Exhibition: 1st August to 6th September 2008
Featuring works by: Ricardo Alcaide, Nobuyoshi Araki, Artists Anonymous, Charlotte Beaudry, Gordon Cheung, Mat Collishaw, Koichi Enamoto, Fafi, James P Graham, Simon Hitchens, Aaron Johnson, Mark Karasick, Andrea Massaioli, Daniel Medina, Emi Miyashita, Mondongo, Javier Rodriguez, Dodi Reifenberg, Luis Romero, Caroline Rothwell, Gaia Scaramella, Augusto Villalva, and Julian Wild.
Since opening it’s doors in October 2007, Maddox Arts has endeavoured to bring some of the most exciting established and emerging international artists to 52 Brook’s Mews. Six exhibitions of wildly different sentiment have featured work in a variety of mediums including drawing, installation, kinetics, painting, performance, sculpture and video. The Summer show aims to capture such diversity with a broad selection of some of the best works from the past ten months as well as a number of new consignments indicating possible future intentions.
Among the works included in the show is James P Graham’s monumental photograph ‘38°48’36.86N 15°13’46.69E’ (2007), taken from his ongoing series of works ‘Voyage of a Deceased Visionary’, which was first realised while working on Stromboli in 2007. In the work, the artist makes use of a human skull fragment, discovered on a trip to Central Tibet near the sacred Guru Rimpoche cave at Sheldrak, shown also in an original Polaroid. Curiously, it displays an additional bone (known as a wormian bone) that is rarely found along the suture of the human skull, the joins of which resemble the marks found within a seismic graph. The work captures a sense of romanticism, where the very idea of “self-expression” is associated with physical and spiritual isolation.
Also featured in the gallery for the first time are Mondongo, the internationally recognised Argentine artist collective comprised of Juliana Laffitte, Manuel Mendanha, and Agustina Picasso. The amount of work Mondongo put into each piece is extensive, and both intricate and beautiful. They are literally paintings without paint – using such materials as thread, beads, plasticine, cookies, and glitter, to name a few.
For the first time the gallery will be showing print works by two artists, Javier Rodriguez and Gaia Scaramella, who both draw on personal reflection and historical reference in different ways to create mysteriously serene and intriguing works. Furthermore, the gallery will present two works by the photographer Ricardo Alcaide taken from his moving series of homeless sitters, portrayed between 2002 and 2005. Dodi Reifenberg’s intricate work makes exclusive use of plastic bags to create detailed collage portraits, landscapes, sculptures and furniture from the new public enemy of our environmentally-conscious society. Also exhibited are a selection of Emi Miyashita’s miniature drawings, recently seen at her degree show at Central Saint Martins, complete with magnifying glasses to view the details.
Joining Simon Hitchens’s stone and resin works are sculptures by Caroline Rothwell and Julian Wild. Rothwell takes industrial materials and shapes them into objects via extraordinary hand-rendered processes: nickel is poured into hand-sewn fabric moulds creating impossibly voluminous solid metal sculptures. Julian Wild’s “Systems” explore the potential of functional materials and the expressive possibilities of a single line. They have been exhibited extensively in public spaces, at the Cass Sculpture Foundation and his work has also been shortlisted for the Jerwood sculpture prize.