20th April – 31st May 2012
Platform A presents its latest exhibition ‘This That and the Other’. The show brings together the work of Deb Covell, Keith Coventry and Barry Flanagan in the second in the series of pairings between Platform A artists and work from the mima collection.
The exhibition concentrates on the transformative potential of every day materials and highlights the subtle beauty in the artists’ formal approach to modernist composition, examining a particular engagement with materiality and celebrating artistic sensibility through a selective approach to recognisable, real life visual experiences.
The visual simplicity of Deb Covell’s work belies the intense rigour and recognition required in making her pared down, refined compositions. In a process of scraping, taping and layering, Covell covers her tracks leaving almost invisible evidence of how her paintings and collages are constructed. Yet this evidence is intentionally left to be found and is transformed into elegant compositions of tone and mark. The result is a kind of obtrusive tranquillity achieved through her own connoisseurship of material.
Keith Coventry is an established artist who looks at the history of art, and at social issues and combines them. In Coventry’s work, the detritus, aggression and excess of postmodern society is expressed through the poised and elegant language of modernism.There is a poetic detachment in his work, expressed through his favouring of workmanlike, un-aesthetic colours which can often appear random, coldly institutional or light industrial. His art conflates the mournful, quotidian sensibility of consumer culture, with both high modernist strategies and geo-political models.
Barry Flanagan was a major international artist who was constantly pushing the boundaries, in terms of materials and the relationship between painting and sculpture, and that of the artist and artisan. As a contemporary of the Process Artists and Arte Povera, he made strong use of canvas, hessian, jute, burlap, wood and even sand to bring every day materials into a fine art context.
