Mixed Signals

Aug 25 - Oct 7, 2016

Christian Larsen presents Mixed Signals, an international group exhibition with a collection of six renowned, exciting and inspirational painters making waves around the globe at the present time. Among them Dale Lewis – chosen for the Jerwood Painting Fellowship, known for his large and darkly humorous paintings – and Rose Wylie – the only non-American artist represented at the Women to Watch exhibition at the Museum of Women in the Arts (Washington DC) in 2010, and winner of several important prizes in recent years.

Christian Larsen have been working closely with exhibiting artist Shane Bradford in recent months to identify certain dynamic practitioners whose seemingly ingenuous approach to image-making disguises a powerful potential to subvert. The result is an innocuous-looking array of confident aesthetic statements by accomplished workers whose potent missions are cloaked in the innocence of the everyday.

Dale Lewis is a connector of signifiers across historical and contemporary modes, relating real-time street experience with the fine art canons of yesteryear. His epic canvasses help to reconcile the polarities of our fragmented epoch; majestic and abhorrent, full of tokens, hope, and empathy.

Ryan Wallace reconstitutes debris from his studio floor into bold and beautiful interlopers into the western canon of modernist art history. The studio floor carrying with it connotations of the oft-overlooked forces of labour behind the sheen of capitalistic achievement.

Hans-Jörg Mayer's pink blossoms in plastic water-bottle vases attempt to cheer the place up. Referencing polite Sunday painting of tasteful tulips in traditional egg-tempura, the flowers sag and weep under the burden of their own beauty. A splash of optimistic gesture then, tempered with a realists' acceptance of his own inevitable fate.

Koen Delaere. This series of 'Beach Paintings' pivot around the ancient and modern tussle between the rigid structure of the grid versus the fluid emotive flow of painterly emulsions. Each work is the result of simple, superficial, scientific cause and effect, yet each carries the dark vestige of our prehistoric selves, emerging victorious from the primordial sea.

Shane Bradford's sardonic use of his distinctive dipping method, in which the paintings are winched into vast vats of colourful tubs again and again, appropriate the mechanistic fascism of the factory floor as well as the drips and pours of defunct abstract expressionism. Each painting is initially defaced with its own sprayed title, and then redeemed from it's own cynicism by the restorative effect of repeated process, colour and form.

Rose Wylie negotiates around the grand notion of painting with innovative, inventive compositions derived from the magical mundane of everyday life. Wylie's work manages to remain defiant against the tide of the mainstream – her seemingly naive gesture belies the sharpness of her wit - and the accuracy of her social commentary.

Many artists attempt to present the world as they'd like it to be; these artists are far more likely to present the world as it is, in all it's glorious, painful, absurd, dangerous and yet humorous reality. Together we gather to contemplate the moment as it stands in a harmonious cacophony of deftly-charged mixed signals.