23/5/2012
Two related exhibitions
Raven Row, London
During the past four years Babak Ghazi has jettisoned his art production to concentrate on the manifestation of Lifework. Untitled Structure is a radically diverse series of works by Gareth Jones spanning a 25-year period.
Raven Row presents two related exhibitions by Babak Ghazi and Gareth Jones. Each artist will stage a totalising view of their work, marking both an end and a beginning of a period of activity, offering a personal synthesis of art and life.
During the past four years Babak Ghazi has jettisoned his art production to concentrate on the manifestation of Lifework. Rejecting the completeness of an artwork, the content of Lifework will be communicated as an open-ended library or resource, in which found and fabricated cultural material is presented collage-like in box files and crates. Lifework is an archive, a diary and a confession – an unfixed ongoing project. It is also a fiction, contrived as object and performance. Much of its material records the successful construction of artistic personas and the way in which artifice, stylisation and self-invention can constitute moments of revelation.
Untitled Structure is a radically diverse series of works by Gareth Jones spanning a 25-year period, united for the first time at Raven Row as a single exhibition. Individually, the structures are elliptical and spare in their apparent refusal of language. Massed together they will saturate the galleries, indicating narrative through a defined vocabulary of materials and processes, and alluding to spatial relationships within the modern city and its interiors. This exhibition is in part a survey of Jones’ art, but in its playful plenitude and suggestion of a journey from public space to psychological interior, it is also a dramatic reconfiguration of earlier positions.
Babak Ghazi (born 1976, lives in London) graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in 2000. He organises the Not Yet Night events series and self-publishes Not-Yet magazine. In 2008, his exhibition Model was featured in the Nought to Sixty programme of emerging artists at the ICA, London.
Gareth Jones (born 1965, lives in London) studied Fine Art at Newcastle upon Tyne Polytechnic from 1984 to 1987. Recent projects include a new edition of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray with Four Corners Books and a solo exhibition at MK Gallery, Milton Keynes. In 2006 he received a Paul Hamlyn Award for Visual Arts.
A double-sided poster will accompany the exhibition
Raven Row is a non-profit contemporary art exhibition centre in Spitalfields that is open free to the public, Wednesdays to Sundays. It has been constructed within eighteenth century domestic rooms, onto which 6a architects have added two contemporary galleries, and it stands on the part of Artillery Lane that was known as Raven Row until 1895.
Image: Babak Ghazi, Alice (detail from Lifework), 2008. Courtesy the artist
Raven Row
56 Artillery Lane London E1 7LS
Wednesday to Sunday 11am–6pm