London elsewhere
25.07. - 09.09.2006
An exciting show with six young artists based in London will take place this summer at Bernhard Knaus Fine Art in Mannheim. Quite different artistic positions in Painting, Sculpture and Photography will show the great variety of contemporary art from the vibrant London scene. Most of the artists have graduated from the Royal College of Art or Goldsmiths College in London, and now continue to live and work in the city.
Ruth Claxton (*1971) transforms pre –existing ceramic figurines into lovingly mutilated creatures of a another world prolonging parts of the body and combining the sculpture with mirror surfaces creating baroque tableaux. The artist is concerned with articulating the fragile relationship between vision and bodily experience, image and that which it depicts.
Anne Kathrin Greiner (*1975) revisited the schools she attended during her formative years. Whilst the architecture functions as autobiography, she also analyses and explores the psychology of these buildings in regards to more universal concerns, therefore allowing the viewer to directly engage with the work and to evoke common histories. The absence of people from the images underlines the ambiguity and placelessness of the institutions, their architectural features being characteristic of spaces in which individuals are assessed and controlled.
James Iveson (*1983) primarily works as a painter as well as recently producing a number of monotypes on paper. His close friend the artist Tania Perez Cordova recently made the following comments about his work:. “James' paintings sorrow for romantic subjectivity. With wistful melancholy the work calls back for attention to detail. Longing for a truthful and personal approach, the paintings portrait encounters once lived. Without revealing a certain mood, they remain as distant quiet personal accounts. It is perhaps this gesture that unveils traces of their sincerity and brings us closer to the artist....”
Noah Sherwoods (* 1976) sculptures arise from a period of activity that records the extended moment of the binding of ideas and materials. Forms, materials and contents are put through processes of transformation and reorganization of their premises. Fragmented objects, their reconfigured parts, the information of matter and the ‘mattering’ of it, all sign a world in a state of collapse. Using objects and materials and putting them through relatively simple processes such as cutting, burning and stapling, describes a degree of expenditure, a mediation of intermittent breakdown on a human scale.
Adam Thompson (*1980) works with various techniques and media recontextualising found images and objects. Employing the miniaturisation and manipulation of landscape his mysterious prints often present romantic diorama and motifs surrounded by a velvety black. The image seems to be falling away like from a bygone time. Embodying themes of the visible and invisible, the subtle and indeterminate nature of the work becomes a visual trap enveloping the viewer in their physicality.
Simon Willems (*1971) is interested in images and meanings that hinge on the psychological distinction between actual and perceived realities – the delusions of false comfort and escapist fantasy that inform a very contemporary vulnerability. In his paintings a bizarre reality opens up. Scenes and places of every day life are charged with a life of its own and seems to be like dream sequences. Surfaces, animals , plants and objects mutate into a biomorphic shape in a space between fantasy and reality.
Ruth Claxton (*1971) transforms pre –existing ceramic figurines into lovingly mutilated creatures of a another world prolonging parts of the body and combining the sculpture with mirror surfaces creating baroque tableaux. The artist is concerned with articulating the fragile relationship between vision and bodily experience, image and that which it depicts.
Anne Kathrin Greiner (*1975) revisited the schools she attended during her formative years. Whilst the architecture functions as autobiography, she also analyses and explores the psychology of these buildings in regards to more universal concerns, therefore allowing the viewer to directly engage with the work and to evoke common histories. The absence of people from the images underlines the ambiguity and placelessness of the institutions, their architectural features being characteristic of spaces in which individuals are assessed and controlled.
James Iveson (*1983) primarily works as a painter as well as recently producing a number of monotypes on paper. His close friend the artist Tania Perez Cordova recently made the following comments about his work:. “James' paintings sorrow for romantic subjectivity. With wistful melancholy the work calls back for attention to detail. Longing for a truthful and personal approach, the paintings portrait encounters once lived. Without revealing a certain mood, they remain as distant quiet personal accounts. It is perhaps this gesture that unveils traces of their sincerity and brings us closer to the artist....”
Noah Sherwoods (* 1976) sculptures arise from a period of activity that records the extended moment of the binding of ideas and materials. Forms, materials and contents are put through processes of transformation and reorganization of their premises. Fragmented objects, their reconfigured parts, the information of matter and the ‘mattering’ of it, all sign a world in a state of collapse. Using objects and materials and putting them through relatively simple processes such as cutting, burning and stapling, describes a degree of expenditure, a mediation of intermittent breakdown on a human scale.
Adam Thompson (*1980) works with various techniques and media recontextualising found images and objects. Employing the miniaturisation and manipulation of landscape his mysterious prints often present romantic diorama and motifs surrounded by a velvety black. The image seems to be falling away like from a bygone time. Embodying themes of the visible and invisible, the subtle and indeterminate nature of the work becomes a visual trap enveloping the viewer in their physicality.
Simon Willems (*1971) is interested in images and meanings that hinge on the psychological distinction between actual and perceived realities – the delusions of false comfort and escapist fantasy that inform a very contemporary vulnerability. In his paintings a bizarre reality opens up. Scenes and places of every day life are charged with a life of its own and seems to be like dream sequences. Surfaces, animals , plants and objects mutate into a biomorphic shape in a space between fantasy and reality.
