exhibition

Ground Zero Size Zero

Artists Maurizio Anzeri, Aram Tanis, Simon Willems, Martin C deWaal, Gert-Jan Akerboom

07.Sep.07 - 07.Oct.07
Wed-Sat 12-6

Private View, 06.Sep.07, 6pm-9 pm

Curators Ken Pratt

Vegas Gallery
64-66 Redchurch Street
London E2 7DP
07726750762 / 02077294819
hello@vegasgallery.co.uk
www.vegasgallery.co.uk
Tube Liverpool Street, Old Street, Aldgate East, Shoreditch / Hoxton

Ground Zero, Size Zero offers a timely nod, in September, to London Fashion Week. Drawing on the work of an improbable selection of artists, it traces body panic, dysmorphia and anxieties about the body through their works. Some engage directly with the media images fed to us by the endless diet of fashion magazines, colluding with and subverting their notions of the idealised body in equal parts. Others tap into the neurotic niggling anxieties about who we are within our own organic existence, their locus of concern, perhaps, sharing something in common with the world of fashion that feels the need to reshape and reform the living form since a natural existence is simply not good enough.
Martin C. de Waal’s practice has criss-crossed that of fashion and art for the past two decades. In addition to working as a stylist and all-round fashionista in his hometown of Amsterdam and further afield. For example, during last September’s London Fashion Week, he performed at the opening of London’s On/Off catwalk. His more conceptual art works have been shown internationally in both commercial galleries and institutions. And, in a further strand of shape-shifting, he is something of a personality on the mainland European underground club and dance music scene. If his constant reinvention is part of his practice, then this literally extends as far as physical re-invention in the trope explored by body artists: cosmetic surgery is equally an option of medium for the contemporary artist.
Earlier this year Martin C. de Waal underwent an eight and a half hour plastic surgery intervention to alter his face, something previously explored in less dramatic ways and included in various series of photographic works –largely what might be called ‘non self-portraits’- in which the effects of surgical intervention were augmented with digital manipulation. The results are at once striking; sometimes very beautiful and yet always marginally or fully disturbing, the presentation of his face often pushed to an extremity that the mainstream fashion industry seldom dares present to us.
Martin C. de Waal has exhibited and performed in a range of galleries and institutions including Fondation Cartier (Paris), Chelsea Museum of Art (New York), FOAM (Amsterdam) and Stedelijk Museum s-Hertogenbosch (s-Hertogenbosch). In 2006 he had a solo exhibition at Torch Gallery (Amsterdam).
In his most recent video work – a kind of eulogy for his now departed previous incarnation- footage from various live performance works are edited together in something that might be best termed an MTV docu-obituary; flashes of grandiose gestures of a ludicrous glamour for a persona no longer physically with us.
Fellow Dutch artist Aram Tanis is best known for his photographic works that often feature combinations of heartless urban environments and human figures, most often female nudes whose depiction does little to encourage us to retain any notion of seduction or glamour. At first glances, the work might share similarities with a kind of ‘heroin chic’ fashion photography that rose to prominence in the 1990’s and resemblances to the contemporaneous use of photography in the visual arts. However, in Tanis’ work the human body always seems to be in engaged in some process –perhaps internal- that is about a diseased state or denotes stress. There is a pathology here where impossibly thin women splay themselves naked over tables in twitched-out states or where impossibly fat women seem to become motionless under their own collapsed weight and young men form unhealthy relationships with blow-up dolls. Where the bland urbanscapes intersperse, we find then suggestion of a dislocated isolation and an environmental alienation that might lead to these states. Like animals in an unnatural captivity, the coats of Tanis’ figures is not glossy. Their noses are not wet. Their eyes are not bright.
Aram Tanis has exhibited work internationally including at Frankfurter Kunstverein (Frankfurt), Witte de With (Rotterdam) and MAMA (Rotterdam) amongst other locations.
Simon Willems’ tight paintings and drawings do not share a single preoccupation or line of content. And yet, some preoccupation with the human body seems to be always present. In one strand of work this involves the unexpected humanisation of the inhuman. Droids and aliens species familiar to us from iconic sci-fi films are captured in dramatised human moments, themselves drawing from the history of painting. In another strand of work, Willems seems to draw on the traditions of 1970’s hyperrealism, abstract painting and graphic design. In such works we often see the sleek peop