DAVID THORPE

In the ground floor space, Thorpe displays a series of rendered mud pipelines intermittently cradled, as if in waiting, around the gallery walls. Using base materials; dried earth, sand, chalk, coal, pigment and bone glue, the surfaces are worked while still wet into intricate forestry patterns that encircle and shroud the pipes. The surface becomes a meticulous camouflage protecting the congealed labour within. The works celebrate their own complexity of making as loved objects that are slowly nurtured into being. They create an atmosphere that lingers somewhere between a historical lament and a utopian ideal where labour, material and form combine in quiet revelry. With no obvious beginning or end, the pipelines suggest the possibility for new systems of flow, of exchange and contact.

In the outer courtyard, enlarged images of a series of frescoes will be printed and displayed at billboard scale.

David Thorpe lives and works in Berlin. Solo exhibitions include The Hepworth Wakefield, UK (2012), Kunstverein Hannover, Germany (2009), Camden Arts Centre, London, UK (2007), Kunsthaus Glarus, Glarus, Switzerland (2007) and Tate Britain, London, UK (2004). His work has been included in group shows including Modern Nature, Drawing Room, London, UK (2019), Half past noon, Centre d’art Neuchâtel, Neuchâtel, Switzerland (2014), Labour and Wait, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, USA (2013), From The Recent Past, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, USA (2011), Edge of the Real, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, UK (2004), Drawing Now: Eight Propositions, MoMA QNS, New York, USA (2002), Twisted. Urban and Visionary Landscapes in Contemporary Painting, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands (2000) and Die Young Stay Pretty, ICA, London, UK (1998).