Launch of three new prints
We are pleased to announce the launch of three new prints by:
Fiona Banner
Dan Hays
Simon Periton
These were launched at an exclusive fundraising event on 20th April with champagne generously provided by Billecart-Salmon.
Fiona Banner
Book 1/1
Edition: 65
Materials: block print on mirror card
Size: 45 x 64 cms
Launch price: £450 plus VAT
Each print in this edition, Book 1/1, is the same and yet each is unique. Each one has its own ISBN number and is registered under its own individual title. Each one of the edition is therefore an official publication and each is an edition in, and only of, itself. An edition of one…a book reduced to a reference, purely an imagined space.
Every book published anywhere in the world today carries its own, identifiable ISBN (International Standard Book Number) number. Since 2007 ISBNs have contained 13 digits. Each print in this edition has its own identifiable ISBN number just as every edition of every book published carries its own number.
Fiona Banner questions the currency of the multiple or limited edition. She has explored many of these issues in her work to date. Words, punctuation and copyright have been recurring themes within her work. Through The Vanity Press, the publishing company she set up in 1994, she has explored these subjects using the democratic medium of print.
Printed on reflective mirror card, Book 1/1 is a one-page, one-off book with a story that the viewer cannot escape: reflected in the surface, the viewer, the time and space of the artwork, is its subject.
Fiona Banner’s work is represented in many collections in the UK & abroad including The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Philadelphia Museum, The Arts Council of England, Tate Gallery, London and the Walker Art Gallery, Minneapolis.
Her solo exhibition ‘The Bastard Word’ was at Toronto’s Power Plant in April 2007. Other recent solo exhibitions include ‘Peace on Earth’, Tate Britain 2008, ‘Every Word Unmade’ at Gallerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin and ‘Nude’ at Frith Street Gallery, London 2006.
Fiona Banner was short-listed for the Turner Prize 2003.
Dan Hays
Spring Snow
Edition: 65
Materials: screen-print on Velin Arches Blanc paper
Size: 70.5 x 89 cm
Launch price: £450 plus VAT
Spring Snow continues Dan Hays’ exploration into ways that snow-covered landscapes can be represented. Under a grey sky, snow scenes are so often rendered colourless, yet over the past few years he has been painting them with points of pure, saturated colour. From a distance these scenes optically merge to form a grey-scale image. At closer range, however, colour perception takes hold, creating “an impression of abstracted coloured noise”.
Spring Snow is a scene in two halves: both a snow-covered landscape depicted with black and white pixels (a nod to digital reproduction) and its reflection in a lake rendered using familiar half-tone colour separation techniques, pushed into perspective, and without the usual black component.
Subverting the Impressionist and Pointillist use of additive colour, Spring Snow makes reference to the noise or ‘snow’ between the channels as well as to Monet’s water-lily paintings. Rosettes of pure colour viewed on the lake’s surface coalesce into a grey-scale snow scene from a distance.
‘Getting the colour balance right required many experiments and, even now, natural and artificial lighting can vary the perception of the work. Spring Snow is necessarily flawed, a futile representation of nature, a constructed technological sublime complete with the associations of hope, memory and loss that this brings.’
Dan Hays won the John Moores Painting Prize in 1997. In 2006 his solo exhibition, ‘Impressions of Colorado’, toured to Manchester Art Gallery, Southampton City Gallery and the Djanogly Gallery, Nottingham.
His solo show at Galerie Zurcher, New York City, continues until 2nd May 2009. Other recent solo exhibitions include Deliverance, Void Gallery, Derry, N. Ireland, 2007, and Twilight in the Wilderness, Platform, London, 2006.
His work is included in many art collections including the Tate Gallery, Walker Art Gallery, and the Natwest, Arts Council, and Victoria and Albert Museum Collections.
Simon Periton
A Sunken Owl Prunes, 2009
Edition: 65
Materials: Screenprint on 300gsm Somerset textured paper
Size: 76cms x 59cms
Launch price: £450 plus VAT
In 2007 Simon Periton painted Unknown Pleasures, a work on glass. A Sunken Owl Prunes -an anagram for Unknown Pleasures – began with the same image flipped horizontally to face the other way. The two works then part company. With the painting on glass the image was built up in layers on the back of the glass and in reverse. When this is turned around you are presented with a shiny glass surface across the whole image making the surface of the painting the focus of attention.
The process of screenprinting also builds up an image in layers but constructs the image by adding layers one on top of the other. In this respect Simon feels that there is a greater degree of accuracy in achieving a successful result:
“The process itself seemed to allow me more control which I enjoyed. By adjusting the intensity of colours I was able to bring out a depth in the image which painting on glass didn’t seem to allow me. The matt varnish on the barbed wire contrasts with the overall gloss surface of the image and draws attention to the surface, making the barbed-wire grid seem like a leaded window, which was an aspect of the original painting on glass that I particularly liked. “
Simon Periton has had recent solo exhibitions at Sadie Coles HQ, London (2009); The Modern Institute, Glasgow (2007), Peter Pears Gallery, Aldeburgh and Karyn Lovegrove Gallery Los Angeles (2005).
Commissions include public sculpture projects for firstsite, Colchester, Essex; Channel Four, and the Victoria and Albert Museum.
A monograph of his work was published in 2008 by Koenig Books and Sadie Coles HQ.
