Exhibition

Monochrome

13 Mar 2015 – 18 Apr 2015

Regular hours

Friday
10:00 – 18:00
Saturday
11:00 – 17:00
Tuesday
10:00 – 18:00
Wednesday
10:00 – 18:00
Thursday
10:00 – 18:00

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Beers London

London
England, United Kingdom

Address

Travel Information

  • Barbican, Farringdon, St. Pauls
  • Farringdon
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Beers Contemporary proudly presents Monochrome, a group exhibition with work by ATOI, Simon Belleau and Alain Urrutia.

About

Here, the included artists utilise a primarily monochromatic colour scheme to explore a series of distinct but interconnected thematic approaches. ATOI, the dynamic up-and- coming pairing of Amy Thomas and Oliver Irvine, have a diverse and indefinite practice that incorporates sculpture, found-object, photography, as well as performance-based installation. For ATOI, this work explores a mode of collaboration within sculptural foundations, exploring the relationship between cause and effect, whereby the repercussions of one event are understood as a physical consequence of the previous. Recent developments in their work have lead to an interest in forensic architecture as elastic, constantly responding and acting as witness to its surroundings. Other sculptural and photo-based artefacts characteristic of ATOI's practice often use their own manifesto of involving the cyclical reconditioning of sculpture within live, charged contexts or scenarios. Typically severe, brutal and founded upon ideas of collision and force. The work comments on irreversible change, the reconditioning of the natural environment, and our own instinctual wonderment when confronted with the physical and archaeological sublime.

Simon Belleau's practice, primarily based in photography but also including sculpture and installation, looks at ideas of mortality and the grotesque, but as well comment on architecture, nature, and the monumental versus the monolithic. With Belleau we find a delicate approach to both nature as sublime and horrific, and ideas of mortality as related to the progression of the natural world. Belleau's concerns are about the microcosmic (the cyclical patterns of the day; a human breath), and the macrocosmic (the rotational aspects of the sun; the creation of stalagmites over years) but return to ideas of birth and decay, life and death. A simple darkened photograph of a granite sarcophagus atop a plinth suggests the artist's affinity for those subtly imposing - even sublime - moments that lay just out of reach of our comprehension - the infinitesimal concept of death, perhaps; or a photo of black stalagmites to suggest the incalculability of the earth and - as humans - our own insignificant minutiae.

For Urrutia, working almost exclusively with black in his paintings and charcoal drawings becomes a process of concealment and fragmentation, where appropriated imagery provides the basis for the formation of new interpretations by removing aspects inherent to the past 'lives' of his imagery. Yet the imagery retains what makes it recognisable or poignant, and is thus a process of shadows, an addition of black or white layers. In fact, precisely the procedural question - 'black or white' - suggests polarised processes: that of either subtraction or addition, and what the artist feels we deserve to be privy to as viewers forms the basis for his practice. Not unlike a photographer or filmmaker, Urrutia is concerned with the concealment and reframing of imagery. Through this destabilisation of our imagery he plays with our collective memory; while Urrutia's images are recognisable, they seem fleeting, as though performing acts like subtle memory triggers or entirely suggestive, calling into question our process of image recognition and personal experience, truth and fiction, reality and fantasy. As a result, the work feels evanescent, fleeting - like some historical trigger that remains just slightly out of grasp, lurking beneath some shadowy cloak left there by the artist to obscure our vision. 

CuratorsToggle

Exhibiting artistsToggle

Alain Urrutia

Simon Belleau

ATOI

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