ROSS HANSEN
Sleight of Hand
Seven artists engaged in alchemy, magic, performance and subterfuge.
There are works in this exhibition that show you one thing and do another; that perform a kind of ocular magic or material transformation before your eyes. Others conjure up the quiet spectacle of rehearsed actions and ritualised production.
The ‘hand’ of the painter-alchemist is never far away, even in its perceived absence. The show is a paean to manual production, to the special place that the hand-made artefact holds in our collective consciousness.
You are invited to confound your senses, and bear witness to the sleight of hand on display at Terrace, 4-17 Frederick Terrace, London, E8 4EW until Jan 11.
Curated by Ross Hansen and Natasha Brown
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Natasha Brown
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b.1996 Johannesburg, South Africa. Lives and works in London
Studied at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg and Central Saint Martins , London
This drawing explores the mechanics of visual gimmicks through the application of a four-colour pencil on canvas. By tracing the hand in a specific position, what is created is a dog, a pattern, a shadow - using the hand as both subject and literal object. The gestures of duplication and repetition introduce a language of commitment to the otherwise immediate process of tracing, using a quick drawing “trick” and a gimmicky four-in-one colour pencil to explore and expand upon the visual language of novelty.
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Eva Dixon
b.2000 Waratah, Australia. Lives and works in London
Studied at Central Saint Martins, London
Dixon takes the persona of a ‘mad-scientist’, investigating materials and subverting their purpose to fit a need within the work. The work takes the form of sheer polyester assemblage stretched over re-constructed stretcher bars. The geometric forms in Dixon’s work are pulled from construction, mirroring the appropriated materials the artist uses such as electrical shrink tubing, paracord and recycled wooden pallets. More recently, Dixon has been working with diamantés, appropriated text as vinyl and found patches. In doing this Dixon blurs the lines between painting, sculpture and craft whilst investigating how the relationship between opacity and transparency can expose the structure and surface as one. Dixon’s use of stable and unstable materials leaves the work in a constant tension, offering a site to question making process, queerness, gender and the binaries between labours.
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Ross Hansen
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b.1973 Northwich, UK. Lives and works in London
Studied at Newcastle University and the Slade School of Fine Art, London.
Ross Hansen makes paintings 'in the simulation', mining the possibilities of reproduction in a cyclic continuum of art making.
The works begin as digital 'finger paintings' on a touch screen. Some trace the outlines of canonical images culled from art history, others simply fill the space of the screen with marks. The coding is limited and only able to produce a basic facsimile of a brushstroke. These virtual gestures are then painstakingly recreated in the tactile media they imitate through a laborious process of masking and layering.
In photographic reproduction, the works can appear indistinguishable from their digital models; encountered in real life, they reveal their identity as painted replicas made with brushes and bespoke formulations of pigment and binder. In an age when images are primarily consumed via screens, Hansen sees the 'invisible labour' required to make these ‘copies without originals’ as a test of his enduring belief in the practice of painting itself.
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Roland Hicks
b.1967 Aldershot, UK. Lives and works in Kent, UK
Studied at Winchester School of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art, London.
Roland Hicks makes paradoxical objects, meticulously painted or drawn to look like minimal abstract constructions - apparently hastily assembled from offcuts of various found materials. No models are made beforehand, so they are effectively trompe l’oeil still life paintings of fictional artworks. It is a contemplative and curious approach, and despite the layers of trickery and deception involved the work maintains a fascination with everyday materials and small creative acts that is entirely genuine.
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Marc Hulson
b.1965 UK. Lives and works in London
Studied at North Staffordshire Polytechnic and Goldsmiths College, London.
Operating somewhere between the devotional space of the sacred image or icon and the basic emotional register of the emoticon, Marc Hulson’s series of paintings of deflated, defacialized balloons collapse affect and appearance into one exquisitely tortured surface. Emotional expression slowly folds in on itself as the crude immediacy of marker pen on cheap latex is rendered in oil on canvas. The images offer themselves as cartoonish avatars of a degendered self, or as shed skins, discarded husks or scraps of subjectivity.
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James William Murray
b.1988 UK. Lives and works in Brighton, UK and Heiloo, The Netherlands
Studied at the University of Brighton
Woodingdean is part of a recent series of works that utilise a frottage method involving abrading finely woven cotton fabric over various surfaces in and around the artist’s studio, including the floor and the surfaces of other paintings. The process relies on varying manual pressure and haptic contact, causing the surface of the fabric to register indexical traces of the hand and of the surfaces beneath. In this process the cloth operates as a kind of tactile membrane, mediating between the hand and the surfaces it encounters while retaining the physical traces of that contact. The cloth is then cropped and stretched over a support, a stage in which the artist’s agency is reasserted through the selection and framing of how the contingent marks are resolved as a composition.
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Christina Niederberger
b.1961 Bern, Switzerland. Lives and works in London
Studied at Byam Shaw School of Art and Goldsmiths College, London
I am interested in the languages of painting and textiles. How they evolved historically and culturally in opposition to each other by traditional notions of the masculine and feminine are my focus as a female painter.
Central to these interests are the politics of the Bauhaus weaving workshop and Penelope’s weaving in the Odyssey as a strategy of self-determination, empowerment and a metaphor for the passing of time. It is in this context that my most recent paintings often pay homage to female artists.
Earlier works had sought to assimilate and re-interpret the formal vocabulary and stylistic devices of Modernism. In these works I ‘translated’ (masculine) expressionistic brushstrokes and modernist design into illusionistic mark making that mimicked embroidery and textiles. Such allusions to craft and its trompe l’oeil rendering ran counter to the prevailing ideologies abound at the height of Modernism.
My practice is slow, repetitive and meditative by its nature but also a choice to invite reflection and act as resistance against a fast-paced world. Borrowing from the vocabulary of painting and textile, my paintings are both abstract and figurative, a representation of a fabric on canvas and the thing in itself. As they forge a hybrid language, they invite a dialogue with new perspectives on both.
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Terrace History
In 2004 Artist Karl Bielik opened Terrace Gallery in Hackney, London.
For over 20 years exhibitions have been held at Terrace Studios, Patchworks, a reclaimed wasteland, a pub back room, a Library and now back where it all began.
More than 100 exhibitions have been held showing works by over 1000 Artists including Matthew Collings, Bob and Roberta Smith, David Leapman, Mali Morris and Eddie Peake.
The primary focus of Terrace Gallery is painting.
Proposals are welcomed for large group shows - please send a one page maximum outline of your proposal with confirmed Artists to Enquiries on www.karlbielik.com