Alex Pollard 'Collaborations'

About

Sorcha Dallas is pleased to announce the second solo show in the gallery by Alex Pollard. Born in Brighton in 1977, Alex Pollard graduated with a BA in Painting from Glasgow School of Art in 1999 before serving on Glasgow's Transmission Gallery committee between 2000—2002. Group exhibitions include the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh; Luhring Augustine, New York; The Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, Peekshill, USA and the Scottish Pavillion at the Venice Biennale in 2005. In 2006 Pollard had solo shows at The Reliance, London and Sorcha Dallas, Glasgow, which was followed by a solo at the Talbot Rice Gallery in 2007 and the solo exhibition ‘Tea-Leaf Demeanour' at the Whitechapel Project Space, London. In 2010 he had a two person exhibition with Clare Stephenson, ‘Four Fatrasies' at The Pumphouse, London, they had previously shown together in ‘The Dirty Hands' at the CCA, Glasgow in 2009. Pollard lives and works in Glasgow. ‘Collaborations' brings together a series of new paintings, ready-mades and assisted ready-mades. The brief ‘Romo' movement in the 1990's was a short- lived moment in British pop. Bands such as Dex Dexter, Plastic Fantastic, Hollywood and Orlando looked back to the 1980's new wave for musical inspiration and styling at a time dominated by white hetero lad pop. The bands involved never really took off despite being heavily promoted by the Melody Maker magazine, mainly because of their association with the New Romantics who had only just been toppled as the then dominant stylistic trend. The appropriation of this pop movement as a research area within the work is a calculated use of marginalised yet somewhat embarrassing cultural material strategically used at the wrong time. The mixed signals that Romo sends out (80's styling used during the 90's) are used to question current systems of cultural reception and consumption. Through a playful re-staging of a 1980's Warhol/Basquiat/Sprouse aesthetic, Pollard riffs with daubed motifs and coolly selected silkscreen imagery, playing the roles of both Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol. The chosen motifs reference identity politics, modes of retail distribution and past works from Pollard's oeuvre, reconfigured within a dubious framework of self-representation.