Itch!

Unit 1 Gallery | Workshop is excited to present Itch!, a solo exhibition showcasing new work by Robin Mason, including collaborative works with Gabriel Gbadamosi, Anne Petters and Debra Allman.

Itch! is an exhibition conceived by Robin Mason as a reaction to the poem ‘Deutsche Schuld’ by Gabriel Gbadamosi, that simply would not leave him. Unit 1 Gallery | Workshop proved to be a space that would suit a site specific work that may just be the satisfying scratch to this long standing itch. Mason observes: “Nagging at my conscience for five years. ‘Dresden, Frankfurt. Completely burnt.’ It was the antithesis of the itch of 1983, when D.M. Thomas’s White Hotel mentored my images into desire and longing. The itch of Gbadamosi’s poem lingered, its exploration of the slip in language in translation eventually subjected me to an understanding of my own preoccupations with sublimating. This slip in language allows the decorative, the playful, the bejewelled sugar coating of darkness to enable the unspeakable to be spoken. Liberated from the wounding of initial reading, and through his careful crafting of language, a new mural scaled painting in the studio, ‘Bedeckt’ became free to become its own being.”

The itch of the past, the future and the present.

The itch as desire. The itch to draw and paint. The itch of the slippage of language, the itch of translation, the itch of sublimation. The itch of D.M. Thomas’s White Hotel, the itch of Otto Dix’s painting ‘War’ held in limbo in the Neue Meister in Dresden. The slip in language where decorative, playful, bejewelled sugar coated itches of darkness enable the unspeakable to be spoken. Road trips itch. Collaborators itch before they collaborate. The itch of landscape traditions of surrealism, of David Claerbout’s film, Travel. The constant itch of cartoons and the comic, the itch of perceived reality shifting from the laws of the Renaissance into realms of Looney Tunes. What is this itch to displace truth, to joke, to break this seriousness? The itch that becomes vocal in the everyday. An itch that gets so deep seated that the studio becomes the only place to turn to. The itch of the studio builds and builds, as all excuses and reasons not to scratch run out.

Dresden collaborators

Dresden is the common denominator with the four collaborators. It’s where Mason’s wife and fellow traveller Debra Allman have journeyed on three occasions. Visiting the city, with its deep history and store of treasures, and beyond into Bohemia into Saxon Switzerland whose landscape gave birth to the Romantic movement and the most famous painting of Casper David Friedrich. The outcome of their sharing has formed itself into a bejewelled and bedecked hiking stick and a small ladder, laden with souvenirs and trinkets. It’s in this area where Dresden born artist, (Mason’s colleague and friend) Anne Petters spent time during childhood visits to her Grandmother’s home amongst the Lilienstein and the Bastei, amidst the haunting fogs that rise from the river Elbe. Their collaborative works include ‘Morgentau’ (morning dew), merging glass casts from objects Petters collected from the area last winter, with works on paper by Mason made from memories of that place, bringing together the mind and body of that location of poetic mystery and wonder. The itch of the burning of Dresden also merges these collaborators through Mason’s friend Gabriel Gbadamosi’s poem, which draws on his fathers experience of arriving into a post war Germany before settling in Vauxhall, London, as well as his recollections of a writing residency in the museums of Frankfurt where he assisted in the mining of the museum archive of difficult documentation and histories.