Exhibitions/Events
2012 – Looking through the Overlooked:
Works on Paper made between 1970 and 1990 (selected from the ‘a.a.a.r.t.s’ collection)
Hive Gallery, Rochdale
Date:
2012
I recently came across a collection of drawings and paintings most of which had never been exhibited. There are between 150 – 200 works in the collection. All of the works were made on paper, most of them were 33” x 24” (A1) and used a variety of drawing media. They reflect an eclectic range of visual styles and references but all suggested a connection to other works, as if they were preparatory for, or a reflection on other aspects of an artist’s practice or a project.
The presentation of these works is not about authorship or a celebration of aesthetic achievement. The maker of the works remains unknown and only a limited critical judgement of quality or hierarchy will be applied. They are displayed essentially chronologically with occasional disruptions by a shared theme or subject. The number of works included in the presentation are responsive to the space available but would normally be around 100.
The artist is not identified and there will be no attempt to make direct interpretations of the work. What is intended, however, is that a particular journey will be revealed through the works themselves. This is not explicitly an individual’s journey but more a kind of reflective commentary on a period of time as a storyline with multiple layers. The physicality of the works themselves, for example, reveal a delicacy of decay as the paper becomes a brittle and discoloured surface, while formal attitudes in the works reflect the shifts in arts practices and theories from the last thirty years of the twentieth century. These appear in one sense as an interaction of abstract-formal qualities and representational systems such as magazine illustration, Renaissance perspective and diagrammatic processes, while in terms of theory it is possible to identify, highly speculatively, references to history of art methodologies, structuralism and theories of film. But, underpinning these materialist and theoretical references there emerges a more personal narrative of places visited and cultures encountered, either directly or indirectly, including references to Soviet Russia, Greece under the colonels, the castles of Northumbria or Battle of Britain aerodromes in Kent.
The presentation provides an opportunity for an audience to engage with the works on any level without the sense of a dominating presence of an artist-creator allowing for a stronger sense of a personally created interactive space that might allow for a more poetic exchange.
Tim Dunbar
October 2011
See also Selected Writings: Looking through the Overlooked (2012)
