Europe After The Rain

About

Taking its title from Max Ernst’s 1942 surrealist painting Europe After The Rain, the exhibition explores a future environment where things have evolved, or devolved, into a strange new state. Though out of this catastrophe, there may be optimism. While some of the works consider normal things from our everyday world (such as caravans or ski-slopes) when framed within the wider context of the exhibition these works become artefacts within a collective dream – a dream of an imagined landscape to come.

Presenting painting, sculpture and film installation, exhibiting artists will include, among others, Larry Achiampong, Peggy Atherton, Karin Bos, Crowe & Rawlinson, Nick Laessing, Onya McCausland, Melanie Manchot, Rebecca Partridge and Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay. 

Europe After The Rain runs parallel to Fathom, a solo show of film and photography by Simon Faithfull at The Exchange, exploring where land meets sea and man’s place in it.

ARTISTS AND WORKS

Larry Achiampong (1984, UK) Relic 1 (2017) is a film about English landscapes seen from an Afro-futurist post-colonial sci-fi vantage point.

Peggy Atherton (1969, UK) work is haunted by a sense of loss and absent presence. She slip-casts road-kill, firing them at 900C leaving an encapsulated space where an animal used to be. These small sarcophagi honour the otherwise unnoticed deaths of small animals.

Karin Bos’ (1966, Netherlands) sparse paintings of caravans have a survivalist mood, hunkered down in a desolate landscape.

Nick Crowe & Ian Rawlinson (1968, UK & 1965, UK) emergency foil blankets are remade into reflective bunting, as a sign of warning or marking a celebration.

Nick Laessing (1973, UK) explores the interfaces of science, art and environmental issues. Plant Orbiter (2017) is a kinetic sculpture and a hydroponic machine which uses anti-gravity conditions to increase plant growth, in a landscape that doesn’t provide food.

Onya McCausland (1971, UK) will create a monochrome wall painting, using pigments from a local mine, abandoned and disused for many years.

Melanie Manchot (1966, Germany). Showing, in the lower gallery, Out of Bounds (2016) is a double projection installation depicting two scenes of regular ski-resort mountain maintenance, but equally sublime and otherworldly – suggesting a ‘terra-forming’ activity on a future Mars landscape.

Rebecca Partridge (1976, UK) is a landscape painter and these two Desert Paintings (2016), one by day and one by night, both have an empty, hard-to-define feeling of post-apocalypse.

Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay (1973, Canada). An air-raid siren that reveals itself to be a boy’s soprano voice – a plaintiff call of warning from perhaps the one most in danger.