Analia Saban, El Anatsui, And Sunday In The Park With Ed, Exhibition Round-Up

Analia Saban

Analia Saban: Interiors – Sprüth Magers

Sprüth Magers presents Analia Saban: Interiors, the artist’s third exhibition with Sprüth Magers, and her first in the London gallery. The artist manipulates the conventions of photography, painting and sculpture. Saban attempts to change the viewers perception through the juxtaposition of media and genre. Using the constituent parts of her media as her very subject matter, the artist constructs a dialogue between the conventions that delineate the languages of art, and the manifestation of these characteristics in individual artworks.

Saban melds Sofa and wall art, with a sly nod to that interior-decorating cliché, the painting above matches the neutral colours to the rest of the piece, as the central work in the gallery. At once sculpture yet employing the surface of the canvas as the material of the sculptural work. The frame of the object becomes the stretcher of a painting, the neutrality of the material merging the separate languages into a single form. Chair and painting merge, painting, and sculpture become intergrated. 

Saban’s treatment of her material extends to photography, the artist has dragged a still-wet photograph across a textured surface, and scraped the emulsion off the paper. Saban implements the ideas and forces that she finds within the photographic image, or the object or material. Throughout the exhibition ‘Interiors’, the artist attempts to depict the very process of the object presented; Saban converses with the material and genre of objects, and conversely even fights against the materiality of works, creating a clean and concise oeuvre that expresses the interplay between genres of art and language.

Analia Saban: Interiors – Sprüth Magers – until 28 March 2015

El Anatsui – October Gallery

October Gallery presents the final week of El Anatsui’s sculptural experiments with media, and form. The artist’s metal wall-hangings subvert the nature of material and object, at once displaying Anatsui’s ‘truth to materials’ and manipulating the viewers perception of weight and volume. Often brightly coloured, the works utilise the individual colours of found metals, either through the natural finish of the material or pre-painted surfaces.

The sculptures are ‘stitched’ together to form what appear to be great hanging blankets, or perhaps African textiles, created from a great ‘plate-mail’ lattice, which is reminiscent of early armour. The artist received recognition in 2013, for one of his largest metal wall-hangings to utilise his bottle-top technique, the work ‘TSIATSIA – searching for connection’, adorned the façade of Burlington House, the piece was created to coincide with the Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition, and won the prestigious Charles Wollaston Award.

Anatsui’s work has received international acclaim. Throughout a distinguished forty-year career as both an artist and teacher, El Anatsui has addressed a wide range of social, political and historical concerns through a practice employing an equally diverse range of media and processes.

El Anatsui – October Gallery – until 28 March 2015

Sunday In The Park With Ed – The Display Gallery

The Display Gallery presents ‘Sunday in the Park with Ed’ a new exhibition curated by Cedric Christie & Pascal Rousson. The show features over 80 artists and takes Édouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe as a starting point. The exhibition asks this large collection of artists to look at what is transgressive in their own practice, questioning whether the radicalism present in Manet’s work has been truly taken forward. Focusing on painting and European artists; the show also includes a picnic installation where a series of guests have been invited to host evening picnics. Artists include Ackroyd & Harvey, Jake & Dinos Chapman, Jacques Charlier, Simon Liddiment, Robert Montgomery, Martha Parsey, Barry Reigate, Danny Rolph, John Smith, Geraldine Swayne, Gavin Turk, Marijke Vasey & Ben Young.

The show also includes multi-disciplinary Belgian artist Jacques Charlier, born 1939, whose project ‘100 sexes d’artistes’ was rejected by the Venice Biennale in 2009. Olivier Mosset, born 1944, known for his monochrome works and influence on the Neo-Geo painters of the 80s and the avant garde filmmaker John Smith. Artists also include Robert Montgomery exhibiting one of his poetic billboard pieces, Barry Reigate maker of ‘pop porn’ works, and Martha Parsey and Marijke Vasey who are both showing paintings dealing with the question of the representation of the female image.

The exhibition is a contemporary salon; as curator Pascal Rousson concludes this is an artists show made by practising artists. Described as a ‘salon des indépendants’, a dialectic formed between artists, to open a discussion through the works juxtaposed with the scandalous Le Déjeuner Salon – where Manet challenged the aesthetic dictatorship of the day. It even serves to highlight the nature of the salon, with a kind of ‘pop-up’ nature, a covertness that suggests an internal dialogue within a society of artists – a furtive discovery to be savoured.

Sunday In The Park With Ed – The Display Gallery – until 28 March 2015

Words: Paul Black, photo and Vine video: P A Black © Artlyst 2015 all rights reserved

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