Exhibition Artists

Attitude

21st April 2010 - 25th September 2010

Artists exhibited in Attitude

Dan Colen
Dan Colen's paintings are often quickly scrawled in spray paint over plywood boards which are built up with sanded layers of moulding base and acrylic; they retain a tension between immediacy of expression and perfection of surface. Spelling out song lyrics, random thoughts, or absurd slogans, Dan Colen’s texts create a form of urban poetry, conjuring up images through word association and impoverished aesthetics. Realism is central to Dan Colen’s practice, sometimes he creates the effect of aerosol spray through meticulous brush technique.
Gerald Davis
Utilising word and image, Gerald Davis retells us stories from his boyhood and prepubescent years. Sexual obsession, real and imagined girlfriends, lewd mis-adventure, unrealised desire and memories from school are all retold with a calm lucidity. Despite often being explicit and rather crude in content, there is a knowing refinement to the flat clean surfaces of his paintings. The cartooning of these stories offers us a new perspective forcing us not so much to judge as to acknowledge and consider.
Gardar Eide Einarsson
Investigations into various forms of social transgression and arguments for political subversion, Gardar Eide Einarsson's text-based works provoke the critical analysis associated with reading to augment the immediate visceral experience of viewing his art. To this end, his choice of media is determined by his current discourse on communities in relation to their outsiders.
Dirk Skreber
Dirk Skreber engages with catastrophe, whether man-made or natural, siting himself at a comparative rather than judgemental position. Known for his series of paintings based on natural disasters such as hurricanes and floods, he is more concerned with depicting the effects and their mediated perception rather than the telling of any one story. Often using non traditional methods as a counterpoint to his use of oil paint, he creates regularly patterned grounds from lengths of foam, insulation and parcel tape. This counterpoint acts as a clue to the mediation of images to which we are all subject.
Banks Violette
Banks Violette has created a visual language linked to his background and personal history that is derived from pop culture's aestheticisation of death. This highly personal language is intended to provide an account of the disturbing psychology that underlies attitudes and acts that have defined the frustrations and anger of a marginalised group of white American youth. Beneath the surface of Violette’s pared down black sculptures, occasionally redeemed by the white of salt crystals, is a melancholy that sometimes sinks into sorrow. This sense of sadness with which all Violette’s work is imbued is linked to a tragic dimension of pop culture.

Facing East

4th February 2010 - 11th April 2010

Artists exhibited in Facing East

He An
He An spent three months in Manchester in 2003 as artist-in-residence at the Chinese Arts Centre. His works reflect the impact of western mainstream culture upon the emergent youth culture in China, and its enthusiasm for contemporary music, fashion, art, and ideas. In major cities all over China, people are feeling the impact of the flourishing economy, the volume of media information, and adjustments in socio-political circumstances. Exposure to Hollywood - for better or worse through the pirating of films made widely available by DVD technology – has opened doors to human experiences that were previously closed.
Bharti Kher
Raised in England, Bharti Kher was educated in painting and design at Newcastle and Middlesex Polytechnics. Since 1993, she has lived and worked in Delhi, her trans-national perspective engenders both personal and ethnographic observations of contemporary Indian life as well describing a long-term negotiation of her identity in India.
Chen Lei
One of the many changes that is taking place in modern China is the relationship between the younger generation and their parents and extended families. Chen Lei’s work often concerns itself with memories and associations that connect the artist with his childhood. While his sculpture expresses the unencumbered memories and fantasies of his childhood, audiences are encouraged by Chen Lei not only to appreciate his childhood experiences and feelings but to reflect upon their own. Chen Lei exemplifies in many ways the radical changes taking place in the youth culture of China today.
Fang Lijun
Lives and works in Beijing, China

Fang Lijun is one of the leading and most influential contemporary artists in China. He was one of the main forerunners of the early 1990’s movement known as Cynical Realism an artistic trend that evolved as a result of the aftermath of the 1989 student demonstrations in Tiananmen Square and the closure by the authorities of the “China Avant-Garde” exhibition at the China National Gallery in Beijing.

The occurrence of these events, which symbolise the climax of artistic aspirations that built up in China during the 1980’s, created a void that Fang Lijun and others filled with a new message full of irony and indifference to the big forces that the individual is subject to. The idealism of the 1980’s gave way to a more somber and realistic understanding of the role of avant-garde art under a one party regime. The events which gave birth to Cynical Realism led Fang Lijun and others to redefine the position of contemporary Chinese art throughout the 1990’s. Fang Lijun was one of the first artists to translate this onto canvas. His repeated use of the image of a bald man with his ambiguous expression and dreamlike background of unlimited space and freedom became a symbol of the subtle mockery that can be detected in the works of the Cynical Realist artists.

Fang Lijun’s works cannot be reduced to simple matters, be they political or social. On the contrary,his multilayered paintings, wood-cuts and sculptures seem to consistently defy any clear statement or interpretation.
Yue Minjun
Yue Minjun’s painting and sculpture always feature a figure or figures with the same laughing face. The face is modelled on his own so, in a sense, Minjun is forever painting a self-portrait. However, as a result of its repeated appearance, the laughing face becomes a serial image that provides an account of the condition of everyman.
Takashi Murakami
Takashi Murakami’s work refers to a variety of cultural, political, social and historical contexts concerning the relationships between high art and popular culture, East and West, contemporary art and traditional Japanese art, art and capitalism. He is part of a generation of artists whose visual vocabulary is steeped in popular culture. Mass produced toys, television, film, pop music, Disney, computer games, manga and animee are all points of reference for his work. American culture was an important influence on him as a child, knowledge of which was available second-hand through his father, who became fascinated with America whilst working there on a naval base.
Yoshitomo Nara
Yoshitomo Nara is well known for his cartoon-like drawings, paintings and sculptures of children and animals sporting adult expressions, provocative stances and salty vocabularies. visual vocabulary is steeped in popular culture. Mass produced toys, television, film, pop music, Disney, computer games, manga and animee are all points of reference for his work.As well as having the spontaneous feel of classroom doodles, his work references children’s publications and the deep psychological questions they raise.
Ravinder Reddy
Reddy began making his massive monumental heads in the 80’s. They are modeled with remarkable skill and painted in dazzling colors, Reddy fuses the Hindu sculptural tradition with a contemporary pop sensibility mixing a reverence for traditional Indian sculptural forms with an appreciation of Andy Warhol's portraits. In addition to creating a dialogue between traditional Hindu art and contemporary pop, Reddy also reflects the way young Indian women are recreating the feminine image to merge a reverence for tradition with an embrace of the contemporary world. Their elaborate hairstyles are adorned with hundreds of delicately sculpted flowers. Many are gilded, giving them the effect of religious icons.
Thukral and Tagra
Jiten Thukral and Sumir Tagra work collaboratively in a wide variety of media including painting, sculpture, and installation, video, graphic and product design, web sites, music and fashion. Their vivid, colourful work typically exhibits a whimsical fascination with consumerism blurring the lines between fine art and popular culture, product placement and exhibition design, artistic inspiration and media hype. Despite the global nature of consumerism and its prevalent existence, Thukral and Tagra display their subjects through a distinctly Indian lens. Given the extremely diverse stratification of Indian classes, lifestyles and the country's economy, the result is a harmonious and beautiful clash of sorts that fuses the current influx of the Western mainstream with India’s deep-rooted cultural heritage.

Minimal Means

15th September 2009 - 6th March 2010

Artists exhibited in Minimal Means

John M Armleder
John Armleder is a performance artist, sculptor, and painter, whose multi-faceted activities are connected by drawing. Affiliated with Fluxus in the late 1960s and 70s, the value of ephemerality and the notion that art is the conduction of creative energy are central to his work. Armleder's use of many different materials and found objects was demonstrated vividly in his 2006 exhibition at Tate Liverpool that incorporated a multitude of materials including televisions, scaffolding, mirrors, lights, CD players, animals, pot plants and Christmas trees, creating a riotous and magical world of disorientating beauty and mystery.
Mathias Bengtsson
Danish furniture designer Mathias Bengtsson is one of a handful of European rising stars to have broken down barriers between fine art and industrial design since the 1990s.
Tom Dixon
Both as a self-taught designer-maker in early 1980s London and as head of design at the Habitat retail chain and Artek, the Finnish furniture manufacturer, Tom Dixon has combined the creative with the commercial throughout his career. Tom Dixon fell into design by accident when he found himself with "time on his hands" while recovering from a motorcycle accident.
Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby
Dunne & Raby use design as a medium to stimulate discussion and debate amongst designers, industry and the public about the social, cultural and ethical implications of existing and emerging technologies.
Gardar Eide Einarsson
Of all those artists included in Minimal Means perhaps Gardar Eide Einarsson is most remote in spirit from the association with Minimalism that predicates the exhibition, Gardar Eide Einarsson's legacy stems more directly from pop art, punk and agit prop than from the refined reductionism of Minimalism that characterises this exhibition.
Olafur Eliasson
Olafur Eliasson frequently uses materials that are elemental and ephemeral: light, heat, moisture, steam, and ice for example are often manipulated by him towards aesthetic ends and in response to a specific site to explore a space between nature and technology, the organic and the industrial. The components of Olafur Eliasson's installations are often industrially produced to create an experience that is physical, sensory, and emotional.
Mark Grotjahn

The original inspiration for Mark Grotjahn's paintings came from shop signs. Living in Los Angeles, he became intrigued in the mid 1990s by the handmade signs he saw in stores. He began to copy those he liked and presented his versions to the storeowners. As such, his origins have something in common with early pop art or the development of some graffiti artists who have crossed over into mainstream art. His first monochrome abstractions began with a cartoon-like mask or face that was then ruled over and gradually obliterated.
Gregor Hildebrandt
The basic material of the works of Gregor Hildebrandt is recorded tape of audio and video cassettes that he glues on canvas, painstakingly, strip by strip. On occasion he installs the tape as a widespread black fluttering membrane. Thus, the music on the tapes takes the form of a score whose rhythm results from the arrangement of the material. The temporal dimension of music is transformed into a spatial one, namely, into the perception of a picture.
Sergej Jensen
Sergej Jensen's work draws on a wide range of materials and formal references. Primarily known for his textile works, his lyrical compositions incorporate a variety of fabrics, from burlap and linen to silk and wool.
Shiro Kuramata
Shiro Kuramata grew up during World War II and the American Occupation of Japan. In 1953 he graduated from Tokyo polytechnic high school, where he studied woodcraft, and went to work for a furniture company. Soon afterwards he enrolled at the Kuwasawa Design School in Tokyo, an institute that taught more Western concepts of interior design. This included the study of chairs, at a time in Japan when even designers maintained traditional Japanese homes where they sat on the floor on tatami mats.
Kenneth Noland
Kenneth Noland's groundbreaking explorations of form, medium and scale have influenced artists internationally since the 1960s. A key artist among a generation of painters who reacted against the highly personal and 'painterly' approach of the then dominant form of Abstract Expressionism, Kenneth Noland's work typifies the so-called 'post painterly abstraction' of the 1960s: a reduced formal vocabulary of simple, often geometric compositions executed in a characteristically detached manner, which was a forerunner of Minimalism.
Richard Prince
Richard Prince came to prominence in the 1980s through his celebrated series of works such as Cowboys, Jokes and Hoods, which appropriate images from magazines, popular culture and pulp fiction to create new photographs, sculptures and paintings that respond to ideas about American identity and consumerism.
Anselm Reyle
Like some other contemporary abstract artists Anselm Reyle revisits modernist painting and sculpture. His interest in modernism stems for his early years, even before he became an artist, and this interest in the classic tradition of modernism has endured. But his paintings and sculptures are not a mere rehash of the work of those artists he admires from forty years ago, he contextualises modernist abstraction in the language of today's visual culture with a unique perception that attempts to reinterpret the core values of pop-art and modernist conventions.
Rudolf Stingel
The idea of painting is central to Rudolf Stingel's oeuvre, even if his work does not always take the form of a painted canvas. His ruminations on the medium assume a multitude of forms and use a wide variety of materials, often from industrial sources. He references both Modernist monochrome painting and the 'all over' compositions of the Abstract Expressionists.
Katja Strunz
Katja Strunz's constructions inhabit space in a dramatic way by combining formal geometric elements with experiments in texture, finish and subtle colour and a poetic allusion to the past by creating an illusion of time passing and the conception of history. In their irregularity Katja Strunz's works bear traces of the past, and an intentional imperfection.
Lee Ufan
Painter, sculptor, writer and philosopher Lee Ufan came to prominence in the late 1960's as one of the major theoretical and practical proponents of the avant-garde Mono-ha (Object School) group. The Mono-ha school of thought was Japan's first contemporary art movement to gain international recognition. It rejected Western notions of representation, focusing on the relationships of materials and perceptions rather than on expression or intervention.

Passage to India Part II

17th March 2009 - 1st August 2009

Artists exhibited in Passage to India Part II

Murali Cheeroth
Born in Thrissur, Kerala, 1966
Currently lives and works in Bangalore

Murali Cheeroth’s work is imbued with issues concerning the rapid development of Indian society and the underlying violence that sometimes erupts as part of this process. His palette is vivid, utilising unnatural colours more akin to advertising and the internet in an attempt to translate the speed and vigour of new urban India onto the canvas. Against the backdrop of a bustling city, a construction worker is hard at work while the city dissolves in psychedelic colours. “It is a celebration of human strength,” remarks Murali Cheeroth.
Subodh Gupta
Born 1964 Khagaul, Bihar, India
Lives and works in New Delhi

Subodh Gupta’s art consciously plays on clichéd images of everyday life in India. He is known best for his sculptures made from accumulations of everyday objects such as antiquated machinery and stainless steel cooking utensils. This liking for ordinary objects suggests a concern for the deprivation of India’s under class in contrast to the accelerating wealth of the rising middle class.
Jitish Kallat
Born 1974, Mumbai,India.
Lives and works in Mumbai

Jitish Kallat’s painting and sculpture incorporate modern technology and popular essentials like the photocopy machine. His images evolve out of texts and captions, well-known phrases and popular song titles. He describes his large format paintings as “a vast collision of the thumping, claustrophobic, city street part of my project to find ways to register the life I see around me. Cars, buses, scooters, cycles, cats, cows and humans collide and coalesce to form mega- explosions”.
Reena Saini Kallat
Born New Delhi, India, 1973
Lives and works in Mumbai

Reena Saini Kallat’s paintings and installations frequently deal with the condition of the ordinary person in a rapidly changing society whose situation can be blighted or improved by the social or political circumstances in which they find themselves. Implicit in her art is a concern with the position of the individual, in danger of being reduced to an anonymous and forgotten statistic. These issues are seldom dealt with literally but are imbued with a poetic and sometimes surreal sensibility.
T.V. Santhosh
Born 1968, Kerala, India
Lives and works in Mumbai, India

T. V. Santhosh’s subject matter deals with violence and injustice. His paintings are a comment on inequality, famine, terrorism and war. He is passionately involved with the larger world and with events that grab the media’s attention. Most of his imagery is sourced from the media: photographs of captured terrorists, the spectacle of war and bomb blasts, uniformed security men with sniffer dogs on a leash. T. V. Santhosh’s work deals with the rhetoric of terrorism and militarism. ‘My recent works are just a continuation of what I have been doing, nothing drastically different. But I see that after the terror attacks in Mumbai, the context of my works has become more relevant’.
Thukral and Tagra
JITEN THUKRAL
Born 1976, Jalandhar, Punjab, India.
Lives and works in New Delhi.
SUMIR TAGRA
Born 1979, New Delhi, India.
Lives and works in New Delhi
Jiten Thukral and Sumir Tagra work collaboratively in a wide variety of media including painting, sculpture, and installation, video, graphic and product design, web sites, music and fashion. Their vivid, colourful work typically exhibits a whimsical fascination with consumerism blurring the lines between fine art and popular culture, product placement and exhibition design, yet always through a distinctly Indian lens.
The result is a harmonious and beautiful clash of sorts that fuses the current influx of the Western mainstream with India’s deep-rooted cultural heritage.

Lightness of Being

6th September 2008 - 19th December 2008

Artists exhibited in Lightness of Being

John M Armleder
Born 1948. Geneva, Switzerland

John Armleder is a performance artist, sculptor, and painter, whose multi-faceted activities are connected by drawing. Affiliated with Fluxus in the late 1960s and 70s, the value of ephemerality and the notion that art is the conduction of creative energy are central to his work. He creates dialogues between disparate objects by placing them within an exhibition context, raising the question of possible equivalences that are created between them when viewed in such a setting.
Dan Attoe
Born 1975. Bremerton, Washington, US

Dan Attoe’s painting frequently depict narratives to do with his early involvement with punk, his biker friends and the narratives of small town America blended with a personal dark surrealism that can move from the prosaic to the heights of gothic realism. He studied creative writing as well as art and his sloganising is part of a reductive process of writing that attempts an honest account of the customs and habits of American life particularly as they effect mainstream moral standards.
Shezad Dawood
Born 1974 London Lives and works in London

Shezad Dawood’s work builds up a bizarre and complex dialogue of subversive parallels between diverse value-systems and artistic practices.The work playfully but critically questions our traditional assumptions about the nature and role of art in contemporary consumer society.
Olafur Eliasson
Born 1967 Copenhagen,Denmark

Olafur Eliasson frequently uses materials that are elemental and ephemeral: light, heat, moisture, steam, and ice for example are often manipulated by him towards aesthetic ends and in response to a specific site to explore a space between nature and technology, the organic and the industrial. The components of Olafur Eliasson’s installations are often industrially produced to create an experience that is physical, sensory and emotional. With basic materials and little technical extravagance, the individual components of Olafur Eliasson’s installations are strictly functional. The simplicity of his materials expands the range of implications his works evoke.
Tracey Emin
Born 1963. Margate, UK

One of very few artists in the UK who has become a household name, Tracey Emin’s impetus as an artist stems from her early years when she was struggling to establish an identity for herself in a disfunctional community in which her adolescent body was exploited and commodified. Subsequently Tracey Emin’s art has been an account of this struggle and the painful, and extreme aspects of it that she has had to endure.
Tracey Emin is an ethical artist whose work is based upon a moral but highly personal world view.
Jason Rhoades
Born 1965 - Died 2006. Newcastle, California, US

Before his death in at the age of 41, Jason Rhoades built large scale installations based upon an ever growing collection of ‘pussy words’, slang words for female genitalia. These he gathered and subsequently scripted in black light and coloured neon, to which he added ‘poetic materials’ such as Chinese rag rugs, camel saddle foot stools, part of an array of unusual artifacts he gathered together. His approach to making installations was to completely fill a space with the lights and artifacts he gathered together to create a complete environment.

Passage to India

15th March 2008 - 2nd August 2008

Artists exhibited in Passage to India

Krishnaraj Chonat
Born 1973, Chennai, India
Lives and works in Bangalore

Krishnaraj Chonat’s sculpture, installation and live work is highly critical of certain aspects of the rapid development taking place throughout India, particularly around his home city of Bangalore. Krishnaraj Chonat identifies property development as one of the most pernicious phenomena in present day India His work comments satirically upon how real estate costs are shooting up even in the outskirts of Bangalore where Venetian bungalows and the replicated images of houses from South California are on offer to the new rich.
Atul Dodiya

Born 1959, Mumbai,
India Lives and works in Mumbai.

Atul Dodiya's work provides a rich vocabulary of stylistic and iconographic references from both Indian and Western art, alongside imagery and ideas rooted in film, history, popular culture, and literature. He is renowned for his use mastery of a range of styles that incorporate frequent improvisation and reinvention.
Subodh Gupta
Subodh Gupta’s art consciously plays on clichéd images of everyday life in India. While he works in a range of media, Gupta is known best for his sculptures made from accumulations of everyday objects such as antiquated machinery and stainless steel cooking utensils. Subodh Gupta’s inspiration stems from his early life in Bihar, India’s least economically developed state. His origins in this largely agrarian region have influenced the direction of his work as he reflects upon the difference existing in India between tradition and modernisation as the sub-continent develops economically. Subodh Gupta’s liking for ordinary objects suggests a concern for the deprivation of India’s under class in contrast to the accelerating wealth of the rising middle class. His painting Idol Thief 2007 depicts, in a super realist style, enlarged close ups of stainless steel food containers. The kind that are commonly used in India by workers to carry meals to and from work. Subodh Gupta’s paintings are an important part of his overall practice as an artist and Idol Thief sits perfectly within his general theme as an artist that of the rapid disappearance of simple agrarian life styles in India.
Jitish Kallat
Born 1974, Mumbai,India.
Lives and works in Mumbai

Jitish Kallat’s painting and sculpture incorporate modern technology and popular essentials like the photocopy machine. His images evolve out of texts and captions, well-known phrases and popular song titles. He describes his large format paintings as “a vast collision of the thumping, claustrophobic, city street part of my project to find ways to register the life I see around me. Cars, buses, scooters, cycles, cats, cows and humans collide and coalesce to form mega- explosions”.
Bharti Kher
Born London 1969.
Lives and works in New Delhi

Raised in England, Bharti Kher was educated in painting and design at Newcastle and Middlesex Polytechnics. Since 1993, she has lived and worked in Delhi, her trans-national perspective engenders both personal and ethnographic observations of contemporary Indian life as well describing a long-term negotiation of her identity in India. She best know for her use of bindis with which she creates intricate patterns, evoking male sperm and genetic chains which cover both large wall panels as well as a menagerie of surfaces.
Riyas Komu
Born 1971 Kerala, India

Riyas Komu’s photo realist portraits depict ordinary, everyday people from his native Kerala. Riyas Komu is a communist but his paintings reflect a less outspoken side to his ideology in which a concern for humanity is portrayed in highly charged images of faces that are genuinely concerned with the position of the mass of the people in a rapidly developing and dividing society that is modern India.
Tallur L.N.
Born 1971, Tallur, India
Lives and works in India and South Korea

Tallur is from rural India, an altogether different environment from its urban counterpart in terms of its culture, economy and geography etc. and he considers the hand made quality of village utensils for example, rather than manufacturing, an important influence on the way in which he fashions his sculpture. He uses this distinction deliberately as part of his visual language encapsulated in his sculpture and installations that contain many references to traditional Indian symbols. Part of his practice has been to translate this symbolic order into a contemporary language that speaks about the depth and diversity of traditional Indian life.
Jagannath Panda
Born 1970, Orissa, India
Lives and works in New Delhi

Through his art, Jagannath Panda reconciles many of our most fundamental contradictions. The dichotomies of Nature/Culture, Urban/Rural, Traditional/Contemporary and Figuration/Abstraction within his paintings and sculptures. These oppositional scenarios are incorporated into a single unified whole, subtly fused by the deft handling of colours, compositions and material. In a single work, Jagannath Panda posits the existence of stylized gods, culled from the palm leaf manuscripts of his ancestral Orissa, within the skyscraper apartment blocks of the burgeoning, newest India. His Realism believes in the existence of Fantasy.
Rashid Rana
Born 1968, Pakistan

Rashid Rana’s digital prints piece together thousands of individual portraits and images, re-casting them as pixels within a single image. Rashid Rana’s works manipulate micro-photographs from contemporary advertisements into digitized, iconic re-creations of, for example, mosque ornamentation, the Mughal Emperor Jahangir in profile, and French Impressionist painting. Such a conglomeration and visual synthesis show Rana’s fascination with the components and history of a photographic ‘moment’.
Ravinder Reddy
Born 1956 Suryapet, Andhra Pradesh, India
Lives and works in Visakhapatnam, India

Ravinder Reddy is one of India's most celebrated contemporary artists, his huge decorated heads have a heraldic presence. They look out frontally’ wide eye and seem to refer to other, earlier periods of civilisation, to Ancient Egypt and the early Greek.His totemic forms owe something to Pop Art. Loud, even bordering on the vulgar, they are simultaneously defiant and expectant as well tender and revealing. Beneath their crude flimsy glamour lies the expression raw feeling.
T. V. Santhosh
Born 1968, Kerala, India
Lives and works in Mumbai, India

T. V. Santhosh’s subject matter deals with violence and injustice. His paintings are a comment on inequality, famine, terrorism and war. He is passionately involved with the larger world and with events that grab the media’s attention. Most of his imagery is sourced from the media: photographs of captured terrorists, the spectacle of war and bomb blasts, uniformed security men with sniffer dogs on a leash. T. V. Santhosh’s work deals with the rhetoric of terrorism and militarism. ‘My recent works are just a continuation of what I have been doing, nothing drastically different. But I see that after the terror attacks in Mumbai, the context of my works has become more relevant’.
Sudarshan Shetty
Born 1961 Mumbai, India

Sudarshan Shetty is known for his large-scale sculpture and installations, he’s also a painter who sometimes combines these forms in object-assemblages. Sudarshan Shetty takes objects apart without dismantling them, decoding them by revealing their mechanical being. He experiments with found objects in a variety of media with the idea of creating an emotionally charged experience. This incongruous association of objects bearing different meanings is intended to form new meaning and create an abstract space where his enduring fascination with the dark underbelly of the object-human relation, the duality of free will and the inertness of things are visually exploded.
Thukral and Tagra
JITEN THUKRAL
Born 1976, Jalandhar, Punjab, India.
Lives and works in New Delhi.
SUMIR TAGRA
Born 1979, New Delhi, India.
Lives and works in New Delhi
Jiten Thukral and Sumir Tagra work collaboratively in a wide variety of media including painting, sculpture, and installation, video, graphic and product design, web sites, music and fashion. Their vivid, colourful work typically exhibits a whimsical fascination with consumerism blurring the lines between fine art and popular culture, product placement and exhibition design, yet always through a distinctly Indian lens.
The result is a harmonious and beautiful clash of sorts that fuses the current influx of the Western mainstream with India’s deep-rooted cultural heritage.

Unholy Truths

8th September 2007 - 15th December 2007

Artists exhibited in Unholy Truths

Dirk Bell
Born 1969 Munich. Lives and works in Berlin

Dirk Bell’s works are mesmerising. romantic, and apparently without irony, his images are soporific and dreamlike, suggesting the mystery and trepidation of fairy tales and legends. His work only hints at figurative elements, instead images, symbols and words are scattered throughout the work in a manner similar in intent, although radically different in technique, to the free association of subconscious thoughts found in Freud and the Surrealists. There is an immediacy about the execution of Dirk Bell’s work that accentuates the ephemeral nature of his subject matter as if his images themselves are in danger of disappearing before they can be entirely understood.
Jake and Dinos Chapman
Jake Chapman born 1966 Cheltenham, Dinos Chapman born 1962 London. They live and work in London.

Jake and Dinos Chapman make iconoclastic sculpture, prints and installations that examine, with searing wit and energy, contemporary politics, religion and morality.
The Chapmans first received critical acclaim in 1991 for a diorama sculpture created out of remodeled plastic figurines enacting scenes from Goya's Disasters of War etchings. Later they took a single scene from the work and meticulously transformed it into a Great Deeds Against the Dead (1994), a life-size tableau of reworked fibreglass mannequins depicting three castrated and mutilated soldiers tied to a tree.
The Chapman’s dark, amoral position as artists has consistently questioned the ethical basis of mainstream society and unpicked the dark side of hypocrisy.
Dan Colen
Born 1979 New Jersey.
Lives and works in New York

Drawing from mass media, environmental experience and sub-cultural language, Dan Colen’s work infuses a sense of magic in the under valued and ordinary. Dan Colen works in painting and sculpture. His paintings are often quickly scrawled in spray paint over plywood boards which are built up with sanded layers of molding base and acrylic, they retain a tension between immediacy of expression and perfection of surface. Realism is central to Dan Colen’s practice, sometimes he creates the effect of aerosol spray through painstaking brush technique. He blurs the boundaries between high and low culture, elevating an intrinsic value from the disenfranchised.
Till Gerhard
Born 1971, Hamburg, Germany

Till Gerhard’s paintings explore the conflict between man and nature. Within his scenes is a recurring intrusion of unnatural entity: oil wells and tree forts exude an encroaching anxiety. Gerhard uses their odd presence as a departure into the surreal: a cabin nestled in the woods or a skyline dotted with refineries are both alien and comforting as their surrounding landscapes stretch, float and churn with hallucinatory disorientation. In this conflicted crusade for spiritual revelation and ideological orthodoxy, ghost-like figures mill about lost in their Thoreau-inspired quest for enlightenment.

Text written by Patricia Ellis
Matt Greene
Born 1972, lives and works in Los Angeles

Matt Greene is inspired by erotica and its cinematic image as a vehicle to address formal concerns such as surface, color, and space. Known for his ethereal landscapes of fleshy fungi, Matt Greene’s practice involves an exploration of his favorite shelves in the library: horticulture, vintage pornography, horror films, fairy tales, 19th Century Symbolist art, and of course the history of Modernism. He selects images from many sources, including heavy metal, botany, the study of fungi, cinematography, the wide world of fetish fixations, and an expansive vein of literature. These disparate interests are approached by Greene in a hallucinatory, visionary manner allowing them to come together in phantasmagoric splendor on his canvases.
Mike Kelley
Born 1954 Detroit. Lives and works in Los Angeles

Mike Kelley’s work frequently involves stuffed animals, textile banners and carpets, and his output also includes drawings, objects, assemblage, collage, performance and video. Mike Kelley’s major project Day is Done, a feature-length ‘musical’ composed of thirty-two separate video chapters. Each section is a live-action recreation of a photograph of an “extracurricular activity” found in a high school yearbook. Over the years Mike Kelley has collected hundreds of such images most of which are recognizable as standard forms of folk entertainment: plays, follies, theme dress-up days, holiday festivities, religious spectacles, etc. Such activities serve as carnivalesque disruptions of the normal school schedule, mirroring the function of such events in the broader cultural arena.
Terence Koh
Born 1980, Beijing, China. Lives and works New York. Berlin and Taiwan

Terence Koh’s themes are the grand dualities of humanity, life and death, youthfulness and decay, beauty and illness, cultural identity and individual personality, sexuality, civilisation and Dionysian excess. He creates atmospheric spaces with his installations and objects in which recollection and fantasy are mixed with art history and sub-cultural extremes and where some of the more superficial aspects of contemporary culture are united with fetish cultures and a use of ritual. Terence Koh employs a wide range of material much of which is ephemeral by nature; shit, dehydrated vegetable matter, bees wax, paraffin and lipstick.
Yue Minjun
Born 1962, Heilongjiang Province, China. Lives and works in Beijing

Yue Minjun’s painting and sculpture always feature a figure or figures with the same laughing face. The face is modelled on his own so, in a sense, Yue Minjun is forever painting a self-portrait. However, as a result its repeated appearance, the laughing face becomes a serial image that provides an account of the condition of everyman. Rather than being a source of comfort, the smiles on Yue Minjun’s characters embody a sense of threat, their laughter is not an expression of happiness but mania, a psychosis that mocks the viewer and separates the subject from the norm.
Tallur L N
Born 1971, Tallur, India
Lives and works in India and South Korea

Tallur is from rural India, an altogether different environment from its urban counterpart in terms of its culture, economy and geography etc. and he considers the hand made quality of village utensils for example, rather than manufacturing, an important influence on the way in which he fashions his sculpture. He uses this distinction deliberately as part of his visual language encapsulated in his sculpture and installations that contain many references to traditional Indian symbols. Part of his practice has been to translate this symbolic order into a contemporary language that speaks about the depth and diversity of traditional Indian life.
Sudarshan Shetty
Born 1961 Mumbai, India

Sudarshan Shetty is known for his large-scale sculpture and installations, he’s also a painter who sometimes combines these forms in object-assemblages. Sudarshan Shetty takes objects apart without dismantling them, decoding them by revealing their mechanical being. He experiments with found objects in a variety of media with the idea of creating an emotionally charged experience. This incongruous association of objects bearing different meanings is intended to form new meaning and create an abstract space where his enduring fascination with the dark underbelly of the object-human relation, the duality of free will and the inertness of things are visually exploded.
Andro Wekua
Born 1977 Sochumi, Georgia. Lives and works in Zurich

Andro Wekua pieces together fragmented fictions, pictorially and sculpturally, that represent worlds of mystery and intrigue. He often bases his work on childhood memories from his home town of Sochumi, a picturesque coastal town in Georgia. Once a holiday destination for Soviet officials it is now a forbidden zone and so remains a source of memories for Andro Wekua from which he draws much of his subject matter. Andro Wekua builds up narrative images from his fragmented memories combining assemblages of photography, painting and sculpture in small installations in which the various components are intended to evoke the world that he has lost.
Douglas White
Born 1977 Guildford, UK

Douglas White is an artist who takes decaying objects, discarded waste and that which we have rejected as useless or irrelevant and breathes new life into it. From rotten trees, lightning struck pine and exploded tyres. Douglas White's reinstating of objects that no longer have a specific use provides new frames of poetic reference and a powerfully visceral experience.

Time Difference

31st March 2007 - 26th July 2007

Artists exhibited in Time Difference

Xiao Bo
Born 1977, Hangzhou, China

Xiao Bo’s paintings owe much to two sources of image production. On the one hand painting skills painstakingly learnt in China’s art academies and, on the other, that of film, photography and television. Photographic or video imagery in the mainstream media is usually considered to provide a factual account that the public can believe in but, in Xiao Bo’s hands, this imagery is described within the context of the propaganda tool. In his multi- canvas works he uses staggered images of film stills. Each canvas details a subtle change as if a strip of film were unrolled across an editing table.
Matthew Day Jackson
Born Panorama City, California 1974
Lives and works in New York

The work of Matthew Day Jackson investigates the history of the United States. Working primarily in large-scale structures and drawing, Matthew Day Jackson is part of a new generation of artists who are explicit about reclaiming their past by highlighting often gruesome parts of American history. Matthew Day Jackson’s recurring motifs include the turkey vulture, Eleanor Roosevelt, Benjamin Franklin, Native American imagery and iconography found in the Civil Rights Movement. Matthew Day Jackson uses this imagery as a way of emphasising the fragility and power found in nature. Matthew Day Jackson’s works have been described as narrative fictions. They examine the myths behind American national identity and represent an alternative to conservative accounts of American history.
Zeng Fanzhi
Born 1964, Wuhan, Hubei, China
Lives and works in Beijing

As a young man Zeng Fanzhi was impressed by European expressionist painters and much of his early painting was overtly expressionistic. Zeng Fanzhi was born just before the start of the Cultural Revolution and his experiences as a somewhat troubled child during those times have influenced his view of the world and therefore his art ever since. Zeng Fanzhi is best known for the series of mask paintings that he undertook exclusively between the years from 1994 to 2000. Figures look out from these canvases, their faces concealed behind the same stylised masks, a clear reference to the disparity between man’s inner nature and metaphorical masks worn to face the world.
Zheng Guogu
Born 1970, Yangjiang, Guandong
Lives and works in Yangjiang, China

Zheng Guogu is one if China’s most versatile contemporary artists. He is driven by ideas rather than media and stands slightly apart from the current surge of interest in contemporary painting from China. Zheng Guogu’s work utilises a wide range of media in order to express the extensive diversity of his ideas. He has worked in performance and moves between photography, painting, sculpture and embroidery. Zheng Guogu is regarded as an artist who reveals the pursuits of new China, often working in collaboration with other artists or students.
Evan Holloway
Born La Mirada, California, 1967
Lives and works in Los Angeles

Evan Holloway makes playful use of materials to arrive at sculpture in which formal and political interests intertwine and establish a balance between a critique of modernist conventions and a carefully calibrated satirical social commentary. Evan Holloway's sculptures combine the abstract and linear with the figurative. Inspired by music and colour theory, economics and mathematics, Evan Holloway creates distinctive, often elegant and sometimes strange forms that constantly make reference to the history of 20th century sculpture.
Matt Johnson
Born 1978 New York
Lives and works in Los Angeles, California

Matt Johnson is a sculptor unafraid to take on the great themes in a search to unearth some of the more fundamental sources of expression. His practice, in common with other young artists based in Los Angles, marks a return to object-hood and away from room size installations. Like others in his generation, he often refers to works of art from other eras. Matt Johnson made a mini tower of ice cubes that mimics Brancusi’s Endless Column. His Pieta obviously refers to Michelangelo and another work Magic Eye is reminiscent of a painting by Giacomo Bala the Italian Futurist.
Terence Koh
Born 1980, Beijing, China. Lives and works New York. Berlin and Taiwan

Terence Koh’s themes are the grand dualities of humanity, life and death, youthfulness and decay, beauty and illness, cultural identity and individual personality, sexuality, civilisation and Dionysian excess. Terence Koh creates atmospheric spaces with his installations and objects in which recollection and fantasy are mixed with art history and sub-cultural extremes and where some of the more superficial aspects of contemporary culture are united with fetish cultures and a use of ritual. Terence Koh employs a wide range of material much of which is ephemeral by nature; shit, dehydrated vegetable matter, bees wax, paraffin and lipstick.
Li Qing
Born 1981, Zhejiang Province, China

Li Qing is one of a new generation of Chinese artists. His current series of paintings are collectively entitled Point out the Difference and are based upon a computer game which tests the player’s visual perception. Like a magazine puzzle, Li Qing presents the viewer with a diptych of two seemingly identical images. Their comparison demands close scrutiny by his audience in order to discover its true but slightly concealed purpose. Close examination reveals minute differences between the two paintings as if they are two snapshots of an event taken in very quick succession.
Li Songsong
Born 1973, Beijing, China
Lives and works in Beijing

Li Songsong is a history painter. Pictures from magazines, film clips, photographs of historical events; all images from the public realm, form the source of his work. Li Songsong is an artist who records moments of recent Chinese history in a dispassionate manner that is countered by the way in which he manipulates the painted surface with a vigorous impasto of paint marks on aluminum panels. He chooses historical scenes and events that range from the time of China’s revolutionary war to the founding of the People’s Republic of China. Li Songsong is concerned with the intrinsic humanity that underpins all the images he appropriates and the memories they have the potential to bring to mind in his audience.
Banks Violette
Born 1973 Ithaca , New York
Lives and works in New York

Banks Violette has created a visual language linked to his background and personal history that is derived from pop culture's aestheticisation of death. This highly personal language is intended to provide an account of the disturbing psychology that underlies attitudes and acts that have defined the frustrations and anger of a marginalised group of white American youth. Beneath the surface of Banks Violette’s pared down black sculptures, occasionally redeemed by the white of salt crystals, is a melancholy that sometimes sinks into sorrow. This sense of sadness with which all Banks Violette’s work is imbued is linked to a tragic dimension of pop culture.
Liu Ye
Born 1974, China
Lives and works in Beijing

There is a stillness and tranquility about the painting of Liu Ye that is in marked contrast with the headlong rush for progress in modern day China. Liu Ye has appropriated the appearance of Pop Art and transposed it into something that is recognisably oriental His paintings employ the apparent sentimentality of popular art and a flatness of imagery that owes a lot to the comic book. Liu Ye’s work has been described as adding a sardonic twist to the ‘cute factor’ although in much of his painting the cute merges with the erotic.
Feng Zhengjie
Born 1968, Sichuan, China
Lives and works in Beijing

The women painted by Feng Zhengjie are pop idols, glamorous faces from a futuristic pop world. All artists who have studied painting in China’s art academies have an excellent training in realism but Feng Zhengjie rejected social realism and Western academic art and was influenced, instead, by the billboard images he saw when growing up in rural China. Developing as an artist during the turbulent years when China’s economy was changing and opening up to the outside world, Feng Zhengjie made use of the access he had to Pop culture and the imagery associated with it and developed a manner of painting that includes a critique of the growth of consumer culture in modern China.

Design For Living

19th January 2007 - 1st March 2007

Artists exhibited in Design For Living

Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec
The Breton-born brothers (Ronan born Brittany, France, 1971 and Erwan born Brittany, France, 1975) are the rising stars of European design and the most promising industrial designers to have emerged from France since Philippe Starck in the 1980s. A combination of romanticism and functionality runs throughout their work. Like all truly talented designers, the Bouroullecs have defined a distinctive visual style. The brothers also have an extraordinary ability to reinvent traditional types of furniture or products by recreating them in a way which is peculiarly appropriate to their generation.
Fernando and Humberto Campana
Fernando and Humberto Campana transform modest materials into objects that celebrate the discarded and mundane and are instilled with the spirit of contemporary Brazil. Central to their practice is the importance of materials. The challenge, as the Campanas see it, is to transform something poor into something decadent and opulent. This process of transformation has injected a new energy into contemporary design by presenting a bold, vibrant alternative to the rationalist ideals of the long dominant European modern movement
Dexter Dalwood
Dexter Dalwood's paintings embody our fascination with the private environments of the rich and famous, functioning as a substitute for documentation of the secluded worlds they depict. Dexter Dalwood rightly claims to be a latter-day history painter, taking it upon himself to visualise notorious locations that have become embedded in the popular consciousness. Dexter Dalwood's paintings stem from his own imaginings, enhanced by exhaustive research of eyewitness testimonies, biographies, available imagery and personal memoirs.
Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset
In 1995 Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset began their collaboration on what has since become a wide range of installations, performances and environmental works. In a series of projects entitled "Powerless Structures" the artist duo challenges the conventional perception of space : Architectural and social structures are reorganised in order to investigate the underlying desires of everyday objects and the mechanisms of ideological control in even the simple arrangements of walls, ceilings, entrances and exits. The works from this series deal with the issue of altering spatial conditions within various fields of the public realm : the urban landscape as well as the art institutional architecture. The projects often provide a possibility of actual change: a change of social structures in smaller scale; alterations of Modernistic design or projects which accentuate the options for alternative ways of presenting art within the museum or gallery. The emphasis is put on the deconstruction and reconstruction of meaning in predetermined or institutionalised spaces.
Zaha Hadid
Zaha Hadid is an architect who consistently pushes the boundaries of architecture and urban design. Her work experiments with spatial quality, extending and intensifying existing landscapes in the pursuit of a visionary aesthetic that encompasses all fields of design, ranging from urban scale through to products, interiors and furniture.
Sabine Hornig
Born in Germany 1964
Lives and works in Berlin

Installation work and photography are only two of the mediums in which Hornig
pursues her exploration of the world around us. Sabine Hornig also builds sculptures that read
as architectural models of functional, generic structures (bus stops, apartment
entrances), but reduced only to the point where they are uninhabitable by humans.
Confronted with the fact that these structures cannot serve their original functions,
the viewer is left contemplating the utilitarian conventions of their design.
objects they represent.

source: MOMA New York
Roger Kelly
Born 1973 Nottingham

Roger Kelly makes intricate large-scale landscape paintings that originate as line drawings which combine photographic references and invented elements. The drawings are enlarged and then transferred to canvas and painted, resulting in compositions that appear to be digitized, downloaded images that belie their painstakingly handcrafted nature. Roger Kelly's images of tornadoes ripping through the city or isolated dwellings in remote landscapes, are eerily emotionally detached. Despite having a deliberate "paint-by-numbers" quality, they are dynamic, visually stimulating, compositions. Roger Kelly is one of several young artists in their late 20s or early 30s who are becoming recognized as new and innovative British landscape painters.
Martin Kobe
Martin Kobe creates dynamic architectural visions in paint: virtual spaces that, while meticulously executed, seem provisional and in the process of collapse.
Martin Kobe’s paintings reference architectural modernism, and its emphasis on sheer horizontality, open-plan living, and visually bisecting lines as much as the seamless set architecture of popular science fiction. Interior and exterior views are compressed using interlocking horizontal planes. Sharp, vertiginous walls and ceilings inter-cut with balconies, picture windows and coulisses, leading the eye around the canvas. Martin Kobe’s palette is vibrant but with each painting, the overall hues are restricted, either a tight range of deep reds, silver blues or acid greens that enhance the emptiness in the work: utopia devoid of the mess of the everyday.
Masakatsu Kondo
Japanese artist Masakatsu Kondo presents hyper-real landscape paintings taken from photographs of places of geological significance, for example in Japan, Tasmania and Chile. From the mid-1990s, Masakatsu Kondo began to produce realistic depictions of mountains. The selected image is enlarged and ‘stretched’ vertically. Through changing the image’s scale and proportions, the mountains appear much higher than in reality, and the viewer is forced to question the assumptions that we bring to bear upon the image. More recent paintings have depicted other landscapes including deserts and forests. In these, Masakatsu Kondo has used colour rather than scale as a device to manipulate the viewer's perception of the image. The images are produced in a flat manner that could almost be an abstract painting, while the realistic nature of photography is maintained.

Source: Cornerhouse
Ross Lovegrove
Born, 1958, Cardiff, Wales

Ross Lovegrove is a sculptor of ordinary things. He is an artisan with a knack for infusing everyday objects with an alluring poetry. He is also simply an industrial designer, an influential designer of functional everyday objects, but he is also a forward-thinking creator of objects possessed with an utterly unexpected beauty.
Nathaniel Mellors
Nathaniel Mellors' films people leaving the exits of a DIY store with their purchases. At a certain point he makes exactly those purchases and later he arranges this material, in the gallery, to achieve an informal sculptural assemblage. Using the mechanism of an arbitrary system, presumably, frees him to explore aesthetics without the guilt of choice; in a constant search to find form.

Source; New Contemporaries
Ian Monroe
Ian Monroe's themes relate to illusory space and function; the trompe l'oeil effect one gets through perspective and texture of material. His series of vast collages depicting a range of stacked and piled stereo speakers - the kind your parents played the Bee Gees through in the 1970s, encased in wood veneer - have an architectural quality reminiscent of long urban avenues, or vistas through an abandoned warehouse. Their sense of boxy physicality is built up through texture - lino, carpet, sticky-backed plastic, paper - lending a cartoonish, slightly claustrophobic feel that also plays with notions of volume. You'd be deafened of course if all of these speakers actually worked.

Source: Alison Roberts, The Observer
Manfred Pernice
Manfred Pernice creates sculptures that vaguely suggest cargo holds, architectural fragments, and utopian models for larger, unrealizable buildings. His work stems from a long-standing interest in containers—whether buildings or shipping vessels—as symbols for our obsession with systematizing, categorizing, packaging, and regulating. Constructed out of the humblest of building materials, such as plywood and chipboard, his structures have a deliberately makeshift and provisional appearance. He frequently adds found materials, such as photographs or magazine clippings, to the surfaces—interruptions that further muddle the meaning of the works by making it unclear whether we are looking at interior or exterior, a volumetric structure or a support for something else. The uncertainty engendered by this oscillation between form and function is the conceptual crux of Manfred Pernice's practice, untamed and unfinished, his works are like open-ended propositions.

Source: Guggenheim Museum
Tobias Rehberger
Tobias Rehberger (b 1966, Germany) constructs futuristic environments that play with light, space, furniture, signage and clothing, inspired by modernist art history and post-war design classics. Sociable, interactive, utopian and playful, his work thrives on chance connections, unexpected encounters and the inevitable interpretative gap between communication and comprehension. Decidedly performative, Tobias Rehberger's productions investigate the performance involved in all works of art.
Carol Rhodes
Born in Glasgow in 1959

Carol Rhodes, makes small, affecting aerial landscapes on squarish wooden panels, in severely muted colors. Narrow roads cut straight or wind across the rectangle, dividing broad areas textured to resemble agricultural fields, forests, sand or bodies of water. Here and there you can make out tiny buildings or industrial installations -- a quarry, a water treatment plant -- but a lack of specificity makes it hard to tell exactly what most of these elements are. The main impression is of yawning emptiness; these places, which Carol Rhodes makes up using photographic sources, have the look of rural wastelands. Though adroitly handled, the flip-flop between picture plane and deep space is nothing new; nor is the equation of aerial landscape and abstract design. What is distinctively appealing in Ms. Rhodes's work is a mood of numbed lonesomeness. The distanced view, the unpopulated vacancy and the repressed color evoke a state for which a therapist might recommend Prozac.

Source: Ken Johnson, New York Times
Thomas Scheibitz
Born Germany 1968, currently lives and works in Berlin

Part of a group of emerging new talent in 1990’s Germany, Thomas Scheibitz’s paintings have a distinctly post-cubist orientation. His paintings are carefully composed in tightly connected compositions locked into shallow space. The forms he uses suggest fragmentary landscape and architectural elements, at once recognizable and abstract. Each of Thomas Scheibitz's paintings features some recognizable and usually quite mundane object or landscape—a flower, an apartment building, a stairwell. This subject matter is then thoroughly abstracted so that only the vestiges of its structure shine through. Solid forms are broken up into jagged planes of color, which are thickly outlined with contrasting hues in a manner reminiscent of the late-nineteenth-century Fauvists. Each shape manages to stand boldly alone, yet the composition never seems unduly fragmented; the shapes somehow coalesce to form a coherent whole.

Source : Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Artpace San Antonio