DON'T LOOK BACK: Curated by Vivienne Roberts

25 October - 30 November 2023
Works
Overview
DON'T LOOK BACK, Curated by Vivienne Roberts

I’m like a slipping glimpser.

Willem de Kooning

Lewis Baxter, Archie Franks, Oliver Dorrell, Phil Goss, Charlotte Winifred Guérard, Andrew Hewish, Diane Howse, Xingxin Hu, Phil King, Sharon Leahy-Clark, Alice Macdonald, Rosemarie McGoldrick, Rebecca Meanley, Rachel Mercer, Laurence Noga, Miroslav Pomichal, Fiona G. Roberts, Bob and Roberta Smith, Ruth Helen Smith, Ondrej Rypáček, Anna van Oosterom, Eugenie Vronskaya, Laura White, Henry Ward, Mark Wright

 

I have found that literature and fine art evoke similar emotions. The artist not only observes but sees obliquely, as out of the corner of their eye, things distorted by emotion, and somehow makes them coherent. Willem de Kooning said, ’I’m like a slipping glimpser’. The glimpser seizes the moment and, when successful, engages the viewer. It’s not so much about beauty as the artist’s perception of complex sensations, a form of qui-vive that includes emotion. The gifted artist has the responsibility to awaken experiences of consciousness in others, which is a strange power. This was pointed out by philosophers Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Gilles Deleuze who said that one should fully express one’s potential, go beyond one’s impossibilities, which is to create new possibilities.

 

Though art has been made from time immemorial, (the human brain contains the history of mankind with its imagery from the grotesque to the beatific), the artist, nevertheless, cannot imitate the past without being derivative. The artist has to work through their influences until the noise of others in their head comes to an end and they find their own voice. That said, a great artist can steal, as Picasso said and did, and fashion something totally new, modern, in a seemingly magical transformation.

 

The artist (at their best) is liberated from indoctrination, because the artist must be free to see what is. Franz Kafka's novel The Trial, begun in 1914, described the mindless machine of bureaucracy and the corridors of power over the hapless individual who didn't know what was going on or what he had done. Meanwhile, Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee were leaning towards abstraction influenced by musical tones, and Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque were experimenting with analytical and synthetic cubism, the fragmentation of images, mirroring the collapse of an era; while Claude Monet was painting water lilies with lyrical expressiveness already ahead of his time. Reaction was happening all over Europe leading up to WWI. James Joyce wrote Ulysses in 1918 bringing an epic into a stream of consciousness monologue in a day in the life of his protagonists. After the war, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Otto Dix, Max Beckman, Christian Schad were painting the decadent life in Berlin leading up to WWII. Historical content can never be dismissed because the artist is reacting to it, which is why authoritarian governments have always banned modern art. The Degenerate Art exhibition (German: Die Ausstellung “Entartete Kunst”) was organised by Adolf Ziegler and the Nazi Party in Munich from 19 July to 30 November 1937. It drew one million visitors. In the aftermath followed the backlash, breaking into anarchy with Jackson Pollock and abstract expressionism; and post-war consumerism with Warhol and pop-art, and Francis Bacon in reaction to “man's capacity for savage violence”.

 

The title of this exhibition doesn’t mean that history is irrelevant, on the contrary, but that creativity is always new. The angel Philip Guston refers to may come to the studio and that’s when the magic happens. Real painting takes place beyond thought but it’s highly personal, emotional, and more relevant than ever. It’s not the grandiose commissions but the work at human scale that communicates at a deeper level. Now, after decades of dematerialisation of art (inspired by the ramifications of conceptual art invented by Marcel Duchamp), we are at a moment of return when paintings, sculptures, and other ‘made’ objects again speak with urgency and are filled with radical potential. In a time of political, social and moral upheaval, artists are again in rebellion. Ahead of their time, they always react against the previous generation. They can see where we’re going and they’re reacting against it because they feel there is something deeply wrong that is destroying our relationship with reality. There is a struggle for ideas, everything is at stake therefore subject matter is important again. Material art is actually a form of rebellion in this digital age.

 

Art is what resists: it resists death, servitude, infamy, shame. - Gilles Deleuze

 

The artist reflects their own experience. It goes beyond illustration or journalism; it is not a reporting of news items but a pouring out of bewilderment at the behaviour of one’s own species, without judgement. The moment judgement comes into the equation it's reduced to propaganda. Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ is a prime example of the artist’s testimony free of constraint, uncensored. Artists such as Jenny Holzer, Christopher Wool, Bruce Nauman, and in this show, Bob and Roberta Smith, use words in their artworks that are thought provoking - echoing voices in the wilderness that might be heard when made into an art form.

 

The artist is the poet and the mystic. At times funny, childlike, ironic, excessive, burlesque, disturbing, depressed, dark - reflecting myriad facets of the mind. Literature, music and the plastic arts that is to say the ‘poets’ have left behind powerful testimonies to how they dealt emotionally, psychologically and philosophically with the times they lived through. The artists in this exhibition are individualistic, making physical art even in this new age of technology where we are assailed with incessant advertising and a confusion of digital images on the internet. The artist knows that the intelligent, thinking, sentient human being will never be a machine that can be programmed. These artists express their lyricism with colour and drawing, paint and mark making, as in a love letter that lays bare the writer's soul to be vulnerable, for without vulnerability there is no sensitivity. Their art is an ongoing pledge to care - to care about what we are at the core of our being, despite the unsettling challenges of cyberspace pervading our world.

~ Vivienne Roberts

Installation Views
Press release

PRESS RELEASE

October 2023

 

'DON'T LOOK BACK'

A group show

 

Vivienne Roberts Projects is pleased to announce Don't Look Back, the first of the gallery's new programme of exciting exhibitions bringing the best of young and emerging artists with a focus on painting and sculpture, showing at The Bindery, one of London’s premier art spaces in the middle of town. We are so proud to be supporting the artistic enterprise now when we need art more than ever.

 

 LOCATION: The Bindery, 53 Hatton Garden, London EC1N 8HN

 

DATES: The exhibition will run from 25 October - 30 November 2023

Tue - Fri 10am - 5pm otherwise by appointment

 

LAUNCH: Private View 24 October 6pm - 8pm RSVP

 

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

Opening 25 October, Don't Look Back is a group exhibition including 25 artists working in painting and sculpture.

 

 Lewis Baxter, Oliver Dorrell, Archie Franks, Phil Goss, Charlotte Winifred Guérard, Andrew Hewish, Diane Howse, Xingxin Hu, Phil King, Sharon Leahy-Clark, Alice Macdonald   Rosemarie McGoldrick, Rebecca Meanley, Rachel Mercer, Laurence Noga, Miroslav Pomichal, Fiona G. Roberts, Bob and Roberta Smith, Ruth Helen Smith, Ondrej Rypáček, Anna van Oosterom, Eugenie Vronskaya, Laura White, Henry Ward, Mark Wright

 

DON'T LOOK BACK is curated by Vivienne Roberts

 

The title of this exhibition doesn’t mean that history is irrelevant, on the contrary, but that creativity is always new. The angel Philip Guston refers to may come to the studio and that’s when the magic happens. Real painting takes place beyond thought but it’s highly personal, emotional, and more relevant than ever. It’s not the grandiose commissions but the work at human scale that communicates at a deeper level. The artist sees obliquely what is mostly missed in the quotidian. “I’m like a 'slipping glimpser', said Willem de Kooning. 

Now, after decades of dematerialisation of art (inspired by the ramifications of conceptual art invented by Marcel Duchamp), we are at a moment of return when paintings, sculptures, and other ‘made’ objects again speak with urgency and are filled with radical potential. In a time of political, social and moral upheaval, artists are again in rebellion. Ahead of their time, they always challenge the previous generation. They can see where we’re going and they’re reacting against it because they feel there is something deeply wrong that is destroying our relationship with reality. There is a struggle for ideas, everything is at stake, therefore subject matter is important again. Material art is actually a form of rebellion in this digital age. 

Art is what resists: it resists death, servitude, infamy, shame. Gilles Deleuze

 

www.viviennerobertsprojects.com

@vivienne.roberts.projects

 

For further information, images and interviews, or the complete online catalogue of works, please contact: 

press@viviennerobertsprojects.com

 

Vivienne: +44 7971172715

 

Artists

 

Bob and Roberta Smith OBE, RA,is the pseudonym of the artist Patrick Brill. Born in London, he received his MA from Goldsmiths College (1991). He trained as a sign painter in New York and uses text as an art form, creating colourful slogans on banners and placards that challenge elitism and advocate the importance of creativity in politics and education. He is best known works are Make Art Not War (1997) and Letter to Michael Gove (2011), a letter to the UK Secretary of State for Education reprimanding him for the “destruction of Britain’s ability to draw, design and sing”. Presently showing at Tate Modern: Thames Codex till 29 October.

 

In his mysterious canvases, twenty-eight years old, Lewis Baxter uses fluid and simultaneously rough mark-making along with emerging emblematic imagery. His painting aims for transparency in the process of image making. He received his BA from London Metropolitan University and is embarking on an MA abroad.

 

Artist and anthropologist, Oliver Dorrell makes paintings on long walks. The walks are inspirations for the work but also integral to it.  On foot through the Alpine pass, he made a set of ten ethereal watercolours on silk. These are fragile artefacts to a physical, more primordial, understanding of our modern world. He holds his MFA from Wimbledon College.

 

Diane Howse’s paintings are a form of process-led abstraction where the image is found in or “excavated” from the materials, on occasion suggesting something seemingly familiar perhaps in a strange or uncanny way. 

In 1989, she founded the Harewood Contemporary programme at Harewood House Trust in Yorkshire and opened the Terrace Gallery, the first such commitment to contemporary art in the heritage sector.  She continues to work with the curatorial team there in developing a changing programme of exhibitions and projects.

 

Dutch artist Anna van Oosterom, using the technique of collage, takes us into a space of disquiet where human presence has suddenly vanished. “In my (New York) Subway Series I show the viewer how I see the subway as a place of beauty in all its urban messiness, the loneliness, which is sometimes painfully beautiful.” She read literature at Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, and interior design at Perk Interieur opleiding Eindhoven.

 

Eugenie Vronskaya’s figurative painting is about identity, facets of self, glimpsed in landscape, in tranquillity. In 1989, Vronskaya arrived to UK and in 1991 she became the first Russian Student ever attending MA at the Royal College of Art.  She lives and works in the Scottish Highlands and London. She was formerly represented by John Martin Gallery.

 

Phil Goss through drawing, creates images that conjure up ways of seeing which resist clear formulation through language. He studied Literature at Edinburgh University and Visual Communication at the RCA, London. His background in literature has played an important role in developing his work.

 

Andrew Hewish BEM. His work mines the ground where painting meets experience - where the sensual world and material object meet the conceptual and the lyrical - folding experience in and of painting with that of the world. Andrew Hewish graduated PhD from the RCA in 2018 where he was supervised by artist (Professor) Ian Kiaer. In 2021 he was decorated with a BEM for his contribution to the arts in the UK.

 

Czech artist Andrej Rypáček’s In his own words: Infinity is, at the same time, infinitely deep and absolutely obtuse. No progress is possible. His works are attempts at fixed points - journeys to infinity. Rypáček holds a PHD in computer science and was a research assistant at Oxford University. He recently received an MFA from London Metropolitan University.

 

In her second year at the RA Schools, award winning (Freelands Painting Prize 2020) twenty-five year old Anglo-French artist Charlotte Winifred Guérard's practice evokes memories and past moments through the medium of paint. Between action and instinct, she approaches each work with movement, to abstract and recompose inner worlds. 

 

Laurence Noga’s densely collaged structures are poetics of obsolescence, a memory made with the saved remains of his father’s memorabilia and tools. The collection of objects are deconstructed and reassembled to reflect the colour, pattern, and discontinuity of today. Noga teaches at Camberwell College and is a mentor to Turps Painting Programme.

 

Henry Ward, artist, writer, curator, is interested in exploring the threshold between representation and abstraction, investigating the formal language of painting; opaque and translucent, thick and thin, the gestural and the graphic. Ward lectures widely and is Director of Freelands Foundation and launched the Freelands Painting Prize in 2020.

 

Laura White’s unruly sculptures are hand built from the bottom up. Pushing the material to the limit, these organic forms are a product of their making, a negotiation between artist and material. Laura supervises the PHD programme at Goldsmith’s University. She won the Ampersand Foundation Fellowship, British School at Rome. Sept 2022 –  June 2023

 

Mark Wright’s painting reflects an engagement with the environment (landscape), investigating its formal and painterly legacies to create an aesthetic that operates on a perceptual, emotional and conceptual level. He studied from 1988 at the RCA. Painter, curator and academic. A founding member of gallery and artist studio cooperative, Cubitt Artists.

 

Phil King sees gesture as a kind of proto-language - a way of direct communication - a form of acting and drama. King holds his MA from Goldsmith’s University. He is Editor and contributor to Turps and Mass Magazines. In 2014, he translated Jean Genet’s The Studio of Giacometti.

 

Rebecca Meanley’s colourful abstract gesture paintings evoke a drama of organic forms, with rhythm, movement, physicality, composition and sensation. Influenced by the American Expressionist movement, she is primarily concerned with gesture and where it takes her, as in following Paul Klee’s line. Meanley commenced her PhD at Glasgow School of Art, in 2022. She previously received an MA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art.

 

Twenty-eight years old, Ruth Helen Smith paints in reaction, stepping back from the confusion of digital media to make works that are in fact refracted experience made tangible. She holds her MA from the Courtauld and graduated In painting from Heatherley’s.

 

Stimulated by the vigorous mark making of Bonnard and Soutine in her observation of daily life, thirty-two years old, Rachel Mercer bends space, fragments, then builds up images that transcend the quotidian. She holds her MA from the Royal Drawing School, where she now teaches.

 

Thirty-two years old, Alice Macdonald, in her individualistic style, paints familiar people and places by constructing the image out of collaged canvas and distemper: it is clumsy, distorts and disrupts the image, echoing the instability of our constructed realities. She received her MA from City and Guilds in 2023, having graduated from the Royal Drawing School. She recently had a solo show in Seoul.

 

Thirty-four years old Chinese artist XingXin Hu makes seductive oil paintings exploring themes of desire: what appears to conceal creates ambiguity. Her work reflects her admiration of Alex Katz and Domenico Gnoli. She recently received her MA from Camberwell College.

 

Fiona G. Roberts’ plaintive faces have been called ‘non-portraits’ that evoke feelings associated with individual and collective experience (Paul Carey-Kent). She holds her MFA in painting from Wimbledon College. Previously, she graduated from Goldsmiths Collage and LSE.

 

The artist is the poet and the mystic. At times funny, childlike, ironic, excessive, burlesque, disturbing, depressed, dark - reflecting myriad facets of the mind. Award winning artist Sharon Leahy-Clark is interested in how we make sense of a seemingly absurd and irrational existence by creating a world of imaginary creatures. 

She holds her MA from the RCA.

 

Artist and academic  Rosemarie McGoldrick’s whimsical velvet and wire figures have their own pathos filled with poetic presence. A London-based sculptor and installation artist, she has shown nationally and internationally. She trained at Middlesex, Chelsea and Goldsmiths. She is now the Course Leader for Fine Art MFA at the School of Art, Architecture and Design. 

 

The toy does not only belong to the child just as the faery tale has a deep psychological symbolism, as in Archie Franks fairground paintings. Franks graduated from the RA Schools and was the recipient of the Sainsbury Scholarship and the Jerwood Painting Fellowship.

 

Slavokian artist Miroslav Pomichal is also an art historian, having studied at the Courtauld before receiving his MFA in Fine Art from Wimbledon College. His oil painting clashes between wonder and violence in his contemporary 'medieval' imagery. Pomichal recently had a solo show with OHSH Projects at the British Art Fair.

 

NOTES TO EDITORS

 

About The Bindery

The Bindery, a former bookbinding  business, is built within a 1930’s Art Déco building, The building has been designed by architects Piercy & Company, and the landscaping on the terrace and the roof by Andy Sturgeon. Guided by Carbon Intelligence, sustainability has been central to this project. The Bindery is owned by Dorrington Plc. Classical building features are combined with flawless levels of comfort, outstanding attention to detail and the impeccable credentials of sustainability and wellness.

https://thebinderyec1.com/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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