Biography
NEW WORK: David Batchelor is now open online. The presenation marks the third iteration of the Waddington Custot digital exhibition series and is the gallery’s first solo show by the Dundee-born artist. Bringing together a collection of Batchelor’s most recent sculptural works, the exhibition emphasises the artist’s distinct approach to colour, one defined by and tied to experiences of the city.
The works on display are created from offcuts and found materials, which are then embedded into a concrete structure, relating to the manifestation of colour in the built environment. One or more brightly coloured element is supported by a neutral, industrial base, echoing the jagged cement-and-broken-glass compositions that often adorn the top of brick walls in towns and cities.
These pieces are a continuation of Batchelor’s Concretos series, which explores the artist’s ongoing interest in the Brazilian Concreto and Neo-Concreto movements of the 1950s and 60s. Concrete Art, and its subsequent splinter group, flourished in Brazil due to a climate of increased internationalism, following the construction of Brasilia, and the formation of the São Paulo Bienal. With an aim to distance visual expression from figurative art, painting and sculpture took on a distinctive geometrically based form. Similarly to artists from this time, Batchelor’s work liberates colour into three-dimensional space. Batchelor explains that the simple, flat and frontal forms of his three-dimensional works ‘are primarily vehicles for colour; as such I try to exclude anything that might interfere with or distract from that.’
继续
