Private View: April 11, 6-9pm

exhibition continues to May 12

 

Opening times: Friday & Saturday 11am-6pm or By Appointment

Carol Rhodes has been one of the most distinctive painters working in the UK in recent times. The significant body of work that she has produced over the past twenty five years assimilates and moves beyond two major critical impasses for modern painting: photography and pure abstraction.

Rhodes makes small-scale paintings depicting, from aerial viewpoints, encounters between the natural environment and human intervention, fictional syntheses resulting from a re-mixing of photographic sources. Finding beauty in deserted and apparently alienating places, her paintings allow us to contemplate our own relationship to the world around us. Writer Mark Prince has recently observed,

She creates compositions out of features she discovers in found photographic material – magazines, pictures, aerial mapping – which are then adapted into the network of a composition. Her marks claim to be in thrall to the way things are, only to turn out out be referent-less. They make us wonder what they might be trying to convince us of, and then encourage us to double back and realise that perhaps this is what all representational painting does.

(Art Review, December 2017)

Carol Rhodes was born in Edinburgh in 1959 and spent her early years in India. She studied at Glasgow School of Art, Scotland, and has lived and worked in Glasgow through her career, and has played an important role in the cultural life of that city and beyond.

This new monograph reproduces over forty of her paintings and, for the first time, a significant number of drawings. Specially commissioned texts by curator Lynda Morris and art critic Moira Jeffrey discuss Rhodes’s work in the context of her biography and cultural background, and examine its place and importance in contemporary art. Jeffrey writes,

Rhodes’s life beyond painting has sometimes been one of political activism... In the studio, her distinction has been to produce a kind of painting that is open and empathetic, alert to the clamour and conundrums of the outside world yet true to her private and sometimes unstated interests. Her paintings suggest that the studio is a place of possibilities... where the tension between freedom of ideas and the inevitable limits of the head, the hand and the materials, might be generative rather than didactic; and conversational rather than declamatory.

The monograph also includes an interview with Rhodes by gallerist and curator Andrew Mummery. Rhodes’s thoughts about her art have rarely appeared in print before and their inclusion here will be especially valuable. As well as the full-page plates, archival and documentary photographs accompany the texts, chronology, exhibition history and bibliography sections. The book provides the most comprehensive overview of Rhodes’s work yet available, and will be a standard reference work on the artist.

 

Exhibition launches Wednesday 4th October 11am-6pm and continues to Saturday 25th November

Opening times: Friday & Saturday 11am-6pm or By Appointment
Special Frieze Week opening hours October 4th to 7th 11am-6pm


Styropor – a classic insulating material and expandable polystyrene. A trademarked product created by BASF in 1951.

 

THILO HEINZMANN (b.1969. Lives in Berlin) began working with Styropor soon after he completed his studies at the Frankfurt Städelschule (1992-97) where he had already started exploring his fascination with natural pigments derived from rock and glass. Moving to Berlin in late 1997, he began using standard sheets of this most modern of materials. Purchased from different suppliers for the varying character of their surfaces and finishes, these were then cut and broken by hand and brought together in patterns that he had previously resolved in drawings.

 

An example of these early Styropor Paintings is ‘O.T.’ from 1999/2000, where a variety of red pigments and epoxy resins are mixed and applied. First with a roller and scraper, then as drips and drops, which are absorbed into and encrusted onto the surfaces.

 

By 2001, Heinzmann had begun to use mouth-blown glass as another method of adding colour to his white surfaces. Bought in sheets sourced from specialist modern and antique dealers across the world, this is a feature of the most recent work in the exhibition from 2017. His use of more sculptural, hand-cut Styropor shapes (seen here in ‘Venus’ 2008) began in 2005 and persists in parallel with the pre-fabricated sheets. In some cases the surfaces are post-treated to further alter the texture of the material’s facets.

 

Why Styropor? Heinzmann states clearly that he is first and foremost a painter. A painter must contend with the very loaded tradition of canvas – that remarkable but uniform material in use for centuries, the 0-1 code, the warp & weft stretched over a wooden frame, is a medium Heinzmann still uses and reveres. The artist is equally attracted to this material that is modern, chaotic in its make up and therefore, in a way, more natural. These are his new proposals for the possibilities of painting.

 

The progressive nature of Styropor, it’s technical lightness as well as the quality of the way it reflects light, made this a logical step for Heinzmann and has been a key element of his practice for over 20 years.