About
BLOCK 336 STUDIO ARTISTS
Private View: 7th February 2014 | 6 10pm
Open: 8th February 7th March | Thurs - Sat | 12 - 6 pm
On 7th February 2014, Block 336 will reveal the most recent work by its studio artists Robert Bell, Jane Hayes Greenwood, Alex Gough, Tom Groves and Alex Virji.
The exhibition features video installation, painting and drawing and aims to explore both the common ground and obvious differences between the artists' practices.
Virji's work charts what he has calls âa pictorial perestroika', a restless entropic state fallen short of its utopian ambition. Unstable, shadowy and susceptible to change, Virji's delicately painted landscapes define an uncertain spatial territory that struggles to come to terms with the loss of identity and the discovery of self.
Hayes Greenwood's drawn objects casually withdraw from any immediate point of recognition. Individually they appear oddly displaced, as if removed from some unknown museological or archaeological setting; but seen together they form a family, a mute mob of comic and sober properties. Despite their technical exactitude and precise execution, her drawings nevertheless retain an uneasy ambiguity. These are unmistakably real things, but exactly what these things are and what they might mean remains curiously concealed.
Robert Bell's new works derive from the digital translations of his paintings. These revolving forms extend the abstract mark, worked painterly surface and conceptual terrain of his wall-based paintings until they begin to resemble singular forms reminiscent of the micro or macro realm. Here, painting is experienced as a 360 degree phenomenon, a spinning contraction of time, memory, process and event.
Gough's recent work continues to explore a fascination with what he describes as âthe equivalence between nature and paint'. Here composition, colour and form are held between flow and gesture, chance and control. The experience of nature and ones immersion within it is both given an open form, and harnessed within the very means of this form's production. Viewing these enigmatic works we find ourselves confronted with the uncertainty of our perceptions and our veiled attempts to make sense of our entanglement within the natural world.
Groves' strange and unsettling works are points of intersection between given reality and unconscious phantasy. Part medical device, part Imaginary plaything, these painted schizoid forms act as trade offs between the artist's desire and its sublimated creative reward. Here, the body is in bits, castrated, dissected and utterly at odds with its own integrity. When presented as a âbody of work' however, an alternative coherency is established, one attaching desire to sensation and meaning to purpose.
Block 336 is based at 336 Brixton Road. The gallery is a short walk from Brixton tube station, Brixton Village and the Brixton O2 Academy.
Block 336 is a UK registered charity Charity number: 1150535
