Laura Buckley & Alexis Harding

Private view Wednesday 14th May 2008 6pm - 9pm

Carter Presents with Bruuns Bazaar is a new gallery space on Albemarle Street in Mayfair, London. The new Bruuns Bazaar project space is devoted to providing a platform for artists to develop new work. The gallery on Albemarle Street, Mayfair, is in a listed Georgian building and comprises of two inter-connected rooms. The concept and format for the exhibition is two solo shows in self-contained spaces where each artist's practice interrelates and plays off of the other.

For the inaugural exhibition, Laura Buckley and Alexis Harding, two London based artists, each separately explore materiality through a conceptual framework initially influenced by modernist reductionism. Both artists approach their medium (painting and film projection) in a sculptural manner, expanding the traditional boundaries of the support/screen.

ALEXIS HARDING explores the processes and physicality of paint literally bringing the painting to earth as the viscosity and liquidity of the medium falls to the gallery floor to create new forms. For Harding, painting is a process, a skin, a physically tangible and alchemical substance. The time-based nature of the wet matter simultaneously teases and critiques the very nature of painting. These temporary site-specific paintings recall Robert Smithson's entropic Glue pours and soil descent spillages of the 1970's and Harding has been making them in a variety of spaces since 2005 in an attempt to liberate the static paintings, which are made over months in the studio.

LAURA BUCKLEY's work demystifies itself by structural and material means. She exposes the process of making and presenting work. Her works are often semi-performative, featuring reflective supports within the natural environment, both framing and dramatically contrasting the setting. Studio activities are juxtaposed with real life events, exploring and blurring points of separation and overlap. Hers is a multi-layered referential conversation between component materials. Buckley uses the devices of kinetic sculptural installation and video projection to question art and illusion, reality and perception. Both Alexis Harding and Laura Buckley have moved beyond modernism's hermetic tendencies by questioning formalism's rules and traditions. As in the thinking and practice of Robert Smithson, Harding and Buckley both separately employ entropy, paradox, language, landscape and anthropology in their uncompromising enquiries.

Place: BRUUNS BAZAAR - 48 Albemarle St - London W1S 4JL

Carter Presents & Bruuns Bazaar
Laura Buckley & Alexis Harding
Ort: BRUUNS BAZAAR, 48 Albemarle St, London