To be installed early 2012

I’M A WINNER!!!! (Why aren’t you?) – CHAPTER 1 from Giles Ripley on Vimeo.

I’M A WINNER!!!! (Why aren’t you?) – CHAPTER 2 from Giles Ripley on Vimeo.

I’M A WINNER!!!! (Why aren’t you?) – CHAPTER 3 from Giles Ripley on Vimeo.

BRIONY ANDERSON Text by Katie Baker, May 2010
Written for exhibition for Briony Anderson curated by Meredith Gunderson June 2010

We look to the background for information, to explain and place things in order. Background denotes our social class and standing, encompasses our education and experience. It is the circumstances that lead up to something and what puts ourselves and others in context. Yet it is also that which by definition is furthest from us, unobtrusive, inconspicuous, an accompaniment to something else. A distant blur, a low level hum, the setting for other things.

Briony Anderson’s latest series of paintings is an investigation of the background, explicitly landscape as background. Evolving from a previous body of work, which took the portraits of artist Henry Raeburn and omitted the figures from their landscape backdrops, Anderson continues this exploration with work that responds to the landscape backdrops of further eighteenth and nineteenth century portraiture.

In Anderson’s re-workings of the portraits, the original landscape has become unrecognisable. Identifying features have been removed and the result is an expressive series of oil paintings detached and unidentifiable from their source. Yet these are not abstract paintings- somewhere, however indistinct, is brought into gradual being and a sense of location is anchored by details that slowly reveal themselves upon looking. Loose, hurried brushwork and dark, muted colours suggest rather than depict remote places with brooding skies and dark horizons. An encounter with some wild and lonely space in all its romantic glory appears to be being dramatically evoked.

Yet far from being pictures of a space in time, these are works that hover disconcertingly between past and present, absence and presence. Without any easily identifiable features the work is destabilized, throwing the viewer into uncertainty. These are evocative and beautiful paintings, but their deliberately self-conscious relationship with other works refuses to allow an uncomplicated encounter with that aesthetic experience. Any attachment to Turner-esque romantic myths of art, a desire for strapped-to-the-mast ‘painting from nature’, is exposed and refused. These are not paintings about the act of observation, but the act of looking, in which the viewer is firmly implicated.

The portraiture these works draw on is from a period on the brink of landscape’s establishment as a genre. Art history tradition would have it that landscape emerged from the margins of other work, in an ahistorical process summed up by Charles Harrison thus-“landscape stands for a space in which history disappears”. Anderson’s paintings challenge this refusal of history in their reinvestigation of landscape’s cultural significance.

Landscape is reframed as a way of seeing, in which its darker side- the proprietary relations and those whom it denies and excludes- must be repressed. The evacuation of the figure in Anderson’s work echoes the displacement in figure-ground relations in the development of landscape painting, but does so knowingly, leaving the viewer haunted by its spectre. Knowing that there has been a figure removed, we cannot view these pieces without feeling a deprivation. The paintings reverberate with a pervasive melancholy, becoming defined by what is not there as much as what is. Just as the strokes of Rauschenberg’s eraser on de Kooning’s drawing performed a self-contradictory act of negation and affirmation, so too does the removal of the figure here act as both a deletion and assertion of their presence. Viewing the paintings we are profoundly aware of what is lacking and the landscapes are a place of unease and uncertainty, left indistinct and troubled by this lacuna and what stalks its edges.

The work exposes our assumed identity as viewer- draws attention to the form of imaginary activity and identity that the landscape imposes on the viewer. Several of the works offer further resistance to our encounter with them, with frames painted plainly onto their surface. Dark oval windows and crude white rectangles cut across the landscapes, meaning the work explicitly becomes something that we must see through something else. An illusion of deep space is refused. The view is interrupted and broken, and recedes away from us, at times appearing almost on the verge of being swallowed up by the dark space at its edges. The naming of the work continues this challenge to our encounter. Titles like “A Repeated Act of Viewing” and “A Landscape Would Have Been Nice” confront us with the implication of viewing as an act. Anderson’s fragments of landscapes explore their own existence as a set, a device and an act of self-conscious repetition, through the very process of their creation. These paintings ask us to see that what is being framed here is not simply the view, but ourselves as viewers called forth and demanded by the landscape in order to make the landscape. We are caught in the act of looking.

Sunday Telegraph January 2011

Ian Garlant was born in 1962 to an English father and Norwegian mother. A former distinguished figure in the fashion world, Ian is now making art full time from his studio on Hardanger fjord in Norway. His fashion background boasts over 20 years at the top of leading fashion houses including Aquascutum and Hardy Amies. Garlantʼs couture fashion designs have been exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts and Victoria & Albert Museum.
Garlantʼs art is inspired by the dramatic isolated landscape of Hardanger fjord. Some of Garlantʼs recent work included in the UnEarth exhibition respond to the late revered Norwegian poet, Olav H Hauge (1908–1994) who also lived on the same fjord. Working with and within the landscape, Garlantʼs creative process involves burning, bathing and scraping pre-used wood, asphalt and sand of the fjord. These materials are transformed into commanding, archetypal, mysterious artworks in the form of sculptural paintings ranging in size from 50x50cm to 120x120cm.
His abstract and formal compositions, that are both primordial and futuristic, are finished in a palette of earth and metallic tones. The dramatic making process brings the materials back to life into artworks which suggest myth, rebirth and creative force – his art is as surprising as the earth itself.
Included in the exhibition will be photographs taken onsite at Garlantʼs studio in Hardanger fjord documenting the artists extraordinary working methods and the surrounding natural environment.
UnEarth has been realized by the generous support and enthusiasm of the Norwegian Ambassador and the Royal Norwegian Embassy. Works in the exhibition will be for sale through Meredith Gunderson ltd.

Andro Semeiko website

MAGNUS BELLUM Andro Semeiko November 2009 – January 2010

Solo exhibition of paintings by London based Georgian artist, Andro Semeiko on the subject of the power-plays in commissioned portraits and the creation of iconic symbols.

How do paintings act as a device to glorify human beings and human accomplishments? How are influential symbols created? How do images of people endure as icons of power? Andro Semeiko unpicks these questions in a body of work from 2005-2009 with wit and satire. The exhibitions title, MAGNUS BELLUM translated from Latin is BIG WAR, hints at the grand enduring themes around the depiction of power and influence.

Semeiko’s training as a painter began at an early age owing to his father being a successful contemporary painter in Georgia. Semeiko attended top institutions in Georgia, the Netherlands as well as London’s Goldsmiths College and the Royal Academy.

In reading contemporary philosopher Baudrillard and Foucault’s critical investigations on how humans assign meanings to objects and the resultant potent symbols of power, Semeiko began a body of work of hyper-realistically painted single objects on large canvases. Semeiko purposefully employed devices he observed in the compositions of highly charged symbols, such as the USSR hammer and sickle he was regularly exposed to growing up in Georgia. These devices included the complete isolation of a floating object, the stripping away of any context, and an illusion of rays of light from behind objects. For instance, Very Big Chocolate Cake, 2006 a large (meter and a half square) oil and acrylic painting of a slice of chocolate cheesecake on a flat black background. Painted many times larger than life and in striking colour, the cake takes on an unlikely strong assertive presence.

Semeiko painted similar images of floating helmets from suits of armour which are based on actual helmets fabricated for a planned Crusade around the 16th century which in fact never took place. The single objects successfully transcend themselves and appear as believable mini-icons. The result is a satire on the absurdity of a pervasive multi-layered assigned meaning to a symbolic object… from hammers and sickles, to apples, a star of David, or a nike swoosh.

The exhibition includes several large paintings based on classical portraits. These “portraits” are not of anyone recognisable, but rather self-contained suits of armour placed into classical poses and compositions which have historically been chosen to communicate a person’s wealth and dominance – a public relations exercise essentially. By using suits of armour with the helmet closed, the figures reveal no flesh and although they are human forms, they are difficult to relate to. All of this posturing and presentation of self-assuredness seems to collapse on itself leaving only artifice and a parody of oneself. It is not unlike our current experience of celebrity culture or even politicians…impossibly groomed and airbrushed actors or a politician wearing an Etonian armour rendering them difficult to relate to…

Semeiko’s work are consciously aware of being a staged exercise. In recreating portraits with borrowed compositions and poses from wealthy and powerful personas of bygone eras, Semeiko cannily exposes that closely managing and controlling one’s image through aesthetics is a human pursuit with a long, long history.

This timely exhibition comes when we are faced with great uncertainty seemingly caused by a cast of ubiquitous characters who would easily fall into the wealthy and powerful, groomed and armoured category. We rightly hold suspicions of self-consciously crafted images. Semeiko shows us how it is all too easy to project power. He is not a political artist, just a keen observer of human nature and the aesthetics of a power play.

- Meredith Gunderson, 2009

World premier presented by Stan Brakhage

Microgarden, 2001, 16mm, 4 minutes, colour, silent

Image still courtesy of the Estate of Stan Brakhage and Fred Camper

Still from <i>Microgarden</i>, 2001