Opening August 9th, runs until August 18th
Galleries Goldstein is to present ‘About Looking at Hamburgers’, a new body of work by Daniel Sparkes.
This show uses his characteristic fusion of the everyday with the fantastical to unravel man’s difficult, and often flawed, relationship with nature.
Sparkes works in the emerging genre of Comic Abstraction, performing interventions into the mundane fabric of life by injecting it with darkly comic motifs. The quotidian becomes a vehicle for social commentary and critique as Sparkes infuses it with his cartoonish characters that falter uncomfortably in a space between Seuss and Disney. This is achieved through the corruption of found images, where Sparkes makes delicate ink drawings that invest the image with equal amounts of outrage and wonder. His early billboard works around Bristol were comprised of spray-painted appendages to advertisements that unmasked the banal absurdity of consumer culture. Sparkes brings to the surface a certain horror that simmers at the unanalysed subterranean level of culture, adding colour, vision and even magic to grim depictions of people, animals and landscapes.
The space in between reality and illusion is the site of Sparkes’ investigations, where he excavates with both muted violence and brutal honesty the timeless themes of life and death. The work draws a line between popular culture and scientific investigation, at once revealing an essence and accentuating a surface. The world is sliced, spliced, butchered and fragmented in his work; whether it is a desolate landscape, a nondescript face or a breathing animal, Sparkes enacts a metaphysical dissection that crosses effortlessly from scratching the moss from the surface to stripping back all the layers to reveal a complex interiority to all life.
‘About Looking at Hamburgers’ is in one sense a continuation of this practice, but in another sense it is the tethering of a number of grand themes in Sparkes’ work. Comic Abstraction enables Sparkes to make a serious point while also enacting a mockery of industrialised man’s disconnection with nature through, for example, the portrayal of animal butchery as a quixotic cartoon scenario. Life itself is dissected so that where there should be organs, bones and meat, images of palm trees and domestic scenes unfurl. The exhibition is comprised of sprawling ink drawings that depict isometric landmasses, macabre pet montage paintings and a series of landscapes depicting Seussian gods. As Sparkes himself has said, these works ‘conjure a mythological foreboding through an aesthetic of fraudulent science’, which digs to the dark core of a world so mired in superficial banality.
Daniel Barnes
