Jacopo Dal Bello and Guy Marshall-Brown

21 April 2017  –  6 May 2017. Thursday, Friday, Saturday 1 – 6pm

Reception: Thursday 4 May 6 – 8pm

The Centre for Recent Drawing is pleased to present works by two London-based contemporary artists Jacopo Dal Bello and Guy Marshall-Brown. Working between painting and ceramics, these artists have in common a use of gesture which emphasises material play, and which draws on a rich tradition of metamorphosis, of flux and historical recombination in motif and form. This is the gesture of the grotto, of the grotesque.

Dal Bello’s emphasis on materiality owes a debt to the Italian Arte Povera or Arte Informale movements. Having grown up in Italy, the materiality of painting was available to Dal Bello in the work of Alberto Burri, whose work is embedded in an exploration of the material. Combined with this is an interest in the work of linguist Antonio Gramsci and the semiotician Umberto Eco, Dal Bello collapses various painterly styles to produce a lattice of language and notation, including that of numbers and words, and different contexts – such as popular culture, art iconography and classicism. Contradictions emerge in the relations of the disparate elements; the visual signifiers gain a certain independence from their usual logic whilst retaining something of their historical impact. Dal Bello has had solo exhibitions recently at 5th Base Gallery London (2016) and Dif-fù-sa contemporanea in Forlì, Italy, (2016).

Guy Marshall produces ceramic work between art and craft, sculpture and painting, between the utilitarian object and the art object – asking how it is the visual languages of these disciplines can be activated and transposed in the nexus between these languages. He identifies the positions that ceramics has taken within the material hierarchies of artistic production and mines the contemporary collapse of these hierarchies. Using primitive sculpting techniques and crudely constructed pots, the work is usually textured and then coated with a white ceramic slip – an act not too dissimilar from priming a canvas. In using these vessels as a support for painting, Marshall-Brown treats glazes and ceramic pigments as paint, exploring the visual language associated with the notion of painting as object. Guy Marshall-Brown has had solo exhibitions recently at Galleria Salvatore Lanteri, Turin (2016) and Puls, Brussels (2016).

The exhibition can be viewed at the reception (all welcome) or during opening times 1 – 6pm Thursday – Saturday, at 2 – 4 Highbury Station Road, Highbury Islington N1 1SB, London. C4RD is a Registered UK Charity 1123530, and would particularly like to acknowledge the support for this exhibition of the Dovehouse Trust.