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Private: Tat Art Barcelona

Mike Ballard, Teresita Dennis, Philip Gurrey, Arthur Lanyon, Claude Temin-Vergez, Jim Threapleton , Sarah Shaw

Ceremony

TAT ART BARCELONA is delighted to announce its collaboration with No20, a London based center for contemporary art. The common interest in the support of emerging artists and the will to present and defend their work in the international scene has lead us to establish a collaboration which will formalize in two moments on the season: No20 will present a group show some of its represented artists at the beginning of the fall term in TAT ART `s Barcelona space, and TAT ART will correspond with a show in No20`s London space in December. This collaboration will articulate a relation between both cities and will help to promote represented artists beyond their immediate contexts.

No20 is delighted to present “Ceremony” at TAT ART BARCELONA, a show curated by Jim Threapleton including works by Mike Ballard, Teresita Dennis, Philip Gurrey, Arthur Lanyon, Claude Temin-Vergez, Jim Threapleton  and Sarah Shaw.

Ceremony

‘Poetic shapes, upholding their sparkle from a destruction of the real, remain at the mercy of nothingness, must rub it, draw from it their ambiguous and desirable aspect: they already have the strangeness of the unknown, the eyes of the blind.’                                                              Georges Bataille

Ceremony — an event of ritual significance, performed on a special occasion. A physical demonstration, a material gesture testifying to an experience of limit, to the possibility of an encounter with the immaterial — an expression of the desire to ascend from the profane to the sacred. For the dissident surrealist French philosopher, Georges Bataille, however, the gesture of ritual articulated instead an anti-hierarchical impulse, a drive from the sacred to the profane. Writing during the interwar period — an ‘age of anxiety’ that prompted a fundamental recalibration of inner experience to the secular — Bataille’s provocative use of language embraced risk and chance To undermine cultural structures and articulate a particular silence, one loaded with the possibility of non-knowledge.

Under the tutelary spirit of Bataille, this exhibition brings together a group of artists fascinated by how paint moves — both in terms of plastic immediacy and subjective potential. Each refuses to discount a certain painterly-ness in the navigation of the territory between representation and abstraction. While such expressionist methods have been castigated, this exhibition aims to reconsider the materiality of gesture as the site of meaning where narrative and form collapse intosubjectivity.

Painting has much of the ceremonial about it. Studio practice is riven with ritual — with the transubstantiation of pigment, canvas, panel, and oil. Image becomes contingent on a material act of faith, on a roll of the dice. While using disparate visual vocabularies, for these painters ceremony is a common language of chance, improvisation, and surface.

Mike Ballard uses the territorial markers that form the boundaries between public and private property to re-evaluate visual codes and image hierarchies of contemporary urban society. Teresita Dennis makes direct and physical contact with the surfaces she works with, developing processes and strategies for creating from from her body in movement. Philip Gurrey’s painting explores the tension between gesture and surface via a vernacular of political slogans, art historical precedents and twenty-first century signifiers. Exposing the sediment of material process, Arthur Lanyon uses compositional tension to trigger unreliable memory and association. Claude Temin- Vergez develops forms that traverse identifications: from sexual connotation, through Baroque ornament, to nature. Both surface and image are metamorphic and constructed from a linearity that traces force. Jim Threapleton explores the figurative possibilities of abstraction through historical remnants of vanitas painting and the kinetic, indeterminate potential of mark making. Sarah Shaw employs a process of improvisation that allows her to excavate fragments of form to investigate memory as an abject state.

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29 MAR 2024