Turps Banana 11 launch

The launch of issue 11 of Turps Banana at The Lamb and Lion. From the top - Turps 11, Pete Jones with darkside Nancy, the mighty Marcus Harvey, The Lamb and Lion gallery and a painting by Alexis Harding, whose title I didn't get.

Will Kendrick 'Trichromatic' Private View photos

Will Kendrick, 'Trichromacy' @ Elements Artspace, The Old Pumping Station, Midland Road, Bath, UK

Abstraktion's first exhibition has just finished, introducing Will Kendrick. This is an exciting show of this young artist recently graduated from Bath School of Art and Design at Bath Spa University. 'Tricomacy' is how humans, bees and monkeys and a few other animals see differentiate colours. Colour is a complex subject and is inextricably linked to taste and taste is linked to survival. These are interesting works exploring colour in their cross-disciplinary platform, from painting with resin, installation, found objects and corrupted video file projection. The works are reminiscent of diverse artists such as Pollock, Benglis and Flavin.

Upper Room: Will Kendrick, 'Circle painting 3', Resin, 2011

Will Kendrick, 'Circle painting 3', Resin, 2011

Will Kendrick, 'Data Drip' Corrupted video file projection

Will Kendrick, 'Stereotone' perforated steel and resin, 2010

Will kendrick, 'Pornament' Resin, spraypaint, found object, lacquer on going series

Will Kendrick, 'Trichromatic,' mixed media light installation, 2012

Will Kendrick, 'Trichromatic,' mixed media light installation, 2012

David Hawley at 146 Art Space

You have a few more days to catch Remote Control a solo exhibition by David Hawley at 146 Art Space  in Hobart Tasmania.

We are always interested in opinions on abstraction and here is an excerpt from the catalogue text by Dr Megan Keating, 2011, Head of Painting, Tasmanian School of Art University of Tasmania 

"In his artist statement for this body of work Hawley questions authenticity and authorship in the age of technology and digital production. One could also ask the same question of abstract painting. It could be argued that all abstract painting today is an appropriation, but if this is true then abstraction becomes a self-referential exercise – an endless loop that goes nowhere. I don’t think David Hawley would agree with this." 

Dr Keating also refers to Capitalism as per original. Rajchman, J., (1995), “Another View of Abstraction”, in Abstraction, Journal of Philosophy and the Visual Arts, no.5, Academy Group, London. p.16

"Abstraction has been re-interpreted such that it ‘consists in an impure mixing and mixing up ...a reassemblage that moves towards an Outside, rather than a purification that turns up to essential Ideas, or in towards the constitute forms of a medium."

images are from the catalogue.

Philip Guston, short documentary, showing us another way of painting...(sorry about little ad, not ours, click to disappear)

Karel APPEL, from CoBrA movement and old school jazzer, paints a picture....

Photographic abstraction, 'Recto/Verso' at The Approach, London

Recto/Verso Michele Abeles, Robert Heinecken, Alexandra Leykauf, Dóra Maurer, Lisa Oppenheim, Erin Shirreff, The Approach, London

This is an interesting exhibition from just over a month ago at The Approach, with specific look at Erin Shirreff and Dora Maurer from Hungary. ''Recto/Verso' is an exhibition that looks at the way six different artists engage with photographic image making and the ambiguous perceptual relationships between object and representation. Be it through contingency, staging, iconicity, or imagined physicality, there is an investigation in to how we read and experience images.'

Erin Shirreff, 'Four Sides' 2012, Four archival pigment prints, 61cm x 61cm each

'Erin Shirreff’s film ‘Ansel Adams, RCA building, circa 1940’, takes as its source imagery the classic American photographer’s architectural portrait of Rockefeller Plaza. Made by re-photographing the same image hundreds of times to counterfeit changing light and climate conditions, it appears to be a time-lapse film of the building itself. She re-imagines a physical and temporal relationship to the autonomous iconic original photograph of building as monument. This shift between the sculptural and photographic is also emphasized in her ‘Four Sides’ series, which similarly destabilizes the viewers sense of perception by taking two photographs of a minimal sculptural form, bisecting the flattened image and reconnecting it in four different permutations that appear to recreate four different sculptures. Shirreff investigates the spaces and intervals between these translated forms and images to animate the imaginative space of what we see and don't see.'

Dóra Maurer, 'Sluices 2 A+B', 1980
Photogram, 59x45 cm each

Dóra Maurer is an important figure in the Hungarian avant-garde art scene. Her artistic process of displacement and change manifests itself in different disciplines, one strand of which is photographic. There are constructive, concrete art methods at work in the way changes are created through translations, progressions and variations. Movement is to be understood not as mechanical but as movement for the eye, movement as the process of perception. Laszlo Beke describes her oeuvre as ‘Objective Tenderness’. Her use of a camera allowed the course of movements to be shown, ways of action and body talk to be made visible in sequences. In the series ‘Blind Touching of Objects’ Maurer wrapped the photo paper around everyday objects from her studio. The imprint of the object becomes the form of the photogram. In her series ‘Sluices’ she moves from a photograph, to a photogram, to a dustgram – all using a template abstract structure to record their different physical traces of movement through it.' Aso see Lisa Oppenheim's 'Heliograms'...

Lisa Oppenheim, 'Heliograms', 1876/2011.
Toned photograms exposed with sunlight, framed with museum glass, 31x31 cm each

Tot op het Bot - To the Bone

Tot op het Bot - To the Bone at Brabants Kenniscentrum Kunst en Cultur in Tilburg The Netherlands.

April 26 - June 17.

Open: from Tue - Sun. from 13.00 - 17.00h

Titanium white and a pinch of Cadmium red and Lemon yellow José Heerkens

Four generations represented in four artists from Brabant: Visic Marina, '87 - installations with thread ( vimeo video), Iris Bouwmeester, '69 - sculpture, Jose Heerkens '50 - painting as above, Ria van Eyk '38 - painting. A nice idea for an exhibition with a beautiful variety of approaches.

Performing Abstraction at Luciano Brito Galeria, Brazil

Hrein Fridfinnsson
Source 1992 - 2012
cardboard and neon sheet

Luciana Brito Galeria is presenting Performing Abstraction which runs from 9th May to 30th June 2012 an international group exhibition guest curated by Rina Carvajal. The exhibition will trace performative dimensions in contemporary abstract geometric art, specific connections to the history of Modernism, and new perspectives on the contextualisation and reinvention of abstraction in recent multimedia artistic practices.

The works of the fourteen artists in the exhibition emerge from a wide range of attitudes towards abstraction, and employs a variety of media and formats, ranging from painting and drawing, to collage, video, dance, film, sound art, and installations. Abstraction as a visual strategy and aesthetic language has had a dynamic, multifaceted history, constantly repositioning and reinventing itself in various contexts, and its complexity continues to unfold today. 

Marine Hugonnier 
"Art for Modern Architecture Dilma's Election" polyptych, 2011 
silkscreen on paper 

Lynda Benglis

Lynda Benglis pouring, thanks to Colette Morey de Morand for bringing this part of Lynda's work to our attention.  Thanks also to Sweet Station blog for the image. The blog has more of the photos and part their text reads "The validity of much of her work was questioned until the 1980s due to its use of sensuality and physicality."
Cheim Reid have a selection of her sculptures and I was surprised to see that she has only had one solo show in the UK at Thomas Dane which finished on 24th March this year. Laura Barnet of G2 recently spoke to her.


Colette's work is in the Territories and Boundaries show at the Kensington and Chelsea College until 3rd May.