Troika is a London-based studio known for their experimental practice that employs a cross-disciplinary approach, intersecting between sculpture, architecture, and contemporary installation. With a particular interest in perception and spatial experience, many of Troika's works employ technology and draw inspiration from fundamental scientific, optical and mechanical principles. Exploring the intersection of rational thought and observation, they consider the changing nature of reality and human experience.
We are pleased to present new works from the series Borrowed Light, which includes a large-scale installation bearing the same name currently on view in the Barbican Centre, London as part of the Level G commissions. These works are comprised of custom-printed photographic filters whose gradient motifs create an infinite loop of sunrises and sunsets.
Troika often applies high and low technology to the use of non-material orephemeral media such as light, colour or water to frame experience as something fractured and transitory rather than absolute. With this installation, Troika continue their research into the ways technology mediates our relationship with reality and how the digital world increasingly reaches out into the physical one.
The work takes inspiration from the strange and mysterious intertwined ontology of reality, photography, cinema, virtual and augmented reality, and technologies whose role it is to effectively double, alter, recompose and edit reality and the duration of things in the world.
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From the beginning of his career, Jorge Méndez Blake has explored the connections between literature and fine arts, developing a large and varied body of work that alludes to the great masters of universal literature. In his work, Méndez Blake develops a visual language to engage classical literature through installations, drawings and interventions based on a multifaceted concept of the'library.'
In his new series of neon works, The Adages of Erasmus (Power and War)(2018), the artist gathered of a selection of Latin phrases out of the more than3,000 adages compiled by Erasmus of Rotterdam. Published in 1540, Adagiorum Chiliade became one of the most popular books in the first half of the 16th century, until it was prohibited-like all Erasmus' artworks-by the Council of Trent in 1562. Méndez Blake's selection alludes to the timely relevance of the phrases in reference to war and abuse of power, a theme far too present in the 21st Century.
Méndez Blake deepened his research on literature and complexities of languageby focusing on the Irish writer Samuel Beckett (1906-1989), winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969. The Mexican artist based his research on the very short play Ohio Impromptu which contains some of the major Beckett themes: isolation, a communication gap, duality, rehashing of words, contemplation of emptiness, allusion to death.
The large drawing of a curtain, Telón V (2018), the theatrical artifice par excellence, opens the question of representation: what to show/what to say? What to watch? Who to listen to? The curtain is a mask and arouses curiosity.
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Yann Gertsberger's series of paintings and textile tapestries depict narratives inspired by patterns, imagery and colours found in Mexican popular culture, art history and nature. Through these works, the artist builds a vernacular vocabulary by referencing the Fábulas Pánicas of Chilean- French artist Jodorowsky, the fantasy of the tropical as experienced from a purely European perspective, post-graffiti and the history of abstraction and its repertoire of ambiguous and mystical shapes.
Gerstberger's new compositions, including BPRMX (2018), are paintedon wood panel with oil pastels and chalk, bringing to mind Mexico'srich history of muralism and 'the big three' painters: Diego Rivera, JoséClemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Through his immersion intothe Mexican culture, the artist finds himself at a point of rupture, aligninghis visual vocabulary with the artistic history of post-colonial Mexico whilefinding inspiration from its architecture, imagery and motifs, and daily-life.
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Since the 1970's, the recurrent approach of Candida Höfer is to visualise the architectonic space as a frame of human relations. Her work consists of identifying and perceiving compositions that existed before she was aware of them and that she leaves unabridged. In photographs of indoor spaces, of public and semi-public buildings, the order and disorder that derive from their communitarian function are revealed.
Known for her meticulously composed, large-scale colour images, Höfer's oeuvre explores the structure, presentation, and influence of space. Interested in the psychological impact of design and the contrast between a room's intended and actual use, Höfer has focused her lens on cultural and institutional buildings such as libraries, hotels, museums, concert halls, and palaces. Whilst devoid of people, the images allow us to consider the role of their missing inhabitants. The large-scale nature of the work invites the viewer to linger over the architectural details and contemplate the subtle shifts in light that make up the character of the space.
On her decision to exclude people from her photographs, Höfer has said,'...it became apparent to me that what people do in these spaces-andwhat these spaces do to them-is clearer when no one is present, just asan absent guest is often the subject of a conversation.'
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The work of Jose Dávila reflects upon the legacy of major movements in art and architecture in the twentieth century. Informed by his training as an architect, Dávila approaches the crucial contradictions between form and function. Located between homage, imitation, and critique, the artist references modern architecture, urbanism, and milestones in mid-century and contemporary art, pointing to both their forecasts and failures.
Dávila's photographic cut-outs, including the new work Untitled (OrangeUnder Table) II (2018), attest an interest in the indeterminacy of viewing as consuming, when the proliferation of images is constantly testing our sense of place or time, as viewers, in order to construct history. By piercing or 'cutting-out' the central subject of the image, Dávila compels the viewer to imagine, as an act of creativity, that which appeals to thecommon universal.
In the artwork, Dávila directly references Alexander Calder's Orange Paddle Under the Table (1949), removing Calder's iconic sculptural form from the composition, leaving only its void to be filled by the viewer's imagination. In this sense, the spectator takes on the role of the creator, through the natural impulse to fill the blank space of the image, allowing for a unique experience drawing from one's own memory, art historical knowledge, or pure imagination.
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Gabriel Rico's work is developed in a zone in which one object crisscrosses with another in the inter-objective configuration space. Starting from his fascination with philosophical analogies and scientific disciplines, Rico creates pieces that fragment the composition of the contemporary human and evidence the geometric imperfection in nature utilising the Gedanken-Experiment techinque. Rico's sculptural works reflect on the nature of the materials used to produce them and their arrangement in the final composition.
The artist has been influenced by the sciences that study form and space; he considers himself a believer in matter, an ontologist with a heuristic methodology-sometimes using technological tools and scientific models as metaphors for our collective memory. Deconstruction and recontextualisation are methods by which he continues the development of his investigation in areas such as knowledge materializations and the fragility of space.
The principle of the presented artworks is to achieve a syncopated rhythm from the elements that compose them. They are pieces that consider the abstraction generated by a measurement of the separate elements that comprise them, as a principle for the uncertainty that is presented when the mind begins to visualise the different forms between them-and after a few moments observing it, the different materials of which they are made are evidenced.
It is a visual game between the image generated by first impression when seeing the artwork and the last image you saw-as if the process of observation itself was the one that discovered, little by little, the aesthetic benefits of the elements that are used in the sculptures.
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Artur Lescher's works attest to his constant experimentation with materials, their physical qualities and objectual characteristics. Through his works, the artist makes constant reference to natural elements, which when reproduced impeccably by means of industrial processes, reveal and deny these real allusions.
Lescher's sculpture Lilla #4 emerges subtly as a poetic gesture in space, transmitting force and instability, balance and movement, tension and silence. Neutralised, the functionality of the object ceases to exist and the possibilities of interpretation and meaning multiply. Without an imposed sense of direction or purpose, the presence of the spectator alters the narrative course of the object on a physical and philosophical level.
Lescher's new installation, Sextante (2018), was debuted in Asterismos, the artist's third solo exhibition in OMR, July 2018. Utilising the pendulum form from his general repertoire, Lescher approaches a new direction in this work by incorporating the wall plane, in addition to that of the ceiling. In thinking of the infinite in its relation to archetectural lines, the artist extends the multifilament threads that anchor the pendulum to the ceiling, bringing them down to ground-level and blasting them through the wall, as if the sculpture has a life of its own and the ability to escape the confines of the modernist, white cube typical of exhibition spaces.
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Matti Braun's work is characterised by a constant negotiation between concrete references and general allusions, between poetic ephemerality and an uncanny sense of visceral immediacy.
Braun has harnessed his interests to post-colonial discourse and notions of globalisation: most of the works suggest the migration of goods, skills or ideas. This interest, combined with feverish research, allows Braun to move rapidly between motifs of trans-nationalism, from 19th century textile trading to the 20th-century Négritude movement. Yet, for all its expansiveness, the logic of these quick-fire references is very contemporary: the associative textuality of the Internet and modern communications technology.
This new group of tableau-like works that result from experiments with pigmented concrete creates an intentional reversal of relations between inside and outside. The underlying narrative logic is not intended to explain the significance of the individual pieces but instead to demonstrate their polysemy. Braun's work is about the inability of objects to contain the meaning with which we burden them, drawing attention to the multiplicity of interpretations with which our personal and cultural histories imbue perception.
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Joep van Lieshout lives and works in a large workshop in Rotterdam's wharf district. He founded Atelier Van Lieshout (AVL) in 1995, assigning this moniker in an effort to break the myth of individual artistic genius. The collective workshop produces works that range from art, architecture and design. Van Lieshout's practice criticises power, politics and autarky, using the cycle of life and death as a central theme of his research.
Atelier Van Lieshout has created a series of artworks that symbolize the power of humanity over the natural world, the Domestikator series. These artworks pay tribute to the ingenuity, the sophistication and the capacities of humanity, to the power of organisation, and to the use of this power to dominate and domesticate the natural environment
Our relationship with nature has become severely disrupted, whilst our needs seem to be growing nonetheless. In order to support 7 billion people, agriculture has become an industry, with factory farming and genetic manipulation a necessity. This provides us with an ethical dilemma, as this kind of farming seems to border on abuse. Domestication Lamp (2017) refers to the literal abuse of animals; bestiality is one of the last remaining taboos. Why is it that treating an animal like a fellow human is an unspeakable act, whilst treating an animal like a resource for industrial production is the norm?
Opening Days & Hours
Wednesday Preview 3 October (Invitation only)
Thursday Preview 4 October: 12pm-8pm
Thursday Private View 4 October: 5pm-8pm
Friday 5 - Saturday 6 October: 12pm-7pm
Sunday 7 October: 12pm-6pm