exhibition

Solo Show

Olivier Millagou

12.Apr.07 - 16.Jun.07
Wed-Sat 11-6 or by appt

Bischoff/Weiss
95 Rivington St
London EC2A 3AY
020 7033 0309
info@bischoffweiss.com
www.bischoffweiss.com
Tube Old Street, Liverpool Street, Shoreditch / Hoxton

BISCHOFF/WEISS is pleased to present Olivier Millagou’s first solo exhibition in the UK. Muster to Custer or else embarks upon the eternal quest for paradise, playing with stereotypes often associated with surf and biking cultures, and exploring the dichotomy between paradise found and paradise lost.

The exhibition welcomes you into a monochrome world. White ‘covers’ all of the ground floor of the gallery. On the white walls, postcards depicting beachfront landscapes, framed in white, are totally covered in Tippex. White electric wires trail across the floor and fall down through a staircase leading to the lower ground floor.

Here the walls become black. Dim lighting seeps from the electric wires as if this ‘underground world’, evocative of a squat, takes its energy from the white clean universe above. A symbiotic relationship is created, utopian purity highlighted by the oppositional, yet dependent, parasitic world below.

Framed in black is a further series of postcards depicting beachfronts, this time in colour. However, a mesh of chicken wire painted over the glass contradicts the image of paradise shown on the cards, and exposes it as being perpetually out of reach. Bikers’ T-shirts are hung on the walls like posters, stretched and deformed suggesting the opulence of their previous owners. Bikers’ leather jackets, using the Hell’s Angels’ colours, are hung on the wall like flags. The lower ground floor is separated into two rooms by a chicken wire wall, behind which there is a stage set for a concert.

There will be a performance of the band, ‘Beauty and the Beat’ on the opening night. A double vinyl (black and white) and a poster will be created for the show. It is a co-production of “les disques en rotin reunis”.

Millagou, born in 1974, studied at the Ecole Superieur des Beaux-Arts in Marseille and spent a year at the Acadamia of Rotterdam. In 2002, he had a solo show at the Centre d’Art Contemporain in Marseille. In 2005, he took part in the group show “WA, Surface d’autonomie temporaire” at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. Since then Millagou has exhibited internationally, in the last year alone at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Palazzo delle Arti Napoli in Italy and Galerie Erna Hecey in Belgium. In conjunction with his Solo Show at the BISCHOFF/WEISS gallery, Olivier will have works included in the exhibition “W.A” in Busan (South Korea). This autumn he will have a Solo Show “art-o-rama” in Marseille.