Ocula Conversation Sandrine Colard on the 6th Lubumbashi Biennale The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the largest Francophone nation in Africa with vast resources and nearly 80 million inhabitants, is a place where commodities play a vital role in the national economy and the country's significance on the world stage. This is the context from which the 6th Lubumbashi Biennale (24 October–24 November...
Ocula Report From 20 to 21 July 2019, Artspace Sydney held a two-day symposium that brought artists in conversation with leading curators, writers, activists, academics, diplomats, and journalists from across Asia. The symposium was the final chapter of the 52 ARTISTS 52 ACTIONS exhibition, publication, website, and Instagram project. Instigated and...
Ocula News U.K. Election Artist Nicky Hirst Reflects on ‘Fractured and Febrile’ Campaign 13 December 2019 'Seeing the democratic electoral process in action has made me thankful for our system but even more thankful that I am an artist and not a politician,' Hirst said. Boris Johnson's Conservative Party won an overwhelming majority in yesterday's U.K. General Election despite the efforts of artists such as Anish Kapoor and Antony Gormley , who...
Ocula Insight Hans Hartung and Art Informel at Mazzoleni London (1 October 2019-18 January 2020) presents key works by the French-German painter while highlighting his connection with artists active in Paris during the 50s and 60s. In this video, writer and historian Alan Montgomery discusses Hartung's practice and its legacy. Born in Leipzig in 1904, Hans...
David Batchelor's work is concerned above all things with colour, a sheer delight in the myriad brilliant hues of the urban environment and underlined by a critical concern with how we see and respond to colour in this advanced technological age.
Read MoreHis studio is a treasure trove piled high with an endless variety of fluorescent plastic objects - clothes pegs, fly-swatters, buckets, spades, children's toys, empty bottles of household products - found in pound shops and markets in cities the world over. He combines these everyday items with a range of light-industrial materials: steel shelving, commercial lightboxes, neon tubing, warehouse dollies, acrylics, plastics and so on to produce extraordinary installations which exalt the ordinary and celebrate the lurid and trashy whilst being, in themselves, often mesmerisingly beautiful.
Batchelor was born in Dundee in 1955 and lives and works in London. In 2013, a major solo exhibition of Batchelor's two-dimensional work, Flatlands, was displayed at Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh and toured to Spike Island, Bristol. Batchelor's work was included in the landmark group exhibition Adventures of the Black Square: Abstract Art and Society 1915 - 2015 at Whitechapel Gallery, London. A separate exhibition of Batchelor's Monochrome Archive (1997-2015) was also on display at Whitechapel Gallery until May 2015.
Batchelor's portfolio includes a number of major public artworks including a commission for the British Council headquarters in Hong Kong, a site-specific work for the McManus Galleries in Dundee, a 10-metre high light installation at the Archway Tube Station in London, and a major commission for St. Pancras International Station entitled Chromolocomotion. His most recent commission in 2015, was Chromorama, situated in Broadgate, London.
Batchelor has written and edited a number of books including The Luminous and the Grey (2014), Found Monochromes (2010) and Colour (2008) and Chromophobia (2000).
Text courtesy Ingleby Gallery.
Related Press A Certain Kind of Light review – let there be mirror balls The Guardian : 29 January 2017 A show about light: a light show – what might a curator put in? Just about all art concerned with making the world visible in some sense speaks of light, the very condition in which it was made.
