Ivan Seal
dal 18/10/2012 al 8/12/2012
Segnalato da
18/10/2012
Ivan Seal
Spike Island, Bristol
In Here Stands It. Seal uses two seemingly disparate media - paint and sound - to create compositions in which meaning and references hover just beyond grasp.
Ivan Seal uses two seemingly disparate media - paint and sound - to create
compositions in which meaning and references hover just beyond grasp. Employing
such methods as working quickly from memory and generating noises and text with a
computer, Seal's work documents a shadow world in which the familiar is made
tantalisingly strange.
Ostensibly working within the tradition of the still life, the British-born,
Berlin-based artist's small-scale oil paintings complicate orthodox depictions of
the inanimate objects with which we surround ourselves; forms suggest a sausage, an
ornamental figurine, a globe, a vase of flowers. At Spike Island, these images are
shown alongside sound works whose structure and rhythm are akin to the flow of
canvases on the gallery wall. Seal's body of work constitutes a lexicon of sorts, a
new vocabulary of matter given inner life.
The painted subjects sit in shallow, ambiguous spaces often demarcated only by a
gradual shift in colour or shade, or a simple horizon line. Sculptural qualities,
such as weight and gravity, are undermined by the ambiguity of the space and the
materiality of the paint itself, which shifts in successive works from thickly
layered crusts to thin washes of colour. Though recognisably of this world, Seal's
subjects represent less the depicted object and more the unstable,
psychologically-inflected territory within our minds.
Seal is deliberately open-ended in his interpretation, playing games that create
space for chance and unpredictability to creep in. For example, his titles are made
by computer programmes that spit our randomly generated words such as imal,
smodmitlyter, or blatlangopslergotrirm. Taken together, these dark, frequently comic
images and strange sounds spark associations and narratives that are very much up to
the viewer to unfold.
Ivan Seal(1973) was born in Manchester and now
lives and works in Berlin. Recent solo exhibitions include Ivan Seal at Carl
Freedman Gallery, London (2011), True as applied to you; false as applied to you at
Krome Gallery, Berlin (2011), I Learn by Osmosis at CEAAC, Strasbourg (2010) and Two
Rooms For A Fall in Berlin (2009). Seal is represented by Carl Freedman Gallery,
London, and RaebervonStenglin, Switzerland.
www.ivanseal.de/
For further information contact Anna Searle Jones, on 0117 929 2266 or anna.searle.jones@spikeisland.org.uk
Preview: Friday 19 October, 6-9pm
Spike Island
133 Cumberland Road, Bristol BS1 6UX
The gallery is open Tuesday to Sunday, 11am to 5pm. Entrance is free.
Live Rogue Game matches are held on the following dates: Friday 7 September, 7pm; Saturday 8 September, 2pm; Saturday 22 September, 2pm; Saturday 29 September, 12.30pm.