16th Interim Exhibition: The Beautiful is Present

  • Artists: Emma Cousin, Wayne Lucas, Charles Ogilvie, Tim Spooner and Ben Wadler
  • Curated by: Emma Cousin
  • HANMI GALLERY | LONDON
  • 4 January - 9 January 2013

Hanmi Gallery is pleased to announce the 16th interim exhibition The Beautiful Is Present by five artists working in different media.

 

In this intimate gathering, five artists question the nature of objects, the beautiful and their relationship to illusions of themselves. They create situations, auras, events, echoes, actions, imprints, painting and performance.

 

In each response, the artists hail the ‘dead’ as a living presence: seductive, sublime, curious and wonderful. The pieces are changing – decaying, flowing and burning through their week in this very particular space. In alchemic exchanges the artists present a dialogue between artist and object, space and perception: preserving and perverting.

 

The works in this exhibition present the various ways in which artists can use, deconstruct and re- contextualise objects to inspire amusement, horror or the scent of a cultural echo. An exquisite fountain bleeds in multicolour, chance meetings between a snail and human blood on a mirrored table and mince vitirined in a museum case. Surprising and illogical juxtapositions are contrived and function subverted. Reality becomes more fantastic than imaginings.

 

Objects here become fetishes, like shrines of immanent magic and alive with independence personality. The artist is absent, the work performs.

 

Imbued with a crepuscular energy this exhibition resonates with a transience, hovering in the presentness of a moment. Themes of melancholia, romance, decay and celebration hum along side one another in disquiet chorus. Relics of ‘happenings’ perhaps that continue to happen, fade, or appear, it is odd and uncanny and aching with the presence of the artist.

 

Here the object, the artist and the beautiful seem present.

 

ARTISTS’ BIOGRAPHIES

 

Emma Cousin’s painterly translations from objects, built structures or human observation verge on the surreal and combine traditional media and handling with the found, absurd, playful and weird. Emma Cousin received her BA in painting from The Ruskin School, Oxford in 2007. She has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally. Recent shows include Collectible, FODO, Sluice and Sand in the Wax. In 2012 her work was featured in the Barbican Arts Trust Prize where she was selected to curate a painting show at Hertford Road Gallery. She was selected for the Threadneedle Art Prize and shortlisted for the WW Salon Art Prize.

 

Wayne Lucas blurs the activities of painting and sculpture, reflecting and considering the human condition through a restless and obsessive accretion of materials. Past shows include Obstractivism at Hales gallery, London, Deptford X Retrospective, at APT Gallery and The Thought of Stuff, at the Royal Society of Sculptors, London. His work has been selected for the Prague Biennale and he was shortlisted for the Jerwood drawing prize in 2008 and 2009. In 2010 he won APT enables award. He lives and works in London.

 

Charles Ogilvie’s practice encompasses a wide range of media including metalwork, ceramics, printmaking, and photography. He addresses subjects including cosmology, taxonomy, the C18 Whaling industry and the UK nuclear fleet with a eye to the line between beautiful myth or cultural echo and the factually substantial. Charles’ work poses riddles that contemplate culture’s often tenuous relationship to knowledge. Charles is a graduate of the Ruskin School and the Royal College of Art, he has show recently at Gloucester Cathedral and the Ashmolean museum in Oxford and was shortlisted for both the Saatchi New Sensations and Red Mansion Prizes in 2011.

 

Tim Spooner works from London on correspondences between the physical world and the world of ideas. These manifest themselves as paintings, writing and live shows. Since 2010 he has been performing a series of metaphysical puppet shows where objects are manipulated and their particular properties are revealed. For the Hanmi Interim show Tim will be performing 24 Grotesque Manipulations. Tim Spooner is an Artsadmin Associate Artist.

 

Ben Wadler looks at the object in art from the unusual perspective of religious philosophy. His enquiry considers how objects function in society, and how our attitudes towards material reflect our basic ideas about the world of form, and the nature of change. Ben makes work that is both critical and playful. He explores how art and architecture might serve as gateways to ideas, rather than ends in themselves. Ben has exhibited widely internationally including New York, London and Germany. Recent group shows include Stonehenge Tetris at The Hayward Gallery and Stereopsis at the Drawing Room. In 2012 Ben was selected for the Young Sculptor Award by the Kenneth Armitage Foundation.