notes

walls
rut blees lux­em­burg, shane brad­ford, soon­hak kwon and brian reed

(from the gallery)

UNION is pleased to present Walls — a group exhi­bi­tion fea­tur­ing works by Rut Blees Lux­em­burg, Shane Brad­ford, Soon­hak Kwon and Brian Reed, all of whom have pre­vi­ously shown with Jari Lager in curated projects or exhi­bi­tions at Union Gallery.

Rut Blees Lux­em­burg known for her explo­ration of urban land­scapes will show the detailed fram­ing of a ruined wall. Blees Luxemburg’s ‘The Pat­tern of the Plans’ gives its sub­ject bear­ing, offer­ing a dis­placed, almost abstract image. ‘We are shown ordi­nary things we might expect to find any­where – a dis­carded cig­a­rette packet, the mar­ble fin­ish­ing in a lobby, damp pave­ment, and a lichen-covered wall – but what we see goes well beyond this. It takes us towards Andre Breton’s idea of con­vul­sive beauty, to the way in which the every­day and the ephemeral can open into and reveal the work­ings of the unconscious.’ — Michael Archer, Art­Fo­rum, Feb­ru­ary 2003.

Shane Bradford’s large-scale paint­ing ‘Rehang’, 2011, has pre­vi­ously been shown at Union gallery. It was hung in pre­cisely the same posi­tion for his solo exhi­bi­tion in May 2010. For this show how­ever, the work has been recoated in thin lay­ers of trans­par­ent white. Thus the primer layer — habit­u­ally applied first – has become an end stage of the artists paint­ing process — a paint­ing in reverse or else primed for a sub­se­quent incar­na­tion. Brad­ford gives as much value to ‘con­text’ in effect­ing the mean­ing of his art objects as to the con­tent and visual lan­guage of the object itself. In the case of  ‘Rehang’, atten­tion is deflected from the paint­ing as fin­ished arti­cle. Exhibit­ing the paint­ing in its unfin­ished state is a vital con­struct for Brad­ford in free­ing the art­work from its usual context.

Four new works by Soon­hak Kwon form part of an ongo­ing series of high res­o­lu­tion pho­tographs of empty gallery walls. Kwon’s pho­tographs doc­u­ment a wall’s his­tory, like a car­tog­ra­pher he high­lights, scans and cap­tures every detail of the walls sur­face before stitch­ing together hun­dreds of close-up shots. Kwon has pho­tographed Union’s walls, installing the works in a dis­lo­cated posi­tion, con­trary to the exist­ing per­pen­dic­u­lar line of the wall. At a dis­tance, Kwon intends his pho­tographs appear as an empty space before, on closer inspec­tion, becom­ing super-high-resolution images, full of minute information.

Brian Reed’s new work focuses on spir­i­tu­al­ity in con­tem­po­rary art — or the absence of it. Faith, prayer and wor­ship are core con­cepts in ‘The Nur­tured Release’, 2011, a framed abstract struc­ture of plas­ter and mar­ble dust. Reed is influ­enced by the visual lan­guage of early reli­gious art as well as areas of east­ern spir­i­tu­al­ity adopted by abstract expres­sion­ist artists Mark Rothko, Antoni Tapies, Robert Moth­er­well and Janez Bernikheld. In this piece he makes ref­er­ence to visual and con­cep­tual themes of the three faiths of Judaism, Chris­tian­ity and Islam, in par­tic­u­lar to the West­ern Wall in Jerusalem, the most sacred of sites in Judaism. Reed has placed 23 prayers appro­pri­ated from a Chris­t­ian faith web­site within the work (the num­ber 23 being sig­nif­i­cant in both Islamic and Chris­t­ian reli­gious numerol­ogy). These prayers are printed onto prayer cards, touch­ing on the emer­gence of online ser­vices offer­ing email, twit­ter and fax as a means of send­ing prayers to the wall from all over the world.

For more infor­ma­tion please con­tact: +44 (0)20 7739 9119 or: info@union-gallery.com

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