calendario eventi  :: 

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6/9/2010

Two Exhibitions

Timothy Taylor Gallery, London

In Dreams

Timothy Taylor Gallery is delighted to present In Dreams, a group exhibition featuring works on paper by established and emerging artists, including Armen Eloyan, Volker Hueller, Tomasz Kowalski, Norbert Schwontkowski, Kiki Smith and Rose Wylie. This selection of figurative works reveals idiosyncratic narratives and their maker’s desire to construct hermetic alternative worlds. In ways similar to the logic experienced when dreaming, these drawn fictions give rise to impossible or incongruous episodes that nevertheless appear convincing when considered within their given context.

Taking inspiration from myths and literature, linking spirit, animal and human worlds, Kiki Smith’s somnambulist characters and symbolic objects appear to float freely in an ambiguous ethereal space. Smith’s large-scale collage and ink works on paper reveal a deeply personal language of coded imagery which speaks of the fragility and transitory nature of the body. Armen Eloyan’s latest body of watercolours depicts exhausted wooden characters, whose blissful facial expressions suggest the shared ability to dream. Highly coloured and defined with bold graphic outlines these vignettes refer to their subjects unrealised and human psychosexual fantasies.

Norbert Schwontkowski’s elusive and surreal monotypes include isolated figures that occupy indeterminate grounds. Favouring a muted or monochrome palette, the artist generates a faded and worn patina, which suggests half remembered instances from a distant memory. Rose Wylie’s quirky and richly associative paintings and drawings are influenced by diverse and potentially clashing sources including Egyptian friezes, medieval wall paintings, South Park cartoons, Match of the Day, and a wide array of popular films. Typically, Wylie combines poetic, humorous and surreal imagery with a powerful political message.

The hand-coloured etchings of Volker Hueller evoke the atmospheric remains of a dark European history. Spidery lines delineate ambiguous scenes: suppressed violence and sexual tension permeate within the cracks and crevices of these complex drawings. Creating unsettling narratives using the iconographic repertoire of art history, the works of Tomasz Kowalski introduce glimpses of a parallel universe. Referring to the passage of time and the cycles of life and death, Kowalski’s surreal landscapes and interiors come crashing into our world. The lone figures that occupy several of the compositions featured in this exhibition bear testimony to a solipsistic tendency in many studio practices. Here an emersion in medium and process leaves only enough room for a projected equivalent of the maker.

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Michael Patterson-Carver

Timothy Taylor Gallery is delighted to present the first solo exhibition by the American artist Michael Patterson-Carver in London. On display in the gallery’s Viewing Room, the show will feature recent works on paper. Born in 1958, Patterson-Carver's life and career have been shaped by his exposure as a young child to the US civil rights movement. His art and life are now inseparable. Taking a frank look at the political realm, Patterson-Carver’s work often represents well-known world leaders and people in power as well as ordinary men and women in their desire for change through direct action and demonstrations.

The power mongers are mocked through caricature, while ordinary folk are depicted with grace and respect. By giving form to, and poking fun at, the failure of world leadership and the disastrous effects of hypercapitalism, his drawings are a form of sympathetic magic, channeling the desire or power to confront these threats and fears. Many of Patterson-Carver's drawings are allegories of well-known conspiracy theories. In Supply and Demand (2010) the artist presents a classroom scenario in which the teacher demonstrates the beneficial impact of the US led invasion of Iraq on oil prices to a group of attentive students.

Patterson-Carver's work expresses, through its mode of address and what it reveals, an essential challenge to the dominant culture. It embodies the very notion of the power of the individual's conscience and witness-bearing, and the continuing belief in art as a means of effecting change. President Obama, the racial intolerance from sections of American society he faces, together with the difficult task that lies ahead of him, provides the subject matter for several recent works. In other drawings, the artist himself makes appearances as a lone demonstrator who stands against bigotry and the herd mentality of intransigent religious or political groups.

Michael Patterson-Carver was born in 1958 in Chicago, Illinois. His recent locations have included Los Angeles; New Orleans; Baja California, Mexico; San Juan Islands, British Columbia; and Portland, Oregon. Previous exhibitions include Laurel Gitlen, New York (2009); White Columns, New York (2007); Memorial to the Iraq War, with Harrell Fletcher, ICA London (2007). Patterson-Carver’s work is included in numerous private and public collections, including the American Folk Art Museum, New York, and the Museum of Everything, London. A monograph published by Four Corners Books, with essays by Matthew Higgs and Harrell Fletcher will be available from October 2010.

More information:
Inbal Mizrahi at Calum Sutton PR
+44 (0)20 7183 3577
inbal@suttonpr.com

Image: Michael Patterson-Carver, Priority, 2010, 38.1 x 50.7 cm

Opening: tuesday 7 september 2010

Timothy Taylor Gallery
15 Carlos Place, London W1K 2EX
Mon-Fri 10-6pm Sat 10-2pm
Free admission

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