Exhibition

ROBERT RUSH GAMBIT

16 May 2008 – 22 Jun 2008

Event times

wed - sun 12 - 6pm

Cost of entry

free

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Lorem Ipsum Gallery

London, United Kingdom

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  • Tube: Bethnal Green
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ROBERT RUSH GAMBIT

About

Lorem Ipsum Gallery is pleased to present Gambit, the first solo exhibition by British painter Robert Rush featuring framed works on paper. Robert Rush makes light, elegant paintings: decorous colours, cartoon lines and arabesques operate among a mix of stylistic motifs and spacial shifts that effect a happy spirited playful quality. Rush picks up stylistic cues from a variety of sources, notably in the purposeful confidence of mid C20th art and design, but his paintings are not remotely pastiches: they are quite distinct, and carefully crafted in their particularities. The success of Robert Rush's paintings hang on his intelligent and nuanced corralling of form, composition and colour. Rush's paintings are arrived at through very particular processes: collage is used, sometimes in the work and sometimes to generate imagery to be used elsewhere; the paintings are arrived at through aprocess of painting and overpainting, assessing and reassessing arrangements, pushing and pulling, experimenting, but arriving, usually, at a result that looks fresh and immediate — this process is quite fluid, such that in drawing a line under a shape there is always the possibility that it might expand to become a painted shadow under a form, and that this form may become something else with just a stroke of the brush. The boundaries of painting, drawing and collage are pushed at and negotiated. Rush's practice is constantly reactive and his paintings mutable. The notion of a gambit is implicit within Rush's practice — he'll smartly forward a visual proposition as a chess player might a pawn, to be sacrificed for a more engaging, more profitable proposition. There is an element of risk in Rush's work: his paintings start with the idea that the conclusion is to be negotiated during the events of painting. It is hardly surprising then that for a few successful paintings Rush makes many more that end up on the studio floor. Whilst Rush's practice is rooted in negotiating the relations of materials and forms in the studio, it is not at all a blankly formal practice. Rush variously invokes sentiments of confident optimism,happiness and humour on the one hand to something altogether more malevolent, manic or hysterical on the other. These sentiments play off allusions to the schematic, organic, figurative and architectural, elements emerge and dissipate, just as a line becomes a shadow. There are elements of whimsey involved, of visual humour, both light and dark. The works operate in a field of historic references and ideas - both grand and local, held open in their rich complex and sometimes contradictory fullness. There is a sense in which Robert Rush's paintings speak to complex, rich, contradictory qualities and narratives that we recognise in life, but never at the expense of being generously involving visual experiences. Robert Rush was born in Guildford, England in 1978. He graduated from the Royal Academy Schools in London in 2006 and was the same year selected for Bloomberg NewContemporaries. Recent group shows include Anticipation at 111 Gallery, London and Creekside Open, curated by Victoria Miro at APT Gallery, London. Alistair Duncan, April 2008

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