Although IMT has been around since 2005, the gallery only began representing artists a couple of years ago. We currently represent David Burrows, Alejandro Ospina, Laura Pawela, Plastique Fantastique, Gordon Shrigley, NaoKo TakaHashi and Mark Peter Wright.
IMT Gallery is about creating a balance between one-off project funded commissions and exhibitions of non-represented artists, and working with artists over a longer period of time. The gallery also has ambitions to be rather broad in the type of work that is exhibited here, we are known for working with installation, film and sound art, but that is only because these art forms are still the exception in the programmes of a gallery of IMT’s size. When the gallery began representing artists it was, and still is, important that we try and work with people who represent this eclecticism. This of course makes selecting work for an art fair quite a challenging process, not least because the artists we work are really scrupulous about challenging their materials and so frequently make work that challenges easy commodification.
For ART13 we wanted to choose work that would both reflect to some degree the breadth of our programme whilst at the same time hold together as a coherent and interconnected stand. We will be presenting work by David Burrows, Laura Pawela, Gordon Shrigley and NaoKo TakaHashi. An art fair is both an opportunity to bring the work to a wider audience and on the other hand an opportunity to see this work in the contexts of the wider landscape of cultural production. As we don’t limit the artists we work with to a particular country or continent, the calculatedly global breadth of ART13 is a real opportunity to see this work reframed alongside other contemporary practices on quite a vast scale.
For our first fair in London we wanted to provide introduction of our programme and the artists we represent. Obviously with a stand one mustn’t try to cram everything in, yet to really represent the gallery we wanted to try and present a broad frame of reference whilst maintaining a cohesive theme. Some of the artists we are working with are currently engaged with modes of drawing and diagrams, the concept of the outline and the nature of such images, so this seemed like an interesting proposal around which we could connect artists’ works.
David Burrows, dEAR BELOVED, 2013 Paper, card, glitter, acrylic, polyethylene foam and glue 110 x 110 cm
David Burrows’ new work exploits the transformations in quality and form that low-res images, inbox trash, glitching, GIFs, and clipart undergo when produced for ease of circulation. He is interested in the ways that images mutate or are transformed as they are distributed, copied, and circulated in digital or hard copy form.
Laura Pawela, After Goya and Friedrich 02, 2009 Pencil on paper 20 x 30 cm
Laura Pawela’s drawings elevate the base and grotesque: urine or chewing gum or spit on a street, into beautifully rendered studies. We are also showing one of her series of After Goya and Friedrich works in which she painstakingly redraws works of art but without the presence of human figures.
Gordon Shrigley: Pencil Drawing, 2005
Alongside this is Gordon Shrigley’s beautiful, rigorously systematic investigation into drawing as a language and as a performance in time, and because of this we wanted to make a couple of key works from different period’s of his practice available for the fair. All three artists use laborious means to delineate what, on the surface, might be seen as simple imagery but through their practice becomes multilayered, complex work.
NaoKo TakaHashi: Transmission Divide for Sending Grandmother’s Poem, 2012
In contrast NaoKo TakaHashi makes quite natural and deceptively makeshift gestures, but which are in fact delicately sensitive balancing acts between form and meaning. Her work fits brilliantly with Burrows in that TakaHashi is interested in materials and methods that might disrupt traditions of meaning and value.
Plastique Fantastique, Cloud gives birth to new animal: plastique fantastique feedback ritual to call forth neuropatheme (subject-without-experience a.k.a. ‘fux-the-shadow’, ‘blanck-the-systemick-system-kcuf-dik’, etc), 2012
In addition to the stand itself, we wanted to include a performance element in the fair. It’s something that is reflected in the gallery’s programme. So Friday afternoon will see a performance by Plastique Fantastique, a group made up of human and inhuman “avatars”. Their performances are always extraordinary things to see in the flesh, and this new work, Welcome Neuropatheme Feeback Loops, is going to transform Plastique Fantastique’s avatars into feedback loops, “Neuropaths” that treat affects and information and desire to be empty caves.
Art13 London Olympia Grand Hall London W14 8UX
