Kate MacGarry

Luke Gottelier & Max Lamb

01 - 31 May 2014

Paintings & Furniture, Luke Gottelier and Max Lamb, installation view, Kate MacGarry, London, 2014
LUKE GOTTELIER & MAX LAMB
1 - 31 May 2014

Kate MacGarry is pleased to present an exhibition of furniture by Max Lamb and paintings by Luke Gottelier. Both bodies of work employ a very direct and physical approach – each piece in the exhibition was created in one day. The works in the show are characterised by the primitive, physical process of their creation.
Designer Max Lamb states "imposing tools on a material is like putting paint on paper for an artist". For the exhibition, he has made a collection of furniture assembled from offcuts of expanded polystyrene accumulated over 8 years of working with the material. No virgin material is used in the process and pieces are combined seemingly spontaneously, albeit with rigorous rationale and efficiency, to make furniture that is traditional in function but wholly unique in form. In true expedient fashion, a fast-drying, multicoloured polyurethane rubber is sprayed onto the surface to form a permanent, waterproof exoskeleton over the fragile polystyrene.

Luke Gottelier’s paintings all come from the series Paintings of Animals and Leisure, made between 2000 and 2004. The paintings are typically crude and explicit in the way they are painted as well as in their subject matter. The paintings take the iconography of faces as their starting point however, startling shifts in scale and grotesque exaggerations of form swiftly abandon any traditional notion of the genre of portrait painting. Gottelier’s quick, aggressive manner of painting and acid colour combinations batter the paintings over the viewer’s head. These works trace their ancestors to the 18th century caricaturists, such as Gilray, Rowlandson and Richard Newton, when scatology and irreverence became enshrined in English visual culture.

LUKE GOTTELIER (b. 1968) is represented by Ancient and Modern, London. MAX LAMB (b. 1980) is represented by Fumi Gallery, London and Johnson Trading Gallery, New York. He recently produced a special project 'Marmoreal' with Dzek shown at Salone del Mobile 2014 in Milan.
 

Tags: Luke Gottelier