Frith Street Gallery presents an exhibition of works by Gauri Gill, James Nelson, Daniel Silver and Rajesh Vangad, curated by Sandhini Poddar. Contemporary Excavations explores the mining of classical, modernist as well as Indigenous art histories and how these knowledge systems are appropriated, synthesised, and made new in the work of these artists.
Gauri Gill has a complex photographic practice containing several lines of pursuit. They are characterised by Gill’s interests in feminism, Buddhism, community, ecology, and education. Gill has had a long engagement with precarious communities including nomadic, tribal and small peasant groups in rural Rajasthan in India over the past two decades, as seen in her ongoing series, The Mark on the Wall. Beginning in early 2013, Fields of Sight is a collaboration with the renowned Adivasi artist, Rajesh Vangad, combining the contemporary language of photography with the ancient one of Warli drawing to co-create new narratives. The Warli define their relationship to existence through Mother Nature and farming and fishing are crucial to their livelihoods. Their ancient matriarchal art form, dating back millennia, was practiced solely by the women of the community until recently. Considered as a leading exponent of this art form, Vangad’s paintings showcase the tribe’s intimate and sensitive relationship to the land and to agricultural cycles, expressed through the harvesting of grains.
James Nelson’s sensitive oeuvre is marked by his daily practice of drawing. Using handmade Chinese and Japanese papers as an aesthetic and textural substrate, Nelson captures the ephemerality and complexity of nature in his monochromatic works in graphite, charcoal and pastels. He states, “For me active looking triggers an empathic response.” Drawing inspiration from the tradition of Song dynasty landscape painting in China (960– 1279 A.D.), Nelson’s works on paper conjure ‘mental landscapes’, inviting viewers to embark on journeys, as they hover between abstraction and representation. For the artist, drawing is a rich, layered, and intimate process, “where you try to experience the world as it was before things were given a name.”
Daniel Silver’s alchemical sculptures are repositories of the artist’s multifaceted interests in classical sculpture dating from the Graeco-Roman period, psychoanalytic theory, and Western modernism. His figurative works, which range in scale from the diminutive to the monumental, always seem in flux – creation and entropy are equally at play. His bodies come to exist in the world / Dasein and thereafter return to a proto-linguistic or proto-historic state. Silver’s new cluster of free-standing ceramic sculptures were made during lockdown at a time of solitude and introspection. Hand-moulded by the artist in terracotta and subsequently fired and freely coloured with oil paints, they appear as totems, pillars, or trees: the axis mundi.
| Duration | 13 April 2021 - 15 May 2021 |
| Times | see website |
| Cost | Free |
| Venue | Frith Street Gallery |
| Address | 17-18 Golden Square, London, W1F 9JJ |
| Contact | 020 7494 1550 / info@frithstreetgallery.com / www.frithstreetgallery.com |