Daiwa Foundation Art Prize 2015 Exhibition

About

One of the three shortlisted artists will be invited to exhibit at the Aoyama | Meguro Gallery in Tokyo in Autumn 2015. In addition, he or she will be awarded a participation fee of £5000, and a period of support and introduction to key individuals and organisations in the Japanese contemporary art world. This will be the third exhibition of the Daiwa Foundation Art Prize, an award offered to British artists resident in the UK who have not previously exhibited in Japan.

Oliver Beer’s body of work interrogates the physical properties and sentimental values of material objects and cultural narratives. In doing so, he casts doubt on the objectivity of perception. In this show, Oliver will exhibit a series of powerfully illusory wall installations, in which ‘dissected’ objects, halved long-ways, are embedded in plaster plaques that lie flush with the wall. Among the series will be a work with coloured pencils, RGB (2014), which links directly to his main exhibit, a video entitled Reanimation – Snow White (2014). Never before shown in the UK, this film loop is a kaleidoscopic assemblage of over 500 images, hand-coloured by French school children, reimagining a sequence from Walt Disney’s 1938 cartoon. With a soundtrack pieced together from archived recordings of the film’s original songs, this film calls upon the universal mythology of Snow White to express the power of the collective imagination.

Julie Brook will be showing an entirely new film exploring her most recent sculptural work made in the semi-desert of Namibia, as part of her MADE, UNMADE series. Lying at the heart of this project is the artist’s desire to explore the tactile, tangible essence of her surroundings in as sincere and immediate a way as possible. Transposing these often-huge ephemeral works, made from the fabric of the landscape itself, into the interior spaces of a gallery has proved an exciting challenge for the artist. At this exhibition, an engrossing double-screen installation will immerse the viewer in the sounds, rhythms and sights of the sparsely populated Namibian landscape.