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10/7/2013

Two exhibitions

Annely Juda Fine Art, London

Wonderland
curated by The Russian Club

The Russian Club Gallery was set up in 2008 as a not-for-profit, artist-run space. Based in East London, the Gallery commissioned new works by more than fifty emerging and mid-career artists, with a particular focus on presenting a dynamic programme of artist pairings, before closing its doors in 2012. Annely Juda Fine Art has invited The Russian Club, now a nomadic curatorial practice, to curate a group show at its established West End gallery.

Rupert Ackroyd, Natsue Ikeda, Juneau Projects, Richard Paul, Yuko Shiraishi and Roy Voss, who have all previously exhibited or performed at The Russian Club, have been selected for this exhibition, alongside Clare Rojas and Simon Cunningham, whom Matt Golden, the final artist and curator of The Russian Club, says "he would like to have made his next pairing, had the gallery continued for longer."

Aside from a connection to the East End space, the artists brought together for this exhibition share an interest in the dualities and inter-changing of fact and fiction, the authentic and acted. There are practices that utilise a pop-fashion magazine and an invented musician character; landscape painting, the gallery architecture, furniture and staff; children's paintings with a post-civilisation sci-fi scenario; traditional American folk art with contemporary politics and the mimicry of an 18th Century copy of a 17th Century prop. A human connection with the past, in heritage and tradition abounds as a sub-plot to the theatrical staging of the works throughout the exhibition.

Although not necessarily evident in this exhibition, several of the artists involved perform or construct artistic narratives under musician pseudonyms: Juneau Projects as Juneau Brothers, Clare Rojas as Peggy Honeywell, and Matt Golden with Natsue Ikeda as Juan Carlode. The exhibition will include a performance by Berlin-based performer Mute Swimmer (aka Guy Dale), whose direct lyrical style in the present tense, off-set against a more traditional acoustic song format, picks up and expands on a number of the themes within this exhibition.

There is a commissioned text by Sarah Cawthorne to accompany the exhibition.

Mute Swimmer will perform at Annely Juda Fine Art on Saturday 20 July.

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Lun Tuchnowski
Shifting Identites

An important new exhibition of works by the distinguished German sculptor Lun Tuchnowski opens at Annely Juda Fine Art in London on 11 July. The exhibition will show a selection of his abstract and figurative work over the past thirty years, including his gigantic sculpture Alpha (2010), and two powerful groups of sculptures that have developed from his fascination with lips and tongues. Tuchnowski was assistant to the celebrated Danish sculptor Robert Jacobsen.

As Richard Cork notes in the catalogue introduction, "Tuchnowski feels at liberty in the Lips series to roam between aggression, mirth and erotic greed. Yet, whatever emotion he conveys, the works always retain his acute awareness of abstraction as well." Reminiscent of gargoyles from medieval cathedrals, the series of fifteen Lips sculptures provocatively protrude from the gallery walls.

His series of five Tongue sculptures that developed from the sculpture Kiss (French) in 1990, include a complex large work entitled Self-Made (2008) – a suspended sculpture in bronze, composed of blade-like tongues that pene- trate outwards from a mass of breast-like forms. Tuchnowski's preoccupation with tongue forms is further extended in his three most recent sculptures that incorporate intertwining animal-like tongues.

Alpha is over five metres wide and is composed of a huge enveloping disc held by two chequered trumpet-like forms that are in turn guarded by a sentinel vertical trumpet. Tuchnowski describes this sculpture as a kind of "planetary gearbox" that helps us engage with the cosmos. As Cork observes, "although the four parts in Alpha are static rather than kinetic, they all seem engaged in a dance with each other... But their stasis appears temporary. We can easily imagine them resuming their dance, just as the cosmos itself never stops changing... Caught up in a fundamental and increasing flow, Alpha exempli- fies and celebrates a belief in ever-shifting identities, which galvanizes Tuchnowski's supple, inventive vision of the world."

Annely Juda Fine Art
23 Dering Street, just off New Bond Street London, UK

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