Clunie Reid creates aggressive and rampant photo-collages. Celebrity culture, art theory, pornography, fashion and cartoon caricatures are spliced together in complex visual jokes constructed from digital assemblage. Working Mum is a series of 21 drawings based on cropped images of breasts from a range of Lads' Mags such as Loaded and Nuts.
Clunie Reid
Dumb Down, Get Dressed, Move Out
Studio Voltaire is pleased to announce a new exhibition by the British artist Clunie Reid. The exhibition will be the artist’s first large-scale solo presentation in a not-for-profit space in London.
Clunie Reid creates aggressive and rampant photo-collages that question the media they are created from, as well as the integrity of the source images that they employ. Celebrity culture, art theory, pornography, fashion and cartoon caricatures are spliced together in complex visual jokes constructed from digital photography, photocopies, drawings and assemblage.
For Studio Voltaire, Reid has created a new series of works on aluminum that draws on the sexual content and rhetoric of advertising and popular magazines. The mirrored surface is interrupted with drawing and imagery that plays on the relationship between surface and penetration, and shatters the reflection of the mirrored surface.
The exhibition follows the artists solo exhibitions at Focal Point Gallery, Southend (2009), MOT, London (2007 and 2007) and Galerie Reinhard Hauff (2009). Reid has been included in numerous group exhibitions including Bielefelder Kunstverein, Germany (2010), Fotomuseum Winterthur, Zurich (2009), Camden Arts Centre (2008) and Transmission Gallery, Glasgow (2007).
Supported by The Elephant Trust
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Edward Kay
Working Mum
For his first solo exhibition in a not for profit space in the United Kingdom, Edward Kay will present a new series of pencil drawings.
Working Mum is a series of 21 drawings based on cropped images of breasts from a range of Lads’ Mags such as Loaded and Nuts. In each drawing, the artist has heavily cropped and framed the image down to the left breast of each woman, emphasizing the construction of the image.
This action not only brings to mind certain medical references such as mastectomies or taxonomic examples, it highlights certain oddities such as strange photoshopping and lighting within the image or the ubiquitous use of hair extensions. This recent series came out of an earlier body of work, Recession Tits.
The artist started the series at the beginning of the financial crisis in attempt to make some saleable work, being both drawing – and therefore cheaper than painting- and aimed at heterosexual male collectors. Although this overt commodification of the female body has reminiscences of artists such as Allen Jones, there is also a sense of surrealist artists such as Magritte, which further confuses our understanding of the artist’s intentions.
Edward Kay (Born 1980) graduated from The Royal Academy in 2005. He has been included in a number of exhibitions including HOTEL, London: Dicksmith Gallery, London; Light&Sie Gallery, Dallas; Engholm Engelhorn Galerie, Vienna; Chung King Project, Los Angeles and Bloomberg Space, London.
For more information/images:
Tamsin Clark +44 (0)20 7622 1294 tamsin@studiovoltaire.org
Image: ClunieReid, Dumb Down
Preview 1 July 2010, 7 – 9pm
Studio Voltaire
1A Nelson's Row - London
Hours: Wednesday - Saturday, 12 - 6pm
free admission