ASTRID COLOURS - Sophie Michael | PARADIES - John Robertson 

FOLD Gallery | London is pleased to announce the first in their new programme of solo shows.

Broken up by conventional group shows and individual solo shows, FOLD Gallery London intend to punctuate the year with a series of two-person, solo shows. These will be two separate solo shows that run in conjunction with each other – presenting two separate bodies of work within the same space – however, there will be no major physical divide within the gallery to set them apart.

The shows will not be coordinated with a view to creating any curatorial links – any relationship or association noticed between the two distinct bodies of work will not have come from an intentional curatorial decision. As the programme continues, we may find that the two separate bodies of work present the viewer with sometimes disparate relationships and, at other times, there may be commonalities to be found. Unintentionally, themes, aesthetics and theories, may cross over, and interact, creating links between the bodies of work from within the separate shows.

The intention is for the viewer to be presented with a unique opportunity to come to their own conclusions, whereas the gallery, rather than intervening, is acting as a catalyst for these events to unfold.



ASTRID COLOURS
SOPHIE MICHAEL

SHOW | SATURDAY 26TH MAY – SATURDAY 30TH JUNE
OPENING | FRIDAY 25TH MAY | 6 – 9 PM

Sophie Michael presents a two part 16mm film installation. The film documents nine-year-old Astrid colouring in a strip of clear 16mm film on a light box. Employed as an agent for drawing, her choices and actions determine the colour, pattern and duration of the hand-made film, which appears as a ‘live feed’ on the opposite screen. The artist is briefly pulled into the film when Astrid asks the camera for confirmation; “Red?” The bright palette of the film set is imported into the gallery, and the projector plinths are modeled on classroom furniture. Faced away from each other as if in an exam, the two screens cannot be viewed at once. The sequence becomes a memory game that recalls 1940s abstract painted film and 1970s educational materials.



PARADIES
JOHN ROBERTSON

SHOW | SATURDAY 26TH MAY – SATURDAY 30TH JUNE
OPENING | FRIDAY 25TH MAY | 6 – 9 PM

Robertson's paintings in PARADIES stem from a trip to Jena, Germany, in April 2011.

The project views Jena as a double city existing in two times: the Jena of 2011 and the Jena of 1800 (the literary moment of the birth of Romanticism). In response to the demands of both this temporal gulf and theoretical Romanticism, the work seeks a poetics of interruption.

Multi-panelled works on anodised aluminium combine different logics of painting to disrupt unity in the work. What is on display here is more like collage, revelling in difference, the cut, the turn, slippage and rupture. Alongside are text paintings on polythene. In these smaller works, light-hearted self-contradictory word-plays become elegant abstract paintings.

In Jena, or at least the Jena of the work, which is nothing if not the site and intensity of interruption between polarised modes, the neutral becomes aggressive, Switzerland invades.