exhibition

Working Space

Artists David Ben White, Justin Hibbs, Richard Galpin

08.Mar.08 - 08.Apr.08
Mon-Fri 9.30 am - 6.30pm (closed Bank Holidays)

Arts Gallery
Arts London, 65 Davies St
London W1K 5DA
020 7514 6448
gallery@arts.ac.uk
www.arts.ac.uk
Tube Bond Street, Oxford Street, Mayfair / Cork Street

The Arts Gallery is pleased to present Working Space, an exhibition featuring five experimental artists sharing a playful and dynamic approach to the manipulation of space. Drawn from a range of disciplines including photography, painting, sculpture, architecture and installation, the artists reinvent the gallery as a laboratory for spatial experiment.

Working collaboratively to reconfigure the gallery space, the artists challenge the usual relationship between the gallery and the artwork, ultimately collapsing the space between the two. Whether the gallery space becomes a work in itself, or simply a key to unlocking the strategies of the artists within the show, is a question open to interpretation.

Featured artists are:

Dylan Shipton remodels the construction of the gallery space creating a large-scale architectural intervention. Redefining the space through a mix of painting dialogues and construction site aesthetics, he creates barriers, obstacles, and thresholds, for the viewer to mentally and physically negotiate. Through this approach he attempts to challenge assumptions of where the artwork ends and the space begins.

Richard Galpin?s futuristic metropolises are derived from photographs of contemporary cityscapes. By scalpelling away the surface of the prints, Galpin creates his own impossible forms and re-imagined fantasy places.

David Ben White?s work draws on the aesthetic of science fiction and cartoon imagery. He paints atomic forms from multiple perspectives simultaneously, disrupting an easy spatial reading of the work. This suggests a series of flawed constructions, appearing to be close to a state of collapse.

Paul Eachus?s photoworks and display pieces adopt a sensory rather than rational logic, excess rather than restraint. They draw upon the experience of the information overload presented to us, as in the superstore, on the internet and in the media, identifying fragile systems on the point of collapse.

Justin Hibbs takes modernist architecture as a starting point for an investigation into the construction of space in painting. Fluctuating between abstraction and representation the work neither inhabits one space or the other, connecting instead to an enigmatic and precarious hybrid space.

Read the review on Spoonfed http://www.spoonfed.co.uk/articles/Tom/168