Exhibitions

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Daniele Puppi: Fatica n.28

Daniele Puppi is amongst the most exciting young Italian artists of his generation. Using video projection and sound, Puppi's work is a direct response to the architecture of the gallery. His work takes two forms; 'Frammenti' (fragments), photographs that evolve from the artist's engagement with a space and 'Fatiche' (efforts) which take the form of sculptural video installations. Projected large scale and with a startling intensity, Puppi's imagery often comes from the artist's own actions in the gallery; a hand – enormous in size – projected to appear slamming against the gallery wall or the artist's leg – colossal – projected as if 'ploughing' through two storeys of a building. For Puppi, the surroundings are not simply a neutral place that hosts the work of the artist, but the raw material from which the work emerges and takes form. Through the artist's distinctive treatment of his subject matter, he demonstrates that rare ability to elevate the most mundane, everyday action to the most profound.

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Kristian Ryokan

MK G presented the first solo exhibition in a UK public gallery by the British painter Kristian Ryokan. The exhibition comprised a selection of paintings intricately crafted in oil and acrylic on canvas. Ryokan plunders with an energetic enthusiasm, from the world around him using a range of everyday objects, images and signs such as monopoly boards, star wars toys, telephone cards and racing cars. Informed by the influence of Buddhist teachings, Ryokan’s paintings are often constructed with a visual play in mind. For instance a painting of a flock of pelicans in diamond formation is entitled ‘747’ (2001) and ‘Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki Zen’ (2003) depicts a D-type Jaguar seen head on. The analytical attention to detail is exquisite, the rendering of metallic and painted surfaces reveals a discerning draughtsmanship; everything is convincing until one notices the car manufacturers’ name has been replaced to simply read ‘zen’ referring to Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki the zen master. Ryokan’s subject matter often relates to a contemplation of time and escapism, activities that are removed from the day to day routine; motor racing, sailing or simply playing games. Ryokan’s work can be interpreted as looking for a balance between spirituality and materialism.

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Pae White: in no particular order

Milton Keynes Gallery presented the first solo exhibition in a British public gallery by Californian- based artist Pae White. The exhibition included new and recent work and served to introduce the varied strands of her artistic practice, that shifts effortlessly across differing genres and media, from fine art and product design to architecture and urban planning, typography and graphics. White's work is often low-tech, comprised, for instance, of repeatedly made cardboard cut-outs, delicate wire constructions, suspended mobiles or evocative ephemeral wall paintings made direct onto the building's surface. Central to her work is the playful exploration of the experience of space and light within a specific architectural setting, that results in a visually engaging experience. Of particular note are White’s papercut mobiles, such as ‘Oroscopo’, 2004. Cascading from scores of nylon threads, these brightly coloured cardboard ovoids perceptually flicker and tantalise the viewer. As ever, there is an in-built responsiveness to the conditions of the gallery space, either through the refraction of light or the passing disruption of air as a viewer walks by. A new installation, specially made for the exhibition, comprised a wall painting featuring White's characteristic 'fading' of one colour into another—at MK G turquoise into black. A selection of White's drawings, designed posters and the display of collaborative artist's books were also included in the exhibition.

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Shirana Shahbazi

This exhibition by the Iranian artist Shirana Shahbazi consisted of recent and new work including a series of tapestries, photographs and poster installation. Shahbazi uses photography to explore the classic genres of art history; portraiture, still life, landscape and history painting, both from an 'Oriental' and Western perspective. In so doing, she calls into question the exotic clichés that so often arise when engaging work from a Middle Eastern context. The exhibition featured her best known series – Goftare Nik/Good Words (2000-2001). It takes its title from the Zoroastrian maxim 'good thoughts, good words, good deeds'. This series was photographed in and around Tehran and is a compendium of social role models and social phenomena. It is a reflection on Iran, on myth-laden Persia and its portrayal and self-portrayal. Shahbazi's images exist in varying formats and media, from the small to the monumental, and her subject matter ranges from the incidental to the epic. Shahbazi's work engages traditional Iranian craft and artistic practices. This exhibition included some large format paintings made by Iranian painters employed in the advertising industry, and traditional hand woven carpets featuring exquisitely crafted images deriving from Shahbazi's original photographs. The format of Shahbazi's works reconciles the traditional with the contemporary but also questions the very cultural hierarchies on which we so often base our assumptions.

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Roger Hiorns

This was Hiorns' first solo exhibition in a UK public gallery. It comprised a selection of work from the preceding five years and provided the opportunity to see the breadth and invention of his practice. The exhibition featured a selection of Hiorns' 'crystallised' car engines. Hiorns dips the engines into a solution of copper sulphate, so that blue crystals form a baroque-like embellishment on the intricate network of pipes, wires and filters, making a stark contrast to the engines' original function as mechanical components. Also included were a series of ceramic sculptures. Hanging from the ceiling, the sculptures contained a piping system that pumped air bubbles into a solution producing columns of white foam that tentatively climbed upwards in infinite configurations until they collapsed or disintegrated. New work commissioned by Milton Keynes Gallery revealed the artist's fascination with materials and their transformation. Hiorns investigated the effects of particular substances on a group of steel sculptures. They were accompanied by 'Benign' (2005), Hiorns' film with a play written by the artist and performed by an actor as a monologue.

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Carlos Bunga

This was the first project in the UK by Portuguese artist Carlos Bunga.  He was commissioned by Director Michael Stanley to make a new site-specific for Milton Keynes Gallery's Long Gallery space. Bunga builds complex structures made from corrugated cardboard held together with packing tape. The structures take over the environment they inhabit, encouraging an alternative reading of the original space.  The constructions emphasise the instability of architecture. There is a possibility of growth and change; the constructions mutate, develop, extend and remain in a state of transformation.

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Phillip Allen

This was the first major solo exhibition in the UK by British artist Phillip Allen. Allen is known for his textured paintings, in which the central motif is framed at the top and bottom by multiple layers of paint that are amassed and coated over each other. Allen’s work demonstrates not only an interest in image-making, but also in the substance and nature of paint itself. The artist’s continuous practice of making numerous felt-tip sketches and drawings on A4 paper chart the inception of his abstract forms and arrangements. These drawings become the basis for his paintings where the rules of modernism are both playfully acknowledged and irreverently dismissed.

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Anja Schrey: Solo Entertainer

MK G presented the first solo exhibition in the UK by German artist Anja Schrey. The exhibition comprised new and recent works of larger-than-life size colour pencil drawings of the artist. Schrey is always the subject of the work. Taking numerous photographs to inform the choice of pose, she then works on an enlarged scale, with drawings ranging from 50cm to 4.5m across; with the resulting images dominating individual gallery walls. In the various poses she assumes, she never engages in direct eye contact with the viewer, but with an air of detachment, stares beyond the margins of the work. Schrey's influences vary; the media, the fashion industry and art history can sometimes be detected in the drawings. Occasionally the poses she adopts have been informed by performances she has made in which the audience are invited to suggest her dress, style and gesture.

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Carlos Amorales: Spider Web Negative

This was Mexican artist Carlos Amorales's first solo exhibition in the UK. It featured new and recent work, comprising video, installation, drawing and animation. Amorales draws on his ongoing fascination with the fictitious and the real, as explored in his evolving "liquid archive". This comprises an inventory of digital images that become the means of collaboration with other practitioners; animators, musicians and composers. As part of his exhibition at MK Gallery, Amorales transformed the archive into an elaborate suite of children's puzzles, set within a specially designed environment.

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Rose Finn-Kelcey

For this, her most comprehensive exhibition in nearly ten years British artist Rose Finn-Kelcey presented three new sculptural installations in the Cube, Middle and Long Galleries. Made partly in response to her recent residency and tour of China sponsored by The Red Mansion Foundation, the use and misuse of language provided the focus for the work in the exhibition. With a characteristic blend of humour and pathos, she investigated the nature of interpretation and re-contextualisation. Chinese characters collided and were assimilated into new and alien contexts so that they were both lost and found in translation, allowing them to develop new meanings. Appropriating street signage, fairground art and shop front hoardings, the exhibition demonstrated the extent and breadth of Finn-Kelcey's invention.

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David Austen

This exhibition was the largest and most comprehensive by British artist David Austen for over ten years. It brought together a rich and significant body of work which included the distinctive paintings and works on paper for which he has become widely known, as well as a film and hanging sculptures, both of which signaled a new and important departure in the artist's work. Central to the exhibition was the premiere of the film Crackers, commissioned by Milton Keynes Gallery and the Centre for Contemporary Visual Arts, University of Brighton, with the support of Arts Council England. Written and directed by Austen, the film is set within the confines of a single space, the Drawing Room of The Regency Town House in Hove, once home to a sea captain and now undergoing a lengthy process of renovation. Sparsely furnished, the room is host to two protagonists, Tin and Heart (actors Toby Kebbell and David Leon), who engage in an exchange that reveals a dark, complex narrative, interjected with black humour and sharp wit. Through the provocative and sometimes explicit nature of the language, Crackers resonates with many ideas that often resurface in Austen's work - love, sex, death and the ache of human impulse and emotion in which love lies complicit with fear, comedy complicit with tragedy. There is no resolution to the story being told, only ambivalence, an uneasy rhythm and profound uncertainty, as Heart poignantly remarks, 'We are adrift. We have left our moorings'. The exhibition featured a number of new paintings including Glass, Tree and Hearts and the text-based Heart Snatcher and Black City. Here, the forcefulness of the statements - the clash of adjective and noun - reveal the distillation of image and text that takes place in Austen's studio. The 'deadness' of the painting surface — as Austen often paints large expanse of his heavy flax canvas with small brushes — and the paint — almost dry, bleached, but seductive to the touch – creates an uncompromising surface.  Within Austen's work, the landscape of text, repeated abstract patterns and graphic forms becomes a measure of time – from the months it may take to finish a canvas to the moments to create a watercolour of one of his tiny figures that can be seen in his installation of watercolours, Froth on a Daydream. In Darkland, the huge and evolving installation of hundreds of black ink drawings that fill an entire wall, the viewer may see the gestation of the source material that will figure in Austen's future films. Much of the basis for the work is derived from observations of the everyday world that, removed from their original context, become invested with new meaning or take on different forms. For example, Austen's sculptural works take the form of suspended mobiles constructed in painted plaster, cardboard, steel and wire. His use of everyday objects is thrown into sharp relief by the elegant balance of the sculpture itself.
Exhibition supported by Arts Council England Grants for the Arts, the Centre for Contemporary Visual Arts, University of Brighton, The Regency Town House, Hove, and MITES, a FACT service.

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Adrian Paci: Per Speculum

Adrian Paci has become internationally recognised as an artist whose work addresses themes of exile, dislocation and loss. Milton Keynes Gallery presented his first solo exhibition in the UK, revealing the depth of his work, in film, sculpture, painting and drawing. Paci sought exile from his native Albania in the mid 1990s and since settling in Italy his films have addressed the political and personal changes that have taken place in Albania and his own experiences. Many of his films have involved his family and friends, and men from the town in which he grew up, providing insight into the adjustments that they have had to make in coming to terms with their new situation. Art and life have until recently been interchangeable, as Paci has used his practice to understand his own role in society and what might be expected of him as an artist. Rather than providing the viewer with a nostalgic glance at the life that was left behind, Paci presents people that are trying to come to terms with how it is now. The short film per speculum (2006), shown at Milton Keynes Gallery, represents a marked shift from the preoccupations of Paci's earlier films. Commissioned and produced by Milton Keynes Gallery and francesca kaufmann, Milan, per speculum, instead of being based on real circumstance, has a fictional, lyrical, slow moving plot. It brings together a number of strands that have surfaced in earlier films, including childhood, human knowledge and light. Filmed on location in the Northamptonshire countryside, per speculum sees a group of children playing with a mirror. Shattered into pieces, it is then used to reflect the sun as the children sit in the boughs of an enormous tree, so that it glistens with sparks of light. The shimmering light alludes to a passage from St Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians (13:12), (providing the source for the film's title) 'videmus nunc per speculum in aenigmate tunc autem face ad faciem' – At present we see indistinctly, as in a mirror, but then face to face. At present I know partially; then I shall know fully, as I am fully known. As the light is reflected back onto the viewer, Paci invites us to consider the possibilities and limits of knowledge and the way that we use it. Religion has been significant in other areas of Paci's practice. The Pasolini Chapel (2005) which was part of the exhibition, is dedicated to the filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini. Painted film stills (gouache on wood) from Pasolini's films The Gospel According to St Matthew (1964) and Mamma Roma (1962) adorn the inner and outer walls of a small hut placed in the middle of the gallery. The Gospel According to St Matthew was highly controversial and showed Christ as a young revolutionary while Mamma Roma was full of allusions to religious stories. The sepia-like paintings depict important silent scenes from each film, and this work, shown alongside paintings of scenes in Pasolini's The Decameron (1971) reveal Paci's avid fascination in the relationship between painting, photography and the cinematic tradition. Paci also captures photographs from his films and exhibits them alongside the films. Again, the significance of light in Paci's work was brought into focus, as visitors had the opportunity to see images from Turn On (2004) which featured a group of men from Paci's home town Shkodra, playing with the effects of light and dark, as they consider their changed lives. The images were accompanied by photographs from other works, including images taken on the set of per speculum. The exhibition was accompanied by a full colour catalogue, with contributions from Christy Lange, Assistant Editor of Frieze and Michael Stanley, Director of Milton Keynes Gallery.
Exhibition supported by The Henry Moore Foundation

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