Brian Griffiths - Another End

22.Jun.08 - 20.Jul.08
Wed-Sun 11-6

Vilma Gold Gallery
6 Minerva Street
London E2 9EH
020 8981 3344
mail@vilmagold.com
www.vilmagold.com
Tube Bethnal Green, Hackney / Bethnal Green

In a new series of sculptures ‘Another End’ presents a drama where a resigned ‘lostness’ and ‘used up-ness’ is rampant. It infers a kind of relentlessness, a laughable existential angst butted against the optimism of a new improved conclusion. The sculptures appear as distinctive players: A bear head with its roughly patched concrete surface and painterly graphic face has an air of an old school entertainer, a wooden box with its numerous openings and gleaming tan brogue shoes is enigmatically quiet, an over-plated concertinaed metal car lump is a somewhat comical showy beast. They all desperately want to be more, to be back performing in another place – instead they sit, wait and put on a brave face. The over zealous lick of brightly coloured paint on the banger car, the daft smile of the bear, the over polished wooden surface is a bravado that is disturbingly fragile.

In Griffiths’ work traditional genres of sculpture are reworked and rethought predominately through the assisted readymade or the fabricated found object. The stone monument, the wooden carving and metal sculpture are all revisited with disarming directness and ingenuity. For Griffiths, conceptual rigor is bound up with processes of making, so everyday materials and objects are selected for their potential to transform and to create rich, evocative experiences. In part Griffiths uses sculpture to inquire into ideas of the flawed and the failed. Employing complex sculptural languages and diverse references Griffiths skillfully confuses categories of the found and the made, the everyday and the fantastical, the humorous and the melancholic. The deliberate bluntness of the work propels the viewer immediately into a landscape where the supposedly familiar is scrutinised. Griffiths transforms everyday objects and base materials into remarkable encounters that question our experience of the contemporary world. Aspirational, and yet tragically flawed, Griffiths’ works are charged with humour, discontent and sadness.