The Sunday Painter

Samara Scott @ Four Six One Nine, Nov 4 – 19

3 November 2016

Presented by The Sunday PainterSamara Scott is showing a solo exhibition at Los Angeles’ Four Six One Nine, opening November 4 and running to November 18.

Offsite Project: Los Angeles sees the London-based artist taking her “process-driven, large-scale environments of impermanent material” to produce a site-specific work responding to the cultural and physical landscape of the Californian city.  

Scott — who has contributed to SALT., exhibited her “sinkholes of paranoia” at Frieze London 2015 and shown Developer solo at Pump House Gallery in August this year — focuses on a saturated materiality within virtual space in her work.

See the The Sunday Painter website for details.**

Samara Scott, 'Developer' (2016). Detail. Photo by Eoin Carey. Courtesy the artist + Pumphouse Gallery, London.
Samara Scott, ‘Developer’ (2016). Detail. Photo by Eoin Carey. Courtesy the artist + Pump House Gallery, London.
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Piotr Łakomy @ The Sunday Painter, Sep 30 – Nov 5

29 September 2016

Piotr Łakomy is presenting solo exhibition Room Temperature at London’s The Sunday Painter, opening on September 30 and running to November 5.

This will be the second solo show at the gallery for the Poznań-based artist. He works across a variety of media, creating installations that appropriate objects and references from the urban space. Both promotional image and press release are abstract and minimal, including a poem by author of Age of Anxiety, English expat poet W. H. Auden called ‘Prologue: The Birth of Architecture’:

“Some thirty inches from my nose
The frontier of my Person goes,
And all the untilled air between
Is private pagus or demesne.”

Recent exhibitions include Statements, (2016) at Art Basel and a self-titled show at London’s Carl Kostyal in 2015.

Visit The Sunday Painter webpage for more details.**

Piotr Lakomy 'Art Basel Statements', (2016). Courtesy the artist + Art Basel.
Piotr Lakomy ‘Art Basel Statements’, (2016). Courtesy the artist + Art Basel.
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Tyra Tingleff @ The Sunday Painter, Apr 15 – May 14

15 April 2016

Tyra Tingleff is presenting solo exhibition Grinding your teeth to keep out the wind at London’s The Sunday Painter, opening April 15 and running to May 14.

There is little information on the theme of the exhibition itself but the Berlin-based Norwegian artist, often working with painting, has presented both solo and as a group at Birsfelden’s SALTS, as well as taking part in the Fulfillment Centre at The Sunday Painter in 2014.

Tingleff’s exhibitions and works pointing to their impressionistic, layered processes, are often presented with sentence fragments and contemplative statements such as 2016’s Leaping over a bush to surprise a Quail in Berlin, and the title of the work accompanying the Grinding your teeth… press release, ‘I like the sky because I don’t believe it’s infinite’.

See The Sunday Painter website for (limited) details.**

Tyra Tingleff, Closer Scrubs (2015) @ SALTS. Exhibition view. Photo by Gunnar Meier. Courtesy the artist.
Tyra Tingleff, Closer Scrubs (2015) @ SALTS. Exhibition view. Photo by Gunnar Meier. Courtesy the artist.

Header image: Tyra Tingleff, ‘I like the sky because I don’t believe it’s infinite’ (2016). Detail. Courtesy The Sunday Painter, London.

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Condo 2016 reviewed

3 February 2016

Out of a conversation at LISTE Art Fair in Basel, a group of galleries decided to join forces and start Condo: an initiative led by Carlos/Ishikawa’s director Vanessa Carlos, through which 32 international galleries come together on London ground. The aforementioned art space along with Supplement, The Sunday Painter, Arcadia Missa, Chewday’s, Rodeo, Southard Reid and Project Native Informant –all based in the British capital –host works represented by 24 other galleries from around the world throughout a month, mimicking an annual project by dutch dealer Jeanine Hofland called A Petite Fair.

Rather than replacing something, Condo is a proposal in order to support the (art) community, promoting younger galleries through the networked London art scene. Its participants, which count with the support of some big institutional names, aim to highlight the fact that it is necessary to support one another in order to survive and succeed in the contemporary art ecosystem.

Like at any art fair, similarities between artists and works are mere coincidences, and while there is no thematic or aesthetic pattern to follow by the participant galleries, some analogies can be drawn.

Antenna Space, Shanghai + Societé, Berlin @ Condo (2016). Courtesy Project Native Informant, London.
Antenna Space, Shanghai + Societé, Berlin @ Condo (2016). Courtesy Project Native Informant, London.

In an era where humans are more aware than ever of their interdependence with other non-human entities, the relationship with animals seems to have become a focus of attention. Artists Lea Cetera, Phoebe Collings-James and Jala Wahid, or the trio composed of Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian work around these topics, like the projection of humanity onto animals or the metaphors drawn out of their features.

Some of Ceteras works were left after her solo show at Southard Reid and seamlessly brought together with the works of artists Bruno Zhu and Tessa Lynch for Condo. The artist’s practice turns around the anthropomorphisation of pets and the circulation of domestic animal imagery through the internet. In her installation ‘Mirrored Gourd Triptych’ (2015), a glazed porcelain pumpkin-like vegetable ‘watches’ a three screen TV, while sitting on a fake fur carpet. The edible is a gourd: a sort of calabash often used in asian cuisine that Cetera recurrently includes in her work. The TVs show a series of Youtube videos about people’s pets getting miscellaneous care treatments, as if they were people.

In her installation Just Enough Violence’ (2016) at Arcadia Missa, Collings-James develops an almost mythological imagery out of water-colors depicting cats and horses. They coalesce with A.L. Steiner’s Greatest Hits exhibition: a collection juxtaposed photographs and videos of pop culture figures, such as Madonna or Boychild. Here, animal and human bodies merge and colonise the gallery walls and windows.

AtThe Sunday Painter, Jala Wahid’s ‘Soft Weaponry III’ (2016) looks like two plaster bird talons coming out of the wall, near ‘Coco’: a sculpture shaped like two livers on top of a rosewater glycerin pedestal. The artist’s works are surrounded by an arte povera-looking landscape consisting of pieces by Rob Chavasse, Ana Mazzei and Debora Bolsoni.

A.L. Steiner, Greatest Hits, Phoebe Collings-James, 'Tar Baby #7 + 8' (2015), 'Safe Passage:Get Home Safe' (2016). Courtesy Arcadia Missa, London.
A.L. Steiner, Greatest Hits, Phoebe Collings-James, ‘Tar Baby #7 + 8’ (2015), ‘Safe Passage:Get Home Safe’ (2016). Photo by Lucie McLaughlin. Courtesy Arcadia Missa, London.

At Rodeo, Iranian born artists Ramin and Rokni Haerizadeh, along with Rahmanian, present But a storm is blowing from paradise (2014-15), a series watercolours and collages, where identity is erased and eventually transformed into rabbits and other animals. It’s these crafty and DIY practices that seem to have taken over more sovereign formats and immaculate presentations. Small-scale works on fragile paper nailed on walls, or pieces of ceramics spread out over the place repeatedly emerge, whether it’s in Laura Aldridge’s coloured brick wall at The Sunday Painter, Cetera’s take away coffee pot tops at Southard Reid or in Ulrike Müller’s square painted tiles hung on the Rodeo wall. Multiple layers of watery pigment and more experimental materials such as dye, enamel or DIY jewellery take over the surface of Tom Humphreys ‘untitled’ (2015), Jeanette Mundt‘s painting series ‘Me as Patricia Arquette As the Femme Fatale’ (2015), Josh Kolbo‘s constructed photographs and Nicholas Cheveldave’s multilayered works, covered by friendship bracelet webs.

Meanwhile, Carlos/Ishikawa literally cut the space in three parts, in order to host its representative galleries: Essex Street, Matthew and Freymond Gruth. They reserve the hall for a sort of pop-up store where they sell “artists clothes”. Among other great commissions, including Puppies Puppies, Darja Bajagic and Stewart Middleton –Ed Fornieles’ virtual alter ego of a humanised cartoon fox wrapped by contemporary anxiety is brought to the physical world in the form of a disguise.

According to an interview with Vanessa Carlos, the art world is “a microcosm of the world at large”. That’s why she hopes the Condo initiative will be taken as a model by other cities and countries in promoting collaborative work that is beneficial to the art community and the people working within it. **

Exhibition photos, top right.

Condo is a collaborative exhibition running across London venues, January 16 to February 13, 2016.

Header image: Artists’ Clothes @ Condo (2016). Installation view. Courtesy the artist + Carlos/Ishikawa. London.

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John @ The Sunday Painter, Apr 2 – May 3

31 March 2015

The Sunday Painter is bringing an inaugural four-artist exhibition titled John to its newly renovated London space, where it will run from April 2 to May 3.

The London gallery welcomes four different artists to take part in the group show John. From the UK, there are London artists Hannah Lees, who recently participated in a website art commission for OPENYOURKIMONO, and David Musgrave, who has exhibited at Tate Britain and appears as part of MoMA’s collection in New York.

Lees and Musgrave are joined by Polish artist Piotr Lakomy, who showed previously at The Sunday Painter with a solo show titled Life Size Shadow in the summer of 2013, as well as US artist Allyson Vieira.

See the exhibition page for details. **

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NADA New York, May 9–11

8 May 2014

Happening in parallel to Frieze week, the third edition of NADA New York is running in the city, May 9 to 11.

Showcasing emerging international art and artists across various locations annually, including Cologne, Miami and Hudson, the NYC program features a presentation of interactive art projects from San Juan’s Beta-Local and Detroit’s MOCAD, as well as a site-specific installation in a Ford Galaxie 500 by Shoot the Lobster, including work by Lena Henke and Marie Karlberg of M/L Artspace and Bradley Kronz.

There’ll be gallerist tours of the exhibition and a “marathon reading” of contemporary poetry on May 10, including Sophia Le Fraga, Ben Fama and Deanna Havas.

Galleries exhibiting include Temnikova & Kasela, Interstate Exports, Tomorrow Gallery, Regina Rex, M+B, ltd los angeles, Invisible-Exports, Et al. and London’s The Sunday Painter showing work by Hannah Perry.

See the NADA New York website for details. **

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Cindie Cheung @ The Sunday Painter, Apr 11 – May 4

14 April 2014

Cindie Cheung is presenting solo exhibition TEETH V2 at London’s The Sunday Painter, opening April 11 and running to May 4.

Working across object, performance and film, Cheung won the 2009 Future Map Prize for her videos Untitled and One Girl in Office, with Coca Cola and took part in last year’s Palazzo Peckham project in Venice. 

There are neither ‘teeth’, nor a blurb to speak of in the press release but as an artist noted for her work exploring cliches and representations of women in film, there’s much potential in the accompanying not-so-cheerful portrait shot.

See The Sunday Painter website for details. **

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Fulfilment Centre @ The Sunday Painter reviewed

14 March 2014

Welcome to 2014, where ‘Fulfilment Centres’ are places that help you sell stuff. As Amazon puts it, you just have to send your items to them and they “[deliver] the products to your customers from our network of Fulfilment centres.” In a month-long exhibition for The Sunday Painter, London collective N/V_PROJECTS trace a link between the hyperbolic name for these warehouses and the literature on “Wellness” and “New Age” lifestyles that “occupies a surprisingly large portion of storage racks” within them. We live in an age where enterprise uses signifiers of spiritual betterment to sell you things that detract from it; where many try to buy access to self-realisation, to their own centres, by dropping The Power of Now or Reiki for Dummies into their virtual baskets.

Fulfilment Centre is an exhibition with its focus on this friction between ‘self-improvement’ according to Capitalism and the Eastern philosophies it borrows from to meet its own ends. The first work to be seen in the space, Lewis Teague Wright’s ‘Suspicions In, For, Without Paradise’, embodies this contrast sharply with its thin twists of copper plated bronze entwined around a pillar of corrugated galvanised steel. These copper rings set off a theme of adornment and appropriation, like “healing” copper bracelets bolstered onto Western wrists, making it even more affecting to realise that the sturdy, industrial pillar they’re attached to is of course a sheet of metal: completely hollow.

12.Lewis teague Wright, Suspicions In, For, Without Paradise, 2014, Corrugated galvanised steel sheet and copper plated bronze, 244 x 29 Ø (detail2) email
Lewis Teague Wright, ‘Suspicions In, For, Without Paradise’ (2014). Detail. Courtesy The Sunday Painter.

Appropriation is explored even more explicitly in two pieces that sit in conversation with one another, Timur Si-Qin’s ‘Deliver me from dipolar spirits’ and Christopher Kulendran Thomas’ re-contextualisation of Prageeth Manohansa’s painting ‘Ganesh XI’ in an extract from his When platitudes become form series. With this ongoing work, Kulendran Thomas explains, “I reconfigure, for the Western art market, artworks by some of Sri Lanka’s most celebrated young artists. This radical re-marketing of the island’s contemporary art raises funds to resist the oppression of communities displaced by civil war, channelling resources that are not under government control to the formerly Tamil-occupied territories of the North and East of the country.” The result of that mission in Fulfilment Centre is a somewhat phallic painting of the Hindu elephant-headed god Ganesh placed over a Nike t-shirt canvas, the iconic tick set jarringly off-kilter in a way emphasising its masculine shape.

The t-shirt’s positioning suggests the exact outline of the “perfect” male torso, sculpted in seams; opposite, Si-Qin’s ‘Deliver me from dipolar spirits’ counter-acts with an extreme close-up of a man’s chest and stomach, all muscly and hair-free. In Si-Qin’s work, the torso (which is displayed on his staple aluminium X-banner stand that could have been taken straight from the conference room) is next to a mirror-image of a woman’s face, airbrushed into the uncanny valley and framed by her delicately manicured hands. In Si-Qin’s installation, “dipolar” qualities are both separate from and inherent to one another, and so these gender ideals are presented together, both propping prop up the flipside of a display promoting “PEACE” with the star and crescent and crucifix of a Chinese yin and yang symbol. The fusion is crude, as is the commodification of Eastern and religious philosophies. This piece more than any other walks the “fine line between cynicism and sincerity” referred to in the Fulfilment Centre press release, directly appropriating its object of critique to form the crux of the space, the other pieces orbiting.

Timur Si-Qin, 'Deliver me from dipolar spirits' (2014); Neil Beloufa, 'Kempinski' video (2007). Fulfilment Centre installation view at The Sunday Painter (2014). Image courtesy the gallery.
Left-right: Timur Si-Qin, ‘Deliver me from dipolar spirits’ (2014); Neil Beloufa, ‘Kempinski’ video (2007). Fulfilment Centre installation view at The Sunday Painter (2014). Image courtesy the gallery.

The most dynamic, immediate work, though, is that of Julie Born-Schwartz, whose mixed media installation ‘I had an expectation that it would fade’ creeps off the wall and across the space, its disembodied arm taking agency as it claws out of nothingness. Formed of hard unfeeling gold and peculiarly skinless, the arm is presented on a backdrop of what looks like skin cells under a microscope, digitally rendered and printed on paper that spills from wall to floor. The fingertips touch lightly on a pyramid; the hand reaching for spirituality, or at least a symbol of it.

Elsewhere along this cycnical-hopeful spectrum of belief and self-improvement are Tyra Tingleff’s painting on raw linen, ‘Respect pop but we’re broken up’, the rough and dense quality of which reveals its shapes slowly, and Neil Beloufa’s award-winning 2007 film ‘Kempinski’. Seemingly named for the luxury hotel chain, the film sees actors in a variety of suburban and rural spaces in Mali talk about their ideas of the future under the buzz of artificial light. “Once you think about something, you have it in front of you,” says one of Beloufa’s subjects. That future is now: think of anything you desire, and it’s probably waiting to fulfil you in a centre not too far away. It’s a hollow, steely promise. Be careful what you wish for. **

N/V_PROJECTS’ Fulfilment Centre is showing at The Sunday Painter, running March 1 to 30, 2014.

Header image: Julie Born Schwartz, ‘I had an expectation that it would fade II’ (2013). Mixed media installation. Detail. Image courtesy The Sunday Painter.

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‘Dialogues’ @ London Art Fair, Jan 15-19

13 January 2014
South London gallery The Sunday Painter will be collaborating with Warsaw-based Galeria Stereo in presenting the work of UK and Polish artists for Dialogues at the upcoming London Art Fair, running January 15 to 19.

As part of the fair’s Art Projects, this new section, curated by Adam Carr, features shared presentations between chosen UK and international galleries -including Limoncello and Seventeen among others. Works exhibited include that of Wojciech Bąkowski, Rob Chavasse, Gizela Mickiewicz, Piotr  Łakomy and Hannah Perry.

See the London Art Fair website for details. **


Header image: Hannah Perry, Not yet titled (2014).

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‘Sunset’ @ The Sunday Painter, Oct 11

11 October 2013

The Sunday Painter in South London will be seeing out the day with the Sunset group exhibition on Friday, October 11.

Featuring Jan Kiefer, Max Ruf and Yves Scherer there’s not much to go off except that it’ll be a London/Basel collective of artists that have been concerned with the image within conceptual directness in the past. How that will translate into this exhibition, you’ll have to see for yourself.

See the The Sunday Painter website for more details. **

Yves Scherer

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‘The Country of the Blind’ @ The Sunday Painter, Sep 19

18 September 2013

As part of this year’s PAMI, running September 19 to 22, Peckham’s The Sunday Painter will be screening Mumbai-based collective CAMP‘s film The Country of the Blind and Other Stories, named after H.G. Wells’ 33 short science fiction and fantasy stories, starting on the Wednesday.

The group, concerned with infrastructures and mediation, spent a year working with volunteers of the National Coastwatch Institution at the coastal ‘blind spot’ of Kent’s Copt Point, investigating the shipping trade, local ecologies and fishing among other things.

See The Sunday Painter website for more details. **

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Rob Chavasse @ The Sunday Painter reviewed

28 February 2013

An unnerving hiss of wind blows through the entrance to Off Season, UK multi-media artist Rob Chavasse’s latest show at The Sunday Painter. Titled ‘Séance’, this tuned field recording sets the scene for the rest of the exhibition. Played out on two speakers, in a room of its own, at the top of a stairwell, it bleeds our ears before our eyes. The senses are locked onto an abstraction in the air, before being allowed a view of the visual.

Each of Chavasse’s works play on this initial reflex in one way or another. Upstairs within the main white walled room, altered to work as part of the exhibition display, an unusual readymade is found in the form of a radiator. Its heat wave, like ‘Séance’’s sound wave, points in the direction of forces beyond our visual perception, emanating between and beyond the walls.

Robert Chavasse, OFF SEASON installation view. Image courtesy of the artist.
Rob Chavasse, OFF SEASON installation view. Image courtesy of the artist.

Installed above it, a large, black piece titled ‘S.A.D’ brings these convection currents in contact with the material. Produced using a scanner left outdoors the lambda print is an optical recording of speckled rainfall patterns, their movement and the glitches created as the scanning device began to crash. A digital work, about natural forces, that inverts drops of water into fragmented white space, only to be brought back to life by the light of day.

In a sense ‘S.A.D’ is activated by the sunlight, the radiator and each of the surrounding works also play against each other’s darker, optimistic or even neutral sides. However you choose to see it, the beauty is in where you choose to stand and where you let your imagination take you. At first glance ‘Kola cube Cola,’ a screen print positioned opposite ‘S.A.D,’ might appear to reflect on its opposite number, built out of a mirror with cloud-like patterns on its surface.

As its title suggests, though, Chavasse is having fun with the idea that a sweet reproduces an already synthetic tasting fizzy beverage. And what surprises further is that at just the right angle you can catch a glimpse of a figure in the reverse of the screen print, based on an image from the film Yeti: Curse of The Snow Demon. Perhaps, it is in itself the idea of what we see up in clouds being subjective reverie but nevertheless representing a very real fear of something out there that cannot be grasped.

Brilliantly, ‘Disco not Disco’ continues this surprise element, presenting in its elongated rectangular shape and apparent abstract expressionist style, what seems to be an homage to Jackson Pollock but is in fact the dirty wastage of a night club crowd presented on calico. It’s a documentation of a very certain type of energy laced with glitter raised to the status of art.

'Disco not Disco' (2013) night club residue on calico. Image courtesy of the artist.
‘Disco not Disco’ (2013) night club residue on calico. Image courtesy of the artist.

There’s much more, of course. ‘Cowboy Casino’ documents an urban intervention monumentalising the architect Eliott Noyes‘ now derelict petrol stations and ‘Not too clever emoticon’ forges the minimalism of Russian Suprematist Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square with its readymade function as a Warmwave Fenix GR900 glass panel heater. It’s here that Chavasse hints most explicitly to the Marshall Berman essay examining modernisation and its conflicting relationship with modernism, as well the shared belief that “all that is solid melts into air”.

Rob Chavasse’s OFF SEASON is on at The Sunday Painter, London and runs from February 22 to March 17, 2013. 

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