Michele Abeles: Find Out What Happens When People Start Getting Real

Michele Abeles
Find Out What Happens When People Start Getting Real
Sadie Cole HQ

It really reminds me of the tiles in the toilets of a pub

A day at the... tracks

Urs Fisher
Sadie Coles HQ
69 South Audley Street
London W1K 2QZ

Ice Fishing: McArthur Binion, Bill Bollinger, Charles Harlan, Virginia Overton, Michael E. Smith (curated by Darren Flook)
Max Wigram Gallery
106 New Bond Street
London W1S 1DN

Michael E. Smith, Sleep (exhaust pipe, taxidermied chicken), 2013

Elisa Sighicelli
MOTINTERNATIONAL London
72 New Bond St. 1st Fl.
London W1S 1RR

Adriana Varejão:
Carnivorous
Victoria Miro Mayfair
14 St George Street
London W1S 1FE

Richard Jackson
New Paintings
Hauser & Wirth
23 Savile Row
London W1S 2ET

Phyllida Barlow
Fifty Years of Drawings
Hauser & Wirth
23 Saville Row
London W1S 2ET

Eva Nielsen
The Road
Selma Feriani Gallery
23 Maddox Street, Mayfair
London W1S 2QN

Mario Dellavedova
Still Lifes Off
Sprovieri
23 Heddon Street
London W1B 4BQ

Jim Lambie
Answer Machine
Sadie Coles HQ
62 Kingly Street
London W1B 5QN

Obliteration Device: Jakup Auce | Aline Bouvy | David Burrows | John Cussans | Benedict Drew | Ryan Jordan | Simon O'Sullivan | Roberto Peyre | Hannah Sawtell | Tai Shani
IMT Gallery
Unit 2/210 Cambridge Heath Road
London E2 9NQ UK

Helen Marten: Oreo St. James

Helen Marten

Oreo St. James

Sadie Coles HQ

Marvin Gaye Chetwynd

Marvin Gaye Chetwynd
Sadie Coles HQ

The Prize! It helps me to explain much of the noise, the long legs on top of high-heels, the high percentage of black clothing, silly hats, and void conversations. It is a dreamer resonance in my head. It is a warm sensation in my stomach fill with a so called Italian beer. They are recognisable death faces posted on a wall. The Prize is my blossom justification for the "so nice to see you" and "I'm going to Ibiza next week." If someone asks me if I love the Prize. I will sensually and endometrial say, "Yes, I do LOVE the Turner Prize, and the Bat Opera, and the unrecognisable sound that comes out of people mouth."

Press Release:

"Marvin Gaye Chetwynd’s second exhibition with Sadie Coles HQ focuses on two bodies of work, each the subject of a major new publication. A recent group of the artist’s Bat Opera paintings – produced last year during a residency in Monteverdi, Italy – appears in conjunction with a new volume published by Sadie Coles HQ and Koenig Books, extensively documenting this long-running series. Also on view is an array of collages which Chetwynd was invited to create for a new edition of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, released this year by Four Corners Books. The exhibition reflects the various stages which led to the creation of each publication, with dummy runs of the two books viewable alongside the final versions.

Alongside her improvisatory performances featuring handmade sets and costumes, Chetwynd has also worked for over a decade on Bat Opera – a cycle of miniature paintings portraying bats of all shapes and sizes in a variety of quixotic settings. In one, a bat spreads its wings before an Italianate backdrop of pine trees and a palazzo. Elsewhere, bats’ faces mass together in a cluster of glistening eyeballs and bared teeth.

These latest works indeed reflect the sweeping thematic range of the Bat Opera genre, which is at odds with its concise and unchanging format. Chetwynd shifts between individual portraits of bats – portrayed heroically or forlornly before billowing skies – and swarming colonies. Several of the portraits channel the pomp of regal or military portraiture, or perhaps the melodramatic poses and kitsch fantasies of Heavy Metal album covers. Others share something of the sumptuous imagery and high drama of wildlife documentaries. We also encounter vacant landscapes and imaginary cities. Half industrial and half biblical, these equally call to mind the roseate cinematography of Michelangelo Antonioni and the overwrought backdrops of nineteenth-century operas. Indistinct fragments of architecture moreover function in the same way as the sentimentalised ruins of Romantic landscape painting. Emblems of decay, they convey the sentiment of death’s omnipresence or Et In Arcadia Ego (‘I exist even in Arcadia’ – famously the title of two paintings by Poussin, affirming death’s dominion even in pastoral idylls). Other works are altogether more playful: one shows not bats but a pair of beetles in clumsy combat.

While evoking theatrical sets or grandiose historical paintings, the Bat Opera pictures – arranged into variously-sized sequences – invite an intimate viewing experience. In this respect they stand in marked contrast to the riotous and collective spirit of Chetwynd performances. Yet viewers nonetheless become participants of a kind: the paintings’ scenes implicate us as audiences of theatrical displays. Many of the elements found in Chetwynd’s performances are also common to the Bat Opera pictures – infernal portals, semi-mythical creatures, troupes of figures. Like Chetwynd’s performances, these images plunder the depths of high and popular culture, ranging between the extremes of heaven and hell, farce and tragedy.

Chetwynd’s new Canterbury Tales collages – which number almost 200 – again embrace the participatory spirit of her practice at large, making use of photographs sent to the artist by friends and acquaintances alongside a plethora of found imagery. Excerpts from the different stories have been integrated into these schemes, in which Chaucer’s characters and their tales are not simply retold but re-staged. We find reincarnations of the bawdy Wyf of Bathe, a narrative cycle devoted to the Merchant’s Tale (in which the lustful Januarie is struck blind and cuckolded by his young wife May), and allusions to the Pardoner’s Tale – a fable about seeking to ‘kill Death’, told by a sly and unctuous cleric. Chetwynd’s images combine references to Medieval churches and Baroque ornamentation with the absurdist jolts and bodily anagrams of Surrealist collage. At the same time, the poses and attitudes of the subjects glance at other more esoteric reference points such Renaissance etchings of duelling positions and Natural History photography. In their frenetic complexity and eclectic sources, the collages capture the richness of Chaucer’s text – its shifts in between ghoulish ugliness, coarse slapstick, and flashes of disarming beauty. At the same time, the poses and attitudes of the subjects glance at other more esoteric reference points such Renaissance etchings of duelling positions and Natural History photography. In their frenetic complexity and eclectic sources, the collages capture the richness of Chaucer’s text – its shifts in between ghoulish ugliness, coarse slapstick, and flashes of disarming beauty.

Marvin Gaye Chetwynd (1973) was born in London and lives and works in Glasgow. She completed a BA in Social Anthropology and History, UCL, London (1995), followed by a BA in Fine Art, Slade School of Art/UCL, London (2000) and an MA Painting, Royal College of Art, London (2004). In 2012 she was nominated for the Turner Prize. Recent solo exhibitions and major performances include those at Nottingham Contemporary (2014); The Monteverdi Gallery, Castiglioncello del Trinoro, Monteverdi, Italy (2013); Home Made Tasers, Studio 231, New Museum, New York (2011-12) and Odd Man Out, Sadie Coles, London, 2011. Her work has featured in numerous group exhibitions, including L’Almanach 14, Le Consortium, Dijon, France (2014); Performance Now: The First Decade of the New Century, curated by Rose Lee Goldberg, various venues, USA (2012-14); Göteborg, International Biennial for Contemporary Art, Göteborg, Sweden (2013); Performa 13, New York (2013); Aquatopia, Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, UK; Tate St Ives, St Ives, UK (2013); Turner Prize, Tate Britain, London (2012); Topsyturvy, de Appel, Amsterdam (2012); British Art Show 7: In the Days of the Comet, various venues, UK (2010-11). Later in 2014 Chetwynd will stage major solo presentations at Studio Voltaire, London; the Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow, and Tadeusz Kantor CRICOTEKA, Kraków, Poland (2014).

Urs Fischer

Urs Fischer
Sadie Coles HQ

Urs Fischer (b. Switzerland, 1973) traverses the fields of painting, sculpture and installation, as well as photography and drawing, in a multifaceted body of work that eludes formal or generic categorisation, coaxing comparisons with the multifarious practices of Martin Kippenberger, Franz West, Fischli & Weiss, and others. His work simultaneously echoes the shifting moods of Dada, Pop Art and conceptualism; and he deploys a dizzying range of materials from food to mirrors to dirt. Urs Fischer lives in New York. Recent major exhibitionsinclude those at MOCA, Los Angeles, 2013; Madame Fisscher, Palazzo Grassi, Venice, Italy,2012; and Skinny Sunrise, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, 2012. He has had solo shows throughout Europe and the USA, including Oscar the Grouch, The Brant Foundation, Greenwich (CT)(2010) and Marguerite de Ponty, New Museum, New York (2009). In 2004, Not My House Not My Fire took place at Espace 315, Centre Pompidou, Paris, and the retrospective KirRoyal was held at Kunsthaus Zürich, Switzerland. Urs Fischer’s work has been included in numerous group exhibitions including the Venice Biennale in 2003, 2007, and 2011.

David Korty: Have/Had

«David Korty’s latest exhibition at Sadie Coles HQ presents a series of eight new paintings alongside a series of ceramic sculptures which mark a dramatic new departure for the artist. Employing collage, ink and pencil, Korty’s latest paintings are sizeable in scale and coolly understated in palette. Collectively titled Blue Shelf, they are each divided into multiple ‘tiers’, their crisply delineated compartments calling to mind the exacting proportions of Donald Judd’s plywood boxes as well as the gridded or subdivided fields of various abstract painters. Yet Korty has arrayed these tiers with an assortment of monochrome shapes, conveyed in dilute ink and silhouetted against a midnight blue ground. Through a rhythmic interplay of line, shape and colour, he distances the paintings dramatically from their sources (mostly Korty’s own drawings), creating images that are pregnant with ambivalence, lurching between representational and abstract modes.

The miscellaneous forms housed on Korty’s ‘shelves’ range from recognisable ornaments (masks, busts, globes) to boxed-in sections of pattern, geometric cut-outs and gestural riffs. Certain works evoke the ephemera of the artist’s studio – propped up studies and drawings, rows of books and nondescript containers.» [... MORE ...]

David Korty (b. California, 1971) trained at the Rhode Island School of design and the University of California, Los Angeles. He has been exhibited widely throughout the United States and Europe, with recent solo exhibitions including those at Night Gallery, Los Angeles (2013), and Kimmerich, New York (2012). His work has featured in group shows including the Glasgow International Festival, Glasgow, UK (2012); Painting Codes: I Codici della Pittura, Galleria Comunale d'Arte Contemporanea di Monfalcone, Italy (2006); and Painting on the Move, Kunstmuseum Basel, Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel, and Kunsthalle Basel (2002). In 2008 a new book on the artist's work featuring a text by Rachel Kushner was published by Sadie Coles HQ, Michael Kohn Gallery and Koenig Books.

Carl Andre: Walnut Works

Carl Andre
Walnut Works
Sadie Coles HQ

Carl Andre, Angelune and Picth (Walnut), London 1995

Carl Andre, Cline and Nearledge (Walnut), London 1995

Carl Andre, Born, Quincy (MA, USA), in 1935