calendario eventi  :: 

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16/7/2012

Two exhibitions

Ikon Gallery, Birmingham

Boyd & Evans
Views

Part of the London 2012 Festival

Ikon presents Boyd & Evans’ first major survey exhibition, comprising painting and photography drawn from the artist couple’s 40 year career. Their paintings, while highly realistic, have a scale, composition and use of perspective that often edge closer to the surreal. In these dreamlike pictures the air feels thin and time suspended. Photography has been integral to Boyd & Evans’ work as painters; more recently they have explored this medium in its own right. With selections from 1968 to 2012, Views tracks their practice from painted scenes of middle-class leisure in 1970s Britain to penetrating photographic landscapes of the American Southwest.

Boyd & Evans have been working together since 1968. In the first decade of their partnership, they created stencils drawn from images in their own photographic archive, spraying acrylic paint through them to create an even, thinly painted surface. Assembling disparate elements from different photographs allowed them to create new, mysterious compositions, which the viewer is left to ponder. Their use of photography, spray guns, square canvases, even their decision to work collaboratively, can all be seen as strategies to shift focus away from the hand of the artist and toward the viewer’s imaginative play.

Vision itself has been a longstanding concern for Boyd & Evans, with many works suggesting the conditions of seeing or being seen. Views 1 and 2 (1973) – paintings from which this exhibition takes its name – show in the first canvas a girl with her back to the viewer, looking out toward a group of people and some cars parked incongruously in the distance. In the second painting she turns, as in a photographic snapshot, and smiles directly at the viewer. The initial puzzle about the relationships within the painting becomes a startling, if light-hearted, confrontation between the figure and her beholders.

In the 1980s and 90s, Boyd & Evans abandoned the spray gun in favour of brushes, but continued to be inspired by photographic imagery, with an increasing emphasis on landscape. Lone figures are set within sweeping, panoramic vistas traversed by railroad tracks and asphalt roads, the everyday traces of human industry and travel. Turning Point (1989), for example, shows two figures facing each other in profile on a wintry desert road as a train passes behind them. The man at the very centre of the painting becomes a kind of fulcrum. Everything in the landscape to his left is horizontal, the train perfectly parallel to the horizon, but on his right both the road and train take a dramatic turn, pulling away into the distance.

Beginning in the 1990s, Boyd & Evans also showed an interest in pure landscape devoid of human presence, a concern which developed while in Indonesia and the American Southwest. Parallel to this strand, they also explored interiors and the familial relationships of people within them.

Views also includes photographs Boyd & Evans have taken throughout their career. Photography has become a central position within their practice, allowing the artists to explore many of the same concerns with the nature of viewing, perspective and narrative as in their paintings. As technology has developed to allow the manipulation of photographs in the last decade, and as their relationship to the near-empty desert landscapes of America has deepened, Boyd & Evans’ photography has become more painterly. Draining colour from all but a central element of their compositions, their works heighten the strange luminosity in pools of water, lone buildings or twisted cans rusting in the desert. Throughout their career, Boyd & Evans have traversed the already porous boundary between realism and illusionism.

Views is part of the London 2012 Festival, a spectacular 12-week nationwide celebration running from 21 June until 9 September 2012 bringing together leading artists from across the world with the very best from the UK.
Views is supported by LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, New Mexico.

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David Theobald
Deepest Sympathy

Ikon presents Deepest Sympathy (2011), a digital animation by British video artist David Theobald.

Through this short video, a biography is conveyed through the medium of greetings cards. Beginning at birth, they mark all of life’s loves, successes and tragedies: childhood birthdays, exam passes, career development, marriage, birth, divorce, retirement and death. In so doing, one person’s story is catered for as a set of pre- packaged events and standarised sentiments available for purchase.

David Theobald is a video artist born in Worthing in 1965. Although originally trained as a chemical engineer, he pursued a career in finance for fifteen years, living both in New York and London. Ten years ago he decided to change profession and dedicate himself to becoming a full-time artist. Most recently, his main works have been animations structured from photographs, scanned images or single frames extracted from video footage, blending these together to create a familiar yet alien environment. These may be structured as conventional films or as continuous loops with no discernible beginning or end.

Deepest Sympathy can also be viewed at http://vimeo.com/19603500

Image: Boyd & Evans, Pale Cafe (2008). Oil on canvas. Courtesy the artists and Jack Evans

For more information, high-res images and to arrange an interview with the curator please contact Helen Stallard on 0774 033 9604 or email h.stallard@ikon-gallery.co.uk

Press Preview on Tuesday 17 July 11-6pm followed by private view, 6-8pm.

Ikon Gallery
1 Oozells Square, Brindleyplace, Birmingham b1 2hs
Tuesday - Sunday 11am-6pm
Closed Mondays except Bank Holidays

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