Future Absurdities
Solo exhibition of Thomas Langley
17 November – 14 December 2017
Private view 16 November 2017 6-9pm
Unit 1 Gallery | Workshop is excited to announce the solo exhibition of Thomas Langley, a fine artist working with an interdisciplinary practice that includes painting, sculpture, performance, drawing and installation. The exhibition presents new works created whilst completing his studies at the Royal Academy Schools.
Future Absurdities is irreverent, humorous, disruptive and challenging. Langley questions and reflects on the very nature of art practice and art production, with rigour and attitude. There is a transparency in the work that Langley creates that instantly destabilises by speaking a rough cut truth levelled from the surface of the canvas. Defiant shouts outlined in urban graphics, symbols of status and value reworked to demonstrate absurdities. Playful, often childish, materials and colour choices unifying the pieces into the realm of humour if it didn’t hit such social nerves. Street culture and working class ethics speak for the social malaise and boldly asks us to wake up to reality, and fix it.
Thomas Langley (b.1986 London) is a fine artist working and living in London. The breadth of his working methods is a means to discover and explore new territories for artistic comment. He is interested in the idea of manual thought – how thinking gets into an object. In parallel, he likes the idea that this manual thought could blur the boundaries between an artwork and the artistic life that gives rise to it. The material expression of consciousness also turns into a question about the physical/spatial boundaries the artwork occupies, and the status it maintains in the wider world. His work is often self-referential although approaching certain universal truths through that; the human condition, or more specifically the artistic condition, are what he strives to make contact with.
Solo exhibition: Art Type Stuff, Stour Space, London 2016. Group exhibitions include YOU SEE ME LIKE A UFO, The Grange, Royal Ascot, 2017, A series of pocket Utopias, Yellow Brick and Snehta, Athens, 2017, It is what it isn’t, Big Shed, Aldeburgh, 2017, Cut, Unit 1 Gallery Workshop, London 2017, Premiums: Interim Projects, Royal Academy, London, 2017, Zone d’Utopie Temporaire Part II, The Koppel Project Hive, London, 2016, Charley Thomas, CRATE, Margate, 2014 and Mega Alright, The Horse Bridge Centre, Whitstable, 2012.