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Tannery Arts is a small, independent charity concerned with supporting the professional development of emerging and established artists through the provision of affordable studios, promoting their practice through opportunities to exhibit work, develop projects, generate partnerships with local authorities, private property owners and social housing organisations as well as engage in learning activities.
DE. FI. CIEN. CY examines a shared concern with the failure, or the ‘deficiency’, of pictorial representation. The exhibition includes over 50 works on paper by Polish artist Andrzej Wroblewski (1927-57), Dutch artist Rene Daniels (b.1950) and Belgian Luc Tuymans (b.1958). Tuymans will also be making an in situ wall drawing for Drawing Room galleries. In the hands of these artists, ‘deficiency’ becomes a positive agent of artistic achievement.
All three artists have been immensely influential and are counted among the outstanding artists of the 20th century. Their shared preoccupation with the failure of pictorial representation has been triggered by a range of socio, personal and political issues, and this exhibition demonstrates affinities and disparities between the work of the three artists, across generations and cultures. Wroblewski’s work after 1955 is informed by a double trauma, that of Nazi atrocities and of the apparently failed communist model. Tuymans reacts to a rift traversing his own family, one part of which collaborated with the German occupation while the other resisted. He consequently engages in the revision of a poisoned past and instances of ideological systems. Daniels's work engages with the 1980s “return to painting” by addressing the institutionalisation and commodification of the art work.
The oeuvres of Daniels's and Tuymans's are distinguished from Wroblewski's in that they both make the installation of pictures a decisive part of their practice, be it in terms of representation or in terms of the actual implementation of site-specific work. Since the end of the 1990s, Tuymans has produced wall paintings based on earlier paintings or drawings. His wall drawing for Drawing Room departs from this practice and will be based on photographed installation views of his work. This wall drawing will highlight the fact that Tuymans openly appropriates and recycles his own work – not to reflect on it in the sense of further development but to emphasize the missing reference to a basic premise, a clear demonstration of his concept of “authentic forgery”. At the same time, it will highlight the related issue of the faded, “deficient” image that draws the power of its sensuous presence from its impotence.
Curated by Ulrich Loock
– DE. FI. CIEN. CY was first presented at Art Stations gallery Art Stations by Grazyna Kulczyk, Stary Browar, Poznan, Poland, 28 November 2014 to 28 February 2015.
IMAGE: Luc Tuymans, Nikko, 2014, watercolour on paper, 29.4 x 41.7 cm, Private Collection.
A 208 page catalogue will be released during the exhibition which illustrates each work (approx. 135 images) and includes text by Ulrich Loock. Co-published with Art Stations Gallery, Stary Browar, Poznan. Research support: Andrezj Wroblewski Foundation.
SEE ARTISTS AND CURATOR BIO HERE
For further information, images, biographies, or to arrange interviews please contact Laura Perry on [email protected] or telephone 020 7394 5657