Contemporary Concrete
Andrew Bick, Katrina Blannin, Natalie Dower, Richard Graville, Sharon Hall, Matt Magee, Peter Ole Rasmussen, Meg Shirayama, Donald Smith, Jeffrey Steele
25 January – 28 February 2025
‘The precision of a precise image is a precision with respect to the structure of reality.’
In 2012 the writer Mel Gooding quoted Wallace Stevens in his preface to Line of Enquiry, a book about the work of Natalie Dower (1931-2023). He was speaking about why Dower valued using mathematics as the starting point for her abstract paintings, reliefs and sculptures. For the artist it offered a precise system of rules that could give rise to an infinite number of visual possibilities and alluded in a wider sense to overarching patterns discernible in the universe.
The decision to work within formal parameters might be seen as reductive yet the current and evolving practice of non-representative and concrete art belies its apparent neutrality. Whether in conversation with the past, or as a means to innovate, artists continue to find value in using visual languages generated by abstract geometric forms, visual codes and systems of ordering information.
Contemporary Concrete presents the work of eight contemporary artists who explore different approaches to concrete and constructivist art, alongside examples by two historic British Systems painters. Curated by the Eagle Gallery / EMH Arts for Turps Gallery, with exhibits that encompass painting, sculpture, prints and artist’s books, the exhibition evidences the rich practice in current non objective art.
The exhibition spans 50 years with the inclusion of a screen print by Jeffrey Steele (1931-2021) that refers to a painting he made in 1965. Steele, who was noted for his pared down black and white compositions, worked ‘to abolish as far as possible subjective, contingent and random factors in favour of a principle of necessity.’ A committed Marxist (and one of the founders of the British Systems Group) his approach is both acknowledged and subverted by the practice of artists such as Andrew Bick, Katrina Blannin and Meg Shirayama, who follow constructivist principles, whilst subtly disrupting them.
Various kinds of visual codes are explored in paintings by Matt Magee and Richard Graville, whose minimalist canvases often employ colours that act in nature as warning signals. Systems of process are investigated by Peter Ole Rasmussen, in paintings where bands of colour are laid down in pre-determined arrangements of diagonal, vertical and horizontal strips.
Colour plays a significant role throughout the exhibition, whether as the means to create optical illusions of space, as in Sharon Hall’s oil on panel paintings and artist’s books, Donald Smith’s canvases, or as a subtly altering undercurrent in the mirror-like surfaces of Graville’s recent work.
While each artist utilises the paradigms of geometric abstraction, they do this to distinctly individual outcomes, conjuring new ways of thinking and different visual results. The mediated layering of geometry acting as an antidote to a world of instantaneous information.
For further information please contact Emma Hill (M 07968 538 458)
TURPS GALLERY
The Chaplin Centre
Taplow House
Thurlow Street
London SE17 2DG
(Open Wednesday–Saturday, 12–6pm)
