George Shaw / Jesper Just
dal 17/2/2011 al 14/5/2011
Segnalato da
17/2/2011
George Shaw / Jesper Just
Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead
Within drawing, video-making, performance and writing, Shaw is best known for his expansive body of painting. Working from photographs taken of and around his childhood home on the Tile Hill Estate, Coventry, Shaw's landscapes are at once familiar and unnerving. Just's short films have the formal qualities and gloss of Hollywood productions while resisting their narrative conventions. His lavish visual language, overlapping musical, literary and cinematic references deliver a framework onto which the viewer can attach personal memory.
George Shaw
The Sly and Unseen Day
18 February 2011 - 15 May 2011
BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art presents a major exhibition of the work of British
artist George Shaw from Friday 18 February – Sunday 15 May 2011. It will be the first
historical examination of the artist’s work to date, bringing together some forty paintings from
1996 to the present day.
Within a practice that has encompassed drawing, video-making, performance and writing,
Shaw is best known for his expansive body of painting. Working from photographs taken of
and around his childhood home on the Tile Hill Estate, Coventry, Shaw’s landscapes are
at once familiar and unnerving. Unassuming buildings, patches of woodland, pubs, his
school, the park, and the arbitrary details of urban infrastructure deposited by town planners,
are the cast of a series of paintings ongoing since the mid-1990s.
Painted exclusively in Humbrol enamel, the material of choice for teenage model-makers,
Shaw’s subject matter brings about associations of domesticity, folk art and a nostalgia for a
lost childhood and adolescence. Yet, as The Sly and Unseen Day reveals, Shaw’s art
quickly moves beyond the autobiography it first suggests. His jarring, atmospheric paintings
become peculiar records of Englishness and are suggestive of a different state of mind.
Even his more tranquil paintings, for example Scenes from the Passion: Pig Wood and
Scenes from the Passion: The Way Home (both 1999), included within the exhibition,
retain a peculiar tension.
As the exhibition progresses we see Shaw take an investigative journey, typically making
something out of nothing, as beauty is found in the mundane. The Ash Wednesday series
(2004-5) depicts the estate hour-by-hour on a single day. Other paintings, such as The Age
of Bullshit 2010 (a demolished pub) and The Assumption 2010 (the local school), offer a
curious record of British social and class life. Conflating memory and present day reality,
Shaw’s art takes on an uncanny quality, alluding to a murkier side of contemporary society
and collective subconscious.
This will be the largest exhibition of the artist’s work to date and will be accompanied by a
major new publication with essays by Michael Bracewell and Laurence Sillars, a new
piece of fiction by Peter Hobbs and an unpublished conversation between the artist and
Gordon Burn conducted in 2007.
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Jesper Just
This Nameless Spectacle
18 February 2011 - 15 May 2011
BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art presents This Nameless Spectacle a major
exhibition of the work of Danish artist Jesper Just from Friday 18 February – Sunday
15 May 2011. The exhibition at BALTIC is Just’s first in a public gallery in the UK and
includes three works: Bliss and Heaven 2004, A Vicious Undertow 2007, and new
work Sirens of Chrome 2010.
Just has been producing films for the last ten years. He describes his films as “working
with a row of open moments” from “pause to pause”. Just’s work is ambiguous, uncertain
and never reaches the moment of ‘closure’. His films investigate emotion, power
structures and psychodynamics through heightened moments of interaction. They form
part of a larger enquiry about human relationships and shifting notions of identity. While
Just’s seductive, apparently simple and often dialogue-less films at first feel familiar, as
the drama unfolds we are forced to re-assess our initial responses to them.
Infused with an ambiguity that allows for many potential readings, Just’s films explore
atmosphere and the moment. The earliest work in the exhibition, Bliss and Heaven
2004, an encounter between an older and younger man, marks a phase in Just’s
practice when the artist exclusively used male protagonists, raising questions about
gender politics and the gaze. In A Vicious Undertow 2007, turns to women and a highly
charged pas de trios takes place between a whistling older woman protagonist and a
younger couple. In Just’s most recent work, Sirens of Chrome 2010, there is a stillness
in this work in a medium that is never still, as five African-American women conduct an
abstracted encounter in an apparently otherwise deserted car park. All three works in the
exhibition play with the idea of spectacle to question human stereotypes. They offer an
insight into the geography of emotional life and, ultimately, the human condition.
Jesper Just was born in Copenhagen, Denmark in 1974 and currently lives and in New
York.
Recent solo exhibitions have included ARTscape: Denmark – Jesper Just, Galerija
VARTAI, Vilnius, Lithuania; Jesper Just: Romantic Delusions, Tampa Museum of Art,
USA 2010; With Mixed Emotions, MOCAD Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, USA;
Twochange/Rio cinema, Stockholm, Sweden; The Retrospective of Jesper Just, X Media
Forum, 31st Moscow International Film Festival, MediaArtLab, Moscow, Russia 2009;
Romantic Delusions, Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris, France and Brooklyn Art
Museum, New York, USA, Todo acabará en lágrimas, La Casa Encendida, Madrid,
Spain 2008; S.M.A.K, Ghent, Belgium; Ursula Blickle videolounge, Kunsthalle Vienna,
Vienna, Austria; Jesper Just : No Man is an Island II, Bliss and Heaven, Something to
Love, Miami Art Museum, Miami, USA 2007; It Will All End in Tears, Special viewing
during Frieze Art Fair: ArtProjx presentation in Prince Charles Cinema, London, UK; The
1st at Moderna: Jesper Just, Something to Love, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden
2006.
Recent group exhibitions include Emporte-moi / Sweep me off my feet, Musee d'art
contemporain du Val-de-Marne MAC/Val, Vitry-sur-Seine, France, Searching Songs,
Yebisu International Festival, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Tokyo,
Japan and fast forward 2. The Power of Motion Media Art, Sammlung Goetz, Karlsruhe,
Germany 2010; CODE SHARE, Contemporary Art Centre (CAC) Vilnius, Lithuania and
Play - Film and Videos, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden 2009; MADE UP,
Liverpool Biennial, UK, Glasgow International - Festival of Contemporary Art, Glasgow,
Scotland and Ciclo Video, CGAC (Galician Centre of Contemporary Art), Santiago de
Compostela, Spain 2008
BALTIC is a major international centre for contemporary art situated on the south bank
of the River Tyne in Gateshead, England. BALTIC presents a constantly changing,
distinctive and ambitious programme of exhibitions and events, and is a world leader in
the presentation, commissioning and communication of contemporary visual art. BALTIC
has welcomed over 3.5 million visitors, since opening to the public in July 2002.
Image: George Shaw, Ash Wednesday: 8.30am, 2004/5, Humbrol enamel on board © the Artist. Courtesy Wilkinson Gallery,
London.
For further information:
Ann Cooper, Head of Communications T: 0191 440 4915 E: annc@balticmill.com
Opening Friday 18 February 2011
BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art
Gateshead Quays, South Shore Road, Gateshead, NE8 3BA, UK
Hours: Monday - Sunday 10-18, Except Tuesdays 10.30-18
Free admission