Cacotopia 04 | Week 4

About

Annka Kultys Gallery is pleased to present CACOTOPIA 04, the fourth edition of its annual survey of leading emerging artists within the contemporary art space.  This year’s exhibition features the work of Nicole Coson, Bex Ilsley, Richie Culver and Garrett Pruter and follows its now traditional format of allocating each artist a solo exhibition of one week’s gallery time during the month long show.  

Nicole Coson | Week 1
16 January – 18 January 2020

Bex Ilsley | Week 2
23 January – 25 January 2020

Garrett Pruter | Week 3
30 January – 1 February 2020

Richie Culver | Week 4
6 February – 15 February 2020

The works of the four artists in the show highlight the blurring and perhaps increasingly symbiotic relationships between the once separate disciplines of painting, photography and more recently digital art; an unambiguous counterpoint to the earlier art historical notion of medium specificity developed by Modernist critics, most notably Clement Greenberg and Michael Friedman.  Greenberg in his Modern Painting essay of 1960, for example, explained “medium specificity holds that ‘the unique and proper area of competence’ for a form of art corresponds with the ability of an artist to manipulate those features that are ‘unique to the nature’ of a particular medium.”  Hence if there is a unifying theme that links the respective works in CACOTOPIA 04 it may very loosely and imperfectly be described as one of medium unspecificity; an anti-specificity or even medium ambiguity.

The final week of the exhibition will feature works by Richie Culver (b. 1979, Hull, England; self-taught; lives and works in London).  Culver grew up in Hull, where his interest in art expressed itself through photographing the people around him, drawing parallels with the work of artists Larry Clark and Nan Goldin, leading exponents of social, and particularly sub-cultural, documentary photographic styles.  Culver began experimenting with collaging his photographs and has evolved his practice to include mediums such as painting, both of which are evident in the artist’s works on show in CACOTOPIA 04.  In It is my ball  (2019), for example, a photograph of Robert Smith, lead-singer of the iconic eighties English band The Cure, sporting the 1986 Mexico world cup England football shirt with his trade mark big hair, is iterated in different dimensions and collaged over itself, before the language of the title is painted over in fluorescent letters.  In addition to being representative of the artist’s process, It is my ball demonstrates Culver’s wry social sensibility, typically expressed through the pithy phrases in his work.  Connotations of British nationalism are presented via Smith being adorned in the now retro England football shirt and the accompanying speech bubble which says “go away,” both references, when read in conjunction with the work’s title, that allude to the recent political phenomenon and its associated interpretations of Little England-ness, isolationism, xenophobia and anti-internationalism.  In a similar vein, Culver’s White Straight English Male Artist (2019) is a not-so-subtle critique of identity politics, employing the least virtuous sectionalities of race, sexuality, nationality and gender against a striking image of an elderly man in the classic ‘wife beater’ white singlet.  Culver’s work has been collected by leading art institutions.

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