"Matt Franks / Gemma Nelson"
2008-01-19 until 2008-03-18
Laure Genillard
London, , UK United Kingdom

"Matt Franks / Gemma Nelson" at Laure Genillard in London brings together two artists who deal with colour and shape in baroque-style excesses. Seductive, engaging and frighteningly singular, their unlimited love for sugar-sweet colours and roundness of forms proposes an antithesis to the minimal neo-conceptualism of the programme. Both artists share a desire to make abstract art that have a quality that looks, through their apparent clumsiness, amateurish. They are interested in biomorphic forms, which sit on the edge between the seductive and the repulsive. With great intensity, time- consuming efforts and a determined obsession, they both pursue personal developments towards abstraction, which at times parodies notions of Modernism.

Matt Franks draws his inspiration from a wide choice of sources ranging from Modernist sculpture, contemporary cartoons and the Baroque. Using industrial plastics such as Styrofoam and polystyrene, meticulously hand-carved and sanded down, he gives life to a fantasy of gravity-defying sculptures resonating with humour and playfulness. The two sculptures presented, Zoicks and New Gods, both from 2002 could resemble plants found in another galaxy.

Gemma Nelson's highly cellular abstractions use a wide variety of materials such as Indian inks, enamel, acrylics, filtered pen, wax beads, cotton thread, paper collages and others. The obsessively crafted cells create a chaotic tapestry-like response to various themes such as female sexuality or notions of webbing and nets. In other parts Gemma's world is drawn from, and pays homage to the patterning and totemic tattoos of indigenous peoples from around the world.

'I see my paintings as being objects of condensed time, suggesting disruption, mutation and beauty. Each of the obsessively crafted cells in my work represents a slot of a few minutes in the production of the painting, although when viewed in their entirety, the cells in my paintings merge and are reminiscent of the psychedelic patterns of the sixties. We can only make sense of time as being a linear journey, although in reality time bends, warps and shifts.' ˆ Gemma Nelson

Related Links:

Indepth Arts Resources for United Kingdom

Other Important Exhibitions in London

Call for Artists : Community Arts Initiative - The Artist Project - Museum of Fine Art Boston Alexis Harding : Bi-product Depositories - Mummery + Schnelle Gallery der PROZESS : hunchentoot goes out 2 - Enda Odonoghue to Take Part - hunchentoot Galerie INTIMACY AND DESECRATION : The Body, Gender and Identity - CACT - centro d'arte contemporanea ticino Mark Edward Harris : The Art of the Japanese Bath - Kopeikin Gallery Call for Artists : 13th Annual Subtle Technologies Festival Explores Sustainability - Subtle Technologies, University of Toronto Art in Mind : Work by Natalia O'Neill - Brick Lane Gallery The Ione Citrin Collection - Poway Center for the Performing Arts Gallery Parallel Realities : Aishan Yu's First Solo Show in the UK - Peifen Fine Art Secrets and Confessions : Peter Sudar, John Stark, Leonard Vartic, Ioan Cristea - Ana Cristea Gallery Call for Artists : The Beast In Me, Johnny Cash - Art Influenced by the Struggle of a Man' - Nave Gallery Notations - Bruce Nauman: Days and Giorni - Philadelphia Museum of Art Beauitful Elsewhere : Fusion and Con-fusion - Migrating Cultures and the Dynamic of Exchange - Universita di Napoli - Partenope Animal Nature : Powerful Paintings, Drawings and Digital Prints by Hyacinthe Kuller-Baron - Computer Arts Gallery