The Manchester Contemporary, Manchester
27-29 September 2013
Vane presents the work of Adam Burns, Kerstin Drechsel, Jorn Ebner, Jock Mooney, Michael Mulvihill, Stephen Palmer, Narbi Price, and Flora Whiteley at The Manchester Contemporary art fair.
Adam Burns creates a series of complex and elusive abstract paintings, exploring both the psychology and the emotional impact of colour. Precisely executed sequences of lines derived from multiple perspective points and painted planes of colour gleam in a pure virtual space.
Kerstin Drechsel captures intimate personal moments of individuals or sub-culture groups expressing or identifying themselves through their clandestine rituals or in the specific environments they create around themselves.
Jorn Ebner creates imaginary realms that seem to hover somewhere between a vision of utopia and dystopia. His actions of marking and mapping in these abstracted, virtual environments are a response to place: small gestures of trespass or disruption exploring and testing basic assumptions around notions of naturalness and artificiality.
Jock Mooney constructs an eclectic, unashamedly alternative view of the world. His pen and ink drawings feature distorted humans, animals and objects. It’s only when we examine them closely we see they are composed of writhing fingers and hands, as if some of the characters in Mooney’s never-ending danse macabre have succumbed to despair, drowning in madness.
Michael Mulvihill makes drawings that are weighted with a sense of menace, one exacerbated by his obsessive process: heavily worked pencil on paper, built up through repeated erasure and overdrawing, leaving a series of ‘ghosted’ images below the finished drawing.
Stephen Palmer has taken newspaper clippings as the subject of his most recent drawings. The stories are not strictly ‘news’ but rather look to reanalyse historic events. Each clipping is rendered in precise detail, a transcription that has the effect of conferring worth to events that may otherwise appear of little importance.
Narbi Price is interested in the perceived histories of spaces and how painting can question the visual understanding of architectural and pictorial space, challenging conventions of figurative and photographically derived painting both aesthetically and in terms of paint application, finish and composition and in blurring the line between figuration and abstraction.
Flora Whiteley makes paintings that seem to sidestep attempts to apply narrative structures. Different links and associations appear to be made between the individual paintings but these are often superficial and lead the viewer nowhere. For her, the act of painting seems to come first and it is not until later that the questions of the why and what to paint emerge.
Leftbank
Spinningfields
Manchester
M3 3BE
themanchestercontemporary.co.uk
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