ADVANCED CONTEMPORARIES

 

ADVANCED CONTEMPORARIES highlights the work of seven artists with three things in common: they’re making excellent work, are over sixty, and don’t have a gallery to represent them. That makes it, in effect, an ‘advanced version’ of the well-known Bloomberg New Contemporaries. The main point is simply to appreciate the art of Francesca Simon, Sara Rossberg, Olivier Richon, Colin Crumplin, Jane Clarke, Pauline Caulfield and Judith Burrows as a celebration of artists over 60 deserving of attention. They may be older, but they are very contemporary, making politically relevant, materially fresh and visually exciting works.

What, after all, does it mean to be Contemporary? Is it linked to youth? 'Contemporary' is defined as ‘living’ or ‘occurring in the present’. These seven artists have been occurring in the present for over forty years. A rare achievement of commitment, belief and quiet dedication, marks them as advanced contemporaries. They are artists not supported to ensure the long-term sustainability of their emerging practices, but who have made work anyway, unattended and unheralded.

That does also raise a question: is the art industry ageist? It seems harder both for older artists to establish themselves if they are ‘late starters’, and to find another gallery if their gallery closes – as will happen to many at some point. Never mind the age, feel the quality!

Installation shots by Theo Ellison:

ARTISTS

             

Judith Burrows: Undeterred by inhospitable terrain: Acer Pseudoplatanus from the series ‘Stitching the scarred Landscape’ - Steel, Organic matter, oils, lacquer, piano hinges. Four panels, each 30x125cms

Judith Burrows uses the antagonistic association of raw steel and organic elements to stand in for industry meeting nature, generating a sharply geometric fragility through controlled exposure to natural elements. Thus ‘Undeterred by inhospitable terrain: Acer Pseudoplatanus’ is a collaboration with nature inspired by ‘Landscapes of Abandonment: Life in the Post-human Landscape’ by Cal Flynn, which looks at nature’s ability to repair polluted and spoiled environments and survive through adaptation and re-invention. And Burrows sees ‘Domestication’ as challenging the anthropocentric view, giving equal status to fellow inhabitants of the planet.

 

Pauline Caulfield: Linen Throw, 2023 – H232 cm x W270 cm gathered to 200 cm

Pauline Caulfield is a textile artist who blurs the lines between art and design in, for example, wall hangings, giant fans and playing cards, architectural interventions and ecclesiastical vestments. There’s a brand-free pop tinge to how her works move between hard-edged abstraction and illusion. The exhibited ‘Linen Throw’ illustrates her playful confusion of categories: it might seem to be neither a day blanket, given its formal display on the wall; nor a painting, given its potential use by any visitor fancying a nap. Perhaps, given the Union Jack colours, it is a flag.

        

Jane Clarke: Goddess, 1995 – 98 - Painted steel, H 100 x W 78.5 x D 35cm

Jane Clarke makes steel sculptures – sometimes exuberantly polychromic, sometimes more monumentally monochrome - bringing many associations together into a distinctive visual language. She sees memory as fundamental to that, saying that ‘memory of family, everyday rituals, of engaging with the world physically, intellectually, and emotionally’ are all  instrumental building blocks for her, and that memory in turn underpins her working practice, as ‘the material of steel, forged through the process of heat, also has memory’. At the same time, her sculptures reference modernist languages and conflate overtones of weapons, machines, the female body, and landscape forms.

Colin Crumplin: Paris, 2021 - acrylic and oil paint on canvas, 64 x 82 cm

Colin Crumplin makes two part paintings that reverse the usual process of abstracting from reality by taking a chance-driven abstract starting point and then – perhaps years later – finding something figurative in reality which matches it in some way. This builds the world’s unpredictability into the process and provides a dynamic and innovative way of staging modern painting’s typical contest between form and content. Travelling from abstraction to the world, he arrives at such as flowers, volcanoes, animals and – here – a fiery anti-government protest with echoes of Delacroix’s iconic ‘Liberty Leading the People’, and his own eye with a temporary condition. 

Olivier Richon: Mound of Butter, 2016 - chromogenic print, framed, 65cm  x 82 cm

Olivier Richon investigates the artifice of representation through highly stylised and formal photographic versions of traditional tableaux, given a witty edge by the choice of caption and arrangement of the elements. He has often featured stuffed animals, apparently out of place and seeming to parody the expectation of their allegorical role. Here less animate still life items play a similarly elusive function, one that Richon has located in Baudrillard as seeking ‘to analyse an object without interpreting it’. A tension arises between the realism of the image and the attempt to impose meaning on it.

           

Sara Rossberg: There, 2023 - acrylic medium + pigment on canvas 200cm x 160cm

Sara Rossberg makes intensely material figurative paintings which represent emotional states.  She describes them as ‘exploring humanness in a broader sense’ – not setting out narratives, nor representing particular individuals, but seeking  to create an object that conveys a feeling of intensity, She likes viewers to read her uncompromising colours and textures up close, like an intimate engagement with skin. That physical presence originated fifty years ago in Rossberg’s experiments with the old master technique of layering egg tempera and oil, a process she has gradually taken to the extreme using acrylic mediums and pigment.

 

Francesca Simon: Coded, 2023 - acrylic and pencil on linen on wood, 63 x 120cm

Francesca Simon plays with repetition, reflection and patterning in geometric abstractions which act as a visual filtering of the world around her: from architectural forms – including the Crossrail building site that neighboured her former London studio – to the North Yorkshire landscape she walks through daily from her current base. She talks of looking down and seeing the ground at her feet, paying attention to the land, its tactility, its colours, its forms. That has fed into the blues and greens typical of recent work, bringing nature into dialogue with the formal rigours of constructivist painting.

 

ADVANCED CONTEMPORARIES opens Tues 16 July 18-21.00 at Somers Gallery, 96 Chalton Street, Somers Town, London (between Euston and Kings Cross stations) and runs to 3 August, Tues – Sat 12-6 (if closed, call at Flori Canto, 96 Chalton Street for access)

Artist presentation / discussion of works on Sat 27 July 15-16.00

Curatorial tours Sat 3 Aug 15-16.00

Curated by Paul Carey-Kent, Emma Cousin and Theo Ellison

TALKS 

Four of the artists explained something more of their process at talks on Saturday 27 July. For example:

Sara Rossberg explained that all her effects – from translucent layers of what looks like resin to textured impasto - are achieved with acrylic medium and pigment - often up to 20 layers.  If she doesn’t like visible results after application, she scrapes off as many layers as necessary in another intense bout of work.

Referring to his mound of butter, Olivier Richon said that he had actually seen a comparably large mound in a restaurant in Brussels: he wanted to photograph it, but it was too difficult to separate it from the background. He had to merge several normal slabs of to make a mound used in his photograph, which uses Antoine Vollon's painting 'Mound of Butter', c.1880, as a starting point.

 Judith Burrows' most striking technique is the integration of plant and steel through a printing-type process, the details of which she is still developing and is not yet ready to reveal…  Which, of course, only increased the curiosity of the audience as to how exactly she does it!

Pauline Caulfield revealed that her linen throw was not painted in a shaped form as one might have expected, but printed in a rectangular form and only then altered to achieve the simple yet striking play of real and illusory seen in the final work – ‘the simplest possible trompe l’oieil’, she said, but very complicated to achieve.