The Beautiful and the Damned

About

The Beautiful and the Damned presents six artists working in different mediums: Alex Daw — Collage and prints Zhivago Duncan - Screen prints and painting Tracey Emin - Prints Christopher Sims - Video installation Sweet Toof - Painting ROA - Drawing The Brick Lane Gallery is excited to announce its forthcoming show during the Christmas period, The Beautiful and the Damned, opening on 21st December and running through to 4th January, with a Christmas opening party on Monday, 21st December - 6:30 to 9pm. Working along different lines to the 80's pop art exhibition currently on at the Tate Modern, the British artist Alex Daw and Berlin based artist Zhivago Duncan use alternative ways to interpret the culture of mass-media of the 21st century. Both artists follow the tradition of using found images — in Daw's case, his works combine paintings with magazine clips from ‘POP' magazine; Duncan on the other hand utilises large format screen-prints of celebrities, deconstructing and reconstructing the materiality of the images and its icon and therefore re-contextualizing the content of newsprint with a tongue-in-cheek approach to this culture of obsession and fetishism. Fashion photographer Christopher Sims will present for the first time a video installation piece celebrating two conflicting sides of the fashion industry in a dynamic way. Also included in the exhibition will be a selection of prints from former Turner Prize winner Tracey Emin which, true to form, address personal elements of her personal life through the medium of drawing. These themes reflect the dual aspect of the exhibition and hint back to the exhibition's title taken from Fitzgerald's love novel. The exhibition will also feature street-artists Sweet Toof and ROA who interpret the idea of the Damned by exploring the notion of death and mortality by illustrating skeletal structures and corpse-like figures. Their works explore the beauty of death in our everyday life with a sense of humour and irony which is also a true reflection of our times. The Beautiful and the Damned is organized by the Brick Lane Gallery and curated by Tony Taglianetti, the director of the Brick Lane Gallery.