in my artistic expression. Photographic elements have started to appear in my hitherto abstract works of art and may find their most prominent expression in my latest portrait series. The blurring and the movement in these figurative works have been inspired by press photography and my fascination with the light effects of film, video stills and photography. The use of sepia in the black and white portraits enhance their photographic character as if they were historic images. The harmonic interplay between contrary tonal gradation, heavy and light forms, or dense and transparent textures requires subtle balancing. The inner balance of the works radiates at the same time stimulation as well as calm.
Affected by the new media my works may be associated with “New Paintings” and its tension between polar opposites, which have always influenced my work: between the individual and society, between freedom and order. My works respond to traditional portrait painting through an expressive and multilayered application of paint and the subsequent removal there of. The soft responds the hard, the smooth answers the rough. The identity of each protagonist is strengthened by the haptic/direct intervention. This makes the people who are portrayed appear much more vulnerable. Ultimately, it serves as a reminder to the vulnerability and transience/transitoriness of our existence.
There is something to be said for being by oneself. Such moments can provide freedom for contemplation, insight and
reflection. My paintings allows a viewer to enter into a private, psycho-geographic space. Each space, each canvasI I am painting suggest a type of psychological landscape in which viewers might find themselves in – a desolate yet strangely passionate landscape that shapes itself through colour, time and mystical topologies.
Solo Exhibitions
2007 Galeria Filomena Soares, Lisbon
2006 Ruth Bachofner Gallery, Los Angeles
University of the Arts, London
Kashya Hildebrand, Zurich
2005 Kashya Hildebrand, New York
Galerie Raphael Rigassi, Bern
Mönchof Galerie, Wehrli, Kilchberg
Group Exhibitions
2007 Anticipation, One One One, London
2006 Frieze art fair, London
Kunst 2006, Zurich
2005 Galerie Wandelbar, Gstaad
Kashya Hildebrand Gallery, Geneva
2003 Art Basel 34, Basel
Tamsin Morse
Morse's landscape paintings have a deep relationship to the specific way in which they are made. Encompassing the action of drawing they come to exist in another world beyond nature. Their purpose is to suggest the real, content wise and compositionally, but with use of colour and line, create, on second glance, a fairly ominous and slightly sinister world. Morse sees much of her painting and drawing as a kind of writing; no more so than in the repetitive 'squiggles' within the work which she sees as a composition of an abstracted written narrative that formulates into a figurative element. For example, shaping areas of ground or bark with quick marks of the paintbrush, that are describing a form rather than painting it flat or tonally.The worlds she paints are initially inviting through their familiar genre and accessible colour. On closer inspection they become quagmires and inaccessible hostile environments that are uncomfortable and unwelcoming.
Solo Exhibitions
2006 One in the Other, London
Group Exhibitions
2007 Jerwood painting Prize, London
2006 Between a rock and a hard place: the Stone in Art, Rove, London Territory, Uni of Arts, London
Black Moon Island, One in the Other, London
The Singh Twins
Solo Exhibitions
2006 Masala Art; Anant Gallery, New Delhi, India. 7th-21st March 2006.
2005 Past Modern;The Singh Twins; major retrospective at The City Gallery, Leicester.
4th June - 9th July 2005.
2005 Past Modern:The Singh Twins; major retrospective at The Walker Art Gallery,
Liverpool. 22nd January - 17th April 2005.
2004 The Singh Twins; Derby City Museum and Art Gallery. 22nd September - 24th
October 2004
Group Exhibitions
2006 Two 2 Tango; Organised by Gallery Nvya but held at Lalit Kala Academi, New
Delhi, India, 15th-29th April.
2005 The Via Dolorosa Project; A multi-media presentation of the 'Stations of the Cross'
by artists of different faiths. St Mary's Church, Slough then touring. (An 'Art
Beyond Belief' initiative launched on 19th March 2005).
2004 Ritu:A Gathering of Seasons; Organised by Anant Art Gallery but held at Triveni
Kala Sangam, New Delhi, India. 8th - 17th January 2005.
2005 Faith; Nottingham Castle Museum.18th December 2004 - 13th February 2
Julian Lee
Although clear in subject, my paintings neither directly define nor specify, rather observe. There are no people but the human presence is always there. An early morning stroll through the still empty and quiet streets before the city awakes, or twilight before the night begins. That short experience for me is the city’s unconsciousness at it’s most visible and is where I’m tapping into.
To most city dwellers, the slow, gradual changing of the seasons is a miracle often ignored or taken for granted. Nature itself plays a major role in the work with seasonal change and its colours deciding my palette. I feel I owe it to the sheer beauty and diversity of nature to rendered it painstakingly in paint with an almost classical appreciation. A sort of romantic homage.
These paintings have a distinctively north European D.N.A. A reoccurring theme is that of Nature. To most north Europeans nature is a metaphor for a Society Utopia. To most English nature is considered a private sanctuary. Being English and living in the heart of Germany allows me to celebrate and explore both sensibilities.
Behind the „Europeaness lie more contemporary issues. Graffiti is random, relentless, pointless, sprayed everywhere, over anything, and on any available surface, including my canvases, which are also surfaces. Nature and Graffiti mirror each other, growing rapidly, obsessively fighting for space. Graffiti is part of the landscape, part of the painting.
Recent Exhibitions
2007 (Solo) Galerie Schuster, BERLIN
2007 Scope Art Fair, Basel
Future Exhibitions
2007 Live Visual Collaboration with musicians Wolfgang Flür (ex-Kraftwerk) and German band
John Stark
The uncanny and the sublime find their most cogent expression in contemporary visual culture in genres like horror and fantasy. John Stark's sombre black-and-grey paintings combine their imagery with the Romanticism's rhetoric of landscape. He underlines how the concerns and motifs of the 19th-century high culture continue to thrive in 21st-century popular culture and investigates the possibilities afforded by these subliminal continuities of Western culture."
The recent series of small paintings attempt to cater for an individual’s love of luxury in the same way as a goldsmith or furniture maker. I look back to painters like Salvator Rosa, Jan Fyt, Ruisdael, Bercham, and Friedrich. They are loosely referenced in the paintings through an intuitive process alongside various films, postcards, novels, comics and found images. The works themselves waver between the familiar and the unexpected, the melodramatic and the gothic, Romanticism and Death-metal."First of all, what is the Beautiful?
For Schelling it is the infinite expressing it self in the finite; for Reid, an occult quality; for Jouffroy an indestructible fact; for de Maistre what is agreeable to virtue; for Pere Andre what conforms to reason.
And there are several kinds of Beautiful; a beautiful in the sciences, geometry is beautiful; a beautiful in ethics, Socrates death is undeniably beautiful. A beautiful in the animal kingdom. A dog's beauty consists in its sense of smell. A pig could never be beautiful, given its filthy habits, nor a serpent, for it evokes ideas of baseness....In short the primary condition of the beautiful is unity in variety, that is the principle." -Gustave Flaubert, 'Bouvard and Pecuchet'
Recent Exhibitions
2007 Eau Savage II, Fieldgate gallery, London
Les Fleur Du Mal, Gallery Primo Alonso, London
New London Kicks, Soho House, New York
new cv, biog & statement
CV
Forthcoming exhibitions
2009 Kapellmeister pulls a doozy; Danielle Arnaud, London
(Artists- Richard Meaghan, Andrew Foulds, Tamsin Morse, John Stark, Zavier Ellis, Andy Denzler, David Hancock, Rui Matsunaga, Rene Holm, The Singh Twins, Julian Lee)
Curated by Richard Meaghan & Andrew Foulds
2008 One can often be thwarted by some antidisestablishmentarianism; Venue tba, London
(Artists-Richard Meaghan, Andrew Foulds, Emma Talbot, Louise Thomas, The Singh Twins, Brendan Lyons, Boo Saville, Jaap de Vries)
Curated by Richard Meaghan & Andrew Foulds
No Current Bun; View 2 Gallery, Liverpool (solo)
Richard Meaghan & Rene Holm; galarie bn24, Hamburg, Germany
Group Show; galerie Wolfsen, Denmark
Selected exhibitions
2007 I’ll be your mirror; Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool & Gallery Primo Alonso, London
(Artists- Marit Andreassen, Jemima & Dolly Brown, Gordon Cheung, Juno Doran, Leo Fitzmaurice, David Hancock, Owen Leong, Andy Magee, Rui Matsunaga, Stuart Semple, Hannah Wooll, Dawn Woolley, Isabel Young, Richard Meaghan.
Curated by Richard Meaghan & David Hancock)
2006 Exposed- Art & Culture from England’s Northwest; Manchester Square, London
(Artists- Chris Ofili, Keith Tyson, Richard Meaghan, Kevin Cummins, Peter Saville, Rachel Goodyear, The Singh Twins, Neville Gabie, Ian Rawlinson, Leo Fitzmaurice.
Curated by Stephen Snoddy)
Selected exhibitions
2007 I’ll be your mirror; Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool & Gallery Primo Alonso, London
(Artists- Marit Andreassen, Jemima & Dolly Brown, Gordon Cheung, Juno Doran, Leo Fitzmaurice, David Hancock, Owen Leong, Andy Magee, Rui Matsunaga, Stuart Semple, Hannah Wooll, Dawn Woolley, Isabel Young, Richard Meaghan.
Curated by Richard Meaghan & David Hancock)
2006 Exposed- Art & Culture from England’s Northwest; Manchester Square, London
(Artists- Chris Ofili, Keith Tyson, Richard Meaghan, Kevin Cummins, Peter Saville, Rachel Goodyear, The Singh Twins, Neville Gabie, Ian Rawlinson, Leo Fitzmaurice.
Curated by Stephen Snoddy)
Jerusalem; Dean Clough galleries, Halifax
(Artists- Gordon Cheung, David Hancock, Richard Meaghan, Beth Harland, Roderick Harris, Reece Jones, Peter Lamb, Rui Matsunaga, Tamsin Morse, Simon Woolham.
Curated by Richard Meaghan & David Hancock)
Biography
Richard Meaghan was born in 1973 and trained at Staffordshire University where he studied Painting and Fine Art.
On graduating, Meaghan was awarded a travel grant to study Renaissance Art in Italy. The resulting work was awarded first prize in the Sefton Open, followed shortly with his first solo Public exhibition at the Atkinson Art gallery, Southport.
Meaghan has had a number of exhibitions both locally and nationally, particularly in London with Catto Contemporary, Houldsworth and gallery Primo Alonso. He was also chosen as one of three emerging artists to exhibit alongside artist’s such as Turner art Prize winners Chris Ofili and Keith Tyson in ‘Exposed- Art and Culture in England’s North West’. He has future exhibitions planned for Copenhagen, Denmark, Hamburg and Berlin, Germany and New York.
Recently Meaghan has concentrated on curatorial collaborations. With Manchester based artist David Hancock: Le Petit Paysage (Liverpool Biennial 2004), Jerusalem (Dean Clough Galleries 2006), I’ll be Your Mirror (Gallery Primo Alonso, London 2007). With Liverpool based artist Andrew Foulds: Kapellmeister pulls a doozy (Danielle Arnaud, London 2009), One can often be thwarted by some antidisestablishmentarianism (Gallery Primo Alonso, London 2008). And with Danish artist Rene Holm at galerie db24, Hamburg, Germany and galerie Wolfsen, Copenhagen, Denmark (both 2008).
Throughout his practice, Meaghan has been a lecturer in Painting at St. Helen’s College, where he will become Module leader in Painting on their new degree course in September 2008.
Richard Meaghan lives and works in Liverpool.
Statement
Richard Meaghan’s paintings are a multi-layered experience that oscillate between extremes. They are invented and are an amalgamation of a number of differing experiences that revolve around memory, making use of allegorical and pictorial inventions and references from contemporary art and art history. Meaghan's narrations are not linear, but rather associative and analytical, so that the works function like short stories, in which the plot is compressed into single images. However, the fragments have to be pieced together and thus can seemingly fall somewhere between dream and reality. The resulting paintings appear as visions of somewhere familiar yet strange, uncanny shimmerings based on careful study of our world that in turn suggests another.
(Artists- Gordon Cheung, David Hancock, Richard Meaghan, Beth Harland, Roderick Harris, Reece Jones, Peter Lamb, Rui Matsunaga, Tamsin Morse, Simon Woolham.
Curated by Richard Meaghan & David Hancock)
Biography
Richard Meaghan was born in 1973 and trained at Staffordshire University where he studied Painting and Fine Art.
On graduating, Meaghan was awarded a travel grant to study Renaissance Art in Italy. The resulting work was awarded first prize in the Sefton Open, followed shortly with his first solo Public exhibition at the Atkinson Art gallery, Southport.
Meaghan has had a number of exhibitions both locally and nationally, particularly in London with Catto Contemporary, Houldsworth and gallery Primo Alonso. He was also chosen as one of three emerging artists to exhibit alongside artist’s such as Turner art Prize winners Chris Ofili and Keith Tyson in ‘Exposed- Art and Culture in England’s North West’. He has future exhibitions planned for Copenhagen, Denmark, Hamburg and Berlin, Germany and New York.
Recently Meaghan has concentrated on curatorial collaborations. With Manchester based artist David Hancock: Le Petit Paysage (Liverpool Biennial 2004), Jerusalem (Dean Clough Galleries 2006), I’ll be Your Mirror (Gallery Primo Alonso, London 2007). With Liverpool based artist Andrew Foulds: Kapellmeister pulls a doozy (Danielle Arnaud, London 2009), One can often be thwarted by some antidisestablishmentarianism (Gallery Primo Alonso, London 2008). And with Danish artist Rene Holm at galerie db24, Hamburg, Germany and galerie Wolfsen, Copenhagen, Denmark (both 2008).
Throughout his practice, Meaghan has been a lecturer in Painting at St. Helen’s College, where he will become Module leader in Painting on their new degree course in September 2008.
Richard Meaghan lives and works in Liverpool.
Statement
Richard Meaghan’s paintings are a multi-layered experience that oscillate between extremes. They are invented and are an amalgamation of a number of differing experiences that revolve around memory, making use of allegorical and pictorial inventions and references from contemporary art and art history. Meaghan's narrations are not linear, but rather associative and analytical, so that the works function like short stories, in which the plot is compressed into single images. However, the fragments have to be pieced together and thus can seemingly fall somewhere between dream and reality. The resulting paintings appear as visions of somewhere familiar yet strange, uncanny shimmerings based on careful study of our world that in turn suggests another.
In the painting “Despite many crises & unforeseen disasters we were often bored,” its like meeting your favourite Grandma with her home made cookies and chocolate biscuits but you are scared of the kiss goodbye with her hairy chin and the scent of lavender. It’s like a fairytale gone wrong or a modern day sommerfrische, a term used in the 19th Century to refer to an extended sojourn in a rural environment. These breaks were often undertaken by members of the aristocracy to their country estates and can be seen as the precursor to the present day summer holiday. I wanted the gorge to dissect the painting so it seemed to divide the old lady from the safe haven of her holiday home with only the ladder and slippery path to guide her back. You’re left feeling on the edge, you want to pull, what seems like a curtain from Ikea on the left hand side over and shut out this world, or maybe the woman wants to shut the viewer out from her island refuge, a painting about escape.
The same is true of the painting “Tick Tock, Tick Tock nothing ever stops the clock” there is again a separation, this time between the two little green men and their Mother Ship. We are left asking questions of what it is we are looking at. Are they the everyday goings on in a world that surely can’t be the world we reside in, scenes that could never exist? Or is this the vision of some artistic prophet and our apocalyptic future and the end of the world? A painting analogous to man’s ever increasing demands for technology and maybe the continual push towards our own destruction.
I’m interested in the whole history of painting as a kind of dictionary of ideals that needs to be ransacked as completely as possible. A need for all the possible characteristics of painting, from the retarded to the sophisticated, to be simultaneously represented, as though the whole past lives of the medium were flashing before our eyes.
Richard Meaghan
Sunday 25 November 2007
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Richard Meaghan's paintings are invented and are an amalgamation of a number of differing experiences that revolve around memory, making use of allegorical and pictorial inventions and references from contemporary art and art history. Meaghan's narrations are not linear, but rather associative and analytical, so that the works function like short stories, in which the plot is compressed into single images. However, the fragments have to be pieced together and thus can seemingly fall somewhere between dream/nightmare and reality. The resulting paintings appear as visions of somewhere familiar yet strange, uncanny shimmerings based on careful study of our world that in turn suggests another.
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