The Manchester Contemporary, Manchester
25-27 September 2015
Vane is proud to be participating in The Manchester Contemporary art fair showing the work of Stephen Palmer, Narbi Price and Matthew Smith.
Stephen Palmer’s most recent paintings feature second-hand copies of albums by iconic male singers, highlighting the inner sleeves with their additions of personalised messages and texts, hand written by their one-time owners. Other new paintings expand on an earlier series of drawings transcribing newspaper clippings, each rendered in painstaking detail, a process that confers value to events that may otherwise appear of little importance. In these earlier works, though the selection of stories seems random, the topics – such as ufology, war or obituaries – attract an obsessive following, not unlike that of the music fans who once owned the LPs depicted in Palmer’s latest paintings.
Narbi Price is interested in perceived histories of locations and how painting can question the understanding of architectural and pictorial space. He challenges the conventions of photographically derived painting in terms of paint application and composition, and in blurring the line between the figurative and the abstract. His paintings are derived from photographs taken on trips to places that have witnessed a range of events, whether from significant moments in music, film and TV, or from whimsical acts through to brutal murders that have spawned folklore.
Matthew Smith creates a multi-layered landscape, a hybrid of the manmade and natural environment that examines the intersections between these two polarities. A series of boulder-like objects constructed from bits and pieces of chipboard have faceted forms that are reminiscent of the abstracted rock shapes that might be seen in one’s peripheral vision in a computer game. Drawings depicting cartoon-like fluffy clouds are constructed from hundreds of different corporate cloud logos. Repeatedly traced in graphite, the faint lines overlap and gradually build up a looming cloud of information.
The Manchester Contemporary is an invitational art fair that gives a platform to emerging galleries and their artists. Launched in 2009, The Manchester Contemporary is returning for its sixth consecutive year with a record number of galleries.
Old Granada Studios
Quay Street
Manchester
M60 9EA
themanchestercontemporary.co.uk
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