PAUL WINSTANLEY – ART SCHOOL

Posted on 2013-11-18

During the Summer months of 2011 and 2012 Paul Winstanley photographed the empty fine art studio spaces of Art Schools throughout England, Scotland and Wales. The artist abided by certain governing rules; the camera was held at the same height for each shot, the studio was photographed as found and the lighting was natural. The result is a comprehensive photographic archive of previously overlooked and un-documented sites of creative potential. This archive has given rise to a truly remarkable body of paintings and a new photographic publication.

The paintings in this exhibition, drawn from his photographs, closely subscribe to this minimal experience of place that is both documentary and sublime. They describe place and yet become, themselves, objects of space defined as much by the transience of light on surfaces as place articulated. Painted on panel, they physically reflect the hard surfaces of walls and screens within the imagery and re live the memory of place as both illusion and object. The visual language approaches abstraction and yet these paintings never lose sight of their social and political content.

Opposite – Art School 17, 2013

Exhibition runs through to November 24th, 2013

Kerlin Gallery
Anne’s Lane
South Anne Street
Dublin 2
Ireland

www.kerlin.ie

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SARA BARKER AND RYDER – ARCHITECTURE

Posted on 2013-11-18

Working with a combination of painting, welding and jewellery-making techniques, Barker (born Manchester, 1980) draws out unexpected properties in material with a sculptural fluidity and lightness. Founded in 1953 as Ryder and Yates, Ryder Architecture is a leading architectural practice based in Newcastle upon Tyne, Liverpool, Glasgow and London. With its early achievements rooted in the European Modernism of Le Corbusier and Berthold Lubetkin, the practice has an integrated approach, designing buildings which elegantly fuse form with function.

Exhibition runs through to March 2nd, 2014

Baltic Centre for Contemporay Art
Gateshead Quays
South Shore Road
Gateshead
NE8 3BA

www.balticmill.com

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MARK BRADFORD

Posted on 2013-11-18

Using materials found in the urban environment, such as billboard sheets, posters and news print, Bradford’s expansive, multi-layered collaged paintings explore the dynamics of social abstraction, where image is fused with context.

The title of the exhibition, Through Darkest America by Truck and Tank, is drawn from a chapter in the memoir of the former American president Dwight D Eisenhower in which he relates his experience as a member of the Transcontinental Motor Convoy of 1919. This encounter, coupled with his observations in Germany during the Second World War, led to the adoption of a nationwide highway system in the US in the 1950s. Applying the map of the interstate roads as a point of origin for a number of paintings in the exhibition, Bradford deftly combines abstract compositions with topographical points of reference that shift in and out of focus. The creation of the freeways, borne out of military exigency to deploy troops across the country, also arbitrarily ripped through communities, including Bradford’s own in south central Los Angeles. Similarly, ruptures, fractures, incisions and segregations echo throughout the work.

In paintings such as The Last Telegraph (2013), passages of dense and dark colour are cut and sanded to reveal intricate cartographic arteries momentarily suggesting the heat and energy of lava flows. The surface of Riding the Cut Vein (2013) is interrupted by an incandescent diagonal fissure, analogous to a natural phenomenon convulsing through a synthetic conurbation. Palimpsests of shimmering networks and tributaries ripple throughout Shoot the Coin (2013), while in Nodding Gunpowder (2013), monochromatic striations are woven in patterns surging back and forth.

Opposite – Michigan, 2013

Exhibition runs through to January 12th, 2013

White Cube
144 – 152 Bermondsey Street
London
SE1 3TQ

whitecube.com

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