Mark Curtis
dal 8/9/2003 al 4/10/2003
Segnalato da
8/9/2003
Mark Curtis
The Blue Gallery, London
Paintings and drawings 1997-2003. In November 1997, his last, The Geometry of DNA, threw down a challenge to the academic guardians of the orthodoxy of Crick and Watson's helical structure. Curtis boldly asserted that their Helix when translated from two into three dimensions, from theory into practice, '[ runs ] into considerable topological problems' and further suggested relatively minor structural alterations to ensure its ability to exist spatially.
Paintings and drawings 1997-2003
The Directors of the Blue Gallery are pleased to announce the first solo
exhibition of work by Mark Curtis for nearly 6 years.
In November 1997, his last, The Geometry of DNA, threw down a challenge to
the academic guardians of the orthodoxy of Crick and Watson's helical
structure. Curtis boldly asserted that their Helix when translated from two
into three
dimensions, from theory into practice, "[ runs ] into considerable topological
problems" and further suggested relatively minor structural alterations to
ensure its ability to exist spatially. (For a full explanation of his thesis,
visit http://www.curtisdna.com) Perhaps unsurprisingly, despite some sympathetic ears
-
Maurice Wilkins, who shared the 1962 Nobel Prize with Crick and Watson, while
not agreeing with Curtis' model, accepted that "it certainly is interesting
and requires careful attention" - and making it on to a Royal Mail Millennium
stamp, the highest echelons of the scientific community effectively stonewalled
this heresy. Martin Kemp, Professor of the History of Art at Oxford
University, recently observed in Nature that "in a real sense, the molecular
biologists' rejection of Curtis' effort to redesign DNA on the basis of a priori
principles represents an extreme example of the tension within science itself
between
the polar instincts of the modellers and the empiricists".
While this controversy remains ongoing, Curtis has continued those enquiries
that initiated his thesis in the first place, examining the relative nature
and depiction of visual space. The work in the new exhibition, both the
paintings and perspectival drawings, adheres to the fairly ubiquitous principle
that
everything in the natural world in some sense has to conform to those
geometric and/or mathematical constants first identified by the great Greek
philosophers and pervasive throughout all studies of the natural sciences ever
since.
Perhaps the most remarkable instance of this and the inspiration of a number of
pieces in the show is the eponymous Fibonacci Series, a sequence of numbers
that appears to govern a range of natural phenomena from rabbits breeding to
leaf arrangement to the ratio of males and females in honey beehives. Curtis
also draws material from such apparently disparate sources as the Platonic
solids, the Golden Section, cosmology from Euclid to Kepler to Hubble, and
particle
physics. The resultant exhibition, while not as intrinsically controversial
as its predecessor, again offers the viewer meticulous meditations on
structural aesthetics in nature. As such, it is an all too rare attempt at
initiating
dialogue between these mutually distrustful disciplines.
PRIVATE VIEW - TUESDAY 9TH SEPTEMBER 6 - 8.30PM
September 9th - October 4th 2003
For further information and/or visual material,
please contact Giles Baker-Smith or Philip Godsal
on 020 7490 3833.
The gallery is open
Monday - Friday 10am - 6pm
Saturday 12pm - 4pm
Tube: Farringdon, Barbican
The Blue Gallery
15 Great Sutton Street
London EC1V 0BX
T +44 (0)20 7490 3833
F +44 (0)20 7490 5749