Carter

"Hobby Life"

Sarah Baker

Galen Riley

Covadonga Valdes

Private View Saturday 5th December 2009

6.30pm - 9.30pm

Exhibition 5th December 2009 - 2nd of january 2010

Carter London

29 Orsman Road

London N1 5RA

tel:07828 553 080

email: carterpresents@gmail.com

Gallery open Thursday - Saturdays 12.pm - 5.30pm and by appointment

If you wish to visit the gallery outside of these times then please don't hesitate to contact Carter by telephone and or email

A hobby life is the life to which people dedicate a private life toward personal reward and fulfillment. A hobby life can be a secret life, an other life, the real life.

"Hobby! " more often said these days with a condescending sneer.

In this age of specialization, of the freelancer, flexi-hours and self employment, no one wants to be thought of as an amateur and everyone wants to get paid. An amateur until very recently could be militantly proud, heroic even. A professional on the other hand takes the devil's shilling and is a whore.

Perhaps stargazing, astronomy, is the earliest of all hobbies and continues to hold a fascination for millions of enthusiasts. There are hundreds of books, clubs and websites devoted to the amateur astronomer, one website even called "Hobby Space". When William Herschel discovered the planet Uranus in 1781, he was a middle-class musician who pursued astronomy as a hobby. Other astronomers had observed Uranus before but thought it was a star. When Herschel observed it with a telescope he designed and built himself, he realized that in fact it was the seventh planet from the sun, David H. Levy discovered or co-discovered 22 comets including Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, the most for any individual ever. Amateur Thomas Bopp shared the discovery of Comet Hale-Bopp in 1995 with unemployed PhD physicist Alan Hale. Robert Owen Evans is a minister of the Uniting Church in Australia and an amateur astronomer who holds the all-time record for visual discoveries of supernovae (42) to date.

It isn't that "Hobby Life" is an antidote for "Pop Life". Hobbies take your mind away from the day to day crap, whilst with a pop life you immerse yourself in to the designated and the popular. Pop is the sugary pill of the 20th century and Pop has: "All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects." Such was also said about Soma in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.

The artists are as much part of the problem as they are the cure, they are in the work, immersed in their own production and their own worlds.

Sarah Baker, Galen Riley and Covadonga Valdes chomp on that bit in between life, veering precariously on the precipice of obsession, application and observation to look deep within their personal anthropologies to produce work of a personal meaning and a wider understanding.

Galen Riley deploys strategies of the hobbyist – macramé, knitting and sewing – and their repetitive, time-counting nature, to evoke the physical presence of her father (an horologist) by constructing body-parts with fragments of his clothing and left belongings, Covadonga Valdes detailed and intense paintings inhabit both calmness and disquiet and Sarah Baker formerly a Synchronized Swimmer often uses the reflection of celebrity to deconstruct narratives and weave stories around obsession, greed and lust

Dallas Seitz

"Save Me"

10th October - 7th November 2009

Carter Presents London

29 Orsman Road

London N1 5RA

tel:07828 553 080

email: carterpresents@gmail.com

Gallery open Thursday - Saturdays 12.pm - 5.30pm and by appointment

If you wish to visit the gallery outside of these times then please don't hesitate to contact Carter Presents by telephone and or email

For his second solo exhibition with Carter Presents London In "Save Me", Dallas Seitz uses, sculpture, photography and text based works to investigate ideas of the savior, self preservation, self-defense, being saved and the saving of objects in terms of archives and collections.

Dallas Seitz reinterpretation of objects involve a passion for collecting, dissecting, creating, displaying and ultimately saving. "Save Me" explores the cult of contemporary iconography where cult figures are idolized and mythologized,

Recent exhibitions include: Castlefield Gallery Manchester, Tou Scene Stavangar Norway, V22 Sculpture show London, The Wharf Road Project London, Solo shows include The Pump House London, Carter Presents London

"Save Me" text by Paul Harfleet

Throughout human history mankind has struggled to define and explain it's purpose and location in the universe. This tendency has resulted in most facets of humanity in what ever region of the globe to construct often complex and mysterious belief systems in an attempt to simultaneously comfort and control it's troubled population.

Omen

(Re-Photograph from Guildford Cathedral Archive) mounted C type print

These governmental and religious structures offer behavioural guidelines with which all members of the community should abide, failure to do so usually results in that community chastising the deviant members with some form of ostracism either socially or physically the latter results in imprisonment. These deviants exist temporarily outside of society and are frequently denied privileges allowed to law abiding members of that society.

Possession

(Re-Photographs from Yuma Territorial Prison Archive, after camera had been possessed by the supernatural) mounted C type prints

Elements of these organisational structures often splinter, separating and evolving into an incredibly complex variety of belief structures and all major religions have been appropriated by popular culture:

Bruce Lee's Fighting Method

Vol 1 self defence techniques, Vol 3 skill in techniques:

150 cut outs from original books, MDF shelf

Though despite this complexity all major religions have one thing in common, the notion of 'the saviour' a mythologically enlightened or altruistic individual who acts as example to the masses. This often God-like figure is seen as outside of society or as somehow super-natural thus excusing the masses from the responsibility of truly altruistic activities. Additionally most major religions often expect or predict that an incarnation of God is due to appear on Earth, to save the human race from imminent catastrophe, until this occurs the threat of Armageddon hangs over all cultures from the Wrath of God to environmental apocalypse, most of the faithful expect to be saved or to save themselves through communion with their respective God.

“After World War II modern man came to accept the absurdity of his existence and even worse came to doubt the existence of God for his being indifferent to all his sufferings. In such a condition which has been emphasised by the lack of communication and individuality, man has two choices either to bear the condition, live and be hopeful about the arrival of the saviour and a better future, or to commit suicide and put and end to his miserable life”

World Applied Sciences Journal 3, 2008

Mohammad Reza Ghanbari

A Very Still Life, Dr Kevorkian and The Suicide Machine

graphite coated air-drying clay, post-card holder, milk bottles, surgical tube, clothes pegs, saline, sedative, poison.

Uneasy

Persuasion

Sarah Baker Gordon Cheung Pure Evil Kirsten Glass

Daniel Jackson Brian Reed Will Tuck

University of Hertfordshire Art and Design Gallery

Fri Sep 11, 2009 to Sat Oct 17, 2009

Telephone: 01707 284290; Email: uhgalleries@hert.ac.uk. Visual Art Uneasy Persuasion

( Junction 3 turn off on the A1)

Open Hours: Mon-Sat 9.30am – 5.30pm Price: FREE

Curated by Jamie Robinson

www.carterpresents.org

There is something both pop like and irreverent in the artists direction, a kitch-ness looking as much at poplar culture such as the street art of Pure Evil, air brushed roccocco references in Will Tucks paintings Daniel Jackson's pop optical coded prints, Brian Reeds, play on languages, Sarah Bakers reverence and pastiche of Jackie Collins in her video "Studs" and kirsten Glass's gothic decadent paintings, Observation, skill, wit and irreverence, personal, psychological and anthropological investigation are the loose threads binding these artists.

In a time of uncertain futures and an economic downturn, the pressure to sell, to borrow and to spend our way out of a recession is the directive from our own leaders, our world is truly bound up on consumption and spending. New car sales are how western states determine wealth. Franchises and Brands on a global scale, encourage trust, loyalty and sales amongst consumers used to international commerce. our world is both local and global at the same time.

Sarah Baker

Sarah Baker grew up in Buffalo, New York where she competed in synchronized swimming and was a U.S. National medalist. Baker received her BFA degree at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2000 and her MA degree at Goldsmiths College, London, in 2002. She is now based in the UK and has been exhibiting her work extensively in the UK and abroad.

Most widely known for her gregarious self-portrait magazine spreads, Baker has also made work about her roots as a synchronized swimmer. Baker’s solo show at 1,000,000 mph in London, "A Portrait of Bill May," focused on one of her former synchronized swimming competitors, Bill May, who continued competing in the female-only sport until he achieved best in the world. In Baker's portrayal, May's graceful movements performed in the water are juxtaposed with Rap and R&B music.

in Studs UK 2008 10min

London artist Sarah Baker’s original take on a Jackie Collins novel in which The Stud, The Bitch and The Rich Husband play it out against each other in a tale of lust, greed and deception.

Kirsten Glass

Peter Davies on Kirsten Glass, 2007

I have always admired Kirsten Glass's ambitious decadent looking paintings. They have a gothic Weimar Republic glamour mixed with a punky day glo make up excitement. I'm impressed by the heroic scale and the painterly dexterity, the way she effortlessly manages to combine figuration and abstraction, and sometimes text. I like the wildness of how she incorporates unlikely materials and objects like sand and glitter and mannequins and dripping paint. They make me think of Robert Rauschenberg and JasperJohns. The women she portrays are incredibly sexy, in a girl who likes girls sort of way which is so appealing, and whilst the paintings have a material sensitivity and femininity, there is also a tough intelligence in their construction. They are literally dripping in references to film noir and fairy tales and magazines and music. They have a rock and roll voodoo feel that reminds me of Patti Smith and PJ Harvey and Debbie Harry, that also ties in with a contemporary art trajectory that runs from Elliott Hundley, Steven Shearer, Banks Violette, Jutta Koether, Isa Genzken to Steven Parrino.

In the newer paintings she has put panels together of different sizes like Elsworth Kelly but in contrast to his minimalism her flamboyant juxtapositions offer up a buzzing full on experience where in Kirsten's own words "editing devices and pre-posed found 'characters' are staged in a continual displacement of conclusive meaning."

Pure Evil

From spray painting fanged vampire bunnies on the streets of London to creating canvases and prints inspired by "the wreckage of utopian dreams", Pure Evil has garnered a strong following amongst art lovers around the world.

To understand a bit about Pure Evil it is illuminating to know that he is a descendant of Sir Thomas More, the Lord Chancellor who wrote the controversial work Utopia and who was later beheaded by King Henry VIII. With this busy background (Sir Thomas was later canonised) it is only natural that Pure Evil should explore the darker side of Utopia and the myth of the Apocalypse, a belief in the life-changing event that brings history with all its conflicts to an end. Stir in a mix of gonzo American pop culture, rock n roll, 19th century London life and French literature, pearly kings and queens, fantasy art, customised motorcycles , latino culture, victorian childrens adventure books, Maoist propaganda, situationism, occultism, latex sex , dead despots and dictators and a whole twisted arkload of asylum bound pandas , budgies , butterflies, bunnies and psychotic penguins and you start to understand the quadrophrenic gallows humour of Pure Evils artwork .

In 1990 PURE EVIL left the Poll Tax Riots of London behind and went to live in California where he spent 10 years doing heroic doses of weapons grade psychedelics , thinking about stuff , making electronic music and printing t-shirts . Inspired by skateboard culture and the west coast character graffiti of Twist he returned to London in 2000 and inexplicably picked up a spraycan and started painting weird fanged vampire bunnies everywhere.

These days Pure Evil can be found creating art on the streets and artwork on canvas, metal, glass, perspex and in neon when he isn't running his PURE EVIL GALLERY in Shoreditch, London, where he has exhibited work by a whole roster of internaional artists. He has also been curating group shows in London and taking his PURE EVIL SOLO SHOW global and has recently exhibited in New York, San Francisco, Beijing, Berlin, Newcastle, Manchester, Brighton, Antwerp and most recently in Sydney. Next up : Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires and Tokyo.

Will Tuck

William Tuck's paintings are very loosely based around old master

paintings and subjects, especially involving classical mythology. He often bases

the composition on an existing painting and sets up tableaux with cheap toys

and other accessories, which are photographed and then painted

These are fantasy worlds mixing high and low culture and painted mainly using an airbrush and fine brushes..

Slick, fast imagery immaculately executed.

A blonde girl, semi clad erotic amongst cherubs and plastic toys,

Large scale using airbrush and sometimes taking months to paint he is a rising star of the art world

William Tuck completed his Masters at The Royal Academy Schools in 2005

Gordon Cheung

Cheung's paintings capture the hallucinations between the virtual and actual realities of a globalised world oscillating between Utopia and Dystopia. Spray paint, oil, acrylic, pastels, stock listings and ink collide in his works to form epic techno-sublime vistas.

All the time he makes visual and conceptual references to the discourse of Modernist painting by using the archetypal visual rhetoric of Modernism; flatness, grid, gesture and materiality. The use of different techniques and languages deliberately interrupts the reading of the painting to encourage, in Cheung's words, a kind of telescopic deconstruction, that has a relationship to the way, how we are always looking or experiencing something beyond. For example when we speak into phones, write and read emails or surf for information on the Internet, it's as if we are in an alternate dimension. It's as if we temporarily dematerialise into virtual landscape.

Cheung began using the stock listings in 1995 when mobile phones and internet were becoming readily available. He was excited by the utopic euphoria of digital frontiers, global villages, information superhighways and Cyberspace; this digital and communication revolution compelled him to visually respond to this modern dimension. Time and space had collapsed into the instant - reconfiguring our perceptions into a state of constant flux. The utopic euphoria was short-lived with the collapse of tech stocks after the entrance into the 21st century, the global hysteria over the millenium and by the titanic corporate corruption of Enron and Worldcom. All these events were underlined by more recorded natural disasters than at any other time, followed by the twin tower attacks that led to Global War of Terror.

If you think of what is omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent, you could also philosophize about the stock market as about the belief in God or another possible power. Cheung has converged these ideas and raises questions to visualize us the megalithic structure, in which we all exist. It is for him our contemporary landscape – a Wilderness of Mirrors.

Gordon Cheung (solo show), Galerie Adler, Frankfurt, Germany

The Other Mainstream II: Selections from the Collection of Mikki and Stanley Weithorn

Arizona State University Art Museum, Arizona, USA

Gordon Cheung (solo show), Harris Museum and Art Gallery, Preston, UK

Carter Presents "Dystopia For All" Wharf Road Project October 2008

Carter Presents Scope London 2008

Daniel Jackson

Daniel Jackson explores the synthesis of computer code with human actions,
engaging with the ideas propositioned by Malevich, Mondrian, Lewitt and
Halley and extending a way forward for conceptual art in this century.

By controlling the parameters of the software that he has purposefully
created, and with the final edit of the output, he is able to produce
rigorously constructed paintings and one off prints. The large monochrome
paintings create a retinal disquiet, like an interference on a screen. The
noise is an overall organised treatment, highly orchestrated and
meticulously worked. The software output is systematically adhered to and
synthesized with the artist's intervention, which allows the works to be
viewed as both optically textured luxury and as a cerebral, logical
construction.

Daniel Jackson has exhibited widely in group shows, notably: 'Junge Scene' at the Seccession, Vienna, 1998; 'Look and Feel', Buerofriedrich, Berlin, 2000; 'A Square of Ground', Jerwood Gallery, London, 2000; 'The Royal Road to the Unconscious', Freud Museum, London,2004.

Brian Reed

There are certain aspects in Brian Reed's work which I feel I have been able to expand upon. Since closely working with Brian onthe 10
print project i have helped to fascilitate the expansion and production of his thinking. in dialoge, constant communication and
also the gallery's vision. I also have a role as a prducer and as an interface and catalyst between the artist in theier studio and a public.I have enjoyed working closely with all artists to develop what is good for their work but also what works and fits in with CP's vision. CP is not an empty vessel to be filled with art. It is a curatorial project. with 10 the whole point was to make ambitious very limited edition prints using the latest printing technologies. As curator it was my ambition to get artists to really try to not only stretcch the parameters and limitations of their own work, but also the printing company.

In Brian Reed's case we were enabled to scale up and really develop photographs which he was not sure how to proceed with and therefore further advance the develpmnt of the artis's work. There were 17 artists in this project and most of them were able to make work which they never would have been able to prior. I worked closely with all artists on this project.

Carter Presents 29 Orsman Road London N1 5RA www.carterpresents.com email:carterpresents@gmail.com tel: 07828 553080

Paul Brandford

"We the People Salute our Glorious Leaders Thus"

Exhibition open 5th September - 4th October 2009

Carter Presents London

29 Orsman Road

London N1 5RA

Tel: 07828 553 080

email: carterpresents@gmail.com

Gallery open Thursday - Saturdays 12.pm - 5.30pm and by appointment

If you wish to visit the gallery outside of these times then please don't hesitate to contact Carter Presents by telephone and or email

Paul Brandford has recently been a nominated finalist in The Threadneedle figurative Prize 2008 and he won First prize in The Jerwood Drawing Prize in 2003. He studied at The Royal Academy Schools and he lives and works in London. Brandford's paintings are often humorous and satyrical a critique of the culture of celebriity, fame, infamy and its mediated portrayal. Many of his paintings are of the anti hero, those who maybe shouldn't be portrayed and are certainly not heroes. But his paintings have an acuity, a wit and a cutting satyrical edge which cuts through the rhetoric and lays bare the reality of the subject matter. These paintings explore the continual historicity of portraiture and these anti- portraits of hate figures, despots and unsavoury characters such as Robert Mugabe and members of the BNP question the fundamental of the celebratory portrait commissioned more often than not through vanity and power to mask and hide rather than reveal often brutal realities,

Paul Brandford's paintings toy with charicature and the cartoon in a traditional painterly style more akin to both Hogarth and Goya. This new body of paintings are snapshots from our time, mediated, consumed, digested and finally regurgitated. These paintings are as much about the media and its dissemination, its arguments and positions as they are about celebrity, the all consuming pervasiveness of our culture and the topical events which become news.

Exhibitions include: The Threadneedle Prize The Mall Galleries London 2008, Drawings For All, Gainsborough's House (1990, 1994, 2002),Resist, Crescent Arts, Scarborough (2003) and the Shewsbury Sotheby's Open, Shrewsbury Art Gallery and Museum (2003). First Prize The Jerwood Drawing Prize 2003.

A Shot In The Dark

Chateau Radvanov

Radvánov 1, Mladá Vožice u Tábora

Czech Republic

30th May - 29th june 2009

Open 12pm - 6.00pm daily by appointment

tel: +420 604 276 447

You are invited to the Private View of

"A Shot In The Dark"

On Saturday 30th May from 12.00pm

30th May - 29th June 2009

Gordon Cheung

Thomas Draschan

Pure Evil

Jonathan Gent

Daniel Jackson

Lee Maelzer

Maslen and Mehra

Jonathan McLeod

Brian Reed

Will Tuck

Gavin Turk

Freya Wright

Mark Wright

curated by Carter Presents London

Shooting in the dark is about blind faith, firing into the darkness in the belief that you might just hit your target.

The work of these artists is pop, irreverent and kitch looking as much into the present and future of popular culture as it does to its past. Mark Wright's paintings of "toxic Wasteland's", The street art of Pure Evil, Gordon Cheung's, post psychadelic, montages, Will Tuck's air brushed roccocco porn, Jonathan Gent's witty musings and irreverent observations, the paintings of 50's and 60's film still's by Freya Wright, Jonathan McLeod's intense psychological ruminations, Lee Maelzers reconstructed landscapes, Daniel Jackson's pop optical coded prints, Brian Reeds, play on languages and perceptual shifts, Gavin Turks self referential notoriety, Thomas Draschan's cult filmography and Maslen and Mehra's mirrored mirroring of peopled landscapes.

"A Shot in the Dark" is the title for the 1964 Pink Panther comedy film cult classic directed by Blake Edwards starring Peter Sellars as the bumbling French inspector Clouseau. The sixties were a time of optimism and fear, 1964 was dubbed the British invasion by Americans as the Beatles, The Stones, Led Zeppelin, Rod Stewart, Deep Purple and the Who dominated the charts. it was a time of revolutionary fervor and despair as the Vietnam war escalated. Now 25 years on and the world is a very different place, but many concerns and fears are still just as important now as they were then, just the backdrop has changed, equality of the races and sexes, democracy, futile wars and the arms race are still of major concern. These artists are in the now, dealing with issues of the day, young, energetic and dynamic

The Artists:

Gordon Cheung

Gordon Cheung is of Hong Kong origin and born in London 1975 where he lives and works. Cheung’s paintings capture the hallucinations between the virtual and actual realities of a globalised world oscillating between Utopia and Dystopia. Spray paint, oil, acrylic, pastels, stock listings and ink collide in his works to form epic techno-sublime vistas. Cheung graduated from the Royal College of Art, 2001 and whilst a student he instigated and was the organiser of Assembly exhibiting 172 MA art graduates in 2 disused Victorian school buildings (Catalogue available on request).

He exhibits internationally and was in the largest and most ambitious survey of recent developments in art from the UK; The British Art Show 6 and The John Moores Painting 24. He was commissioned for a Laing Art Solo Award (Selected by Susan May) July 2007. 2009 solo shows will be at Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, Volta NYC, New York and The New Art Gallery Walsall UK

Cheung's works are in international public and private collections including the Hirshhorn Museum, Whitworth Museum, ASU Art Museum, The New Art Gallery Walsall, Hiscox Collection, Progressive Arts Collection and UBS Collection.

Thomas Draschan

Thomas Draschan born 1967 Lives and works in Vienna. He studied at the Academie of Fine Arts in Frankfurt and at Cooper Union in NY. He is working with Video, Film and Collages. The re-combination of existing images into a new, condensed and enriched form is one of his main concerns. Italian porn comics, pop and pop art and films like "svezia, inferno e paradiso" have a strong impact on his current workcelebrating italian pop culture from the past and transcending it into a visionary cultish shrine or totem like existence. A Homage for antique heritage and old master renaissance paintings mixed with sex and violence from popular imagery for good measure.

Draschan has exhibited widely in Europe and The USA since 1998, he has been the recipient of numerous awards for his experimental films. His films include documentaries on Herman Nitsch The Viennese Actionistand music videos for New Order "Turn".

Pure Evil

The Apocalyptic Anthropomorphism of the Pure Evil Bunny was spawned in San Francisco and was first spotted in London around the turn of the millennium along with other characters in the So Fuzzy Crew, infamous for writing ''WAR IS SO LAST CENTURY'' LARGE under a bridge in the East End. Pure Evil and the S.F.C. are the aliases of one man. His pop gothic artwork is inspired by death metal , rock zombies and home studio vampires everywhere. His work can be seen in cities worldwide. 4 years ago he moved back to London from San Francisco where he used to skate every day and was one of the designers for west coast clothing label ANARCHIC ADJUSTMENT. He enjoys making short films about graffiti ( www.graffititv.net ) and painting vampire rabbits and other weird stuff all over the world. His work has appeared in Beijing, Tokyo, New York, London, San Francisco, Barcelona, Antwerp, Berlin, Hong Kong.

JONATHAN GENT

Born in 1976 Jonathan Gent studied at Cheshire and Edinburgh School's of Art respectively, Gent moved to Glasgow then Aberdeenshire to forge his practice. Since that time he has been an artist in transit, constantly moving between The USA, Latin America, Europe, The Milddle East and England. He has had solo shows at XVA Gallery Dubai 2008, GLU Gallery Los Angeles 2004 and 2005 and Hotel London 2004. Jonathan Gent will be having a solo show at Carter Presents in 2009.

Gent's paintings and drawings explore a perceptive and wry observation on human complexity. Humorous, wry, and acutely tuned his work is punchy and fast. Sometimes strikingly minimal, they can often be deceptively simple. Gent's obsession is with the line and the expansion of ideas through its limitless possibilities. His observations on close examination feel painfully insightful and true to life. They are visual poems keenly observed teetering on the brink of pathos and comedy. Jonathan Gent has work in numerous private and public collections around the world.

Daniel Jackson

Daniel Jackson explores the synthesis of computer code with human actions, engaging with the ideas propositioned by Malevich, Mondrian, Lewitt and Halley and extending a way forward for conceptual art in this century. By controlling the parameters of the software that he has purposefully created, and with the final edit of the output, he is able to produce rigorously constructed paintings and one off prints. The large monochrome paintings create a retinal disquiet, like an interference on a screen. The noise is an overall organised treatment, highly orchestrated and meticulously worked. The software output is systematically adhered to and synthesized with the artist’s intervention, which allows the works to be viewed as both optically textured luxury and as a cerebral, logical construction.

Daniel Jackson has exhibited widely in Solo and group shows, notably: 'Junge Scene' at the Seccession, Vienna, 1998; 'Look and Feel', Buerofriedrich, Berlin, 2000; 'A Square of Ground', Jerwood Gallery, London, 2000; 'The Royal Road to the Unconscious', Freud Museum, London,2004

Lee Maelzer

Lee Maelzer's new body of work whilst rooted in urbanity outwardly manifests itself in visions of nature. Maelzer's paintings have derived from a need to connect to the directness of living in the contemporary landscape in which diversity is under threat and becoming a thing of the past. Through evolution what is here and present in our world is the fittest, the strongest and the most resilient. If natural beauty abounds then it is a by-product which is functional and subservient to survival. Maelzer's trees are both majestic and complex. She takes them apart as pure matter, then reconstructs them as pure paint. Her trees are imbued with personalities, moody, mournful and brutish. Their colour is not closely related to the real tree, but rather a theatrical and filmic re-invention of it. The natural world given the glamour of artifice is isolated then displayed as an archive. The beauty and elegance of Maelzers paintings underlie a mute landscape and an imperiled world.

A graduate from The Royal College of Art, Lee Maelzer has exhibited widely in Britain, Europe and America in both solo and group shows including: "Art Futures" Bloomberg Space London, "An Archaeology" 176 London, The John Moores painting exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery Liverpool, "Domestocity" Cell Projects London, "Houses in Motion" Fieldgate Gallery London, Lucy Macintosh Gallery Lausanne Switzerland. Solo shows include "Sparkle with Squalor " The University of The Arts Gallery London, Carter Presents London, Museum 52 London. Lee Maelzer has carried out residences abroad including an Arts Council of England Residency in Colima, Mexico and the Abbey Fellowship at the British School in Rome. Lee Maelzer is in numerous collections around the world including Frank Cohen, David Roberts and Anita Zabludowicz.

MASLEN & MEHRA

We are living in a time when the real environmental consequences of economic growth and progress is being discussed and debated in the press, scientific research, documentaries, publications and television. Whilst becoming aware of some of these issues and concepts such as ‘global warming’ and ‘carbon footprints’ for many an understanding of the natural world is gleaned through television and perhaps an exotic holiday break. Living in the natural world is becoming alien to us as populations shift towards urban lifestyles which isolate us from nature. Working in a diverse, imaginative and experimental graphic language, Maslen & Mehras' collaborative practice engages in dialogues which compare, contrast and juxtapose the natural and human world in which we live. In tIn the ‘Mirrored’ series, mirrored sculptures of people from urban settings are placed in more natural environments. Reflecting their surroundings, the ghost-like figures appear as if from another dimension; skateboarders and people on mobile phones go about their business.

"Lying behind both the Native images, and the images of the Mirrored series that are their antonym, lies a longing for an Edenic world that perhaps never truly existed in fact. I think it is part of the fascination of these works that they both preach a certain kind of morality, a morality of respect for nature, and at the same time question it. You can inhabit these scenes, but only as a ghost. The problems they pose are ultimately insoluble – there are no slick solutions to be found here."

EDWARD LUCIE-SMITH Quote from Mirrored – Maslen & Mehra monograph published by Verlag für moderne Kunst Nürnberg 2008

Recent solo exhibitions/Projects include: 2008- "Because There Is Nothing On This Green Earth That Is Stronger Than", Galerie Caprice Horn/Berlin, 2008- "Shadow Lands", Priska C. Juschka Fine Art, New York, 2008- Maslen & Mehra, MK Contemporary, Milton Keynes UK, 2008- Two Worlds, Piramid Art Center, Istanbul , 2007/8 Around, Maslen & Mehra / Federico Guida, First Gallery Rome, 2007- Maslen & Mehra, Seven Dials Covent Garden, London, 2006- Metropolis, Galerie Caprice Horn/Berlin, 2006- Maslen & Mehra, Galería Sicart, Barcelona, 2006- Maslen & Mehra, Lacen Galerie, Paris, 2003- Phoenix, Perth International Arts Festival, holmes à court Gallery, Perth, Australia

Jonathan Mcleod

Solo exhibitions include Carter Presents London 2008, 2007 and recent

group shows include "DystopiaFor All" The Wharf Road Project 2008, The Cafe Gallery London 2008, "Gothic" Fieldgate Gallery London 2008, Scope London 2008, Scope New York 2007, Scope Miami and Scope London 2006- 2007, Year 07 London 2007. His work is in private collections in Europe and The USA.

Jonathan McLeod lives and works in London and the north-west Scottish Highlands

BRIAN REED

Brian Reed's found photos represent an ongoing obsession with the discarded and wasted. Portraiture and anthropology. Collected over many years from litter bins around stations and shopping centres, the anonymity and personal histories become prevalent. Found fragments of torn photographs are re photographed and reconstructed, blown up including the dirt and the tears. and re-presented. The photographs singled out to create new meanings becomes the image and object in its own right.

Brian Reed has exhibited extensively in the UK and Europe, and he has work in the collections of the Nicholas Logsdail [Lisson Gallery], University of the Arts London as well as various private collectionns

Will Tuck

Will Tuck's paintings are very loosely based around old master paintings and subjects, especially involving classical mythology. He often bases the composition on an existing painting and sets up tableaux with cheap toys and other accessories, which are photographed and then painted. These are fantasy worlds mixing high and low culture and painted mainly using an airbrush and fine brushes.. Slick, fast imagery immaculately executed.

William Tuck completed his Masters at The Royal Academy Schools in 2005

Exhibitions include: Carter&Gallagher Gallery London October 2007 solo exhibition, ‘Artistic Vandals’, Nomoregrey Gallery, London, October 2006, ‘Transcription’, Sarah Myerscough Fine Art, London, Aug-Sep 2006, BP Portrait Award, National Portrait Gallery, London, June-Sep 2006, Royal Academy Summer Show, Royal Academy of Arts, London, June-Aug 2006, ‘Fantasy Stories’, Sarah Myerscough Fine Art, London, Dec 2005-Jan 2006, ‘Three Graduates’ Marksman Gallery, Reading, Nov-Dec 2005, Royal Academy Summer Show, Royal Academy of Arts, London, June-Aug 2005.

He is in the Jean pigozzi collection, David Roberts Collection

Gavin Turk

Gavin Turk's art often involves his own image disguised as that of a more famous person. He has cast himself in a series of detailed life sized sculptures as different romantic heroes, including Sid Vicious, Jean-Paul Marat and Pop a waxwork of Turk as Sid Vicious (in white jacket and black trousers, pointing a gun - a work which toured London, Berlin and New York as part of the 1997 Sensation exhibition) appropriated the stance of Andy Warhol's painting of Elvis Presley, thereby depicting Turk himself (like Presley) as (semiotically speaking) a cowboy. Ambiguity features as much as self-obsession throughout Turk's work. What appeared to be a discarded plastic rubbish bag was in fact a bronze sculpture of one. A large industrial skip (normally yellow, battered and covered in rust) was painted an immaculate gloss black. Turk turned up at the private view of the Sensation exhibition at the solemn Royal Academy, London, dressed as a down-and-out. A set of what appeared to be classic posters of Che Guevara in a beret, revealed themselves on further scrutiny to be photos of Turk himself. Gavin Turk (born 1967) is a British artist and one of the Young British Artists (YBAs). He often uses his own image in life-size sculptures of famous people. He was born in Guildford, near London, and went to the Royal College of Art. However, in 1991, the tutors refused to give him the final degree because of his show, called Cave, which consisted of a whitewashed studio space, containing only a blue heritage plaque (of the kind normally found on historic buildings) commemorating his own presence as a sculptor. This bestowed some instant notoriety on Turk, whose work has been collected by Charles Saatchi and is in many private and public collections.

Freya Wright

Freya Wright's paintings engage with the juxtaposition of the technological distance of film and the human touch of painting. Painting’s lack of obligatory narrative structure introduces questions on the reliability of the cinema image. Each painting is made from a low key moment, a small sequence where narrative is lost and the moment is quiet and still, and action is gestured out of the frame. With the subtle editing of space or the subtraction of certain figures, and with the choice of specific early Technicolour film, a further ambiguity and tension is created, and paintings venture into the realms of the “uncanny”. Images chosen engage with the perception of memory within each film, as each, however low key, have a resonance and association throughout the film. These moments also play with the memory of film itself, as with involuntary association they cross our perceptions and thoughts of everyday life. Freya Wright won The Landmark Fine Art Prize, First Prize, June 2008

Freya Wright born 1986 Studied Wimbledon School of Art 2005 - 2008. Her work is in a number of private collections including Judith and Richard Greer.

Mark Wright

The aftermath of a napalm strike comes to mind when immersed in the paintings of Mark Wright as synthetic and haunting beauty belie moribund existence in his toxic wastelands.

The sublime nature and stillness of the landscapes simultaneously recall petrified forests, the ritual aboriginal burnings of the bush, Dante's descent in to the bowels of the earth and the allusion to the wounding of the Fisher King and the sympathetic sterility and infertility of his lands that is caused when he is injured. His kingdom suffers as he does, his impotence affecting the fertility of the land and reducing it to a barren wasteland. Little is left for him to do but fish in the river near his castle.

Weaving strands from ancient celtic myths through to T S Eliots "The Wasteland" and The Who's "Baba O'Riley" with the kind of concerns now 40 years on, that it isn't the youthful fear of growing old which engulfs our collective thinking, but the worrying concerns that there may not be a future to grow old in at all if we continue to consciously deplete our natural resources and pollute our planet at the rate we are doing. Mark Wright's paintings encapsulate the psychology of our neurotically dyspeptic world in a place where we are peculiarly happy to wallow in and offer us a focused and penetrating view of our skewed habitue.

Mark Wright graduated from The Royal College of Art London in 1990. He has exhibited widely in the UK, USA and Europe.

Recent Exhibitions include: Carter Presents London May 2008 Solo Exhibition, Scope London, Carter Presents 2008, "Fastest With The Mostest" Carter & Gallagher London 2007, "Dystopia For All" The Wharf Road project London 2008, Scope Miami 2007, Year 07 London 2007, "Kamikaze Blossom" Fieldgate Gallery, London 2006, Scope London Carter Presents 2006, "For and From" The Metropole Galleries Folkestone Kent 2005, i-Level Gallery, London 2003 Solo Exhibition, Rhodes+Mann London 2000 Solo Exhibition. His work is in pubic and private collections including:British Airways, David Roberts Collection, Deutsche Bank, Merrill Lynch, Nick Mason, Pfizers Collection, Royal College of Art, Robert and Susan K. Summer, NY, Sony International, Wellcome Trust

Lee Maelzer

Invisible Stoic

Private View: Saturday 2nd May 2009. 6.30pm to 9.30pm

Exhibition Dates: 2nd May to 30^th May 2009

Opening Times: Thursday - Saturday 12.00pm to 5.30pm

and by appointment

Maelzer's trees are both majestic and complex. She takes them apart as pure matter, then reconstructs them as pure paint. Her trees are imbued with personalities, moody, mournful and brutish. Their colour is not closely related to the real tree, but rather a theatrical and filmic re-invention of it. The natural world given the glamour of artifice is isolated then displayed as an archive. The beauty and elegance of Maelzers paintings underlie a mute landscape and an imperiled world.

Vestige Condition

Brian Reed

Exhibition Dates: 28^th March to 19^th April 2009

For the exhibition Brian Reed has created new works from his photographic series of appropriated found images and the ongoing signage pieces. A formidable sense of the end of history permeates the works, the destruction of the world as foretold by many religions. As the burgeoning population continues unchecked and global resources become limited, the increase of in-fighting leads to a self-furfilling prophecy.

His large scale signage work Ideology Converter is embedded with the vernacular of doublespeak, borrowed from the political and corporate spheres. As in previous work the statements are deliberately infused with ambiguous content and meaning. With this black on black text piece a topographical space is created – a space where the words become both a visual and verbal experience. This piece is at once both an apparatus of power, instructing individuals on their conduct and communication, and a memorial to the persuasion of belief systems and their implication.

The end of days or the ultimate destiny of humanity comes to the fore in Disrupted Command, a work comprising of seven individual images of nuclear explosions from different periods in the history of the atomic bomb. The seven images reflect the seven seals from the Book of Revelation in the Christian Bible. The sublime beauty of the explosion, the combination of the grotesque and beautiful, is disrupted by the slicing of the image, a jarring or shifting of a reality forces the focus back to the subject; that of the totality of the man-made destruction.

An oversized portrait shows a male - his face obscured by a blot of brown paint - is a scaled reproduction of a found passport photograph. The mark applied by person unknown is conceptually ambiguous. Does this reflect a defacing made in anger or hatred? Soiled by a rejected friend or lover? This work and others in the Do Not Become What You See series question our ideas about identity and loss.

When Reason Stops is a small photographic piece. In it, spots of sunlight stream through a canopy of trees focusing on an area of undergrowth. It is a quiet reflective piece on hope and renewal, taken by the artist at the peaceful wooded park that is the location of the destroyed Jewish Cemetery at Gedenkstätte Grosse Hamburger Strasse, Berlin.

Brian Reed lives and works in London. He has works in various private collections.

The Stuff of Images: Laura White

If I had a Monkey I wouldn’t need a TV

28th February - 15th March 2009

The Sculptural Language of images investigated through the work of Laura White and text by Lisa Le Feuvre, Andrew Renton and Laura U. Marks. Ideas are explored around the physical relationship to images, where image and object are dissolved into one another in creating a haptic experience. The documentation of White’s practice and the stuff of images, is embedded within the book and its production.

The Stuff of Images: Laura White includes essays by Laura U. Marks, Andrew Renton and a conversation with Lisa Le Feuvre.

Published by Castlefield Gallery.

Distributed Cornerhouse Distribution.

ISBN: 978-0-9559557-1-6

Exhibition of work continues until March 15^th. Opening hours: Saturday and Sunday 12 – 6pm and by appointment

Carter Presents 29 Orsman Road London N1 5RA T: 07828 553 080

carterpresents@gmail.com

Laura White - If I Had a Monkey I Wouldn’t Need a TV

Carter Presents is pleased to present If I Had a Monkey I Wouldn’t Need a TV, a solo show of new work by London based artist Laura White. Working with image and objects her work addresses the idea of a haptic experience in relation to imagery, where one has a physical relationship to an image and encounters them through a sculptural language. By representing images in this way the viewer confronts the image both physically and spatially, inviting them to dissolve their subjectivity in the close and bodily contact with the image.

Jonathan McLeod

15th November - 18th December 2008

Jonathan McLeod explores universal themes of life, death, rebirth
and the lifecycle of our own planet with detailed paintings which accentuate the fragility of our modern world. Symbolistic,
mysterious and beautifully crafted, these intense and haunting paintings become prophetic metaphors of our time.

Born: St Asaph Wales Jonathan McLeod studied at Chelsea School of Art BA and The Royal College of Art MA. He was awarded the Picker Fello (painting)

Solo exhibitions include Carter Presents London 2008, 2007 and recent group shows include "Dystopia For All" The Wharf Road Project 2008, The Cafe Gallery London 2008, "Gothic" Fieldgate Gallery London 2008, Scope London 2008, Scope New York 2007, Scope Miami and Scope London 2006- 2007, Year 07 London 2007. His work is in collections in Europe and The USA

Jonathan McLeod lives and works in London and the north-west Scottish Highlands

"Dystopia For All"

4th – 19th October

Dallas Seitz, Mark Wright, Will Tuck, Cedric Christie, Gavin Turk, Hannah Wooll, Lee Maelzer, Gordon Cheung, Thomas Draschan, Jonathan Gent, Daniel Jackson, Brian Reed, Jonathan McLeod

The Wharf Road Project
The Wenlock Building, Room 1.5
50-60 Wharf Road
London, N1

Cedric Christie

"The Triumph Of Consumption"

Sep 20 - Oct 25 2008

You may have seen Cedric Christie's art cars at major art events in Europe over the last two years. Since 2006 Christie has made over a dozen art cars and driven across Britain and Europe with them to Documenta in Kassel, Art Basel, Frieze London, Manifesta in Italy and most recently The Liverpool Biennial. The cars have moved around individually, been put on transporters and driven in convoy like rally cars racing between start points.

In his 2006 exhibition outside Carter Presents on the forecourt were exhibited two "car sculptures" covered in rally style transfers advertising names of contemporary and historical artists superimposed on the logos of well known global brands. The artist's names in effect re-brandimg and claiming cultural commodities as their own whilst subsuming their individual signature in to the corporate designed logo.

The final stage in the car's journey is to be crushed and flattened and displayed as "paintings" on the wall. Utilitarian art objects recyclable and redefined, literally pressed into the service of art through an "auto" destructive act.

The only car to be born from the triumph of the will was Hitler's Volkswagen "The People's car", The "KdF Wagen," Kraft durch Freude, meaning "Strength through Joy". Modern cars are born through the triumph of consumption. This consumerism doesn't negate the love of speed, luxury, practicality, economy or style, but embraces it all. There is quite literally a car for everyone today.

In J G Ballards book "The Atrocity exhibition" the protagonist takes on different names.There is no beginning or end, Ballard wanted readers to open the book anywhere and read through at will. Influenced by Burroughs, Becket and Joyce, Ballard produces a deconstructivist book in which fragments can be pulled from the strata of the text, the present, past, fictive and truth are all narratives which influence and inform the whole. Christie's art is also immersed in the narratives of 20th Century contemporary art, picking at it, re examining it, toying with it, and ultimatly extracting pieces from it. Christie's narrative like Ballard's, mashes all of this together to arrive at an astonishing and unexpected expressionistic piece of work. The cars are crushed to as near flat as can be and presented hanging from the walls as paintings and this fusion of paint and metal creates an all over effect. Thus a conceptualised deconstructive route is concluded with a sensuous tact!
ility which is akin to the all over paintings of Jules Olitski, Morris Louis and Jackson Pollock.

Cedric Christie has exhibited widely and recent exhibitions have included Kiss your own Arse coz I m not Sorry Anymore at 10000000mph Gallery, London; I did but Touch the Honey of Romance at Carter Presents, London; Please Shut the Gate at New Art Centre, Roche Court, Wiltshire; POZ at Gallerie Frederic Desimpel, Belgium and Repeat Performance at Anthony Grant, New York.

Cedric Christie was born in 1962 and lives and works in London.

Jonathan Gent - Brian Reed - Hannah Wooll,

"A Shot In The Arm"

14 June - 13 July 2008

During Chris Burden's seminal work "Shoot" in 1971 a friend was asked to shoot him in the arm from 15 feet away with a .22 rifle. The shot was actually meant to graze his arm, but his friend may not have been such a great friend as he missed slightly and the bullet penetrated the flesh. Still, he was luckier than William Burrough's wife Joan, who was accidentally shot in the head during a drunken game of William Tell in Mexico City in 1951.
As in Peter Sellers second Pink Panther film "A shot in the Dark " 1964, there is tragedy in the comedy, because all the best comedy is founded on tragedy and all the best tragedy is littered with comic moments.

A shot in the arm may make one think of injections and the many innoculations we receive as children and adults, or conversely Heroin abuse and self inflicted pain.

A shot in the arm, may be a little painful, but it isn't half as bad as a shot in the arse, or for that matter as brutal as a shot in the head. There is even a hint of gentility at only being shot in the arm with wounds you can show off to your friends, rolling down your sleeve in a bar to offer them a peek at.

These young artists are doing just that, offering us a glimpse at their work which explores observance and reality and often mixing them up to be indistinguishable.

Hannah Wooll's penetrating observances of accepted notions of beauty and deep seated desires, Brian Reed's anthropological collection of discarded lives and Jonathan Gent's insights of a life and lives lived in transit.

JONATHAN GENT

Born in 1976 Jonathan Gent studied at Cheshire and Edinburgh School's of Art respectively, Gent moved to Glasgow then Aberdeenshire to forge his practice. Since that time he has been an artist in transit, constantly moving between The USA, Latin America, Europe, The Milddle East and England. He has had solo shows at XVA Gallery Dubai 2008, GLU Gallery Los Angeles 2004 and 2005 and Hotel London 2004. Jonathan Gent will be having a solo show at Carter Presents in 2009.

Gent's paintings and drawings explore a perceptive and wry observation on human complexity. Humorous, wry, and acutely tuned his work is punchy and fast. Sometimes strikingly minimal, they can often be deceptively simple. Gent's obsession is with the line and the expansion of ideas through its limitless possibilities. His observations on close examination feel painfully insightful and true to life. They are visual poems keenly observed teetering on the brink of pathos and comedy. Jonathan Gent has work in numerous private and public collections around the world.

BRIAN REED

Brian Reed's found photos represent an ongoing obsession with the discarded and wasted. Portraiture and anthropology. Collected over many years from litter bins around stations and shopping centres, the anonymity and personal histories become prevalent. Found fragments of torn photographs are re photographed and reconstructed, blown up including the dirt and the tears. and re-presented. The photographs singled out to create new meanings becomes the image and object in its own right.

Brian Reed has exhibited extensively in the UK and Europe, and he has work in the collections of the Nicholas Logsdail [Lisson Gallery], University of the Arts London as well as various private collection.

HANNAH WOOLL

Hannah Wooll was born in 1977 in Norfolk, England. In 2000 she graduated from Manchester Metropolitan University with a 1st Class BA (hons) Degree in Fine Art, Painting. Wooll then went on to study at the Royal Academy Schools, London, graduating in 2003, receiving the May Cristea Award for Fine Art.

Since graduating Hannah Wooll has been living and working in London, Newcastle, and East Anglia, England, and has shown both nationally and internationally."Radical Art", Jerwood Space, London, 2005; "New London Kicks", Wooster Projects, New York, 2005; "Jerusalem", Dean Clough, Halifax, 2006; "I'll be Your Mirror", Primo Alonso, London, 2007; "Fastest with the Mostest", Carter and Gallagher, London, 2007; and "The Future Can Wait" Atlantis Gallery, London 2007.

Carter Presents '10'

8th May - 28th May 2008

The Printspace
74 Kingsland Road
London E2 8DL

Gavin Turk
Mark Titchner
Gary Webb
Bob And Roberta Smith
Cedric Christie
Dallas Seitz
Danny Rolph
Lee Maelzer
Thomas Draschan
Daniel Jackson
Jonathan McLeod
Mark Wright
Will Tuck
Claire DeJong
Jamie Robinson
Brian Reed
Jonathan Gent

Carter Presents is delighted to be working closely and collaboratively
with The Printspace in Hoxton London on this new venture of
Commissioning limited edition prints by some of the most exciting
artists working in Britain and Europe today.

Carter Presents has exclusively commissioned significant pieces of
artists work as limited edition Giclee prints to be exhibited at The
Printspace in Hoxton London in May 2008. Each print will be signed by
the artist in a limited edition of only 10 prints and will be
exclusively available through Carter Presents.

The revolution in printing which has been taking place in recent years
offers boundless opportunities to artists to expand the boundaries
of creativity and to produce very highly sophisticated and exciting
works of art at the cutting edge of technology. '10' seeks to
radicalise and redefine the generalised acceptance of an artist
print by offering ambitiously conceived and executed works by each
artist. The 17 artists in '10' veer between the pure and the kitsch,
the sign and the craft of making in a focused and penetrating look at
our skewed habitue.

Carter Presents & Bruuns Bazaar

Laura Buckley & Alexis Harding

15th May - 4th June 2008

BRUUNS BAZAAR - 48 Albemarle St - London W1S 4JL

Carter Presents with Bruuns Bazaar is a new gallery space on Albemarle Street in
Mayfair, London. The new Bruuns Bazaar project space is devoted to providing a
platform for artists to develop new work. The gallery on Albemarle Street, Mayfair, is
in a listed Georgian building and comprises of two inter-connected rooms. The
concept and format for the exhibition is two solo shows in self-contained spaces
where each artist's practice interrelates and plays off of the other.

For the inaugural exhibition, Laura Buckley and Alexis Harding, two London based
artists, each separately explore materiality through a conceptual framework initially
influenced by modernist reductionism. Both artists approach their medium (painting
and film projection) in a sculptural manner, expanding the traditional boundaries of
the support/screen.

ALEXIS HARDING explores the processes and physicality of paint literally bringing the painting to earth as the viscosity and liquidity of the medium falls to the gallery floor to create new forms. For Harding, painting is a process, a skin, a physically tangible and alchemical substance. The time-based nature of the wet matter simultaneously teases and critiques the very nature of painting. These temporary site-specific paintings recall
Robert Smithson's entropic Glue pours and soil descent spillages of the 1970's and Harding has been making them in a variety of spaces since 2005 in an attempt to liberate the static paintings, which are made over months in the studio.

LAURA BUCKLEY's work demystifies itself by structural and material means. She exposes the
process of making and presenting work. Her works are often semi-performative, featuring
reflective supports within the natural environment, both framing and dramatically
contrasting the setting. Studio activities are juxtaposed with real life events, exploring and
blurring points of separation and overlap. Hers is a multi-layered referential conversation between component materials. Buckley uses the devices of kinetic sculptural installation and video projection to question art and illusion, reality and perception. Both Alexis Harding and Laura Buckley have moved beyond modernism's hermetic tendencies by questioning formalism's rules and traditions. As in the thinking and practice of Robert Smithson, Harding and Buckley both separately employ entropy, paradox, language, landscape and anthropology in their uncompromising enquiries.

Mark Wright

May 3 - June 1 2008

Carter Presents?29 Orsman Road?London?N1 5RA
Private View Saturday May 3rd 6.30pm - 9.30pm
Exhibition from 3rd May - 1st June 2008
Opening times Wednesday - Friday 12.00pm - 5.30pm and by appointment
www.carterpresents.com
email: carterpresents@gmail.com
tel: 0207 0121203

The aftermath of a napalm strike comes to mind when immersed in the paintings of Mark Wright as synthetic and haunting beauty belie moribund existence in his toxic wastelands.
The sublime nature and stillness of the landscapes simultaneously recall petrified forests, the ritual aboriginal burnings of the bush, Dante's descent in to the bowels of the earth and the allusion to the wounding of the Fisher King and the sympathetic sterility and infertility of his lands that is caused when he is injured. His kingdom suffers as he does, his impotence affecting the fertility of the land and reducing it to a barren wasteland. Little is left for him to do but fish in the river near his castle.
Weaving strands from ancient celtic myths through to T S Eliots "The Wasteland" and The Who's "Baba O'Riley" with the kind of concerns now 40 years on, that it isn't the youthful fear of growing old which engulfs our collective thinking, but the worrying concerns that there may not be a future to grow old in at all if we continue to consciously deplete our natural resources and pollute our planet at the rate we are doing.
Utopia has always been 'nowhere' ever since Thomas Moore's publication in 1516 and it is the dystopic which is the reality for the masses, utopia for a very few just as in Mel Brookes musical "The Producers" what was "Springtime for Hitler and Germany" was definitely "Winter For Poland and France". T S Eliot's The Wasteland opens with "April is the cruellest Month."
As the first world war emphatically killed the dreamers of the industrial age, 1968 saw the idylls of the new progressive liberals turn sour with the belated realization of global putrefaction and societal cynicism. 40 years on and where are we. The red brigades and unrest of the 70s has turned in to extremism of another form. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq today are escalations of conflicts and ideologies sown a century before under British colonial rule in India, Palestine and North Africa. large tracts of land lie destroyed and polluted and our rivers and seas emptied and bled dry.
Mark Wright's paintings encapsulate the psychology of our neurotically dyspeptic world in a place where we are peculiarly happy to wallow in and offer us a focused and penetrating view of our skewed habitue.

"My kids ain't gonna break my heart
And my greed ain't gonna spoil their part
This land just has to be a new one
I'm gonna tan underneath a new sun"
Pete Townsend "Baba O'Riley"

Mark Wright Biography

Carter Presents is delighted to be exhibiing a new body of work by Mark Wright in his first solo show at Carter Presents London.
Mark Wright is a graduate from Central School of Art and The Royal College of Art London in 1990 since then he has exhibited widely in the UK, USA and Europe.
Recent Solo Exhibitions include: Carter Presents London 2008, Metropole Galleries 2006, Folkestone Kent. i-Level Gallery, London 2003.
Recent Group exhibitions include: Scope London with Carter Presents 2006, Scope Miami 2007, Year 07 London 2007 Kamikaze Blossom, Fieldgate Gallery, London 2006
He is currently showing in: " Nature, attitude, aspects of international painting and photography" with Marie-Jo Lafontaine, Allessandro Raho, Emil Nolde, Max Ernst, Fernando Botero amongst others at Samuelis Baumgarte Galerie, Bielefeld Germany 2008

Dallas Seitz

"Georgette Magritte and the Exotic Sea"

23rd February - 30th March 2008

Opening times Wednesday - Saturday and by appointment 12.00pm - 5.30pm

Georgette Magritte and the Exotic Sea

trees, white tarpaulin, goats teeth, hand carved portland stone,
charcoal, paper, blown glass, sea sponges, sheep bones, fish tail,
felt, chain-sawed river log, fish netting, horse glue, paint, air
drying clay, coyote fur, cast ceramic, hair, prosthetic eyes fishing
line, grommets, coral, string, scotch whisky

For his first solo exhibition with Carter Presents London, Dallas
Seitz unapologetically utilizes the poetry of objects to combine his
interest in collecting, museumology, colonization, personal history,
and the falsity of representation. The often-absurd works expose an
awareness of the thinking process while recalling museum collections
and relationships or narratives created by display. Seitz points us in
various directions with a non-intentionality. Surreal practises such
as wrapping exotic trees for protection from the cold, to voodoo, to
the belief in fantasy creatures, distorting history in museum
collections, using sea sponges to protect artworks in the basement of
the Louvre, and hunting wild beasts with his father in Canada, build a
system of branches much like a Darwin's tree.

Derek Ogbourne

Nov 25 2007 - Jan 25 2008

There is something fundamentally disturbing in the outpouring of the mind of Derek Ogbourne and for this exhibition the artist sets up scenarios of discomfiture by assimilating elements of the surreal, the structuralist and the plain mad to engage with a world that is all of these things and more.

Embedded in Ogbourne's art is the sadness of mortality and the precariousness, inconsequentiality and fallibility of our existence and as such the artist operates with and explores pervasive fears within and which constantly shadow our lives.
Derek Ogbourne has recently had a solo show at Brigitte Schenk Gallery Koln "The Museum of Optography". He has exhibited extensively in the UK, Europe and the East since completing his MA at the Slade School of Fine art in 1989. Notably The Sharjah Biennal 2003, Cell projects London. This is his first solo exhibition at Carter presents.

The Shutter of Death - Derek Ogbourne

The Shutter of Death Museum of Optography This part art book, part anthology gathers together a collection of essays by some of the only writers on the subject of optography, the process of obtaining the last thing you see before you die, an image laid bare and preserved on your retina. This process, forever shrouded in myth was in the late 1880s heavily speculated upon. A condemned young man, two scientists, Jack the Ripper, Salvador Dali and the only known Human Optogram.

William Tuck

Carter&Gallagher / October 2007

22 Uppper Grosvenor Street
London W1

"The rise of the neo renaissance"

There is a shift of emphasis going on with a small group of young English painters. Jonathan McLeod, Gavin Nolan, John Stark, David Hain and Will Tuck.

This new generation, educated, technical, skillful and highly articulate delve in to personal psyches raid history paintings and work with knowledge and skills of a past age. What sets these guys apart from other painters and artists of today is their informed knowingness and highly developed skills. For their paintings are about now and are highly contemporary.

Will Tuck's canvases are entirely made by using spray paint. A graduate from The Royal Academy Schools he will be having his first solo show at CARTER&GALLAGHER in October. William Tuck's paintings are very loosely based around old master paintings and subjects, especially involving classical mythology. He often bases the composition on an existing painting and sets up tableaux with cheap toys and other accessories, which are photographed and then painted. These are fantasy worlds mixing hi and lo culture and painted wholly using an airbrush. Slick, fast imagery immaculately executed. A blonde girl,semi clad erotic amongst cherubs and plastic toys,

William Tuck completed his Masters at The Royal Academy Schools in 2005

Exhibitions:

Carter&Gallagher Gallery London October 2007 solo exhibition
‘Artistic Vandals’, Nomoregrey Gallery, London, October 2006
‘Transcription’, Sarah Myerscough Fine Art, London, Aug-Sep 2006
BP Portrait Award, National Portrait Gallery, London, June-Sep 2006
Royal Academy Summer Show, Royal Academy of Arts, London, June-Aug 2006
‘Fantasy Stories’, Sarah Myerscough Fine Art, London, Dec 2005-Jan 2006
‘Three Graduates’ Marksman Gallery, Reading, Nov-Dec 2005
‘Retrospective’, Hills Road College, Cambridge, July 2005
Royal Academy Diploma Show, Royal Academy of Arts, London, June 2005
Royal Academy Summer Show, Royal Academy of Arts, London, June-Aug 2005
‘The Superlative Show’ ‘A’ Gallery, London, September 2004
Royal Academy Summer Show, Royal Academy of Arts, London, June-Aug 2004
‘Premiums’ Interim Show, Royal Academy of Arts, London, March 2004
‘Not The Turner Prize’, The Mall Gallery, London, July 2003
‘Noumena,’ Studio Voltaire, London, February 2002
Graduates Show, Stroud House Gallery, Stroud, Aug-Sep 2001
‘Recent Graduates’, ‘A’ Gallery, London, July-Aug 2001
BA(hons) Degree Show, Wimbledon School of Art, London, June 2001

"Fastest with the mostest"

May 28 - Jul 24 2007

Carter & Gallagher

Roadrunner, fast, conceited and smug, endlessly pursued by the hapless Wile y Coyote tears up the desert highway. Our empathy though is for the poor frustrated beast who will always be outsmarted. For the roadrunner is literally the fastest with the mostest and the coyote, desperate and laughably pathetic. The frustration is that once and it only needs once would it be great for this witless creature to actualy catch kill and eat the smug little bird. The poor coyote needs putting out of his misery for even when dispatched he never dies. The point of his existence is for us to mock and his life is one of perpetual hunger, torture, pain and frustration.

This new breed of young artists, intelligent, witty and knowing are smart and confident leaders of the pack, not a scraggy bunch of chasers. Whilst we admire them, we cant't get to them and like the roadrunner as they speed off in to the distance we are the coyotes left spluttering in their clouds of dust.

Thomas Draschan

"Resemblances Between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics"

Apr 29 - June 24

Carter Presents is delighted to exhibit the first solo show in the UK of Austrian artist Thomas Draschan who will be presenting his new installation:

"Resemblances Between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics"
In this new piece the film and video work is not only accompanied bylarge-scale collages, but has expanded out into the gallery. An altar-like totemic TV monitor shows the colourful flickering
results of the quick fire editing of two commercials. Draschan has united the two films with around 1000 hand-made splices that almost make the TV set explode. The resulting collision of images a cacophony of stimuli is driven beyond the monitor frame by its sheer kinetic energy in to the room and beyond.

The whole installation can best be seen from a seat especially made for this purpose: a florence knoll design classic that has been seriously abused by glueing on to it all the images that form Thomas Draschan's cosmic universe.

The complex symbolic language of Draschan's work is inspired by such thinkers and writer as j.k. huysmans, c.g. jung, gustave flaubert and Sigmund Freud. The exhibition refers both to Freud's collection of antique fallic figures surrounding his desk at the Freud Museum in London and to his book 'Totem and Taboo' (1913)

Freud writes " If the totem animal is the father, then the two principal ordinances of totemism, the two taboo prohibitions which constitute its core - not to kill the totem and not to have sexual relations with a woman of the same totem - coincide in their content with the two crimes of Oedipus, who killed his father and married his mother, as well as with the two primal wishes of children, the insufficient repression or the re-awakening of which forms the nucleus of perhaps every psychoneurosis.. "

Thus the multi layering interdisciplinary and transgressive nature to the work reaches in to our primitive and damaged psyches, through barely known apocryphic religious writings, pulp novels, classic Italian
porn and saccharine mass produced comics which inform and become the work. Thomas Draschan embraces the deviant pubescent miscreant in us all and This installation at its core is both savagely neurotic and neurotically savage.

The works in this exhibition contain sexual and violent conten and may cause offence. Any persons under the age of 16 may only enter if accompanied by an adult.

Thomas Draschan born 1967 Lives and works in Vienna. He studied at the Academie of Fine Arts in Frankfurt and at Cooper Union in NY. He is working with Video, Film and Collages. The re-combination of existing images into a new, condensed and enriched form is one of his main concerns.

Draschan has exhibited widely in Europe and The USA since 1998, he has been the recipient of numerous awards for his experimental films.His films include documentaries on Herman Nitsch The Viennese Actionist and music videos for New Order "Turn"

This is his first solo exhibition in the UK.

Bad Beuys Entertainment

"Final Count Of The Collision Between Us And The Damned"

Nov 18 - Dec 17 2006

Bad Beuys Entertainment was founded in 1999, at Cergy-Pontoise, in the Parisian suburbs. Stemming from the "culture of suburbs", the members of this group produce objects and ‘repetitions’ extracted from urban life, which are conceived as singular forms, for the audience to have a physical, sensitive relation to them. These works, with their basic and minimalist aspects, are feed-backs of perceptions, observations of architectural models, media representation and decoration standards. A balance between reality and cliché reveals unusual, repressive, economical, playful, social, cultural and at last aesthetic aspects of our environment.

At Carter Presents, Bad Beuys Entertainment presents Final Count Of The Collision Between Us And The Damned, a major sound installation of samplers and sound-systems The sound materials are placed to evoke the form of suburban towers and this juxtaposition of different machines produces a repetitive, systematic and polyphonic musical experience. The samplers, amplifiers and loud-speakers play Public Enemy’s hip hop interludes, which are simultaneously rewritten and replayed on separated canals via a specific protocol. This is Bad Beuys Entertainment's first solo exhibition in London.

Based in Paris, Haptic is a non-profit exhibition space, which is committed to the diffusion and production of contemporary art. By helping emerging artists to gain visibility, haptic became a footbridge between art schools and the art market. We also develop collaborations between experts from different fields or with similar organisations from abroad. Haptic is supported by DRAC Ile-de-France. For more information, please visit www.haptic.fr This exhibition is part of/organised in collaboration with Paris Calling, a season of contemporary art from France, supported by lead sponsor Société Générale Corporate & Investment Banking.

Cedric Christie

"I did but touch the honey of romance..."

Oct 7 - Nov 12 2006

For his first solo exhibition at Carter Presents, Cedric Christie uses the scaffolding pole in a critical appraisal of modernism. These are the most ambitious
scaffolding sculptures Christie has made yet and Carter Presents is delighted to have the opportunity to exhibit them.

T he scaffolding like Andre's bricks are the workaday instruments of modern growth and construction now re used to explore simple forms. Donald Judd shaped industrial materials exploring limited form ad infinitem whilst Robert Ryman has spent a lifetime negotiating the subtleties of white in his canvases.
Christie's art is similarly rigorous and uncompromising, but a young artist in the 21st century producing minimal work today can't proceed with the same
modernist intent and flawed certainty. This work then knowingly agitates underlying subtexts. A large scaffolding sculpture referencing Malevich's Suprematist. ideals and hopes which were tragically crushed by Stalin after the October revolution. Another is wrapped in the pages of the Financial Times Magazine "How To Spend It" magazine. Art now as a necessary luxury or a luxurious necessity. food for the gods as opposed to fish and chips
wrapped in the daily news. food for the masses.

Another work, is a small red cross made of scaffolding The red cross on white reminds one of chest pounding caucasian working class nationalism in a multi
culturally ethnically diverse England. And the artist a former welder engages with and acknowledges the multiplicity of interwoven references with this loading of the symbol, Christian, Constructionist or Constructivist and the raising of hopes and shattering of ideals. The Cross of Saint George, the English national flag is today potentially polarizing rather than a flag of unification and is a blinkered and romantic vision of England baseless, false and redundant as Poussin's vision of arcadia is to the French.

Outside the gallery, two cars sit on the forecourt covered in rally style transfers. One commissioned by Hull Time Based Art celebrating William Wilberforce's
importance in next years bicentennial of the abolition of slavery in this country and on the other car advertising names of well known contemporary artists. The artist as brand and traders in cultural commodities.

"Funiculus Atrocities"

Charlotte Shinerock, Alex Ratcliffe, Yuri Lee, Richard Gaspar, Thomas Needham

Sep 1 - Sep 24 2006

Funiculus Atrocities is a group show of emerging artists focusing particularly on sculpture and sculptural works. The selected artists include the Korean artist Yuri Lee, and British artists Charlotte Shinerock, Thomas Needham, Alexandra Ratcliffe and Richard Gasper. Orientated by the seduction of materials, Funiculus Atrocities is a show which extracts involuntary instinctual responses from its audience.

Funiculus Atrocities is an exhibition which embodies the term ‘Assemblage’. Visually, the artists in this show follow a specific approach to object making and
reintroducing human trace. Decision making is informed by an intuitive, semi autonomous involvement in relation to material and compositional format. Conceptually these works look at and indulge upon the desires felt towards certain materials. Materials such as clay, piped icing sugar, glass and paint are used for their immediate and reactionary properties. These works enjoy a very fluid process which can only encourage creativity and instant moments of expression. It is this process which enables them to explore how a sensibility can be seduced / captured into the surface of material.

Works in this show may pay homage to what might grow, protrude from the wall, sprout from the gallery floor and lie unnoticed on the ceiling, whilst others will be overtly attention seeking, purposely self degrading, ridiculous and daft. Works in this exhibition are unique for they refer to more than just the creative process and form. They are artworks which construct and explore fantasies, illusions, and abstract figurations to reveal various elements that are playful, absurd, sovereign, anti-sovereign, seductive yet peculiar.

Funiculus Atrocites is curated by Charlotte Shinerock

Born in Woking, 1982, Raticliffe studied at Winchester School of Art 2001 – 2004 at BA level, her most recent exhibition was Seditious Delicious: a Taste of Art, at the
Crawford Arts Centre, St Andrews, Scotland, 2005. Born in Seoul, South Korea, 1973, Lee is a recent MFA graduate of The Slade School of Fine Art, 2005, (Lee lives and Works in London.) Gasper, born in London is currently completing his MA in Fine Art at the Royal college of Art. Some of his most recent exhibitions include the interim show at the RCA and Bulky Luggage, at Seven Seven, 2005. Needham, born 1982 in Southampton graduated from Middlessex University in 2004. Selected exhibitions include CCA Opens Studios, Kitakyushu, Japan, 2006 and Bloomberg New Contemporaries, Barbican Centre, London. Shinerock, born 1982 in West Sussex, also graduated from Middlesex University in 2004. Recent exhibitions include the Hallow Salon 2006, London.

David Cunningham

July 2 - Aug 6 2006

A piano sits in the middle of an empty gallery. All the sound in the room is amplified and the sound passed through loudspeakers which resonate over the piano strings which vibrate into the room in a continuous cyclical process.

This situation is the inverse of a piano amplified.

The piano, instrument, conduit and sculpture. The work, paired down and minimal, continuous and evolving. An aesthetic encompassing a reductive gesturality, part Dada, part Bauhaus and part Fluxus, David Cunningham's installations are all part of one continuous body of work exploring acoustics and subtle sonic dynamics in different locations with changing materials and changing dynamics.

Since 1993 artist and musician David Cunningham has created a continuing series of installation works based on real time exploration of acoustics. 'The Listening Room', Biennale of Sydney (1998) was followed by two installation works in "Days Like These", The Tate Triennial of Contemporary British Art, Tate Britain 2003 and subsequent installations at ICC Tokyo, Ikon Birmingham and Camden Arts Centre London.

This body of work responds acoustically not only to the space but also to the physical presence of its audience, integrating the object of the work with its subject. This self referentiality is central to one of Cunningham's basic principles - sound isn't used to illustrate an idea, it is the idea in itself.

The installations reveal the legacy of Fluxus, the often minimalist exploration of scientific, philosophical, sociological, or other extra-artistic ideas, in this case fused with the sensibility of John Cage's use of silence as a compositional tool. Cage's renowned work 4'33", (four minutes and 33 seconds of silence) shifts the focus of the audience to their immediate situation, to the ambient sound around them.

Cunningham structures that ambience through subtle amplification, by placing microphones and loudspeakers in the gallery.This isolating of sound and its magnification back to us makes us aware of the complexities of our presence in any place we are situated. it is this complexity brought out by subtlety that makes for meaningful and potent art. By being able to explore greater issues through tiny subtleties and an economy of means gives a greater understand of our place and effect in our environment.

This work responds acoustically not only to the proportions and dimensions of the space but also to the physical presence of its audience, integrating the object of the work with its subject. This self referentiality is central to the installation - sound isn't used to illustrate an idea, it is the idea in itself. The work isolates and makes audible the movement of air within a given space, something invisible and so quiet we are normally oblivious to it.

David Cunningham's work has ranged from pop music to gallery installations, including work for television, film, contemporary dance, and a number of collaborations with visual artists. His first significant commercial success came with The Flying Lizards' single 'Money', which reached number 4 in the UK charts in 1979 and was an international hit around the world.

Since his first album release 'Grey Scale' in 1976 he has worked as a composer and record producer, engaging with an eclectic range of people and musics, from pop groups to free improvisation (This Heat, Owada, David Toop, Steve Beresford) to Michael Nyman's music for Peter Greenaway's films and work with Ute Lemper and others.

Live work has involved collaboration and performances with John Cage, Kathy Acker, Michael Nyman, Peter Gordon, Pansonic, Michael Giles, Scanner and others.

Music for film and television has included Ken McMullen's films 'Zina' and (in collaboration with Michael Giles and Jamie Muir) 'Ghost Dance', and a series of television collaborations with visual artists which has included John Latham, David Hall, Stephen Partridge, Bruce McLean. Related work has included the production and treatment of sound for installation and broadcast artworks by Martin Creed, Brad Butler and Karen Mirza, Sam Taylor-Wood, Susan Hiller, João Penalva, Ian Breakwell, Gillian Wearing and many others.

David Cunningham information: http://www.stalk.net/piano/dcbio.htm

Colin Smith

May 14 - June 18 2006

Known for his paintings of disembodied shirts and coats hanging ghostlike, voluptuous yet intense. Smith concentrates on the intimate, the private and the minutae that make up daily experience.

This holds true for this new work excepting that the subjects of these paintings are all dead and their last private moments have gone to the grave with them. Now the clothing is worn by the recently deceased who have no need for them. A gentleness and sensitivity in the paintings belie the brutality and distastefulness of the subject matter. Sometimes a sheet is thrown over a body, at others the victim lies where they were struck down. Are they victims of crime, of an atrocity, or a natural disaster? Or are their deaths the tragic result of their own misdemeanors? No clues are given and nothing is explained.

It is in the familiarity of these images seen too often in films, newspapers and on TV of ordinary people going about their daily lives and suddenly struck down that make these painting both compelling and distressing,

Colin Smith has shown extensively in The UK, Europe and The USA. Recent and forthcoming exhibitions include solo shows at Rockwell London in 2004 and Buenos Aires, El Paso and Stockholm in 2007. His paintings are in many private and public collections including The Tate Gallery and The Arts Council. He is a regular contributer to Turps Banana.

Carter Presents at Apt Draschan

April 10 - May 10 2006

Gerhard Himmer
Ellie Howitt
Daniel Jackson
Leo Kogan
Gavin Nolan
Dereck Ogbourne
Hans Petri
Jamie Robinson
Paul Sakoilsky
Colin Smith
Heather Sparks

Carter Presents is a young gallery in London's East
End which is gaining a reputation for exhibiting challenging and innovative
art with a series of curated group shows, as well as solo exhibitions of young emergent talent exhibiting with more established experimental artists.

With a youthful approach and a disregard for social niceties, Carter Presents artists who search deep inside themselves for ways to extemporize their language, and relay their message. The artists filter in often oblique ways the inner thoughts and anxieties of society to act as a countering and balancing mechanism. They recognize and use the resources to hand to produce work of insight, not just a barometer of taste, fashion and opinion. These artists are at the zeitgeist, attuned and sensitized to the reality of the present, the immediate and the imminent. They are the urbanites from the USA, England and Europe feeding off the rich pickings of greed, avarice,
envy, dislocation and paranoia which nestles at the kernel of society.

London's East End in particular has always been inhabited by the working classes, the poor, the criminal, the revolutionary the immigrant and the artisan. Beginning with the Jews in 1653, then the Huguenots fleeing the Catholic persecutions in the 1680s to more recently Bangladeshis, West Indians, Africans, Cypriots, artists and bohemians. It was here that Marx visited whilst researching and writing Das Kapital, Lenin and even Stalin came to Whitechapel. It is here that the suffragette movement was formed whilst Jack The Ripper sliced up prostitutes and the Kray twins, Britain's most notorious gangsters, ruled. More recently city money, urban regeneration and improving infrastructure has seen an up market economic migration in advance of the Olympics to be held here in 2012.

Carter sets out to highlight this with on-going curatorial projects. Carter is also forging links with American and European artists and art spaces and sees this as part of a continual dialogue to exhibit exciting talent from London to a wider audience, but also importantly to bring artists from Europe and beyond to London. The first exhibition at Apt Draschan in Vienna sets up a collaboration for future shows traveling to Frankfurt, Paris and Amsterdam in 2006 and 2007.

Daniel Jackson

February 25 - March 26 2006

Carter Presents Daniel Jackson’s first solo show in the UK.

Daniel Jackson explores the synthesis of computer code with human actions,
engaging with the ideas propositioned by Malevich, Mondrian, Lewitt and
Halley and extending a way forward for conceptual art in this century.

By controlling the parameters of the software that he has purposefully
created, and with the final edit of the output, he is able to produce
rigorously constructed paintings and one off prints. The large monochrome
paintings create a retinal disquiet, like an interference on a screen. The
noise is an overall organised treatment, highly orchestrated and
meticulously worked. The software output is systematically adhered to and
synthesized with the artist’s intervention, which allows the works to be
viewed as both optically textured luxury and as a cerebral, logical
construction.

Daniel Jackson has exhibited widely in group shows, notably: 'Junge Scene' at the Seccession, Vienna, 1998; 'Look and Feel', Buerofriedrich, Berlin, 2000; 'A Square of Ground', Jerwood Gallery, London, 2000; 'The Royal Road to the Unconscious', Freud Museum, London,2004.

Lee Maelzer

January 21 - February 19 2006

Lee Maelzer's filmic paintings of cities, landscapes and interiors are carefully worked and layered. Often there is a brooding mystery and a hidden other story to unfold, if certain visual clues and cyphers can be understood. Buildings belch smoke, crash in to the sea or are torn apart in apocryphal ways. In other paintings simple observations are beautifully observed - the way of seeing and language developed creates an interdependence which makes the artist own her subject and the subject in turn control her inescapably.

Her paintings, seemingly both nostalgic and traditional, have a sting in the tail, offering a contemporary vision of the world told with traditional and technical craft. The observation of Vuillard with the realities of today.

A graduate from The Royal College of Art, she has work in international collections and she has exhibited widely in Britain in group shows such as the prestigious John Moores painting exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery, the BP Portrait Award, the Hunting Art Prizes and in Germany, Amsterdam, Los Angeles, New York and Switzerland. She has carried out residences abroad including an Arts Council of England Residency in Colima, Mexico and the Abbey Fellowship at the British School in Rome.

This is her second solo show of paintings in London.

"Prussian Blue" (synthetic seduction)

December 10 2005 - January 15 2006

Daniel Jackson
Mark Jones
Jamie Robinson
Laura White
Thomas Draschan
Paul Sakoilsky
Colin Smith
Gavin Nolan
Denise Kum
Chris Fitzpatrick
Godfried Donkor

The Christmas season is upon us, conspicuous consumption at its most visible, credit cards are maxed out. More death and destruction on the news, another scandal to get our teeth into and we can't seem to get enough.

"Prussian Blue" (synthetic seduction) is an examination and exploration of the dynamics and complexities of consumerism during this season to be jolly. As producers and consumers we go round in an inescapable loop of culpability, responsibility and morality, caught in the world and trapped in time and place. Only creativity in its many guises can be either a way of escape or a way for redress.

The first modern artificially manufactured color was Prussian blue. Made by the colormaker Diesbach of Berlin in about 1704. Diesbach accidentally formed the blue pigment when experimenting with the oxidation of iron. The pigment was available to artists by 1724 and was extremely popular throghout the three centuries since its discovery. More unnervingly Prussian Blue is the name of a cutesy teenage pop duo Lynx and Lamb from Bakersfield California spouting racist and fascist ideology. Lynx and Lamb are scary new entrants in to white supremacist marketing, two pretty (bleached) blond cutesy teenagers expounding their parents racist and homophobic doctrines through words, pop music and seemingly innocent good willed saccharine smiles. Home schooled on a farm, their father's branding stick for cattle is reputedly in the shape of the Swastika. These girls can be found modeling clothing for Aryan wear, an internet "fashion" accessories company selling swastika patches and other supremacist and Nazi sympathizers tat.

Type in "swastika" on ebay and at any given time over 200 listed items, stamps, coins, nazi memorabilia are for sale 24 hours seven days a week. Type in "sex" and you get over 2000 listed items. On Ebay at least, sex and swastikas sell. Hitler's own personal copy of Mein Kampf sold at auction (not ebay) recently for $23,000. (There is a persistent rumour that Prince Philip has one of the world's best collections of editions of the book.)

You can pick up a watercolour by Hitler for around $50,000 and he was reputed to have made over 2000 paintings. He almost certainly would have used Prussian blue in his work.

Mein Kampf has only been outsold by The Bible and Harry Potter. The sale of Mein Kampf alone made Hitler a millionaire with every household having to buy a copy in Germany when he came to power. It's this year's bestseller in Turkey and it's also a hot item in Poland. Mein Kampf is translated in to all main languages including Urdu. It's sale is banned in Germany and Israel. It can be bought through Amazon and many sellers.

When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, most of the world rightly saw a menace to humanity and millions died as a result. But IBM saw Nazi Germany as a lucrative trading partner. Its president, Thomas J. Watson, engineered a strategic business alliance between IBM and the Reich, beginning in the first days of the Hitler regime and continuing right through World War II. This alliance catapulted Nazi Germany to become IBM's most important customer outside the U.S. IBM and the Nazis jointly designed, and IBM exclusively produced, technological solutions that enabled Hitler to accelerate and in many ways automate key aspects of his persecution of Jews, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, and others the Nazis considered enemies. Custom-designed, IBM-produced punch cards, sorted by IBM machines leased to the Nazis, helped organize and manage the initial identification and social expulsion of Jews and others, the confiscation of their property, their ghettoization, their deportation, and, ultimately, even their extermination.

Recently discovered Nazi documents and Polish eyewitness testimony make clear that IBM's alliance with the Third Reich went far beyond its German subsidiary. A key factor in the Holocaust in Poland was IBM technology provided directly through a special wartime Polish subsidiary reporting to IBM New York, mainly to its headquarters at 590 Madison Avenue.

In this season of good cheer Prussian Blue (synthetic seduction) is a more sobering examination and exploration of the dynamics and complexities of consumerism and the role art plays in embracing cultural norms and in critiquing them. Sex and violence have been a staple in art since the earliest markings on caves thousands of years ago. The history paintings from the rennaisance through Goya to Delacroix and Picasso.

artists, like the media, have always made work about the great themes love and death and artists whatever their politics become complicit in the thing they are critiquing.
Prussian Blue (synthetic seduction) therefore goes round in a continuous loop of questioning, absorption, regurgitation and inescapability.

But as artists and consumers, aesthetes, romantics, stoics, cynics and pragmatists, the directions that we choose to go, the dreams we act on, the lives we lead and the goals we strive toward are all compromised in some way or other. Politicians call it diplomacy, the young call it lies, but most people call it getting real.

Mark Jones's direct women look out defiantly displaying their wares - pornographic and seedy a deftness of touch and references to Courbet and Sickert make them compelling if not uncomfortable.

Gavin Nolan's disturbing brutalized portraits of men and women vertiginous vaginal eyes distorted faces ugliness and aggressive a psycho-chiaroscuro dark hell, a nod and a wink to Dali, the teenage within and inner demons.

Godfried Donkor's collages of Black Madonnas - provocative and engaging these women know their heritage and flaunt their sexuality proudly. Rising out of the bowels of slave ships and surrounded by black boxers they also explore notions of stereotyping, role models and taboo.

Denise Kum war wounded are actors she has made up and photographed out of context during down time. It is hard to know what to make of them but in knowing it is make up the gruesome wounds become less a horror. The amputee extra though is a real amputee and both soldiers fought in the Balcans. Paid more as extras than in the real war these men have to relive the past for our entertainment.

Chris Fitzpatrick Bug eyed girls are a different proposition to the advertising of goods. Mutant eyes and disfigurement. yet smiley, having fun, putting on their make up blind to the reality of their disfigurement and difference.

Jamie Robinson's photographs Punk Kunst shot during a punk festival in a village in the Basque country tribes of punks gather, take over the town and party. To the excluded a threatening potentially violent group, to those in the tribe a family get together. Swastika Stamps are bought on a whim from Ebay, uncertainty, guilt and politically correct pressure conspire together. The stamps on display are put back up for auction on Ebay (auction lasting the length of the exhibition) and the selling price at a profit!

Paul Sakoilsky takes segments from Mein Kampf out of context and drawn over one text on aesthetic decisions on designing the Nazi Flag and another on the ills of teenage dress and activities, seem like the rantings of a vainly stupid old man. and render the text impotent and laughable. In his video a man attaches a clamp to his nipple and screams with pain but the screams, pain and absurdity generate painful laughter. This is Jackass Art at its highest nee lowest level.

In Colin Smith's paintings a man lies bleeding from the head lying on the ground. One wants to walk past, not get involved, whilst in another painting a passenger jet lifts off in to a beautiful sunrise. deadpan and direct, Smith's work is matter of fact, dissafected. and detached.

In Daniel Jackson's 'Extraction, Freud’s Desk – The Interpretation of Dreams’ exhibited on Freud’s Desk in the ‘Royal Road to the Unconscious’ at the Freud Museum, January 2004‘Extraction’ can take any text and, in a given period of time, will extract all the words from that text, one by one. The process continues until all the words of the text have been removed. A word is removed from the text at random and displayed. The software is extracting the words according to a rhythmic timing, using a musical 4/4 time signature structure. The structure gives the extraction of the words a rhythmic feeling, suggesting an intonation to the presentation of the
words - as if the randomly selected words are being read out. The time given to extract the text is approximately the time it would take to read the text.

Laura White's projection in to a box of domesticated budgies.
Originally from Australia in the wild are only green but have been bred for a domestic market for their cuteness. Budgies like many pets are bred as much for their aesthetics as anything else and you can order your budgie in any colour now to suit your curtains. Laura Whites work explores nature as entertainment the budgies projected in to a box, where they can't escape moving between the colors red yellow and blue. nature is synthetised and sanitised to be switched on in comfort and turned off at will.

Thomas Draschan, cuts and edits film from libraries, seventies advertising, porn, His film set to a bollywood soundtrack is a cacophany of images which explode in to our senses.

"Pencil (a drawing show)"

October 15 - November 27 2005

Marcus Harvey
Matt Franks
Thomas Draschan
Wayne Winner
Bob and Roberta Smith
Dan Coombes
David Rayson
Tamsin Morse
Lee Maelzer
John McLeod
Mark Wright
Daniel Jackson
Colin Smith
Heather Sparks
Dag Seeman
Ian Dawson
Kate Waters
Richard Clegg
Tina Spear
Ellie Howitt
Danny Rolph
Mark Jones
Paul Sakoilsky
Peter Jones
Roger Kelly
Jo Mitchell
Milika Muritu
Sophie Newell
Martin Westwood
Jo Robertson
Dereck Harris
Phill Sawdon
Pauline Hall
Claire de Jong
Dallas Seitz
Piers Jamson
Monica Biagioli
Reza Aramesh
David Leapman

This a show that embraces the direct nature of representation through its most basic simplest and economical means. Although entitled Pencil, the act of drawing can be with anything and on anything.

The old arguments about Picasso being a draughtsman who painted and Matisse a painter who drew, make for a lively but circular argument about what a drawing is and what a drawing can propose. With Pencil, I have quite simply asked the artists involved to bring me a drawing and have left it to them to define what that is and what drawing means to them.