Quodlibet
Date: 31 March - 15 April 2010Time: Monday to Friday, 9.00 - 17.00
Private View: Thursday 8 April
"a philosophical argument; a humorous medley of tunes" - Chambers
Internationally exhibiting British abstract painter Bruce Russell introduces his new series of works on circular and rectangular formats in simultaneous shows at Clare Hall Gallery, University of Cambridge and Ruskin Gallery, Anglia Ruskin University.
This is a pioneering collaboration between major galleries in the two universities in the city. Clare Hall will show rectangles, opening on Thursday 25 March, followed by Ruskin Gallery featuring circles, opening on 31 March. Both then run concurrently throughout April.
Russell has work in public collections around the world, and was for 19 years Head of the School of Fine Art at Kingston University, where he is now Emeritus Professor. He is also Visiting Professor in Painting at Anglia Ruskin University.
The new work continues themes that have developed in distinctly personal ways in a career spanning over 40 years. Originally trained as a graphic designer, Russell has long been fascinated by contemporary culture's densely mediated systems of signs, symbols and tropes - the clamour of advertising, the insistence of signals, the chatter of icons and legends. The virtual electronic revolution of the last 30 years has ratcheted this babel exponentially, with the screen in hand or on desk now a panoptic hub of information and command, an infinite nexus of overlaid, simultaneous scapes, both convergent and divergent.
Russell has always been driven by format, shape and pattern, which his personal abstract discipline emphasises; he finds antecedents to Apple and Google, Stella and Warhol, in the rich geometries and algebras ("a reasoning about relationships and operations") of past civilizations, from Peru to Persia. In these new paintings, some formal accommodations, avowedly contingent and negotiable, between past and present systems of mapping, ordering and gathering, are attempted within the classic arenas of circle and square. Reflecting this historical palimpsest, ancient materials such as canvas and oil paint cohabit with car spray paint, acrylic pens and industrial templates, whilst traditional religious semiologies are conflated with those of a secular cyberspace.
Russell's is a world where aleatory and planned operations collide (or cohere), and where the systems we use to represent and order our experience navigate between the underground (the tube-map), the foreground (Times Square) and the meta-ground (www), all on a surface that is as flat actually as it is deep virtually.
Please click images to enlarge.
Russell has always been driven by format, shape and pattern, which his personal abstract discipline emphasises; he finds antecedents to Apple and Google, Stella and Warhol, in the rich geometries and algebras ("a reasoning about relationships and operations") of past civilizations, from Peru to Persia. In these new paintings, some formal accommodations, avowedly contingent and negotiable, between past and present systems of mapping, ordering and gathering, are attempted within the classic arenas of circle and square. Reflecting this historical palimpsest, ancient materials such as canvas and oil paint cohabit with car spray paint, acrylic pens and industrial templates, whilst traditional religious semiologies are conflated with those of a secular cyberspace.
Russell's is a world where aleatory and planned operations collide (or cohere), and where the systems we use to represent and order our experience navigate between the underground (the tube-map), the foreground (Times Square) and the meta-ground (www), all on a surface that is as flat actually as it is deep virtually.
Please click images to enlarge.
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