Stanley Picker Gallery

“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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Uta Kogelsberger  lives and works in London. After completing her Masters Degree in Sculpture she began working with photography, producing  intense and vivid photos of wilderness and urban American landscapes.

Selected Exhibitions:
2012 Off Road, Ersatz, Antwerp, Belgium
2008 Bunker Series, Photofusion
2007 A Private Paradise Danielle Arnaud Contemporary Art, London
2006 Festival off Les Recontres, Arles
2005 Dark Light Glasselll Project Space, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas
2003 Oases Laurence Miller Gallery, New York.

www.utakogelsberger.uk

My work explores the female performer and spectacle within the process of painting, using a number of visual resources, currently a journey to, The Exotic World Museum of Burlesque, in Los Angeles and transforming that information into decorative motif. Individual histories and costume are examined through an open process where an initial construction of the paintings surface creates a new context for the activity/performance to take place. The aspiration of the performer and expectation of the viewer are a constant focus for the paintings where failure and success are negotiated through the surface of the work.

Selected Exhibitions:
2006 Captaine Can-Can solo exhibtion, painting installation and artist book, Sadlers Wells, London
2005 Variety group exhibition and commission of site specific painting installation with artist book and exhibition catalogue, De La Warr Pavillion, Bexhill-on-Sea
2004 Unframed group exhibition and book Unframed: Practices & Politics of Women’s Contemporary Painting Standpoint Gallery
2002 walk slowly towards the light solo exhibition and commission of site specific painting installation and catalogue, Matt’s Gallery, London
2001 Warped: painting and the feminine group exhibition and catalogue, Angel Row Gallery, Nottingham.

The world of science, technology and nature are the trinity of subjects that influence the theme of my work.

The Cyber Flora series is an exploration of nature, genetic modification and our possible future. In my constructions, I reference familiar elements such as petals, stalks and stems. Although they are recognisable, they have been altered in subtle and outrageous ways. Like many esteemed members of the human race, I tinker with the architecture of nature to satisfy my needs. The materials and ideas I use, allow me to translate the lines I make on paper into three-dimensional physical drawings in space. The sculptures are formed of coloured lines that are made more of nothing than something. The realised pieces are like ghosts, echoes of life from an alternate dimension or time-line. They have begun to half-exist and inhabit our world.

My latest work, entitled Daisy Bear, is an unnatural anomaly: a cute and cuddly transgenic totem of flora and fauna melded together to form a bear made out of skeletal daisies.

Selected Exhibitions:
2007 UBE Biennale Ube City, Yamaguchi, Japan
2006 V22 Contemporary Art Collection Exhibition Clerkenwell Workshops, London
2005 The Real Ideal – Utopian Ideals and Dystopian Realities Millennium Galleries, Sheffield
2005 Painting is Cruel Danielle Arnaud Contemporary Art, London
2001 Theoland solo show, Ha Gamle Prestgard, Norway.