Cut
Alexandre Bianchini, Cedric Christie, Thomas Langley, Lynn Loo, Simon Liddiment, Jeff McMillan, Loukas Morley, Simon Ogg, Harrison Pearce, Pascal Rousson, Russell Terry and Gavin Turk
Curated by Corridor Projects
29th April – 18th May 2017
Alexandre Bianchini (b 1966) is a Swiss/Italian artist living and working in Geneva. Graduate of l’Ecole supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Geneva. Bianchini is also Founder of Forde and Art Space Geneva. In his current work Bianchini cuts photographs into strips and weaves images together. The resulting image is an interplay between two images, sourced from pornography, which when cut together in this way seems to negate their explicit material so that it is hidden in plain sight.
Cedric Christie (b 1962) is a London based artist, where he continues to live and work. His practice explores a broad range of cultural and art historical references, often using humour and irony as subtle vehicles of communication. He incorporates and manipulates everyday objects such as snooker balls, scaffolding, and even cars to create sculptures that are meticulously and skilfully made. They become both a critical appraisal of modernism as well as a playful exploration of form and meaning. Cedric Christie has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally and has curated a number of large-scale group exhibitions including Something I don’t do and The Things of Life at Flowers Gallery. His work is held in the private collections of Anita Zabludowicz, Unilever and Derwent Valley Holdings, among others.
Thomas Langley (b 1986) is from Canterbury, Kent, now working and living in Hackney Wick, London, as well as studying at the Royal Academy. He says, “I consider myself a fine artist working with an interdisciplinary practice that includes painting, sculpture, performance, drawing and installation. The breadth of my working methods is a means to discover and explore new territories for artistic comment. I’m interested in the idea of manual thought – how thinking gets into an object. At the same time, I like the idea that this manual thought could blur the boundaries between an artwork and the artistic life that gives rise to it. For me, boundaries of artistic practice are fluid and questionable. 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. My work is often self-referential, but I attempt to approach certain universal truths through that; the human condition, or more specifically the artistic condition, are what I strive to make contact with.”
Simon Liddiment (b 1964) is a UK based artist. His practice is located somewhere in the stand- off between words and objects, in the visual and verbal slippages that occur between what may be spoken or written, and the physical stuff of the world. The work is epigrammatic in the best sense – concise, paradoxical and witty – revealing an attempt to understand something and share his findings. It is about locating an appropriate form for the observation. It is somehow about containment. How it all fits together remains important – the shape of the idea, the shape of the material it comes in and the shape of the thing.
Jeff McMillan (b 1968) is an American artist who has lived and worked in London since 1998. He approaches painting through materiality, often in combination with the found object or second-hand image. His method of partially submerging an existing drawing or print into opaque colour cuts a traditional picture in two, forcing a split into either abstraction or figuration. A more subtle intervention of a rapier-thin line of acrylic paint pierces the identity of the portrait while leaving it almost wholly intact. McMillan’s most recent works are more purely abstract, on old fabrics or linens. Offcuts are literally sliced off the ends of large stretched paintings, which the artist has hung in his studio to bring good luck.
Loukas Morley (b 1973) makes work about the exploration of the creative process of an artist and his artwork is about beauty. He is aware of perfection within the creative process and his mental and emotional response to the materials goes beyond vocalisation. His practice recognises the value of not knowing where the creative process is leading him and he enjoys it as a space of possibilities, allowing more scope for its unexpected, fluid and constantly changing nature. This enables him to enter a meditative state exploring the capabilities of materials, their versatility as a medium, the process and act of the making art.
Gavin Turk (b 1967) is a British born, international artist. He has pioneered many forms of contemporary British sculpture now taken for granted, including the painted bronze, the waxwork, the recycled art-historical icon and the use of rubbish in art.
Turk’s installations and sculptures deal with issues of authorship, authenticity and identity. Concerned with the ‘myth’ of the artist and the ‘authorship’ of a work, Turk’s engagement with this modernist, avant-garde debate stretches back to the ready-mades of Marcel Duchamp. Turk’s appropriation of Lucio Fontana’s punctured egg paintings symbolise life, creation and originality. Turk’s ovoid canvases, however, are punctured with buchi (‘holes’) and tagli (‘slashes’) to spell his own initials.
Simon Ogg has remade a work called Slats for this show. In this context the term slats refers to the lengths of wood that stone sits on as it is cut. Originally a trained stonemason, Ogg made Slats on the Isle of Portland in a stone-yard/quarry in response to the working practices he found there. It consisted of 4 long pieces of hand and machine-cut stone and was displayed as a broken line. It is now shown as Cut Slats in 16 smaller pieces. There is a strong reminder of the architectons of Kazimir Malevich or Donald Judd’s floor sculpture.
Harrison Pearce (b 1986) is a multidisciplinary artist, with a background in analytic philosophy. His works often explore philosophical ideas, with an emphasis on the nature of the human mind, language and experience. His recent body of work looks at the idea of the ‘conversation piece’, a term originally used to describe an 18th century genre of painting but now more commonly used to describe an object that sparks a phatic exchange. In Pearce’s kinetic sculpture the work is often found in conversation with itself. Here, he has focused on the experience of a disruption to the flow of conversation, when one is cut off or fails to communicate effectively.
Pascal Rousson (b 1963) graduated from Beaux Arts de Lyon in 1985, and from Geneva School of Visual Art in 1991. Rousson now lives and works in London. His latest works are part of a series in which he is revisiting Cubism through popular culture. In this case with a cover version of Picasso’s 1910 Portrait of Wilhem Unde as Iggy Pop or Georges Braque’s 1913 Woman with a Guitar as Black Sabbath; re-enacting through painting the idea of fragmentation, collage and cut-out of the subject, as in Cubist paintings, where figures and objects were dissected, cut or “analysed” into a multitude of small facets.
Russell Terry (b 1981) lives and works in East London and is currently studying MA Painting at Royal College of Art, London after completing BA(hons) Fine Art at Kent Institute of Art and Design in 2005. The combination and invention of processes in Terry’s work can leave many of the outcomes without a precise definition. Working with painting, hand-cut paper, collage, casting and mould-making, it is clear that the making process is of primary importance. There is a compulsive inclination towards pattern and sequential variation and an awareness of the grand, corrupting concept of infinity.