Work from the Polari Range. Neal Rock paints with pigmented silicon, piped onto deep three-dimensional supports using icing bags. The densely layered, glistening constructions of paint which he creates are baroque in their decorative excess. Their visceral surfaces sometimes enclose synthetic flowers or other appropriated objects of commercial decoration; the silicon itself spreads across and away from its support like an organic form.
Work from the Polari Range
Neal Rock paints with pigmented silicon, piped onto deep three-dimensional
supports using icing bags. The densely layered, glistening constructions of
paint which he creates are baroque in their decorative excess. Their visceral
surfaces sometimes enclose synthetic flowers or other appropriated objects of
commercial decoration; the silicon itself spreads across and away from its
support like an organic form. Rock orchestrates our responses to the work
between fascination and gentle revulsion.
For this, his first solo exhibition in London, Neal Rock will use the full
height and architectural complexity of the f a projects space to install a new
series of works entitled: Work from the Polari Range. They draw their title from
the covert language used in London's 'Homosexual Underworld' as it was then
prejudicially termed in the 1950s. This indicates the terrain of the work within
a field of shifting meanings, both linguistic and visual. The works at times
seem to grow out of the building's very structure, a kind of ebullient decay, at
other times they stand alone as pure sculptural compositions in paint.
Since graduating from St Martins in 2000, Rock has developed a unique and
personal language and technique; his concerns are painterly in as much as his
work develops an intense relation between surface and material, and abstract in
so far as there is no distinction between the work's form and what it
represents. His work explores the limits of painting as practice, the boundaries
between painting, sculpture and construction.
In the autumn of 2003 Rock will show in 'Temporary Fiction' with David Burrows,
Hew Locke, Danny Rolph and Deidre King at Transition, and in an exhibition at
APT curated by Peter Lamb. He is currently exhibiting at Kontainer Gallery in
Los Angeles, and in 2004 will have a solo show with Henry Urbach Architecture,
New York.
Private View Thursday 27 November 6.00 - 8.00 pm
Gallery open Tuesday - Friday 10 am - 6 pm Saturday 12 - 5 pm
For further information or for images, please contact the gallery
f a projects 1-2 Bear Gradens London SE1 9ED t: 0044 207 928 3228 f: 0044 207
928 5123