Century Gallery
ACAVA, 1-15 Cremer Street, Shoreditch, London E2 8HD
Contemporary fine art in an artist-run gallery
  

Paint in 2003
Oct 21-Nov 1, 2003
Mark Brogans, Dierdre King, Brendan Lyons, Piers Secunda
| paintings | space 1,2,3
Paint in 2003 is an exhibition of four English artists who work with paint, away from the supports to which it is applied in traditional painting practices. Each of the four artists in this exhibition have developed their own unique techniques to work in this way.  
   
Mark Brogans’ sausage shaped, rolled, high gloss paint skin sculptures have a delicious Oldenburg vinyl quality, they appear squishy and loaded with Freudian references. Thick paint snakes are awkwardly pushed through a hole and tied together in a garish display of fetishistic gloss. Dierdre King takes a Glenn Brown type approach to her material, making her work by applying coats of acrylic to plastic and peeling them off when dry, to layer or concertina them into wall mounted or floor based works. The multi layered pieces duplicate and replicate the intensity of colour and texture of the material. She’s painting paint, often using sculptural space.
   
Brendan Lyons has constructed stretched canvases, paint hooks, nails and staples from paint, in a range of works that reference issues of implied space, boundaries and attachment. Some works target more specific areas of opposing positions, internal/external, negative/positive, front/back, surface/structure use and form. His works have a consistent paint textured surface, reminding us of their only physical content: Paint. Piers Secunda has developed an acrylic paint that is designed to work in moulds. His painting practice pushes the work as far as possible into a sculptural realm, whilst studiously testing the limits of the material by scaling up to a near-industrial scale, as one piece, a sharp edged, white, 1700 lb cube of paint. Other works dissect colour into hundreds of tones and textures, by using moulded reproductions of  paint tubes.

A catalogue is available for this exhibition with an introductory essay by Dr. Tom Learner, the head painting conservator at the Tate and author of 'The Impact Of Modern Paints'. Photo portraits for the catalogue were taken by Johnny Shand-Kydd. This form of painting is the subject of a documentary film being made by award-winning film maker John Burder.