David Batchelor exhibition

TEN SILHOUETTES

Gloucester Road Tube Station District and Circle Line 27 June – 24 October 2005

Platform for Art is delighted to present an exhibition of new work by David Batchelor made especially for Gloucester Road Tube station. The exhibition continues the programme’s commitment to showing significant work by mid-career artists.

Batchelor has used each of 10 of the arched niches on the disused platform to house a single work, each a structure made of found steel or aluminium, centrally suspended and illuminated from behind. Viewers will see a series of dark silhouettes of varying sizes and shapes, each surrounded by a halo of colour that fills each alcove. The works are simultaneously dark and bright, not unlike the Underground, and indeed the city, itself. They exploit the peculiarities of the arches and the space on the platform.

These works are a continuation and development of a project Batchelor has been working on over the last decade: an examination of the characteristic colours and associated materials of our urban environment, and an attempt to make vivid three-dimensional work from these materials and effects.

Some of the structures are made from items that have been decommissioned from the Underground network and that would otherwise have gone to the scrap heap. The use of found, second-hand objects is one of a number of preoccupations within Batchelor’s artistic practise. He has made works using items such as industrial trolleys and steel shelving to discarded road signs, commercial light-boxes and polyurethane bottles. The pervasive yet indescribable nature of colour, monochrome in particular, is also a key focus for Batchelor, along with a fascination with the urban experience that firmly places the city as a central frame of reference in all of his work. Titles such as The Spectrum of Hackney Road, a series of works from 2003, relate directly to specific places in the city of London.

David Batchelor’s work has been shown in many UK and international galleries and group exhibitions. He had a major solo exhibition at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham in 2004. As well exhibiting in conventional art settings, he has sought to present site-specific installations in non-art spaces such as a theatre (Sadler’s Wells), a shop (Habitat), a hospital (Bart’s), a government building (the Treasury) and a university (Warwick). These new structures, presented within the gritty, urban arena of an Underground station, make a further link with the city environs that Batchelor explores and celebrates in his work.

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