Beers Contemporary is exhibiting at the London Art Fair this week (14- 19 January, 2014) for the third consecutive year in booth 5 of the ‘Village Green’. We are exhibiting five amazingly talented artists: Scott Carter, Neil Harrison, Andrew Salgado, Pawel Sliwinski & Leonardo Ulian, and we are very much looking forward to exhibiting this collection of installation/sculpture, painting, and mixed media at the LAF.
For more information on the fair please visit their site HERE.
Scott Carter is influenced by the experience of living amongst mass produced materials, spaces and objects that are inherent in contemporary architecture and design. His work manifests as immersive installations and interactive objects that facilitate subtle shifts in value and attempt to redefine utility in relation to everyday experiences. His practice parallels contemporary discourse in art, design, architecture and sound. In short, Carter’s process is undoubtedly unique: upon entering the exhibition space, Carter’s methods are both performative and sculptural: he reshapes the contemporary gallery space by literally excavating sections of the gallery drywall (or floor) and reconstructing a new sculpture or installation from those pieces.
SCOTT CARTER (b. 1984, United States) received his MFA in Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2011 where he was the first recipient of the Eldon Danhausen Fellowship for Sculpture. Scott recently attended two funded residencies at the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, Vermont and the Ox Bow School of Art in Saugatuck Michigan. Selected solo shows are Zero Point Field, Evanston Art Centre, Evanston, Il (2013); Force Majeure, Linda Warren Projects, Chicago, Il (2012) and in 2011 he completed a solo exhibition entitled Affect/Effect at the Contemporary Art Center of Las Vegas. He has been part of several group exhibitions Somewhere Else, Urban Institute of Contemporary Art, Grand Rapids, Mi (2012); Plural Zone, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Columbus Building Chicago, Il (2012). In 2013 he was the first place winner of the Beers Contemporary Emerging Artist Award in sculpture. He also participated and performed in the 2013 CAFKA Biennial and Open Ears Sound Festival in Kitchener/ Waterloo Canada.
Neil Harrison’s paintings concern location, boundary, margin, and the engagement between form and space. His figures conflate line with volume to moderate between simplicity and complexity; curvilinear and rectilinear; open and closed; particular and whole. Informed by his undergraduate study of physics, Harrison’s paintings serve as artifacts of the process of quantifying. His formal solutions address the self-sufficiency of the image, while juxtaposing iconic precision with the inexact.
NEIL HARRISON (b. 1981, Winnipeg, Canada) holds a Bachelor of Science from the University of Victoria, British Columbia (2004), and a Masters of Fine Art from York University, Toronto (2013). His work has been exhibited in Canada and Switzerland. Recent exhibitions include Superabstraction, Angell Gallery, Toronto (2013); Fresh Paint/New Constructions at Art Mur in Montreal (2013) and Nine, Loop Gallery, Toronto (2013); Openings, Special Projects Gallery, York University (2012); Homecoming, Living Arts Centre, Mississauga (2012) and he received honorable mention in the 15th Annual RBC Canadian Painting Competition. He also exhibited with Beers Contemporary at Kunst 13, Zurich, Switzerland.
Andrew Salgado’s paintings have evolved greatly in style since first rising to prominence over half a decade ago with his (then) signature large-scale, painterly portraits, where large swathes of colour played across the surface to define his subjects. In his most recent work – the representational has given way to the more abstract: and now such colourful, symbolic, and compositional elements are the driving force of the painted image. While the figures remain a common thread – today Salgado’s subjects are depicted in a fantastical, often ominous tableaux. There are abundant references to the tradition of figurative painting both historic and contemporary: Matisse, Gauguin, and Bacon are all readily recalled; while contemporary greats like Tal R, Daniel Richter, and Peter Doig are also referenced with equal reverie and respect – often like quiet in-jokes for a viewer to catch. The artist’s long-standing tendency to paint clowns and the absurd remain constant (in 2016’s The Fool Makes a Joke at Midnight, the artist had actual circus performers in the exhibition space during the exhibition’s duration), and again one sees faces are painted in bright orange, with purple noses and vibrantly coloured hair. Where there once was a plain background, which placed the figure at the forefront of the image, now there is a kind of harmonious cacophony, a medley of pop-coloured squiggles, harlequin patterns, and wonky block shapes–all of which may seem hastily scribbled if it weren’t for the fact that they slot into one another like an impossibly orchestrated puzzle.
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.
Pawel Sliwinski (b. 1984) is a Polish painter based in Warsaw who believes that painting should transcend the need for a utilitarian function or purpose. Influenced by the German New Objectivity movement of the 20th century, Sliwinski’s paintings embrace a raw and almost satirical view of humanity, and continually reference deep-seated psychological concerns. Here we see a view of humanity that is at once completely responsible to our surroundings, both historically and contemporarily, yet strangely occupy a total divorce from reality.
Pawel Sliwinski has been selected as one of the 100 artists to be included in the forthcoming publication authored by Kurt Beers, director of BEERS London, and published by Thames & Hudson. Sliwinski will also feature in BEERS London's first exhibition of 2014, a 4-man exhibition titled Non-Sequitur which will run from January 9th to the 15th February.
Leonardo Ulian’s meticulously created works use technological components (from literally deconstructed appliances) to be methodically rearranged upon a surface mount in a mandala formation. The mandala, is a spiritual and ritual symbol in many Indian religions representing the circular nature of the world, existence, but also references a type of metaphysical order to things. Thus, the ideas and concepts behind Leonardo Ulian’s work stems from a profound interest in how systems can be applied in the process of making art, how life evolves, how technologies exist. Perhaps Ulian’s technique-laden discipline is meant to approach ideas about a scheme of convention, exploring the system itself in order to understand it, and perhaps, trying to find a condition of artistic autonomy within the framework created. Like Mondrian’s grids lifted from the constraints of their 2-dimensionality, the abstraction in his work appropriates ideas of reincarnation, and displaced communication, where one finds a newly formed meaning from a reincarnation of previous elements. The work has expanded to incorporate different elements: including encased books, abstract ‘paintings’ made from copper soldering, and free-standing sculptural forms. In his last solo exhibition with the gallery, he created a suspended veil within the gallery, transforming the space into a space of almost technological reverence. The artist has collaborated with Hermes, Wired Magazine, and countless other brands and companies eager to see how the artist can translate their message through his unique way of seeing – and making.
LEONARDO ULIAN (b. 1974, Gorizia, Italy) lives and works in London, England. Solo exhibitions include: Devotion, The Concept Space, Berlin (2016); Technological Mandala 48 – Eye of Pula, Singular Gallery, Pula (2015); Volta NY Art Fair, Massimo Carasi Gallery, New York (2015); Tesla Remixed, Massimo Carasi Gallery, Milan (2014) and Flames, Roses and Wires, Shift Gallery, London, (2013). Group exhibitions include: RA Summer Show, Royal Accademy, London (2019); Himalaya Revealed, IFS Antiquity plaza and L7 Art Gallery, Chengdu, (2019)’, Impact, Sharjah Art Museum (part of the Islamic Art Festival), Sharjah (2017); Matter Matters, Massimo Carasi, Milan (2017); and Spirit Mandala, The Scorching Sun Art Lab, Lhasa (2016). Ulian was awarded the Owne Rowley Award in 2009, as well as the Stamps of the XX Century, Italy. He has been collected by the fashion house Hermes of Paris International and Fidelity Worldwide Investments. Ulian’s group showings with BEERS London include London Art Fair, London (2013 and 2014). Solo exhibitions with BEERS London include Sacred Space, London (2013); and Real Reality, London (2017).
