www.millenniumgallery.co.uk
KEN SPOONER ‘Skin’
Ken’s latest exhibition ‘Skin’ embodies the vibrant energy and ever evolving dynamic he pushes in his work. The ‘Skin’ is at once the textural, coloured layers stretched across the surface and the envelopment of the sculptural shapes beneath. He continually explores the blurring of the lines and dimensions between differing art disciplines. His work has a great sense of fearlessness and a willingness to step into the unknown. This spontaneity is perhaps the hardest thing to achieve visually yet Ken does so with well-justified confidence.
‘For me painting is about creation not stagnation. That’s what I do, it’s my approach.
To figure out how it works, the different possibilities that can happen I need to know how it all goes together, how it works. There’s no real plan to any of the series of works, only the experience of the previous work. It comes about through its own development. What comes from that makes the decision whether to keep it or not. To explore the possibilities between art as object and art as surface or skin.
Painting as sculpture. Sculpture as painting. Structure and ornament. For me as an artist I am interested in what it can be, not in what can I do.’
Ken Spooner
It is difficult to summarize the work, in the same way that it is difficult to hit a moving target. Perhaps it is best to start by saying that he makes art, and has made it his business to make art from childhood until now his 67th year, with little regards for the market place. Simply to please and to challenge himself.
Spooner himself states that he is interested in what a work can be, not what he can do, which gives us an insight in to the childlike energy that goes in to the continuation of his journey as an artist.
When you meet him, he has an infectious, almost exhausting appetite for stimulus, all that he sees, and all that he handles has the potential to become a work. To be taken apart, put back together to make a new ‘it’.
One is reminded of Robert Rauchenberg, the play of limitless possibilities that leads to something serious. But only through play and daring can it be reached.
This is my fourth experience of working with Ken on a solo exhibition, and once again the work is new to me. His objects, as they are difficult to classify as paintings or sculpture, move in the direction that they themselves dictate. He takes the structure for the work and then goes about applying its ‘skin’.
This exhibition seems to contain many strands, you are reminded of the modernists, the primitives, expressionists, not because the work borrows or lends, but because it is human and hasn’t reached its final destination so walks the paths that art leads us. The dizzying use of frenetic symbolism, that you would have seen in past exhibitions, has been replaced by a
much calmer juxtaposition of surface and colour. Different relationships are created, but you know, and it is exciting that you know, that all can change again, and you can be pulled back to freneticism again. Yet somehow you can always see that it is a Ken Spooner, something remains. I guess that can only be put down to honesty as an artist, once again returning to the fact that the work is about what it can do, not the artist himself. Removal of ego to reach the truer self.
The exhibition will be showing in Galleries 2 & 3 from 11 July – 3 August 2009
Gallery 1 will have a mixed show of Millennium artists.
The gallery is open seven days a week 10 am – 5 pm.
If you require further press material please contact contact: Sarah Goldbart or Joseph Clarke on: 01736 793 121
