EXETERCONTEMPORARY

OPEN2014

EXETERCONTEMPORARY

OPEN2014

Exeter Contemporary Open is an annual exhibition open to submissions in any media from contemporary visual artists based across the UK and beyond. The exhibition aims to be a platform for the most talented emerging artists and to reflect current themes and concerns in contemporary art practice.

The exhibiting artists are eligible to receive a £1000 Overall Award, a £500 Additional Award and £200 Audience Choice Award, as voted for by the visiting public and announced at the end of the exhibition.

The 2014 selection and judging panel consisted of Turner Prize-nominated artist David Shrigley, Independent Curator and Art Consultant Ceri Hand and Phoenix Gallery Curator Matt Burrows.

Generous support for the exhibition has been provided by our main sponsor Haines Watts Chartered Accountants, along with additional support from St Austell brewery and our media partner Big Issue magazine.

Robert Cervera

Samantha Donnelly

Andrew Ekins

Alex Hardy

John Lawrence

Gorka Mohamed

Hannah Murgatroyd

Lexi Strauss

12 Sep - 1 Nov

ROBERT CERVERA

Robert Cervera’s works explore encounters (real or imagined) between our bodies and the physical structures that surround us, such as walls, enclosures and buildings. In Cures, photographic prints become containers for poured concrete that covers images of scraped or grazed body parts like some kind of ill-advised sticking plaster. In Swabs, concrete slabs are cast with bodycare products like glycerin and muscle rub, which disrupts the setting process and generates failures in the surface.

robertcervera.com

SAmAnThA DOnnElly

Samantha Donnelly’s materials-led approach to making is underpinned by references to art history and popular culture - specif ically photography, TV, f ilm and advertisements. her work is made through questioning, rephrasing and reworking a range of sculptural matter - mass-produced household wares, imported fashion bargains and second-hand f inds – and processes of editing, cropping, elimination, montage and narration. While some appear relic-like and precious, others are seemingly transient and momentary, on the edge of dissolve.

axisweb.org/p/samanthadonnelly

AnDREW EkInS

Andrew Ekins employs a concoction of materials to create works that explore the materiality of painting while investigating the embodiment of contemporary notions of beauty, the abject and the sublime. Often sculptural in their form, his paintings explore themes of mortality and decay, growth and renewal. The form of a work like Fat Of The land - stacked, sagging, misshapen – alludes both to a body of land and to painting as a convention. meaty brush strokes on a used t-shirt in me, myself and I, refer to the media obsession with skin, roughly pixelated as an expression of a confected, degraded beauty.

AlEx hARDy

The focus of Alex’s work is the way language is central to our understanding of the world - the f ilter through which we make sense. Working in a variety of media, he applies linguistic techniques and processes to a selection of commonly known examples of language - in the widest sense of the word - in order to create the possibility of opening them up to new, more aware and playful relationships. The piece in this exhibition is made by layering together found video footage to create a new aesthetic that is both chaotic and engaging. It also brings in to relief the conventions used in the creation of the original footage.

hardyalex.com

JOhn lAWREnCE

John lawrence’s work deals with the contemporary mediated experience, mining a world of popular culture, imagery and f ilm footage from a vast array of sources. he works across text, object, video and print, reconf iguring familiar cultural tropes to offer up new readings and open out meaning within a common popular language. In I’ve Been loving you Too long, we appear to be offered some kind of insight to the contemporary creative process, the oblique, disembodied activity accompanied by Otis Reading’s classic soul track.

johnlawrence.tv

GORkA mOhAmED

Gorka mohamed’s paintings explore amorphous forms, serious cartoons and organic geometries. They create an extravagant and enigmatic world in which each painting may suggest many themes, while remaining ambiguous. his irrational portraits are constructed out of an accumulation of shapes, forms and objects in an almost sculptural way, making reference both to classical painting and a sense of alienation from a contemporary world grotesquely saturated by images and information.

gorkamohamed.com

hAnnAh mURGATROyD

hannah murgatroyd’s work hinges on an ongoing exploration of an evolving, open visual narrative in words and images under the title of lumpenstadt. Conceived as a non-linear novel of images, unfolding over paper and canvas rather than the pages of a book, recent works are staged in the setting of an otherworldly country estate, making reference to both personal and historical tales and the history of the body as told through art - both high and low. Each image drawing is the conclusion of layer upon layer of gesture, every line marking the division between inner consciousness and outer concreteness.

hannahmurgatroyd.com

lExI STRAUSS

Often working in narrative series that unfold across painting, performance and video practice and seek out absurdity and subversion, lexi Strauss explores ideas of individuation and complex human relationships with belief systems. The series The Twelve Apostles as Babies, follows the aforementioned babies’ development, having arrived for the second coming without Christ, thereby being required to work things out for themselves. Paintings depict the children dressed as Ghandi, Johnny Rotten and others, as they learn the good deeds of those who came before and after them.

lexistrauss.com

Bradninch Place, Gandy Street, Exeter, Ex4 3lS | 01392 667080 | exeterphoenix.org.uk

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