Ruby Throats
Ruby Throats
Houldsworth is very pleased to launch its new programme and premises with solo
exhibition Ruby Throats by surrealist comic bad boy Neil Farber, of Canadian
Collective, Royal Art Lodge. This will be Neil Farber’s first solo exhibition in
London.
Farber’s work tessellates an astounding array of imagery to form surrealist
fantasies, where material acts as foil to his audacious desire to push a cast of
frogs, boys, birds, fried eggs, blood and bones to the extremities of decency. The
figures in the images seem sorry, hapless subjects of their inner disorders and the
alienating confusion of their external realities. Just when we feel we may have a
grip on Farber’s work he surprises us by producing a piece of profound morbidity or,
conversely, picturesque delicacy.
Ruby Throats echoes the beguiling and disturbing nature of Farber’s works. The
diaphanous pools of paint swirl around the hunched figures of round headed boys,
humming birds and long haired maidens, but all too easily these pools of flowing
colour become the excesses of bleeding necks and drowning seas. Farber explodes
illustration outwards, creating a spiralling coil of tragic-comic absurdity and
gesture, with a poetic sensibility.
Canadian born Neil Farber has shown internationally both as a solo artist and as
part of the infamous comic collective the Royal Art Lodge. Farber has recently had
solo exhibitions with Clementine Gallery, New York, Richard Heller Gallery, Santa
Monica and Alice Day Gallery, Brussels. He was also part of recently ended Darkness
Ascends at Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto. His work has been widely
reproduced, most recently as the cover artist for Comic Release: Negotiating
Identity for a New Generation and a monograph published by Richard Heller.
Houldsworth Gallery
50 Pall Mall Deposit, 124 Barlby Road - London