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Indepth Arts News:
"Watching Paint Dry"
2002-07-29 until 2002-08-23
Showstudio.com
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A unique opportunity to see a complete unedited view of the working lives of three influential artists on the contemporary art scene. Watching Paint Dry is a live Web broadcast from the studios of Matthew Collings, Liz Neal, and Gavin Turk on www.showstudio.com, an online broadcasting workshop conceived and supported by British fashion photographer Nick Knight to commission independent projects from the fields of fashion, design, music and the visual arts.
Matthew Collings is widely recognised as a writer and broadcaster, though he is trained as and still practises as an artist. He has published several popular and high profile books such as Blimey and Art Crazy Nation that challenge the orthodoxy of art writing - erudite, astute, often maverick viewpoints written with simplicity and humour. He has appeared frequently on television as presenter of his own series This is Modern Art, and as presenter of Channel 4's The Turner Prize. Here Collings, a dedicated painter, embarks on a new painting specially conceived for Watching Paint Dry - it will be a composite image made from 12 smaller canvasses.
Liz Neal is a young artist who has a provocative practice confronting pornographic imagery. She came to notoriety for exhibiting a whole room of sexual painting and collages in Death to the Fascist Insect that Preys on the Life of the People (2001), curated by Martin Maloney for the Anthony D'Offay Gallery, London. Neal's explosive canvases are punk inspired odes to subjects - prostitutes advertising cards and banner slogans shout for attention in paintings that are intelligent and slowly compelling. Neal has been working for over a year on a remarkable project in which she has covered the whole of her studio in canvas - masking every inch of ceiling, walls and floor, and sewn intricately over fixtures such as radiators and light switches. Onto this she has begun painting and during the month Neal will finish and dismantle the room.
Gavin Turk is probably best known for Pop (1993) the waxwork he made of himself as Sid Vicious in the stance of Warhol's Elvis Presley, exhibited at Sensation, Royal Academy, London (1997). He has made a number of subsequent works based on his own physical presence mutated into others. Since his infamous degree show (1991) where he presented simply an English Heritage plaque bearing the inscription "Borough of Kensington Gavin Turk Sculptor Worked Here 1989-1991", Turk has made prints, sculptures and paintings investigating what it means to be an artist, often dealing with issues of authorship and originality. Turk's contribution is likely to be humorous and unpredictable.
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