SUPERPAINTING (UBERKUNST) James Connelly & Oliver Bancroft
18 May - 19 June 2013
Preview Fri 17 May 6-9pm Gallery Open Fri - Sun 12-6pm
‘Friedrich Nietzsche notes, “We should consider every day lost in which we do not dance at least once.” Still, Germany’s most notorious philosopher never had to sit down on the dance floor in a line of make-believe rowers and chant "Agadoo-doo-doo". Dance music has come on since the days of Black Lace (who also had a hit called Superman, another concept with which Nieszche was not unfamiliar).’ Paul Simpson, _The Rough Guide to Cult Pop
Superpaintings features eight new paintings made in collaboration, for the first time, by two old friends who met at art school in the late 1990s. It is a friendship that started because of a shared infectious sense of humour, a love of old-master paintings and a tendency for late night disco dancing. All of these traits are apparent in the new paintings.
The paintings re-enact a dance move from the 1981 cult hit song Superman by Black Lace. Dance moves include clapping hands, walking, swimming, skiing, spraying deodorant, sounding a horn, Macho Man, ringing a bell, and the Superman. As society suffers cuts from tightening-of-the-belt austerity measures, one has to remember that, maybe, in the bigger picture Neitzsche and Black Lace were right after all.
The process of painting is no longer just something that painters share by talking and viewing the finished piece. Using cutting edge technology the artists add a new dimension to the discourse of painting by creating an augmented celebration of the superman. The history of each painting will be able to be viewed in the gallery by holding a mobile device to the subject of the work thus unfolding the life and process of the artwork.
Superpaintings is one of a series of shows at Transition that examine ideas around collaboration. The subject is also examined in Garageland 15: Collaboration, published in April 2013.
"I use light as a material to work the medium of perception, basically the work really has no object because perception is the object. And there is no image because I am not interested in associative thought."
- James Turrell
PIPPY HOULDSWORTH GALLERY, London presents RUTH CLAXTON - Specular Spectacular
7 June - 6 July 2013
Specular Spectacular is a complex maze that occupies the 'centre stage' of the gallery.
Interconnecting structures hold mirrors that both become part of and reflect the installation itself.
Worlds within worlds are housed here, and inhabited by found figurines that are themselves swallowed up by amorphous reflective masks.
Icelandic nature is prominent in Eliasson's work, and his artistic relationship with it often involves collection or documentation that is scientific in tone. The country becomes a sensory laboratory where ideas can be developed and evolved into art, as evidenced in the multiple photographic series that would seem to witness a near compulsive need for collecting.
