Van Gogh House: Life and its most trivial particulars by Brian Griffiths and Frank Kent

About

In the form of a photographic installation across all eight rooms of the restored 3-storey Georgian terraced house, Life and its most trivial particulars responds to the accumulated histories and constructed realities of the building, from the early 19th century to the present day. Transposing still life and landscape, everyday materials and objects, sculptors Griffiths and Kent present their carefully staged and situated photographs as sideways moments of focus and narrative.

Drawing on themes from Van Gogh’s life and work, Life and its most trivial particulars builds associated fictions and connections that reflect Griffiths’ and Kent’s own imaginings of the artist, his myth and legacy. The works are informed by a wide range of references from Van Gogh’s early works such as Potato Field (1883), the artist’s evolving colour palette, Bob Law’s sculpture Vincent’s Chair (1984) and the writings of Charles Dickens; to the sight of a church roof in Gainsborough, a Japanese parasol, and everyday found objects collected from car boot sales and Griffiths’ and Kent’s studios. Within the composition of each photograph is an open cube, a framing device that presses objects into action and flattens three-dimensional space. The objects are arranged with an improvised formality, the resulting images depicting spaces that appear both imagined and ordered, and often with a comedic edge.

Livia Wang, Creative Director at Van Gogh House said, “The carefully considered relationships between object, stage and frame in Life and its most trivial particulars truly resonate with our approach to the house. Griffiths and Kent’s playful process of collaboration creates compositions with their own atmosphere, story and natural humour, an alternate rewriting of the infamous collaboration between Van Gogh and Gaugin.”

Griffiths and Kent met at the Royal Academy Schools where Griffiths is a lecturer and Kent was a student, and soon after they began a collaborative artistic practice, culminating in AIR SIGNS, an ongoing series of photographic sculptural installations, first presented at Karsten Schubert in London in 2019.

Van Gogh House presents an ongoing programme of interchanging exhibitions and invited artist residencies, undertaken in August by Roy Claire Potter and Lilian Nejatpour. In parallel, a poster work for the front window of the house presents a new commission each month by artists Allison Katz (July, Jordan Baseman (August), Ye Funa (September) and Katrina Palmer (October).