Text for Andy Maughan

more at schediosunrehearsed.blogspot.com

Andrew Maughan

As garish as a pantomime dame, and as hapless as road kill, Andrew Maughan's new series of portraits depicting Bilderberg attendees confront us at the tenuous border between fascination and repulsion. His gaudy – verging on grotesque – pallet of colours, and fast, lacerating brush marks, build up paintings which are almost entirely plastic surface, subsuming (or denying) any suggestion of the subject's personality, humanity, or of an interiority to the work. This specularization, and negation of an interior life, serves a double purpose. On the one hand, Maughan utilizes the frenetic painterly gestures and synthetic colours to obscure the identity of the subjects as a simile for the abstracting, and alienating effects of the esoteric secrecy surrounding the Bilderberg meetings. Whilst on the other hand, he is underlining, with jovial cynicism, the complicity of contemporary art in the entirely material, and vacuous systems of commodity culture.

But hold on, Bilderberg? You may well ask. What is Bilderberg?...Surrounded by police tape, political opacity, and media blackout, Bilderberg is reportedly the most well-protected, unofficial, meeting of the world's elite. Whether a supreme cabal, a political conference, or a bombastic shindig (that the rest of us aren't invited to), what little is known about Bilderberg is that it is an annual get together of the most influential politicians, heads of state and directors of big business in a luxury hotel, beyond the public gaze and democratic accountability. Everything else we know are the morsels gleamed by concerned journalists such as The Guardian's Charlie Skelton, reporting from the periphery of the World's most influential party; from outside hotel lobbies, and secret bolt-holes, whilst pursued by shady goons and government security officers.
Invited to produce this series by Skelton, Maughan shares similar concerns in his practice. With impudent curiosity both men highlight the clandestine operations of social axioms and the ideological bankruptcy of pervasive systems of power and influence. With the deceptive playfulness of an itinerant Art school graduate, Maughan adopts the spontaneous, pseudo-macho gestures and raw, barely mixed colours of modernisms predecessors (such as De Kooning). But he deploys these with the slick, cynical virtuosity of Kippenberger to develop calculated paintings which are simultaneously instantaneous, and highly laboured, as indicated by the accumulated layers of texture and colour, the painted, and re-painted details. There is something jarring about these parallels however, and about the appropriation, the plundering of art history's corpse, which operates in Maughan's larger-than-life canvases... The distorted, liquescent faces of Prince Philip, and Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, hover like carnivorous monsters above backgrounds reminiscent of pre-school imitations of Rothko colour field paintings. Their flat, plastic, and gaudy appearance hints at the tacky reproductions of 'monumental' art works that can be found in gallery gift shops, and on the walls of living rooms and student's bedrooms as dead signs of cultural appreciation and intellectual prestige. This reference seems to underscore the contradictory, and seedy functions of the contemporary Art world, in which Art is now entirely bound up with the mechanics of consumer desires, and of material culture.

Just as the Heroes of Abstract Expressionism – whose work was intended to be variously reactionary, revolutionary, and spiritual – have their works sold at Christie's for millions of dollars to hang in the homes and collections of the rich, Art is now inevitably subjected to the changing fashions of the Art World, the Art Market, and the capitalist Zeitgeist. Painting has seen a revival in recent years after Saatchi's monumental Triumph of Painting (2005) whether this was a savvy reaction to changing trends, or an innovative move on Charles Saatchi's part , painting was firmly reestablished on the agenda of galleries, art publishing houses, and artists alike.

Andy Maughan's distorted, and fragmentary portraits endlessly obfuscate comfortable certainty. They require the viewer to reconstruct the subjects in their imaginations – with their scratched-out eyes, the grotesque mouths, the dribbles of paint – but this is an impossible task. Identity, and recognition, is never complete. It continually shades off beyond the frenetic marks, and beneath the macabre fleshy colours, in the same way as the subjects do; in their inaccessible, elitist echelons of power.

Iris Aspinall Priest

Exquisite Corpse

Exquisite Corpse

29th April - 9th May

Core Gallery

8-12 Creekside, Deptford, London, SE8 3DX


http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/dealers_galleries/Gallery/Core+Gallery/20092.html

'DNR', Vault Gallery

DNR

An Exhibition of new work by Rachael Allen and Iris Priest

The VAULT Gallery, Lancaster, UK
60-62 Church Street

April 9th - April 23rd

Preview 7pm Thursday April 8th

http://www.vaultgallery.org/

Brick by Brick, xsite Gallery, Newcastle

Brick by Brick: An exhibition of small-scale wall drawings by 25 artists.

25 artists have been invited to make a wall drawing.

All the wall drawings will occupy the same wall.

Each artist will be asked to pick a number at random from a selection of 1-25. That number will dictate which row of bricks on the wall they will work on.

There will be only one artist per row.

Each artist will then chose a specific brick on that row to work on.

Each artist must work within the space of a single brick.

Each artist must work directly onto or into the wall.

Each artist may work using any medium.

All works are to be completed by December 14th 2009.

All works are temporary.

Globe Gallery Plan Chest December 09

http://www.globegallery.org/eshot/14/

ARKA Analysis

In accompaniment to Ben Jeans Houghton's new art work ARKA, Field Work One, Iris has been contributing to an ongoing dialogue with Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau and Emma Cummins concerning the nature of dreams, their place in art, and critical discourse.

The online discussion is regularly updated and can be viewed at www.arkaanalysis.com

The Spaces Between

The Spaces Between

36 Lime Street Gallery and Studios,
Newcastle upon Tyne

Saturday 17th - Sunday 24thOctober

"...truth can neither be apprehended nor communicated...history is an art like all other sciences."
Cicely Wedgwood (1960), English Historian

The Spaces Between is a show of new, site-responsive drawing and paintings by the Newcastle based artist Iris Priest.

The work in the show seeks to establish a poetic archaeology of the space at 36 Lime Street, exploring its history and past incarnations, as recorded through the archives, newspaper stories and rumour.

By avoiding elevating or giving authority to any one of these sources, Priest attempts to distill a history which is at once factual, fantastical, personal and metaphorical. The work hints towards the presence of absence, and the presence of unknowable history.