PUNCH!
Tuesday April 9th – Saturday April 27th 2019
Olivia Bax
The work of Olivia Bax is often characterised by familiar elements such as a hook, handle or vessel presented in unconventional, coloured forms. However, it is the texture of the surface which offers the viewer the most immediate insight. Bax generates her own paper pulp to cover and form a mantle over linear armatures. Moulding each sculpture in this way creates the distinctive texture of the work. Rooted in drawing, the work carries instinctive gestures from start to finish to suggest an action or feeling.
Olivia Bax (b. 1988, Singapore) lives and works in London. She studied BA Fine Art at Byam Shaw School of Art, London (2007-2010) and MFA Sculpture at Slade School of Fine Art, London (2014-2016). Recent solo exhibitions include: Roost, Lily Brooke Gallery, London (2018); at large, VO Curations, 93 Baker Street, London (2018) and Zest, Fold Gallery, London (2016/17). Recent group exhibitions include: Olivia Bax | Milly Peck | Rafal Zajko, Three Works, Scarborough (2018); The Ground is Good, Modern Painters, New Decorators, Loughborough (2018) and A Motley Crew, Christian Larsen Gallery, Stockholm (2017). Recent residencies include: Artist in residence at Academy of Visual Arts, HKBU, Hong Kong (2016/17); British Council INSPIRE exchange, Dhaka, Bangladesh (2015) and Presidents Fellow, Vermont Studio Centre, USA (2013). Prizes include: Kenneth Armitage Young Sculptor Prize (2016), Additional Award, Exeter Contemporary Open, Exeter Phoenix (2017) and Public Choice Winner, UK/Raine, Saatchi Gallery, London (2015). See more at www.oliviabax.co.uk
Dominic Beattie
Dominic Beattie is a London born artist who works from his studio in Lewisham.
He is a graduate of Camberwell College of Art.
Beattie’s practice encompasses painting, sculpture, drawing and design and curation. His work is known for referencing the modernist movement, and is influenced by the sensibilities of that era. Borrowing from, textiles, ceramics, furniture and graphics, Beattie creates abstract works that are a hybrid of formal and optical elements.
His ‘Studio Furniture’ range made in collaboration with the architect Lucia Buceta has been exhibited in museums and art fairs around the world since production began in 2015.
Beattie has exhibited widely and in 2015 won the UK/Raine Painting prize at The Saatchi Gallery. His work has numerous collectors, most notably The Saatchi Collection and Soho House.
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Dominic Beattie’s work is cut and built and then rebuilt, painted then overpainted. The traces of constant readjustment haunt the final image. Riffing on a wide and varied group of abstract languages that loosely come out of a constructivist history, Beattie’s eye for colour is at once direct and original. These works create surprising spatial shifts and vibrations that suggest a wink to Op and Pop but the emphasis on repetition and sequencing is also concomitant with sampled beats in advanced subcultures of electronic music. With skill and attention to the crafting of colour and shape, Beattie obsessively tilts, turns and twists the grammar of hard edged abstraction until something new and unprecedented is achieved.
John Bunker, 2017
