VINEspace's Page

Robert Currie
'8 Days, 17 Hours, 46 Minutes and 21 Seconds'
5 September - 19 Oct 08
Open Thu-Sun 12.00 - 18.00
Private View 4 September 2008 18.00- 21.00
An installation with video tape that exploits the architecture of the gallery

'A One Night Stand with ....Russel Herron'
4 Sep from 6pm to 9pm

Rana Begum
'Transient Symmetry'
29 May - 6 June
Open Thu-Sun 12.00-18.00
Private View 29 May 2008 18.30-21.00

In this new body of work, Rana Begum appears to capture those fleeting instances when form, colour, light and structure momentarily align in our consciousness.

Begum continues to explore her fascination with the repetition and geometry found in the vocabulary of Islamic Art and architecture; as well as how patterns and forms reoccur accidentally, randomly and chaotically within the urban environment (for example road signs, advertising and hazard markings). Using symmetry and reiteration, the work embodies how balance and harmony can emerge from chaos.

In contrast to Bell’s theory of ‘significant form’ which elevated and separated the aesthetic experience of viewing art above other aesthetic experiences (such as viewing nature), Begum’s work turns a more radical corner. It reawakens a fundamental instinct to critically engage with form and colour, whilst exploiting existing experiences of the world around us. The work teases our natural curiosity to explore visual stimuli as it juts and cuts into space, and the artist’s working processes place a high value on the slightest of very specific formal adjustments that can shift the experience of perception to something not anticipated. In this way the work is the object of emotional engagement, not a vehicle of description.

Rana Begum was born in Bangladesh in 1977 and brought up in England. She graduated with a BA from Chelsea School of Art and completed an MFA from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2002. Solo shows include Colour Codes at The Third Line, Dubai 2007, and group shows include Monologue/Dialogue II, Bischoff/Weiss, London (2008), Repetition and Sequence Jerwood Space London (2007), Monologue/Dialogue British Council Residency, Bangkok University Gallery Bangkok (2006), Art:21 Power/Memory/Structures/Play, Art Museum of Western Virginia, Ad Infinitum: Aesthetics of Repetition Haines Gallery San Francisco (2005) and Colour My World, Riflemaker, London (2005). The artist lives and works in London.


Simon Morse
Reckoners/Reckoning

VINEspace, 25a Vyner Street, London E2 9DG
4 April - 11 May 2008
Open Thu-Sun 12.00-18.00
Private View 3 April 2008 18.30-21.00


Simon Morse’s first solo show at VINEspace presents an array of machines whose pragmatic origins and intended uses point to their − and our − tragicomic undoing.

Like the series of systemic derangements, both human and automated, in Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying And Love the Bomb, the objects in the exhibition appear to exist and operate within entirely rational parameters. Upon closer inspection however, their potential functions describe a world in which expediency has caused the languages of control and the machineries of discourse to become kaleidoscopically self-entangled through doomed attempts to create and maintain literal and metaphorical power structures.

The work asks if it is humanly possible to imagine a way out of this situation any more. Have we indeed passed a moment of ‘peak thought’, when the perils created via our technologies, our languages, have overtaken and corralled our ability to come up with dependable solutions?

In the tradition of the great satirists, Morse uses his work to fold the crazed logic of our time back in on itself, creating an exponentially skewed reality attuned with precision to the absurdities of its context.

Simon Morse was born in Swindon, England in 1969. He studied at Liverpool Polytechnic (BA Fine Art 1989-92) and Chelsea College of Art and Design (MA Fine Art 1992-3). He has exhibited widely in the UK, and also in the US, Germany, the Netherlands, Ireland and Spain. He lives and works in London.


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JAAKKO MATTILA AND ROBERT CURRIE


feb 7th – march 13th

VINEspace is pleased to present brand new work by Robert Currie and Jaakko Mattila.

“When the avant-garde artists of the early twentieth century, such as the Constructivists in Russia or the De Stijl painters of the Netherlands, incorporated geometry into their work, it symbolised a belief that human rationality could pave the way to a brighter future, a social utopia for all. Unsurprisingly, given the turmoil of the Second World War, in which technological advances enabled the conflict to be fought on a wider and more devastating scale than previously imaginable, many began viewing the claim that rationalism and science equals progress with far greater scepticism. What is more, when a new generation examined the paintings and sculpture of their pre-war forbears they noticed that, although these works endeavoured to avoid the arbitrary and the accidental at all costs, in practice they were often imbued with personal and emotional concerns, with the hand of the artist stubbornly revealing its presence again and again” (Pryle Behrman)

Robert Currie and Jaakko Mattila play with the dichotomies that result from merging the personal with the scientific, the mechanical with the handmade. Water colour has notoriously ephemeral qualities. Always respectfully handled by artists wanting to exploit its ability to behave in particular ways, it is, quite simply, a medium that will achieve much for an artist that knows how to leave it to its own devices and claim the 'happy accidents'. Jaakko Mattila refuses to settle for that. He experiments with semi-mechanical processes and repetitive patterns and lines, to inject more rigour and control into the process of painting with this medium. By narrowing down opportunities for the paint to behave in a 'freelance' manner, the resulting work fidgets intriguingly between an aesthetic defined by process and one defined by chance.

Robert Currie creates intricate worlds from a range of unusual materials such as nylon and cassette tape using exacting techniques that are both painstakingly precise and intrinsically random. He fuses a mathematical precision with a love of the uncontrollable to create intricate visions of controlled chaos. His work shows a keen awareness of the opposing hypotheses of chaos theory - the notion that order will inevitably descend into disorder - and complexity theory, which argues that order will always emerge in any sufficiently complex system.

Robert Currie lives and works in London. Jaakko Mattila currently lives and works in Finland.

(Many thanks to Pryle Behrman for his contributions on the work of Robert Currie)