Artist Akram Zaatari @ Thomas Dane Gallery, Naples - "Father and Son" Exhibition

Akram Zaatari: Father and Son

Thomas Dane Gallery, Naples

23 April - 13 July 2024

Thomas Dane Gallery presents Father and Son, a solo exhibition of Akram Zaatari. The exhibition is  Akram Zaatari’s third with the gallery and the artist’s first major solo exhibition in Italy.      

Akram Zaatari (b. 1966, Saida) has played a critical role in developing the formal, intellectual and institutional infrastructure of Beirut's contemporary art scene. He has produced more than fifty films and videos, a dozen books and countless installations of photographic material, all sharing an interest in writing histories and the search for records and objects, keeping track of their changing hands, the retrieval of narratives and missing links that have been hidden, misplaced, lost, found, buried or excavated. The act of digging itself has become emblematic of his practice while acting to restore connections lost over time, or due to war and displacement. Akram Zaatari has dedicated a large volume of his work to the research and study of photographic practices in the Arab world and has made uncompromising contributions to the wider discourse on preservation and archival practice.

Rooted in this research practice, Akram Zaatari’s exhibition in Naples retraces the element of restitution in the artist’s work, expressed mainly through text, documents and photographs that revisit descriptions and recreate objects or ties that once existed but are now lost. The exhibition features works across many media from the last two decades, beginning with his two-hour-long video, Ain el Mir (2002), in which the artist looks for a buried letter that never reached its destination. It spans through to Akram Zaatari’s most recent body of work, Father and Son (2024), in which the sarcophagi of two Phoenician Kings (father and son), separated since antiquity, are reunited. The project is accompanied by a series of new works on paper that look at the Mediterranean as a locus of exchange, extraction and movement across millennia.

Amongst these works Archeology (2017), Photographic Currency (2019) and Venus of Beirut, (2022), and a new work, Ibrahim and the Cat, For Inji Efflatoun (2024), all engage in the process of recreating objects that have either vanished or were never produced. The brass relief Ibrahim and the Cat – made with artisans in Naples – gives new form to a forgotten photograph taken by the father of Egyptian artist Inji Efflatoun for the purpose of making a painting that was never produced.

Akram Zaatari’s idea of ‘giving life to things that do not exist in the present’ also applies to the recreation of a stone monolith used to seal King Tabnit’s tomb, which was completely destroyed when his sarcophagus was extracted in 1887.  All that Refuses to Vanish (2022) was made from drawings and notes left by Ottoman statesman and painter Osman Hamdi during his excavation of the Sidon Necropolis.

Akram Zaatari lives and works in Beirut, Lebanon. Recent exhibitions include: Against Photography. An Annotated History of the Arab Image Foundation, Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE (2019); The Script, New Art Exchange, Nottingham, England (2018); The Fold, Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati OH (2018); Letter to a Refusing Pilot, Moderna Museet, Malmö, Sweden (2018); Against Photography. An Annotated History of the Arab Image Foundation, MACBA, Barcelona, Spain (2017); travelling to: K21, Düsseldorf, Germany (2018); Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, Korea (2018); Double Take: Akram Zaatari and the Arab Image Foundation, National Portrait Gallery, London, England (2017); This Day at Ten, Kunsthaus Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland (2016); Unfolding, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden (2015); Akram Zaatari: The End of Time, The Power Plant, Toronto, Canada (2014); Lebanese Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy (2013); Projects 100: Akram Zaatari, Museum of Modern Art, New York NY, (2013); This Day at Ten / Aujourd’hui à 10, Magasin Centre National d’Art Contemporain de Grenoble, France (2013); Tomorrow Everything Will be Alright, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge MA (2012); The Uneasy Subject, MUAC, Mexico City, Mexico (2012); Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, León, Spain (2011). 

Additionally, Akram Zaatari’s work has been part of Sharjah Biennial 14, Sharjah, UAE (2018); the 12th Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul, Turkey (2011); The Yokohama Triennale, Yokohama, Japan (2014); the 55th and 52nd Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy (2013 and 2007); dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, Germany (2012); 27th São Paulo Biennial, São Paulo, Brazil (2006); the 6th Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, South Korea (2006); and the 15th Biennale of Sydney, Sydney, Australia (2006). 

Akram Zaatari’s work is included in the collections of Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Louis Vuitton, Paris, France; Bristol Museum & Art Gallery, Bristol, England; Tate Modern, London, England; MCA Chicago, Chicago IL; Guggenheim Museum, New York NY; Museum of Modern Art, New York NY; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles CA and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis MN.

The Father and Son project is also the artist’s doctoral project in Arts at ENSAPC and the Cy University, France, under the direction of François Pernot, Alejandra Riera and Bénédicte Savoy.

THOMAS DANE GALLERY

Via Francesco Crispi 69, 80122 Naples

www.thomasdanegallery.com

Cecily Brown @ Thomas Dane Gallery, London - Studio Pictures

Cecily Brown: Studio Pictures 

Thomas Dane Gallery, London 

11 October – 17 December 2022 

‘It is as if you looked through the keyhole’

 – E. Degas

It perhaps comes as no surprise that, after having realised in recent years some of the largest works of her career – including the epic Triumph of Death, 2019, which was first exhibited at Blenheim Palace two years ago and has been on view for most of 2022 at the Capodimonte Museum in Naples – Cecily Brown would have felt compelled to return yet again to her beloved smaller (and smallest) paintings.

Cecily Brown feels at ease with both scales – the looser, gestural, hyperactive physicality of the former, or the quieter, contained focus of the latter – and consistently goes back and forth between the monumental and the intimate.

Because the grands formats are possibly where you lose your breath; small paintings are probably where you lose your mind. For Cecily Brown, ‘you can see things more clearly when they are small’, or as Altoon Sultan wrote when reviewing her 2015 exhibition of small paintings, The English Garden, at Maccarone Gallery in New York: ‘it [is] a lesson to me in slowing down, looking carefully, and being open to new work. […] Each painting contains a particular quality of light and air, and most refer to a landscape space, one that asks us to make our way through dense paint to the spaces behind.’

Their effects are no less virtuosic, but their demands are deceptively effortless – even though Cecily Brown will mostly work on them seated and will have to move around the paintings much less, they are not easier to make than a large one. In conversation with Allie Biswas, Cecily Brown reminds us that ‘It is a quieter process, definitely. And, this is a cliché, but it is a lot harder to make a small painting than a big one.’ Minute is often much more.

Some of the most memorable and iconic paintings in art history are indeed tiny: 'La mort de Casagemas', 1901, by Pablo Picasso, is merely 30cm and yet eclipses the next 70 years of his career in poignancy and precision. 'Le Talisman', 1888, by Paul Sérusier, contains, on a wood panel barely the size of a biscuit tin, a lesson in Modernism (as dictated by Paul Gauguin) that would never be transcended. Such is the scale of Eugène Boudin’s timeless beachscapes or Johannes Vermeer’s hypnotic vignettes.

Cecily Brown’s small(er) studio pictures from the studio, of the studio even, make her full repertoire. This is what happens (and remains) behind closed doors. The works can hang on her studio walls for years, as inspiration, as aides-memoire or just old friends. Always in the corner of her eyes, sometimes reflecting from a judiciously or randomly placed mirror, they are neither studies nor afterthoughts, but forever present.

Cecily Brown’s entire gamut and palette are on display: her older small paintings are like old tunes echoing and supporting the new album, as the majority of the pictures in the show were realised in the last two years. There are landscapes, interiors, hunting and battles scenes, swings and bowers, Baroque mélées and Rococo fantasies, Shipwrecks and Assemblies – a palimpsest of art historical references which becomes Brown’s own iconography. It is as if the whole of French painting history was playing in front of our eyes: Poussin, Watteau, Fragonard, David, Delacroix, Manet, Boudin, Degas and Bonnard… The latter is a particular favourite of Brown’s, in the ways he treats his female models with such empathy.

Edgar Degas himself acquainted this as almost looking ‘through a keyhole’ – coining the term ‘keyhole views’ – as if, without any sense of misplaced voyeurism or male-gaze control, the models and subjects were seen through the modesty, ease and naturalness of their alcove or bathroom. This re-emerges in a series of works, central to Brown’s exhibition. Following a visit to the major Walter Sickert retrospective at the Tate Britain this year, Brown depicts a reclining female nude on a bed as an homage to a suite of faux-louche paintings Sickert realised in Paris in the summer of 1906, themselves very much reminiscent of Degas and Bonnard.

Through these iterations and transformations, the same respectful (and gentle) act of looking, or as Brown-the-female-artist puts it, a painting in which ‘you are the model’, traverses time and space and perhaps becomes the central allegory of the show.

THOMAS DANE GALLERY

3 Duke Street St James’s, London SW1Y 6BN

www.thomasdanegallery.com

Bob Law @ Thomas Dane Gallery, Naples - In association with Richard Saltoun

Bob Law

in association with Richard Saltoun

Thomas Dane Gallery, Naples

Through 18 December, 2021

“I have, or I think I have, my perfect work in my mind’s eye. To bring that work into reality or existence is another matter - there is always some small flaw. Some improvement to be made. And it is this seeking after quality that most interests me... The work becomes a very serious trial and examination process in which the artist is solely responsible to himself for the quality and conviction of the work. The justification of the work is in the endeavour of the artist to seek out the quality and skill within his own mind and correlate his inner spirit with the art he can touch and make.” - Bob Law, July 1977

"We met [Bob Law] in, I think, 1974. Most of his paintings were painted in dark ink: blue, dark rust, or violet. A single colour covered the whole surface ... These were very allusive paintings, severe but not sad. Here was a strange limitless night, two contradictory aspects since one should have excluded the other. The sense of emptiness seemed to cohabit with tranquil serenity." from Giuseppe Panza: Memories of a Collector, 2007.

For the first time in Naples, Thomas Dane Gallery presents a solo exhibition of the pioneering artist BOB LAW (1934-2004). Comprising works from 1950s – 2000s, this survey show a critical overview of Bob Law’s expansive career, and features key examples from his major bodies of work, including Field Drawings, Chairs, Castles, and the Black Paintings.

Considered amongst the founders of British Minimalism, Bob Law's work defies easy categorisation and ranges across drawing, painting and sculpture and retains a firm yet always uneasy embrace of pure abstraction. As opposed to the New York-based minimalist artists, Bob Law's practice drew on his engagement with the English landscape and his esoteric range of interests.

Championed by the critic Lawrence Alloway, whom he met while in Cornwall, Bob Law exhibited with Peter Hobbs in Two Young British Painters at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London (1960). There followed one-man shows at some of the most prestigious galleries across Europe, including Konrad Fischer, Dusseldorf, Germany (1970) and the increasingly influential Lisson Gallery, London, UK (1971). Major institutional solo exhibitions include 10 Black Paintings 1965-70, Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, UK (1974); Bob Law: Paintings and Drawings 1959-1978, Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK, curated by Nicholas Serota (1978); and Bob Law: Drawings, Sculpture and Paintings, Newlyn Art Gallery, Cornwall, UK, which travelled to Kettle's Yard, Cambridge, UK (1999). Recent group exhibitions include Assorted Paper, The Sunday Painter, London, UK (2017); Artists and Poets, Secession, Vienna, Austria (2015); Abstract Drawing, curated by Richard Deacon, Drawing Room, London, UK (2014); A House of Leaves, curated by Vincent Honoré, at DRAF, London, UK (2013). His work is included in numerous private and public collections throughout the world, including Tate, London, UK; the British Museum, London, UK; The Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Netherlands; the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia; Museum Sztuki, Lodz, Poland; and the Panza Collection, Varese, Italy, amongst others.

THOMAS DANE GALLERY

Via Francesco Crispi, 69, 80122 Napoli

www.thomasdanegallery.com

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Alexandre da Cunha @ Thomas Dane Gallery, Naples - Arena : Curated in dialogue with Jenni Lomax

Alexandre da Cunha: Arena
Curated in dialogue with Jenni Lomax
Thomas Dane Gallery, Naples
29 September - 12 December 2020

Alexandre da Cunha challenges the implicit value systems of objects. In his careful arrangement of material and things—whether domestic, utilitarian or disposable—da Cunha re-evaluates hierarchies of attention and perception by scrutinising the play of shape, form and colour.

For Arena, his first exhibition at Thomas Dane Gallery in Naples, Alexandre da Cunha presents certain aspects of his observations of how objects sit in the world around us. Through conversation with Jenni Lomax, with whom he worked for his 2009 show Laissez-faire at Camden Art Centre, an emphasis is placed on the spatial relationship of progression between rooms in the gallery; shifting perspectives of wall, floor and ceiling. 

Elements from the Camden Arts Centre show, such as assembled mop heads and coconut casts, are newly articulated in Arena, where Alexandre da Cunha’s sensitivity to material is enhanced by Lomax’s treatment of space and installation. Doorways are deliberately closed to organise movement through the gallery; uniformity reinforcing ‘the arena’ as the enclosed site of activity or conflict.

One of a series of floor works Quilt (Sahara), (2011), weaves leather between paving slabs, while for Kentucky (Napoli), (2020), dyed cotton mop heads are constructed to form a hanging textile that suspends diagonally from the ceiling. Elsewhere, discarded wheelbarrows and metal benches are recalibrated as lighting arrangements, activating both floor and wall. A sociological dimension is never far from view—concrete mixers, their surfaces rusted and worn, are displayed for their aesthetic qualities while reinstating the social economies of labour in which these objects circulate.

Through Alexandre da Cunha’s eyes banal objects are readdressed to overcome material contractions and to articulate a weightier sense of ambivalence. Marble, (2020), features an inflatable rubber ring draped with fabric which gathers over the floor in this subtle and intuitive positioning of material, challenging the perception of what may be hard or soft: Alexandre da Cunha lures the subtext of sensation to the foreground in a humorous undoing of conventional meaning.

The works in Arena possess harmony in their hybridity, and are testament to Alexandre da Cunha’s continued desire to edit form without diminishing meaning. The exposure and endurance of his handling of material generates a more sympathetic reading of the readymade, one that warms to the lived reality of objects and the communities or individuals who used them.

JENNI LOMAX was the Director of Camden Art Centre, London, from 1990 to 2017, where she established an influential and forward-thinking programme of international exhibitions, residencies and education projects. Previously, she established and ran the Whitechapel Gallery’s pioneering Community Education Programme. She is currently working independently on a range of curatorial, writing and archival projects whilst also acting in an advisory capacity for a number of charitable arts organisations and grant giving foundations. 

ALEXANDRE DA CUNHA was born in Rio de Janeiro and lives and works in London and São Paulo. He has exhibited widely throughout the world and his work is included in major private and institutional collections including the Tate, England; ICA Boston, Boston MA; and Inhotim, Brazil. Selected solo exhibitions include: Duologue with Phillip King, Royal Society of Sculptors, London, England (2018); Boom, Pivô, São Paulo, Brazil (2017); the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago IL (2015); and Dublê, Centro Cultural São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil (2011). Forthcoming commissions include Alexandre da Cunha: Figurehead II, The Box, Plymouth, England (2020); and a new permanent artwork at Battersea Power Station, commissioned by Transport for London, Art on the Underground (2021). 

Major outdoor sculptures by Alexandre da Cunha are on permanent view at the Laumeier Sculpture Park in St. Louis, MI; the Monsoon Building in London; the Rochaverá Tower in São Paulo; and at The Pierce Tower in Boston, MA. 

THOMAS DANE GALLERY
Via Francesco Crispi, 69 - Naples
thomasdanegallery.com

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Artist Cecily Brown @ Thomas Dane Gallery, Naples - "We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea" Exhibition

Cecily Brown

We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea

Thomas Dane Gallery, Naples

16 March - 27 july 2019

In We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea, the seventh book in Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons series of children’s books, an unexpected bank of fog flows across the river, leaving Goblin (the small sailing cutter) no option but to drift from the river into the North Sea. Narratively and aesthetically, fog marks a stage for improvisation, weighted by confusion and alarm. Such tensions coexist in Cecily Brown’s first Naples exhibition, where paintings, pastels, and watercolours elaborate precisely on the significance of the “partial view”, utilising the shipwreck as a socio-political, theatrical, and symbolic prism. 

As a painter of lush compositions, vibrant tones and sensual brushwork, Cecily Brown appears to echo the vivid history and vehemence of Naples, for her work and the city resonate with the same, rare ambiguity. Her paintings bridge the exalted and tumultuous styles of the French ‘Romantiques’, from Gericault’s The Raft of the Medusa (1818-19) to Delacroix’s The Massacre of Chios (1824), transforming their vision with some of her favourite subjects, namely the Nude and the Bathers. For instance, the drawings in The Sirens and Ulysses (after William Etty) (2018) series directly reference Etty’s eponymous work, each elaborating on the last from an alternate viewpoint; where the Sirens’ chimerical carousal is foregrounded in one painting, another reveals the expanded suffering of Ulysses and the sailors. 

Cecily Brown’s practice is deceptively paradoxical: simultaneously moving toward the ephemeral and corporeal, and yet her paintings contain tangible traces of Romantic, modern and contemporary history. The subject of the Shipwreck becomes the perfect ground for both: an evanescent event of inevitable material decay, as well as an “absolute metaphor” of complex historical precedent.

Whether fictitious, eminently real, or symbolic, Cecily Brown’s use of the shipwreck invokes a palimpsest construction. It can be likened to Gianni Vattimo’s philosophical “pensiero debole” (weak thought): to understand and re-configure traces from the history of thought in ways that harmonise with postmodern conditions. Through the acceleration of technological and political change, Cecily Brown’s impassioned, expressive content — of shipwrecks, bathers, and beaches — evokes these conflicting currents and resurfacing histories: the rise of migration, environmental and geopolitical crises, and the policing of public space. In We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea, Cecily Brown apprehends the past, returning to the limits and possibilities for painting to maintain critical anchorage over the political. 

CECILY BROWN was born in London in 1969, she lives and works in New York. Public collections include Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Tate, London. Solo exhibitions include: Cecily Brown, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humblebaek, Denmark (2018); Triumph of the Vanities II, The Metropolitan Opera House, New York (2018); If Paradise Were Half as Nice, Instituto Tomie Ohtake, Sao Paulo; travelling to: Museo Oscar Niemeyer, Curitiba, Brazil; The Iberê Camargo Foundation, Porto Alegre, Brazil (2018); Cecily Brown: Rehearsal, MCA Santa Barbara, CA (2018); Cecily Brown: Shipwreck Drawings, the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, UK (2017); Cecily Brown: Rehearsal, The Drawing Center, New York (2017); Madrepora, Thomas Dane Gallery, London, UK (2017). 

THOMAS DANE GALLERY

Via Francesco Crispi 69, 80122 Naples

www.thomasdanegallery.com

Amie Siegel @ Thomas Dane Gallery, London

Amie Siegel: Backstory
Thomas Dane Gallery, London
Through 16 February, 2019

Thomas Dane Gallery presents Amie Siegel's exhibition Backstory, comprised of an intimately connected constellation of video and works on paper that inquire after the social fashioning of value and how cultural memory evolves - itself becoming a product, artifact or experience. The artist's work often creates layered, atmospheric tableaux, querying the genesis of images and the latent relationships between cinematographic, acoustic and architectonic space. Originally commissioned for the second part of Amie Siegel's double solo exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart in 2016, Backstory is the inaugural presentation of this body of work in London.

Amie Siegel's series of framed works on paper, Body Scripts (2015) consists of pages from the English translation of Alberto Moravia's novel Il disprezzo (A Ghost at Noon), the basis for Jean-Luc Godard's film Le Mépris (Contempt) (1963). Selecting only the novel's pages focused on the female protagonist, the artist further highlights these passages by painting over the surrounding sentences with 'the average colour' of the Tyrrhenian Sea. The resultant geometry of the monochrome blocks recalls architectural floor plans, the pages forming 'scripts' for the gestures and movements in the exhibition's related work, The Noon Complex (2016).

For the multi-channel video installation The Noon Complex (2016) Amie Siegel reverses her approach, digitally removing the female protagonist played by Brigitte Bardot from key corresponding scenes in Godard's film. As a result, the space portrayed in the film - the Villa Malaparte on the Italian island of Capri - is underscored, lending the sequences of tracking shots, directed at a now absent actress, an uncanny quality. Doubling this feeling, Siegel poses a surrogate actress as Bardot on an adjacent screen, in a neutral environment, emphasizing her physical, yet ghostly, presence. The traced movements of the actress are experienced twice, against the film's two different soundtracks - French and Italian - the scenes thus oscillating from melancholy drama to burlesque.

Genealogies (2016) suggests the artist's associative thinking by combining novels, films, images, advertising and soundtrack recordings from multiple sources into a baroque invocation of image and artwork provenance, remake and copy. Extending from the choreography of Brigitte Bardot, infamously sunning her backside on the Villa Malaparte's roof terrace, Siegel's video traces an acute iconography of economies of architecture and the female body, suggesting how these are visualised in cinema, and harnessed by advertising and media. From Wilhem Jensen's novella Gradiva, to Freud, de Chirico, Rossellini, Curzio Malaparte, Moravia, Resnais, Robbe-Grillet, Godard, Pink Floyd and the Beastie Boys to images by brands Hugo Boss and Persol, Genealogies maps a broadly layered trajectory of ideas shared and reprised, speculating on homage, influence and originality and, ultimately, drawing together a genealogical lineage of adaptation, appropriation and recurrence stripped from hierarchical order.

Together the works in the exhibition bring into high relief the sculptural, soundtracked backstory of gendered cinematic forms. Noon is the time of day when objects lose their shadow, but also the cinematic notion of a final, decisive confrontation.

Amie Siegel: Backstory is presented in collaboration with Simon Preston Gallery, New York, as part of a series of exhibitions hosting galleries with shared overlaps and synergies, following kurimanzutto's recent Signals: If you like I shall Grow.

Born in Chicago in 1974, Amie Siegel lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Her recent solo exhibitions include Winter, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao; Strata, South London Gallery; Double Negative, Museum Villa Stuck, Munich; Imitation of Life, Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin; Ricochet, Kunstmuseum Stuttgart; Provenance, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and the Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna. She has participated in group exhibitions including the 2018 Gwangju Biennial; Dhaka Art Summit, Berlinische Galerie; CAPC Musée d'Art Contemporain de Bordeaux; Museum of Contemporary Art, Manila; Witte de With, Rotterdam; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; MAXXI Museum, Rome; Kunst-Werke Berlin; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; CCA Wattis, San Francisco; Swiss Institute, New York; Vancouver Art Gallery and the Hayward Gallery, London.

Amie Siegel has been a fellow of the DAAD Berliner-Künstlerprogramm and the Guggenheim Foundation, a recipient of the ICA Boston's Foster Prize, Sundance Institute and Creative Capital Awards. Siegel's films have screened at the Cannes, Berlin, Toronto and New York Film Festivals.

Amie Siegel's work can be found in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Tate, London; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Kunstmuseum Stuttgart; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others. Provenance (2013) is currently on display at Tate St. Ives, and the 2019 Sharjah Biennial will feature a new commission by the artist. 

THOMAS DANE GALLERY
3 Duke Street, St James's, SW1Y, London
www.thomasdanegallery.com

Caragh Thuring @ Thomas Dane Gallery, Naples

Caragh Thuring
Thomas Dane Gallery, Naples
22 January - 2 March 2019

On the first anniversary of Thomas Dane Gallery in Naples and the fourth exhibition in the space, the gallery presents a solo exhibition of new works by Caragh Thuring (b. 1972, Brussels). Utilising various fabrics as canvas, including sailcloth, Neapolitan tartan and woven images of her own previous works, Caragh Thuring constructs fragments of submarines, coins, plants, figures, textiles and volcanoes into compositions that explore the spatial depth and vocabulary of painting. The exhibition is accompanies by an artist's book focused purely on Caragh Thuring's depictions of volcanoes created over the last fifteen years.

In these new works Caragh Thuring has returned frequently to the motif of tartan, both as a woven fabric and as depicted in paint. The tartan geometry acts as a two-dimensional plane and referential grid on which the syntactical elements of the painting are arranged and through which they are all connected. Thuring has continued this exploration by stretching as her canvas, a registered Neapolitan tartan produced by local draper ISAIA, a fabric producer established in the 1920s and still in operation today as a renowned tailor and menswear label. The long tradition of tailoring and cloth making in Italy and Naples here linked directly with that of Scotland where Caragh Thuring grew up, close to another industrial port city: Glasgow, much alike in its energy and vibrancy to Naples.

The often idiosyncratic depictions of tartan act like a tousled veil or curtain across the work, through which we view the elements of the painting. Its hand-rendered imprecision is in stark contrast to the strict, flat surface of the canvas. This veil adds a strong spatial element to the works, with fragments of imagery appearing behind, on and in front of it. The sequence of components seems to stretch even beyond the bounds of the painting, with the un-primed canvas receding to an infinite depth while elements on the surface almost fall out of the painting and collide with the viewer. 

Alongside stretched and painted tartan Caragh Thuring will also utilise a unique method she has developed to produce her canvas, collaborating with English silk-weavers to make fabric from images of her own previous paintings. This process extends Caragh Thuring's interest in seriality and the interchange between digital and analogue processes in her work. By fabricating her own canvas, Thuring is able to start not from emptiness but from an already activated surface. In these over-painted woven and textile surfaces Caragh Thuring takes on responsibility for all aspects of the painting's physicality, rather than simply relying on an established or found surface material.

The publication that accompanies the show reproduces forty-four paintings made by the artist over the last fifteen years that include depictions of volcanoes alongside a text written by Gillian Darley, author of Vesuvius (published by Profile Books in 2011) and an in-conversation with artist Glenn Brown (b. 1966, Hexham). Caragh Thuring, since the beginning of her career, has been captivated by volcanoes, their mystery, phenomenal natural power and depiction in romantic paintings. This fascination goes back to the very first painting she made on beginning her studio practice after years working in a gallery: a cut-through cross section of an erupting volcano. The book is available on sale during the exhibition.

Caragh Thuring was born in Brussels, Belgium, in 1972, but grew up in UK and has lived and worked in London since graduating from Nottingham Trent University in 1995. Recent solo exhibitions include: Anthony Meier, San Francisco, 2018; Thomas Dane Gallery, London 2016/17 and Chisenhale Gallery, London, 2014/15.

Recent group exhibitions include: Criminal Ornamentation, Hayward Touring exhibition curated by Yinka Shonibare; Virginia Woolf, an exhibition inspired by her writings, Tate St. Ives, St. Ives, Cornwall; Pallant House, Chichester, England; Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; Voyage, Galeria Bergamin & Gomide, Sao Paulo, Brazil and Call and Response at Gavin Brown's Enterprise, New York.

THOMAS DANE GALLERY
Via Francesco Crispi, 69, Napoli
www.thomasdanegallery.com

Barbara Kasten @ Thomas Dane Gallery, London

Barbara Kasten: Intervals
Thomas Dane Gallery, London
3 February - 25 March 2017

Thomas Dane Gallery presents Intervals, the very first solo presentation in the UK of the internationally acclaimed artist BARBARA KASTEN (b. 1936). The exhibition displays both historic and recent works that showcase the Chicago-based artist’s striking oeuvre, which spans over 40 years.

Barbara Kasten herself speaks of her work as ‘Painting in motion’, as it incorporates sculpture, photography and film, all of which contribute equally to the formation of her pieces. Her works are the results of extensive and carefully constructed installations, which she assembles in the studio by using ‘props’ like glass, mirrors, acrylic and metal elements, meticulously set up, solely for the camera. Barbara Kasten’s work is strongly informed by Postmodern Design and Architecture as well as by Constructivism, not to mention the works and lives of Kazimir Malevich and Lázló Moholy-Nagy and the latter’s engagement with the Bauhaus School. Deeply shaped by the California Light and Space Movement in the 1970s, Kasten, who was trained as a sculptor and painter, began to challenge preconceived notions of these disciplines by making use of the photographic medium.

In her ground breaking series Construct, developed in the late 70s and early 80s and taken with a Polaroid camera, Barbara Kasten transformed building materials into tableaux whose composition, style and manipulation of space display a true painterly sensibility. In her recent series Transpositions (2014-2016) and her latest body of photographic work titled Collisions (2016), she uses Plexiglas elements to create large-scale compositions. The use of Plexiglas allows the artist to achieve a degree of transparency whilst simultaneously denying its own physical existence – further intensified through the strong color saturations typical of the Cibachrome print’s surface, these works seem to amalgamate foreground and background to an abstract surface. Barbara Kasten’s diligent treatise of material, undeniably tied to her insatiable drive to explore the mysticism of light, questions the very essence of the image-making process, a quality that seems to defy medium-specific categorisation. In light of the contemporary habit of taking images without necessarily materializing them, this tension between the object-ness of the “thing” and the flat surface of the image adds a significant and growingly topical facet to her oeuvre.

A restless innovator, Barbara Kasten’s most recent body of work takes on the form of a mixed media projection. Revolutions (2017) comprises characteristic components such as Plexiglas, neutral photographic backdrop paper and light, channelled through a moving image recording. For the first time in the artist’s career, these hitherto “passive” elements, observed exclusively in their photographic reproduction, now step into 3-dimensional reality. Drawing from the paintings of Malevich, the work resonates with the findings of Suprematism, whose pursuit was to reach for the so-called zero degree of painting. Thus, Revolutions is structured by an algorithm, that creates repetitive and lingering elements which, darting to others, mimic habitual ways of examining works of art. Perceptually deceitful, or even illusionistic, solid material travels back and forth between sheer obscurity and physical presence: as with Barbara Kasten’s photographic work, the scale and materiality are interchangeable and thus become co-dependent.

The transition to moving image in Barbara Kasten’s oeuvre constitutes a metacommentary on the relationship between photography and film. The artist’s ongoing exploration of concepts rooted in art history and her experimentation with a wide variety of media, moving fluidly between the fine and applied arts, reveal an inquiry of the Constructivists endeavours to illuminate the interrelation of life, art, and technology. Always in sync with her times, yet in conversation with her predecessors, the ability of her imagery to transmit change and flexibility triggers an understanding of the present, which today seems utterly vital from our contemporary, digital perspective.

Barbara Kasten lives and works in Chicago. The monograph titled "Stages" has been published on the occasion of the same –named retrospective at The Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, The Graham Foundation and the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, curated by Alex Klein. Recent exhibitions include "IMAGINE REALITY. RAY 2015" MMK Frankfurt / Museum für Angewandte Kunst / Fotografie Forum Frankfurt, "A World of Its Own: Photographic Practices in the Studio", Museum of Modern Art New York, "Extended Composition: Künstlerhaus Bethanien (, Nürnberger Kunstverein; and her work is included in renowned collections such as: Centre Pompidou Paris; Tate Modern London; Generali Foundation; Museum of Modern Art NY; Whitney Museum NY; J. Paul Getty Museum L.A.; The Hammer Museum, UCLA, CA; National Gallery of Art, Washington DC.

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