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Indepth Arts News:
" THE LONG DARK : 9 contemporary artists explore ‘medievalism’ in the modern age"
2010-07-17 until 2010-09-19
Kettle's Yard Gallery, University of Cambridge
Cambridge, ,
UK United Kingdom
The Long Dark brings together sculpture, painting, photography and etchings by nine contemporary artists to consider the enduring influence of medievalism in the modern age. Artsists included are Eva Berendes, Simon Bill, Alexandra Bircken, Nicholas Byrne, Raphael Danke, Peter Linde Busk, Kalin Lindena, Maria Loboda, and Bernd Ribbeck.
The exhibition takes as its starting point John Ruskin’s essay, On the Nature of Gothic Architecture, published within the second volume of The Stones of Venice (1853). In his essay, Ruskin championed the qualities of workmanship and artistic liberty in the Gothic style, at a moment when architecture and the decorative arts in Britain were being remodelled by modern, mechanical methods of production. Ruskin believed that architecture was a distinctly 'political' art. The values of 'truthfulness' and the unity of fact with design that he aligned with the Gothic style would find resonance later with the Arts and Craft movement in England and the Bauhaus in Germany.
The Long Dark cites Ruskin’s essay within a tradition of historical revivalism. Hailing from across northern Europe, the artists in this exhibition draw primarily on 20th century modernism to set their terms of reference. However, their work also reveals inflections of a ‘Gothic’ sensibility, pre-modern ideas such as occultism and modes of production such as traditional crafts, filtered through an aesthetic language indebted to modernism.
From Alexandra Bircken’s woven screens to Maria Loboda’s ‘poisonous’ wall drawing, the works in this exhibition exploit a wide variety of techniques and materials and conjure a mixture of visual and cultural references, from harlequins and heraldry to new age mysticism, Gothic architecture to constructivist patterns.
Many of the artists adopt collage-like methods, creating works with multiple layers; Raphael Danke rephotographs found photographs using a mobile phone, sometimes using double exposures to suggest degraded spectral images - while figures seem to float within Peter Linde Busk’s densely patterned, collaged paintings. Nicholas Byrne’s paintings on transparent Plexiglas suggest successive veils of ornamental and figurative forms, and Bernd Ribbeck’s jewel-like geometric compositions are built up with layers of thinly applied colour, scraped back in places to reveal the layers. Screens and veils are evoked elsewhere by Eva Berendes, while the sensuality of these 2-dimensional works is echoed in the raw materiality of sculpture by Kalin Lindena, Alexandra Bircken, Eva Berendes, Raphael Danke and Maria Loboda.
Lindena’s heraldic ‘flags’ combine mass-produced items of clothing with salvaged fragments of coloured glass and heavy metal armatures while Loboda applies jewel-like glazes to lumpen ceramic vases crafted in the dark. The seams on Berendes’ geometric patchwork screens are left unfinished and Bircken brings together machine-finished materials, natural objects and toxic colours in what often look like makeshift assemblages. Flaunting conventions of style and taste, Simon Bill’s oval canvases bring a note of irony.
The exhibition includes new work by Simon Bill, Peter Linde Busk, Alexandra Bircken and Nicholas Byrne, and new site-specific installations by Kalin Lindena and Maria Loboda.
This international group of artists includes a number of rising stars for whom The Long Dark is their first exhibition in a UK public gallery.
The Long Dark is curated by Michelle Cotton and was originally commissioned by International 3, Manchester.
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