Unloud
dal 5/4/2004 al 1/5/2004
Segnalato da
5/4/2004
Unloud
The Blue Gallery, London
This Duncan Higgins' show is the result of a recent trip to the northernmost part of Europe, where Norway meets Russia. Unloud is a literal translation of a generic Russian term lifted from a local guide book, which is used to describe the unique atmosphere, metaphysical as well as meteorological, of the area. Texts, found objects etc. undergo a natural metamorphosis are finally further deconstructed through translation into painting
An exhibition of recent work by Duncan Higgins
This is Duncan Higgins' third show with the Blue Gallery and is the result of a recent trip to the northernmost part of Europe, where Norway meets Russia. The region, although comparatively uninhabited, is resonant with a tumultuous and bloody recent history and straddles a cultural faultline between east and west. Unloud is a literal translation of a generic Russian term lifted from a local guide book, which is used to describe the unique atmosphere, metaphysical as well as meteorological, of the area. The word encapsulates Higgins' own intense experience of the place and his interpretation of that experience within the confines of this exhibition.
The visit coincided with the onset of winter. Quite apart from the bitter cold, a landscape shrouded in snow and tenuously lit by often insipid and short-lived daylight is inevitably disorientating and certainly imposes highly specific visual and conceptual conditions upon an artist. What I am interested in is how the imagination works in relation to distortions or just a muddled set of distorted perspectival differentiations. This may appear seemingly prosaic but it signals a potential rupture, a break in the causal network or structure of things.
Higgins' previous exhibitions with the gallery and elsewhere (the Site Gallery, Sheffield, Salzburg and Brussels during the last 4 years alone) have explored how far painting can still engage the viewer in a world so saturated with apparently disposable imagery. Is it indeed an outmoded rhetorical language? To address this question, he has consistently investigated within his work the definition, relevance and status of particular personal images and experiences when set against pervading cultural and historical traditions. My interest is in the autonomy of the witness; testimony, to live through something, to put your feet on the ground, once seen you can't not remember; from images to places, people to objects, placed in relation to painting as a potential language for exploratory cultural communication.
The process is usually initiated through the collation and manipulation in the studio of all primary materials – any form of audio or lens-based media, texts, found objects etc. These original materials undergo a natural metamorphosis when filtered through memory and imagination (what he terms ''distance viewing'') and are finally further deconstructed through translation into painting. Painting for me is an open language where autobiographical marks can be merged, manipulated and explored in relation to an extended set of models or possibilities.
For further information and/or visual material,
please contact Giles Baker-Smith or Philip Godsal on 020 7490 3833.
The Blue Gallery
15 Great Sutton Street London EC1V 0BX
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