exhibition

Les Choses Perdues

Artists Alex Hudson, Géraldine Gliubislavich, Karin Hanssen

15.Jan.09 - 14.Feb.09
Wed-Sun 12-6 or by appointment

Private View, 14.Jan.09, 18:30 - 21:00

Curators Ken Pratt

Vegas Gallery
45 Vyner Street
London E2 9DQ
07726750762
hello@vegasgallery.co.uk
www.vegasgallery.co.uk
Tube Bethnal Green; BR Cambridge Heath, Hackney / Bethnal Green

Bracha Ettinger
Joris Ghekiere
Geraldine Gliubislavich
Karin Hanssen
Alex Hudson

Vegas is pleased to present ‘Les Choses Perdues’, a special project curated by Ken Pratt as the opening show for its new gallery space in Vyner Street.

If the twentieth century can be called the century of ‘the image’, it now seems that we have entered the era of ‘the archive’. It is not hard to understand how and why ‘the archive’ has emerged as a discernable current locus for artistic and curatorial investigation and intervention. Just as the progress of image-making technology in the twentieth century builds a momentum for the late twentieth century painters engaging with ‘the (moving) image’, it is inevitable that the rapid advancement of digital storage, manipulation and sharing mechanisms would contribute to more recent explorations of the mass, the pool; the archive.

With ‘Les Choses Perdues’, the aim is to prompt thinking about the continuum. Represented in the exhibition is one artist whose pioneering practice rose to prominence during that original wave considering ‘the image’ and its (inter)relationships and discourses, two younger painters reaching a certain maturity during the more recent ‘archive era’ and, significantly, two painters gaining recognition in that strange cusp; the years in between. In other words, we can consider a snapshot of three ‘generations’ of artists intrinsically – though not always exclusively- deploying painting as a means of conceptually engaging with ‘the image’ and/or ‘the archive’ as a coordinate for contemporary painting.

Furthermore, selection and inclusion is hardly broad: there is no painter in the exhibition that works with randomness, even if it sometimes appears so. All of the painters in ‘Les Choses Perdues’ are notable for distilling very particular images into their work. What may at first seem random never remains so, even if a certain enigma or level of opacity as to their intended meaning/s is equally present. Furthermore, as also becomes apparent, this work can never be readily taken as simply ‘representational’. Within the choices of images emerging in the paintings themselves, there is almost certainly something indicating a dislocation of time. The paintings before us, through different means, conjure up a visual language expressed in the past tense; a discourse in the present that makes necessary reference to the past. It’s there in the art historic references and quotes. It’s there in something hovering between an ambivalent nostalgia and a critique of the past or present. Naturally, it’s there, implicitly, in the decision to paint. And yet, it is never once reactionary.

Bracha Ettinger
The work of the British/Israeli artist Bracha Ettinger first gained recognition at the end of the 1980’s, when she was living and working in Paris. As striking for her layered, cryptic works as for the fact that she had trained as and practiced as a clinical psychologist – in fact, Ettinger’s work as a clinician informed by the overarching framework of psychoanalysis has never really entirely stopped- hers were works that both consciously and intuitively engaged with a plethora of theoretical developments influencing academic and cultural spheres at the time. Concurrent with revisions of history from almost every postmodern angle, Ettinger’s work, then as now, seemed to be strongly located in placing the image at a confluence between contemporary psychoanalytic thinking and larger overarching narratives; Freud as an (art) historical phenomenon and Feminism’s discourses on gender identity locked into an aesthetic extrapolation. But, Bracha Ettinger is an artist. And artists – not to mention those engaged in psychoanalysis- place a lot of import on the intuitive too. Shadowy figures reach to us from within paintings made over a very long period. Looking at the surface, the technique at times almost defies technique, the artist’s mark in paint as almost a form of protracted automatic writing. Like a patient on that iconic couch, we reach into her works to dare to name what we often recognize