First Thursdays is back!
The first stop is at Hales for The National Gallery Project, a solo exhibition by Ken Kiff (b. 1935, Dagenham, Essex — d. 2001, London, UK) . Kiff’s first show at the gallery centres on works directly connected to his time as Associate Artist in Residence at the National Gallery, London, between 1991-1993. He was the second artist to hold the position, following Paula Rego. Primarily a painter, Kiff pursued the formal qualities of painting — of shape, line, texture, transparency and colour. His practice was driven by an exploration of the material and emotional properties of colour, viewing colour as image, and image as colour. Kiff would work on many pieces over years at a time – this process is exemplified by The Sequence, which spanned decades and 200 works, a ‘continuous flux’ of image and form which resembles a long episodic dream: allowing thoughts and imagery to spill over into the next work, creating reoccurring themes and symbolic motifs.
Later, the walking route will head to Standpoint Gallery. The gallery is pleased to present Spillâge, a group exhibition curated by HAZE projects. Spillâge has been created as a sniglet – a word made up to describe something for which no dictionary word exists. Bringing together eleven artists, this exhibition looks at the fluidity of language and interruptions from the familiar. It fills in the gaps for alternative expression, embracing the spontaneous and unknown. The exhibition embodies the notions surrounding happy accidents and freedom of play, the loss of control and unconscious reactions. Within the exhibition, artists are encouraged to explore playful elements of their practice and step back from the preciousness of expectation. The place becomes a playground for experimentation. This show celebrates the artists’ ability to harvest their boiling over of intuitive reactions, exaggerating and pushing their mistakes and unconscious decisions into their own language, creating works which radiate other-worldliness. Using the accent hat brings together a duality of languages in a subtle jovial form, the word Spillâge bridges together different territories and celebrates combined communication through different worlds in a fluid way.
The last stop is New Art Projects for Baroque-O-Vision Redux, a site-specific installation marking the first UK exhibition by sculptor Bill Albertini. Albertini’s “Pipe Dream System” is a body of work he has been making since 2017. The series is based on an ever-growing catalogue of parts, which can be assembled into unique configurations that differ from space to space. The main rule that unites his installations is that all of his pre-fabricated components are modular and designed to be connected. Time and timing is also important to the work and this manifests itself in how his Pipe Dream System evolves through the linear “design” process of the individual components (which is somewhat slow paced and methodical) to the timing of the assembly of those components into the finished sculptures which tends to be a fast, intuitive process.
