With the help of the committee, artists, galleries and installation staff, EWX is near completion. We would like to thank all those involved for their staggering commitment to the project. The exhibition will be open to the public on the 21st January 2012 – if you wish to request an invite please email eastwing.collection@courtauld.ac.uk
AnOther Magazine have picked up on the EWX Gabriel Dawe Installation. Check out the amazing ‘AnOther Loves’ section of their website, full of weird, wonderful and artful images.
AnOther Feature
The Dutch artists Heringa / Van Kalsbeek will be exhibiting a series of works at EWX. The nature of their artistic programme is inherently dynamic, sporadic and unpredictable, comprising a series of techniques which allow the medium itself to direct the sculptural process. The duo describe their pieces as “controlled accidents”, however amidst the aesthetic chaos resides an organic appeal unique to their pioneering works. Not quite bird like, not quite aqueous, not quite skeletal, the joy of Heringa / Van Kalsbeek is that undecipherable amalgam of colour and form.
Q. Can you talk us through your artistic process and the way you re-interpret the sculptural medium?
Well, we call our work controlled accidents; we search for a moment in the process where we cannot control the process. Our artwork, with the influence of time and gravity, sort of creates itself. The resin slowly hardens and at a certain point when the resin is at different state of drying the medium takes on different forms and shapes. We hang it in the studio then turn it as it dries to make the resin stretch and fall in different directions. We keep turning it until we decide to stop developing the work.
Time is a really important theme, because these sculptures sort of grow. The process is interesting to work with but we don’t have any idea about what the sculpture will look like at the end. We start with a word, ‘wind’ or whatever and it shapes itself in a way. It depends how we feel when we step into the studio. We always need to time to see what direction we are heading, in terms of our artistic selves and the sculpture itself.
Q. How did resin become your foremost medium?
Normally, it is used for moulds, so we had the stuff in the studio already. We thought we could try to make something from it. However, mould resin was never intended to be used the way we do. We add pigment to the resin to give the colour and allow it to stay in a dripping liquid format. They way the resin falls and mixes allows us to almost paint in 3D.
It’s a delicate process mixing the pigment and the resin. The warmer it gets the faster it goes, and the more it moves as we hang it. We mix the colours but not too much as it can dry suddenly like plaster, you have to be precise with timing. Even the change in seasons effects the way the medium behaves. But we feel these challenges bring out the best in our work.
Q. Can you tell us how you met?
We met at art school. But we didn’t work together straight away, we first discussed each others work.
Leit: At one point I was living in London, I was making sculptures and I would take a slide of it and send it to Maarten and he would do an “improved version” is his studio. Not to make the point it was wrong but to suggest, “you can also bend it this way”. Then he would send a slide to me and I would “improve’” his. It was our way of collaborating over seas.
Maarten: In a way we have always collaborated, even if our work was shown separately. There came a point in 1998 when we didn’t know who figured out so we decided to unite completely.We constantly challenge each other and as a result we are going places in the sculptural world where we would never have gone on our own.
Q. What are you working on now?
We are working with large scale bronze commissions. Unlike mosts artists we don’t use moulds, we create smaller parts of the sculpture and then link them together. We position the pieces surrounding a central light and this allows light to shine through the sculpture. Instead of the work being lit from the outside, it comes out of the inside. The light creates a coloured effect and almost situates the works in their own microcosmic world. All our works you can look through, they are never a classical, solid, sculptural form. We like the space that we can create.
A cheeky preview of the work Heringa/Van Kalsbeek will be displaying at EWX
The established artist Simon Edmondson has recently installed his works. The pieces Edmondson has chosen to exhibit illustrate the artist’s exploration of medium through preparatory studies and sketches, culminating in a large scale painting which dominates room 4 of the EW space. We wanted to find out more about the artist and his creative process, below is the typed version of an interview we carried out last week.
Q. What has been the most significant moment or experience in your artistic career so far?
Well I suppose the most significant moment was sometime in my early youth when it occurred to me that I was going to be a painter. Not that I decided I was going to be painter, I just knew I was. There really weren’t any more significant moments after that, just a long voyage with small incidents, good fortune and discoveries.
Q. As you know, EWX will be focusing on the artist’s exploration of medium. How do you consider your use of medium innovative?
It is my intention to rediscover or reinvent, which I categorise as pioneering. I am looking for what it is that makes painting significant, the thing that painting can be adapted to do better than anything else. For example, there are things that photography can do better than painting. However, perhaps painting can do something more profound, as well and parallel to a photographic likeness. Optical realism has never been the most important aspect of painting, I’m trying to get to something much more to do with creating lasting moments of atmosphere and stillness which slowly reveal the felt or unseen. Paintings have a physical presence that is absent in mechanically produced images.
Q. Where do you see your artwork moving in the future and what are your aspirations as an artist?
I envisage making fewer paintings. I want to make each of my paintings more resolved, comprising a lot of studies, comparative work and investigation. Every painting I do has a private intent; I’m taking a non-commercial standpoint and find out what I want to find out for myself. I believe art appreciation to be an incredibly personal experience, but one has to allow for an openness of interpretation, and genuine themes, founded in reality, will always reward contemplation and awaken interest.
As an artist, you have the moral responsibility to bring out the fullest and most challenging aspects of your work. You find many people today believing in a purely “tongue and cheek” post-culture stance, devoid of moral responsibility, and sidestepping possibilities of meaning. But, I found by studying the example of great art, or more specifically great artists like Velázquez or Titian, that painting can still convey a contemporary message, uniquely still, potent and profoundly moving.
Q. Finally, why do hospitals feature so predominantly in your work?
Because that is the place where you really concentrate on what your life has been about. It’s only when you get ill, or approach death, that you really reflect. I find that an interesting idea.
Simon Edmondson's work arriving to us from Spain, brilliant jigsaw packaging!
Simon Edmondson, 'Table', 2009
Installing the works into the EWX exhibition space
Simon Edmondson, 'Altarpiece', 2008
My Little People Project by British-born artist Slinkachu has to be one of the wittiest, clever and endearing art projects conceived in recent years. Since 2006, miniature model train set characters have been surfacing in an around metropolises, compelling city-dwellers to consider their surroundings more thoughtfully.
Twinned as an installation/photography project, Slinkachu narrates his various miniature installations on his blog. His endeavors as a photographer – often displaying his photographs as triptychs on his blog – articulate how the often overpowering nature of the modern city can engender loneliness and melancholy. His work is situated in an artistic realm that seeks to empathize with the viewer in a identifiable and lighthearted way. The influence of Banksy is ever present in the wit and social comment of Slinkachu’s work. Although, unlike Banksy, Slinkachu succeeds in expressing his morals with an intelligible subtleness– in less than a few centimeters. A series of Slinkachu’s photographic works will be featured in the EWX exhibition, open to the public from January 21 2012.
Here is Erik Sanner’s work all packaged up and ready to be shipped to the EWX exhibition space. We can’t wait until all the walls are filled.
With just over two months until our opening night, artists are slowly filtering into the EWX exhibition space. Gabriel Dawe and Simon Edmondson have already situated their pieces and the EWX team are working with the artists to arrange the finishing touches
EWX had the pleasure of showing Tim Noble and Sue Webster around their chosen area of the Courtauld before their installation process begins in January. The pair will be curating a self-referential “cabinet of curiosities”: presenting works and objects that act as a precursor to their artistic practise and denote the artists themselves. Very exciting stuff, watch this space for more details.
'London Swings' 1997 - Tim Noble and Sue Webster
Some wonderful coverage for EWX and Gabriele Dawe, who has custom designed a 20 meter cotton installation for the exhibition. The feature will be in print on page 12 of the most current Guardian, you can also read it online here.
“The exhibition was planned, organised and fund raised by students at the Courtauld who have this year attracted 55 artists including Damien Hirst, Thomas Allen, Hugo Dalton, and Georgia Russell.
Dawe was suggested by a student who had spotted his work in Los Angeles last year. Like most of the artists, once they managed to get past the agent and gallery system, he agreed immediately. The Courtauld, a university internationally renowned for history of art and conservation, moved in 1989 to a wing of Somerset House. The East Wing exhibition was launched two years later by Joshua Compston, a student who went on to become a brilliant and maverick curator, and died of an accidental drugs overdose in 1996 aged 25. His first Courtauld exhibition – billed as the first contemporary art show in the space since the Royal Academy’s summer show was housed there in the 19th century – included Gary Hume, Gilbert and George, Langland and Bell, and a promising young painter called Damien Hirst.”
Where would we be without our fantastic sponsors? A sincere thank you to Naked Wines (a group of over 50,000 wine drinkers who sponsor 25 winemakers to make delicious wine) who will be providing alcohol for our opening nights in January. Check out their website!
Yesterday EWX talked art and influnce with contributing artist Hugo Dalton. Dalton will be creating a light drawing specifically for the exhibition, which will open to the public in January 2012. Watch this space for more artist interviews.
Q. Why did you want to be part of EastwingX?
Firstly because I was asked to! And also because the Courtauld is a venerable Institute. I was approached by the EWX committee at the Andipa Gallery and after I went to look at the space I though I would love to be involved.
Q. As you know, EWX is about the artist’s exploration of unusual materials and pioneering technique. Can you talk us through your process as an artist?
Most of the time I paint murals in some form or another. However the spatial logistics of painting a mural made me want to make the art form more accessible, you can look at my series of Lightdrawings as a mural that you can turn on and off. The Lightdrawings were first exhibited at The Fine Art Society and then became part of a stage set I made with the choreographer Chris Wheeldon at Sadler’s Wells. I started to look at how I could use light to break down the barriers between the stage and the audience by projecting between the two spaces. I wanted to create a much more involving environment.
Q. What is your favourite medium to work in?
Drawing, its likes my rubick’s cube; I turn my drawings around on themselves and they kind of make other things as a result but it always comes back that medium. Drawing from life is also important, it’s my key concern. I find anything that I do away from that doesn’t quite have the edge that I want.
Q. What has been a significant artwork or artistic experience that you have taken from your life so far?
I think probably a boat. I used to work on a fishing boat in Scotland that had been converted to take passengers. It was a really beautiful old oak boat, originally made in Norway. It looked a bit like a canoe in a weird way; both the stern and the bow were very high with a low central area designed to carry a fish. It sounds like a cliché, but the design was a total work of art. I liked that isolated but encompassing experience when it was just you and the boat, that’s the kind of encounter I want my art works to generate.
Q. And what would you pass on?
I think a Ferrari 355, but I can’t pick two vehicles can I? If I picked an artwork I think it would be the Madonna of the Rocks by Leonardo da Vinci.
Q. Finally, where do you see you working going in the future?
There is an experience when I am drawing something in real life that is very pure. After I have been drawing all day, although you remain very focused, there comes a point when your work becomes very genuine and umediated. I want to progress that feeling in my work on larger scale.
Hugo's Studio
Hugo explaining to Amanda the process of his Light Drawings (sorry for the terrible photo quality!)
