SIMON MCWILLIAMS – SHOOTS AND LADDERS

Posted on 2012-05-28

Irish Artist Simon McWilliams brings his unique perspective on the urban landscape to the heart of Culver City’s art district with an exhibition of his new paintings at Skotia Gallery. McWilliams takes his observations of the city around him and filters them through his bold, painterly imagination. What he delivers is a fictional developing city, housing mysterious forms cloaked with impasto paint, reminiscent of Christo’s wrapped buildings. Not a drab concrete city but a new optimistic metropolis, resplendent in abundant, tactile colours, promising, “a glorious morrow”.

Sound drawing and painterliness combine to produce a unique vision that is part fact and part fantasy. Dust clouds created by ant-like workers on vast scaffolds, glitter in the sunlight taking on ghostly appearances. Victorian palm houses burst with growth; a profusion of exotic plants and organic shapes, green shoots grappling and seemingly merging with the cast iron struts, the natural and the manmade conjoin, to harness and energize the environment.

Opposite – Smoke and Ladders, 2011

Exhibition runs through to June 16th, 2012

Skotia Gallery
6144 Washington Blvd
Los Angeles
CA
90232

www.skotiagallery.com

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SIROUS NAMAZI

Posted on 2012-05-28

For this exhibition Namazi extrapolates on the themes he has been addressing throughout his practice: social structures and patterns, architecture, consumption and detritus. In two major new works he focuses on the urban landscape in the context of instability and failure.

Leaning Horizontal (2012) comprises a supermarket shelving system full of products. The sculpture is a Ready-made, though here it leans against the gallery wall at a 45-degree angle. Through this act he distorts our understanding of the object and renders it uncanny. The sculpture brings up issues around consumption, commerce, exploitation, existence and security. The sculpture leans against the wall like a painting – object becomes image.

Opposite – Leaning Horizontal, 2012

Exhibition runs through to June 21st, 2012

Galerie Nordenhake
Hudiksvallsgatan 8
SE-113 30
Stockholm
Sweden

www.nordenhake.com

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ALEXIS HARDING – SUBSTANCE AND ACCIDENT

Posted on 2012-05-28

The relationship between what has happened, and what has been done, is not always clear in Alexis Harding’s work. Nor is the status of the material his practice corrals into place a clear cut question of cause and effect, or of the essential and the superfluously contingent. An awareness of questions of agency and possibility, the structures in which these occur, and the ways in which these react back upon one another are part of the disruptive but fecund power of his paintings.

Recent paintings demonstrate a technical approach in some respects unchanged from earlier work, but are offered up as a difference on another level, like the same sound caught by differently configured microphones. A gradated spectrum of gloss paint poured through a partitioned container and moved across a surface of wet oil colour on panel is a recent organising principle. These panels often take a regularised format, the 8′ x 4′ of a standard mdf sheet, or perhaps the circular tondo form. The upper skin of the paint in some of these works has left incremental ridges depending on interruptions of its journey across the surface, these ridges acting as a different sort of graphic trace to the initial frictionless pouring.

Opposite – Crack Tip (Unraveller), 2011

Exhibition runs through to June 23rd, 2012

Mummery + Schnelle
83 Great Titchfield Street
London
W1W 6RH

www.mummeryschnelle.com

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