Line
Lewis
Betts, John Dougill, Georgie Hopton, Edit Oderbolz, Amy Stephens
Private view: Thursday 14 April
2011
Exhibition Continues: 15 April
– 21 May 2011
Line brings together the work of five artists who,
working with diverse media and forms, employ the trace, the contour and the mark
in gestures that are at times incidental and at others explicit.
The
installations of Swiss artist Edit Oderbolz draw lines through the space of the
gallery with the use of metal curtain rails trailing colourful fabric. Her work
hovers between dimensions, the sculptural drapery casting painterly hues on the
gallery wall. It meanwhile straddles the everyday and the ethereal: common
household items fashion diaphanous forms, inducing an alternative logic.
Complementing the delicacy of Oderbolz’s
installation, Georgie Hopton’s string and wool collages of cyclamen
function simultaneously as both drawing and relief. Inspired by the
flower’s sculptural and modernist qualities, the artist reworks their
angles and curves on the paper as an embroiderer might on a piece of cloth.
Influenced by her mother’s needlework, Jean Arp and children’s
crafts, the work conveys form and volume through the simple juxtaposition of
colour and its lack.
The effect Lewis Betts produces through his process
of routering into plywood sheets and the gallery wall is likewise both graphic
and sculptural. The resulting imagery of simplified, bulbous forms evokes the
bodily and the machinic, the awkward and the absurd. Primitive yet canny, the
sexually suggestive totems are coupled with subtly provocative colouration.
These understated interventions in the gallery space appear like cave paintings
of the future.
John Dougill mediates between the introspection of
the horizon and the affirmation of the puncture in a series of small paintings
about the sea and its pleasures and politics. These variations overlay the
seascapes with brightly coloured perforations which introduce a
push-and-pull between an atmospheric space and the surface. The work poignantly
brings together presence and absence, appealing to the ephemeral workings of
memory.
Birch in
Space by Amy Stephens continues the meditative thread. The bronze sculpture
cast in eight parts from the branch of a birch tree reflects the artist’s
interest in the appropriation of nature. Its linear, metallic form acts as an
index of the gallery space, this playful elegance typical of Stephens’s
work and its inherent themes of beauty, performativity and value.
Edit Oderbolz (b. 1966, Stein am Rhein) was featured
at Art Basel by Lullin + Ferrari, and has had solo exhibitions at Galerie Mark
Müller, Zürich, Kunsthaus Langenthal and Kunstmuseum Basel, Museum
für Gegenwartskunst. Georgie Hopton (b. 1967, North
Yorkshire) has shown at New Art Centre, Wiltshire, South London Gallery and
Milton Keynes Gallery. She was nominated for the Max Mara Art Prize for Women in
2007. Lewis Betts (b. 1985 Plymouth) was included in the 2011
Premiums exhibition at the Royal Academy, where he is completing his
postgraduate degree. John Dougill (b. 1934, Liverpool) has had
recent exhibitions at Studio 1.1, London, and North House Gallery, Manningtree.
Amy Stephens (b. 1981, lives and works in London) has shown
recently at IMT Gallery, London, Project Space Leeds and
No Soul For Sale - A Festival of Independents at Tate Modern. She has been
awarded an Artists’ Residency with the Irish Museum of Modern Art in 2011
and completed residencies at the Banff Centre, Canada in 2010, and SÍM,
Iceland in 2009.
Notes for Editors:
Image
caption: Edit Oderbolz, Untitled, Wood, aluminium and fabrics, 400 x 290 x 50
cm, 2011
Address: All Hallows Hall, 6 Copperfield Street, London, SE1
0EP
Opening hours: Tuesday – Saturday 10am- 6pm or by appointment
Contacts and further information: +44(0)20 7928 3096 gallery@poppysebire.com
www.poppysebire.com
