Stanley Picker Gallery

Stanley Picker Design Fellows El Ultimo Grito (“all the rage”) were founded in 1997 by Spanish-born Rosario Hurtado and her partner Roberto Feo. They established themselves at the forefront of new British design winning three years running The Blueprint Design Award (100% Design, London). Nominated in 2004 for the prestigious Jerwood Applied Arts Prize in Furniture they will be producing their first ever book project to accompany an installation of new work at the gallery, to be researched and developed over the coming months.

In spring 2005 El Ultimo Grito undertook a series of collaborative interdisciplinary workshops with students from the Faculty of Art, Design & Architecture. Using pen and paper as both a two and three dimensional medium, the group developed the research themes of Make Believe to feed the results into the objects Rosario and Roberto were preparing for their exhibition at the gallery.

Drawing forms an essential part of El Ultimo Grito’s design process, as both a way of developing ideas between them and a tool for describing those ideas to others. During their Stanley Picker Fellowship, they were invited to make a personal selection of drawings by graduating students from across the Faculty’s disciplines for the exhibition Lines of Investigation, which took place to coincide with the 2005 Degree Shows at Kingston University.

Andrew Carnie (b.1957) studied chemistry and painting at Warren Wilson College, North Carolina (USA) then zoology and psychology at Durham University (UK) before completing a Degree in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College and a Masters in Painting at the Royal College of Art, London. Since graduating Andrew has combined his studio based practice with ventures such as the Carnie Chapel Gallery (1986-88) and the Tram Depot Gallery (1994-96), working on various collaborative arts projects, as a consultant for Greater London Arts and a teacher at Winchester School of Art (UK).

Projects include: 451 (2004) Winchester Art Gallery; Head On (2002) Science Museum/Wellcome Foundation, London – working with neuroscientists at the Medical Research Centre for Developmental Neurology, Kings College London; Alight at Royal Victoria Dock (2002) – a 50m long multi-media video work, as part of the group No Limits; Embark (2002) Millais Gallery, Southampton – a solo-show of large paintings and travel-works; Disperse (2002) – a work, produced for the School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine London, looking at how the body might be physically dispersed at the point of death and rendered back into atomic particles; Complex Brain: Spreading Arbor (2003) – a joint project looking at the migration of neurones in the human brain, with neurologists Dr Richard Wingate (Kings College London) and Nick Didovsky (Rocafella University New York) and funded by the Wellcome Trust.

“In art terminology Dagmar Glausnitzer-Smith is basically an installation-maker though more by osmosis than calculated adoption of the genre. For her, the appropriation of space or of a specific place as integral to a constructed metaphor follows naturally from the fact that we are always somewhere in particular where we live, where we work (and they are probably much the same for her). We move constantly back and forth between our domestic base and a range of destinations, some of which are local and habitual, others more distant, infrequent or exotic. But the journeys, in both prospect and retrospect, give shape and a veneer of purpose to our lives; they also confer a fragile sense of security. This abstract map of movement within a social/cultural frame of reference is offered as both the extension and the expression of identity; its shapes and characters are her subject matter.”

Tony Carter
Director of City and Guilds Art College London 2003

Selected Exhibitions:
2006 Seven of Eglise and Eru title:Number JB 339 (vermeidbare Stoversuche) exhibition and live performance, Motorenhalle, Dresden; Transit Station Edinburgh (two days continuous Action in Art in Action) Ocean Terminal, Edinburgh
2005 Transit Sation Berlin (two days continuous Action in Art in Action) Gebauer Hofe, Berlin
2000 Agglutinates of Pleasure and Playing in Workskin with Sikablock M450 live performance and projection, 291 Gallery, London

“At first, unable to cope, the mind and the body retreat, withdrawing from the trauma. The weight of this burden is oppressive. There is no solace. The psyche is scarred. A barrier is erected for protection, imprisoning the trauma. The mind cannot deny what has happened, but rather than torment the psyche, it seeks refuge in silence. Isolation and seclusion envelop the physical environment. The body resides in captivity, enclosing itself in a regulated existence. Contained in this recess, memory remains dormant, awaiting interruption. In time, the mind and the body decay, revealing the indelible.

Shona Illingworth’s new video and sound installation, The Watch Man, produced in dialogue with memory researcher Martin A. Conway, weaves together the physical and the psychological, creating an immersive environment that reflects the context of the work. Her installations speak to her interest in depicting psychological realms in response to the physical environments that circumscribe and shape that relationship. She is drawn to those whose voice is often silenced, both inflicted and self-imposed, voices that reflect societal expulsions and conflicting zones of engagement. This territory is harsh and unforgiving, bound by codes and actions used in self-preservation. She seeks to define these boundaries, transgressing their limitations and restrictions, allowing the voices to be heard. It is this collision of the mind and the body that weaves throughout her work.

In The Watch Man, a large circular projection screen is suspended above an installed floor that has been painted red. The installation activates the gallery space, using new sound technology that turns the floor into a speaker resonating with sound. The sound encompasses the space, sweeping underfoot as it moves from the video speakers, situated overhead, across the floor, and back to the video. The sounds are both familiar and abstract, shifting from the reassuring to the threatening. The listener/viewer walks over the sound, effectively embodying the work, and becoming part of this encapsulated world.

The importance of the frame in The Watch Man cannot be overlooked. The visual representation of the circular screen with its enclosed space sets the formal structure and mirrors the optical focus of the work. The watch man’s visual apparatus of eye glass and magnifying glass are used to facilitate the precision of his craft. These seeing devices shield the eye, becoming barriers or obstructions to the eye as a memory portal. The views are tightly framed, obscured and magnified, corresponding with the watch man’s psychological state.

The Watch Man suspends time. It records the lapses in time when the past interrupts the present with disturbing traumatic memories. Like a watchman guarding an entry and exit portal, Illingworth’s watch man labors over time in an attempt to control its passage. Although the watch man’s craft enables him mechanically to fix time, he is unable to suppress the captivity of the past. While the pendulum measures time, the watch man shelters himself in the controlled and the habitual. A world weighted in time.”

Rhonda Corvese, Curator
Extracts from an exhibition text for The Watch Man, 2007

Selected Exhibitions:
2007 The Watch Man solo exhibition, Dilston Grove, London; Interaccess Toronto, with artist monograph; Central Asian Project group exhibition, Cornerhouse, Manchester and SPACE, London, touring to Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgystan
2006 Strangers with Angelic Faces group exhibition, Akbank Sanat, Istanbul and SPACE, London
2001/2 PILOT solo exhibition, Gymnasium Gallery, Berwick upon Tweed, UK touring to Art Gallery of Newfoundland, Canada. Related short film ‘Sounding’ for Channel 4 Television
2001 Passing solo exhibition, Hayward Gallery, London, Turnaround commission

“The painted surface itself has become a pulsating patchwork of intricately interlocking colored shapes””units of sheer sensory impulse whose value demanded to be experienced haptically as much as optically. Ornate, flamboyantly twisting and swelling forms derived both from the observation of biological forms and nature and from studies of the way such forms have historically been translated into decorative schemata, for example in art nouveau, counterpointed determinedly flat color. Now, protuberant tendrils of color, twining biomorphic strands, stand out against a return of the monochrome ground, and in some cases these patches of color have given way to simple colored outlines.

In essence, Temin-Vergez has come to the realization that there is greater pictorial power to be derived from working neither with a classic figure/ground dichotomy in which self-contained shapes can be more or less clearly distinguished nor with the allover, in which this dichotomy is done away with, but rather with this more ambiguous situation in which a profusion of small-scale elements, somewhat elongated so that they seem at a halfway point between being shapes and lines, agglutinate into these diffuse yet not allover configurations that are, as the artist herself puts it, “forms without form, shapes without shape.

There is undoubtedly something seductive about these formless forms that remind us so strongly of things that we find decorative and beautiful but they harbor a subliminal sense of threat as well, because there is something inherently unnatural underlying their hallucination of naturalness. You want to keep your eye on them, at once for delight and from mistrust, until you finally can’t tell the two feelings apart.”

Selected Exhibitions:
2007 Castellon International Painting Prize 3rd edition Castellon County Council and touring to Madrid ARCO, Spain; two person show, Marksman Gallery, Reading; London Assembly Academy Royale des Beaux Arts, Brussels
2006 Ebb & Flow touring show Raid Project, Los Angeles; Abstract Mode Contemporary Art Project, London

“Richard Trupp is one of the most talented and ambitious young British sculptors working today. Having gained a wealth of technical experience while serving as assistant to Sir Antony Caro, Trupp has now embarked upon his own creative enterprise. His work is grounded in a deep respect for the history of sculpture and a curiosity about the myths that have grown up around it.

A former Jerwood Sculpture Prize nominee, Trupp currently divides his time between making his own work and teaching sculpture to students at Kingston University. To his own work he brings an in-depth knowledge of the technical processes of manufacture combined with sensitivity towards a broad range of conventional and unorthodox sculptural materials.

His most recent work – an ambitious piece entitled Anticipating Mars – draws on what Trupp sees as a primal connection between the discipline of sculpture and the process of ‘vulcanisation’ “” the curing of rubber through the application of heat, discovered by Charles Goodyear in 1859 and named after the Roman god Vulcan. Inspired by Vulcan’s skill in forging richly ornamented armour for Mars, the god of war, and jewellery for Venus, Trupp’s forged rubber pieces are decorated with classical ornament, evoking fragments of ancient Roman armour. But they also work as a visual pun on the shared attributes of rubber and bronze. Trupp wanted the sculptures to be exhibited together on a piece of blackened steel, “as if they have come straight from the forge of Vulcanus in anticipation of a visit from Mars.” At Eyestorm they can be seen displayed within an austere Richard Serra-like bronze container that references an ongoing dialogue between sculpture ancient and modern.

In marked counterpoint to this genuflection towards the ancients, Trupp has also ventured into more contemporary realms. ‘POP’ – a brightly-painted red bronze balloon – functions both as a realist work in its own right and as a witty play on the eponymous 1960s movement. Trupp also intends it as a comment on “the fragility of life and the threat to our environment”. Moreover, playing as it does with notions of scale, POP may yet be realised as a monumental outdoors piece – a respectful homage to Oldenburgh et al – or what Trupp envisions as “a contemporary sculptural exclamation mark within the landscape”.

Tom Flynn

Selected Exhibitions:
2005 Metal Thoughts solo show, Metal, West Hampstead, London
2002 British Sculptors group show, Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh
2001 Jerwood Sculpture Prize Jerwood Space, London; Stanley Picker Fellowship Exhibition group show, Stanley Picker Gallery, London
2000 Fixing Blocks solo show, Royal British Society of Sculptors, London

‘I use and also manipulate basic systems and rules of games or of my own. The structure these rules provide are the starting point of my work. The simple rules are used to issue instructions and outline my strategies in the making of the painting. I also allow an element of chance and self-determination to enter the process in order to introduce playfulness in the face of constrained activity’.

‘Games act as a model for the real world- they provide a structure for activity with an uncertain outcome. The act of painting functions in a similar way- there are the boundaries of the canvas, the limitations of paint, the conceptual constraints of making a painting, and finally the structure of the environment in which they are shown. I seek to create a space for experimentation and play within this discipline. I want the paintings to have an immense energy, at once vibrant and full of humanity’.

Marta Marce 2007

Selected Exhibitions
2007 Encounters Moriaty Gallery, Madrid
2006 Pasajero Riflemaker Gallery, London; Nice to meet you Mark Moore Gallery, USA
2005 John Moores 23 National Museums Liverpool
2004 Playroom Riflemaker, London

Susanne Clausen works and and publishes continuously under the artist name ‘Szuper Gallery’ in collaboration with the artist Pawlo Kerestey. ‘Szuper Gallery’s work has ranged from the occupation of Bloomberg’s London headquarters after hours, to CRASH! at the ICA, in which the artists set up a day-trading office within the gallery, to Performance with Police Uniforms, an intervention into a nightclub in which the participants were costumed in the police uniforms designed for the 1972 Olympics. In the ICA presentation, funds were traded (and lost) as an examination of the intersection of art and finance: in the latter, the participants engaged in conventional nightclub activities in their borrowed obsolete uniforms. Throughout their work, Szuper Gallery challenges the division between lived and represented reality, history and fiction, and the defined limits of performance-or art practice in general’.

Lorna Brown
Set Project, Vancouver

Selected Exhibitions
2006 Szuper Gallery Kunsthalle Helsinki, Finland
2005 Nightshifts Western Front Vancouver, Canada
2001/05 Liftarchiv Kreisverwaltungreferat, Munich, Germany
2001 Temporary Accomadation Whitechapel Art Gallery, London;Tele(visions) Kunsthalle, Vienna

Dissecting is central to my art. How do organisms work? How do they relate to their surroundings? I open them up as in forensics; turn them inside out, as a scientist on a quest for kinship in life forms. Humans shape shift into plants, dogs, amoebas. My work shows evolutionary biology run wild, reversed, perverted.

Drawing is always my starting point. My installations too can be seen as spatial drawings. Studies of bones and flesh as well as physiological processes in cells then are subjected to associative jumps that may seem arbitrary but have an autobiographical basis. Also scalpel and saw can serve as pencils, when I cut bits from photocopies, magazines, drawings and glue them in. Nature enjoys every haphazard meeting that functions, if only barely – so do I.

All of this is an attempt to look through the threateningly autonomous processes of the body, to ward off fears of disease, violence, decay. To ease the human condition.
Sometimes the work stays on paper. But I may put it between sheets of glass, as in a microscopic preparation, to achieve yet another kind of transparency.

I want to suck the viewer into a world full of biomorphic associations, alienation, and fear of contamination, wonder and lust: the world of a curiously happy hypochondriac

Selected Exhibitions
2006 The Drawing Centre, New York; Clementine Gallery, New York
2005 Galerie Tanya Rumpf, Haarlem; Follie commission for Den Haag Sculptuur, The Hague
2004 Stedelijk Museum Bureau, Amsterdam

“In some respects Ian’s own practice has a very private quality to it. His work is not produced in relation to public or corporate commission, nor does he see himself in the role of political agitator in the mould of a Guy Debord or John Jordan. Within that context his chosen medium takes on a particular relevance. Paintings are, by nature contemplative things, and that is another one of the reasons Ian works in that medium. He also wants this work to belong to the history of painting, in the sense that historically painting has contributed to how society works for centuries, from Van Eyck (and before) to Manet, to Keifer and so on. So it is not a simple case of saying that painting is what he has always done, but that Ian has thought very carefully about achieving an effective synthesis between medium and subject and the ideas that underpin it.

Landscapes and interiors are suggestive of private worlds; ideas about nostalgia for a perceived past that reside within the imagination; veiled warnings that we should not assume progress to be an axiomatically good thing. Thus, superficially opulent interiors often sit in conflict or opposition to scenes glimpsed through windows, with a very strong sense that this ‘view’ is a very private one, both literally and metaphorically. Having said all that, the idea of progress is symbiotically linked to the idea of continual growth, that mainstay of capitalist ideology and, by extension, does put Ian’s work within a political and economic context. There is a clear allusion here to the dilemma of late Capitalism, so consummately outlined in Fredric Jameson’s exceptional treatise, ‘Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, where (to put it in a nutshell) he draws our attention to the fact that whilst Capitalism bestows enormous material benefits upon us it also delivers an equal measure of the very opposite. This dichotomy is partly alluded to in the paintings via their discreet structural disharmony in the paintings, in one instance looking like a combination of a decorators dust sheet and a page out of Frank Ghery’s sketchbook.”

Mick Stubbs
Excerpt from exhibition catalogue

Selected Exhibitions:
2007 Reality Bites Toronto; USA is the middle Jerusalem Rare Gallery, New York
2006 Scope London; avoid the void Richard Ekstract, New York
2005 if you go down to the woods today Rare Gallery, New York

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