Clem Crosby - Continuum

About

Pippy Houldsworth Gallery is delighted to announce the Opening of its new gallery space at 6 Heddon Street, London W1, designed by Simon Dance Design. Affirming the mission of the gallery to work closely with a number of the most important national and international contemporary artists, the inaugural exhibition Continuum brings together seven seminal paintings by Clem Crosby. Clem Crosby emerged with a generation of artists including Jessica Stockholder, Phyllida Barlow and Ross Bleckner, for whom both a human and a philosophical relationship with materials became a means through which to value the gesture in artmaking. For Crosby, the painted gesture brings together line and form in a way that imposes control and at the same time locates a kind of freedom for the resulting image. The process of drawing within the work pushes the paint into an unknown and ultimately impossible place, where representation and ideas become redundant, and a new, non-representational space is created. Crosby's large-scale commission for The Young Vic Theatre in London, 180 Monochrome Paintings, was installed on the exterior of the theatre in 2006 as part of a major architectural renovation, which received the 2007 RIBA award. Recent exhibitions include Laure Genillard Gallery, London; Beacon Art Project, Calke Abbey, Derbyshire, with Jimmie Durham, Karla Black and Roger Hiorns; and the Tate Britain Drawing Symposium/Exhibition. Crosby's work was reviewed in ArtForum, September 2011 by Barry Schwabsky.