DALE ADCOCK, The Validator, 2013
BEERS London is very pleased to have been accepted to exhibit in the main fair of Art14 London in February/March 2014. We will be exhibiting 5 artists (booth M21): Dale Adcock, Robert Fry, Catalin Geana, Anthony Goicolea and Andrew Salgado and we are very much looking forward to being a part of Art14 London in 2014.
For more information on the fair please visit their site HERE.
As a nine year old, British born Dale Adcock (b. 1980) was given a ‘gold star’ for a painting of Tutankhamen’s death mask in school; it was this precise moment that led to his decision to become an artist. Massive in scale, with inverted images, a flattened surface, and an attention to detail that would astound most; Adcock’s paintings are themselves oddly subversive versions of the monumental trompe l’oeil relics they depict. Tomb, for instance, entails a repeated engraving motif (executed entirely in paint) that is historically based in death ritual but ultimately the artist’s own recreation. Stack of Heads is precisely that: six geometric, humanoid blocks, stacked in an inverted pyramid with a perspectival distortion that, while unnoticeable to the naked eye, creates a marked sense of the uncanny, or even unease. Sourced from the artist’s sketches, these imagined relics are based in historical antiquity, with trademark subject matter including inverted sphinxes, skew-eyed tribal masks, or origami-like portraits. The artist insists that his creations are meant to be neither idiosyncratic nor ironic. Certainly, they are the product of an obsessive attention to his practice: a 2005 graduate from London’s Chelsea College of Art & Design, the artist works from a canal-side East London studio where he takes three to six months to complete each painting. What is perhaps most interesting is Adcock’s relationship to paint. With so many of his peers celebrating the fluidity and materiality of their chosen media, Adcock chooses to subvert this tendency, hiding the nature of his brushwork and working with such precision that his mark-making is nearly indecipherable.
Robert Fry’s works, whether on canvas or paper, typically revolve around the act of stripping the human body down to its barest – often most psychologically charged – elements. He creates flattened forms and silhouettes which, when coupled with his trademark dark and brooding colour palette of purple, magenta, maroon, and oxblood, results in figures that ebb and flow from their surroundings. The works are often typified by subject matter that is culled from Classical references and motifs (including Renaissance archways and curving porticoes), skeletal and muscular diagrams (from the Vesalius Man to Arnold Schwarzenegger), or his own personal memory bank (imagined images of himself and his father, vistas from his West London home and studio), and – most recently – found magazine and pornographic material which has made its way, in collage-form, into the surface of the paintings, along with obsessively repeated text that creates a sort of onomatopoeia-like border around the scene itself. Fry is – at a base level – a figurative painter, but the work is so obscurely and poetically charged that to categorize in any one manner seems shortsighted: they are more like psychological landscapes, where figures are so obscured that we, as viewers, are forced to examine them in abstract means. The works perhaps recall Francis Bacon, where grotesque, writhing male figures seem trapped within an architectural space. His desire to withhold any easy answer from the viewer creates an unnerving tension between reality and fantasy, depiction and imagination. Fry believes that by always presenting the figure nude, he is permitted to explore the human condition in the most accessible manner, presenting the human body as a conduit of expression and meaning, devoid of any preconceptions that may otherwise arise through the depiction of their face, clothing, or background. Figures are often shown in groups, with one or more individuals representing either an ‘other’ or an alternative state of mind or being, and often laid one atop the other, stripped of identity and presented for the viewer in a totally metaphorical, painterly context. Fantastical, haunting, and poetic, Fry’s work is quite unlike any other contemporary working painter.
ROBERT FRY (b. 1980 London), graduated with a BA Hons Fine Art from Oxford Brooks University in 2002. Solo exhibitions include: Robert Fry and Casey McKee: Unpacking Ego, Space K, South Korea (2018); Robert Fry and Tina Schwarz, Galerie Kornfeld, Berlin (2017); Partners, Galerie Kornfeld, Berlin (2015) and VOLTA NY (2015). Group exhibitions include: Works on Paper, BEERS London, London (2018), The Therapist Office, 1969 Gallery, New York, USA (2018); Berlin Calling, Galerie Kornfeld, Berlin (2018); ’75 Works on Paper’, BEERS London (2017); ‘The Nude in the XX and XXI Century’, Sotheby’s SI2, London, England (2015) and ‘100 Painters of Tomorrow’, One Art Space, New York (2014). Fry will be having a solo exhibition with BEERS London in the fall of 2019.
In an attempt to intentionally work outside of an art historical canon, Catalina Gaena’s bronze sculptures are transformative pieces quoting from a history of primitive art, modern art, and even Native American iconography. These intimate, writing figures vacillate between figurative and pure abstraction, situating themselves wryly in a contemporary art canon but questioning their legitimacy as such; in fact, at times their appropriation from various cultural traditions makes them indistinguishable from the cultural traditions from which they draw their imagery, be that Native American, Pre-Columbian Moche sculpture, East Asian, or even, paradoxically, Gaena’s native Romania. Recontextualized like a sardonic amalgam of archaic totems from lost civilizations, dislodged from their museological status, they compel the viewer to reconsider the value placed on the narrative and historical lineage. For Gaena, they are even presented as a comical tongue-in-cheek pastiche of contemporary society’s tendency to muddle cultures, geographies, and tradition into a language of indefinable sameness. Working in bronze further accentuates the artist’s approach: simultaneously working in homage and critique, drawing inspiration from objects, animals, people, and contemporary society in an intentional violation of tradition. “I want my work to give people that feeling of admiration towards beauty, regardless of its origin.” Gaena states.
ANTHONY GOICOLEA (b. 1971, USA) obtained an MFA in Sculpture and Photography from the Pratt Institute of Art (1996) as well as a BFA in Drawing and Painting from the University of Georgia (1994). Goicolea has shown extensively internationally gaining notable solo and group exhibitions in France, Germany, Switzerland, Canada, Spain, New Zealand, Korea, China, UK, Scandinavia and the USA (2000-2013). Goicolea was also been granted the Cintas Fellowship in 2006, the 2005 BMW Photo Paris Award, the Bronx Museum ‘Artist in the Market Place’ program in 1998 and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant in 1997. Goicolea’s work has been included in private and public collections worldwide: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, Museum of Modern Art and Guggenheim Museum of Art, New York; Groninger Museum, The Netherlands; El Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Castilla, Spain and Israel Museum, Jerusalem. The artist has been the subject of four separate US publications and has been featured in ARTnews, Art in America, the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune.
Salgado’s more recent works have made a noted effort to distance himself from a 2008 assault (in which he was attacked for being a gay man), and are decidedly certainly more irreverent than his previous offerings: brighter, more celebratory, even theatrical. The artist carries this sense of play into his exhibitions, too. For ‘The Snake’ (BEERS London, 2016), hundreds of butterflies were released to flutter amongst the audience as if they had burst from the artworks themselves; ‘A Room with a View of the Ocean’ (Lauba House, 2017) saw an 8-metre ocean projection (and artificial ‘beach’) on the final room’s wall, inviting the audience to partake in a meditation of what they had seen; and the two-day-only exhibition ‘Nature Boy’ (BEERS London, 2018) saw a pianist (at a baby-grand!) playing the eponymous song on repeat for the entirety of the show’s duration. For Salgado, similar to his increasing use of collaged elements, an exhibition is an opportunity to extend elements of the painting beyond the canvas–an invitation into his world of colour, fantasy, and fun.
ANDREW SALGADO (b. 1982, Regina, Canada) lives and works in London, England. He graduated with an MA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art and Design in 2009, and has since had 13 sold-out solo exhibitions held all over the world, and is widely regarded as one of the UK’s leading young figurative painters. In 2017, Salgado was the youngest artist to ever receive a survey-exhibition at The Canadian High Commission in London, accompanied by a 300-page monograph, both of which were entitled TEN. Previous solo exhibitions include, ‘Blue Rainbow’ Angell Gallery, Toronto, (October 2018); ‘Nature Boy’, Beers London, (2018); ‘Dirty Linen’, Christopher Moller Gallery, Cape Town (2018), ‘A Room with a View of the Ocean’, Lauba Art House, Zagreb (2017); ‘The Snake’, Beers London, (2016); ‘The Fool Makes a Joke at Midnight’, Thierry Goldberg, New York (2016). He has exhibited his work at various international art fairs, including Zona Maco, Mexico City (2019); Pulse Miami (2016); and Volta Basel (2015). In 2015, Salgado curated The Fantasy of Representation, including work by Francis Bacon, Gary Hume, and Hurvin Anderson, with an impassioned manifesto on representational painting. In 2014 he was the subject of a documentary, Storytelling. He has received extensive press both online and in print, including GQ, The Evening Standard, The Independent, Artsy, METRO, Attitude Magazine, Globe and Mail (CAN) and Macleans (CAN). He frequently donates to charities including Pride London, Stonewall, and Diversity Role Models; his donations to the Terrence Higgins Trust are of particular note, having have raised over £75,000 in 5 years. In March 2019, he successfully entered the secondary market with a piece in a Strauss & Co auction in South Africa. Forthcoming solo exhibitions include a booth over Basel Miami (TBA, December 2019); and a fourth solo at BEERS London (October 2020). His works have been collected extensively in private and public collections worldwide.
