Matt Carey-Williams has announced the launch of a new global curatorial project. Drawing on nearly three decades’ experience connecting artists, institutions and collectors at the highest levels, Carey-Williams has developed a year-round programme of artist presentations unfolding at two different scales and speeds.
Designed to create unexpected encounters between emerging and established artists and international audiences, ‘Scenes’ will showcase a single body of work and will be presented in the same studio space at 12 Porchester Place in London. ‘Episodes’ will create thematic narratives elucidated with in-depth curatorial essays by Carey-Williams, offering fresh perspectives on art and its relationship to the world around us presented at different venues across the world. The first Episode, entitled Bump, opens on 7th March at No. 9 Cork Street in London. Together, these Scenes and Episodes will form an annual ‘Series.’
The first Scene presents new paintings by London-based artist Glen Pudvine (b. 1989) and opens to the public on 6 February. In a visual signature both outlandish and banal, light yet loaded, Pudvine’s work unpicks traditional genres of the Western canon. “Scene I: Glen Pudvine, Mug” takes the viewer on a journey from celebrated cave paintings to the Surrealism of René Magritte, exploring on the way the veracity and virility of image and index.
Many of the paintings in Pudvine’s Scene employ the motif of a mug handle, with the handle itself functioning as a kind of portal throwing the viewer from contemporaneity into prehistory, as evident in a painting such as Present (2023). The word ‘mug’ is also slang for a face and in many of these works the artist’s own face is locked in some kind of combat with a series of images – known or imagined – that make up a landscape of his obsessions and anxieties. Mammal (2023), for example, has a mug adorned with a familiar online description of an alien cut across an abbreviated portrait of Pudvine’s own pierced ear. Questions of depiction and perspective, time and presence, abound in both their synergy and dissonance.
Bump, Matt Carey-Williams’ first Episode, will take place at No. 9 Cork Street, London, from 7th to 23rd March, featuring Pudvine alongside 20 other international contemporary artists including Ana Benaroya, Marius Bercea, Marc Dennis, Rachel Howard, Jessie Makinson, Jin Meyerson, James White, Clare Woods and Flora Yukhnovich. Bump explores that flash, juncture or peculiarity that can swing or sway the movement, direction, sign or signfier of a painting. It can be the impossibly meticulously rendered hair of an eyelid; the sweep of a brush; the contradistinction of one colour against its surrounding palette. A moment of painterly singularity, where nothing becomes something and vice versa, triggering the entire composition and its protagonists into various states of alarm, action and even ambiguity. Future Episodes are planned for Seoul and Rome in 2024.
Carey-Williams said:
I am thrilled to kick start this exciting chapter of my career not with a bang, but a Bump. I hope this first Episode – zooming in on the trinity of cause, effect, and aftermath in various dialects of painting as presented by 21 of my favourite artists working today – will delight and frustrate, answer and question in equal measure.
I am also very pleased to present Glen Pudvine’s work as my opening Scene at my new studio space on Porchester Place in London. Glen is a brilliant young artist I have long admired. He is a painter who is not afraid to strip down everything – especially himself – to get to the real nub of today’s challenging world. In my first Scene, Glen records its remarkable evolution and revolutions (as well as his own hopes and fears of and for it) across a series of simple, commonplace mugs. With so many ‘mugs’ both running and ruining our world, I could not have hoped for a more telling start to my programme.
Carey-Williams has worked at some of the world’s leading galleries and auction houses for more than 25 years. Most recently Senior Director and Head of Sales at Victoria Miro, his position at the centre of global contemporary art will empower exceptional, personalised presentations of artists’ work to a sophisticated network of global collectors and the public across the world.
About
What is a ‘Scene’?
A ‘Scene’ is a small, intimate presentation of around 5-8 works of a single artist at Matt Carey-Williams’ studio space at 12 Porchester Place in London. ‘Scenes’ focus on emerging artists, giving them a chance to be spotlighted on Carey-Williams’ platform and allowing them access to his extensive market knowledge and substantial client base. ‘Scenes’ also offer a platform to more established artists who have have little or no presence in the UK and aim to refocus collectors’ attention on mid-career UK-based artists.
What is an ‘Episode’?
An ‘Episode’ is a large-scale group exhibition born out of a core curatorial idea. ‘Episodes’ mix artists of all stages of their careers, drawing parallels and conversations between their works from a practice-based approach and inviting them to engage with curatorial concepts of varying degrees.
What is a ‘Series’?
For Carey-Williams, the use of the term ‘Episodes’ implies presentations that are part of a more cohesive series, and rather than isolated, independent curatorial projects. This is then compounded through the additional ‘Scenes’, which are small intimate presentations that feed into the larger programme. This is then all wrapped up annually as a ‘Series’, which will be a collection of around 10 small ‘Scenes’ and 2-3 larger ‘Episodes’.
Matt Carey-Williams
Carey-Williams has worked at the world’s leading galleries and auction houses, most recently Victoria Miro, where he was a Senior Director and Head of Sales from 2018–23. He has held sales roles at the influential galleries Gagosian in New York and White Cube in London, led Haunch of Venison in Europe, and occupied senior global positions at Phillips, Christie’s and Sotheby’s, where he began his career in 1997
