Funk of Terror into Psychic Bricks

Margarita Gluzberg

14.Apr.07 - 13.May.07
Wed - Sun, 12 - 6pm

Private View, 13.Apr.07, 7- 9pm

Paradise Row
17 Hereford Street
London E2 6EX
+44(0)207 6133311
info@paradiserow.com
www.paradiserow.com
Tube Liverpool Street, Bethnal Green, Spitalfields / Brick Lane

“O course, a great fighter will not live with anxiety like other men. He cannot begin to think of how much he can be hurt by another fighter. Then his imagination would not make him more creative but less – there is, after all, endless anxiety available to him. Here at Deer Lake, the order was to bury all dread; in its place Ali breathed forth a baleful self-confidence, monotonous in the extreme. Once again his charm was lost in the declamation of his own worth and the incompetence of his enemy. Yet his alchemy functioned. Somehow, buried anxiety was transmuted to ego. Each day interviewers came, each day he learned about the 2 1/2 -1 odds for the first time, and subjected his informants to the same speech, same poems, stood up, flashed punches two inches short of their faces… The funk of terror was being compressed into psychic bricks. What a wall of ego Ali’s will had erected over the years.”

The Fight – Norman Mailer.

Paradise Row presents ‘Funk of Terror into Psychic Bricks’, a solo show by Margarita Gluzberg comprising of a series of large-scale, coloured pencil drawings in which fictions and ideologies are gently confused in territories dominated by desire, memory and romance.

Highly allusive, the works layer multiple figurative elements such as boxers caught in action with their gloves becoming semi-abstract blurs of movement, pin-up girls frozen in coquettish poses, record-players in mid-turn and lilies in full bloom, generating an air of nostalgia - the translucence of each layer mimicking the distance and faintness of dreams. Here cultural and ideological traditions also collide and merge, the square format employed by Gluzberg for her monumental drawings, bringing to mind the Modernist engagement with the form whilst simultaneously emulating the record cover.

Part of the inspiration for these works came from Gluzberg’s interest in the tumultuous career of popular British boxer Lenny Dawes. On a May night in 2006, at York Hall in Bethnal Green, Gluzberg saw Dawes beat Nigel Wright to win the vacant British light welterweight title, and then in January 2007, saw Dawes lose in his first title defence at Alexandra Palace. Whilst hardly bearing comparison with the most famous fight in history, the ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ – in which Muhammad Ali sensationally defeated George Foreman in Kinshasa in October, 1974, Gluzberg’s memory of Dawes’ fights meshed and cross-faded with Norman Mailer’s written account of the Ali/Foreman match and transmuted into the visual meditation on power and desire that is ‘Funk of Terror into Psychic Bricks’.