David Batchelor – Reef

Handel Street Projects 
14 Florence Street, London N1

David Batchelor
Reef

17 September – 12 November 2016
Wednesday: – Friday 12:00 – 18:00
Saturday: 10:00 – 13:00 and by appointment

Private View: Friday 16 September 18:00 – 20:00

The exhibition comprises a series of hundred small sculptures through which the artist continues his long-term exploration of colour. Irregular sections of transparent, opaque or mirrored Perspex offcuts are set vertically in simple grey concrete bases. The first of these offcuts ­– ‘shadows of another shape’ – were found in the artist’s studio. Various basic forms – circles, squares, triangles – have been removed from the sheets of Perspex, leaving irregular, perforated planes of flat colour. For Batchelor, ‘these offcuts are almost perfect vehicle for colour: the shapes appear to serve no other purpose than to support their given hue. In addition, the shapes are open in the sense of being visually porous as well as often transparent or reflective. Colours spill easily from one object to another in an irregular and extended family of about hundred individual works’. In these works, colour floats and vibrates freely, in the constant state of flux.

reef-e

David Batchelor, Reef, 2016, concrete, cast acrylic, dimensions variable

David Batchelor was born in Dundee, Scotland in 1955. He studied Fine Art at Trent Polytechnic, Nottingham (1975-78) and Cultural Theory at Birmingham University (1978-80). He works with variety of mediums including three-dimensional structures, photographs, painting and drawings, all of which relate to his long term interest in colour and urbanism. He has exhibited widely in the UK, continental Europe and the Americas. Recent exhibitions include Flatlands, Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh/Spike Island, Bristol (2013/14); Light Show, Hayward Gallery, London and touring (2013-16); Chromophilia: 1995-2010, Paco Imperial, Rio de Janeiro (2010); Color Chart, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2008) and Tate Liverpool (2009); Extreme Abstraction, Albright Knox Gallery, Buffalo, New York (2005); Shiny Dirty, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (2004); and the 26th Bienal De São Paulo (2004). In 2015 Batchelor presented Monochrome Archive 1997-2015, a large scale installation at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, as part of their exhibition Adventures of the Black Square: Abstract Art and Society 1915-2015.

_16a9758

_16a9775

Batchelor has written several books including Chromophobia, on colour and the fear of colour in the West, published by Reaktion Books, London (2000), now available in eight languages. His new book on colour, The Luminous and the Grey (2014) is also published by Reaktion Books. Colour (2008), an anthology of writings on colour from 1850 to the present, edited by Batchelor, is published by Whitechapel, London, and MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. His book of photographs, Found Monochromes: vol. I, nos. I-250 (2010) is published by Ridinghouse, London, and a new volume of drawings, The October Colouring-In Book (2015) is published by Common-Editions, London.