16th January – 16th February 2013
Ronchini Gallery London presents The Uncanny featuring new works by two young artists, Adeline de Monseignat and Berndnaut Smilde, curated by James Putnam .
The Uncanny draws on each artist’s relationship with their materials and the ways in which they create a sense of unease for the viewer by using the familiar out of context.
The exhibition’s theme is partly inspired by Sigmund Freud’s celebrated 1919 essay of the same title. Based on the notion that the strange could not exist without the non-strange, Freud’s study pioneered the distinctive nature of the uncanny as a feeling of something not simply weird or mysterious but, more specifically, as something strangely familiar. Freud’s concept of the uncanny and his interpretation of dreams had a significant influence on the Surrealist movement and their depiction of the unnatural and strange.
Dutch-Monegasque artist de Monseignat creates sculptures and installations from organic and tactile materials such as fur, a material suspended between life and death, often encased in glass. Her works have an uncertainty as to whether they are animate or inanimate objects. She refers to her creations as ‘creaptures’ as they are somewhere in between creatures and sculptures. Her kinetic works aim to create a sense of life through movement and mimic a slow breath. The creaptures thus hold a sense of presence and their tactile qualities elicit in the spectator an unfulfilled desire to touch them.
Dutch artist, Berndnaut Smilde produces striking images of ‘real’ clouds suspended within empty rooms. Using a fog machine, he carefully adjusts the temperature and humidity to produce clouds just long enough to be photographed. There is a unique ephemeral aspect to the work where the photograph captures a very brief moment before the cloud dissipates and disappears again as mysteriously as it was formed. His choice of lighting and viewing aspect enables him to create a representation of the cloud’s physicality. Smilde has starting working with a material called aerogel . It consists of 99.8% air and is the lightest solid material on earth.
In a new series of work specially commissioned by Ronchini Gallery, aerogel hovers like an eerie translucent smoke over scaled down models of buildings.
About the artists
Adeline de Monseignat (b. 1987, Monaco) lives and works in London. She was awarded the Catlin Art Prize, Visitor Vote Prize (2012) and was long listed for The Threadneedle Prize (2012). She studied at UCL, the Slade School of Fine Art and Parsons The New School, New York, before graduating with an MA in Fine Art from City & Guilds of London Art School in 2011.
Berndnaut Smilde (b. 1978, Groningen) lives and works in Amsterdam. Smilde’s work has been exhibited at Out of Focus, Saatchi Gallery, London (2012) and Red Sky at Night, Mercer Union, Toronto (2012). Smilde holds an MA from the Frank Mohr Institute, Groningen. Awards include a starter stipend from The Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture. He was a resident artist at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin in 2008.
