Dexter Dalwood @ Simon Lee Gallery, Hong Kong - 2059

Dexter Dalwood: 2059

Simon Lee Gallery, Hong Kong 

Through October 30, 2021 

DEXTER DALWOOD

2059, 2020

Oil on canvas, 60 x 72 cm (23 5/8 x 28 3/8 in.) 

Courtesy of the artist and Simon Lee Gallery

Simon Lee Gallery presents a series of new paintings by British artist DEXTER DALWOOD on the occasion of his second exhibition at the Hong Kong space.

In these recent works, Dexter Dalwood looks nearly four decades into the future, to the year 2059; something that the title of each painting in the exhibition makes reference to. In spite of this nominative forward-looking approach, the artist resumes his longstanding commitment to the construction and interpretation of history in painting: each work is composed out of a network of interrelated references and sources from across the annals of art, politics, literature, as well as Dexter Dalwood’s own biography. The mix of brutalism and elegance, the old and the new depicted in this latest series creates visual paradoxes that echo a version of the future that simultaneously reflects on the present.

Although Dexter Dalwood’s lexicon remains deeply embedded in the history painting genre, these new works dispense with diagrammatic attitudes towards pictorial space, instead bringing together various, often disparate, elements. Ultimately, Dexter Dalwood prioritises the overall consonance of the painting over any preconceived notion of composition, sacrificing linear perspective in the pursuit of an overall approach to painting as object that takes negative space, the edge of the canvas and the temperament of the paint – amongst other elements – into account.

Nonetheless, Dexter Dalwood continues to allude to the art-historical canon: each work is similar in scale to Jean-Siméon Chardin’s The House of Cards, offering compositional references both to this painting and Cezanne’s The Card Players. Appearing throughout the series is a circular motif that materialises in astronomical configurations of planets, or as in 2059 (portal), a classical still life fruit bowl. From Giotto’s perfect, free-hand O to a symbolic link between heaven and earth, the circle in art history conjures a myriad of associations. Painted over the course of the past year, Dexter Dalwood communicates with this imagery something of the insularity of life and the circularity of existence.

DEXTER DALWOOD was born in 1960 and lives and works in London, UK. He received his BFA from Central Saint Martins, London and his MFA from the Royal College of Art, London. Recent solo exhibitions include What is Really Happening, Simon Lee Gallery, London, UK (2019); Propaganda Painting, Simon Lee Gallery, Hong Kong (2016); London Paintings, Simon Lee Gallery, London, UK (2014); Dexter Dalwood, Kunsthaus, Centre PasquArt, Biel, Switzerland (2013); Orientalism, David Risley Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark (2012); Dichter und Drogen, Nolan Judin, Berlin, Germany (2011) and a major solo exhibition Dexter Dalwood, Tate St Ives, UK (2010), which travelled to FRAC Champagne Ardenne, Reims, France and CAC, Malaga, Spain (2013). Recent group exhibitions have included Marx Collection, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany (2018); Painters' Painters at Saatchi Gallery, London, UK (2016); Mon art à moi, Centre PasquArt, Biel, Switzerland (2016); The Painting Show, a touring exhibition by The British Council, London, UK which travelled to Limerick City Gallery of Art, Limerick, Ireland (2017) and CAC, Vilnius, Lithuania (2016); Fighting History, Tate Britain, London, UK (2015); The Venice Syndrome – The Grandeur and Fall in the Art of Venice, Gammel Holtegaard, Denmark (2014), Not Being Attentive I Notice Everything: Robert Walser and the Visual Arts, Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau, Switzerland (2014); Le Corps de l'Absence, FRAC Champagne Ardennes, Reims, France, Setting the Scene, Tate Modern, London, UK (2012); and Dublin Contemporary, Dublin, Ireland (2011). His work is in major private and public collections including Tate, London, UK, The British Council Collection, London, UK, The Saatchi Gallery, London, UK, FRAC Champagne-Ardennes, Reims, France and Centre PasquArt, Biel, Switzerland. In 2021 Dexter Dalwood presents solo exhibitions in Mexico at Museo Nacional de Arte (MUNAL), Mexico City and Centro de las Artes San Agustín, Oaxaca in 2022.

SIMON LEE GALLERY HONG KONG

304, 3/F The Pedder Building, 12 Pedder Street, Central, Hong Kong

www.simonleegallery.com

Dexter Dalwood, Tate St Yves Spring Season

DEXTER DALWOOD

TATE ST YVES

23 January – 3 May 2010

British artist Dexter Dalwood has been building a strong reputation over the last decade in the UK, Europe and the States. This selected survey, featuring major paintings and collages made over the last twelve years, will provide an important and timely opportunity to review his work in both a national and international context. 

Typically, Dexter Dalwood's works depict imagined and constructed interiors or landscapes, usually devoid of figures, that act as memorials or descriptions of various historic people, places or moments. They draw on an idea of 'History Painting' as a genre and, like their illustrious antecedents, the quotations, allusions and references can be elusive and highly codified at first. But, like the grand eighteenth and nineteenth century works they allude to, the canvases have an immediacy, and power as paintings first and foremost. They range in subject from major political events like The Death of David Kelly 2008 or The Birth of the UN 2003, to imagined places that are marked by some traumatic history or event, or which have simply become lodged in our collective cultural unconscious; these include Sharon Tate's House 1998, Neverland 1999, Greenham Common 2008 and Camp David 1999. 

Other works are presented as ‘portraits' of famous or infamous writers, artists and political figures like William Burroughs 2005, Diana Vreeland 2003, Truman Capote 2004 and Hunter S Thompson 2009. These people populate our shared cultural memory, and for one reason or another seem to continue to exert a fascination or influence through both their work and their lives. Once again, these 'portraits' are produced by Dalwood through the constructed 'scenes' or 'sets' that he creates. 

Almost all of Dexter Dalwood's paintings initially start out as small collages - compositions he assembles by literally cutting and pasting from the pages of magazines and art history. In the subsequent large-scale canvases the abrupt disjunctures and sharp, clinical edges, are faithfully reproduced, preserving the slightly unnerving, almost jarring quality at a sometimes exhilarating and monumental scale. The way that Dexter Dalwood constructs his pictures, referencing and juxtaposing both image and content, is highly sophisticated. He weaves together personal, social and political histories with art history, popular culture and biography to produce provocative and complex new constellations of meaning. Dexter Dalwood's post-modern, post-pop 'history paintings' display a smart and seductive lightness of touch; an accessibility and wit offered through the shared experience of the collective political and cultural histories they invoke.

A full colour monographic publication will accompany the exhibition.

The exhibition will tour to FRAC Champagne – Ardenne and CAC Malaga through 2010.

ALSO ON VIEW AT TATE ST YVES From Saturday 23 January through Monday 3 May 2010

The Tate Collection – 1971

Dexter Dalwood has made a personal selection of work from the Tate Collection to accompany his exhibition. Taking the year 1971 as his starting point, he has brought together an international collection of works, all made that year, by artists of very different generations, backgrounds and practices. In this way he offers a kind of cross section through time, and constructs a snapshot of a personally relevant period.

 

In 1971 Sam Peckinpah's controversial film Straw Dogs, shot entirely in Cornwall, was released; an event that made a distinct and profound impression on Dexter Dalwood who was 11 years old at the time and living in Penzance. That same year the Rolling Stones Sticky Fingers album was produced with a sleeve designed by Andy Warhol. Concurrently Oscar Kokoshka, born in the previous century in Vienna, painted Time Gentleman Please 1971, as Nixon continued to send troops to Vietnam. Meanwhile Irish artist Rita Donagh was making a painting titled Three weeks in May 1970 – relating to both a group action carried out by her students at Reading University and the shooting dead of anti-Vietnam protestors at Kent State University in Ohio. In Cornwall, Roger Hilton and Bryan Wynter were developing a new painterly abstraction as American abstract artist Philip Guston was returning to figuration. Barbara Hepworth was making her last works and Naum Gabo, now 81 and living in the States, continued to produce some of his best work. This eclectic display also includes, among others, the work of Pablo Picasso, Howard Hodgkin, Arnulf Rainer, Margaret Harrison and Ewa Partum.

NAUM GABO – BARBARA HEPWORTH – DENIS MITCHELL

This display of stone carvings brings together three significant modernist sculptors working in St Ives from 1939. Whilst Barbara Hepworth's abstract works were at the forefront of international modernism, the tradition of carving remained consistently at the heart of her practice. It was both an intellectual and sensory process which combined her love of natural materials with her humanist political ideals. Following his association with Barbara Hepworth from the 1930s, Naum Gabo, who was best known for his radical constructions in plastic and metal, began an unusual series of 'kinetic' stone carvings. Living in St Ives during the war, elements of natural forms seemed more apparent in his work. Denis Mitchell worked as Hepworth's assistant for 10 years from 1949. Unconventionally, he often worked into solid rough casts of bronze which he carved, chased and polished like stone. His reliefs and sculptures in slate and stone also considered formal relationships between balance, line, space and form.

Tate St Ives - Opening hours: March–October daily 10.00–17.20, last admission 17.00; November–February, Tuesday–Sunday 10.00–16.20, last admission 16.00. Admission: £5.65; £3.20 concessions; free to 18s and under and Members