London’s most exciting visual arts talent is presented in a new accessible format, opening with a pop-up exhibition in a disused dental surgery along Time Out’s ‘One to Watch’ Chatsworth Road. The group show explores our relationship to pain, and what can be gained from endurance.
Launching in April 2012, Alvarado Gallery is set to become a new artistic outlet that bridges the gap between artists and illustrators and the domestic art collector. The gallery is set to have a series of themed temporary shows across London, before residing in a yet to be disclosed, fixed residence. The debut show is happening in what was once a dental surgery in Hackney’s up and coming Chatsworth Road. Alvarado Gallery was born out of the need to offer a professional platform for emerging and well-known artists to develop and show their work in an accessible format for the viewer within a relatively affordable price range. The gallery will create a playful environment of artistic expression, exploration and development. It will also give visitors the chance to see some of the most important new work being created today.
The Alvarado Gallery will launch with an exciting group show including works by Rob Ryan, Barbara Ryan, Reuben Dangoor, The Wooden Truth, Maddy Sargent, Le Gun’s Steph von Reiswitz and Neal Fox, Hannah Bays, Hayden Kays, Stone and Spear, Paul Willoughby, Martin O’Neill, Nick White, ATG’s Jack Murray and Jamie Brown, David Shillinglaw and Lynnie Zulu, plus other artists to be announced.
Inspired by Ovid’s quote ‘Be patient and be strong; for someday this pain will be useful to you’, the exhibition, entitled ‘Pain at the Dentist’, explores our relationship with the endurance of pain. In today’s society, we are encouraged to ignore and even anaesthetise pain, which often can have detrimental effects later on. However, beauty and growth can sometimes be born out of the most painful experiences.
The exhibition will run from 20th April – 2nd May, and will include a series of workshops and music sessions. A limited edition, silkscreen exhibition poster will be signed by all the artists in the show, which the first 25 guests to arrive will receive. Sunday 22nd April will see the infamous City Shanty Band perform their gritty folk songs to a backdrop of Chatsworth Road’s inviting Sunday market.
Director and curator of the Alvarado Gallery, Laura Alvarado, connects a refreshing and perhaps unexpected mix of prolific talent. These are London’s visual innovators. Many of the artists featured are not only printmakers or illustrators, but have multi-faceted capacities in many disciplines.
Rob Ryan and daughter Barbara Ryan prove that creativity really does run in the genes. On this rare occasion their beautiful images hang side by side. One to watch, Reuben Dangoor, half of the genius behind YouTube’s ‘Being a Dickhead’s Cool’ viral, will be showing his illustration work for the first time in a gallery setting, after recently finishing the album artwork for the band Get cape. Wear cape. Fly.
Paul Willoughby, who is known for his award winning creative direction at The Church of London, is also the illustrator of the majority of Little White Lies magazine covers. His work shown in the exhibition is part of a collection of images from a personal project.
Jack Murray and Jamie Brown are both part of ATG (Ahead’a The Game). The collective was formed by a group of friends that form a collective of graffiti writers, visual artists, musicians and DJ’s, rooted in London sub-culture.
Le Gun, the East London based art collective, are perhaps one of the most intoxicating and imaginative group of graphic designers and illustrators currently making work. In this show Steph Von Reiswitz and Neal Fox, show prints that explore the darker side of pain.
Nick White combines found imagery with drawing and painting to create myriad surfaces of faces, eyes, pattern and texture. Motifs mingle with symbols and signs, plucked from their original contexts, in unexpected combinations.
Lynnie Zulu’s current work depicts tribal-inspired illustrations of pointy-chinned, mythical-seeming characters. She works both on paper and collaborates with fashion designers to adorn garments with her inky drawings.
David Shillinglaw’s use of text in his imagery brings the viewer in closer to explore the intricacy and weaving maps of people and things, created with vibrant colour and expressive mark making. His work can be seen framed, whilst also at a grand scale, covering buildings and rooms.
Martin O’Neill’s work has been described as ‘so defiantly old-school, analog, hands-on, scissors and paste that he appears almost avant garde’, for the exhibition O’Neill explores the theme of pain through his medium of collage.
Simon Cook created the world of Stone and Spear, it is a place where he escapes the monotonous routine of day to day life, submerging himself in a fantasy land where anything is possible. He uses retro photographic imagery, geometric forms and creepy characters. His recent print designs for Givenchy have been highly celebrated.
