exhibition

Martian Hearts

Artists JiaJia Wang, Coral Churchill, Michael OMahony, Gabor Gyory, Christopher Page

04.Dec.08 - 13.Dec.08
Wed-Sat 12-6 or by appt; first Thursdays 12-9

Private View, 04.Dec.08, 6:30-8:30

Contemporary Art Projects
20 Rivington St
London EC2A 3DU
020 7739 1743
info@caprojects.com
www.commentart.com/ gallery/Contemporary_Art_Projects
Tube Old Street, Liverpool Street, Shoreditch / Hoxton

Contemporary Art Projects is delighted to present Martian Hearts, an exhibition of paintings by Jia Jia Wang, Gabor Gyory, Michael O’Mahony, Coral Churchill and Christopher Page.

Martian Hearts explores alienation as seen through prisms, whether political, existential, emotional, architectural, or zoological. The works comment on the beautiful and the militaristic, and the alien nature of the world. The ethereal in the mundane is explored through paintings that depict platform computer games or fascist symbolism, void-like spaces that hover in architecture that cannot be placed and strange distopias that reflect in the eyes of primates.

Jia Jia Wang paints fantasy worlds inspired by contemporary culture, fables and the history of paintings. He references Western artists and Chinese traditional painting, as well as cinema, music, cartoons and platform computer games.

Christopher Page places often contradictory and “controversial” symbols on items or beings that render them somewhere between farcical and uncannily appropriate. These beasts often occupy a dark void that alludes to existentialism, or simple senselessness.

Gabor Gyory finds inspiration in the “charged spaces” of public and private monuments, alien to their surroundings. He explores the significance of such spaces, their design and how they have informed the people inhabiting them, looking at the relationship between man and object.

Michael O’Mahony depicts detailed drawings of landscapes inhabited by multiples of the artist: allusions to memory and family are playfully distorted, creating intimate but warped distopias.

Coral Churchill paints abstractions of the natural world exploring the nature of the machine in relation to the organic, commenting on Darwinism and schisms.