Sorcha Dallas

‘Rearrange your face’ with Michael Bauer, Charlie Hammond and Gabriel Hartley

4th March – 8th April 2011

Preview: 4th March 2011, 7-9 pm

Sorcha Dallas is pleased to present the group show ‘Rearrange your face’ with Michael Bauer, Charlie Hammond and Gabriel Hartley. All the invited artists share an interest in using figuration as a starting point to abstraction, with the resulting works retaining a connection to the original image or experience from which they are drawn. Forms are spliced, layered, cut covered and rearranged through the application of paint and sculptural materials to create forms that shift between the imagined, remembered and appropriated.

Michael Bauer creates figurative paintings comprised of composites from figuration, abstraction and design. Reminiscent of the anthropomorphic portraits of Giuseppe Arcimboldo, his forms are meticulously abstracted and rearranged through fluid brush strokes, scabby encrustations, harlequin ornamentation and antiquarian colours. The resulting images balance the obscene with the delicate, creating their own distinct composite narrative. Bauer was born in 1973 in Erkelenz and graduated from the Hochschule fur Bildende Kunste, Braunschweig in 2002. Recent solo shows include ‘Anthem’, Kunsthalle Basel and ‘Legion Picknick’, HOTEL, London (both 2009), with forthcoming solo shows in 2011 at Norma Mangione, Turin; Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich and Lisa Cooley, New York. Bauer recently curated the group show ‘K-Hole’ at Villa Merkel, Esslingen. He lives and works in Berlin.

In Charlie Hammond’s paintings and sculptures a cast of petty bureaucrats, middle class Doeruppers, and planning officials jockey for position in a sub-fusc world constructed in their own unfortunate image. A dysfunctional suburbia of broken wheelie bins, ring roads, and exploding vehicles provide the satirical backdrop to a disturbingly familiar world in which progress is measured out by polite discussion on radio 4. Hammond’s universe subjects the advocates of improvement schemes to a cartoon buffoonery, rendering them both ridiculous and pitiful. His recent paintings depict their sweaty armpits as a faux-monumental testimony to their nervous, unending labour. Hammond was born in Aylesbury in 1979, and graduated from the painting department at Glasgow School of Art in 2002. Recent group shows include: ‘Euro Savage’ (Linn Luhn, Cologne) with Michael Bauer; ‘Rive Gauche/Rive Droite’ (Azzedine Alaia, Paris); ‘SUPERNATURE, an exercise in loads’ (AMP, Athens) and Jerwood Contemporary Painters 2010 (Jerwood Space, London). Hammond has presented solo shows at Sorcha Dallas, Glasgow (2009), Anton Kern Gallery, New York (2008) and Michael Benevento, Los Angeles (2008). Other selected shows include ‘Ventriloquist’ (Timothy Taylor Gallery, London); ‘If Not Now’ (Broadway 1602, NY); ‘Keep Passing the Open Windows’ (Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne); ‘You will be re-materialised through your secrets’ (Michael Benevento, LA); ‘Expanded Painting 2’ (3rd Prague Biennale), and ‘Dogtooth and Tessellate’ (The Approach, London). In 2011 Hammond will participate in ‘When Flanders Failed’ at the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin and ‘The Keno Twins IV’, a group show curated by Michael Bauer at Villa Merkel, Esslingen. He lives and works in Glasgow.

Gabriel Hartley’s oil paintings and sculptures fuse the concepts and techniques of abstraction with powerfully raw figurative forms. His works appear to be at once taking on subjects and unraveling them, to be both gestating and timeworn. With bold brushstrokes he uses both clashing and coordinated colors in fields of patterning that are over-painted and, in places, burnt. He simultaneously builds and excavates forms that can be sensual, emotive, metaphoric, and ironic. He has an eye to art history and the role of painting within it, most notably indigenous British painting, partially evoking the work of early 20th century artists such as Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell and Roger Fry, as well as postwar painting from the ’40s and early ’50s. Yet, rather than being burdened by quotation, Hartley’s lines, marks, colors and surfaces let this history to seep into them. Gabriel Hartley was born in London, 1981. He graduated with a BA (Hons) in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art and Design, University of the Arts, London and a Post Graduate Diploma in Fine Art from the Royal Academy Schools, London. He has had solo shows at Foxy Production, New York (2010) and Swallow Street, London (2009). Group shows include ‘Fine Things To Be Seen’, Kensal Green Cemetery, London (2010); Jerwood Contemporary Painting Prize, Jerwood Space, London (2009); John Moores Painting Prize, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (2008) and Bloomberg New Contemporaries, Liverpool, Manchester, Walsall, London (2007 - 2008). He lives and works in London.

With thanks to Marta Fontolan and all at HOTEL, Michael Gillespie and all at Foxy Productions. Charlie Hammond would like to thank to Nick Evans, Lotte Gertz and Creative Scotland.

Please contact the gallery for further information and images: tel + 44 (0) 141 553 2662 / info@sorchadallas.com