NewcastleGateshead Art Fair, Gateshead
2-4 October 2009
Vane presents Paul Becker, Adam Burns, EC Davies, Michael Davies, Jorn Ebner, Nick Fox, Michael Mulvihill, Stephen Palmer, and Alison Unsworth, at NewcastleGateshead Art Fair, Gateshead.
Paul Becker makes paintings and drawings exploring the extremities of basic human feelings. The scenarios he creates flit between the conscious and unconscious, a feeling that is emphasised by Becker’s stubborn and involved painting process of daubing, scraping and repeated re-working of images.
Adam Burns creates elusive abstractions, each composed of a sequence of lines deriving from multiple perspective points and a subtle use of tonal range – resulting in a series of ‘impossible spaces’ that shift between the illusive and concrete.
EC Davies draws the viewer into an enchanted environment of colour, light, sound, and motion, coaxing them into an immersive engagement with the image, here drawn from the visual lingua franca of the town planner.
Michael Davies engages in a process of sifting, enlarging and translating old photographs into paintings. Images that began as superficially innocuous snapshot moments are freed from their original context and rendered ambiguous; these minor details from past life became wry meditations on desire and mortality.
Jorn Ebner deals with landscapes and cityscapes – often using digital media in a variety of ways – his diagrammatic renditions of which are designed to unsettle and challenge the idea of fixed meanings and categorisation.
Nick Fox makes paintings and objects that combine fine art and craft, romantic desire and explicit eroticism, decorative pattern and loaded symbolism in a reflection on both the historical contexts of the art object and other artefacts, as well as in the subtle unravelling of systems of pictorial and personal codes of concealment.
Michael Mulvihill makes drawings weighted with a sense of menace; his landscapes, urban scenes and even his portraits are all potential harbingers of threat, of disasters waiting to happen and evil deeds waiting to be done.
Stephen Palmer is interested in the documentation of collected cultural ephemera – most recently, second hand record sleeves – elevating them above the level of utilitarian banality and imbuing them with a new-found emotional resonance in the process.
Alison Unsworth creates delicately rendered records of public monuments from around the world, complete with the graffiti and casual defacement that reflects the alienation and disaffection present within the contemporary urban landscape.
The Sage Gateshead
St Mary's Square
Gateshead Quays
Gateshead
NE8 2JR
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